_THE PASSION OF GOD._
ISAIAH xlii. 13-17.
At the beginning of ch. xlii. we reach one of those distinct stages,
the frequent appearance of which in our prophecy assures us, that,
for all its mingling and recurrent style, the prophecy is a unity
with a distinct, if somewhat involved, progress of thought. For
while chs. xl. and xli. establish the sovereignty and declare the
character of the One True God before His people and the heathen, ch.
xlii. takes what is naturally the next step, of publishing to both
these classes His Divine will. This purpose of God is set forth in
the first seven verses of the chapter. It is identified with a human
Figure, who is to be God's agent upon earth, and who is styled _the
Servant of Jehovah_. Next to Jehovah Himself, the Servant of Jehovah
is by far the most important personage within our prophet's gaze.
He is named, described, commissioned and encouraged over and over
again throughout the prophecy; his character and indispensable work
are hung upon with a frequency and a fondness almost equal to the
steadfast faith, which the prophet reposes in Jehovah Himself. Were
we following our prophecy chapter by chapter, now would be the time
to put the question, Who is this Servant, who is suddenly introduced
to us? and to look ahead for the various and even conflicting
answers, which rise from the subsequent chapters. But we agreed, for
clearness' sake,[78] to take all the passages about the Servant,
which are easily detached from the rest of the prophecy, and treat
by themselves, and to continue in the meantime our prophet's main
theme of the Power and Righteousness of God as shown forth in the
deliverance of His people from Babylon. Accordingly, at present we
pass over xlii. 1-9, keeping this firmly in mind, however, that
God has appointed for His work upon earth, including, as it does,
the ingathering of His people and the conversion of the Gentiles,
a Servant,--a human figure of lofty character and unfailing
perseverance, who makes God's work of redemption his own, puts his
heart into it, and is upheld by God's hand. God, let us understand,
has committed His cause upon earth to a human agent.
God's commission of His Servant is hailed by a hymn. Earth answers
the proclamation of the _new things_ which the Almighty has declared
(ver. 9) by _a new song_ (vv. 10-13). But this song does not sing of
the Servant; its subject is Jehovah Himself.
_Sing to Jehovah a new song,_
_His praise from the end of the earth;_
_Ye that go down to the sea, and its fulness,_
_Isles, and their dwellers!_
_Let be loud,--the wilderness and its townships,_
_Villages that Kedar inhabits!_
_Let them ring out,--the dwellers of Sela!_
_From the top of the hills let them shout!
Let them give to Jehovah the glory,_
_And publish His praise in the Isles!_
_Jehovah as hero goes forth,_
_As a man of war stirs up zeal,_
_Shouts the alarm and battle cry,_
_Against his foes proves Himself hero._
The terms of the last four lines are military. Most of them will be
found in the historical books, in descriptions of the onset of Israel's
battles with the heathen. But it is no human warrior to whom they are
here applied. They who sing have forgotten the Servant. Their hearts
are warm only with this, that Jehovah Himself will come down to earth
to give the alarm, and to bear the brunt of the battle. And to such a
hope He now responds, speaking also of Himself and not of the Servant.
His words are very intense, and glow and strain with inward travail.
_I have long time kept my peace,_
_Am dumb and hold myself in:_
_Like a woman in travail I gasp,_
_Pant and palpitate together._
Remember it is God who speaks these words of Himself, and then think
what they mean of unshareable thought and pain, of solitary yearning
and effort. But from the pain comes forth at last the power.
_I waste mountains and hills,_
_And all their herb I parch;_
_And I have set rivers for islands,_
_And marshes I parch._
Yet it is not the passion of a mere physical effort that is in God;
not mere excitement of war that thrills Him. But the suffering of men
is upon Him, and He has taken their redemption to heart. He had said
to His Servant (vv. 6, 7): _I give thee ... to open the blind eyes,
to bring out from prison the bound, from the house of bondage the
dwellers in darkness._ But here He Himself puts on the sympathy and
strain of that work.
_And I will make the blind to walk in a way they know not,
By paths they know not I will guide them;
Turn darkness before them to light,
And serrated land to level.
These are the things that I do, and do not remit them.
