_THE TURN OF THE TIDE: MORAL EFFECTS OF FORGIVENESS._
ISAIAH xxii., contrasted with xxxiii. (701 B.C.).
The collapse of Jewish faith and patriotism in the face of the enemy was
complete. Final and absolute did Isaiah's sentence ring out: _Surely
this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die, saith Jehovah of
hosts._ So we learn from chap. xxii., written, as we conceive, in 701,
when the Assyrian armies had at last invested Jerusalem. But in chap.
xxxiii., which critics unite in placing a few months later in the same
year, Isaiah's tone is entirely changed. He hurls the woe of the Lord
upon the Assyrians; confidently announces their immediate destruction;
turns, while the whole city's faith hangs upon him, in supplication to
the Lord; and announces the stability of Jerusalem, her peace, her glory
and the forgiveness of all her sins. It is this great moral difference
between chaps. xxii. and xxxiii.--prophecies that must have been
delivered within a few months of each other--which this chapter seeks to
expound.
In spite of her collapse, as pictured in chap. xxii., Jerusalem was not
taken. Her rulers fled; her people, as if death were certain, betook
themselves to dissipation; and yet the city did not fall into the hands
of the Assyrian. Sennacherib himself does not pretend to have taken
Jerusalem. He tells us how closely he invested Jerusalem, but he does
not add that he took it, a silence which is the more significant that he
records the capture of every other town which his armies attempted. He
says that Hezekiah offered him tribute, and details the amount he
received. He adds that the tribute was not paid at Jerusalem (as it
would have been had Jerusalem been conquered), but that for "the payment
of the tribute and the performance of homage" Hezekiah "despatched his
envoy"[60] to him when he was at some distance from Jerusalem. All this
agrees with the Bible narrative. In the book of Kings we are told how
Hezekiah sent to the King of Assyria at Lachish, saying, _I have
offended; return from me; that which thou puttest upon me I will bear_.
_And the King of Assyria appointed unto Hezekiah, King of Judah, three
hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold. And Hezekiah gave
him all the silver that was found in the house of Jehovah and in the
treasures of the king's house. At the same time did Hezekiah cut off the
gold from the doors of the temple of Jehovah, and from the pillars which
Hezekiah, King of Judah, had overlaid, and gave it to the King of
Assyria._[61] It was indeed a sore submission, when even the Temple of
the Lord had to be stripped of its gold. But it purchased the relief of
the city; and no price was too high to pay for that at such a moment as
the present, when the populace was demoralised. We may even see
Isaiah's hand in the submission. The integrity of Jerusalem was the one
fact on which the word of the Lord had been pledged, on which the
promised remnant could be rallied. The Assyrian must not be able to say
that he has made Zion's God like the gods of the heathen, and her people
must see that even when they have given her up Jehovah can hold her for
Himself, though in holding He tear and wound (xxxi. 4). The Temple is
greater than the gold of the Temple; let even the latter be stripped off
and sold to the heathen if it can purchase the integrity of the former.
So Jerusalem remained inviolate; she was still _the virgin, the daughter
of Zion_.
[60] Schrader, _Cuneiform Inscriptions_, _O.T._, i., p. 286.
[61] 2 Kings xviii. 13-16. Here closes a paragraph. Ver. 17 begins to
describe what Sennacherib did, in spite of Hezekiah's submission. He had
withdrawn the army that had invested Jerusalem, for Hezekiah purchased
its withdrawal by the tribute he sent. But Sennacherib, in spite of
this, sent another corps of war against Jerusalem, which second attack
is described in ver. 17 and onwards.
And now upon the redeemed city Isaiah could proceed to rebuild the
shattered faith and morals of her people. He could say to them,
"Everything has turned out as, by the word of the Lord, I said it
should. The Assyrian has come down; Egypt has failed you. Your
politicians, with their scorn of religion and their confidence in their
cleverness, have deserted you. I told you that your numberless
sacrifices and pomp of unreal religion would avail you nothing in your
day of disaster, and lo! when this came, your religion collapsed. Your
abounding wickedness, I said, could only close in your ruin and
desertion by God. But one promise I kept steadfast: that Jerusalem would
not fall; and to your penitence, whenever it should be real, I assured
forgiveness. Jerusalem stands to-day, according to my word; and I repeat
my gospel. History has vindicated my word, but _Come now, let us bring
our reasoning to a close, saith the Lord; though your sins be as
scarlet, they shall be white as snow: though they be red like crimson,
they shall be as wool_. I call upon you to build again on your redeemed
city, and by the grace of this pardon, the fallen ruins of your life."
Some such sermon--if indeed not actually part of chap. i.--we must
conceive Isaiah to have delivered to the people when Hezekiah had bought
off Sennacherib, for we find the state of Jerusalem suddenly altered.
Instead of the panic, which imagined the daily capture of the city, and
rushed in hectic holiday to the housetops, crying, _Let us eat and
drink, for to-morrow we die_, we see the citizens back upon the walls,
trembling yet trusting. Instead of sweeping past Isaiah in their revelry
and leaving him to feel that after forty years of travail he had lost
all his influence with them, we see them gathering round about him as
their single hope and confidence (xxxvii.). King and people look to
Isaiah as their counsellor, and cannot answer the enemy without
consulting him. What a change from the days of the Egyptian alliance,
embassies sent off against his remonstrance, and intrigues developed
without his knowledge; when Ahaz insulted him, and the drunken magnates
mimicked him, and, in order to rouse an indolent people, he had to walk
about the streets of Jerusalem for three years, stripped like a captive!
