Notes on Isaiah - Chambers, Oswald
Notes on Isaiah
Oswald Chambers
Copyright 1941, Oswald Chambers Publications Association
Scripture versions quoted: kjv, rv
Introduction
Source
The Notes on Isaiah are taken from lectures by Oswald Chambers at the Bible Training College in 1912 and 1913. 1
Publication History
• As articles: This material was first published as thirteen articles in the Bible Training Course (BTC) Monthly Journal,2 between April 1941 and March 1944.
• This material has never been published in book form until now.
In January 1912, Oswald Chambers began teaching Isaiah in his biblical theology class at the Bible Training College, London. During the next three years, he covered the Four Great Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel) as part of his Old Testament survey course.
Mrs. Chambers apparently did not take detailed notes of these lectures as she did with other classes. As lady superintendent of the College, she had a myriad of daily responsibilities for students and the college operation. In later terms, she taught her own class in Scripture memory. In May 1913, she gave birth to their only child, Kathleen, 3 making it even more difficult to attend all of Oswald’s classes and record the lectures in shorthand.
The fact that Mrs. Chambers’ notes were abbre- viated most likely led to her decision not to publish them in book form.
Contents
Foreword …………………………………………………………………………………..1368
Introductory……………………………………………………………………………….1369
The Prophetic Vision Isaiah 1 ………………………………………………………1370
The Painful Path to Power Isaiah 6 ……………………………………………….1371
Through the Shadow of an Agony Cometh Redemption Isaiah 8–11…..1374
The Tribulation of Nations Isaiah 13–23 ………………………………………1375
Isaiah 24–26 …………………………………………………………………………….1377
Isaiah 27–29 ……………………………………………………………………………..1379
The Centre of the Cyclone Isaiah 30 ……………………………………………1380
Isaiah 36–38 …………………………………………………………………………….1381
The Lord God Omnipotent Reigneth Isaiah 40…………………………….1383
“Servus servorum Dei” Isaiah 42 ………………………………………………..1384
God the Goal Isaiah 45………………………………………………………………1386
Our Implicit Difference with God Isaiah 53 …………………………………1387
Foreword
A Series of Notes on the great evangelical Prophet Isaiah by Oswald Chambers begins in this number of the Journal. They will extend through this new volume. They are in the nature of a first draft fol- lowing a very close study of the subject and so are not carried to that completed stage which was prob- ably intended. But gems of great beauty abound in them, and truths of deepest significance for us, as for those of Isaiah’s time, are made clear. The Outlines sometimes cover more ground than the comments following exhaust. Lovers of the Word of God will value them and find continual help in searching the Scriptures—that we may find Him.
As a groundwork of his own studies O. C. was able to discern and use the rare scholarship behind such Commentators as Dr. George Adam Smith 4 though he did not accept their “critical” positions, such as the Deutero-Isaiah in chapters 40–66. Here is a note on that very subject. The Book of Isaiah is the field the Higher Critics have torn up with their hooves; the one reason is an inveterate suspicion of anything to do with belief in the Mind of God. The only mind for the author of the Bible is the Mind of God, and the only Interpreter is the Spirit of God. “
Yet he recognised, as I heard him once say, that Dr. G. A. Smith showed a marvellous insight into the moral and spiritual significance of Isaiah’s prophecy. Therefore, on occasion, he would quote him and accept some of his illuminating remarks.
We shall find in these Notes deep fundamental things, well worth our careful study and appropriation.
David Lambert5 April 1941
From The Bible Training Course Monthly journal
vol. 10 April –May 1941 nos . 1–2
notes on Isaiah
Introductory
And after that with wonder rose in me
Strange speech of early prophets, and a tale
First learnt and last forgotten, song that fell
With worship from the lonely Israelites,
Simeon and Anna; for these twain as one
Fast by the altar and in the courts of God
Led a long age in fair expectancy.
And all these pointed forward, and I knew
That each was prophet and singer and sire and seer.
That each was priest and mother and maid and king,
With longing for the babe of Nazareth,
For that man-child who should be born and reign.
F. W. H. Myers6
First Principle—Holiness as the Law
1. The Unveiled Prophecy at Work in Darkness
(a) The Vision Glorious (Isaiah 9:6;
11:1–10)
(b) The Valley of Grovelling (Isaiah 1:27)
(c) The Vindication of God (Isaiah 39:6)
Second Principle—Chastisement as the Means
2. The Unveiled Prophecy at Work in Daylight
(a) When It Was Dark (Isaiah 1:28–31)
(b) When It Was Dawn (Isaiah 1:25–27)
Third Principle—Holy Remnant as the Result
(a) Advent of the Dayspring (Isaiah 2:3)
(b) Agents of the Deliverance (Isaiah 44:28;
52:13–15)
(c) Anointed Deliverer in Temporalities
(Isaiah 45:1–4)
(d) Anointed Deliverer in Eternalities
(Isaiah 53:1–2)
We have to acquire the habit of brooding on what the prophets uttered. Brooding is exalted, excessive attention. There is a difference between exegetical interpretation and spiritual interpretation. The danger of spiritual interpretation is that we interpret in the light of our own experience, consequently there can be many spiritual interpretations. When we come to these prophetic visions we come to something we have never experienced. The modern mind won’t have it that there is anything supernatural in the visions; the reason for that is an inveterate prejudice against the supernatural; an incurable suspicion which will not allow that the Mind of God is other than the mind of a man. The great inspiring Mind behind the prophets and the apostles is not an ingenious human mind, but the Mind of Almighty God. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:21).
The spirit of a man is his personality, his soul is that personality trying to express itself in rational words and ideas. The Spirit of God coming into the prophets and the apostles takes the ideas they have formed by contact with the world and brings them into a new combination of which God alone is the Author. That is why the expression is not the same; individuality is marked, e. g. , Isaiah is different from Ezekiel, John from Paul; there is the same Mind behind, but not the same ideas.
Never imagine that the prophets had a perfectly clear plan as to what they prophesied; the Spirit of God made them prophesy infinitely more than they knew. We know so much from the New Testament that the prophets did not know at all. The prophets speak with all the blood and passion of their natures; they do not stand off like a superior authority, they are wrapped up in their prophecy. Notice the identification of the prophet with the life of his time; we gather our spiritual skirts from touching the life of the time we are in. These men did not, they stood for God in every condition of things. The prophets prefigure Jesus Christ in an even more marvellous way than the ritual of the Old Testament.
The Bible is a record of facts that actually occurred and the Spirit of God makes them the symbol of some- thing other which we only discern as we rely on Him. Our own lives illustrate this, as we look back we realise that the incidents have been connected by a Hand behind. We imagine that if we could order the history of our lives according to a mathematical system everything would be all right, but the providence of God makes our lives higgledy-piggledy, twisting round anyhow, the reason being that He is bringing out His purpose in His own way. Leave your life alone; you cannot alter history, and you cannot alter life; see that you maintain a right attitude to God, let come what will. What we are apt to call interruptions are God’s way of introducing us to a new knowledge of Himself.
God will never have us follow Him blindly, He won’t amaze us, He won’t dazzle us with sudden floods of light. He breaks His revelation bit by bit as we will accept it. The appeal made by Jesus Christ is His character, His truth and His beauty, every man’s conscience when he sees Him says, That Man is right. There is nothing of the nature of the superstitious. The supernatural power of Satan never reasons, it appeals to man’s superstition, not to his conscience.
When we begin to work for God there is any amount of crude harsh sternness about us, and we have the word of God for it, but slowly and surely through the discipline of life we begin to come to another aspect of those same statements. When we understand how God is dealing with us, He takes us where we can understand His dealing with the world outside.
From The Bible Training Course Monthly journal
vol. 10 June–July 1941 nos. 3–4
notes on Isaiah
The Prophetic Vision
Isaiah 1
The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw
concerning Judah and Jerusalem. . . . Isaiah 1:1
Yea, Lord, I know it, teach me yet anew
With what a fierce and patient purity
I must confront the horror of the world.
For very little space on either hand
Parts the sane mind from madness;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I would I never may be left of thee,
O God, my God, in whatsoever ill;
Be present while thou strikest, thus shall grow
At least a solemn patience with the pain;—
When thou art gone what is there in the world
Seems not dishonoured, desperate with sin?
F. W. H. Myers
1. God Is Nigh—Personal Relations (Isaiah 1:1)
Practical Relations (Isaiah 1:4–8)
2. God Is Love—Rousing of Moral Reasonings
(Isaiah 1:18)
Recession from Moral Righteousness
(Isaiah 1:21–23)
Reviving of Mental Repentance
(Isaiah 1:24-31)
3. God Is High—Refuge of Religiousness
(Isaiah 1:11–15)
Revolution of Rectitude (Isaiah 1:16–17)
1. God Is Nigh
Whenever the people of God disobey God in any particular, God’s judgements are severe. There seems to be a peculiar disproportion about God’s judgements: “My people doth not consider. God’s judgement on wrong is inevitable, but it is not inevitable to the individual; it depends on the individual whether he escapes the judgement. There is no law to make a man go wrong saving himself; there is no law to keep a man right saving himself. There is no such thing as fate; a human being always has the power to do the incalculable thing. There are fatal issues, but not fate. When God’s decrees come to pass it is because men will not turn. God’s will is supreme, but God never fights against us; it is self-will that fights against God. When the Spirit of God is at work in him a man lets God’s will overcome, there is no fight, it is a higher power easily overcoming. If I view anything as inevitable with regard to any human being I am unbeliever. I have no right to have anything less than the hope and the belief of Jesus Christ with regard to the worst and most hopeless of men.