They fall backwards, with shame are they shamed,
That put trust in a Carving,
That do say to a Cast, Ye are our Gods._[79]
Now this pair of passages, in one of which God lays the work of
redemption upon His human agent, and in another Himself puts on its
passion and travail, are only one instance of a duality that runs
through the whole of the Old Testament. As we repeatedly saw in the
prophecies of Isaiah himself,[80] there is a double promise of the
future through the Old Testament:--_first_, that God will achieve
the salvation of Israel by an extraordinary human personality, who
is figured now as a King, now as a Prophet and now as a Priest; but,
_second_ also, that God Himself, in undeputed, unshared power, will
come visibly to deliver His people and to reign over them. These two
lines of prophecy run parallel, and even entangled, through the Old
Testament, but within its bounds no attempt is made to reconcile
them. They pass from it still separate, to find their synthesis, as
we all know, in One of whom each is the incomplete prophecy. While
considering the Messianic prophecies of Isaiah, which run upon the
first of these two lines, we pointed out, that, though standing in
historical connection with Christ, they were not prophecies of His
divinity. Lofty and expansive as were the titles they attributed to
the Messiah, these titles did not imply more than an earthly ruler of
extraordinary power and dignity. But we added that in the other and
concurrent line of prophecy, and especially in those well-developed
stages of it which appear in Isa. xl.-lxvi., we should find the true
Old Testament promise of the Deity in human form and tabernacling
among men. We urged that, if the divinity of Christ was to be seen
in the Old Testament, we should more naturally find it in the line
of promise, which speaks of God Himself descending to battle and to
suffer by the side of men, than in the line that lifts a human ruler
almost to the right hand of God. We have now come to a passage, which
gives us the opportunity of testing this connection, which we have
alleged between the so-called anthropomorphism of the Old Testament,
and the Incarnation, which is the glory of the New.
When God presents Himself in the Old Testament as His people's
Saviour, it is not always as Isaiah mostly saw Him, in awful power
and majesty--a _King high and lifted up_, or _as coming from far,
burning and thick-rising smoke, and overflowing streams; causing the
peal of His voice to be heard, and the lighting down of His arm to be
seen, in the fury of anger and devouring fire--bursting and torrent
and hailstones_.[81] But in a large number of passages, of which
the one before us and the famous first six verses of ch. lxiii.
are perhaps the most forcible, the Almighty is clothed with human
passion and agony. He is described as loving, hating, showing zeal
or jealousy, fear, repentance and scorn. He bides His time, suddenly
awakes to effort, and makes that effort in weakness, pain and
struggle, so extreme that He likens Himself not only to a solitary
man in the ardour of battle, but to a woman in her unshareable
hour of travail. To use a technical word, the prophets in their
descriptions of God do not hesitate to be anthropopathic--imparting
to Deity the passions of men.
In order to appreciate the full effect of this habit of the Jewish
religion, we must contrast it with some principles of that religion,
with which at first it seems impossible to reconcile it.
No religion more necessarily implies the spirituality of God than
does the Jewish. It is true that in the pages of the Old Testament,
you will nowhere find this formally expressed. No Jewish prophet
ever said in so many words what Jesus said to the woman of Samaria,
_God is spirit_. In our own prophecy, _spirit_ is frequently used,
not to define the nature of God, but to express His power and
the effectiveness of His will. But the Jewish Scriptures insist
throughout upon the sublimity of God, or, to use their own term, His
holiness. He is the Most High, Creator, Lord,--the Force and Wisdom
that are behind nature and history. It is a sin to make any image of
Him; it is an error to liken Him to man. _I am God and not man, the
Holy One._[82] We have seen how absolutely the Divine omnipotence and
sublimity are expressed by our own prophet, and we shall find Him
again speaking thus: _My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are
your ways My ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than
the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than
your thoughts._[83] But perhaps the doctrine of our prophet which
most effectively sets forth God's loftiness and spirituality is his
doctrine of God's word. God has but to speak and a thing is created
or a deed done. He calls and the agent He needs is there; He sets
His word upon him and the work is as good as finished. _My word that
goeth forth out of My mouth, it shall not return unto Me void, but
it shall accomplish that which I please, and shall prosper in the
thing whereto I sent it._[84] Omnipotence could not farther go. It
would seem that all man needed from God was a word,--the giving of a
command, that a thing must be.
Yet it is precisely in our prophecy, that we find the most extreme
ascriptions to the Deity of personal effort, weakness and pain. The
same chapters which celebrate God's sublimity and holiness, which
reveal the eternal counsels of God working to their inevitable ends
in time, which also insist, as this very chapter does, that for the
performance of works of mercy and morality God brings to bear the
slow creative forces that are in nature, or which again (as in other
chapters) attribute all to the power of His simple word,--these same
Scriptures suddenly change their style and, after the most human
manner, clothe the Deity in the travail and passion of flesh. Why
is it, that instead of aspiring still higher from those sublime
conceptions of God to some consummate expression of His unity, as
for instance in Islam, or of His spirituality, as in certain modern
philosophies, prophecy dashes thus thunderously down upon our hearts
with the message, scattered in countless, broken words, that all this
omnipotence and all this sublimity are expended and realised for men
only in passion and in pain?
It is no answer, which is given by many in our day, that after all the
prophets were but frail men, unable to stay upon the high flight to
which they sometimes soared, and obliged to sacrifice their logic to
the fondness of their hearts and the general habit of man to make his
god after his own image. No easy sneer like that can solve so profound
a moral paradox. We must seek the solution otherwise, and earnest minds
will probably find it along one or other of the two following paths.
1. The highest moral ideal is not, and never can be, the
righteousness that is regnant, but that which is militant and
agonizing. It is the deficiency of many religions, that while
representing God as the Judge and almighty executor of righteousness,
they have not revealed Him as its advocate and champion as well.
