ISAIAH 41 COMMENTARY

EDITED BY GLENN PEASE

INTRODUCTION

WILLIAM KELLY, This chapter, if it be not a second part the preceding one being the first, is a

most appropriate sequel. For Jehovah, having opened His counsels as to Jerusalem and its comfort

(after, many vicissitudes and troubles) at His coming in power and glory, turns now to the Gentiles,

challenging them to meet Him in judgement. He had there been displayed in His shepherd care over

Israel, in His might and wisdom over all, needing no counsellor, and the nations counted less than a

cipher and vanity, so that comparison or image was futile, and Israel's unbelief was the more

deplorable because of His special goodness to all amongst them who waited on Him. Now He says (v.

1), "Keep silence before me, islands, and let the peoples renew [their] strength: let them come near,

then let them speak; let us draw near together to judgement."

Cyrus is meant though not yet named. It is no question of a past name of renown, but of a future

deliverer, of whom God knew all: man and his idols could say nothing. Before the prescient eye of the

prophet stands the mighty conqueror of Babylon. None but the true God, Who made him the

instrument of His designs in providence, had anticipated his rise. Jehovah here describes him, but

typically (in the manner of the prophetic Spirit) as the shadow of a greater than Cyrus, Who should for

ever overturn the idols of the nations, judge their pride, and deliver the people of Israel from all their

dispersions, as well as from the sins which brought them under wrath in the righteous ways of

Jehovah. "Who raised up from the east him whom righteousness calleth to its foot? He gave the

nations before him, and made [him] rule over kings; he gave [them] as dust to his sword, as driven

stubble to his bow. He pursued them, he passed on safely, by a way he had not come with his feet.

Who hath wrought and done [it], calling the generations from the beginning? I Jehovah, the first, and

with the last; I [am] He" (vv. 2-4).

It is as vain to drag in the gospel of Christ here as in Isa. 40 to interpret Jacob and Israel of

Christendom. Nor is the plea at all valid that the Jews will never more meddle with

idols. Mat_12:43; Mat_24:15, not to speak of the Revelation, are clear evidence confirmatory of Isa.

65-66, and of other passages in the Old Testament, which prove that the end of the age will see a fatal

revival of idolatry, the return of the unclean spirit (Mat_12:43-45) with the full antichristian power of

Satan, which will bring down the Assyrian scourge on the Jews and thereon also the Lord's coming in

vengeance, when the indignation shall be accomplished, and Jehovah's anger, in the destruction of

the foe. The last state of that generation which rejected Christ will then be characterized both by idol

worship and the Antichrist; so that, on this score, there is no pretence for turning aside the

expostulation, here addressed to the peoples, to the Gentiles that are now baptized, or for

interpreting Jacob and Israel of Christendom as some have done who ought to have known better.

Again, it is absurd to say that the gospel could be foreshown by the first one raised up from the east;

for, among the Jews, the east was always reckoned from Palestine, never Palestine itself. The

Rabbinical idea (strange to say, espoused by Calvin, Hausschein, Piscator, Lowth the younger, Bengel,

and stranger still, by the late Mr. Birks) was not so unreasonable: the allusion, they thought, was to

Abraham, who was a righteous man called out of Mesopotamia. But this idea fails. For who could

think that the patriarch's exceptional sally against the kings of the east who were returning after their

successful raid into the valley of the Jordan, or the incidents of Pharaoh and Abimelech, duly answer

to the discomfiture of nations and subjugation of kings, making his sword as a column of dust and as

the driven stubble his bow in resistless progress? Still less does verse 2 suit the testimony of Christ in

the gospel.

The comparison of Isa_45:1; Isa_45:13, ought to convince any unbiased thoughtful mind that Cyrus is

really in view, but of course ultimately the foreshadowed triumph when Christ comes in His kingdom,

putting all enemies under His feet instead of gathering souls out of the world in one body for heaven,

as He is now doing by the Holy Ghost's power through the gospel. (Compare also Ezr_1:1-3) If the

Babylonish captivity of Judah was the divine chastening of their idolatry by means of the chief patron

of idols on earth, the fall of Babylon was a tremendous blow on its own idolatry, predicted as this was

by the Jewish prophet long before either event. These were among the reasons which made the first

success and the final ruin of Babylon so important in scripture. They were bound up with God's ways

in His people. And hence the answer to the infidel sneer touching the silence of prophecy respecting

America. What has the discovery or growth of the New World in the far west to do with Israel? From

the New Testament again all such matters are excluded, because the rejected Messiah involves not

only the disappearance of Israel and the kingdoms of the earth from the foreground, but the calling of

the church for glory in the heavenly places as the body and bride of Christ, at least until the corruption

of Christendom becomes morally unbearable. For the age ends in the judgement of apostate Jews and

Gentiles under the Beast and the false prophet, when Christ and His glorified saints appear from

heaven, and the godly remnant of Jews here below will become a strong nation, the earthly centre of

His kingdom under the whole heaven.

Hence the suitability here of confronting in this very connection "Jehovah, the first, and with the last,"

the One Who had wrought and spoken. Why were the gods of the nations silent and powerless? why

were the boasted oracles dumb? If the fall of Judah, moral necessity as it was (unless Jehovah must

sanction His own dishonour in the midst of His people, and sustain them to give His glory to a graven

image), made His power questionable in a Gentile's eyes, let them learn in the downfall of Babylon,

which the Jews alone knew generations beforehand, even to the name and race of him who was its

instrument, that His righteousness and wisdom were no less than His power, and that the chastised

Jews were the people of His choice. "The isles saw [it] and feared; the ends of the earth were afraid,

drew near, and came. They helped every one his neighbour, and [each] said to his brother, Be of good

courage. So the carpenter encouraged the founder, he that smootheth [with] the hammer him that

smiteth on the anvil, saying of the soldering, [it is] good: and he fasteneth it with nails, [that] it be not

moved. But thou, Israel, my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen, the seed of Abraham my friend,

whom I have grasped from the ends of the earth, and called from its corners (or, nobles), and said

unto thee, Thou [art] my servant; I have chosen thee, and not rejected thee. Fear not, for I [am] with

thee; be not dismayed, for I [am] thy God. I will strengthen thee, yea, I will help thee, yea, I will

uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness" (vv. 5-10).

The honour to which Cyrus was called by the way was no change in His purposes or affections

respecting Israel. Not Cyrus but Israel was His servant. "Behold, all they that are incensed against thee

shall be ashamed and confounded: they that strive with thee shall be as nothing, and shall perish.

Thou shalt seek them, and shalt not find them, - them that contend with thee. They that war against

thee shall be as nothing, and as a thing of naught. For I Jehovah thy God will hold thy right hand,

saying unto thee, Fear not, I will help thee. Fear not, thou worm Jacob, ye few men of Israel; I will help

thee, saith Jehovah, and thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel. Behold, I have made thee a new sharp

threshing instrument having teeth: thou shalt thresh and beat small the mountains, and shalt make

the hills as chaff. Thou shalt fan them, and the wind shall carry them away, and the whirlwind shall

scatter them: and thou shalt rejoice in Jehovah, thou shalt glory in the Holy One of Israel" (vv. 11-16).

These last words, however, render it beyond just doubt that the prophet carries his eye far beyond

the immediate occasion, and presents, not the condition of the Jews under their Persian or other

Gentile lords, but days still future when Israel shall take them captive whose captives they were, and

shall rule over their oppressors. It is impossible to apply to the same period the prophetic description

here and Nehemiah's language: "Behold, we [are] servants this day, and [for] the land that thou

gavest unto our fathers to eat the fruit thereof and the good thereof, behold, we [are] servants in it;

and it yieldeth much increase unto the kings whom thou hast set over us because of our sins: also

they have dominion over our bodies, and over our cattle, at their pleasure, and we [are] in great

distress" (Neh_9:36-37). Here the word is in manifest contrast, and in figurative language, no doubt;

but it prefigures neither servitude, nor the grace of the gospel, but triumph when the true Sun of

Righteousness shall arise with healing in His wings, and Israel shall flourish and tread down the wicked

in the day that shall burn all the proud and lawless as an oven.

The Maccabean or the apostolic triumphs of Vitringa and others are a burlesque on a sound

interpretation. Not only must we leave room for the future, but for a total change from the character

of God's actual working in and by the church. Now it is grace building living stones on the foundation

of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner-stone; then it will be the

awful descent of the Stone cut without hands on the statue of Gentile empire in its last phase, which

leads to, as it corresponds with, the judicial functions of Israel here described in "that great day" of

the future.

Not that refreshment will fail from Jehovah for Israel. "The afflicted and the needy seek water, and

[there is] none; their tongue faileth for thirst: I Jehovah will hear them, [I] the God of Israel will not

forsake them. I will open rivers on the bare heights, and fountains in the midst of the valleys; I will

make the wilderness into a pool of water, and the dry lands into water-springs. I will give in the

wilderness the cedar, acacia, and myrtle, and oleaster; I will set in the desert the cypress, pine (or,

plane), and box-tree together; that they may see and know and consider and understand together,

that the hand of Jehovah hath done this, and the Holy One of Israel hath created it" (vv. 17-20).

