_THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF ISRAEL AND THE
RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD._
ISAIAH xl.-lxvi.
In the chapters which we have been studying we have found some
difficulty with one of our prophet's keynotes--_right_ or
_righteousness_. In the chapters to come we shall find this difficulty
increase, unless we take some trouble now to define how much the word
denotes in Isa. xl.-lxvi. There is no part of Scripture, in which
the term _righteousness_ suffers so many developments of meaning. To
leave these vague, as readers usually do, or to fasten upon one and
all the technical meaning of righteousness in Christian theology, is
not only to obscure the historical reference and moral force of single
passages,--it is to miss one of the main arguments of the prophecy. We
have read enough to see that _righteousness_ was the great question
of the Exile. But what was brought into question was not only the
righteousness of the people, but the righteousness of their God.
In Isa. xl.-lxvi. righteousness is more often claimed as a Divine
attribute, than enforced as a human duty or ideal.[126]
I. RIGHTEOUSNESS.
Ssedheq, the Hebrew root for righteousness, had, like the Latin
"rectus," in its earliest and now almost forgotten uses, a physical
meaning. This may have been either _straightness_, or more probably
_soundness_,--the state in which a thing is _all right_.[127] _Paths
of righteousness_, in Psalm xxiii., ver. 4, are not necessarily
straight paths, but rather sure, genuine, safe paths.[128] Like all
physical metaphors, like our own words "straight" and "right," the
applicability of the term to moral conduct was exceedingly elastic.
It has been attempted to gather most of its meaning under the
definition of _conformity to norm_;[129] and so many are the instances
in which the word has a forensic force,[130] as of _vindication_ or
_justification_, that some have claimed this for its original, or,
at least, its governing sense. But it is improbable that either of
these definitions conveys the simplest or most general sense of the
word. Even if _conformity_ or _justification_ were ever the prevailing
sense of ssedheq, there are a number of instances in which its
meaning far overflows the limits of such definitions. Every one can
see how a word, which may generally be used to express an abstract
idea, like _conformity_, or a formal relation towards a law or person,
like _justification_, might come to be applied to the actual virtues,
which realise that idea or lift a character into that relation. Thus
righteousness might mean justice, or truth, or almsgiving, or religious
obedience,--to each of which, in fact, the Hebrew word was at various
times specially applied. Or righteousness might mean virtue in general,
virtue apart from all consideration of law or duty whatsoever. In the
prophet Amos, for instance, _righteousness_ is applied to a goodness so
natural and spontaneous that no one could think of it for a moment as
conformity to norm or fulfilment of law.[131]
In short, it is impossible to give a definition of the Hebrew
word, which our version renders as _righteousness_, less wide than
our English word _right_. _Righteousness_ is _right_ in all its
senses,--natural, legal, personal, religious. It is to be all right,
to be right-hearted, to be consistent, to be thorough; but also to be
in the right, to be justified, to be vindicated; and, in particular,
it may mean to be humane (as with Amos), to be just (as with Isaiah),
to be correct or true to fact (as sometimes with our own prophet), to
fulfil the ordinances of religion, and especially the command about
almsgiving (as with the later Jews).
Let us now keep in mind that righteousness could express a relation,
or a general quality of character, or some particular virtue. For we
shall find traces of all these meanings in our prophet's application
of the term to Israel and to God.
II. THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF ISRAEL.
One of the simplest forms of the use of _righteousness_ in the Old
Testament is when it is employed in the case of ordinary quarrels
between two persons; in which for one of them _to be righteous_ means
_to be right_ or _in the right_.[132] Now to the Hebrew all life and
religion was based upon covenants between two,--between man and man
and between man and God. Righteousness meant fidelity to the terms
of those covenants. The positive contents of the word in any single
instance of its use would, therefore, depend on the faithfulness and
delicacy of conscience by which those terms were interpreted. In
early Israel this conscience was not so keen as it afterwards came
to be, and accordingly Israel's sense of their righteousness towards
God was, to begin with, a comparatively shallow one. When a Psalmist
asseverates his righteousness and pleads it as the ground for God
rewarding him, it is plain that he is able with sincerity to make a
claim, so repellent to a Christian's feeling, just because he has not
anything like a Christian's conscience of what God demands from man.
As Calvin says on Psalm xviii., ver. 20, "David here represents God
as the President of an athletic contest, who had chosen him as one of
His champions, and David knows that so long as he keeps to the rules
of the contest, so long will God defend him." It is evident that in
such an assertion righteousness cannot mean perfect innocence, but
simply the good conscience of a man, who, with simple ideas of what
is demanded from him, feels that on the whole "he has" (slightly to
paraphrase Calvin) "played fair."
Two things, almost simultaneously, shook Israel out of this primitive
and naïve self-righteousness. History went against them, and the
prophets quickened their conscience.[133] The effect of the former of
these two causes will be clear to us, if we recollect the judicial
element in the Hebrew righteousness,--that it often meant not so
much to be right, as to be vindicated or declared right. History, to
Israel, was God's supreme tribunal. It was the faith of the people,
expressed over and over again in the Old Testament, that the godly
man is vindicated or justified by his prosperity: _the way of the
ungodly shall perish_. And Israel felt themselves to be in the
right, just as David, in Psalm xviii., felt himself, because God
had accredited them with success and victory. But when the decision
of history went against the nation, when they were threatened with
expulsion from their land and with extinction as a people, that just
meant that the Supreme Judge of men was giving His sentence against
them. Israel had broken the terms of the Covenant. They had lost
their right; they were no longer _righteous_. The keener conscience,
developed by prophecy, swiftly explained this sentence of history.
This declaration, that the people were unrighteous, was due, the
prophet said, to the people's sins. Isaiah not only exclaimed, _Your
country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire_; he added, in
equal indictment, _How is the faithful city become an harlot! it was
full of justice, righteousness lodged in it, but now murderers: thy
princes are rebellious, they judge not the fatherless, neither doth
the cause of the widow come before them_. To Isaiah and the earlier
prophets Israel was unrighteous because it was so immoral. With their
strong social conscience, righteousness meant to these prophets the
practice of civic virtues,--truth-telling, honesty between citizens,
tenderness to the poor, inflexible justice in high places.
Here then we have two possible meanings for Israel's righteousness
in the prophetic writings, allied and necessary to one another,
yet logically distinct,--the one a becoming righteous through the
exercise of virtue, the other a being shown to be righteous by the
voice of history. In the one case righteousness is the practical
result of the working of the Spirit of God; in the other it is
vindication, or justification, by the Providence of God. Isaiah and
the earlier prophets, while the sentence of history was still not
executed and might through the mercy of God be revoked, incline to
employ righteousness predominantly in the former sense. But it will
be understood how, after the Exile, it was the latter, which became
the prevailing determination of the word. By that great disaster God
finally uttered the clear sentence, of which previous history had
been but the foreboding. Israel in exile was fully declared to be in
the wrong--to be unrighteous. As a church, she lay under the ban; as
a nation, she was discredited before the nations of the world. And
her one longing, hope and effort during the weary years of Captivity
was to have her right vindicated again, was to be restored to right
relations to God and to the world, under the Covenant.
This is the predominant meaning of the term, as applied to Israel, in
Isa. xl.-lxvi. Israel's unrighteousness is her state of discredit and
disgrace under the hands of God; her righteousness, which she hopes
for, is her restoral to her station and destiny as the elect people.
To our Christian habit of thinking, it is very natural to read the
frequent and splendid phrases, in which _righteousness_ is attributed
or promised to the people of God in this evangelical prophecy, as
if righteousness were that inward assurance and justification from
an evil conscience, which, as we are taught by the New Testament,
is provided for us through the death of Christ, and inwardly sealed
to us by the Holy Ghost, irrespective of the course of our outward
fortune. But if we read that meaning into _righteousness_ in Isa.
xl.-lxvi., we shall simply not understand some of the grandest
passages of the prophecy. We must clearly keep in view, that while
the prophet ceaselessly emphasizes the pardon of God _spoken home
to the heart_ of the people, as the first step towards their
restoral, he does not apply the term righteousness to this inward
justification,[134] but to the outward vindication and accrediting
of Israel by God before the whole world, in their redemption from
Captivity, and their reinstatement as His people. This is very clear
from the way in which _righteousness_ is coupled with _salvation_ by
the prophet, as (lxii. 1): _I will not rest till her righteousness
go forth as brightness, and her salvation as a lamp that burneth_.
Or again from the way in which righteousness and glory are put in
parallel (lxii. 2): _And the nations shall see thy righteousness,
and all kings thy glory_. Or again in the way that _righteousness_
and _renown_ are identified (lxi. 11): _The Lord Jehovah will cause
righteousness and renown to spring forth before all the nations_.
In each of these promises the idea of an external and manifest
splendour is evident; not the inward peace of justification felt
only by the conscience to which it has been granted, but the outward
historical victory appreciable by the gross sense of the heathen.
Of course the outward implies the inward,--this historical triumph
is the crown of a religious process, the result of forgiveness and
a long purification,--but while in the New Testament it is these
which would be most readily called a people's righteousness, it is
the former (what the New Testament would rather call _the crown of
life_), which has appropriated the name in Isa. xl.-lxvi. The same is
manifest from another text (xlviii. 18): _O that thou hadst hearkened
to My commandments; then had thy peace been as the River, and thy
righteousness like the waves of the sea_. Here _righteousness_ is not
only not applied to inward morality, but set over against this as its
external reward,--the health and splendour which a good conscience
produces. It is in the same external sense that the prophet talks of
the _robe of righteousness_ with its bridal splendour, and compares
it to the appearance of _Spring_ (lxi. 10-11).
For this kind of righteousness, this vindication by God before the
world, Israel waited throughout the Exile. God addresses them as
_they that pursue righteousness, that seek Jehovah_ (li. 1). And
it is a closely allied meaning, though perhaps with a more inward
application, when the people are represented as praying God to give
them _ordinances of righteousness_ (lviii. 2),--that is, to prescribe
such a ritual as will expiate their guilt and bring them into a right
relation with Him. They sought in vain. The great lesson of the Exile
was that not by works and performances, but through simply waiting
upon the Lord, their righteousness should shine forth. Even this
outward kind of justification was to be by faith.
The other meaning of righteousness, however,--the sense of social
and civic morality, which was its usual sense with the earlier
prophets,--is not altogether excluded from the use of the word in
Isa. xl.-lxvi. Here are some commands and reproaches which seem to
imply it. _Keep judgement, and do righteousness_,--where, from what
follows, righteousness evidently means observing the Sabbath and
doing no evil (lvi. 1 ff). _And justice is fallen away backward, and
righteousness standeth afar off, for truth is fallen in the street,
and steadfastness cannot enter_ (lix. 14). These must be terms for
human virtues, for shortly afterwards it is said: _Jehovah was
displeased because there was no justice_. Again, _They seek Me as
a nation that did righteousness_ (lviii. 2); _Hearken unto Me, ye
that know righteousness, a people--My law is in their hearts_ (li.
7); _Thou meetest him that worketh righteousness_ (lxiv. 5); _No
one sues in righteousness, and none goeth to law in truth_ (lix.
4). In all these passages _righteousness_ means something that man
can know and do, his conscience and his duty, and is rightly to
be distinguished from those others, in which _righteousness_ is
equivalent to the salvation, the glory, the peace, which only God's
power can bring. If the passages, that employ _righteousness_ in the
sense of moral or religious observance, really date from the Exile,
then the interesting fact is assured to us that the Jews enjoyed
some degree of social independence and responsibility during their
Captivity. But it is a very striking fact that these passages all
belong to chapters, the exilic origin of which is questioned even by
critics, who assign the rest of Isa. xl.-lxvi. to the Exile. Yet,
even if these passages have all to be assigned to the Exile, how
few they are in number! How they contrast with the frequency, with
which, in the earlier part of this book,--in the orations addressed
by Isaiah to his own times, when Israel was still an independent
state,--_righteousness_ is reiterated as the daily, practical duty
of men, as justice, truthfulness and charity between man and man!
The extreme rarity of such inculcations in Isa. xl.-lxvi. warns us
that we must not expect to find here the same practical and political
interest, which formed so much of the charm and the force of Isa.
i.-xxxix. The nation has now no politics, almost no social morals.
Israel are not citizens working out their own salvation in the
market, the camp and the senate; but captives waiting a deliverance
in God's time, which no act of theirs can hasten. It is not in the
street that the interest of Second Isaiah lies: it is on the horizon.
Hence the vague feeling of a distant splendour, which, as the reader
passes from ch. xxxix. to ch. xl., replaces in his mind the stir of
living in a busy crowd, the close and throbbing sense of the civic
conscience, the voice of statesmen, the clash of the weapons of war.