2. God Is Love
When the Bible says “God is love” it means what it says, but remember that the love of God is exhibited on a cruel cross. The love of God cannot make room for sin or self-interest, therefore the appeal of the love of God is not that of kindness and gentleness, but of holiness. If you take the natural view of the love of God you will become atheistic. If God were love according to our natural view of love He ought never to cause us pain, He ought to allow us to be peaceful; but the first thing God does is to cause us pain and to rouse us wide awake. He comes into our lives all along with ideals and truths which annoy and sting us and break up our rest, until He brings us to the one point, that it is only moral and spiritual relationships which last. That is why God looks cruel judged from the human sentimental standpoint; He loves us so much that He will not prevent us being hurt.
God will never allow any of us to rest in a sleep of conscience, He will reason with us and rouse us, and then He will give us a “clearing house” for conscience. The doctrines of salvation that ignore the love of God as revealed to a man’s conscience are false because they do not tell us how our guilty conscience is to be cleansed. The “clearing house” which God grants to us through the atoning blood of Jesus Christ is inter- cession. We enter into a roused relationship with God through the Atonement, and then we are put in the place where we can repair the damage we have done to other lives. No matter what our spiritual experiences may be, if we are in danger of forgetting what we owe in intercession to the lives we damaged before we got right with God, the Holy Spirit will bring it back to us—”Remember that person, that relation- ship. Many a life is paralysed because this is not realised—”I know God has forgiven me, I know I am right with God, but every now and again I remember the things I did that damaged other lives. ” If I put the wrong right with my fellow men, have I become right with God? No, get right with God and He will put you on the way to be right with your fellow men. When people are being roused by the Holy Spirit they always want to confess to you; never allow them to. It is not confession to men that is required but the confession of a guilty conscience to God.
Mental repentance means an altered point of view. Have I altered my point of view with regard to service of God? The Almighty is not going to allow His people to be unconscious hypocrites, He is not going to allow them to pray and worship while all the time their moral nature is asleep. To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto Me? saith the lord. Before any sacrifice or service can be acceptable to God it must be the outcome of a reasoning together with God. Have I ever thought what my salvation and my sanctification mean from God’s standpoint?
3. God Is High
Immediately we are born again God puts upon us a condition which was never there before, viz. , that of holiness. A born-again soul is condemned to holiness; he is not at liberty to do what he likes but only what God likes, a “bondslave of Jesus”; my relationship to God first, second and third and all the time. The modern note is that we have sinned against this one and that one: every sin we commit against another is a sin against God, and the Bible brings us face to face with God. Can my salvation stand the glaring light of God? Can my relationship with my fellow men stand the light of God? It has got to one day. That is the way the Spirit of God rouses us up to see that there is no refuge in anything or anyone other than Himself. The whole life must be established in God. The one thing that keeps us right is walking in the light of the great High God. We have to be as open and above board in every relationship of our lives as Nature is. The first thing that happens to an artificial religious life is that it wants to be a little out of keeping with the intense purity of Nature.
From The Bible Training Course Monthly journal
vol. 10 August–September 1941 nos . 5–6
notes on Isaiah
The Painful Path to Power
Isaiah 6
His face is glorious with a beam
Unborrowed from our earthly skies,
The radiance of a heavenly dream
Is on his brow and in his eyes,
And in his breast the unconquered heart
That fails not when his brethren fail,
That sees his earliest friends depart
One after one and doth not quail.
One after one they go, the bold
Companions of his dwindling band,
For under stormy skies and cold
Their march is, through a barren land.
And some their earlier faith deride
(For man is man and seeks his own),
Till the last straggler leaves his side,
And the worn pilgrim walks alone.
Edward Sydney Tylee
This chapter is a record of the experience Isaiah went through before entering on his prophetical ministry. Isaiah is his own remembrancer. It is easy to forget the love of our espousal’s, to be so taken up with Christian work that we forget after a while what God has done for us. We have to keep the call of God alive, and continually recall to our minds what we are here for. This process will reveal at once whether the soul has had any personal history with God. There is no danger of spiritual retrogression if we will keep in mind the times, one or more, when the Spirit of God has touched us. God intends us to be reserved over His revelations, but we are rarely allowed to be reserved about ourselves. God can make a man so one with Him- self that he never thinks of being reserved because he does not take himself into account. Here Isaiah is being led by the Spirit of God to give his own experi- ence, proving thereby that he is God’s man, spoilt for everything else but loyalty to God. The making of a prophet is along this line. The proof that the Spirit of God is at work in me is that I am willing to testify to what God has done; that is always the evidence of a supernatural element at work.
1. The Price of Vision
In the year that king Uzziah died . . . (see 2 Kings 15:1–4; 2 Chronicles 26:16–23)
God’s dates are not man’s. God seems to pay no attention to our calendars; He has a calendar of His own in which He suddenly surprises a man in the midst of his days. Leave room for God. We expect God only on special days, in particular meetings; that is not God’s way. He comes suddenly, at midnight or at noonday. We learn to trace our history by the rare moments in which we find out who we are and where we are tending. There are moments
Sure, tho’ seldom, . . .
When the spirit’s true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones. . . .
Robert Browning
Isaiah chronicles his time by these moments. The history of our soul with God is frequently that of the passing of the hero. Over and over again God removes our friends in order to bring Himself in their place, and that is where we faint and fail and get discouraged. Take it personally—”In the year that the one who stood for God to me died”—”I gave up everything? ” “I became ill? ” or—”I saw also the Lord”? My vision of God depends upon the state of my character. Character determines revelation. Before I can say “I saw also the Lord” there must be some- thing corresponding to God in my character. Until I am born again and enter into the Kingdom of God I see only along the line of my prejudices; I need the surgical operation of external events and an internal purification. It must be God first, God second and God third, until the life is faced steadily with God and no one else is of any account. “In all the world there is none but thee, my God, there is none but thee. Let God see that you are willing to live up to the vision; keep paying the price. I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision, ” says the Apostle Paul. Am I obeying the vision, or only beginning to dole out the price of it?
2. The Purging of the Prophet’s Perception
I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and His train filled the temple.
The purpose of the vision is to enable me to see “the arm of the lord” behind all circumstances (see Isaiah 53:1). God never gives a man the power to say “I see” until his character proves itself worthy of its purification. What hinders the purging of our perception is that we will build our faith on our experiences instead of on the God who gave us the experiences. My experience is the evidence of my faith, never the ground of it, and is meant to reveal to me a God who is bigger than any experience. In the case of Isaiah we are dealing with a prophet in the Presence of God (cf. Revelation 1:17–18). Have I seen also the Lord, and do I know that He is holy?
3. The Platform of the Vision
. . . sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and His train filled the temple.
If my worship is consumed in the glory of the Lord till that is the one thing left in my mind, I have come to the right place of vision. In the Old Testament the idea of God’s holiness is that of aloofness and separateness, the sublimity of God. No unholiness can ever stand before God, therefore if God is going to bring man into fellowship with Himself He has to reinstate him in every particular. Anything that belittles or obliterates the holiness of God by a false view of the love of God is untrue to the revelation given by Jesus Christ. In this prophet we have a marvellous picture of the Atonement.
4. The Presence and the Perfected Praise
Above it stood the seraphims. . . . And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of His glory. (Isaiah 6:2–3)
When the veil is lifted, instead of seeing the Ark, Isaiah sees the Lord; instead of the usual Temple ritual, he hears the praise of sinless beings, and with a rush his own sinfulness and the sin of his people heads itself up on one particular point: “Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips. . . . ” Isaiah went through the crisis of face-to- face contact with God and the effect of the vision of God’s holiness was to bring home to him that he was a man of unclean lips, i. e. the expression of his nature was pernicious. He not only confesses his own sin but identities himself with the sin of his people—”and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. ” Our Lord said “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. ” But remember when it is that our speech reveals what is in our heart, viz. , when we are brought to a sudden crisis and the whole nature expresses itself. The majority of us are much too cunning to express what is in our heart until we are brought to a crisis, then the true state of our heart is out instantly. A crisis will always reveal the condition of our heart because it makes us express ourselves. The Spirit of God convicts us by focusing our mind on one particular point, there is never any vague sense of sin, and if we will yield to His conviction He will lead us down to the disposition of sin underneath. That is always the way God deals with us when we are consciously in His presence.
5. The Process of the Vision
Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, . . . and he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged. (Isaiah 6:6–7)
There is nothing between God and Isaiah now. The fire expiates his guilt at the very spot where he is convicted of his personal sin. Second Corinthians 5:21 (“For He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him”) states what God makes to transpire in every soul who is identified with Jesus: there is a moral agreement with God’s verdict on sin in the Cross and we experience the expiation of our sin through the marvel of His substitution for us on the Cross. All the Old Testament ritual and the presentation of truth by the prophets is blended in one marvellous Personality, the Lord Jesus Christ, and by the “new and living way, which He has consecrated” any one of us can enter into the holiest, with no ceremonial in between, no intermediary—God and my own soul brought face to face in Jesus Christ.
The only sacrifice which we as sinners have to bring is a contrite heart, “Nothing in my hands I bring. . . . What happens then is that the whole life is given over to God for His service. When once the application of the sacrifice of Christ has been made it is the essence of pain to use the life for any other purpose than for Him (see Colossians 1:24). The symbol of the live coal “from off the altar” represents the twofold nature of the substitution of Christ, not only Christ for me, but Christ in me. This is the key to the Apostle Paul’s teaching of identification, not the sacrifice of the body of Christ at a distance, but my identification with that sacrifice so that the Atonement is made efficacious in me and God can indwell me as He indwelt His Son.