Jehovah then recurs to a renewal of His challenge to the Gentiles and their idols, but in terms of justly

increased contempt for their trust in a thing of naught, again grounding His appeal on their ignorance

of the scourge of idolatry who should come from the north and east. "Produce your cause, saith

Jehovah; bring forth your strong [reasons] saith the King of Jacob. Let them bring [them] forth and

show us what shall happen: show the former things, what they [be], that we may pay heed to them,

and know their issue; or declare us things to come. Show the things that are to come hereafter, that

we may know that ye [are] gods; yea, do good, or do evil, that we may be dismayed, and behold [it]

together. Behold, ye [are] of nothing, and your work of naught: an abomination [is he that] chooseth

you. I have raised up [one] from the north, and he shall come; from the rising of the sun will he call

upon my name: and he shall come upon princes as [upon] mortar, and as the potter treadeth clay.

Who hath declared [it] from the beginning, that we may know? and beforetime, that we may say,

Right? Indeed there is none that declareth, indeed there is none that showeth, indeed there is none

that heareth your words. The first [I say] to Zion, Behold, behold them; and to Jerusalem I will give

one that bringeth good tidings. For I look, and there is no man; even among them, and there is no

counsellor, that, when I ask of them, can answer a word" (vv. 21-28). The oracles are dumb, even

reason abashed - nothing but insensate folly is in men owning as gods things which could neither

speak nor hear. "Behold, they [are] all vanity: their works [are] naught: their molten images [are]

wind and confusion" (v. 29). Human helps to devotion are the death-bed of faith. Man by his devices,

now as of old, only succeeds in shutting himself out from the living God; and the mercy He reveals in

His word, as well as His judgements, are sealed up in the darkness of unbelief. Prophecy is the truest

and most permanent witness of the true God, till His power overwhelm those that dispute it and

dishonour Him. Hence the gravity of the present scepticism in Christendom which will issue in "the

falling away" or apostasy (2Th_2:3).

The Helper of Israel

41 Be silent before me, you islands!

Let the nations renew their strength!

Let them come forward and speak;

let us meet together at the place of judgment.

1.BARNES, The design of this chapter is the same as that of the preceding, and it is to be regarded as the continuation of the argument commenced there. Its object is to lead those who were addressed, to put confidence in God. In the introduction to Isa. 40 it was remarked, that this is to be considered as addressed to the exile Jews in Babylon, near the close of their captivity. Their country, city, and temple had been laid waste. The prophet represents himself as bringing consolation to them in this situation; particularly by the assurance that their long captivity was about to end; that they were about to be restored to their own land, and thai their trials were to be succeeded by brighter and happier times. In the previous chapter there were general reasons given why they should put their confidence in God - arising from the firmness of his promises, the fact that he had created all things; that he had all power, etc. In this chapter there is a more definite view given, and a clearer light thrown on the mode in which deliverance would be brought to them. The prophet specifies that God would raise up a deliverer, and that that deliverer would be able to subdue all their enemies. The chapter may be conveniently divided into the following parts:

I. God calls the distant nations to a public investigation of his ability to aid his people; to an argument whether he was able to deliver them; and to the statement of the reasons why they should confide in him Isa_41:1.

II. He specifies that he will raise up a man from the east - who should be able to overcome the enemies of the Jews, and to effect their deliverance Isa_41:2-4.

III. The consternation of the nations at the approach of Cyrus, and their excited and agitated fleeing to their idols is described Isa_41:5-7.

IV. God gives to his people the assurance of his protection, and friendship Isa_41:8-14. This is shown:

1. Because they were the children of Abraham, his friend, and be was bound in covenant faithfulness to protect them Isa_41:8-9.

2. By direct assurance that he would aid and protect them; that though they were feeble, yet he was strong enough to deliver them Isa_41:10-14.

V. He says that he will enable them to overcome and scatter their foes, as the chaff is driven away on the mountains by the whirlwind Isa_41:15-16.

VI. He gives to his people the special promise of assistance and comfort. He will meet them in their desolate condition, and will give them consolation as if fountains were opened in deserts, and trees producing grateful shade and fruit were planted in the wilderness Isa_41:17-20.

VII. He appeals directly to the enemies of the Jews, to the worshippers of idols. He challenges them to give any evidence of the power or the divinity of their idols; and appeals to the fact that he had foretold future events; that he had raised up a deliverer for his people in proof of his divinity, and his power to save Isa_41:21-29. The argument of the whole is, that the idol-gods were unable to defend the nations which trusted in them; that God would raise up a mighty prince who should be able to deliver the Jews from their long and painful calamity, and that they, therefore, should put their trust in Yahweh.

Keep silence before me - (Compare Zec_2:13) The idea is, that the pagan nations were to be silent while God should speak, or with a view of entering into an argument with him respecting the comparative power of himself and of idols to defend their respective worshippers. The argument is stated in following verses, and preparatory to the statement of that argument, the people are exhorted to be silent. This is probably to evince a proper awe and reverence for Yahweh, before whom the argument was to be conducted, and a proper sense of the magnitude and sacredness of the inquiry (compare Isa_41:21). And it may be remarked here, that the same reasons will apply to all approaches which are made to God. When we are about to come before him in prayer or praise; to confess our sins and to plead for pardon; when we engage an argument respecting his being, plans, or perfections; or when we draw near to him in the closet, the family, or the sanctuary, the mind should be filled with awe and reverence. It is well, it is proper, to pause and think of what our emotions should be, and of what we should say, before God (compare Gen_28:16-17).

O islands - ( 'iyiym). This word properly means islands, and is so translated here by the Vulgate, the Septuagint, the Chaldee, the Syriac, and the Arabic. But the word also is used to denote maritime countries; Countries that were situated on seacoasts, or the regions beyond sea (see the note at Isa_20:6). The word is applied, therefore, to the islands of the Mediterranean; to the maritime coasts; and then, also, it comes to be used in the sense of any lands or coasts far remote, or beyond sea (see Psa_72:10; Isa_24:15; the notes at Isa_40:15; Isa_41:5; Isa_42:4, Isa_42:10, Isa_42:12; Isa_49:1; Jer_25:22; Dan_11:18). Here it is evidently used in the sense of distant nations or lands; the people who were remote from Palestine, and who were the worshippers of idols. The argument is represented as being with them, and they are invited to prepare their minds by suitable reverence for God for the argument which was to be presented.

And let the people renew their strength - On the word renew, see the note at Isa_40:31. Here it means, Let them make themselves strong; let them prepare the argument; let them be ready to urge as strong reasons as possible; let them fit themselves to enter into the controversy about the power and glory of Yahweh (see Isa_41:21).

Let us come near together to judgment - The word judgment here means evidently controversy, argumentation, debate. Thus it is used in Job_9:32. The language is that which is used of two parties who come together to try a cause, or to engage in debate; and the sense is, that God proposes to enter into an argumentation with the entire pagan world, in regard to his ability to save his people; that is, he proposes to show the reasons why they should trust in him, rather than dread those under whose power they then were, and by whom they had been oppressed. Lowth renders it, correctly expressing the sense, Let us enter into solemn debate together.

2. CLARKE, Keep silence before me, O islands Let the distant nations repair to

me with new force of mind - , Septuagint. For hacharishu, be silent, they

certainly read in their copy hachadishu, be renewed; which is parallel and synonymous

with ! yechalephu!coach, recover their strength; that is, their strength of mind, their powers of reason; that they may overcome those prejudices by which they have been so long

held enslaved to idolatry. A MS. has har, upon a rasure. The same mistake seems to have

been made in this word, Zep_3:17. For ! yacharish!beahabatho, silebit in directions sua, as the Vulgate renders it; which seems not consistent with what immediately follows,

exultabit super te in laude; the Septuagint and Syriac read ! yachadish!beahabatho, he

shall be renewed in his love. elai, to me, is wanting in one of De Rossis MSS. and in the Syriac.

3. GILL, Keep silence before me, O islands,.... The great controversy in the world after the coming of Christ, which is expressly spoken of in the preceding chapter, was, as Cocceius observes, whether he was a divine Person; this was first objected to by the Jews, and afterwards by many that bore the Christian name; some, in the times of the apostles, especially the Apostle John; and others in later ages; some affirmed that he was a mere man, as Ebion and Cerinthus; others that he was a created God, as Arius; and others a God by office, as Socinus and his followers; now these are called upon, wherever they were, whether on the continent, or in the isles of the sea; and especially all such places which were separated from Judea by the sea, or which they went to by sea, were called islands, perhaps the European nations and isles are more particularly intended; and now, as when the judge is on the bench, and the court is set, and a cause just going to be tried, silence is proclaimed; so here, Jehovah himself being on the throne, and a cause depending between him and men being about to be tried, they are commanded silence; see Zec_2:13, and let the people renew their strength; muster up all their force, collect the most powerful arguments they had, and produce their strong reasons in favour of their sentiments: let them come near, then let them speak; let them come into open court, and at the bar plead their cause, and speak out freely and fully all they have to say; and let them not pretend that they were deterred from speaking, and not suffered to make their defence, or were condemned without hearing: let us come near together in judgment: and fairly try the cause; the issue of which is put upon this single point that follows.