There is no opportunity for individuals to reveal themselves. It is
a nation waiting, indistinguishable in shadow, whose outlines only
we see. It is no longer the thrilling practical cry, which sends
men into the arenas of social life with every sinew in them strung:
_Learn to do well; seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the
fatherless, plead for the widow_. It is rather the cry of one who
still waits for his working day to dawn: _I will lift up mine eyes to
the hills, from whence cometh my help?_ Righteousness is not the near
and daily duty, it is the far-off peace and splendour of skies, that
have scarce begun to redden to the day.
III. THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD.
But there was another Person, whose righteousness was in question
during the Exile, and who Himself argues for it throughout our
prophecy. Perhaps the most peculiar feature of the theology of Isa.
xl.-lxvi. is its argument for _the righteousness of Jehovah_.
Some critics maintain that righteousness, when applied to Jehovah,
bears always a technical reference to His covenant with Israel.
This is scarcely correct. Jehovah's dealings with Israel were no
doubt the chief of His dealings, and it is these, which He mainly
quotes to illustrate His righteousness; but we have already studied
passages, which prove to us that Jehovah's righteousness was an
absolute quality of His Godhead, shown to others besides Israel, and
in loyalty to obligations different from the terms of His covenant
with Israel. In ch. xli. Jehovah calls upon the heathen to match
their righteousness with His; righteousness was therefore a quality
that might have been attributed to them as well as to Himself. Again,
in xlv. 19,--_I, Jehovah, speak righteousness, I declare things that
are right_,--righteousness evidently bears a general sense, and not
one of exclusive application to God's dealing with Israel. It is the
same in the passage about Cyrus (xlv. 13): _I have raised him up in
righteousness, I will make straight all his ways_. Though Cyrus was
called in connection with God's purpose towards Israel, it is not
that purpose which makes his calling righteous, but the fact that God
means to carry him through, or, as the parallel verse says, _to make
straight all his ways_. These instances are sufficient to prove that
the righteousness, which God attributes to His words, to His actions
and to Himself, is a general quality not confined to His dealings
with Israel under the covenant,--though, of course, most clearly
illustrated by these.
If now we enquire, what this absolute quality of Jehovah's Deity
really means, we may conveniently begin with His application of
it to His Word. In ch. xli. He summons the other religions to
exhibit predictions that are true to fact. _Who hath declared it
on-ahead that we may know, or from aforetime that we may say, He is
ssaddîq._[135] Here ssaddîq simply means _right_, _correct_, true
to fact. It is much the same meaning in xliii. 9, where the verb is
used of heathen predicters, _that they may be shown to be right_, or
_correct_ (English version, _justified_). But when, in ch. xlvi.,
the word is applied by Jehovah to His own speech, it has a meaning,
of far richer contents, than mere correctness, and proves to us that
after all the Hebrew ssedheq was almost as versatile as the English
"right." The following passage shows us that the righteousness of
Jehovah's speech is its clearness, straightforwardness and practical
effectiveness: _Not in secret have I spoken, in a place of the
land of darkness_,--this has been supposed to refer to the remote
or subterranean localities in which heathen oracles mysteriously
entrenched themselves,--_I have not said to the seed of Jacob, In
Chaos seek Me. I am Jehovah, a Speaker of righteousness, a Publisher
of straight things. Be gathered and come, draw near together, O
remnants of the nations. They know not that carry the log of their
image, and pray to a god who does not save. Publish and bring near,
yea, let them take counsel together. Who caused this to be heard of
old? long since hath published it? Is it not I, Jehovah, and there
is none else God beside Me; a God righteous and a Saviour, there is
none except Me. Turn unto Me and be saved, all ends of Earth,_[136]
_for I am God, and there is none else. By Myself have I sworn, gone
forth from My mouth hath righteousness: a word and it shall not turn;
for to Me shall bow every knee, shall swear every tongue. Truly in
Jehovah, shall they say of Me, are righteousnesses and strength. To
Him shall it come,_[137] _and shamed shall be all that are incensed
against Him. In Jehovah shall be righteous and renowned all the seed
of Israel_ (xlv. 19-25).
In this very suggestive passage _righteousness_ means far more
than simple correctness of prediction. Indeed, it is difficult to
distinguish how much it means, so quickly do its varying echoes
throng upon our ear, from the new associations in which it is
spoken. A word such as _righteousness_ is like the sensitive tones
of the human voice. Spoken in a desert, the voice is itself and
nothing more; but utter it where the landscape is crowded with novel
obstacles, and the original note is almost lost amid the echoes
it startles. So with the _righteousness of Jehovah_; among the
new associations in which the prophet affirms it, it starts novel
repetitions of itself. Against the ambiguity of the oracles, it is
echoed back as _clearness_, _straightforwardness_, _good faith_ (ver.
19); against their opportunism and want of foresight, it is described
as equivalent to the capacity for arranging things beforehand and
predicting what must come to pass, therefore as _purposefulness_;
while against their futility, it is plainly _effectiveness and power
to prevail_ (ver. 23). It is the quality in God, which divides His
Godhead with His power, something intellectual as well as moral, the
possession of a reasonable purpose as well as fidelity towards it.
This intellectual sense of righteousness, as reasonableness or
purposefulness, is clearly illustrated by the way in which the
prophet appeals, in order to enforce it, to Jehovah's creation of
the world. _Thus saith Jehovah, Creator of the heavens--He is the
God--Former of the Earth and her Maker, He founded her; not Chaos did
He create her, to be dwelt in did He form her_ (xlv. 18). The word
_Chaos_ here is the same as is used in opposition to _righteousness_
in the following verse. The sentence plainly illustrates the truth,
that whatever God does, He does not so as to issue in confusion,
but with a reasonable purpose and for a practical end. We have here
the repetition of that deep, strong note, which Isaiah himself so
often sounded to the comfort of men in perplexity or despair, that
God is at least reasonable, not working for nothing, nor beginning
only to leave off, nor creating in order to destroy. The same God,
says our prophet, who formed the earth in order to see it inhabited,
must surely be believed to be consistent enough to carry to the
end also His spiritual work among men. Our prophet's idea of God's
righteousness, therefore, includes the idea of reasonableness;
implies rational as well as moral consistency, practical sense as
well as good faith; the conscience of a reasonable plan, and, perhaps
also, the power to carry it through.
To know that this great and varied meaning belongs to _righteousness_
gives us new insight into those passages, which find in it all the
motive and efficiency of the Divine action: _It pleased Jehovah for His
righteousness' sake_ (xlii. 21); _His righteousness, it upheld Him; and
He put on righteousness as a breastplate_ (lix. 16, 17).
With such a righteousness did Jehovah deal with Israel. To her
despair that He has forgotten her He recounts the historical events
by which He has made her His own, and affirms that He will carry
them on; and you feel the expression both of fidelity and of the
consciousness of ability to fulfil, in the words, _I will uphold thee
with the right hand of My righteousness. Right hand_--there is more
than the touch of fidelity in this; there is the grasp of power.
Again, to the Israel who was conscious of being His Servant, God
says, _I, Jehovah, have called thee in righteousness_; and, taken
with the context, the word plainly means good faith and intention to
sustain and carry to success.
It was easy to transfer the name _righteousness_ from the character of
God's action to its results, but always, of course, in the vindication
of His purpose and word. Therefore, just as the salvation of Israel,
which was the chief result of the Divine purpose, is called Israel's
righteousness, so it is also called _Jehovah's righteousness_.
Thus, in xlvi. 13, _I bring near My righteousness_; and in li. 5,
_My righteousness is near, My salvation is gone forth_; ver. 6,
_My salvation shall be for ever, and My righteousness shall not be
abolished._ It seems to be in the same sense, of finished and visible
results, that the skies are called upon _to pour down righteousness,
and the earth to open that they may be fruitful in salvation, and let
her cause righteousness to spring up together_ (xlv. 8; _cf._ lxi. 10,
_My Lord Jehovah will cause righteousness to spring forth_).
One passage is of great interest, because in it _righteousness_ is
used to play upon itself, in its two meanings of human duty and
Divine effect--lvi. 1, _Observe judgement_--probably religious
ordinances--_and do righteousness; for My salvation is near to come,
and My righteousness to be revealed_.
* * * * *
To complete our study of _righteousness_ it is necessary to touch
still upon one point. In Isa. xl.-lxvi. both the masculine and
feminine forms of the Hebrew word for righteousness are used, and it
has been averred that they are used with a difference. This opinion
is entirely dispelled by a collation of the passages. I give the
particulars in a note, from which it will be seen that both forms are
indifferently employed for each of the many shades of meaning which
_righteousness_ bears in our prophecies.[138]
That the masculine and feminine forms sometimes occur, with the same
or with different meanings, in the same verse, or in the next verse
to one another, proves that the selection of them respectively cannot
be due to any difference in the authorship of our prophecy. So that
we are reduced to say that nothing accounts for their use, except, it
might be, the exigencies of the metre. But who is able to prove this?
FOOTNOTES:
[126] It is only by confining his review of the word to its
applications to God, and overlooking the passages which attribute it to
the people, that Krüger, _Essai sur la Théologie d'Isaïe xl.-lxvi._,
can affirm that the prophet holds throughout to a single idea of
righteousness (p. 36). On this, as on many other points, it is Calvin's
treatment, that is most sympathetic to the variations of the original.
[127] In Arabic the cognate word is applied to a lance, but this
may mean a sound or fit lance as well as a straight one. "Originem
Schult. de defect. hodiernis § 214-224 ponit in _rigore_, _duritia_,
coll. [Arabic: **] lancea dura, al. aequabilis" (Gesenii _Thesaurus_,
art. צדק).
[128] It is not certain whether righteousness is here used in a
physical sense; and in all other cases in which the root is applied
in the Old Testament to material objects, it is plainly employed in
some reflection of its moral sense, _e.g._, _just_ weights, _just_
balance, Lev. xix. 36.
[129] "Der Zustand welcher der Norm entspricht." Schultz, _Alt. Test.
Theologie_, 4th ed., p. 540, n. 1.
[130] _Cf._ Robertson Smith, _Prophets of Israel_, p. 388, and
Kautzsch's paper, which is there quoted.
[131] "Die Begriffe צדקה und צדק ... bedeuten nun wirklich bei
Amos mehr als die juristische Gerechtigkeit. Indirect gehen die
Forderungen des Amos über die blos rechtliche Sphäre hinaus" (Duhm,
_Theologie der Propheten_, p. 115).
[132] Gen. xxxviii. 26. _Cf._ 2 Sam. xv. 4.
[133] The first chapter of Isaiah is a perfect summary of these two.
[134] But the verb to _make righteous_ or _justify_ is used in a
sense akin to the New Testament sense in liii. 11. See our chapter on
that prophecy.
[135] At first sight this is remarkably like the cognate Arabic root,
which is continually used for truthful. But the Hebrew word never meant
truthful in the moral sense of truth, and here is _right_ or _correct_.
[136] _Earth_ again without article, though obviously referring to
the world.
[137] Sense doubtful here. Bredenkamp translates by a slight change
of reading: _Only speaking by Jehovah: Fulness of righteousness and
might come to Him, and ashamed, etc._
[138] דקצ, the masculine, is used sixteen times; צדקה, twenty-four.
Both are used of Jehovah: xlii. 21 צדקו, and lix. 16 צדקתו. Both of His
speech: masc. in xlv. 19, fem. in xlv. 23 and lxiii. 1. Perhaps the
passage in which their identity is most plain is li. 5, 6, where they
are both parallel to salvation: ver. 5, My righteousness (m.) is near;
ver. 6, My righteousness (f.) shall not be abolished. Both are used of
the people's duty: lix. 4, None sueth in righteousness (m.); xlviii. 1,
But not in truth nor in righteousness (f.); lvi. 1, Keep justice and do
righteousness (f.) And both are used of the people's saved and glorious
condition: lviii. 8, Thy righteousness (m.) shall go before thee;
lxii. 1, Until her righteousness (m.) go forth as brightness; xlviii.
18, Thy righteousness (f.) as the waves of the sea; liv. 17, Their
righteousness (f.) which is of Me. Both are used with prepositions
(_cf._ xlii. 6 with xlviii. 1), and both with possessive pronouns. In
fact, there is absolutely no difference made between the two.
BOOK III.
_THE SERVANT OF THE LORD._
BOOK III.
Having completed our survey of the fundamental truths of our prophecy,
and studied the subject which forms its immediate and most urgent
interest, the deliverance of Israel from Babylon, we are now at liberty
to turn to consider the great duty and destiny which lie before the
delivered people--the Service of Jehovah. The passages of our prophecy
which describe this are scattered both among those chapters we have
already studied and among those which lie before us. But, as was
explained in the Introduction, they are all easily detached from their
surroundings; and the continuity and progress, of which their series,
though so much interrupted, gives evidence, demand that they should be
treated by us together. They will, therefore, form the Third of the
Books, into which this volume is divided.