6. The Programme after the Vision
God did not address the call to Isaiah; Isaiah over- heard God saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us? God did not lay a strong compulsion on Isaiah; Isaiah was in the presence of God and realised that there was nothing else for him to do but say, in conscious freedom, “Here am I; send me. If we will let the Spirit of God bring us face to face with God we too shall hear something akin to what Isaiah heard, the still, small voice of God, and in perfect freedom say, “Here am I; send me. We have to get out of our minds the idea of expecting God to come with compulsion and pleadings. When Our Lord called His disciples there was no irresistible compulsion from outside; the quiet, passionate insistence of His “Follow Me” was spoken to men with every power wide awake. There is one fact more about Isaiah which must always be borne in mind, and that is he not only heard God’s call but he understood the nature of God who gave the call.
It is not sufficient to say “God reigns” we must know the nature of the God who reigns. Isaiah stood unperturbed because he knew God. Isaiah had been disillusioned about himself and about the people of God, there is not a single prop left; in this respect he comes nearest to the attitude of Jesus Christ who would not commit Himself to men because “He knew what was in man. ” What is true of the great prophets is true in our own little world. After we have had the vision of God and have had a time alone with Him we are plunged straight away into appalling affairs, when either all we have learned is absolutely swamped, or else we emerge exactly in accordance with the vision God gave.
God only gives us visions of Himself for one purpose, that we may work them out into character. When once you have had the vision of God, or the experience of sanctification, you will be put into places where everything is as unlike God as the world, the flesh and the devil can make it, and you have to be there not to criticize, but to stand true to God in the center of it all, and be crushed by the things that are not of God. The natural tendency is to withdraw; when God wants to withdraw His chil- dren, He does it (see 1 Peter 4:12–13). After God has given us a time of face-to-face contact with Himself and then puts us into tumults, the temptation is to sit down and say “Where is the blessedness I had when first I knew the Lord? The Spirit of God holds us steady until we learn to know God, and the details of our lives are established before Him, then nothing on the outside can move us.
God can rely on the man or woman to whom He has given the vision of Himself. Some of us are rushing on at such a headlong pace in Christian organisation, we want to vindicate God’s character in a great revival, but if God did give us a revival we would be the first to forget Him and swing off on some false fire. When once we know Him we can stand wherever He puts us.
From The Bible Training Course Monthly journal
vol. 10 October–November 1941 nos . 7–8
notes on Isaiah
Through the shadow of an
agony cometh redemption
Isaiah 8–11
Thou! if thou wast He, who at mid-watch came,
By the starlight, naming a dubious name!
And if, too heavy with sleep—too rash
With fear—O Thou, if that martyr-gash
Fell on Thee coming to take thine own,
And we gave the Cross, when we owed the Throne—
Thou art the Judge. We are bruised thus.
But, the Judgement over, join sides with us!
Thine too is the cause! and not more thine
Than ours, is the work of these dogs and swine,
Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed!
Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed!
Robert Browning
It is characteristic of the prophecies of Isaiah that just when he is summing up the sins of the people and you should imagine that God was going to denounce them, there comes a ray of light in the darkness, e. g. Isaiah 9:1–2: “they that dwelt in the land of deep darkness, upon them hath the light shined” (rv mg). There is a danger in trying to trace out God’s way where He has not revealed it. Our experiences of God are simply part of the revelation of God Himself. The great line of God’s revelation has never altered, and when individuals and nations leave their experiences and remain true to God, they find the revelation goes on all the time. God did not give a progressive rev- elation of Himself through the Old Testament: the people progressively grasped the revelation, which is very different. For instance, God knew when He told Abraham to offer up Isaac for a burnt offering that Abraham would interpret it to mean he was to kill his son. God can only reveal His will according to the state of a man’s character and his traditional belief. Abraham had to be brought to the last limit of the tradition he held about God before God could give him its right meaning. Abraham had to have his faith puri- fied, i. e. , to have it stripped of every tradition he held until he stood face to face with God and understood His mind, and Abraham is the father of the faithful.
Isaiah 9
Isaiah is speaking as he is “moved by the Holy Ghost, ” and he portrays a character neither he nor anyone else had ever seen. The Mind of God alone knows the Being Isaiah is portraying. The remark- able thing is that when Jesus Christ comes, every one of the things the prophets have been saying fit in with one Personality, the Being whom we know as the Lord Jesus Christ. Isaiah never saw Jesus Christ, he could not have imagined Him, then what inspired him? the very Mind of God (see 1 Peter 2:20). The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this” (Isaiah 9:7). The meaning of the word “zeal” is a mixture of hot anger and affection. Jealousy in its good sense comes near the meaning, it is that overflow of love that cannot keep still, when men think God has surely done all He will do and can do for an ungrateful race, He visits them in their distress and carries them forward into His desired haven for them. God Almighty is ever gracious in His promises, He does not only fulfill His promises, He over-fulfill them. In our Lord’s parable of the two sons, the love of the father for the elder brother staggers religious calculations about the love of God.
Isaiah 10
(See 2 Kings 18–19. ) According to Isaiah, the rulers of the people are the expression of the life and ambition of the people. We fix on the mountain-peak characters and say they are to blame, but God holds the people themselves responsible also. The people are never exonerated for having bad rulers; the reason they have bad rulers is that they are bad people. Those who rule the people do not autocratically crush them, the people are their inspirers; they are the rulers the people deserve. The man of God has to vicariously take on himself the suffering under the providential order of tyranny. Isaiah was right in the midst of it all, yet he stood like a rock, perfectly confident in God, and let the onslaught of tyranny do its worst (cf. John 19:10–11). The paralysing effect of brute force was making the people lose their faith in God. Isaiah found King Ahaz wanting, he found the people of God wanting, but he does not have the idea that the nation is going to hell; he gathers together the remnant that stands true, and the hope persistently crops up, born in him by the Spirit of God, that what God has shown him in vision will yet be fulfilled, and the nation be one with God.
The things dominantly in force to-day are the characteristics of Assyria. Fear is apt to make us atheistic and in our outlook we enthrone the devil, not God. God is behind it all, not a thing happens but He knows all about it. When the tyrannizers crow and think they have the right by their own power, suddenly the message of God comes—”Wherefore it shall come to pass, that when the Lord hath performed His whole work upon mount Zion and on Jerusalem, I will punish the fruit of the stout heart of the king of Assyria, and the glory of his high looks . . . ” (Isaiah 10:12).
Isaiah 11
And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him, . . . and He shall be of quick understanding [mg] in the fear of the Lord” (rv), literally, “He shall draw His breath in the fear of the Lord ” (Isaiah 11:2–3). The only way we can breathe the atmosphere of the fear of the Lord is by being born from above (rv mg) of the Spirit of God, then we find that Jesus Christ is our moral open air. The hymn has the idea—
Prayer is the Christian’s vital breath,
The Christian’s native air. . . .
The Personality Isaiah is describing has definitely clear characteristics, He produces His own atmosphere. Just as sea and mountain air form the open air to our physical life, so Jesus Christ is the moral atmosphere for our spiritual life, and if we try to draw our breath from any other source we instantly get dis- eased. By prayer and communion with God we live out in God’s moral open air, consequently we can live in the cities and amongst the places of men and maintain the life which is in accordance with the Messiah’s life Isaiah is referring to—the only thing is that in the practical domain of Christian ethics we forget to do it! The enemy of our souls goes for all he is worth against our praying, against our solitudes with God, he tries to prevent us drawing our breath in the fear of the Lord. The great need is to bring every thought and imagination into captivity to the obedience of Christ until every bit of our nature is reconstructed, and we manifest the reconstruction as we draw on the same Source as the Messiah drew from, viz. , God. Isaiah 11:6–9. Isaiah is forecasting what is going to be through the Redemption: everything that has been touched by the consequences of man’s sin will be put absolutely right by God. The point to note is that the mediator in all this is man himself—”For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. The order is—For God our worship; for man our service; for the creature our providence through the meditation of holiness. Everything that has partaken of the curse is to be absolutely reinstated by Jesus Christ. “And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb. . . . They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (rv). The lower creation was not in antipathy to human beings until they learned to suspect them. This is proved by Darwin’s experiments and in isolated experiences such as St. Francis of Assisi.
From The Bible Training Course Monthly journal
vol . 10 December 1941–January 1942 nos . 9–10
notes on Isaiah
The tribulation of Nations
Isaiah 13–23
. . . the day of the Lord is at hand. Isaiah 13:6
The Day of the Lord is at hand, at hand:
The storms roll up the sky;
The nations sleep starving on heaps of gold:
All dreamers toss and sigh;
The night is darkest before the morn,
When the pain is the sorest, the child is born,
And the Day of the Lord is at hand.
Charles Kingsley
Every day is somebody’s day, not a day that we prepare but a day prepared for us. Herod’s “convenient day” came. It dawns quietly and ordinarily like any other day, then suddenly something happens and it is marked as either the blackest or the brightest day. If it is the blackest day it is God bringing you to the place where there streams up over your head the trend of your character unseen before.