4. HENRY, That particular instance of God's care for his people Israel in raising up Cyrus to be their deliverer is here insisted upon as a great proof both of his sovereignty above all idols and of his power to protect his people. Here is,

I. A general challenge to the worshippers and admirers of idols to make good their pretensions,

in competition with God and opposition to him, Isa_41:1. Is is renewed (Isa_41:21): Produce your cause. The court is set, summonses are sent to the islands that lay most remote, but not out of God's jurisdiction, for he is the Creator and possessor of the ends of the earth, to make their appearance and give their attendance. Silence (as usual) is proclaimed while the cause is in

trying: Keep silence before me, and judge nothing before the time; while the cause is in trying between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan it becomes all people silently to expect

the issue, not to object against God's proceedings, but to be confident that he will carry the day.

The defenders of idolatry are called to say what they can in defence of it: Let them renew their strength, in opposition to God, and see whether it be equal to the strength which those renew that wait upon him (Isa_40:31); let them try their utmost efforts, whether by force of arms or

force of argument. Let them come near; they shall not complain that God's dread makes them

afraid (Job_13:21), so that they cannot say what they have to say, in vindication and honour of their idols; no, let them speak freely: Let us come near together to judgment. Note. 1. The cause of God and his kingdom is not afraid of a fair trial; if the case be but fairly stated, it will be surely

carried in favour of religion. 2. The enemies of God's church and his holy religion may safely be

challenged to say and do their worst for the support of their unrighteous cause. He that sits in heaven laughs at them, and the daughter of Zion despises them; for great is the truth and will prevail.

5. JAMISON, Isa_41:1-29. Additional reasons why the Jews should place confidence in Gods promises of delivering them; He will raise up a Prince as their deliverer, whereas the idols could not deliver the heathen nations from that Prince.

(Zec_2:13). God is about to argue the case; therefore let the nations listen in reverential silence. Compare Gen_28:16, Gen_28:17, as to the spirit in which we ought to behave before God.

before me rather (turning), towards me [Maurer].

islands including all regions beyond sea (Jer_25:22), maritime regions, not merely isles in the strict sense.

renew ... strength Let them gather their strength for the argument; let them adduce their strongest arguments (compare Isa_1:18; Job_9:32). Judgment means here, to decide the point at issue between us.

6. K&D, Summons to the contest: Be silent to me, ye islands; and let the nations procure fresh strength: let them come near, then speak; we will enter into contest together. The words are addressed to the whole of the heathen world, and first of all to the inhabitants of the western islands and coasts. This was the expression commonly employed in the Old Testament to designate the continent of Europe, the solid ground of which is so deeply cut, and so broken up, by seas and lakes, that it looks as if it were about to resolve itself into nothing but islands and

peninsulas. is a pregnant expression for turning in silence towards a person; just as in Job_13:13 it is used with min, in the sense of forsaking a person in silence. That they may have no excuse if they are defeated, they are to put on fresh strength; just as in Isa_40:31 believers are spoken of as drawing fresh strength out of Jehovah's fulness. They are to draw near, then speak, i.e., to reply after hearing the evidence, for Jehovah desires to go through all the forms of

a legal process with them in pro et contra. The mishpa0t is thought of here in a local sense, as a forum or tribunal. But if Jehovah is one party to the cause, who is the judge to pronounce the decision? The answer to this question is the same as at Isa_5:3. The nations, says Rosenmller, are called to judgment, not to the tribunal of God, but to that of reason. The deciding authority is reason, which cannot fail to recognise the facts, and the consequences to be deduced from them.

7. CALVIN, 1.Be silent to me, (133) O islands. Though the Prophet discourse appears to be different

from the former, yet he pursues the same subject; for, in order to put the Jews to shame, he says that he

would have been successful, if he had been called to plead with unbelievers and blind persons. Thus he

reproves not only the sluggishness, but the stupidity of that nation, whom God had been so nigh and so

intimately known by his Law. (Deu_4:7.) Yet we need not wonder that the people, overtaken by many

terrors, trembled so that they scarcely received solid consolation; for we have abundant experience how

much we are alarmed by adversity, because amidst; this depravity and corruption of our nature, every

man labors under two diseases. In prosperity, he exalts himself extravagantly, and shakes off the

restraint; of humility and moderation; but, in adversity, he either rages, or lies in a lifeless condition, and

scarcely has the smallest perception of the goodness of God. We need not wonder, therefore, that the

Prophet dwells so largely on this subject, and that he pursues it in many ways.

He gives the name of islands to the countries beyond the sea; for the Jews, having no intercourse with

them, gave to all that lay beyond the sea the name of and therefore he addresses not only the nations

which were at hand, but likewise those which were more distant, and requires them keep silence before

him. But of what nature is this silence? Isaiah describes a kind of judicial pleading which the Lord is not

unwilling to enter into with all nations. He demands only that he shall be heard in his own cause, and that

there shall be no confusion or disorder in the proceedings, which would be altogether at variance with a

court of justice. On this account he commands the Gentiles to keep silence, that, when this has been

done, he may openly plead his cause; for the order of a court of justice demands that every person shall

speak in his turn; for, if all should cry aloud together, there must be strange confusion. (134)

This reminds us, that the reason why we do not think with so much reverence as we ought concerning the

power and goodness and wisdom and other attributes of God, is, that we do not listen to him when he

speaks. Men roar and murmur against God; some, swelling with their pride, openly despise his word;

while others, through some kind of slothfulness, disregard him, and, in consequence of being buried in

earthly delights, take no concern about aspiring to the heavenly kingdom. Even now we perceive with

what insolence and rebellion many persons speak against God. How comes it that Papists are so

obstinate and headstrong in their errors, but because they refuse to listen to God? for if they would listen

to him in silence, the truth would speedily convince them. In a word, the Lord shews by these words that

he will be victorious, if men listen to him attentively. He does not wish that they shall listen to him in a

careless manner, as unjust and corrupt judges, having already determined what sentence they shall

pronounce, are wont to do; but that they shall examine and weigh his arguments, in which they will find

nothing but what is perfectly just.

It may be asked, the Prophet now exhort the Gentiles to hear? I reply, these things relate chiefly to the

Jews; for it would be long before this prophecy would reach the Gentiles. But this discourse would be

fitted more powerfully to remove the obstinacy of the Jews, when he shows that the Gentiles, though they

were estranged from him, would speedily acknowledge his power, provided only that they chose to listen

to him in silence. There is greater weight and force in these words addressed directly to the themselves

than if he had spoken of them in the third person.

And let the people collect their strength. The Lord defies all the Gentiles to the contest, and in a

contemptuous manner, as is commonly done by those who are more powerful, or who, relying on the

goodness of their cause, have no doubt about the result. them collect their strength and league against

me; they will gain nothing, but I shall at length be victorious. As we commonly say, disdain them, (Je les

despite.) Even though they bend all their strength both of mind and of body, still they shall be conquered;

all I ask is, that they give me a hearing. By these words he declares that truth possesses such power that

it easily puts down all falsehoods, provided that men give attention to it; and, therefore, although all men

rise up to overwhelm the truth, still it will prevail. Consequently, if we are led astray from God, we must

not throw the blame on others, but ought rather to accuse ourselves of not having been sufficiently

attentive and diligent when he spoke to us; for falsehoods would not have power over us, nor would we

be carried away by any cunning attempt of Satan to deceive us, or by the force of any attack, if we were

well disposed to listen to God.

As to his assuming the character of a guilty person, in order that he may appear and plead his cause

before a court of justice, it may be asked, among men will be competent. to judge in so hard and difficult

a cause? I reply, there is nothing said here about choosing judges; the Lord means only, that he would

be successful, if impartial judges were allowed to try this cause. He cannot submit either to men or to

angels, so as to render an account to them; but, for the purpose of taking away every excuse, he declares

that victory is in his power, even though he were constrained to plead his cause; and, consequently, that

it is highly unreasonable to dispute among ourselves, and not to yield to him absolute obedience; that we

are ungrateful and rebellious, in not listening to him, and in not considering how just are his demands.

And, indeed, though nothing can be more unreasonable than for mortals to judge of God, yet it is still

more shocking and monstrous, when, by our blind murmuring, we condemn him before he has been

heard in his own defense.

(133) Devant moy me.

(134) alludes to the method observed in courts of judicature, where silence is always commanded to

prevent interruption; he calls upon the idolatrous nations to appear at the bar with him, and see if they

could give so convincing proofs of the divinity of their gods as he could of his own. White.