The passages on the Servant of Jehovah, or, as the English reader is
more accustomed to hear him called, the Servant of the Lord, are as
follows: xli. 8 ff; xlii. 1-7, 18-25; xliii. _passim_, especially 8-10;
xliv. 1, 21; xlviii. 20; xlix. 1-9; l. 4-11; lii. 13-liii. The main
passages are those in xli., xlii., xliii., xlix., l., and lii.-liii.
The others are incidental allusions to Israel as the Servant of the
Lord, and do not develop the character of the Servant or the Service.
Upon the questions relevant to the structure of these prophecies--why
they have been so scattered, and whether they were originally
from the main author of Isa. xl.-lxvi., or from any other single
writer,--questions on which critics have either preserved a discreet
silence, or have spoken to convince nobody but themselves,--I have no
final opinions to offer. It may be that these passages formed a poem
by themselves before their incorporation with our prophecy; but the
evidence, which has been offered for this, is very far from adequate.
It may be that one or more of them are insertions from other authors,
to which our prophet consciously works up with ideas of his own about
the Servant; but neither for this is there any evidence worth serious
consideration. I think that all we can do is to remember that they
occur in a dramatic work, which may, partly at least, account for the
interruptions which separate them; that the subject of which they treat
is woven through and through other portions of Isa. xl.-liii., and
that even those of them which, like ch. xlix., look as if they could
stand by themselves, are led up to by the verses before them; and that,
finally, the series of them exhibits a continuity and furnishes a
distinct development of their subject. See pp. 313, 314, and 336 ff.
It is this development which the following exposition seeks to
trace. As the prophet starts from the idea of the Servant as being
the whole, historical nation Israel, it will be necessary to devote,
first of all, a chapter to Israel's peculiar relation to God. This
will be ch. xv., "One God, One People." In ch. xvi. we shall trace
the development of the idea through the whole series of the passages;
and in ch. xvii. we shall give the New Testament interpretation and
fulfilment of the Servant. Then will follow an exposition of the
contents of the Service and of the ideal it presents to ourselves,
_first_, as it is given in Isa. xlii. 1-9, as the service of God and
man, ch. xviii. of this volume; then as it is realised and owned by
the Servant himself, as prophet and martyr, Isa. xlix.-l., ch. xix.
of this volume; and finally as it culminates in Isa. lii. 13-liii.,
ch. xx. of this volume.
CHAPTER XV.
_ONE GOD, ONE PEOPLE._
ISAIAH xli. 8-20, xlii.-xliii.
We have been listening to the proclamation of a Monotheism so
absolute, that, as we have seen, modern critical philosophy, in
surveying the history of religion, can find for it no rival among the
faiths of the world. God has been exalted before us, in character so
perfect, in dominion so universal, that neither the conscience nor
the imagination of man can add to the general scope of the vision.
Jesus and His Cross shall lead the world's heart farther into the
secrets of God's love; God's Spirit in science shall more richly
instruct us in the secrets of His laws. But these shall thereby only
increase the contents and illustrate the details of this revelation
of our prophet. They shall in no way enlarge its sweep and outline,
for it is already as lofty an idea of the unity and sovereignty of
God, as the thoughts of man can follow.
Across this pure light of God, however, a phenomenon thrusts itself,
which seems for the moment to affect the absoluteness of the
vision and to detract from its sublimity. This is the prominence
given before God to a single people, Israel. In these chapters the
uniqueness of Israel is as much urged upon us as the unity of God.
Is He the One God in heaven? they are His only people on earth,
_His elect, His own, His witnesses to the end of the earth_. His
guidance of them is matched with His guidance of the stars, as if,
like the stars shining against the night, their tribes alone moved to
His hand through an otherwise dark and empty space. His revelation
to humanity is given through their little language; the restoration
of their petty capital, that hill fort in the barren land of Judah,
is exhibited as the end of His processes, which sweep down through
history and affect the surface of the whole inhabited world. And His
very righteousness turns out to be for the most part His faithfulness
to His covenant with Israel.
Now to many in our day it has been a great offence to have "the
curved nose of the Jew" thus thrust in between their eyes and the
pure light of God. They ask, Can the Judge of all the earth have been
thus partial to one people? Did God confine His revelation to men to
the literature of a small, unpolished tribe? Even most uncritical
souls have trouble to understand why _salvation is of the Jews_.
The chief point to know is that the election of Israel was an election,
not to salvation, but to service. To understand this is to get rid of
by far the greater part of the difficulty that attaches to the subject.
Israel was a means, and not an end; God chose in him a minister, not
a favourite. No prophet in Israel failed to say this; but our prophet
makes it the burden of his message to the exiles. _Ye are My witnesses,
My Servant whom I have chosen. Ye are My witnesses, and I am God. I
will also give thee for a light to the nations, to be My salvation to
the end of the earth_ (xliii. 10). Numbers of other verses might be
quoted to the same effect, that "there is no God but God, and Israel
is His prophet."[139] But if the election of Israel is thus an election
to service, it is surely in harmony with God's usual method, whether
in nature or history. So far from such a specialisation as Israel's
being derogatory to the Divine unity, it is but part of that order and
division of labour which the Divine unity demands as its consequence
throughout the whole range of Being. The universe is diverse. _To
every man his own work_ is the proper corollary of _God over all_, and
Israel's prerogative was but the specialisation of Israel's function
for God in the world. In choosing Israel to be His mediator with
mankind, God did but do for religion what in the exercise of the same
practical discipline He did for philosophy, when He dowered Greece with
her gifts of subtle thought and speech, or with Rome when He trained
her people to become the legislators of mankind. And how else should
work succeed but by specialisation,--the secret as it is of fidelity
and expertness? Of fidelity--for the constraint of my duty surely lies
in this, that it is due from me and no other; of expertness--for he
drives best and deepest who drives along one line. In lighting a fire
you begin with a kindled faggot; and in lighting a world it was in
harmony with all His law, physical and moral, for God to begin with a
particular portion of mankind.
The next question is, Why should this particular portion of mankind
be a nation, and not a single prophet, or a school of philosophers,
or a church universal? The answer is found in the condition of
the ancient world. Amid its diversities of language and of racial
feeling, a missionary prophet travelling like Paul from people to
people is inconceivable; and almost as inconceivable is the kind
of Church which Paul founded among various nations, in no other
bonds than the consciousness of a common faith. Of all possible
combinations of men the nation was the only form, which in the
ancient world stood a chance of surviving in the struggle for
existence. The nation furnished the necessary shelter and fellowship
for personal religion; it gave to the spiritual a habitation upon
earth, enlisted in its behalf the force of heredity, and secured
the continuity of its traditions. But the service of the nation to
religion was not only conservative, it was missionary as well. It
was only through a people that a God became visible and accredited
to the world. Their history supplied the drama in which He played
the hero's part. At a time when it was impossible to spread a
religion, by means of literature, or by the example of personal
holiness, the achievements of a considerable nation, their progress
and prestige, furnished a universally understood language, through
which the God could publish to mankind His power and will; and in
choosing, therefore, a single nation to reveal Himself by, God was
but employing the means best adapted for His purpose. The nation was
the unit of religious progress in the ancient world. In the nation
God chose as His witness, not only the most solid and permanent, but
the most widely intelligible and impressive.[140]
The next question is, Why Israel should have been this singular and
indispensable nation? When God selected Israel to serve His purpose,
He did so, we are told, of His sovereign grace. But this strong
thought, which forms the foundation of our prophet's assurance about
his people, does not prevent him from dwelling also on Israel's
natural capacity for religious service. This, too, was of God. Over
and over again Israel hears Jehovah say: _I have created thee, I
have formed thee, I have prepared thee_. One passage describes
the nation's equipment for the office of a prophet; another their
discipline for the life of a saint; and every now and then our
prophet shows how far back he feels this preparation to have begun,
even when the nation, as he puts it, was _still in the womb_. How
easily these well-worn phrases slip over our lips! Yet they are not
mere formulas. Modern research has put a new meaning into them,
and taught us that Israel's _creation_, _forming_, _election_,
_polishing_, _carriage_, and _defence_ were processes as real and
measurable as any in natural or political history. For instance, when
our prophet says that Israel's preparation began _from the womb,--I
am thy moulder, saith Jehovah, from the womb_,--history takes us
back to the pre-natal circumstance of the nation, and there exhibits
it to us as already being tempered to a religious disposition and
propensity. The Hebrews were of the Semitic stock. The _womb_ from
which Israel sprang was a race of wandering shepherds, upon the
hungry deserts of Arabia, where man's home is the flitting tent,
hunger is his discipline for many months of the year, his only arts
are those of speech and war, and in the long irremediable starvation
there is nothing to do but to be patient and dream. Born in these
deserts, the youth of the Semitic race, like the probation of their
greatest prophets, was spent in a long fast, which lent their spirit
a wonderful ease of detachment from the world and of religious
imagination, and tempered their will to long suffering--though it
touched their blood, too, with a rancorous heat that breaks out
through the prevailing calm of every Semitic literature.[141] They
were trained also in the desert's august style of eloquence. _He hath
made my mouth like a sharp sword; in the shadow of His hand hath
He hid me._[142] A "natural prophecy," as it has been called, is
found in all the branches of the Semitic stock. No wonder that from
this race there came forth the three great universal religions of
mankind--that Moses and the prophets, John, Jesus Himself and Paul,
and Mohammed were all of the seed of Shem.
This racial disposition the Hebrew carried with him into his calling
as a nation. The ancestor, who gave the people the double name by
which they are addressed throughout our prophecy, _Jacob-Israel_,
inherited with all his defects the two great marks of the religious
temper. Jacob could dream and he could wait. Remember him by the side
of the brother, who could so little think of the future, that he was
willing to sell its promise for a mess of pottage; who, though God
was as near to him as to Jacob, never saw visions or wrestled with
angels; who seemed to have no power of growth about him, but carrying
the same character, unchanged through the discipline of life, finally
transmitted it in stereotype to his posterity;--remember Jacob by the
side of such a brother, and you have a great part of the secret of the
emergence of his descendants from the life of wandering cattle-breeders
to be God's chief ministers of religion in the world. Their habits,
like their father's, might be bad, but they had the tough and malleable
constitution, which it was possible to mould to something better.
Like their father, they were false, unchivalrous, selfish, "with the
herdsman's grossness in their blood," and much of the rancour and
cruelty of their ancestors, the desert-warriors, but with it all they
had the two most potential of habits--they could dream and they could
wait. In his love and hope for promised Rachel, that were not quenched
or soured by the substitution, after seven years' service for her, of
her ill-favoured sister, but began another seven years' effort for
herself, Jacob was a type of his strange, tenacious people, who, when
they were brought face to face with some Leah of a fulfilment of their
fondest ideals, as they frequently were in their history, took up again
with undiminished ardour the pursuit of their first unforgettable
love. It is the wonder of history, how this people passed through the
countless disappointments of the prophecies to which they had given
their hearts, yet with only a strengthening expectation of the arrival
of the promised King and His kingdom. If other peoples have felt a gain
in character from such miscarriages of belief, it has generally been at
the expense of their faith. But Israel's experience did not take faith
away or even impair faith's elasticity. We see their appreciation of
God's promises growing only more spiritual with each postponement,
and patience performing her perfect work upon their character; yet
this never happens at the cost of the original buoyancy and ardour.
The glory of it we ascribe, as is most due, to the power of the Word
of God; but the people who could stand the strain of the discipline
of such a word, its alternate glow and frost, must have been a people
of extraordinary fibre and frame. When we think of how they wore for
those two thousand years of postponed promise, and how they wear
still, after two thousand years more of disillusion and suffering, we
cease to wonder why God chose this small tribe to be His instrument on
earth. Where we see their bad habits, their Creator knew their sound
constitution, and the constitution of Israel is a thing unique among
mankind.
From the racial temper of the elect nation we pass to their history,
on the singularity of which our prophet dwells with emphasis.
Israel's political origin had no other reason than a call to God's
service. Other peoples grew, as it were, from the soil; they were the
product of a fatherland, a climate, certain physical environments:
root them out of these, and, as nations, they ceased to be. But
Israel had not been so nursed into nationality on the lap of nature.
The captive children of Jacob had sprung into unity and independence
as a nation at the special call of God, and to serve His will in
the world,--His will that so lay athwart the natural tendencies of
the peoples. All down their history it is wonderful to see how it
was the conscience of this service, which in periods of progress
was the real national genius in Israel, and in times of decay or of
political dissolution upheld the assurance of the nation's survival.