It is these moments we live for, the rest we trifle away; when they come there is no illusion left, we know as clear as a sunbeam whether we are going “or the right way, the wrong way, to our triumph or undoing. ” It depends on what use we make of the doom days whether we are in a right or wrong relationship at the final doomsday. God does not leave a man with a “ghastly smooth life, dead at heart”; God’s convicting days are His mercies preparing us for the final Doomsday. God gives doom days to nations as well as to individuals. This dispensation is man’s day when he can do exactly as he likes, and we are doing it; we are allowed absolute liberty for a time. If you want a mirror of how God is dealing with the world at large, watch your own private history with Him. It is necessary to guard our spirit when we read the Bible. For instance, it is possible to credit God with a personal vindictiveness that belongs to the devil; as if God were saying to the nations through Isaiah, “You have withstood Me and slandered Me, you have done everything you could against My people, but now the time has come when I will grind you to powder and obliterate you from off the face of the earth. Or take Our Lord’s words, “How can ye escape the damnation of hell? ” Who was it spoke them? The One who died on Calvary.
Behind the words is an unfathomable sadness that even God Himself cannot save them from perdition. The idea is not that God in great triumphal power is going to ignore every other nation, but rather that through the first-born people of God all the other nations are to come to know Him. It is perilously possible to credit God with our prejudices, even after we are sanctified. We make hell out to be a place for the venting of our spleen, not for the working of the justice of God. God never justifies our spleen. Isaiah’s message needs to come home to us to- day, viz. , that God is behind the devil, not the devil behind God; all the great world forces are in front of God, and they cannot do a thing without His permission. To-day we are so emphasising the freedom of the human will that we are forgetting the sovereignty of God, consequently when we come up against the forces at work in the world we are paralysed by fear and get into despair, which we need never have done if we had been built up in faith in God. Never minimise what you don’t understand, and never knuckle under to the world forces; stand strong in faith in God—”I don’t understand this, but I know God is behind it. Weigh the force and stand true to God at all costs.
Too often we rush in where angels fear to tread. Let God place you by His providence where He will, the tendency is to “wobble” out of it—”I would rather stand for God somewhere else. ” We have the idea that we ought to separate ourselves from the world and its enterprises; that is foreign to Isaiah and to Our Lord (see John 17:15). We are to be in the world while not of it, and to denounce by lip and life the things that are wrong.
The world forces referred to in these chapters are not foreign to us, they are at our very doors to-day— civilisation, being pushed under the guise of Christianity; communism, socialistic blether full of all kinds of promise; and commercialism, binding every nation under heaven into one. Isaiah faced these forces fearlessly, and we have to do the same. There is no cow- ardice about Isaiah or about his message. He never lost his faith in God or got discouraged, and when the things he foretold happened, he did not desert the people. The lord hath founded Zion, and in her shall the afflicted of His people take refuge” (Isaiah 14:32 rv). Just as Zion is spoken of as the central place of safety for the nations, so the only safe place for the saint, and it is as safe as God Himself, is the secret place of the Most High, abiding under the shadow of the Almighty (cf. Psalm 125:1–2).
The same great majestic note is brought out in Psalm 46—”There- fore will not we fear, though . . . ” It is the grand position got from the great God. Behind everything stands God; behind the tumult and the confusion God is bringing out everything according to His will. The great thing about faith in God is that it keeps a man undisturbed in the midst of disturbance. Every now and again God lets loose the hounds of hell all around you, and if you are His child, indwelt by His Spirit, you will experience the truth that Isaiah pro- claims, viz. , that all the forces outside you are futile because they are less powerful than the indwelling of God (see 1 John 4:4). No matter what may be the clanging of forceful interests all around, the work of God’s grace stands true in His servants. Discouragement comes when we say what God will do—that God will always keep me healthy, that He will always be bringing me into the land of Canaan where I will eat honey; well, He won’t.
God is concerned about only one thing, viz. , getting me into a personal relationship with Himself. There is no possibility of discouragement if we will only remember that this is the relationship, not God’s blessings, but Himself. Beware of the modern craze for healing, it is Satan’s opportunity to switch the saints off the central thing. A thing may have its source in Jesus Christ and yet easily turn traitor to Him once it becomes divorced from Himself. If Satan cannot switch the saints off on false fire, he will switch them off on anything that is less than the central thing.
The central thing is the life hid with Christ in God where we can stand by the grace of God where this prophet stood, true to God and to God’s aspect of things, letting other things shift as they may. A man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth” (Luke 12:15); it consists only in what he is. All our judgements of God, and our mis-judgements, are based on our own point of view, not on Jesus Christ’s. Am I cultured in the iron tonic of the Bible? Have I really got incorporated into my faith the certainty that God will never allow anything to last that is not godly? The whole experiment of the human race from God’s standpoint is the overthrow of the devil, not by God—the devil is no match for God—but by man. God is going to overthrow the arrogance of the devil by a being less than Himself, viz. , by man, that is why God became Incarnate. There is only one expression of God’s attitude to the devil and that is Calvary. The Spirit of Jesus conflicts with the things we esteem highest.
It is impossible to carry out the principles of the Sermon on the Mount and have success. The mark of the beast is here already, and it will grow clearer before the man of sin is revealed (see 2 Thessalonians 2). It is slighting no one to say that prosperity in this order of things along with godliness is impossible, and growingly more impossible. The destruction of every civilisation there has ever been has come about through a force for which the civilisation had a contempt. We estimate by what a man possesses; God’s only concern is what a man is. There is only one thing that will endure and that is personality, no possessions, no pretence, nothing in the way of what men call greatness will last.
All the rest is trappings; in their right place, great and good trappings, but Satan wants to keep our minds on them. Holiness in character is the only thing that will remain. Some of us will have a spiritual character so microscopic that it will take the archangels to find it! The majority of us are bound up in the show of things, and when the stern dark lines of God’s truth come we say it is harsh. It is the true strain only we cannot hear it aright unless we are where the prophet Isaiah was—standing with God behind the show of things, consequently he is imperturbable, he never got into a panic. It would be a liberal education to go through the Bible unbiased by convictions. Stop exploiting the Bible to back up a particular doctrine and let the Bible bring you into its own atmosphere and you will find that instruction is clear and emphatic regarding every phase of life there is. If Satan as an angel of light can limit and bind us to our own particular experiences he will succeed in keeping us from an understanding of the Mind of God. The great need for the saint is to get his brains at work on the Word of God, otherwise he will stagnate, no matter how much he may Name the Name of God.
(These chapters were not studied in detail, consequently only some brief notes are available. )
From The Bible Training Course Monthly journal
vol. 11 April –May 1942 nos . 1–2
notes on Isaiah
Isaiah 24–26
1. The Mysterious Inevitableness of Sin (Isaiah 24)
Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof. . . . The earth also is polluted under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant. (Isaiah 24:1, 5)
The Bible reveals that the material world has been blighted by reason of man’s sin. The connection between man’s sin and the material universe is indelible, the connection is made by God. The great truth which runs all through God’s Book and takes clearer features in the New Testament is that the material universe and the moral universe are from the same Hand. Man was intended by God to govern Nature (see Genesis 1:26); instead, he has infected it with his sin and it has become a partaker of the curse with him, so that “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. Men say “We are going to build a holy city on this earth”—you cannot; the earth is infected, it is a diseased chamber, and the holy city will never be on it until God has purged it with fire and taken the epidemic out of it. The Bible says that the holy city is going to come down from above (see Revelation 21:2). God cannot bring in the Millennium by moral renovation, but only by cremation, by burning all the infected rubbish out.
Beware of saying that God is too kind and loving to do that; we have to read God’s love in the light of His character, and He is absolutely just and holy. Sin infects matter although it is not in matter, and this has given rise to the old pagan idea that sin is in the flesh. Sin is a disposition which rules human nature, but it is not in human nature. The things Our Lord mentions as proceeding, “from within, out of the heart of men, ” are all connected with the physical life (see Mark 7:20–23); and when Paul speaks of the outcome of indwelling sin he connects it with the physical life (see Colossians 3:5). We have no standing before God physically, morally or spiritually; the only way we can ever stand before God is through only way we can ever stand before God is through the Atonement. It is truths like this that enable us to understand the meaning of the Cross. Sin has infected the material universe as well as human nature, and both must be cleansed and purged. If I can see how it works in my individual life I will see how it works in the world at large.
We infect all we possess by what we are. This principle is brought out all through. If I indent myself on any place, my study for instance, as being lazy, that place will take its revenge on me every time I enter it by making me feel lazy. The opposite is also true, if I have made my study a place of stern industry it will act upon me as an inspiration every time I go into it. Nearly every man and woman has a blighted place somewhere, blighted not by some- one else but by themselves, by their relationship to someone else in that particular place. Where is it you feel most tested physically? You will find it is in the place where you have been peculiarly mean in days gone by. If we are irritable at home it is because we have been in the habit of being mean there, and when we come into the same situation the meanness shows itself in irritability of nerves. There is a great deal said rightly and wrongly about the power of circumstances over a man; circumstances have a stupendous power, but unless we realise that Jesus Christ undertakes for a man’s circumstances as well as for the removal of the disposition of sin, we shall never experience all the benefits which come through the Atonement. Wherefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature: the old things are passed away”; not only sin, but the whole old order of things; “behold, they are become new” (rv ).
2. The Vision of Resurrection (Isaiah 25–26)
The great note of the Bible revelation is not immortality but Resurrection. The doctrine of the Resurrection is that something comes from God Himself direct into the dust of death. Dust is the symbol of death—”Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust” (Isaiah 26:19 rv). A dead body retains the look of life, but touch it, and it is gone; God will bring it the “dew of light [mg] and the earth shall cast forth the dead” (rv ). The Resurrection is the manifestation of the direct power of God, not the manifestation of inherent life. The Bible always goes back to God; books about “the implicit promise of immortality” go into vague hopes—”Because I have so many hopes that cannot be realised in this life, it would be unjust if there were no life after death. That is not Christianity; Christianity is centered in the power of God, and the resurrection is the direct work of the sovereign God—nothing between God and a dead body. “Thy dead shall live; my dead bodies shall arise. ” When the Apostle Paul wants to measure the power of God in our lives he uses the illustration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead (Romans 8:11; Ephesians 1:19–20, etc. ).