8. BI, The convocation of the nations

(whole chapter):The conception of this passage is superb. Jehovah is represented as summoning the earth, as far as the remote isles of the west, to determine once and for ever who is the true God: whether He, or the idols and oracles of which there were myriads worshipped and believed in by every nation under heaven. The test proposed is a very simple one. The gods of the nations were to predict events in the near future, or to show that they had had a clear understanding of the events of former days. On the other hand, the servant of Jehovah was prepared to show how fast-sealed prophecies, committed to the custody of his race, had been precisely verified in the event, and to utter minute predictions about Cyrus, the one from the East, which should be fulfilled before that generation had passed away. Not, as in Elijahs case, would the appeal be made to the descending flame; but to the fitting of prophecy and historical fact. Immediately there is a great commotion, the isles see and fear, the ends of the earth tremble, they draw near and come to the judgment-seat. On their way thither each bids the other take courage. There is an industrious furbishing up of the dilapidated idols, and manufacturing of new ones. The carpenter encourages the goldsmith; and he that smooths with the hammer him that smites the anvil. They examine the soldering to see if it will stand, and drive great nails to render the idols steadfast. The universal desire is to make a strong set of gods who will be able to meet the Divine challengemuch as if a Roman Catholic priest were to regild and repaint the images of the saints on the time-worn altar of a fishing hamlet, in the hope of securing from them greater help in quelling the winter storms. Amidst the excitement of this vast convocation the idols are dumb. We can almost see them borne into the arena by their attendant priests, resplendent in gold and tinsel, flashing with jewels, bedizened in gorgeous apparel. They are set in a row, their acolytes swing high the censer, the monotonous drawl of their votaries arises in supplication. Silence is proclaimed that they may have an opportunity of pronouncing on the subject submitted to them; but they are speechless. Jehovah pronounces the verdict against which there can be no appeal, Behold, ye are of nothing, and your work of nought; an abomination is he that chooseth you (Isa_41:24). As Jehovah looks, there is no one. When He asks of them, there is no counsellor that can answer a word. Behold they are all

vanity; their works are nought; their molten images are wind and confusion. (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)

Heathen oracles and Scripture prophecy

History furnishes some interesting confirmations of this contrast between the predictions of heathen oracles and the clear prophecies of Old Testament Scripture, which were so literally and minutely realised. For instance, Herodotus tells us that when Croesus heard of the growing power of Cyrus, he was so alarmed for his kingdom, that he sent rich presents to the oracles at Delphi, Dodona, and elsewhere, asking what would be the outcome of his victorious march. That at Delphi gave this ambiguous reply, That he would destroy a great empire, but whether the empire would be that of Cyrus or of Croesus was left unexplained: thus, whichever way the event turned, the oracle could claim to have predicted it. This is a fair illustration of the manner in which the oracles answered the appeals made to them by men or nations when in the agony of fear. How striking a contrast the precise prediction of these pages which give us the name of the conqueror; the quarter from which he would fall upon Babylon; the marvellous series of successes that gave kings as dust to his sword, and as the driven stubble to his bow; his reverence towards God, his simplicity and integrity of purpose (Isa_41:2; Isa_14:3; Isa_14:25; Isa_45:1). (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)

A drama

In form the chapter is dramatic. Two great debates are imagined: the first (Isa_41:1-7) between Jehovah and the nations; the second (Isa_41:21-29) between Jehovah and the idols, the subject of both being the appearance of Cyrus. In the intervening passage (Isa_41:8-20) Jehovah encourages His servant Israel in view of this great crisis of history. (Prof. J. Skinner, D. D.)

A trial at law

Chapter 41. is loosely cast in the same form of a trial at law which we found in chapter 1. (Prof. G. A. Smith, D. D.)

Gods response to Israels complaint

In reply to Israels complaint Isa_40:27) that his cause against the heathen oppressors is neglectedor dismissed by the Great Judge, God now summons the nations to His court of justice; and as Israel had just been assured that, if they would wait upon Jehovah, they would renew their strength and discern His wisdom, an interval is granted to the heathen and their gods, in which they too may renew their strength and have time to produce evidence of the powers of design and action possessed by their gods, and in virtue of which they claim the right to keep Israel in subjection. The solemn pause thus allowedKeep silence . . . then let them speakis filled (how bitter the irony!)by the nations employing their carpenters and goldsmiths m make a particularly good and strong set of gods, because there is a general alarm that the emergency is great. For it is already seen that the judgment goes against them by default: that these gods can show no plans, can do nothing good or bad; and that they and their worshippers have neither right nor power to break up the designs of Almighty wisdom. They have been trying to do this by those oppressions of Israel which were only permitted for a time, because they fell into and formed a part of Gods own plan. But Israel had from the first an appointed and chief

place in that plan: He who is at once King of Israel and God of all the earth, has been maintaining His chosen people in their place, generation after generation, when He made Abraham His friend, and gave the blessing to his seed, and then He made the well yield springs of water under the rod of Moses; and now, though they are reduced to extremity of weakness and dismay, the Holy One of Israel bids them fear not, for He has taken upon Himself to be their Redeemer. (Sir E. Strachey, Bart.)

A lawsuit

If Jehovah is a party, who then is the presiding judge? This question is to be answered as in Isa_5:3. The decisive authority is reason, which must acknowledge the state of the case and the conclusions following therefrom. (P. Delitzsch, D. D.)

A fair trial

1. The cause of God and His kingdom is not afraid of s fair trial. If the case be but fairly stated it will be surely carried in favour of religion.

2. The enemies of Gods Church and His holy religion may safely be challenged to say and do their worst for the support of their unrighteous cause. (M. Henry.)

Islands

A characteristic word of the second half of Isaiah occurring twelve times. In the general usage of the Old Testament it denotes the islands and coastlands of the Mediterranean (comp the use of the singular by Isaiah in Isa_20:6). Etymologically, it probably means simply habitable lands; and this prophet uses it with great laxity, hardly distinguishing it from lands (Isa_42:15). (Prof. J. Skinner, D. D.)

Solemn pleadings for revival

We also who worship the Lord God have a controversy with Him. We have not seen His Church and His cause prospering in the world as we could desire; as yet heathenism is not put to the rout by Christianity, neither does the truth everywhere trample down error. We desire to reason with God about this, and He Himself instructs us how to prepare for this sacred debate. He bids us be silent; He bids us consider, and then draw near to Him with holy boldness and plead with Him, produce our cause and bring forth our strong reasons.

I. FIRST, THEN, LET US BE SILENT.

1. Before the controversy opens let us be silent with solemn awe, for we have to speak with the Lord God Almighty! Let us not open our mouths to impugn His wisdom, nor allow our hearts to question His love. We are going to make bold to speak with Him, but still He is the eternal God, and we are dust and ashes. It is the glory of God to conceal a thing, and if He chooses to conceal it, let it be concealed. Truly, God is good to Israel, and His mercy endureth for ever.

2. Our silence of awe should deepen into that of shame; for, though it is true that the cause of God has not prospered, whoso fault is this?

3. Go further than this, and keep the silence of consideration. This is a noisy age, and the Church of Christ herself is too noisy. We have very little silent worship, I fear. Let us be silent, now, for a minute, and consider what it is that we desire of the Lord. The conversion of thousands, the overthrow of error, the spread of the Redeemers kingdom. Think in your minds what the blessings are which your soul pants after. Suppose they were to be now bestowed, are you ready? If thousands of converts were to be born unto this one Church, are you prepared to teach them and comfort them? You pray for graceare you using the grace you have? You want to see more powerhow about the power you have? Are you employing it? If a mighty wave of revival sweeps over London, are your hearts ready? Are your hands ready? Are your purses ready? If you reflect, you will see that God is able to give His Church the largest blessing, and to give it at any time. Keep silence and consider, and you will see that He can give the blessing by you or by me. Ask yourselves in the quiet of your spirits, what can we do to get the blessing? Are we doing that?

4. Then we shall pass on to the silence of attention. Keep silence that God may speak to you. We cannot expect Him to hear us if We will not hear Him.

5. If you have learned attention, be silent with submission.

II. In that silence LET US RENEW OUR STRENGTH. Noise wears us; silence feeds us, To run upon the Masters errands is always well, but to sit at the Masters feet is quite as necessary; or, like the angels which excel in strength, our power to do His commandments arises out of our hearkening to the voice of His Word. But how happens it that such silence renews our strength?

1. It does so by giving space for the strengthening word to come into the soul, and the energy of the Holy Spirit to be really felt.

2. We must be silent to renew our strength, by using silence for consideration as to who it is that we are dealing with. We are going to speak with God about the weakness of His Church, and the slowness of its progress. We are coming to plead now with One whose arm is not shortened, and whose ear is not heavy. Renew your strength as you think of Him. Hath not the Lord said concerning His beloved Son that He shall divide the spoil with the strong, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hands? Shall it not be so? Think, too, that you are about to appeal to the Holy Spirit. What cannot the Spirit of God do?

