For the Lord hath called thee as a woman forsaken
God is love
None of those who came before the Lord Jesus ventured to define God as love.
But it does not follow, as we sometimes assume, that the holy men who were moved by the Holy Ghost before Christ came into the world did not know and teach the fatherly and redeeming love of God. They could not be so familiar with that love as we are; but that they recognized it, and insisted on it with rare force and pathos, that they did all that mere words could do to convince and persuade men of it, no candid student of the Old Testament will deny, although when they were most profoundly moved by it we can still detect in their language a certain accent of almost incredulous surprise. Isaiah, for example, as he utters these pathetic phrases of my text, can hardly believe for joy and wonder. Again and again he is compelled to remind himself that it is God who is speaking in him and through him. The tender phrases which, were they not so tender, might run on with even flow, are again and again broken with such words as “saith thy God,” or “saith the Lord thy Redeemer,” or “saith the Lord that hath compassion on thee.” Do you wonder that Isaiah, who knew God so well, found it hard to believe in a love so tender and true, and so feared that his hearers would find it quite impossible to believe Ah, but consider who and what they were on whom he was told that God had set His heart, and all the treasures of His love and compassion I God had lavished on them every possible means of grace, insomuch that He both could, and did, appeal to them whether there was even one single thing He could have done for him which He had not done. Yet, despite His singular and boundless grace, they had sunk to the level, and below the level, of the heathen around them. Was it likely that God should love them? Consider, too, how stern and dreadful was the burden which Isaiah had been commissioned to denounce upon them. And God had been as good as His word. Assyrian and Chaldean armies had swept the land of its inhabitants; their cities were burned with fire, and the once fertile and wealthy land turned into a desert. All who were left of the people were carried away captive, and left to weep for seventy years over their unstrung harps as they sat by the waters of Babylon. It was to these sinful, miserable captives and exiles that the prophet was moved to proclaim the tender and inalienable love of God! The words authenticate themselves. None but God could have spoken them. No man would have dared to conceive of God--no man, untaught of Heaven, ever has conceived of God, as yearning with love for the human race; and still less could any man have invented the tender, melting, beseeching phrases in which Isaiah has clothed that conception. (S. Cox, D. D.)
The wonderful love of God
Mark what the words do convey. God is speaking to men who had persistently sinned against all the influences of His love and grace, to men who were being consumed by the inevitable results of their transgressions. And He tells these poor miserable creatures that they are as dear to Him as the bride to her husband; that, though their offences against Him have been so many and so deep, He cannot tear His love for them out of His heart. Nay, as if this were not enough, He goes on to say that, though the blame is none of His, He is willing to take all the blame of their offences on Himself. Instead of reproaching them for their sins against HIS love, He compares them to a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit, to a young and tender bride whose husband has despised and disgraced her, refusing to live with her and sending her away from his tent. It is He who has abandoned her, not she who has abandoned Him. It is He who has been hard and stern, not she who has been wilful and gone astray. But He never meant to be hard and stern. It was only for a brief moment that He left her, and in a momentary flush of anger. If she will return to Him, and give Him another chance, He will welcome her with “great mercies” and comfort her with an “everlasting kindness.” How shall He persuade her to return, to trust in Him? how convince her that He will be angry with her no more? He calls heaven and earth to witness to His truth, His fidelity, His deathless and unchanging love. He can appeal to His covenant with her, with Israel. She may think that that has been broken both by Him and by herself. But there was one of His covenants that had never been broken, an unconditional covenant, the covenant with Noah, which did not depend on men and their obedience, which depended only on God and on His faithfulness to His word. Henceforth His covenant with her shall be as the “waters of Noah;” He will no more fall in His love to her than He will suffer the earth to be wasted by another flood. He will never forsake her, even though she should forsake Him; never be wroth with her, nor rebuke her, even though she should still be wilful and provoke Him to anger. Nay, more; as if even this great promise were not enough, He casts about for another and a still more reassuring figure, and goes on to say: The mountains were planted and the hills stood firm before the Deluge swept over the earth; even the waters of Noah could not wash them away, nor as much as make them quake. And His love shall henceforth be firm and unchanging as the mountains and hills; nay, more firm and unchanging. The mountains may remove and the hills may quake; but His lovingkindness shall never remove, His covenant of peace shall never quake. Even all this, wonderful and incredible as it is, is not enough. There is the sigh of an infinite compassion and truth in the exclamation, “O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, not comforted! “ There is an unbounded and Divine generosity in the promise to the bride, to the woman, that, if she will only come back to Him, her very palace shall be built of rare gems; and in the promise to the mother, than which no promise could be more dear to a mother’s heart, “All thy children shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of thy children.” Is that a fable of man’s invention? Can it be? Would any man have dared to give it as a statement of the facts, or possible facts of human life? (S. Cox, D. D.)