To-day people prefer to talk about the implicit promise of immortality rather than the resurrection. Probably the most amazing writer on the theme of immortality was Dr. F. W. H. Myers, he was a poet of the first order and he became a scientist in order to try and prove his intuitions; he wrote a book entitled Human Personality and the Survival of the Body after Death. The whole of his argument ends where it begins, in intuition; you cannot prove an implicit intuition. Men try to make out that the idea of the resurrection is something that occurred naturally to the human mind; it is a revelation, granted by God to His own people. For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:21). “He hath swallowed up death for ever. . . . And it shall be said in that day, Lo this is our God; . . . we have waited for Him, we will be glad and rejoice in His salvation” (Isaiah 25:8–9 rv). Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind [imagination, rv mg] is stayed on Thee: because he trust- eth in Thee” (Isaiah 26:3). Undisciplined imagination is the greatest disturber not only of growth in grace, but of spiritual sanity.
From The Bible Training Course Monthly journal
vol. 11 june –September 1942 nos . 3–6
notes on Isaiah
Isaiah 27–29
1. The Day of Jehovah’s Judgements (Isaiah 27)
Let him take hold of My strength, that he may make peace with Me. (Isaiah 27:5)
The judgements of God are for another purpose than the vindictive spirit of man would like to make out. It was this that gave Jonah the sulks with the Almighty, and the same spirit is seen in the elder brother—jealous of God’s generosity to others. You never find that spirit in the prophets; if there is destruction and death it is for one purpose only, viz. , deliverance. God is on the line of salvation, not of damnation; He only damns the damnable things, and Jesus Christ’s presentation is that if you identify yourself with the damnable things even God Himself cannot save you; it is a determined dead set against the good and a determined identification with the wrong (cf. Matthew 23:33). When you come in contact with the great destructive sins in other lives, be reverent with what you don’t understand; there are elements you know nothing about, and God says “Leave them to Me. ” Never make a virtue out of necessity; virtue is the overcoming by moral strength an inclination to go the other way.
2. Reiteration by Conscience and Commonplace (Isaiah 28)
He that believeth shall not make haste. (Isaiah 28:16)
Conscience does not shout in thunderclaps, you can easily drown its record, but it goes on, and if you do not heed it for a while because of sensational sinning, as soon as the sensation exhausts itself, back comes the monotonous tick, tick, that nearly drives a man mad. God will never make us listen to Him; we have to will to listen. In the midst of all the excitement the prophet says “he that believeth shall not make haste”—no wonder they ridiculed him! “We have to get on with the negotiations with Assyria and Egypt. Isaiah says when the judgement comes you will find that all your alliances are like a bed that is too short (Isaiah 28:20), a hopeless commonplace annoyance. The punishment of sensational sinners is never sensational but appallingly commonplace, dull, dreary, desperate drudgery. Prison is not man’s order, it is God’s order for the man who refuses to listen to what he calls the childish platitudes of God and life; he is determined to get rid of the quiet ordinary ways on which God has built human life, then he has to take the commonplace way of prison to bring him back to his senses. Take it in the religious domain, people who are given over to religious excitement cannot stand a solid godly meeting, they must have sensationalism—crowds, speaking in tongues. God never works like that. Beware of sensationalism in every shape and form.
3. God’s Performances (Isaiah 29)
Ye turn things upside down! Shall the potter be counted as clay; that the thing made should say of him that made it, He made me not; or the thing framed say of him that framed it, He hath no understanding? (Isaiah 29:16 rv)
In our own day we seem to have come to the conclusion that God has made a number of blunders and we have to put them right; we have private notions of our own which if put down in black and white would prove that we do not believe God is intelligent in allowing the history of the world to go on as it has, in allowing sin and war. We talk about these things as if they were amazing blunders that nearly take God’s breath away and we have to do the best we can. We won’t see that behind the whole thing is the wisdom of God, that neither bad men nor the devil himself can do one thing without the direct permission of God. “The foolishness of God is wiser than men. ” God has chosen “the weak things of the world, ” and men laugh at them. To the crowd we represent Jesus says, “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. A man who has faith in God is easily ridiculed, then when he comes out into the sun people say, What a cunning man he was, look how he worked it all out. We would rather credit man with an intelligence he never possessed than credit God with intelligence. The astuteness behind all is the Mind of God.
And in that day shall the deaf hear the words of the book . . . (Isaiah 29:18)—”that day”—the day in which God manifests His wisdom and turns man’s wisdom to nonsense. The result of God’s wisdom is a moral result, it is going to be realised to its full extent in what we call the Millennium, but it is manifested now whenever God’s wisdom bursts through. All through Isaiah there is the confidence that God is reigning and ruling; the devil likes to make us believe that we are in a losing battle. Nothing of the sort! we have to overcome all the things that try to obscure God. The rugged truths of Isaiah point out not only the appalling state of the world as it is, but that we have to live a holy life in it by the power of God, not a sequestered life in particular temples or rituals, but real genuine magnificent men and women of God, no matter what the devil or the world or the flesh may do. The only thing God is interested in is life, He is not interested in religious forms, and this is what the people had for- gotten, they only recognised God in their moribund religious services. God is going to make us worthy of the best saints we have known if we go on with Him (Isaiah 29:22–24).
From The Bible Training Course Monthly journal
vol . 11 o October–December 1942 nos . 7–9
notes on Isaiah
The center of the cyclone
Isaiah 30
The test of true religion is the knowledge of the character of God. As long as you think of God in the quietness of a religious meeting you will never know God—what kind of God have you got when you are in touch with the wrong, bad, evil things? God’s Book reveals that it is right in the midst of the very opposite of God that His blessings occur. The very things which seem to be making for destruction become the revealers of God. It is an easy business to preach peace when you are in health and have everything you want, but the Bible preaches peace when things are in a howling tumult of passion and sin and iniquity; it is in the midst of anguish and terror that we realise who God is and the marvel of what He can do.
1. The Buttresses of a Bungled Building
Therefore this iniquity shall be to you as a breach ready to fall, swelling out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instant. (Isaiah 30:13)
The trouble is not that the wall has been badly built, but there is too much on the inside and it will burst through no matter what buttresses there are; the real danger comes from within. The supposed buttresses will prove to be breaches—”and he shall break it as a potter’s vessel is broken, breaking it in pieces with- out sparing” (Isaiah 30:14 rv ). Your principles may be all right, but if the personal relationship to God is ignored the whole thing will come to the ground. Belief in God will always manifest itself in right principles, but if you put principles first you will end in disbelief in God. Men quote Our Lord’s words: “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself “; true, but if you build on that you blot God out of His heaven and you end as an atheist where you began as a lover of men. It is the same truth that Jesus enunciated: “. . . he that gathereth not with Me scattereth. In Luke 14:26– 33, where Our Lord is laying down the conditions of discipleship, He implies that He is not less than a man among men—”I know the kind of building I am going to rear, I have counted the cost and only those in whom My work is effective will be taken up into My building and battling enterprises”; consequently there will be no incompleteness, no bursting out from within of what is wrong, in Jesus Christ’s building.
2. The Benefit of Building by Belief
And therefore will the Lord wait, that He may be gracious unto you, . . . for the Lord is a God of judgement: blessed are all they that wait for Him. (Isaiah 30:18)
God’s purpose is not destruction but the bringing out into light and blessing all the nations as well as His own people. Nowadays we have lost the iron tonic of the belief in God behind everything. The Bible view is that God is allowing the devil and sin to do their worst, but behind all the calamities He is working out His purpose. Learn to relate everything in your own life to God, and remember that if things go wrong it is because they must go wrong, but the must is not necessity, it is God. “Things wrong are needful where wrong things abound. ” If we had made the world would we have made pain? No, we would have ruled pain out. We all pronounce against God and say that pain comes from the devil. The devil knows far too much to allow pain—when he reigns “his goods, ” i. e. the souls of men, “are in peace. Pain, physical, moral and spiritual pain is the gateway of life every time. The thing that to us is the ugliest blot on the face of Creation God makes to be the angel of the revelation of Himself. Belief in God’s mercy will always be inclined to wobble between sleepy satisfaction that God is indulgent and fretful impatience that He is indifferent.
When we become spiritual the thing that comes out more and more clearly is not so much the fact that we have discerned God, but His amazing patience with us in our absurd bungling ways of talking about Him. God never hurries up no matter what men say about Him, about Him, He goes steadily forward, and bit by bit as we follow the light of the Spirit of God we begin to discern His methods. “For the Lord is a God of judgement: blessed are all they that wait for Him. The only place of confidence is personal trust in God and patient waiting for Him. One of the things we have to unlearn is the idea of judgement which never came from God’s Book, viz. , the idea that God is vindictive. Our Lord never spoke from personal vindictiveness, He spoke from a knowledge of the eternal principles of God, which are inexorable. To trust in the goodness of God is not enough, it is not eternal and abiding; we have to trust God, who is infinitely more than goodness.
3. The Benign Blessing of the Besieged
For the people shall dwell in Zion at Jerusalem: thou shalt weep no more. (Isaiah 30:19)
All through Isaiah is true to his original vision, viz. , the survival of the holy remnant. That stands symbolically for the indestructibility of God’s purpose, and it will be true historically also, the prevailing of God’s purpose notwithstanding all that the devil and sin may do. The danger with us as workers is that we do not stand in the thick of things as the prophets did, we stand aloof from them and are no use in the way God intends us to be. Whatever the circumstances may be we have to stand true for God there. “Ye shall have a song, as in the night . . . and gladness of heart” (Isaiah 30:29).
