SERMON XIV.

ISAIAH AND AHAZ.

LINCOLN'S INN, 3RD SUNDAY IN LENT.-MARCH 14, 1852.

ISAIAH, VII. 10-14.

Moreover the Lord spake again unto Ahaz, saying, Ask thee sign of the Lord thy God; ask it either in the depth, or in the height above. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord. And he said, Hear ye now, O house of David; Is it a small thing for you to weary men, but will ye weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

THE chapter from which this passage is taken immediately follows the one upon which I spoke to you last Sunday. The vision in the year that Uzziah died prepares us for the message of Ahaz. Nevertheless a considerable period-the whole reign of Jotham-elapsed between them. Are we to suppose that the lips which had been touched by the fire from the altar were silent during that time, that the man who had said 'Here am I, send me,' and had received so terrible a message, did not deliver himself of it for sixteen years?

If that had been so I do not know that there may not be

Serm. XIV.] THE REIGN OF JOTHAM.

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many parallel cases in the ancient and modern world. A man may feel that he is called to a work long before the moment arrives when he can perform it, long before the outward event occurs which corresponds to the inward impulse and explains its full meaning. Such intervals no doubt make great demands upon the faith and patience of him who is appointed to pass through them. There is the strongest temptation to doubt whether that which seemed to give a law and purpose to his life was not itself a dream. There is a temptation to create the occasion for speaking or acting before it arises. But the delay is an education which is profitable in proportion as the original inspiration and conviction are kept alive; it is necessary and often lengthened, in proportion as the subsequent work is to be of a powerful, terrible kind, such as may affect generations to come. If the opinion which has been ordinarily deduced from St. Paul's account of his stay in Arabia in the Epistle to the Galatians be a true one, he would offer the most memorable example of this probation.

There is no reason however to suppose that Isaiah was silent during the time I have spoken of. There is the best evidence that he was not. What we may, I think, fairly affirm is that the events in the reign of Ahaz, to which I alluded in a former lecture, the conspiracy against him by the Samaritans and Syrians, the appearance of the Assyrian hosts in Palestine, the entreaty of Ahaz that Tiglath Pileser would punish his enemies, the fulfilment of that petition and the consequent preparation of a new and fearful calamity for his son and his people, were the especial objects to which Isaiah's vision pointed, and that the prophecy contained in the text derives great part of its

232

CHAPTER I.-PARTLY GENERAL.

[Serm.

interpretation from that vision. It is equally true that the connexion between them would not be intelligible, if the purged eyes of the prophet had not been enabled to see the condition of society in Judea in the years of apparent prosperity and splendour which preceded the league of Pekah and Rezin, and if he had not given us a most vivid and graphical description of that which he saw.

The first chapter of his prophecy can hardly be said to contain this description. The words at the commencement of it, "I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me; the ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib; but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider," might apply to Jotham's time or any other. I hinted last Sunday that they served as a kind of general preface to the prophecy, indicating what the sin was against which all the after denunciations of the seer would be directed; how it was the revolt of a people from One who cared for them, watched over them, loved them; how it was the wild and wilful desire of the heart to seek abroad for the treasures which it would have found stored up at home. Something of the same general character may be traced through the rest of the chapter. But there are passages such as these, "Your country is desolate, your cities are burnt with fire, your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate as overthrown by strangers, and the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city," which must, it would seem, refer to a much later time, when either Shalmaneser or Sennacherib had laid waste the greater part of Palestine, and when Jerusalem was nearly the last hold of the chosen race. Some may feel a difficulty in connect

XIV.]

PARTLY BELONGING TO A LATER TIME.

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ing the following passages which declare that their condition would have been like that of Sodom and Gomorrha if the Lord had not preserved a very small remnant, with the time in which Hezekiah was reigning, after he had commenced a great reformation. But we may find as we proceed, what all reason and experience would lead us to expect, that this reformation was slow in its progress, that it brought to light evils which were lying very deep in the heart of the nation, that some of the immediate household of the king (Shebna the scribe is denoted by name as one of them) fully deserved to be called "companions of thieves, men who loved gifts and followed after rewards, who judged not the cause of the fatherless." And the reaction in favour of the temple-services and the appointed feasts which was sure to follow the change in the disposition of the king may have led to that semblance of faith which the prophet denounces in the words, "To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats;" together with that cry for an inward and radical reformation, "Wash you. Make you clean. doings from before mine eyes. do well. Seek judgment. Relieve the oppressed. Judge the fatherless; plead for the widow." And the promises at the end of the chapter that the city should become once more a city of righteousness, a faithful city, point naturally to that higher and nobler state of things which was to be seen in the latter years of Hezekiah's reign after the ministers of corruption had been swept away, and the truer hearts had been purified by suffering.

Put away the evil of your Cease to do evil; learn to

But the most intelligent students of Isaiah have be

234 CHAPTER II.—TEXT FROM AN OLD PROPHET. [Serm. lieved, and apparently on the most reasonable grounds, that the next passage of his prophecy, from the beginning of the second to the end of the fourth chapter, belongs to the very commencement of his work. There had been many allusions in earlier prophets, we have noticed one in Joel,-to a time of great blessedness and glory when Mount Zion should be exalted above the hills and the law of the Lord should go forth from Jerusalem. Such sentences we may easily suppose had become texts and common places among the people, often in the mouths of the popular and court prophets, applied by them to the state of things which was then established, or to some one which would naturally grow out of it. A passage of this kind it is supposed,—and the hypothesis gives great coherency to the whole discourse, is to be found in the second, third, and fourth verses of the second chapter. Adopting words which were well known to his audience, from some venerable teacher of the past, the prophet proceeds to comment upon them and shew that they might indeed have been fulfilled in that time, but that the sins of the nation had produced a state as unlike as possible to that which the seer spoke of.

No contrast can be more living and terrible than that which the prophet draws between the actual condition of things and that true and blessed one which he as much as his predecessor looks for. The first sign of corruption is that they were replenished from the east, and pleased themselves in the children of strangers. In other words, they had a love for all foreign habits, luxuries, superstitions. Above all they had acquired a taste for enchantments, a delight, and—if it were not profaning the word—a faith, in auguries drawn from visible portents--in whatever wonders