3. In silence, too, let us renew our strength by remembering His promises. There are a thousand promises. Let us think of that, and however difficult the enterprise may be, and however dark our present prospects, we shall not dare to doubt when Jehovah has spoken and pledged His Word.

4. Our strength will be renewed next, if in silence we yield up to God all our own wisdom and strength.

5. Keep silence, then, ye saints, till ye have felt your folly and your weakness, and then renew your strength most gloriously by casting yourselves upon the strength of God.

III. Our text proceeds to add, Then let them draw near. You that know the Lord DRAW NEAR. You are silent, you have renewed your strength, now enjoy access with boldness. The condition in which to intercede for others is not that of distance from God, but that of great nearness to Him. Even thus did Abraham draw nigh when he pleaded for Sodom and Gomorrah.

1. Let us remember how near we really are. We are one with Christ, and members of His body. How could we be nearer?

2. You are coming to a Father.

3. The desire in our heart for Gods glory and the extension of His Church, is a desire written there by the Holy Spirit.

4. What we ask, if we are about to plead with God concerning His kingdom, is according to His own mind.

5. Moreover, there is this further consideration; the Lord loves to be pleaded with. He might have given all the covenant blessings without prayer; wherefore does He compel us to use entreaties, unless it be that He loves to hear the voices of His children?

IV. I now come to the last point, which is, LET US SPEAK. Be silent, renew your strength, draw near, and then speak. What have we to say upon the matter which concerns us?

1. Let us first speak in the spirit of adoring gratitude. How sweet to think that there should be a Saviour at all. To think that there should be a heavenly kingdom set up, as it is set up; that it should have made such advances as it has made, and should still grow mightily!

2. Next, let us speak in humble expostulation.

3. Then turn to pleading.

4. Let us speak in the way of dedication.

5. Let us speak still in the way of confidence. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Silence and speech before God

God addresses men here by two designations, the one having reference to their remoteness and isolation, and the other to their unity. The series of injunctions begins with silence and ends with speech. Right silence before God, passing on through stirring up of energy and earnest confiding approach, issues m speech. We shall consider the beginning and the end of this seriessilence before God and speech to God.

I. SILENCE BEFORE GOD. Shall we not be silent in the endeavour to realise that God is, and what He is? Would not this do more for us than any urging of ourselves or any kind of activity and noise whatever? And can anything have its proper effect on our soul without this? If we but realise with ourselves that we have to do with an Infinite One, that there is One Being of spotless perfection, almighty power, unchangeableness, boundless love, complete and earnest opposition to evil, what an effect this will produce on us! Unless we can bear to be silent and brood, the thought of God will not rise before us in fulness and splendour. But God speaks, and we must listen in silence. With what glad silence should we listen to the Divine voice. A single word of God must be worth more to us than all other words. When we read the Word of God we should say to ourselves, Hush! God is speaking. We should listen to it as a message conveying what we are to believe and embrace and ponder and do. We may spoil everything by letting the murmur of our own thoughts arise. Our silence in the presence of God will often take the form of thinking of ourselves. Thinking of self becomes sincere and profitable when it goes on consciously in Gods presence. The felt presence of God revives memory, prevents besetting self-deception, and turns the survey of the future from chaotic dreams into earnest outlook. Can any man make such a survey, however imperfectly, without shame? Shame makes him silent. He who knows the bitterness of being put to silence in the presence of God, will scarcely be without experience of the sweetness of silent satisfaction and rest. He will be led to see such a graciousness in God, such a benign healing aspect of His mercy, such a fulness in Christ, such a might of forgiveness, such a sublime oblivion, that he will feel for a while as if he had nothing more to ask. This satisfaction passes into expectation.

II. SPEECH TO GOD FOLLOWING UPON THE SILENCE. Silence before God in which such thoughts as these go on leads to a stirring of the soul, a forth-putting of endeavour, and a drawing near to God. Silence before God heaps a load on the heart which can only be thrown off

by speaking to God. One thing after another brings fresh penitence, new discovery of sin, new sense of the greatness of God; new fears spring up, new resolutions gather, and all these weigh very heavily. And much more than freedom from pressure will be experienced. The convictions that gather in silence will be strengthened by speech. If they did not find expression they would begin to decay. In short, speaking to God of the things that have lain on the soul in its silence is a necessity at once for relief, for understanding, for intensity, for permanence, and for growth, It would be a wrong inference to draw from this passage that one ought not to speak to God without consciously going through these stages of the text. There may be true speaking to God which seems to break forth at once and immediately from the soul. It is not always a bad sign when we feel that we cannot speak, but must be silent before God. This state is not, indeed, to be prolonged. Nor must it be a dull, dead, distant silence, but one that has its own peculiar activities. Hasting to cut short the period of silence may enervate and chill. The silence may be more acceptable to God for the time than any words could be. We should expect times of silence before Godtimes in which speaking to God is not indeed absent, but in which silence is the dominating element. If it is a silence before God, it is a leaving of space for God to speak, and surely this is implied in communion. (J. Leckie, D. D.)

The silence of reverence

The silence of reverence is the soil in which earnestness and energy grow. By this reverent silence resolution takes shape and gathers force. Men gird up their energies afresh when in solemn silence they have gone over the actualities and the possibilities of life. Then with purpose and intensity they come near to God. (J. Leckie, D. D.)

The relief of speech after silence

You may have seen a reservoir of water which, by continuous rain, had become so full that it threatened to overflow all its banks or burst themthe rain through days and nights had been pouring on its broad bosom, and the brooks and rills from miles around had been hurrying their foaming tributes into it, till the ordinary small outlet is wholly unable to relieve the immense pressure, and the very edge of ruin is reached, when, lo! the great sluice is raised, and away rushes the pent-up flood in immense volume. There is relief and safety at once. So is it with the burdened soul on which silence before God has been laying load after load, pressing and crushing it with memories, convictions, fears, resolutions. Relief and freedom are gained by pouring out the soul in words before God. (J. Leckie, D. D.)

Conviction aided by both silence and speech

In silence there is the rooting of conviction, but in speaking to God its expansion and growth. When you have hyacinths in water glasses, you put them first in darkness for some weeks till the roots strike down into the water. You find that the roots have spread and filled the glass, but there is scarcely a sign of growth upward, the stalk remains undeveloped. Light is needed for that. So speech to God is needed to raise and expand the feelings that have been rooted in silence. (J. Leckie, D. D.)

9. EBC, GOD: AN ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY

HAVING revealed Himself to His own people in chapter 40, Jehovah now turns in chapter 41 to the heathen, but, naturally, with a very different kind of address. Displaying His power to His people in certain sacraments, both of nature and history, He had urged them to "wait upon Him" alone for the salvation, of which there were as yet no signs in the times. But with the heathen it is evidently to these signs of the times, that He can best appeal. Contemporary history, facts open to every mans memory and reason, is the common ground on which Jehovah and the other gods can meet. Chapter 41 is, therefore, the natural complement to chapter 40. In chapter 40 we have the element in revelation that precedes history: in chapter 12 we have history itself explained as a part of revelation.

Chapter 41 is loosely cast in the same form of a Trial-at-Law which we found in chapter 1 To use a Scotticism, which exactly translates the Hebrew of Isa_41:1, Jehovah goes "to the law" with the idols. His summons to the Trial is given in Isa_41:1; the ground of the Trial is advanced in Isa_41:2-7. Then comes a digression, Isa_41:8-20, in which the Lord turns from controversy with the heathen to comfort His people. In Isa_41:21-29 Jehovahs plea is resumed, and in the silence of the defendants-a silence, which, as we shall presently see by calling in the witness of a Greek historian, was actual fact-the argument is summed up and the verdict given for the sole divinity of Israels God.

The main interest of the Trial lies, of course, in its appeal to contemporary history, and to the central figure Cyrus, although it is to be noted that the prophet as yet refrains from mentioning the hero by name. This appeal to contemporary history lays upon us the duty of briefly indicating, how the course of that history was tending outside Babylon, -outside Babylon, as yet, but fraught with fate both to Babylon and to her captives.