Whenever a ruler like Ahaz forgot that Israel's imperishableness
was bound up with their faithfulness to God's service, and sought to
preserve his throne by alliances with the world-powers, then it was
that Israel were most in danger of absorption into the world. And,
conversely, when disaster came down, and there was no hope in the
sky, it was upon the inward sense of their election to the service
of God that the prophets rallied the people's faith and assured them
of their survival as a nation. They brought to Israel that sovereign
message, which renders all who hear it immortal: "God has a service
for you to serve upon earth." In the Exile especially, the wonderful
survival of the nation, with the subservience of all history to that
end, is made to turn on this,--that Israel has a unique purpose to
serve. When Jeremiah and Ezekiel seek to assure the captives of their
return to the land and of the restoration of the people, they commend
so unlikely a promise by reminding them that the nation is the
Servant of God. This name, applied by them for the first time to the
nation as a whole, they bind up with the national existence. _Fear
thou not, O My Servant Jacob, saith Jehovah; neither be dismayed,
O Israel: for, lo, I will save thee from afar, and thy seed from
the land of their captivity._[143] These words plainly say, that
Israel as a nation cannot die, for God has a use for them to serve.
The singularity of Israel's redemption from Babylon is due to the
singularity of the service that God has for the nation to perform.
Our prophet speaks in the same strain: _Thou, Israel, My Servant,
Jacob whom I have chosen, seed of Abraham My lover, whom I took hold
of from the ends of the earth and its corners_. _I have called thee
and said unto thee, My Servant art thou, I have chosen thee and have
not cast thee away_ (ch. xli. 8 ff). No one can miss the force of
these words. They are the assurance of Israel's miraculous survival,
not because he is God's favourite, but because he is God's servant,
with a unique work in the world. Many other verses repeat the same
truth.[144] They call _Israel the Servant_, and _Jacob the chosen_,
of God, in order to persuade the people that they are not forgotten
of Him, and that their seed shall live and be blessed. Israel
survives because he serves--_Servus servatur._
Now for this service,--which had been the purpose of the nation's
election at first, the mainstay of its unique preservation since,
and the reason of all its singular pre-eminence before God,--Israel
was equipped by two great experiences. These were Redemption and
Revelation.
On the former redemptions of Israel from the power of other nations
our prophet does not dwell much. You feel, that they are present
to his mind, for he sometimes describes the coming redemption
from Babylon in terms of them. And once, in an appeal to the _Arm
of Jehovah_, he calls out: _Awake like the days of old, ancient
generations! Art thou not it that hewed Rahab in pieces, that pierced
the Dragon? Art thou not it which dried up the sea, the waters of
the great deep; that made the depths of the sea a way of passage for
the redeemed?_[145] There is, too, that beautiful passage in ch.
lxiii., which _makes mention of the lovingkindnesses of Jehovah,
according to all that He hath bestowed upon us_; which describes the
_carriage of the people all the days of old_, how _He brought them
out of the sea, caused His glorious arm to go at the right hand of
Moses, divided the water before them, led them through the deeps as a
horse on the meadow, that they stumbled not_. But, on the whole, our
prophet is too much engrossed with the immediate prospect of release
from Babylon, to remember that past, of which it has been truly said,
_He hath not dealt so with any people_. It is the new glory that is
upon him. He counts the deliverance from Babylon as already come; to
his rapt eye it is its marvellous power and costliness, which already
clothes the people in their unique brilliance and honour. _Thus saith
Jehovah, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: For your sake have
I sent to Babylon, and I will bring down their nobles, all of them,
and the Chaldeans, in the ships of their exulting._[146] But it is
more than Babylon that is balanced against them. _I am Jehovah, thy
God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Saviour. I am giving as thy ransom,
Egypt, Cush and Seba in exchange for thee, because thou art precious
in mine eyes, and hast made thyself valuable_ (lit., _of weight_);
_and I have loved thee, therefore do I give mankind for thee, and
peoples for thy life._[147] _Mankind for thee, and peoples for thy
life_,--all the world for this little people? It is intelligible
only because this little people are to be for all the world. _Ye are
My witnesses that I am God. I will also give thee for a light to
nations, to be My salvation to the end of the earth._
But more than on the Redemption, which Israel experienced, our
prophet dwells on the Revelation, that has equipped them for their
destiny. In a passage, in ch. xliii., to which we shall return,
the present stupid and unready character of the mass of the people
is contrasted with the _instruction_ which God has lavished upon
them. _Thou hast seen many things, and wilt not observe; there is
opening of the ears, but he heareth not. Jehovah was pleased for
His righteousness' sake to magnify the Instruction and make it
glorious_,--_but that_--the result and the precipitate of it all--_is
a people robbed and spoiled_. The word _Instruction_ or _Revelation_
is that same technical term, which we have met with before, for
Jehovah's special training and illumination of Israel. How special
these were, how distinct from the highest doctrine and practice
of any other nation in that world to which Israel belonged, is an
historical fact that the results of recent research enable us to
state in a few sentences.
Recent exploration in the East, and the progress of Semitic philology,
have proved that the system of religion, which prevailed among the
Hebrews, had a very great deal in common with the systems of the
neighbouring and related heathen nations. This common element included
not only such things as ritual and temple-furniture, or the details of
priestly organization, but even the titles and many of the attributes
of God, and especially the forms of the covenant in which He drew near
to men. But the discovery of this common element has only thrown into
more striking relief the presence at work in the Hebrew religion of an
independent and original principle. In the Hebrew religion historians
observe a principle of selection operating upon the common Semitic
materials for worship,--ignoring some of them, giving prominence to
others, and with others again changing the reference and application.
Grossly immoral practices are forbidden; forbidden, too, are those
superstitions, which, like augury and divination, draw men away
from single-minded attention to the moral issues of life; and even
religious customs are omitted, such as the employment of women in
the sanctuary, which, however innocent in themselves, might lead men
into temptations, not desirable in connection with the professional
pursuit of religion.[148] In short, a stern and inexorable conscience
was at work in the Hebrew religion, which was not at work in any of
the religions most akin to it. In our previous volume we saw the same
conscience inspiring the prophets. Prophecy was not confined to the
Hebrews; it was a general Semitic institution; but no one doubts the
absolutely distinct character of the prophecy, which was conscious of
having the Spirit of Jehovah. Its religious ideas were original, and
in it we have, as all admit, a moral phenomenon unique in history.
When we turn to ask the secret of this distinction, we find the answer
in the character of the God, whom Israel served. The God explains the
people; Israel is the response to Jehovah. Each of the laws of the
nation is enforced by the reason, _For I am holy_. Each of the prophets
brings his message from a God, _exalted in righteousness_. In short,
look where you will in the Old Testament,--come to it as a critic or
as a worshipper,--you discover the revealed character of Jehovah to be
the effective principle at work. It is this Divine character, which
draws Israel from among the nations to their destiny, which selects and
builds the law to be a wall around them, and which by each revelation
of itself discovers to the people both the measure of their delinquency
and the new ideals of their service to humanity. Like the pillar of
cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, we see it in front of
Israel at every stage of their marvellous progress down the ages.
So that when Jehovah says that _He has magnified the Revelation and
made it glorious_, He speaks of a magnitude of a real, historical
kind, that can be tested by exact methods of observation. Israel's
_election_ by Jehovah, their _formation_, their unique _preparation_
for service, are not the mere boasts of an overweening patriotism,
but sober names for historical processes as real and evident as any
that history contains.
To sum up, then. If Jehovah's sovereignty be absolute, so also is the
uniqueness of Israel's calling and equipment for His Service. For, to
begin with, Israel had the essential religious temper; they enjoyed a
unique moral instruction and discipline; and by the side of this they
were conscious of a series of miraculous deliverances from servitude
and from dissolution. So singular an experience and career were not,
as we have seen, bestowed from any arbitrary motive, which exhausted
itself upon Israel, but in accordance with God's universal method
of specialisation of function, were granted to fit the nation as an
instrument for a practical end. The sovereign unity of God does not
mean equality in His creation. The universe is diverse. There is one
glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of
the stars; and even so in the moral kingdom of Him, who is Lord of
the Hosts of both earth and heaven, each nation has its own destiny
and function. Israel's was religion; Israel was God's specialist in
religion.
For confirmation of this we turn to the supreme witness. Jesus was
born a Jew, He confined His ministry to Judæa, and He has told
us why. By various passing allusions, as well as by deliberate
statements, He revealed His sense of a great religious difference
between Jew and Gentile. _Use not vain repetitions as the Gentiles
do.... For after all these things do the nations of the world seek;
but your Father knoweth that you have need of these things._ He
refused to work except upon Jewish hearts: _I am not sent but to the
lost sheep of the house of Israel. And He charged His disciples,
saying, Go not into any way of the Gentiles, and enter not into any
city of the Samaritans; but go rather to the lost sheep of the House
of Israel._ And again He said to the woman of Samaria: _Ye worship ye
know not what; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews_.
These sayings of our Lord have created as much question as the
pre-eminence given in the Old Testament to a single people by a God,
who is described as the one God of Heaven and earth. Was He narrower of
heart than Paul, His servant, who was debtor to Greek and Barbarian?
Or was He ignorant of the universal character of His mission till it
was forced upon His reluctant sympathies by the importunity of such
heathen as the Syrophenician woman? A little common-sense dispels
the perplexity, and leaves the problem, over which volumes have been
written, no problem at all. Our Lord limited Himself to Israel,
not because He was narrow, but because He was practical; not from
ignorance, but from wisdom. He came from heaven to sow the seed of
Divine truth; and where in all humanity should He find the soil so
ready as within the long-chosen people? He knew of that discipline of
the centuries. In the words of His own parable, the Son when He came
to earth directed His attention not to a piece of desert, but to _the
vineyard_ which His Father's servants had so long cultivated, and where
the soil was open. Jesus came to Israel because He expected _faith in
Israel_. That this practical end was the deliberate intention of His
will, is proved by the fact that when He found faith elsewhere, either
in Syrian or Greek or Roman hearts, He did not hesitate to let His love
and power go forth to them.
In short, we shall have no difficulty about these Divine methods
with a single, elect people, if we only remember that to be Divine
is to be practical. _Yet God also is wise_, said Isaiah to the Jews
when they preferred their own clever policies to Jehovah's guidance.
And we need to be told the same, who murmur that to confine Himself
to a single nation was not the ideal thing for the One God to do;
or who imagine that it was left to one of our Lord's own creatures
to suggest to Him the policy of His mission upon earth. We are
shortsighted: and the Almighty is past finding out. But this at least
it is possible for us to see, that, in choosing one nation to be His
agent among men, God chose the type of instrument best fitted at the
time for the work for which He designed it, and that in choosing
Israel to be that nation, He chose a people of temper singularly
suitable to His end.
Israel's election as a nation, therefore, was to Service. To be a
nation and to be God's Servant was pretty much one and the same thing
for Israel. Israel were to survive the Exile, because they were to
serve the world. Let us carry this over to the study of our next
chapter--The Servant of Jehovah.
FOOTNOTES:
[139] Wellhausen.
[140] "Revelation is never revolutionary.... As a rule, revelation
accepts the fragments of truth and adopts the methods of religion
already existing, uniting the former into a whole, and purifying
the latter for its own purposes."... For instance, "in the East
each people had its particular god. The god and the people were
correlative ideas, that which gave the individuals of a nation unity
and made them a people was the unity of its god; as, on the other
hand, that which gave a god prestige was the strength and victorious
career of his people. The self-consciousness of the nation and its
religion re-acted on one another, and rose and fell simultaneously.
This conception was not repudiated, but adopted by revelation; and,
as occasion demanded, purified from its natural abuses."--Professor
A. B. Davidson, _Expositor_, Second Series, vol. viii., pp. 257-8.
[141] Mr. Doughty, in his most interesting account of the nomads of
Central Arabia, the unsophisticated Semites on their native soil,
furnishes ample material for accounting for the strange mixture of
passion and resignation in these prophet-peoples of the world.
[142] Ch. xlix. 2.
[143] Jer. xxx. 10, cf. xlvi. 27; also Ezek. xxxvii. 25: _And they
shall dwell in the land that I have given My servant Jacob_. Cf.
xxviii. 25.
[144] xliv. 1, 21; xlviii. 20, etc.
[145] Ch. li. 9, 10.
[146] Ch. xliii. 14.
[147] _Ib._ 3, 4.
[148] Robertson Smith, Burnett Lectures in Aberdeen, 1889-90.
CHAPTER XVI.
_THE SERVANT OF THE LORD._
ISAIAH xli. 8-20; xlii. 1-7, 18 ff; xliii. 5-10; xlix. 1-9; l. 4-10;
lii. 13-liii.
With chapter xlii. we reach a distinct stage in our prophecy. The
preceding chapters have been occupied with the declaration of the
great, basal truth, that Jehovah is the One Sovereign God. This has
been declared to two classes of hearers in succession--to God's own
people, Israel, in ch. xl., and to the heathen in ch. xli. Having
established His sovereignty, God now publishes His will, again
addressing these two classes according to the purpose which He has for
each. Has He vindicated Himself to Israel, the Almighty and Righteous
God, Who will give His people freedom and strength: He will now define
to them the mission for which that strength and freedom are required.