God makes His people sing where in the eyes of the world it seems ironical to sing—in a besieged city where things are going to ruin, in the suburbs of hell, in the valley of the shadow of death. When you see lives in the midst of turmoil and anguish full of amazing brightness and uncrushable elasticity of faith in God, if you do not know God you will say, “However can they go through it? how is it that they remain undiscouraged and undismayed? The explanation is the presence of God made real in His promises. Think of the ridiculously legal way we treat the promises; we say to God, “You made this promise now fulfill it. The promise itself is the fulfillment, God’s presence is in the promise. No one can fulfill a promise but the one who made it. For all the promises of God in Him are yea, and in Him Amen, unto the glory of God by us” (2 Corinthians 1:20), not “yea and Amen” to faith, but in Christ Jesus.
The Book of God is a revelation of God; that means there is no key to its interpretation other than a knowledge of God. Likewise our lives are a series of puzzles and God alone is the answer to them. Unless we discern God in Bible interpretation and in the interpretation of our lives we will come to disaster. God’s Book is merciless on sham and pretence, any- thing that obscures the one real relationship—”In all the world there is none but Thee, my God there is none but Thee. God first, second and third; not refinement, but holiness—a holy God and a holy people and Isaiah cares for nothing else.
From The Bible Training Course Monthly journal
vol. 11 January–March 1943 nos. 10–12
notes on Isaiah
Isaiah 36–38
1. The Tryst of Faith (Isaiah 36)
. . . that the trial of your faith, . . .
All our beliefs unless they have been made ours through suffering, stand helpless immediately we are faced by a healthy pagan. Rabshakeh stands for rationalism, and rationalism can never understand the “Isaiah” element, viz. , the impregnable citadel of faith in God.
If we obey the “Isaiah” element we are brought where Isaiah is trying to bring these people—”in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength. ” Sennacherib, the Assyrian king, has been subduing the fenced cities of Judah, and now he sends this astute man, Rabshakeh, to Jerusalem with a great army, and he struts before the people with all the assurance imaginable. We are familiar with Isaiah’s method of bringing his message to the people and then making them decide, and Rabshakeh does the same thing (see Isaiah 36:4–10). The most formidable enemy to faith in God is rationalism because there is no answer saving on the spiritual line. When people go down spiritually it is because they have begun to heed the earnestness which quotes the words of God without His Spirit. The first thing always that blinds us is that people are in earnest. If the people had heeded Isaiah and learned to depend upon God for themselves they would have seen through the disguise of Rabshakeh’s earnestness.
The trial of faith never comes along a fantastic line, it always comes along a line on which we can be tested. Here, Rabshakeh’s counsel made it seem the wisest thing to affiliate with Assyria; the facts he hurls at them are facts. Beware of the talk that sympathises with your bias—no one is unbiased; there is nothing captivates you more quickly. In listening to certain people you feel, “That is the only thing that can be said, ” they bear you down with an overplus of common sense. If in the face of all the appeals of common sense you remain true to God, that is the “proof of your faith” (rv) which will be found to the glory of God. The nature of faith is that it must be tested; and the trial of faith does not come in fits and starts, it goes on all the time. The one thing that keeps us right with God is the great work of His grace in our hearts. All the prophets had to take part in something they did not understand, and the Christian has to do the same. If we were to say “This is the way God is going to work, ” it would lead to spiritual pride, to the ban of finality8 about our views, to imagining that God was on our side. The question for us is, will we so yield to the Spirit of God that we always side with Him? The “trial of your faith” is in order to bring God into the practical details of your life.
2. The Tribulation of Faith (Isaiah 37)
. . . being much more precious than gold . . . (rv)
Faith is the trend of the life all through, and every- thing that is not “hid with Christ in God” is against it. The trial of faith always comes in such a way that it is a perplexity to know what to do. You get advice that sounds wise, it has your welfare in view; every- thing seems right, and yet there is the feeling that there is an error at the heart of it. “And Hezekiah received the letter from the hand of the messengers, and read it: and Hezekiah went up unto the house of the Lord , and spread it before the L ord ” (Isaiah 37:14). If any letter is not important enough to be spread “before the lord ” it is too small to annoy you. If I have not prayed about things so ridiculously small that I almost blush to mention them, I have not learned the first lesson in prayer. It is not easy to find your way to God in a sudden crisis unless you have been in the habit of going to God about everything. The thing that rationalism ridicules is not a man praying to God when he is in distress, but a man praying to God when he is not in distress. To the rationalist it is ridiculous to pray to God about everything; behind the ridicule is the devil to keep us from knowing the road when the crisis comes. Hezekiah knew the road. In his prayer (Isaiah 37:16–20) Hezekiah tells God what he knows God knows already. That is the meaning of prayer—I tell God what I know He knows in order that I may get to know it as He does (cf. Matthew 6:8). It is not true to say that a man learns to pray in calamities, he never does; he calls on God to deliver him, but he does not pray (see Psalm 107:6, 13, 19). A man only learns to pray when there is no calamity.
3. The Triumph of Faith (Isaiah 38) .
. . might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 1:7)
God’s Book is like life, it records facts; we try to be consistent to our theories instead of to God’s character. God has a way of bringing in facts which upset a man’s doctrines if they stand in the way of God get- ting at his soul. God does not deal with lives in our way, but in His own way. When we get down to the real issues of life we forget to be consistent to doctrine because we are face to face with God, and those who have been teaching us how to do things have to retire. “What shall I say? He hath both spoken unto me, and Himself hath done it: I shall go softly [“as in solemn procession, ” mg] all my years because of the bitterness of my soul. O Lord, by these things men live . . . ” (Isaiah 38:15–16 rv ).
If you have studied the faces of men and women you will find you can always tell those who have been face to face with danger, it has brought out a dignity of expression and a stateliness, and it is these lives that set the pace for a society that had been going too quickly. It is a benediction for a young life to have to face danger and death, the character is more likely to tell for good ultimately than if it had gone with a skip and jump into life without any realisation of its tremendous depths.
It is perilously easy to conclude that God’s honour is bound up with my deliverance; whereas my deliverance is in order to bring me into touch with Reality and not for God’s honour at all. If, like Hezekiah, you go through a crisis you find that all the small mean 9 things in your nature disappear, you are face to face with the real issues—your back is to life and your face is to death; then when God brings you through the crisis with your back to death and your face to life, be careful that you don’t degenerate into a “small potato. We are apt to think that any one who has faced death and has seen the true issues of life will never become small and mean again, but that is a great fallacy.
When we forget to walk in the light of the vision the meanness and selfishness will crop up again. Hezekiah forgot the grand stately processional gait and he degenerated into a childish piece of disgraceful conduct (see Isaiah 39). If you have had a spiritual awakening, a time of the sense of God’s presence and revelation of His word, a crisis you can only account for by God, remember you have to pay for it, if you are to be worth God’s trouble—to pay for it by the determination to keep steadily on that line. The crisis in which God was revealed is to be the light of your life when there is no crisis. Keep paying the price; let God see you are willing to live up to the vision. In a crisis leave everything to God, shut out every voice saving the voice of God and the psalm of your own deliverance; make it your duty to remain true to both these voices. In the life of a saint tribulation does this super- natural thing—it brings back innocence with experience; in the natural world experience brings cunning and craftiness. We sit down under the tyranny of a devil’s lie and say, “I can’t undo the past”: you cannot, but God can. God can make the past, as far as our spiritual life is concerned, as if it had never been and even in its worst features He can make it bring out the “treasures of darkness.
From The Bible Training Course Monthly journal
vol. 12 April –June 1943 nos .1–3
notes on Isaiah
The lord god omnipotent reignite
Isaiah 40
1. The Voice of Inner Reassurance (Isaiah 40:1–2)
Comfort ye, comfort ye My people, saith your God. (Isaiah 40:1)
A revelation-voice always implies a previous knowledge. God cannot make a revelation to a sinner; He can make a revelation to a backslidden saint, and in order to effect this He sends His Spirit to prepare the way by conviction. This revelation-voice comes to the people of God who are experiencing punishment for their sin; but they have had an experience of God, they have known Him, and in the midst of their tribulation His voice speaks to them. We cannot imitate God’s voice, even when we utter His words. The preacher can never rouse up a backslider; it is only when the Spirit of God has got hold of the preacher and is making the words of God living, that the backslider hears God’s voice and awakens. The insistent need in practical Christianity is to rely on the Spirit of God; it is the only way to kill the arrogant impudence of preachers. I look upon a congregation as those whom I have to induce to come to God—and I am made of the same stuff as they are! The only reason for my being in the preacher’s place is that I have heard God’s voice and He has done something in me which He can for them, and I deliver God’s message, knowing that the Spirit will apply it as I rely upon Him. Beware of ignoring the ministry of the Spirit by relying on your sensible knowledge of the people you talk to. The great snare in modern Christian enterprise is this very thing—”Do remember the people you are talking to. We have to stay true to God and His message, not to our knowledge of the people. We must not consider what the people want but what God wants us to present to them, and as we rely on His Spirit we find God works His marvels in His own way. “Comfort ye, comfort ye My people, saith your God. Notice the “My, ” and remember that they were a disobedient people, and yet God is “not ashamed to be called their God. It is not the love of God for a pure saint, but the love of God for a sin-stained people. He might well have been ashamed of them on account of their sin and degradation, but His voice comes in all its amazing wonder—”Speak ye comfortably [“to the heart of, ” rv mg] to Jerusalem. . . . It is a wonderful picture of what God does in the Atonement.
