I. Consider the essentially symbolic character of the captivities and deliverances of the Jewish people. The history of Israel is the Divine key to the history of man. In that history there were two great captivities and two great deliverances. The people were born in the one captivity it was the dark accident of nature; the other they earned by sin. These represent our natural bondage, and the self-earned serfdom of the soul. There is one Deliverer and one deliverance from both. The method of His deliverance was the same out of both captivities a glorious manifestation of the might of the redeeming arm of God.
II. We have the image here of the great deliverance which is freely offered in the Gospel. It furnishes (1) the key to our protracted discipline. God will not have us "go out with haste, nor go forth by flight." These long wanderings, this patient waiting, is a store of power and wisdom, whose worth you will never estimate till your footsteps press the borders of your Canaan. (2) "The Lord will go before you." He has gone before us (a) in bearing to the uttermost the penalty of sin; (b) in breaking the power of evil; (c) in the way of the wilderness, through life's protracted discipline, to glory.
J. Baldwin Brown, The Sunday Afternoon,p. 419.
References: Isaiah 52:12. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. v., No. 230, vol. xxx., No. 1793; S. A. Tipple, Old Testament Outlines,p. 215.Isaiah 52:13-15. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxi., No. 1231; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. xxii., p. 211.Isaiah 52:14. T. B. Dover, A Lent Manual,p. 142.Isaiah 53:1. Homiletic Magazine,vol. xiv., p. 55; R. Milman, The Love of the Atonement,pp.8, 17. Isaiah 53:1-12. C. Clemance, To the Light through the Cross,p. 3.