Has He proved to the Gentiles that He is the one true God: He will
declare to them now what truth He has for them to learn. In short, to
use modern terms, the apologetic of chs. xl.-xli. is succeeded by the
missionary programme of ch. xlii. And although, from the necessities
of the case, we are frequently brought back, in the course of the
prophecy, to its fundamental claims for the Godhead of Jehovah, we are
nevertheless sensible that with ver. 1 of ch. xlii. we make a distinct
advance. It is one of those logical steps which, along with a certain
chronological progress that we have already felt, assures us that
Isaiah, whether originally by one or more authors, is in its present
form a unity, with a distinct order and principle of development.
The Purpose of God is identified with a Minister or Servant, whom He
commissions to carry it out in the world. This Servant is brought
before us with all the urgency with which Jehovah has presented
Himself, and next to Jehovah he turns out to be the most important
figure of the prophecy. Does the prophet insist that God is the only
source and sufficiency of His people's salvation: it is with equal
emphasis that He introduces the Servant as God's indispensable agent
in the work. Cyrus is also acknowledged as an elect instrument. But
neither in closeness to God, nor in effect upon the world, is Cyrus
to be compared for an instant to the Servant. Cyrus is subservient
and incidental: with the overthrow of Babylon, for which he was
raised up, he will disappear from the stage of our prophecy. But
God's purpose, which uses the gates opened by Cyrus, only to pass
through them with the redeemed people to the regeneration of the
whole world, is to be carried to this Divine consummation by the
Servant: its universal and glorious progress is identified with his
career. Cyrus flashes through these pages a well-polished sword: it
is only his swift and brilliant usefulness that is allowed to catch
our eye. But the Servant is a Character, to delineate whose immortal
beauty and example the prophet devotes as much space as he does
to Jehovah Himself. As he turns again and again to speak of God's
omnipotence and faithfulness and agonising love for His own, so
with equal frequency and fondness does he linger on every feature of
the Servant's conduct and aspect: His gentleness, His patience, His
courage, His purity, His meekness; His daily wakefulness to God's
voice, the swiftness and brilliance of His speech for others, His
silence under His own torments; His resorts--among the bruised, the
prisoners, the forwandered of Israel, the weary, and them that sit
in darkness, the far-off heathen; His warfare with the world, His
face set like a flint; His unworldly beauty, which men call ugliness;
His unnoticed presence in His own generation, yet the effect of His
face upon kings; His habit of woe, a man of sorrows and acquainted
with sickness; His sore stripes and bruises, His judicial murder,
His felon's grave; His exaltation and eternal glory--till we may
reverently say that these pictures, by their vividness and charm,
have drawn our eyes away from our prophet's visions of God, and have
caused the chapters in which they occur to be oftener read among
us, and learned by heart, than the chapters in which God Himself is
lifted up and adored. Jehovah and Jehovah's Servant--these are the
two heroes of the drama.
Now we might naturally expect that so indispensable and fondly
imagined a figure would also be defined past all ambiguity, whether
as to His time or person or name. But the opposite is the case.
About Scripture there are few more intricate questions than those
on the Servant of the Lord. Is He a Person or Personification? If
the latter, is He a Personification of all Israel? Or of a part of
Israel? Or of the ideal Israel? Or of the Order of the Prophets? Or
if a Person--is he the prophet himself? Or a martyr who has already
lived and suffered, like Jeremiah? Or One still to come, like the
promised Messiah? Each of these suggestions has not only been made
about the Servant, but derives considerable support from one or
another of our prophet's dissolving views of his person and work.
A final answer to them can be given only after a comparative study
of all the relevant passages; but as these are scattered over the
prophecy, and our detailed exposition of them must necessarily be
interrupted, it will be of advantage to take here a prospect of them
all, and see to what they combine to develop this sublime character
and mission. And after we have seen what the prophecies themselves
teach concerning the Servant, we shall inquire how they were
understood and fulfilled by the New Testament; and that will show us
how to expound and apply them with regard to ourselves.
I.
The Hebrew word for _Servant_ means a person at the disposal of
another--to carry out his will, do his work, represent his interests.
It was thus applied to the representatives of a king or the
worshippers of a god.[149] All Israelites were thus in a sense the
_servants of Jehovah_; though in the singular the title was reserved
for persons of extraordinary character or usefulness.
But we have seen, as clearly as possible, that God set apart for
His chief service upon earth, not an individual nor a group of
individuals, but a whole nation in its national capacity. We have
seen Israel's political origin and preservation bound up with that
service; we have heard the whole nation plainly called, by Jeremiah
and Ezekiel, the Servant of Jehovah.[150] Nothing could be more clear
than this, that in the earlier years of the Exile the Servant of
Jehovah was Israel as a whole, Israel as a body politic.
It is also in this sense that our prophet first uses the title in a
passage we have already quoted (xli. 8); _Thou Israel, My Servant,
Jacob whom I have chosen, seed of Abraham My lover, whom I took
hold of from the ends of the earth and its corners! I called thee
and said unto thee, My Servant art thou. I have chosen thee, and
not cast thee away._ Here the _Servant_ is plainly the historical
nation, descended from Abraham, and the subject of those national
experiences which are traced in the previous chapter. It is the
same in the following verses:--xliv. 1 ff: _Yet now hear, O Jacob
My servant; and Israel, whom I have chosen: thus saith Jehovah thy
Maker, and thy Moulder from the womb, He will help thee. Fear not, My
servant Jacob; and Jeshurun, whom I have chosen.... I will pour My
spirit upon thy seed, and My blessing upon thine offspring._ xliv.
21: _Remember these things, O Jacob; and Israel, for My servant art
thou: I have formed thee; a servant for Myself art thou; O Israel,
thou shalt not be forgotten of Me._ xlviii. 20: _Go ye forth from
Babylon; say ye, Jehovah hath redeemed His servant Jacob._ In all
these verses, which bind up the nation's restoration from exile with
the fact that God called it to be His Servant, the title _Servant_
is plainly equivalent to the national name _Israel_ or _Jacob_. But
_Israel_ or _Jacob_ is not a label for the mere national idea, or the
bare political framework, without regard to the living individuals
included in it. To the eye and heart of Him, _Who counts the number
of the stars_, Israel means no mere outline, but all the individuals
of the living generation of the people--_thy seed_, that is, every
born Israelite, however fallen or forwandered. This is made clear
in a very beautiful passage in ch. xliii. (vv. 1-7): _Thus saith
Jehovah, thy Creator, O Jacob; thy Moulder, O Israel.... Fear not,
for I am with thee; from the sunrise I will bring thy seed, and from
the sunset will I gather thee; ... My sons from far, and My daughters
from the end of the earth; every one who is called by My name, and
whom for My glory I have created, formed, yea, I have made him._ To
this Israel--Israel as a whole, yet no mere abstraction or outline
of the nation, but the people in mass and bulk--every individual of
whom is dear to Jehovah, and in some sense shares His calling and
equipment--to this Israel the title _Servant of Jehovah_ is at first
applied by our prophet.
2. We say "at first," for very soon the prophet has to make a
distinction, and to sketch the Servant as something less than the
actual nation. The distinction is obscure; it has given rise to a
very great deal of controversy. But it is so natural, where a nation
is the subject, and of such frequent occurrence in other literatures,
that we may almost state it as a general law.
In all the passages quoted above, Israel has been spoken of in the
passive mood, as the object of some affection or action on the part
of God: _loved_, _formed_, _chosen_, _called_, and _about to be
redeemed by Him_. Now, so long as a people thus lie passive, their
prophet will naturally think of them as a whole. In their shadow
his eye can see them only in the outline of their mass; in their
common suffering and servitude his heart will go out to all their
individuals, as equally dear and equally in need of redemption. But
when the hour comes for the people to work out their own salvation,
and they emerge into action, it must needs be different. When they
are no more the object of their prophet's affection only, but pass
under the test of his experience and judgement, then distinctions
naturally appear upon them. Lifted to the light of their destiny,
their inequality becomes apparent; tried by its strain, part of them
break away. And so, though the prophet continues still to call on
the nation by its name to fulfil its calling, what he means by that
name is no longer the bulk and the body of the citizenship. A certain
ideal of the people fills his mind's eye--an ideal, however, which is
no mere spectre floating above his own generation, but is realised in
their noble and aspiring portion--although his ignorance as to the
exact size of this portion, must always leave his image of them more
or less ideal to his eyes. It will be their quality rather than their
quantity that is clear to him. In modern history we have two familiar
illustrations of this process of winnowing and idealising a people in
the light of their destiny, which may prepare us for the more obscure
instance of it in our prophecy.
In a well-known passage in the _Areopagitica_, Milton exclaims,
"Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself
and shaking her invincible locks; methinks I see her as an eagle mewing
her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday
beam, ... while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with
those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she
means." In this passage the "nation" is no longer what Milton meant by
the term in the earlier part of his treatise, where "England" stands
simply for the outline of the whole English people; but the "nation"
is the true genius of England realised in her enlightened and aspiring
sons, and breaking away from the hindering and debasing members of the
body politic--"the timorous and flocking birds with those also that
love the twilight"--who are indeed Englishmen after the flesh, but form
no part of the nation's better self.
Or, recall Mazzini's bitter experience. To no man was his Italy more
really one than to this ardent son of hers, who loved every born
Italian because he was an Italian, and counted none of the fragments
of his unhappy country too petty or too corrupt to be included in
the hope of her restoration. To Mazzini's earliest imagination,
it was the whole Italian seed, who were ready for redemption, and
would rise to achieve it at his summons. But when his summons came,
how few responded, and after the first struggles how fewer still
remained,--Mazzini himself has told us with breaking heart. The
real Italy was but a handful of born Italians; at times it seemed
to shrink to the prophet alone. From such a core the conscience
indeed spread again, till the entire people was delivered from
tyranny and from schism, and now every peasant and burgher from the
Alps to Sicily understands what Italy means, and is proud to be an
Italian. But for a time Mazzini and his few comrades stood alone.
Others of their blood and speech were Piedmontese, Pope's men,
Neapolitans,--merchants, lawyers, scholars,--or merely selfish and
sensual. They alone were Italians; they alone were Italy.
It is a similar winnowing process, through which we see our prophet's
thoughts pass with regard to Israel. Him, too, experience teaches
that _the many are called, but the few chosen_. So long as his people
lie in the shadow of captivity, so long as he has to speak of them
in the passive mood, the object of God's call and preparation, it
is _their seed_, the born people in bulk and mass, whom he names
Israel, and entitles _the Servant of Jehovah_. But the moment that he
lifts them to their mission in the world, and to the light of their
destiny, a difference becomes apparent upon them, and the Servant of
Jehovah, though still called Israel, shrinks to something less than
the living generation, draws off to something finer than the mass
of the people. How, indeed, could it be otherwise with this strange
people, than which no nation on earth had a loftier ideal identified
with its history, or more frequently turned upon its better self,
with a sword in its hand. Israel, though created a nation by God
for His service, was always what Paul found it, divided into an
_Israel after the flesh_, and an _Israel after the spirit_. But it
was in the Exile that this distinction gaped most broad. With the
fall of Jerusalem, the political framework, which kept the different
elements of the nation together, was shattered, and these were left
loose to the action of moral forces. The baser elements were quickly
absorbed by heathendom; the nobler, that remained loyal to the divine
call, were free to assume a new and ideal form. Every year spent in
Babylonia made it more apparent that the true and effective Israel
of the future would not coincide with all the _seed of Jacob_, who
went into exile. Numbers of the latter were as contented with
their Babylonian circumstance as numbers of Mazzini's "Italians"
were satisfied to live on as Austrian and Papal subjects. Many, as
we have seen, became idolaters; many more settled down into the
prosperous habits of Babylonian commerce, while a large multitude
besides were scattered far out of sight across the world. It required
little insight to perceive that the true, effective Israel--the
real _Servant of Jehovah_--must needs be a much smaller body than
the sum of all these: a loyal kernel within Israel, who were still
conscious of the national calling, and capable of carrying it out;
who stood sensible of their duty to the whole world, but whose first
conscience was for their lapsed and lost countrymen. This Israel
within Israel was the real _Servant of the Lord_; to personify it in
that character--however vague might be the actual proportion it would
assume in his own or in any other generation--would be as natural to
our dramatic prophet as to personify the nation as a whole.
All this very natural process--this passing from the historical
Israel, the nation originally designed by God to be His Servant, to
the conscious and effective Israel, that uncertain quantity within
the present and every future generation--takes place in the chapters
before us; and it will be sufficiently easy for us to follow if we
only remember that our prophet is not a dogmatic theologian, careful
to make clear each logical distinction, but a dramatic poet, who
delivers his ideas in groups, tableaux, dialogues, interrupted by
choruses; and who writes in a language incapable of expressing such
delicate differences, except by dramatic contrasts, and by the one
other figure of which he is so fond--paradox.