Christ gave us a very plain lesson upon this. As He clearly
showed, when He refused the offer of all the kingdoms of the
world, the highest perfection is not to be omnipotence upon the
side of virtue, but to be there as patience, sympathy and love.
To will righteousness, and to rule life from above in favour of
righteousness, is indeed Divine; but if these were the highest
attributes of divinity, and if they exhausted the Divine interest in
our race, then man himself, with his conscience to sacrifice himself
on behalf of justice or of truth,--man himself, with his instinct to
make the sins of others his burden, and their purity his agonizing
endeavour, would indeed be higher than his God. Had Jehovah been
nothing but the righteous Judge of all the earth, then His witnesses
and martyrs, and His prophets who took to themselves the conscience
and reproach of their people's sins, would have been as much more
admirable than Himself, as the soldier who serves his country on the
battle-field or lays down his life for his people is more deserving
of their gratitude and more certain of their devotion, than the king
who equips him, sends him forth--and himself stays at home.
The God of the Old Testament is not such a God. In the moral warfare
to which He has predestined His creatures, He Himself descends to
participate. He is not abstract--that is, withdrawn--Holiness, nor
mere sovereign Justice enthroned in heaven. He is One who _arises and
comes down_ for the salvation of men, who makes virtue His Cause and
righteousness His Passion. He is no whit behind the chiefest of His
servants. No seraph burns as God burns with ardour for justice; no
angel of the presence flies more swiftly than Himself to the front
rank of the failing battle. The human Servant, who is pictured in our
prophecy, is more absolutely identified with suffering and agonizing
men than any angel could be; but even he does not stand more closely
by their side, nor suffer more on their behalf, than the God who sends
him forth. _For the Lord stirreth up jealousy like a man of war; in all
His people's affliction He is afflicted; against His enemies He beareth
Himself as a hero._ So much from the side of righteousness.
2. But take the equally Divine attribute of love. When a religion
affirms that God is love, it gives immense hostages. What is love
without pity and compassion and sympathy? and what are these but
self-imposed weakness and pain? Christ has told us of the greatest
love. _Greater love than this hath no man, that a man lay down his
life for his friends_; and the cost and sacrifice in which He thus
outmatched man is one that the prophets before He came did not
hesitate to impute to God. As far as human language is adequate for
such a task, they picture God's love for men as costing Him so much.
He painfully pleads for His people's loyalty; He travails in pain
for their new birth and growth in holiness; in all their affliction
He is afflicted; and He meets their stubbornness, not with the swift
sentence of outraged holiness, but with longsuffering and patience, if
so in the end He may win them. But the pain, that is thus essentially
inseparable from love, reaches its acme, when the beloved are not only
in danger but in sin, when not only the future of their holiness is
uncertain, but their guilty past bars the way to any future at all.
We saw how Jeremiah's love thus took upon itself the conscience and
reproach of Israel's sin; how much distress and anguish, how much
sympathy and self-sacrificing labour, and at last how much hopeless
endurance of the common calamity, that sin cost the noble prophet,
though he might so easily have escaped it all. Now even thus does God
deal with His people's sins; not only setting them in the light of His
awful countenance, but taking them upon His heart; making them not only
the object of His hate, but the anguish and the effort of His love.
Jeremiah was a weak mortal, and God is the Omnipotent. Therefore, the
issue of His agony shall be what His servant's never could effect,
the redemption of Israel from sin; but in sympathy and in travail the
Deity, though omnipotent, is no whit behind the man.
* * * * *
We have said enough to prove our case, that the true Old Testament
prophecy of the nature and work of Jesus Christ is found not so much
in the long promise of the exalted human ruler, for whom Israel's
eyes looked, as in the assurance of God's own descent to battle with
His people's foes and to bear their sins. In this God, omnipotent,
yet in His zeal and love capable of passion, who before the
Incarnation was afflicted in all His people's affliction, and before
the Cross made their sin His burden and their salvation His agony, we
see the love that was in Jesus Christ. For Jesus, too, is absolute
holiness, yet not far off. He, too, is righteousness militant at
our side, militant and victorious. He, too, has made our greatest
suffering and shame His own problem and endeavour. He is anxious for
us just where conscience bids us be most anxious about ourselves. He
helps us, because He feels when we feel our helplessness the most.
Never before or since in humanity has righteousness been perfectly
victorious as in Him. Never before or since, in the whole range of
being, has any one felt as He did all the sin of man with all the
conscience of God. He claims to forgive, as God forgives; to be
able to save, as we know only God can save. And the proof of these
claims, apart from the experience of their fulfilment in our own
lives, is that the same infinite love was in Him, the same agony and
willingness to sacrifice Himself for men, which we have seen made
evident in the Passion of God.
FOOTNOTES:
[78] See Introduction.
[79] So the grammar of the original.
[80] Vol. i., pp. 144, 334.
[81] Isa. xxxi.
[82] Hosea xi. 9.
[83] Ch. lv. 8, 9.
[84] _Ibid._ ver. 11.