Nebuchadrezzar, although he had virtually succeeded to the throne of the Assyrian, had not been able to repeat from Babylon that almost universal empire, which his predecessors had swayed from Nineveh. Egypt, it is true, was again as thoroughly driven from Asia as in the time of Sargon: to the south the Babylonian supremacy was as unquestioned as ever the Assyrian had been. But to the north Nebuchadrezzar met with an almost equal rival, who had helped him in the overthrow of Nineveh, and had fallen heir to the Assyrian supremacy in that quarter. This was Kastarit or Kyaxares, an Aryan, one of the pioneers of that Aryan invasion from the East, which, though still tardy and sparse, was to be the leading force in Western Asia for the next century. This Kyaxares had united under his control a number of Median tribes, a people of Turanian stock. With these, when Nineveh fell, he established to the north of Nebuchadrezzars power the empire of Media, with its western boundary at the river Halys, in Asia Minor, and its capital at Ecbatana under Mount Elwand. It is said that the river Indus formed his frontier to the east. West of the Halys, the Medes progress was stopped by the Lydian Empire, under King Alyattis, whose capital was Sardis, and whose other border was practically the coast of the AEgean. In 585, or two years after the destruction of Jerusalem, Alyattis and Kyaxares met in battle on the Halys. But the terrors of an eclipse took the heart to fight out of both their armies, and, Nebuchadrezzar intervening, the three monarchs struck a treaty among themselves, and strengthened it by intermarriage. Western Asia now virtually consisted of the confederate powers, Babylonia, Media, and Lydia.

Let us realise how far this has brought us. When we stood with Isaiah in Jerusalem, our western horizon lay across the middle of Asia Minor in the longitude of Cyprus. It now rests upon the Aegean; we are almost within sight of Europe. Straight from Babylon to Sardis runs a road, with a regular service of couriers. The court of Sardis holds domestic and political intercourse with the courts of Babylon and Ecbatana; but the court of Sardis also lords it over the Asiatic Greeks, worships at Greek shrines, will shortly be visited by Solon and strike an alliance with Sparta. In the time of the Jewish exile there were without doubt many Greeks in Babylon; men may have spoken there with Daniel, who had spoken at Sardis with Solon.

This extended horizon makes clear to us what our prophet has in his view, when in this forty-first chapter he summons "Isles" to the bar of Jehovah: "Be silent before me, O Isles, and let Peoples renew their strength,"-a vision and appeal which frequently recur in our prophecy. "Listen, O Isles, and hearken, O Peoples from afar"; (Isa_49:1) "Isles shall wait for His law"; (Isa_42:4) "Let them give glory to Jehovah, and publish His praise in the Isles"; (Isa_42:12) "Unto me Isles shall hope"; (Isa_51:5) "Surely Isles shall wait for me, ships of Tarshish first." The name is generally taken by scholars-according to the derivation in the note below-to have originally meant "habitable land," and so "land" as opposed to water. In some passages of the Old Testament it is undoubtedly used to describe a land either washed, or surrounded, by the sea.

But by our prophets use of the word it is not necessarily "maritime provinces" that are meant. He makes isles parallel to the well-known terms "nations, peoples, Gentiles," and in one passage he opposes it, as dry soil, to water. Hence many translators take it in its original sense of "countries or lands." This bare rendering, however, does not do justice to the sense of "remoteness," which the prophet generally attaches to the word, nor to his occasional association of it with visions of the sea. Indeed, as one reads most of his uses of it, one is quite sure that the island-meaning of the word lingers on in his imagination; and that the feeling possesses him, which has haunted the poetry of all ages, to describe as "coasts" or "isles" any land or lighting-place of thought which is far and dim and vague; which floats across the horizon, or emerges from the distance, as strips and promontories of land rise from the sea to him who has reached some new point of view. I have therefore decided to keep the rendering familiar to the English reader, "isles," though, perhaps, "coasts" would be better. If, as is probable, our prophets thoughts are always towards the new lands of the west as he uses the word, it is doubly suitable; those countries were both maritime and remote; they rose both from the distance and from the sea.

"The sprinkled isles, Lily on lily, that oerlace the sea

And laugh their pride, where the light wave lisps, Greece."

But if Babylonia lay thus open to Lydia, and through Lydia to the "isles" and "coasts" of Greece, it was different with her northern frontier. What strikes us here is the immense series of fortifications, which Nebuchadrezzar, in spite of his alliance with Astyages, cast up between his country and Media. Where the Tigris and Euphrates most nearly approach one another, about seventy miles to the north of Babylon, Nebuchadrezzar connected their waters by four canals above which he built a strong bulwark, called by the Greeks the Median wall. This may have been over sixty miles long; Xenophon tells us it was twenty feet broad by one hundred high. At Sippara this line of defence was completed by the creation of a great bason of water to flood the rivers and canals on the approach of an enemy, and of a large fortress to protect the bason. Alas for the vanity of human purposes! It is said to have been this very bason which caused the easy fall of Babylon. By turning the Euphrates into it, the enemy entered the capital through the emptied river-bed.

The triple alliance-Lydia, Media, Babylonia-stood firm after its founders passed away. In 555, Croesus and Astyages, who had succeeded their fathers at Sardis and Ecbatana respectively, and Nabunahid, who had usurped the throne at Babylon, were still at peace, and contented with the partition of 585. But outside them and to the east, in a narrow nook of land at the head of the Persian Gulf, the man was already crowned, who was destined to bring Western Asia again under one sceptre. This was Kurush or Cyrus II of Anzan, but known to history as Cyrus the Great or Cyrus the Persian. Cyrus was a prince of the Akhaemenian house of Persia, and therefore, like the Mede, an Aryan. but independent of his Persian cousins, and ruling in his own right the little kingdom of Anzan or Anshan, which, with its capital of Susan, lay on the rivers Choaspes and Eulaeus, between the head of the Persian Gulf and the Zagros Mountains.

Cyrus the Great is one of those mortals whom the muse of history, as if despairing to do justice to him by herself, has called in her sisters to aid her in describing to posterity. Early legend and later and more elaborate romance; the schoolmaster, the historian, the tragedian, and the prophet, all vie in presenting to us this hero "le plus sympathique de lantiquite"-this king on whom we see so deeply stamped the double signature of God, character and success. We shall afterwards have a better opportunity to speak of his character. Here we are only concerned to trace his rapid path of conquest.

He sprang, then, from Anshan, the immediate neighbour of Babylonia to the east. This is the direction indicated in the second verse of this forty-first chapter (Isa_41:2): "Who hath raised up one from the east?" But the twenty-fifth verse veers round with him to the north (Isa_41:25): "I have raised up one from the north, and he is come." This was actually the curve, from east to north, which his career almost immediately took.

For in 549 Astyages, king of Media, attacked Cyrus, king of Anshan; which means that Cyrus was already a considerable and an aggressive prince. Probably he had united by this time the two domains of his house, Persia and Anshan, under his own sceptre, and secured as his lieutenant Hystaspes, his cousin, the lineal king of Persia. The Mede, looking south and east from Ecbatana, saw a solid front opposed to him, and resolved to crush it before it grew more formidable. But the Aryans among the Medes, dissatisfied with so indolent a leader as Astyages, revolted to Cyrus, and so the latter, with characteristic good fortune, easily became lord of Media. A lenient lord he made. He spared Astyages, and ranked the Aryan Medes second only to the Persians. But it took him till 546 to complete his conquest. When he had done so he stood master of Asia from the Halys to perhaps as far east as the Indus. He replaced the Medes in the threefold power of Western Asia, and thus looked down on Babylon, as verse 25 says, "from the north". (Isa_41:25)

In 545, Cyrus advanced upon Babylonia, and struck at the northern line of fortifications at Sippara. He was opposed by an army under Belshazzar, Bel-sharuzzur, the son of Nabunahid, and probably by his mothers side grandson of Nebuchadrezzar. Army or fortifications seem to have been too much for Cyrus, and there is no further mention of his name in the Babylonian annals till the year 538. It has been suggested that Cyrus was aware of the discontent of the people with their ruler Nabunahid, and, with that genius which distinguished his whole career for availing himself of the internal politics of his foes, he may have been content to wait till the Babylonian dissatisfaction had grown riper, perhaps in the meantime fostering it by his own emissaries.

In any case, the attention of Cyrus was now urgently demanded on the western boundary of his empire, where Lydia was preparing to invade him. Croesus, king of Lydia, fresh from the subjection of the Ionian Greeks, and possessing an army and a treasure second to none in the world, had lately asked of Solon, whether he was not the most fortunate of men; and Solon had answered, to count no man happy till his death, The applicability of this advice to himself Croesus must have felt with a start, when, almost immediately after it, the news came that his brother-in-law Astyages had fallen before an unknown power, which was moving up rapidly from the east, and already touched the Lydian frontier at the Halys. Croesus was thrown into alarm. He eagerly desired to know Heavens will about this Persian and himself, who now stood face to face. But, in that heathen world, with its thousand shrines to different gods, who knew the will of Heaven? In a fashion only possible to the richest man in the world, Croesus resolved to discover, by sending a test-question, on a matter of fact within his own knowledge, to every oracle of repute: to the oracles of the Greeks at Miletus, Delphi, Able; to that of Trophonius; to the sanctuary of Amphiaraus at Thebes; to Dodona; and even to the far-off temple of Ammon in Libya. The oracles of Delphi and Amphiaraus alone sent an answer which in the least suggested the truth. "To the gods of Delphi and Amphiaraus, Croesus, therefore, offered great sacrifices, -