Perhaps the first traces of distinction between the real Servant
and the whole nation are to be found in the Programme of his Mission
in ch. xlii. 1-7. There it is said that the Servant is to be for a
_covenant of the people_ (ver. 6). I have explained below why we are
to understand _people_ as here meaning Israel.[151] And in ver. 7 it
is said of the Servant that he is _to open blind eyes_, _bring forth
from prison the captive_, _from the house of bondage dwellers in
darkness_: phrases that are descriptive, of course, of the captive
Israel. Already, then, in ch. xlii. the Servant is something distinct
from the whole nation, whose Covenant and Redeemer he is to be.
The next references to the Servant are a couple of paradoxes, which
are evidently the prophet's attempt to show _why_ it was necessary
to draw in the Servant of Jehovah from the whole to a part of the
people. The first of these paradoxes is in ch. xlii. ver. 18.
_Ye deaf, hearken! and ye blind, look ye to see!
Who is blind but My Servant, and deaf as My Messenger_ whom _I send?
Who is blind as Meshullam, and blind as the Servant of Jehovah?
Vision of many things--and thou dost not observe,
Opening of ears and he hears not!_
The context shows that the Servant here--or Meshullam, as he is
called, the _devoted_ or _submissive one_, from the same root, and of
much the same form as the Arabic Muslim[152]--is the whole people;
but they are entitled _Servant_ only in order to show how unfit
they are for the task to which they have been designated, and what
a paradox their title is beside their real character. God had given
them every opportunity by _making great His instruction_ (ver. 21,
cf. p. 247), and, when that failed, by His sore discipline in exile
(vers. 24, 25). _For who gave Jacob for spoil and Israel to the
robbers? Did not Jehovah? He against whom we sinned, and they would
not walk in His ways, neither were obedient to His instruction. So
He poured upon him the fury of His anger and the force of war._ But
even this did not awake the dull nation. _Though it set him on fire
round about, yet he knew not; and it kindled upon him, yet he laid
it not to heart._ The nation as a whole had been favoured with God's
revelation; as a whole they had been brought into His purifying
furnace of the Exile. But as they have benefited by neither the one
nor the other, the natural conclusion is that as a whole they are no
more fit to be God's Servant. Such is the hint which this paradox is
intended to give us.
But a little further on there is an obverse paradox, which plainly
says, that although the people are blind and deaf as a whole, still
the capacity for service is found among them alone (xliii. 8, 10).
_Bring forth the blind people--yet eyes are there!
And the deaf, yet ears have they!...
Ye are My witnesses, saith Jehovah, and My Servant whom I have
chosen._
The preceding verses (vv. 1-7) show us that it is again the whole
people, in their bulk and scattered fragments, who are referred to.
Blind though they be, _yet are there eyes_ among them; deaf though
they be, yet _they have ears_. And so Jehovah addresses them all, in
contradistinction to the heathen peoples (ver. 9), as His Servant.
These two complementary paradoxes together show this: that while
Israel as a whole is unfit to be the Servant, it is nevertheless
within Israel, alone of all the world's nations, that the true
capacities for service are found--_eyes are there, ears have they_.
They prepare us for the Servant's testimony about himself, in which,
while he owns himself to be distinct from Israel as a whole, he is
nevertheless still called Israel. This is given in ch. xlix. _And He
said unto me, My Servant art thou; Israel, in whom I will glorify
Myself. And now saith Jehovah, my moulder from the womb to be a
Servant unto Him, to turn again Jacob to Him, and that Israel might
not be destroyed; and I am of value in the eyes of Jehovah, and my
God is my strength. And He said, It is too light for thy being My
Servant,_ merely _to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the
preserved of Israel; I will also set thee for a light of nations,
to be My salvation to the end of the earth_ (xlix. 3-6). Here the
Servant, though still called Israel, is clearly distinct from the
nation as a whole, for part of his work is to raise the nation up
again. And, moreover, he tells us this as his own testimony about
himself. He is no longer spoken of in the third person, he speaks
for himself in the first. This is significant. It is more than a
mere artistic figure, the effect of our prophet's dramatic style--as
if the Servant now stood opposite him, so vivid and near that he
heard him speak, and quoted him in the direct form of speech. It is
more probably the result of moral sympathy: the prophet speaks out
of the heart of the Servant, in the name of that better portion of
Israel which was already conscious of the Divine call, and of its
distinction in this respect from the mass of the people.
It is futile to inquire what this better portion of Israel actually
was, for whom the prophet speaks in the first person. Some have
argued, from the stress which the speaker lays upon his gifts of
speech and office of preaching, that what is now signified by the
Servant is the order of the prophets; but such forget that in these
chapters the proclamation of the Kingdom of God is the ideal, not
of prophets only, but of the whole people. Zion as a whole is to be
_heraldess of good news_ (xl. 9). It is, therefore, not the official
function of the prophet-order which the Servant here owns, but the
ideal of the prophet-nation. Others have argued from the direct form
of speech, that the prophet puts himself forward as the Servant. But
no individual would call himself Israel. And as Professor Cheyne
remarks, the passage is altogether too self-assertive to be spoken
by any man of himself as an individual; although, of course, our
prophet could not have spoken of the true Israel with such sympathy,
unless he had himself been part of it. The writer of these verses may
have been, for the time, as virtually the real Israel as Mazzini was
the real Italy. But still he does not speak as an individual. The
passage is manifestly a piece of personification. The Servant is
_Israel_--not now the nation as a whole, not the body and bulk of the
Israelites, for they are to be the object of his first efforts, but
the loyal, conscious and effective Israel, realised in some of her
members, and here personified by our prophet, who himself speaks for
her out of his heart, in the first person.
By ch. xlix., then, the Servant of Jehovah is a personification of
the true, effective Israel as distinguished from the mass of the
nation--a Personification, but not yet a Person. Something within
Israel has wakened up to find itself conscious of being the Servant
of Jehovah, and distinct from the mass of the nation--something that
is not yet a Person. And this definition of the Servant may stand
(with some modifications) for his next appearance in ch. l. 4-9.
In this passage the Servant, still speaking in the first person,
continues to illustrate his experience as a prophet, and carries
it to its consequence in martyrdom. But let us notice that he now
no longer calls himself _Israel_, and that if it were not for the
previous passages it would be natural to suppose that an individual
was speaking. This supposition is confirmed by a verse that follows
the Servant's speech, and is spoken, as chorus, by the Prophet
himself. _Who among you is a fearer of Jehovah, obedient to the voice
of His Servant, who walketh in darkness, and hath no light. Let him
trust in the name of Jehovah, and stay himself upon his God._ In
this too much neglected verse, which forms a real transition to ch.
lii. 13-liii., the prophet is addressing any individual Israelite,
on behalf of a personal God. It is very difficult to refrain from
concluding that therefore the Servant also is a Person. Let us,
however, not go beyond what we have evidence for; and note only that
in ch. l. the Servant is no more called Israel, and is represented
not as if he were one part of the nation, over against the mass of
it, but as if he were one individual over against other individuals;
that in fine the Personification of ch. xlix. has become much more
difficult to distinguish from an actual Person.
3. This brings us to the culminating passage--ch. lii. 13-liii. Is
the Servant still a Personification here, or at last and unmistakably
a Person?
It may relieve the air of that electricity, which is apt to charge
it at the discussion of so classic a passage as this, and secure us
calm weather in which to examine exegetical details, if we at once
assert, what none but prejudiced Jews have ever denied, that this
great prophecy, known as the fifty-third of Isaiah, was fulfilled in
One Person, Jesus of Nazareth, and achieved in all its details by
Him alone. But, on the other hand, it requires also to be pointed
out that Christ's personal fulfilment of it does not necessarily
imply that our prophet wrote it of a Person. The present expositor
hopes, indeed, to be able to give strong reasons for the theory
usual among us, that the Personification of previous passages is at
last in ch. liii. presented as a Person. But he fails to understand,
why critics should be regarded as unorthodox or at variance with
New Testament teaching on the subject, who, while they acknowledge
that only Christ fulfilled ch. liii., are yet unable to believe
that the prophet looked upon the Servant as an individual, and who
regard ch. liii. as simply a sublimer form of the prophet's previous
pictures of the ideal people of God. Surely Christ could and did
fulfil prophecies other than personal ones. The types of Him, which
the New Testament quotes from the Old Testament, are not exclusively
individuals. Christ is sometimes represented as realising in His
Person and work statements, which, as they were first spoken, could
only refer to Israel, the nation. Matthew, for instance, applies to
Jesus a text which Hosea wrote primarily of the whole Jewish people:
_Out of Egypt have I called My Son_.[153] Or, to take an instance
from our own prophet--who but Jesus fulfilled ch. xlix., in which,
as we have seen, it is not an individual, but the ideal of the
prophet people, that is figured? So that, even if it were proved
past all doubt--proved from grammar, context, and every prophetic
analogy--that in writing ch. liii. our prophet had still in view that
aspect of the nation which he has personified in ch. xlix., such a
conclusion would not weaken the connection between the prophecy and
its unquestioned fulfilment by Jesus Christ, nor render the two less
evidently part of one Divine design.
But we are by no means compelled to adopt the impersonal view of
ch. liii. On the contrary, while the question is one, to which all
experts know the difficulty of finding an absolutely conclusive
answer one way or the other, it seems to me that reasons prevail,
which make for the personal interpretation. . Let us see what exactly
are the objections to taking ch. lii. 13-liii. in a personal sense.
First, it is very important to observe, that they do not rise out
of the grammar or language of the passage. The reference of both of
these is consistently individual. Throughout, the Servant is spoken
of in the singular.[154] The name Israel is not once applied to him:
nothing--except that the nation has also suffered--suggests that he
is playing a national _rôle_; there is no reflection in his fate
of the features of the Exile. The antithesis, which was evident in
previous passages, between a better Israel and the mass of the people
has disappeared. The Servant is contrasted, not with the nation as a
whole, but with His people as individuals. _All we like sheep have
gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord
hath laid on him the iniquity of us all._ As far as grammar can,
this surely distinguishes a single person. It is true, that one or
two phrases suggest so colossal a figure--_he shall startle many
nations, and kings shall shut their mouths at him_--that for a moment
we think of the spectacle of a people rather than of a solitary
human presence. But even such descriptions are not incompatible with
a single person.[155] On the other hand, there are phrases which
we can scarcely think are used of any but a historical individual;
such as that he was taken from _oppression and judgement_, that is
from a process of law which was tyranny, from a judicial murder, and
that he belonged to a particular generation--_As for his generation,
who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living_.
Surely a historical individual is the natural meaning of these words.
And, in fact, critics like Ewald and Wellhausen, who interpret the
passage, in its present context, of the ideal Israel, find themselves
forced to argue, that it has been borrowed for this use from the
older story of some actual martyr--so individual do its references
seem to them throughout.
If, then, the grammar and language of the passage thus conspire to
convey the impression of an individual, what are the objections to
supposing that an individual is meant? Critics have felt, in the
main, three objections to the discovery of a historical individual in
Isa. lii. 13-liii.
The _first_ of these that we take is chronological, and arises from the
late date to which we have found it necessary to assign the prophecy.
Our prophet, it is averred, associates the work of the Servant with
the restoration of the people; but he sees that restoration too close
to him to be able to think of the appearance, ministry and martyrdom
of a real historic life happening before it. (Our prophet, it will be
remembered, wrote about 546, and the Restoration came in 538.) "There
is no room for a history like that of the suffering Servant between the
prophet's place and the Restoration."[156]
Now, this objection might be turned, even if it were true that the
prophet identified the suffering Servant's career with so immediate
and so short a process as the political deliverance from Babylon.
For, in that case, the prophet would not be leaving less room for the
Servant, than, in ch. ix., Isaiah himself leaves for the birth, the
growth to manhood, and the victories of the Prince-of-the-Four-Names,
before that immediate relief from the Assyrian, which he expects
the Prince to effect. But does our prophet identify the suffering
Servant's career with the redemption from Babylon and the Return?
It is plain that he does not--at least in those portraits of the
Servant, which are most personal. Our prophet has really two
prospects for Israel--one, the actual deliverance from Babylon;
the other, a spiritual redemption and restoration. If, like his
fellow prophets, he sometimes runs these two together, and talks
of the latter in the terms of the former, he keeps them on the
whole distinct, and assigns them to different agents. The burden
of the first he lays on Cyrus, though he also connects it with
the Servant, while the Servant is still to him an aspect of the
nation (see xlix. 8_a_, 9_b_). It is temporary, and soon passes
from his thoughts, Cyrus being dropped with it. But the other, the
spiritual redemption, is confined to no limits of time; and it is
with its process--indefinite in date and in length of period--that
he associates the most personal portraits of the Servant (ch. l. and
lii. 13-liii.). In these the Servant, now spoken of as an individual,
has nothing to do with that temporary work of freeing the people
from Babylon, which was over in a year or two, and which seems to be
now behind the prophet's standpoint. His is the enduring office of
prophecy, sympathy, and expiation--an office in which there is all
possible "room" for such a historical career as is sketched for him.