2. The Voice of Imminent Reality (Isaiah 40:3–5)
Prepare ye the way of the Lord . . . . And the glory of the L ord shall be revealed. (Isaiah 40:3, 5)
Unless we prepare on the outside in accordance with the inner vision we are not in God’s order. John the Baptist prepared the way of the Lord historically, but take it personally—how many valleys have I exalted, and how many mountains have I made low? How many mountains of prejudice have I put out of the way? If we prepare on the outside we enable God to plant His glory there, and the first thing we have to do is to go dead against our ingrained prejudices which put a barrier round about us. If I will do in accordance with what God has made me be, He will reveal His glory.
3. The Voice of Insistent Reminding (Isaiah 40:6–8)
The grass withereth, . . . but the word of our God shall stand for ever. (Isaiah 40:8)
Think of asking these people in their misery and sin to prepare the way of the Lord! No wonder the prophet says, “What shall I cry? ” “Cry first, ” the voice says, “that everything is vanity; don’t build your hopes again on anything you can see; don’t put your confidence again in men, in alliances with Egypt and Assyria; they all wither as the grass. ” Then comes the heartening verity—”but the word of our God shall stand for ever. Everything will shift but God and His word. How steadily the Spirit of God warns us not to put our trust in men and women, not even in princes, or in anything or anyone but God and His word. Isaiah is reminding the people of this— “You should by this time have said farewell for ever to confidence in everyone and everything but God. That is what happens in sanctification. It has to be a valediction once and for ever to confidence in anyone but God, then the hundredfold can be given without any fear of deceiving the heart.
4. The Voice of Infinite Redemption (Isaiah 40:9–11)
Behold, the Lord God will come with strong hand, and His arm shall rule for Him. (Isaiah 40:10)
Isaiah is not trying to convert the minds of the people, but speaking to their hearts. They have got into despair—”We do not doubt what God can do, but He has wearied of us, and we don’t blame Him. Isaiah’s message comes to recover to them their lost heritage. What we all need is someone who can make real to us the ideas we had of God but have forgotten; the only One who can do this for us is the Spirit of God. Isaiah is bringing back to the people first of all the memory of who God is; you cannot have faith in anyone you have forgotten. It is not God’s promises we need, it is Himself. “His presence is salvation. ” Once let that Presence come, and all the inner forces of hope are rallied at once. Isaiah is calling upon them to “hang in” to God—”No matter how challenging facts may be to disprove your faith, remember that you did know God, and that there is good reason for all that has happened. The reason the children of Israel could not see this was that they were not blaming themselves— “We are God’s favoured people, the things which have happened are from the devil. ” No, they are from God. God is using external forces as a scourge to bring back His people to Himself—Holiness as a law; chastisement as a means; a holy remnant as a result. Isaiah calls upon them to exercise unshaken faith in God and in His predicted deliverance of which there seems no likelihood. This profound truth runs all through God’s word. It is not faith when you trust in what you see; faith is trusting in what you don’t see, hanging in to the God whose character you know though meantime there is no evidence that He is at work on your behalf. The vision of God’s purpose comes from a pure heart, from an acute intellect; the condition is—the inner life right with God. An illiterate old woman with a pure heart has a greater insight into the purposes of God than a prime minister. If the prime minister has a pure heart as well as powerful intellect, then you have a man like Isaiah, a giant for God. The sanctification- metaphysic underlies everything. The opportunity is given to us all to be the choice souls. The God who guides the stars, unhasting and unresting, will as assuredly fulfill what He has promised.
From The Bible Training Course Monthly journal
vol . 12 July–September 1943 nos . 4–6
notes on Isaiah
“servus servorum dei”
Isaiah 42
1. Commission for Service
Behold My servant, whom I uphold.
A servant is one who is at the disposal of another— “a servant of the servants of God. Christianity is the deification of this type of service. Jesus Christ Himself is the servant of all— “I am in the midst of you as He that serveth” (rv), and Paul delights to call himself “a bondservant of Jesus” (rv mg). If you want to know what a servant of God is to be like, read what Isaiah says in this chapter and the following ones about the great Servant, Jesus Christ. The characteristics of the great Servant must be the characteristics of every servant; it is the identification of the servant of God with the immortal characteristics of God Himself.
In service for God we have to be abandoned to Him, let Him put us where He will, whether He blesses us or crushes us with burdens, we have nothing to do with what it costs. God will bring folks round in order to see whether He can put anything on you to bear for them—”I can put the burden of insight on that man, that woman, they have only one interest in life, and that is Myself. Would to God that we would get finished once for all with the experience of being rightly adjusted to God, and let Him begin to send us forth into vicarious service for Him! May God make us understand that if we are in His service He will do exactly what He likes with us. We are not saved and sanctified for ourselves, but for God to crush us with burdens if He chooses. What do we know about filling up that which remains behind of the sufferings of Christ? A servant of Jesus Christ is one who is willing to go to martyrdom for the reality of the Gospel of God.
2. Character of the Servant
He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street. (Isaiah 42:2)
This verse refers to the tone of the servant, self-effaced to such an extent that self is not thought of; nothing sickly or sentimental, but complete self-effacement so that Jesus only is known. The servant is absorbed in Jesus as He was in God. The mark of false service is the self-conscious pride of striving after God’s favour. The Holy Ghost will glorify Me, ” said Jesus. “He shall not . . . cause his voice to be heard in the street, ” i. e. , he shall not advertise himself. Nothing is entered into for the sake of self-vindication; just as Our Lord never showed any desire to be found in the right, but only a strong desire that the right of God should have its way. Could we stand the humiliation Jesus stood of having words flung at us without saying “Now I must explain? Men never heard His voice in the street vindicating Himself, but watch Him in the Temple, with a whip of small cords in His hand driving out the moneychangers; then it was His Father’s honour that was at stake.
3. Considerateness of the Service
A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench.
This verse refers to the quality of the service. The accuser of the brethren comes and says to God, “That man is a broken reed, don’t build any hope on him whatever, he is a hindrance and an upset to You; break him. But no, the Lord will bind up the broken reed and make it into a wonderful instrument and discourse sweet music through it. Or Satan insinuates—”That woman is a perfect disgrace to You, she has only one spark of grace among all the fibres of her being, the best thing to do is to stamp out that spark. ” But no, He will raise it to a flame. The whole conception of the work of a servant of God is to lift up the despair- ing and the hopeless. Immediately you start work on God’s line He will bring the weak and infirm round you, the surest sign that God is at work is that that is the class who come—the very class we don’t want, with the pain and the distress and limitation. We want the strong and robust, and God gathers round us the feeble-minded, the afflicted and weak. Pain in God’s service always leads to glory. We want success, God wants glory. Some of us have the notion, till God shakes it out of us, that we are saved and sanctified to have a holy hilarious time before God and among men. Never! We are saved and sanctified to be the servants of men—”ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake. “
4. The Creator’s Call to the Servant
Thus saith God . . . , He that created the heavens and stretched them out; . . . I the Lord have called thee in righteousness. . . . (Isaiah 42:5–6)
Naturally we never look to Nature for illustrations of the spiritual life, we look at the methods of business men, at man’s handiwork. Our Lord drew all His illustrations from His Father’s handiwork, He spoke of lilies and trees and grass and sparrows. As Christians we have to feast our souls on the things ignored by practical people. A false spirituality blots Nature right out. The way to keep your spiritual life un-panicky, free from hysterics and fuss, free from flagging and breaking, is to consider the bits of God’s created universe you can see where you are. Foster your life on God and on His creation and you will find a new use for Nature. Read the life of Jesus—the calm, unhasting, unperturbed majesty of His life is like the majesty of the stars in their courses because both are upheld by the same power. Nothing happens in history or in Nature without God’s permission and under His direct control. When the saints say, “God gave us good weather”; “He overruled that disaster for my good”; “He changed the wind”—in the eyes of the world, it is absurd. None of these things happens by chance, they have a distinct permissive purpose behind, and the saint discerns this. Jesus bases every- thing on what looks ridiculous to the eyes of common sense if God is ignored. Take intercessory prayer— how ridiculous it looks for a being like you or me to pray and expect God to answer: is it? It becomes the sublimest truth when we get hold of these principles. To open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house. ” That is the “Beulah” of the saints, the land of rest to which the service of men will bring men when it is performed in God’s way. The law of God running all through the Bible is that every spiritual nature must be able to reproduce its kind, otherwise it abides alone; not produce the attitude of life, you can do that by your creeds, but produce your own kind. “Go . . . and make disciples” (rv ), said Jesus, and you cannot disciple others unless you are a disciple yourself. God regenerates lives; we disciple those whom He regenerates. “I am the Lord : that is My name. ” The one test of a saint, which is another name for servant, is that he knows the incommunicable Name.
From The Bible Training Course Monthly journal
vol . 12 o October–December 1943 nos . 7–9
notes on Isaiah
God the goal
Isaiah 45
I am the Lord , and there is none else; beside Me there is no God. Isaiah 45:5 (rv)
1. “Lo, These Are Parts of His Ways”
Thus saith the Lord to His anointed, to Cyrus . . .