three thousand victims of every kind; and on a great pile of wood he burned couches plated with gold and silver, golden goblets, purple robes and garments, in the hope that he would thereby gain the favour of the god yet more And as the sacrifice left behind an enormous mass of molten gold, Croesus caused bricks to be made, six palms in length, three in breadth and one in depth; in all there were 117 bricks. In addition there was a golden lion which weighed ten talents. When these were finished, Croesus sent them to Delphi; and he added two very large mixing bowls, one of gold, weighing eight talents and a half and twelve minae, and one of silver (the work of Theodorus of Samos, as the Delphians say, and I believe it, for it is the work of no ordinary artificer), four silver jars, and two vessels for holy water, one of gold, the other of silver, circular casts of silver, a golden statue of a woman three cubits high, and the necklace and girdles of his queen." We can understand, that for all this Croesus got the best advice consistent with the ignorance and caution of the priests whom he consulted. The oracles told him that if he went against Cyrus he would destroy a great empire; but he forgot to ask, whether it was his own or his rivals. When he inquired a second time, if his reign should be long, they replied: "When a mule became king of the Medes," then he might fly from his throne; but again he forgot to consider that there might be mules among men as among beasts. At the same time, the oracles tempered their ambiguous prophecies with some advice of undoubted sense, for when he asked them who were the most powerful among the Greeks, they replied the Spartans, and to Sparta he sent messengers with presents to conclude an alliance. "The Lacedaemonians were filled with joy; they knew the oracle which had been given Croesus, and made him a friend and ally, as they had previously received many kindnesses at his hands."

This glimpse into the preparations of Croesus, whose embassies compassed the whole civilised world, and whose wealth got him all that politics or religion could, enables us to realise the political and religious excitement into which Cyprus advent threw that generation. The oracles in doubt and ambiguous; the priests, the idol-manufacturers, and the crowd of artisans, who worked in every city at the furniture of the temple, in a state of unexampled activity, with bustle perhaps most like the bustle of our government dockyards on the eve of war: hammering new idols together, preparing costly oblations, overhauling the whole religious "ordnance," that the gods might be propitiated and the stars secured to fight in their courses against the Persian; rival politicians practising conciliation, and bolstering up one another with costly presents to stand against this strange and fatal force, which indifferently threatened them all. What a commentary Herodotus story furnishes upon the verses of this chapter, in which Jehovah contrasts the idols with Himself. It may actually have been Croesus and the Greeks whom the prophet had in his mind when he wrote Isa_41:5-7 : "The isles have seen, and they fear; the ends of the earth tremble: they draw near and they come. They help every man his neighbour, and to his brother each sayeth, Be strong. So carver encourageth smelter, smoother with hammer, smiter on anvil; one saith of soldering, It is good: and he fasteneth it with nails lest it totter. "The irony is severe, but true to the facts as Herodotus relates them. The statesmen hoped to keep back Cyrus by sending sobbing messages to one another, Be of good courage; the priests "by making a particularly good and strong set of gods."

While the imbecility of the idolatries was thus manifest, and the great religious centres of heathendom were reduced to utter doubt that veiled itself in ambiguity and waited to see how things would issue, there was one religion in the world, whose oracles gave no uncertain sound, whose God stepped boldly forth to claim Cyrus for His own. In the dust of Babylonia lay the scattered members of a nation captive and exiled, a people civilly dead and religiously degraded; yet it was the faith of this worm of a people which welcomed and understood Cyrus, it was the God of this people who claimed to be his author. The forty-first chapter looks dreary and ancient to the uninstructed eye, but let our imagination realise all these things: the ambiguous priests, oracles that would not speak out, religions that had no articulate counsel nor comfort in face of the conqueror who was crushing up the world before him, but only sobs, solder, and nails; and

our heart will leap as we hear how God forces them all into judgment before Him, and makes His plea as loud and clear as mortal ear may hear. Clatter of idols, and murmur of muffled oracles, filling all the world; and then, hark how the voice of Jehovah crashes His oracle across it all!

"Keep silence towards Me, O Isles, and let the peoples renew their strength: let them approach; then let them speak: to the Law let us come."

"Who hath stirred up from the sunrise Righteousness, calleth it to his foot? He giveth to his face peoples, and kings He makes him to trample; giveth them as dust to his sword, as driven stubble to his bow. He pursues them, and passes to peace a road that he comes not with his feet. Who has wrought it and done it? Summoner of generations from the source, I Jehovah the First, and with the Last; I am He."

Croesus would have got a clear answer here, but it is probable that he had never heard of the Hebrews or of their God.

After this follows the satiric picture of the heathen world, which has already been quoted. And then, after an interval during which Jehovah turns to His own people (Isa_41:8-20), -for whatever be His business or His controversy, the Lord is mindful of His own, -He directs His speech specially against the third class of the leaders of heathendom. He has laughed the foolish statesmen and image-makers out of court (Isa_41:5-7); He now challenges, in Isa_41:21, the oracles and their priests.

We have seen what these were, which this vast heathen world-heathen but human, convinced as we are that at the back of the worlds life there are a secret, a counsel, and a governor, and anxious as we are to find them - had to resort to. Timid waiters upon time, whom not even the lavish wealth of a Croesus could tempt from their ambiguity; prophets speechless in face of history; oracles of meaning as dark and shifty as their steamy caves at Delphi, of tune as variable as the whispering oak of Dodona; wily-tongued Greeks, masters of ambiguous phrase, at Miletus, Able, and Thebes; Egyptian mystics in the far-off temple of "Lybic Hammon,"-these are what the prophet sees standing at the bar of history, where God is Challenger.

"Bring here your case, saith Jehovah; apply your strong grounds, saith the King of Jacob. Let them bring out and declare unto us what things are going to happen; the first things announce what they are, that we may set our heart on them, and know the issue of them; or the things that are coming, let us hear them. Announce the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods. Yea, do good or do evil, that we may stare and see it together. Lo! ye are nothing, and your work is of nought; an abomination is he who chooseth you."

Which great challenge just means, Come and be tested by facts. Here is history needing an explanation, and running no one knows whither. Prove your divinity by interpreting or guiding it. Cease your ambiguities, and give us something we can set our minds to work upon. Or do something, effect something in history, be it good or be it evil, -only let it be patent to our senses. For the test of godhead is not ingenuity or mysteriousness, but plain deeds, which the senses can perceive, and plain words, which the reason and conscience can judge. The insistence upon the senses and mental faculties of man is remarkable: "Make us hear them, that we may know, stare, see all together, set our mind to them."

But as we have learned from Herodotus, there was nobody in the world to answer such a challenge. Therefore Jehovah Himself answers it. He gives His explanation of history, and claims its events for His doing.

"I have stirred up from the north, and he. hath come; from the rising of the sun one who calleth upon My Name: and he shall trample satraps like mortar, and as the potter treadeth out clay."

"Who hath announced on-ahead that we may know, and beforehand that we may say, Right! Yea, there is none that announced, yea, there is none that published, yea, there is none that heareth your words. But a prediction" (or predicter, literally a thing or man on-ahead-rishon corresponding to the me-rosh of Isa_41:26) "a prediction to Zion, Behold, behold them, and to Jerusalem a herald of good news-I am giving." The language here comes forth in jerks, and is very difficult to render. "But I look and there is no man even among these, and no counsellor, that I might ask them and they return word. Lo, all of them vanity! and nothingness their works; wind and waste their molten images."

Let us look a little more closely at the power of Prediction, on which Jehovah maintains His unique and sovereign Deity against the idols.

Jehovah challenges the idols to face present events, and to give a clear, unambiguous forecast of their issue. It is a debatable question, whether He does not also ask them to produce previous predictions of events happening at the time at which He speaks. This latter demand is one that He makes in subsequent chapters; it is part of His prophets argument in chapters 45-46, that Jehovah intimated the advent of Cyrus by His servants in Israel long before the present time. Whether He makes this same demand for previous predictions in chapter 41 depends on how we render a clause of Isa_41:22, "declare ye the former things." Some scholars take former things in the sense, in which it is used later on in this prophecy, of previous predictions. This is very doubtful. I have explained in a note, why I think them wrong; but even if they are right, and Jehovah be really asking the idols to produce former predictions of Cyrus career, the demand is so cursory, it proves so small an item in His plea, and we shall afterwards find so many clearer statements of it, that we do better to ignore it now and confine ourselves to emphasising the other challenge, about which there is no doubt, -the challenge to take present events and predict their issue. Croesus had asked the oracles for a forecast of the future. This is exactly what Jehovah demands in Isa_41:22, "declare unto us what things are going to happen"; in Isa_41:23, "declare the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods"; in Isa_41:26 (spoken from the standpoint of the subsequent fulfilment of the prediction), who declared it on-ahead that we may know, and beforehand that we may now say, "Right! Yea, there is none that declared, yea, there is none that published, yea, there is none that heareth your words. But a prediction unto Zion, Behold, behold them, and to Jerusalem a herald of good news-I give." I give is emphatically placed at the end, -"I Jehovah alone, through My prophets in Israel, give such a prediction and publisher of good news."