His relation to Cyrus, before whose departure from connection with
Israel's fate the Servant does not appear as a person, is thus most
interesting. Perhaps we may best convey it in a homely figure. On the
ship of Israel's fortunes--as on every ship and on every voyage--the
prophet sees two personages. One is the Pilot through the shallows,
Cyrus, who is dropped as soon as the shallows are past; and the
other is the Captain of the ship, who remains always identified with
it--the Servant. The Captain does not come to the front till the
Pilot has gone; but, both alongside the Pilot, and after the Pilot
has been dropped, there is every room for his office.
The _second_ main objection to identifying an individual in ch. lii.
13-liii. is, that an individual with such features has no analogy in
Hebrew prophecy. It is said that, neither in his humiliation, nor
in the kind of exaltation, which is ascribed to him, is there his
like in any other individual in the Old Testament, and certainly not
in the Messiah. Elsewhere in Scripture (it is averred) the Messiah
reigns, and is glorious; it is the people who suffer, and come
through suffering to power. Nor is the Messiah's royal splendour at
all the same as the very vague influence, evidently of a spiritual
kind, which is attributed to the Servant in the end of ch. liii.
The Messiah is endowed with the military and political virtues. He
is a warrior, a king, a judge. He _sits on the throne of David, He
establishes David's kingdom. He smites the land with the rod of His
mouth, and with the breath of His lips He slays the wicked._ But very
different phrases are used of the Servant. He is not called king,
though kings shut their mouths at him,--he is a prophet and a martyr,
and an expiation; and the phrases, _I will divide him a portion with
the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong_, are simply
metaphors of the immense spiritual success and influence with which
His self-sacrifice shall be rewarded; as a spiritual power He shall
take His place among the dominions and forces of the world. This is
a true prophecy of what Israel, that _worm of a people_, should be
lifted to; but it is quite different from the political throne, from
which Isaiah had promised that the Messiah should sway the destinies
of Israel and mankind.
But, in answer to this objection to finding the Messiah, or any other
influential individual, in ch. liii., we may remember that there
were already traces in Hebrew prophecy of a suffering Messiah:
we come across them in ch. vii. There Isaiah presents Immanuel,
whom we identified with the Prince-of-the-Four-Names in ch. ix.,
as at first nothing but a sufferer--a sufferer from the sins of
His predecessors.[157] And, even though we are wrong in taking the
suffering Immanuel for the Messiah, and though Isaiah meant him only
as a personification of Israel suffering for the error of Ahaz, had
not the two hundred years, which elapsed between Isaiah's prophecy of
Israel's glorious Deliverer, been full of room enough, and, what is
more, of experience enough, for the ideal champion of the people to
be changed to something more spiritual in character and in work? Had
the nation been baptized, for most of those two centuries, in vain,
in the meaning of suffering, and in vain had they seen exemplified in
their noblest spirits the fruits and glory of self-sacrifice?[158]
The type of Hero had changed in Israel since Isaiah wrote of his
Prince-of-the-Four-Names. The king had been replaced by the prophet;
the conqueror by the martyr; the judge who smote the land by the rod
of his mouth, and slew the wicked by the breath of his lips,--by
the patriot who took his country's sins upon his own conscience.
The monarchy had perished; men knew that, even if Israel were set
upon their own land again, it would not be under an independent king
of their own; nor was a Jewish champion of the martial kind, such
as Isaiah had promised for deliverance from the Assyrian, any more
required. Cyrus, the Gentile, should do all the campaigning required
against Israel's enemies, and Israel's native Saviour be relieved for
gentler methods and more spiritual aims. It is all this experience,
of nearly two centuries, which explains the omission of the features
of warrior and judge from ch. liii., and their replacement by those
of a suffering patriot, prophet and priest. The reason of the change
is, not because the prophet who wrote the chapter had not, as much
as Isaiah, an individual in his view, but because, in the historical
circumstance of the Exile, such an individual as Isaiah had promised,
seemed no longer probable or required.
So far, then, from the difference between ch. liii. and previous
prophecies of the Messiah affording evidence that in ch. liii. it
is not the Messiah who is presented, this very change, that has
taken place, explicable as it is from the history of the intervening
centuries, goes powerfully to prove that it is the Messiah, and
therefore an individual, whom the prophet so vividly describes.
The _third_ main objection to our recognising an individual in
ch. liii. is concerned only with our prophet himself. Is it not
impossible, say some--or at least improbably inconsistent--for the
same prophet first to have identified the Servant with the nation,
and then to present him to us as an individual? We can understand the
transference by the same writer of the name from the whole people to
a part of the people; it is a natural transference, and the prophet
sufficiently explains it. But how does he get from a part of the
nation to a single individual? If in ch. xlix. he personifies, under
the name Servant, some aspect of the nation, we are surely bound
to understand the same personification when the Servant is again
introduced--unless we have an explanation to the contrary. But we
have none. The prophet gives no hint, except by dropping the name
Israel, that the focus of his vision is altered,--no more paradoxes
such as marked his passage from the people as a whole to a portion of
them,---no consciousness that any explanation whatever is required.
Therefore, however much finer the personification is drawn in ch.
liii. than in ch. xlix., it is surely a personification still.
To which objection an obvious answer is, that our prophet is not a
systematic theologian, but a dramatic poet, who allows his characters
to disclose themselves and their relation without himself intervening
to define or relate them. And any one who is familiar with the
literature of Israel knows, that no less than the habit of drawing
in from the whole people upon a portion of them, was the habit of
drawing in from a portion of the people upon one individual. The
royal Messiah Himself is a case in point. The original promise to
David was of a seed; but soon prophecy concentrated the seed in
one glorious Prince. The promise of Israel had always culminated
in an individual. Then, again, in the nation's awful sufferings,
it had been one man--the prophet Jeremiah--who had stood forth
singly and alone, at once the incarnation of Jehovah's word, and the
illustration in his own person of all the penalty that Jehovah laid
upon the sinful people. With this tendency of his school to focus
Israel's hope on a single individual, and especially with the example
of Jeremiah before him, it is almost inconceivable that our prophet
could have thought of any but an individual when he drew his portrait
of the suffering Servant. No doubt the national sufferings were in
his heart as he wrote; it was probably a personal share in them
that taught him to write so sympathetically about the Man of pains,
who was familiar with ailing. But to gather and concentrate all
these sufferings upon one noble figure, to describe this figure as
thoroughly conscious of their moral meaning, and capable of turning
them to his people's salvation, was a process absolutely in harmony
with the genius of Israel's prophecy, as well as with the trend of
their recent experience; and there is, besides, no word in that
great chapter, in which the process culminates, but is in thorough
accordance with it. So far, therefore, from its being an impossible
or an unlikely thing for our prophet to have at last reached his
conception of an individual, it is almost impossible to conceive of
him executing so personal a portrait as ch. lii. 13-liii., without
thinking of a definite historical personage, such as Hebrew prophecy
had ever associated with the redemption of his people.
4. We have now exhausted the passages in Isa. xl.-lxvi. which
deal with the Servant of the Lord. We have found that our prophet
identifies him at first with the whole nation, and then with some
indefinite portion of the nation--indefinite in quantity, but most
marked in character; that this personification grows more and
more difficult to distinguish from a person; and that in ch. lii.
13-liii. there are very strong reasons, both in the text itself and
in the analogy of other prophecy, to suppose that the portrait of an
individual is intended. To complete our study of this development of
the substance of the Servant, it is necessary to notice that it runs
almost stage for stage with a development of his office. Up to ch.
xlix., that is to say, while he is still some aspect of the people,
the Servant is a prophet. In ch. l., where he is no longer called
Israel, and approaches more nearly to an individual, his prophecy
passes into martyrdom. And in ch. liii., where at last we recognise
him as intended for an actual personage, his martyrdom becomes an
expiation for the sins of the people. Is there a natural connection
between these two developments? We have seen that it was by a very
common process that our prophet transferred the national calling from
the mass of the nation to a select few of the people. Is it by any
equally natural tendency that he shrinks from the many to the few, as
he passes from prophecy to martyrdom, or from the few to the one, as
he passes from martyrdom to expiation? It is a possibility for all
God's people to be prophets: few are needed as martyrs. Is it by any
moral law equally clear, that only one man should die for the people?
These are questions worth thinking about. In Israel's history we have
already found the following facts with which to answer them. The
whole living generation of Israel felt themselves to be sinbearers:
_Our fathers have sinned, and we bear their iniquities_. This
conscience and penalty were more painfully felt by the righteous in
Israel. But the keenest and heaviest sense of them was conspicuously
that experienced by one man--the prophet Jeremiah.[159] And yet all
these cases from the past of Israel's history do not furnish more
than an approximation to the figure presented to us in ch. liii. Let
us turn, therefore, to the future to see if we can find in it motive
or fulfilment for this marvellous prophecy.
FOOTNOTES:
[149] A king's courtiers, soldiers, or subjects are called _his
servants_. In this sense Israel was often styled the _servants of
Jehovah_, as in Deut. xxxii. 36; Neh. i. 10, where the phrase is
parallel to _His people_. But _Jehovah's servants_ is a phrase also
parallel to His worshippers (Psalm cxxxiv. 1, etc.); to those who trust
Him (Psalm xxxiv. 22); and to those who love His name (Psalm lxix. 36).
The term is also applied in the plural to the prophets (Amos iii. 7);
and in the singular, to eminent individuals--such as Abraham, Joshua,
David and Job; also by Jeremiah to the alien Nebuchadrezzar, while
engaged on his mission from God against Jerusalem.
[150] See p. 244.
[151] The definite article is not used here with the word people, and
hence the phrase has been taken by some in the vaguer sense of _a
people's covenant_, as a general expression, along with its parallel
clause, of the kind of influence the Servant was to exert, not on
Israel, but on _any_ people in the world; he was to be _a people's
covenant_, and _a light for nations_. So practically Schultz, _A. T.
Theologie_, 4th ed., p. 284. But the Hebrew word for people עם is
often used without the article to express _the_ people Israel, just
as the Hebrew word for land רץא is often used without the article
to express _the_ land of Judah. (הארץ with the article, is in Isa.
xl.-lxvi. _the Earth_.) And in ch. xlix. the phrase a _covenant of
the people_ again occurs, and in a context in which it can only mean
_a covenant_ of _the_ people, Israel. Some render עם ברית a _covenant
people_. But in xlix. 8 this is plainly an impossible rendering.
[152] Meshullam is found as a proper name in the historical books of
the Old Testament, especially Nehemiah, _e.g._, iii. 4, 6, 30.
[153] Hosea xi. 1; Matt. ii. 15
[154] Of all the expressions used of him the only one which shows
a real tendency to a plural reference is _in his deaths_ (ver. 9),
and even it (if it is the correct reading) is quite capable of
application to an individual who suffered such manifold martyrdom as
is set forth in the passage.
[155] Not one word in them betrays any sense of a body of men or an
ideal people standing behind them, which sense surely some expression
would have betrayed, if it had been in the prophet's mind.
[156] A. B. D., in a review of the last edition of Delitzsch's
_Isaiah_, in the _Theol. Review_, iv., p. 276.
[157] _Isaiah I._ i.-xxxix., pp. 134, 135.
[158] See p. 42.
[159] See ch. ii. of this volume.
CHAPTER XVII.
_THE SERVANT OF THE LORD IN THE NEW
TESTAMENT._
In last chapter we confined our study of the Servant of Jehovah to
the text of Isa. xl.-lxvi., and to the previous and contemporary
history of Israel. Into our interpretation of the remarkable Figure,
whom our prophet has drawn for us, we have put nothing which cannot
be gathered from those fields and by the light of the prophet's own
day. But now we must travel further, and from days far future to
our prophet borrow a fuller light to throw back upon his mysterious
projections. We take this journey into the future for reasons he
himself has taught us. We have learned that his pictures of the
Servant are not the creation of his own mind; a work of art complete
"through fancy's or through logic's aid." They are the scattered
reflections and suggestions of experience. The prophet's eyes have
been opened to read them out of the still growing and incomplete
history of his people. With that history they are indissolubly bound
up. Their plainest forms are but a transcript of its clearest facts;
their paradoxes are its paradoxes (reflections now of the confused
and changing consciousness of this strange people, or again of the
contrast between God's design for them and their real character):
their ideals are the suggestion and promise which its course reveals
to an inspired eye. Thus, in picturing the Servant, our prophet
sometimes confines himself to history that has already happened to
Israel; but sometimes, also, upon the purpose and promise of this,
he outruns what has happened, and plainly lifts his voice from the
future. Now we must remember that he does so, not merely because
the history itself has native possibilities of fulfilment in it,
but because he believes that it is in the hands of an Almighty and
Eternal God, who shall surely guide it to the end of His purpose
revealed in it. It is an article of our prophet's creed, that the God
who speaks through him controls all history, and by His prophets _can
publish beforehand_ what course it will take; so that, when we find
in our prophet anything we do not see fully justified or illustrated
by the time he wrote, it is only in observance of the conditions he
has laid down, that we seek for its explanation in the future.