God does not work according to His own precedents. To learn this supreme lesson, that God is not concerned about His own precedents, is to keep your soul in the state of a child, humbly depending on God, who will then guide you everywhere. Israel was looking at God’s dealings with them in the light of what He had done in the past, forgetting altogether that what God had done in the past proved Him to be the sovereign Lord. Cyrus, the Persian, is not to be taken as a type of Christ, though God says of him “He is My shepherd, and shall perform all My pleasure. ” Cyrus is an illustration of the sovereignty of God. Behind all his successful campaigns was no “lucky star, ” or chance, or fortune, but the great fundamental, unshakeable pur- pose of God. Remember there is a difference between an instrument and a servant; a servant is one who has given up his right to himself to the God whom he proclaims. The term “servant” in this sense is never applied to Cyrus; he is an instrument in God’s hands for the deliverance of His people.
2. Ways Past Finding Out
I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places. . . . (Isaiah 45:3)
We often state the character of God in terms of brutal harshness which makes men atheists, while our motive is to glorify Him. Ever remember that “eternal life” is to know God, therefore you cannot expect to know Him in five minutes or forty years. Measure your ultimate delight in God’s truth and joy in God by the little bit that is clear to you. There are whole tracts of God’s character unrevealed to us as yet, and we have to bow in patience until God is able to reveal the things which look so dark. The danger is lest we make the little bit of truth we do know a pinnacle on which we set our- selves to judge everyone else. It is perilously easy to make our conception of God like molten lead and pour it into our specially designed mould and then when it is cold and hard, fling it at the heads of the religious people who don’t agree with us. The stamp of the saint is not the metallic rapping out of a testimony to salvation and sanctification, but the true humility which shows the fierce purity of God in ordinary human flesh.
The purity in your soul burns the wrong in other souls because it is the fierce purity of God, and it was the purity of God in Christ that made people either hate Him or turn to Him. We are so certain that we must be right because we have had the experience of salvation and sanctification; the only sign that you are right is that you are a bondslave of Jesus. There are depths inaccessible in the Divine nature; mysteries unrevealed in the method of God’s procedure. God never reveals anything ahead of moral and spiritual progress.
The Christian worker who has never walked in the darkness of God’s hand with no light, has never walked with God at all. The principle of walking with God is that it is a walk by faith, not by sight; a walk in the light of Christ, not in the light of dogmatic conviction. Jesus as our example was under the shadow of the hand of God. If it be possible, let this cup pass from Me. ” He knew He could have called twelve legions of angels to His rescue, but He did not call one; not one fire of His own did He kindle, not one self-generated effort did He ever make. One of the saddest sights is to see Christians who were true go under through the lassitude of some sorrow.
This is where it begins—God brought them under the shadow of His hand, and they said, “This is the devil, I have no business to be in darkness, ” forgetting that there are things God cannot explain. Our Lord taught over and over again that things will never be explained in this life. We have to get rid of the idea that we are going to be vindicated down here; Jesus was not. The millennium age will be the vindication of the saints; this is the age of their humiliation. The triumphant thing for a saint is to stand true to God in spite of all the odds the world, the flesh and the devil can bring. God’s Spirit will lead us away from our limitations and teach us to think the thoughts of God behind the things that contradict them, He will give us the “treasures of darkness. ” This was true in Isaiah’s own life, he was undaunted because he was going on with God, events did not affect him. Along this line we get some idea of the amazing courage of these men of God. God never vindicates His saints in their own lifetime. The place of scrutiny for us to keep our lives faced with the Lord; at the back of all is the love of God which will not let a soul go. If you are a servant of God, He will put you through desert experiences without asking your permission.
From The Bible Training Course Monthly journal
vol. 12 January–March 1944 nos. 10–12
notes on Isaiah
Our Implicit difference with God
Isaiah 53
Surely He . . . : yet we . . . (Isaiah 53:4) Every heart, saintly or unsaintly, differs from God on the subject of pain. It is an implicit difference, i. e. , better felt than expressed. We argue, “Why should there be pain? “Things have no business to be like this; this is what God means. . . . Whenever pain is mentioned as being God’s plan, the innate heart of man rebels—”Surely God does not mean that we are only perfected through suffering? “
1. Vicarious Inspiration
The 53rd chapter of Isaiah stands alone as a great burst of amazing prophecy. The greatest spiritual exposition of the Lord Jesus Christ is not in the New Testament; it is in this chapter, given by a man who lived hundreds of years before Christ was born. If you want to know the characterisation of the Person of Christ you will find it here, sketched by His Father, through the mouth of Isaiah. The prophet Isaiah, more even than the Apostle Paul, interprets the Person of Christ; his is the power of seeing not with the outward eye, but with the inward vision of the spirit. In these latter chapters an alteration comes over Isaiah’s picturing of the Servant of Jehovah; it is no longer a personification, but a Person; the great truth dawns on the prophet that it is God Himself in His Servant who is the vicarious Sufferer. It was no mighty monarch who was to come, no great conqueror, but One in the guise of a sufferer. Vicarious suffering is always voluntary.
2. Vicious Indifference
He is despised and rejected of men. (Isaiah 53:3) When Our Lord came on this earth how many discerned Him? We needs must love the Highest when we see it”; but the highest is measured by our inner disposition, and when the Son of God, who was The Highest, appeared, men did not love Him; in fact, He was unheeded, despised and rejected. He could easily be unheeded because He did not resent it; He could be treated like the earth under our feet. If we belong to His crowd we shall be despised. Watch how people treat you who don’t love Him. “He was despised, and we esteemed Him not. ” This is God’s picture of how His Servant will appear, not sometimes, but at all times. We will preach what the Apostle Paul never preached; we will preach an exalted Christ: Paul said, “For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Modern holiness teachers ignore God’s method and present what is called the glory side; we have to present the side represented by the Cross. These are all characteristics of this implicit difference; we say, “Surely God does not mean we have to present a despised and neglected and crucified Jesus? ” He does. The Spirit of God presents the glorified, exalted Jesus; but the only way that presentation can be made is through the Cross. “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me, ” said Jesus; He is exalted on the Cross. Where we blunder is in trying to explain the Cross doctrinally while we refuse to do what Jesus told us to do, lift Him up.
We want to present our understanding of how God worked in our own experience, consequently we confuse people. Present Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit will do in them what He has done in you. The preaching of the Cross will produce its miraculous result in lives, not what we preach about the Cross (see 1 Corinthians 1:21).
When the Bible speaks of the Death of Jesus it is not as the crucifixion of a Nazarene Carpenter, but as the point in history which reveals the nature of God—that He is not sitting on the remote circle of the world in omnipotent indifference, but that He is right at the very heart of things. The symbol for God is not a circle, but a cross, symbolic of supreme suffering and distress.
3. Voluntary Identification
Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. (Isaiah 53:4)
The coming of God is always on the line where the devil and sin have ranged themselves—”But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. The majority of people who have never been touched by affliction see Jesus Christ’s death as a thing beside the mark; but when a man is convicted of sin, then for the first time he begins to see something else— “At last I see; I thought He was smitten of God; but now I see He was wounded for my transgressions. He was bruised for my iniquities: the chastisement of my peace was upon Him. ” The hand of God was on Him; the reason for His suffering was sin; but it was our sin, our transgression. “Surely He hath borne our griefs”: He bore for all. We cannot bear for anyone, it is impossible. Jesus Christ came weighted with the message of God, but that was not what weighed Him down; the thing that weighed Him down was sin.
The only thing that made God’s shoulders stoop was sin. He made His own Son to be sin; and the Son “put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. Jesus Christ’s suffering was unique: He knew why He suffered. The sufferings of Jesus are God’s inscrutable plan for the carrying out of His Redemptive purpose—”Ought not Christ to have suffered . . . ? “
There was nothing of the morbid fanatic about Our Lord: He looked beyond the travail to the joy set before Him, consequently He “endured the cross, despising the shame. ” Has the Christian anything like this to go through? Peter talks about suffering when you don’t deserve it. But if, when ye do well, and suffer for it ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God. No man can do that unless the Son of God is born in him. Have you ever accepted an undeserved stripe? Suffering unjustly will either produce sympathy with Satan or similarity to Christ. Sympathy with Satan arises from self-pity—”Why should I have to go through this? What do we know about filling up “that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ? Have we ever taken on our shoulders for one second the consequence of the insight the Holy Spirit gives into the corruption of men and women as they are? or is the recoil so desperately offensive that we turn away from it? Insight is an additional burden God places on us. Be careful not to turn your insight into supercilious criticism. Immediately you become spiritual your body becomes the burden-bearer for sins you never committed, so do your nerves. This is the dispensation of the humiliation of the saints; the more you walk in the light with God the more humiliating is your position on earth. It is true God does keep His saints in health, but remember what He does it for, that they may be crushed with burdens. If you take holiness or health as an exhibition of what God has done for you, you will get dry rot in your soul, but pour it out like water on the ground, spend right out to the last drop, and you will find the supply is always there. You can’t reserve anything if you are a servant of Jesus Christ. It is the finest saints who are most easily utilised. Every servant of God suffers in his stand for God because of the upheaval that the stand makes in the natural order. The natural has to be sacrificed, that is what it was made for, in order to make it spiritual.
Forgiveness of sin is the great revelation of God, all the rest is slight. We have belittled the meaning of forgiveness of sin by making it mean the forgiveness of offences. The only way God can forgive sin is because His Servant “poured out His soul unto death. Have I ever realised that the only way I am forgiven is by the panging depth of suffering God’s Servant went through? The consciousness of what sin is comes long after the redemptive processes have been at work. The man who comes to for God for the first time convicted of sins knows nothing about sin; it is the ripest saint who knows what sin is. Our salvation is the out- come of what it cost the Son of God. He shall see of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied. “