We scarcely require to remind ourselves, that this great challenge and plea are not mere rhetoric or idle boasting. Every word in them we have seen to be true to fact. The heathen religions were, as they are here represented, helpless before Cyrus, and dumb about the issue of the great movements which the Persian had started. On the other hand, Jehovah had uttered to His people all the meaning of the new stir and turmoil in history. We have heard Him do so in chapter 40. There He "gives a herald of good news to Jerusalem,"-tells them of their approaching deliverance, explains His redemptive purposes, proclaims a gospel. In addition, He has in this chapter accepted Cyrus for His own creation and as part of His purpose, and has promised him victory.

The God of Israel, then, is God, because He alone by His prophets claims facts as they stand for His own deeds, and announces what shall become of them.

Do not let us, however, fall into the easy but vulgar error of supposing, that Jehovah claims to be God simply because He can predict. It is indeed prediction, which He demands from the

heathen: for prediction is a minimum of godhead, and in asking it He condescends to the heathens own ideas of what a god should be able to do. When Croesus, the heathen who of all that time spent most upon religion, sought to decide which of the gods was worthiest to be consulted about the future and propitiated in face of Cyrus, what test did be apply to them? As we have seen, he tested them by their ability to predict a matter of fact: the god who told him what he, Croesus, should be doing on a certain day was to be his god. It is evident, that, to Croesus, divinity meant to be able to divine. But the God, who reveals Himself to Israel, is infinitely greater than this. He is not merely a Being with a far sight into the future; He is not only Omniscience. In the chapter preceding this one His power of prediction is not once expressed; it is lost in the two glories by which alone the prophet seeks to commend His Godhead to Israel, -the glory of His power and the glory of His faithfulness. Jehovah is Omnipotence, Creator of heaven and earth; He leads forth the stars by "the greatness of His might"; Supreme Director of history, it is He "who bringeth princes to nothing." But Jehovah is also unfailing character: "the word of the Lord standeth for ever"; it is foolishness to say of Him that He has forgotten His people, or that "their right has passed" from Him; He disappoints none who wait upon Him. Such is the God, who steps down from chapter 40 into the controversy with the heathen in chapter 41. If in the latter He chiefly makes His claim to godhead to rest upon specimens of prediction, it is simply, as we have said, that He may meet the gods of the heathen before a bar and upon a principle, which their worshippers recognise as practical and decisive. What were single predictions, here and there, upon the infinite volume of His working, who by His power could gather all things to serve His own purpose, and in His faithfulness remained true to that purpose from everlasting to everlasting! The unity of history under One Will-this is a far more adequate idea of godhead than the mere power to foretell single events in history. And it is even to this truth that Jehovah seeks to raise the unaccustomed thoughts of the heathen. Past the rude wonder, which is all that fulfilled predictions of fact can excite, He lifts their religious sense to Himself and His purpose, as the one secret and motive of all history. He not only claims Cyrus and Cyrus career as His own work, but He speaks of Himself as "summoner of the generations from aforehand; I Jehovah, the First, and with the Last; I am He," It is a consummate expression of godhead, which lifts us far above the thought of Him as a mere divining power.

Now, it is well for us-were it only for the great historic interest of the thing, though it will also further our argument-to take record here that, although this conception of the unity of life under One Purpose and Will was still utterly foreign, and perhaps even unintelligible, to the heathen world, which the prophecy has in view, the first serious attempt in that world to reach such a conception was contemporary with the forty-first chapter of Isaiah. It is as miners feel, when tunnelling from opposite sides of a mountain, they begin to hear the noise of each others picks through the dwindling rock. We, who have come down the history of Israel towards the great consummation of religion in Christianity, may here cease for a moment our labours, to listen to the faint sound from the other side of the wall, still separating Israel from Greece, of a witness to God and an argument against idolatry similar to those with which we have been working. Who is not moved by learning, that, in the very years when Jewish prophecy reached its most perfect statement of monotheism, pouring its scorn upon the idols and their worshippers, and in the very Isles on which its hopes and influence were set, the first Greek should be already singing, who used his song to satirise the mythologies of his people, and to celebrate the unity of God? Among the Ionians, whom Cyrus invasion of Lydia and of the Aegean coast in 544 drove across the seas, was Xenophanes of Colophon. After some wanderings he settled at Elea in South Italy, and became the founder of the Eleatic school, the first philosophic attempt of the Greek mind to grasp the unity of Being. How far Xenophanes himself succeeded in this attempt is a matter of controversy. The few fragments of his poetry which are extant do not reveal him as a philosophical monotheist, so much as a prophet of "One greatest God." His language (like that of

the earlier Hebrew prophets in praising Jehovah) apparently implies the real existence of lesser divinities:-

"One God, mongst both gods and men He is greatest

Neither in shape is He like unto mortals nor thought."

Xenophanes scorns the anthropomorphism of his countrymen, and the lawless deeds which their poets had attributed to the gods:-

"Mortals think the gods can be born, have their feelings, voice, and form; but, could horses or oxen draw like men, they too would make their gods after their own image."

"All things did Homer and Hesiod lay on the gods,

Such as with mortals are full of blame and disgrace,

To steal and debauch and outwit one another."

Our prophet, to whose eyes Gentile religiousness was wholly of the gross Croesus kind, little suspected that he had an ally, with such kindred tempers of faith and scorn, among the very peoples to whom he yearns to convey his truth. But ages after, when Israel and Greece had both issued into Christianity, the service of Xenophanes to the common truth was recounted by two Church writers-by Clement of Alexandria in his "Stromata," and by Eusebius the historian in his "Praeparatio Evangelica."

We find, then, that monotheism had reached its most absolute expression in Israel in the same decade in which the first efforts towards the conception of the unity of Being were just starting in Greece. But there is something more to be stated. In spite of the splendid progress, which it pursued from such beginnings, Greek philosophy never reached the height on which, with Second Isaiah, Hebrew prophecy already rests; and the reason has to do with two points on which we are now engaged, -the omnipotence and the righteousness of God.

Professor Pfleiderer remarks: "Even in the idealistic philosophy of the Greeks matter remains, however sublimated, an irrational something, with which the Divine power can never come to terms. It was only in the consciousness, which the prophets of Israel had of God, that the thought of the Divine omnipotence fully prevailed." We cannot overvalue such high and impartial testimony to the uniqueness of the Hebrew doctrine of God, but it needs to be supplemented. To the prophets sense of the Divine onmipotence, we must add their unrivalled consciousness of the Divine character. To them Jehovah is not only the Holy, the incomparable God, almighty and sublime. He is also the true, consistent God. He has a great purpose, which He has revealed of old to His people, and to which he remains forever faithful. To express this the Hebrews had one word, -the word we translate righteous. We should often miss our prophets meaning, if by righteousness we understood some of the qualities to which the term is often applied by us: if, for instance, we used it in the general sense of morality, or if we gave it the technical meaning, which it bears in Christian theology, of justification from guilt. We shall afterwards devote a chapter to the exposition of its meaning in Second Isaiah, but let us here look at its use in chapter 41. In Isa_41:26, it is applied to the person whose prediction turns out to be correct: men are to say of him "right" or "righteous." Here it is evident that the Hebrew-ssaddiq-is used in its simplest meaning, like the Latin rectus, and our "right" of what has been shown to be in accordance with truth or fact. In Isa_41:2, again, though the syntax is obscure, it seems to have the general sense of "good faith with the ability to ensure success." Righteousness is here associated with Cyrus, because he has not been called for nothing but in good faith for a purpose which will be carried through. Jehovahs righteousness, then, will be His trueness, His good faith, His consistency; and indeed this is the sense which it must evidently bear in Isa_41:10. Take it with the context: "But thou, Israel, My servant, Jacob whom I have chosen, seed of Abraham who loved Me, whom I took hold of from the ends of the earth and its corners,

I called thee and said unto thee, Thou art My servant. I have chosen thee, and will not cast thee away. Fear not, for I am with thee. Look not round in despair, for I am thy God. I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of My righteousness." Here righteousness evidently means that Jehovah will act in good faith to the people He has called, that He will act consistently with His anciently revealed purpose towards them. Hitherto Israel has had nothing but the memory that God called them, and the conscience that He chose them. Now Jehovah will vindicate this conscience in outward fact. He will carry through His calling of His people, and perform His promise. How He will do this, He proceeds to relate. Israels enemies shall become as nothing (Isa_41:11-12). Israel himself, though a poor worm of a people, shall be changed to the utmost conceivable opposite of a worm-even "a sharp threshing instrument having teeth"-a people who shall leave their mark on the world. They shall overcome all difficulties and "rejoice in Jehovah." Their redemption shall be accomplished in a series of evident facts. "The poor and the needy are seeking water, and there is none, their tongue faileth for thirst; I, Jehovah, will answer them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them." And this shall be done on such a scale, that all the wor