Let us, then, take our prophet upon his own terms, and follow the
history, with which he has so closely bound up the prophecy of the
Servant, both in suggestion and fulfilment, in order that we may
see whether it will yield to us the secret of what, if we have read
his language aright, his eyes perceived in it--the promise of an
Individual Servant. And let us do so in his faith, that history is
one progressive and harmonious movement under the hand of the God in
whose name he speaks. Our exploration will be rewarded, and our faith
confirmed. We shall find the nation, as promised, restored to its
own land, and pursuing through the centuries its own life. We shall
find within the nation what the prophet looked for,--an elect and
effective portion, with the conscience of a national service to the
world, but looking for the achievement of this to such an Individual
Servant, as the prophet seemed ultimately to foreshadow. The world
itself we shall find growing more and more open to this service.
And at last, from Israel's national conscience of the service we
shall see emerge One with the sense that He alone is responsible and
able for it. And this One Israelite will not only in His own person
exhibit a character and achieve a work, that illustrate and far excel
our prophet's highest imaginations, but will also become, to a new
Israel infinitely more numerous than the old, the conscience and
inspiration of their collective fulfilment of the ideal.
* * * * *
1. In the Old Testament we cannot be sure of any further appearance
of our prophet's Servant of the Lord. It might be thought, that in a
post-exilic promise, Zech. iii. 8, _I will bring forth My Servant_
the _Branch_, we had an identification of the hero of the first part
of the Book of Isaiah, _the Branch out of Jesse's roots_ (xi. 1),
with the hero of the second part; but _servant_ here may so easily
be meant in the more general sense in which it occurs in the Old
Testament, that we are not justified in finding any more particular
connection. In Judaism beyond the Old Testament the national and
personal interpretations of the Servant were both current. The Targum
of Jonathan, and both the Talmud of Jerusalem and the Talmud of
Babylon, recognise the personal Messiah in ch. liii.; the Targum also
identifies him as early as in ch. xlii. This personal interpretation
the Jews abandoned only after they had entered on their controversy
with Christian theologians; and in the cruel persecutions, which
Christians inflicted upon them throughout the middle ages, they were
supplied with only too many reasons for insisting that ch. liii. was
prophetic of suffering Israel--the martyr-people--as a whole.[160]
It is a strange history--the history of our race, where the first
through their pride and error so frequently become the last, and the
last through their sufferings are set in God's regard with the first.
But of all its strange reversals none surely was ever more complete
than when the followers of Him, who is set forth in this passage, the
unresisting and crucified Saviour of men, behaved in His Name with
so great a cruelty as to be righteously taken by His enemies for the
very tyrants and persecutors whom the passage condemns.
2. But it is in the New Testament that we see the most perfect
reflection of the Servant of the Lord, both as People and Person.
In the generation, from which Jesus sprang, there was, amid national
circumstances closely resembling those in which the Second Isaiah
was written, a counterpart of that Israel within Israel, which our
prophet has personified in ch. xlix. The holy nation lay again in
bondage to the heathen, partly in its own land, partly scattered
across the world; and Israel's righteousness, redemption and
ingathering were once more the questions of the day. The thoughts
of the masses, as of old in Babylonian days, did not rise beyond
a political restoration; and although their popular leaders
insisted upon national righteousness as necessary to this, it was
a righteousness mainly of a ceremonial kind--hard, legal, and often
more unlovely in its want of enthusiasm and hope than even the
political fanaticism of the vulgar. But around the temple, and in
quiet recesses of the land, a number of pious and ardent Israelites
lived on the true milk of the word, and cherished for the nation
hopes of a far more spiritual character. If the Pharisees laid their
emphasis on the law, this chosen Israel drew their inspiration rather
from prophecy; and of all prophecy it was the Book of Isaiah, and
chiefly the latter part of it, on which they lived.
As we enter the Gospel history from the Old Testament, we feel at once
that Isaiah is in the air. In this fair opening of the new year of the
Lord, the harbinger notes of the book awaken about us on all sides
like the voices of birds come back with the spring. In Mary's song,
the phrase _He hath holpen His Servant Israel_; in the description
of Simeon, that he waited for the _consolation of Israel_, a phrase
taken from the _Comfort ye, comfort ye My people_ in Isa. xl. 1; such
frequent phrases, too, as _the redemption of Jerusalem_, _a light
of the Gentiles and the glory of Israel_, _light to them that sit
in darkness_, and other echoed promises of light and peace and the
remission of sins, are all repeated from our evangelical prophecy.
In the fragments of the Baptist's preaching, which are extant, it is
remarkable that almost every metaphor and motive may be referred to
the Book of Isaiah, and mostly to its exilic half: _the generation
of vipers_,[161] the _trees and axe laid to the root_,[162] _the
threshing floor and fan_,[163] _the fire_,[164] _the bread and clothes
to the poor_,[165] and especially the proclamation of Jesus, _Behold
the Lamb of God that beareth the sin of the world_.[166] To John
himself were applied the words of Isa. xl.: _The voice of one crying
in the wilderness, Make ye ready the way of the Lord, make His paths
straight_; and when Christ sought to rouse again the Baptist's failing
faith it was of Isa. lxi. that He reminded him.
Our Lord, then, sprang from a generation of Israel, which had a
strong conscience of the national aspect of the Service of God,--a
generation with Isa. xl.-lxvi. at its heart. We have seen how He
Himself insisted upon the uniqueness of Israel's place among the
nations--_salvation is of the Jews_--and how closely He identified
Himself with His people--_I am not sent but to the lost sheep of the
house of Israel_. But all Christ's strong expression of Israel's
distinction from the rest of mankind, is weak and dim compared with
His expression of His own distinction from the rest of Israel. If
they were the one people with whom God worked in the world, He
was the one Man, whom God sent to work upon them, and to use them
to work upon others. We cannot tell how early the sense of this
distinction came to the Son of Mary. Luke reveals it in Him, before
He had taken His place as a citizen and was still within the family:
_Wist ye not that I must be about My Father's business?_ At His
first public appearance He had it fully, and others acknowledged
it. In the opening year of His ministry it threatened to be only a
Distinction of the First--_they took Him by force, and would have
made Him King_. But as time went on it grew evident that it was to
be, not the Distinction of the First, but the Distinction of the
Only. The enthusiastic crowds melted away: the small band, whom He
had most imbued with His spirit, proved that they could follow Him
but a certain length in His consciousness of His Mission. Recognising
in Him the supreme prophet--_Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast
the words of eternal life_--they immediately failed to understand,
that suffering also must be endured by Him for the people: _Be it
far from Thee, Lord_. This suffering was His conscience and His
burden alone. Now, we cannot overlook the fact, that the point at
which Christ's way became so solitary was the same point at which
we felt our prophet's language cease to oblige us to understand
by it a portion of the people, and begin to be applicable to a
single individual,--the point, namely, where prophecy passes into
martyrdom. But whether our prophet's pictures of the suffering and
atoning Servant of the Lord are meant for some aspect of the national
experience, or as the portrait of a real individual, it is certain
that in His martyrdom and service of ransom Jesus felt Himself to be
absolutely alone. He who had begun His Service of God with all the
people on His side, consummated the same with the leaders and the
masses of the nation against Him, and without a single partner from
among His own friends, either in the fate which overtook Him, or in
the conscience with which He bore it.
Now all this parallel between Jesus of Nazareth and the Servant of
the Lord is unmistakable enough, even in this mere outline; but the
details of the Gospel narrative and the language of the Evangelists
still more emphasize it. Christ's herald hailed Him with words which
gather up the essence of Isa. liii.: _Behold the Lamb of God_. He read
His own commission from ch. lxi.: _The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me_.
To describe His first labours among the people, His disciples again
used words from ch. liii.: _Himself bare our sicknesses_. To paint His
manner of working in face of opposition they quoted the whole passage
from ch. xlii.: _Behold My Servant ... He shall not strive._ The name
Servant was often upon His own lips in presenting Himself: _Behold,
I am among you as one that serveth_. When His office of prophecy
passed into martyrdom, He predicted for Himself the treatment which
is detailed in ch. l.,--the _smiting_, _plucking_ and _spitting_: and
in time, by Jew and Gentile, this treatment was inflicted on Him to
the very letter.[167] As to His consciousness in fulfilling something
more than a martyrdom, and alone among the martyrs of Israel offering
by His death an expiation for His people's sins, His own words are
frequent and clear enough to form a counterpart to ch. liii. With them
before us, we cannot doubt that He felt Himself to be the One of whom
the people in that chapter speak, as standing over against them all,
sinless, and yet bearing their sins. But on the night on which He was
betrayed, while just upon the threshold of this extreme and unique
form of service, into which it has been given to no soul of man, that
ever lived, to be conscious of following Him--as if anxious that His
disciples should not be so overwhelmed by the awful part in which
they could not imitate Him as to forget the countless other ways in
which they were called to fulfil His serving spirit--_He took a towel
and girded Himself, and when He had washed their feet, He said unto
them, If I, then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you
also ought to wash one another's feet_--thereby illustrating what is
so plainly set forth in our prophecy, that short of the expiation, of
which only One in His sinlessness has felt the obligation, and short
of the martyrdom, which it has been given to but few of His people to
share with Him, there are a thousand humble forms rising out of the
needs of everyday life, in which men are called to employ towards one
another the gentle and self-forgetful methods of the true Servant of
God.
With the four Gospels in existence, no one doubts or can doubt that
Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled the cry, _Behold My Servant_. With Him
it ceased to be a mere ideal, and took its place as the greatest
achievement in history.
3. In the earliest discourses of the Apostles, therefore, it is not
wonderful that Jesus should be expressly designated by them as the
Servant of God,--the Greek word used being that by which the Septuagint
specially translates the Hebrew term in Isa. xl.-lxvi.[168]: _God hath
glorified His Servant Jesus. Unto you first, God, having raised up His
Servant, sent Him to bless you, in turning away every one of you from
your iniquities.... In this city against Thy holy Servant Jesus, whom
Thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and
the peoples of Israel, were gathered together to do whatsoever Thy hand
and Thy counsel foreordained to pass. Grant that signs and wonders may
be done through the name of Thy Holy Servant Jesus._[169] It must also
be noticed, that in one of the same addresses, and again by Stephen
in his argument before the Sanhedrim, Jesus is called _The Righteous
One_,[170] doubtless an allusion to the same title for the Servant
in Isa. liii. 11. Need we recall the interpretation of Isa. liii. by
Philip?[171]
It is known to all how Peter develops this parallel in his First
Epistle, borrowing the figures but oftener the very words of Isa.
liii. to apply to Christ. Like the Servant of the Lord, Jesus
is _as a lamb_: He is a patient sufferer in silence; He _is the
Righteous_--again the classic title--_for the unrighteous_; in exact
quotation from the Greek of Isa. liii.: _He did no sin, neither
was found guile in His mouth, ye were as sheep gone astray, but He
Himself hath borne our sins, with whose stripes ye are healed_.[172]
Paul applies two quotations from Isa. lii. 13-liii. to Christ: _I
have striven to preach the Gospel not where Christ was named; as it
is written, To whom He was not spoken of they shall see: and they
that have not heard shall understand_; and _He hath made Him to be
sin for us who knew no sin._[173] And none will doubt that when he so
often disputed that the _Messiah must suffer_, or wrote _Messiah died
for our sins according to the Scriptures_, he had Isa. liii. in mind,
exactly as we have seen it applied to the Messiah by Jewish scholars
a hundred years later than Paul.
4. Paul, however, by no means confines the prophecy of the Servant
of the Lord to Jesus the Messiah. In a way which has been too much
overlooked by students of the subject, Paul revives and reinforces
the collective interpretation of the Servant. He claims the Servant's
duties and experience for himself, his fellow-labourers in the
gospel, and all believers.
In Antioch of Pisidia, Paul and Barnabas said of themselves to the
Jews: _For so hath the Lord_ commanded us saying, _I have set thee to
be a light of the Gentiles, that thou shouldest be for salvation to the
ends of the earth._[174] Again, in the eighth of Romans, Paul takes the
Servant's confident words, and speaks them of all God's true people.
_He is near that justifieth me, who is he that condemneth me?_ cried
the Servant in our prophecy, and Paul echoes for all believers: _It is
God that justifieth, who is he that condemneth?_[175] And again, in his
second letter to Timothy, he says, speaking of that pastor's work, _For
the servant of the Lord must not strive, but be gentle towards all_;
words which were borrowed from, or suggested by, Isa. xlii. 1-3.[176]
In these instances, as well as in his constant use of the terms
_slave_, _servant_, _minister_, with their cognates, Paul fulfils the
intention of Jesus, who so continually, by example, parable, and direct
commission, enforced the life of His people as a Service to the Lord.