Truly this was the day of Isaiah's triumph, when God by events
vindicated his prophecy, and all the people acknowledged his leadership.
It was the hour of the prophet's triumph, but the nation had as yet only
trials before it. God has not done with nations or men when He has
forgiven them. This people, whom of His grace, and in spite of
themselves, God had saved from destruction, stood on the brink of
another trial. God had given them a new lease of life, but it was
immediately to pass through the furnace. They had bought off
Sennacherib, but Sennacherib came back.
When Sennacherib got the tribute, he repented of the treaty he had made
with Hezekiah. He may have felt that it was a mistake to leave in his
rear so powerful a fortress, while he had still to complete the
overthrow of the Egyptians. So, in spite of the tribute, he sent a force
back to Jerusalem to demand her surrender. We can imagine the moral
effect upon King Hezekiah and his people. It was enough to sting the
most demoralised into courage. Sennacherib had doubtless expected so
pliant a king and so crushed a people to yield at once. But we may
confidently picture the joy of Isaiah, as he felt the return of the
Assyrians to be the very thing required to restore spirit to his
demoralised countrymen. Here was a foe, whom they could face with a
sense of justice, and not, as they had met him before, in carnal
confidence and the pride of their own cleverness. Now was to be a war
not, like former wars, undertaken merely for party glory, but with the
purest feelings of patriotism and the firmest sanctions of religion, a
campaign to be entered upon, not with Pharaoh's support and the strength
of Egyptian chariots, but with God Himself as an ally--of which it could
be said to Judah, _Thy righteousness shall go before thee, and the glory
of the Lord shall be thy rereward_.
On what free, exultant wings the spirit of Isaiah must have risen to the
sublime occasion! We know him as by nature an ardent patriot and
passionate lover of his city, but through circumstance her pitiless
critic and unsparing judge. In all the literature of patriotism there
are no finer odes and orations than those which it owes to him; from no
lips came stronger songs of war, and no heart rejoiced more in the
valour that turns the battle from the gate. But till now Isaiah's
patriotism had been chiefly a conscience of his country's sins, his
passionate love for Jerusalem repressed by as stern a loyalty to
righteousness, and all his eloquence and courage spent in holding his
people from war and persuading them _to returning and rest_. At last
this conflict is at an end. The stubbornness of Judah, which has divided
like some rock the current of her prophet's energies, and forced it back
writhing and eddying upon itself, is removed. Isaiah's faith and his
patriotism run free with the force of twin-tides in one channel, and we
hear the fulness of their roar as they leap together upon the enemies of
God and the fatherland. _Woe to thee, thou spoiler, and thou wast not
spoiled, thou treacherous dealer, and they did not deal treacherously
with thee! Whenever thou ceasest to spoil, thou shall be spoiled; and
whenever thou hast made an end to deal treacherously, they shall deal
treacherously with thee. O Jehovah, be gracious unto us; for Thee have
we waited: be Thou their arm every morning, our salvation also in the
time of trouble. From the noise of a surging the peoples have fled; from
the lifting up of Thyself the nations are scattered. And gathered is
your spoil, the gathering of the caterpillar; like the leaping of
locusts, they are leaping upon it. Exalted is Jehovah; yea, He dwelleth
on high: He hath filled Zion with justice and righteousness. And there
shall be stability of thy times, wealth of salvation, wisdom and
knowledge; the fear of Jehovah, it shall be his treasure_ (xxxiii. 1-6).
Thus, then, do we propose to bridge the gulf which lies between chaps.
i. and xxii. on the one hand and chap. xxxiii. on the other. If they are
all to be dated from the year 701, some such bridge is necessary. And
the one we have traced is both morally sufficient and in harmony with
what we know to have been the course of events.
What do we learn from it all? We learn a great deal upon that truth
which chap. xxxiii. closes by announcing--the truth of Divine
forgiveness.
The forgiveness of God is the foundation of every bridge from a hopeless
past to a courageous present. That God can make the past be for guilt as
though it had not been is always to Isaiah the assurance of the future.
An old Greek miniature[62] represents him with Night behind him, veiled
and sullen and holding a reversed torch. But before him stands Dawn and
Innocence, a little child, with bright face and forward step and torch
erect and burning. From above a hand pours light upon the face of the
prophet, turned upwards. It is the message of a Divine pardon. Never did
prophet more wearily feel the moral continuity of the generations, the
lingering and ineradicable effects of crime. Only faith in a pardoning
God could have enabled him, with such conviction of the inseparableness
of yesterday and to-morrow, to make divorce between them, and turning
his back on the past, as this miniature represents, hail the future as
Immanuel, a child of infinite promise. From exposing and scourging the
past, from proving it corrupt and pregnant with poison for all the
future, Isaiah will turn on a single verse, and give us a future without
war, sorrow or fraud. His pivot is ever the pardon of God. But nowhere
is his faith in this so powerful, his turning upon it so swift, as at
this period of Jerusalem's collapse, when, having sentenced the people
to death for their iniquity--_It was revealed in mine ears by Jehovah of
hosts, Surely this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die,
saith the Lord, Jehovah of hosts_ (xxii. 14)--he swings round on his
promise of a little before--_Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall
be white as snow_--and to the people's penitence pronounces in the last
verse of chap. xxxiii. a final absolution: _The inhabitant shall not
say, I am sick; the people that dwell therein are forgiven their
iniquity_. If chap. xxxiii. be, as many think, Isaiah's latest oracle,
then we have the literal crown of all his prophesying in these two
words: _forgiven iniquity_. It is as he put it early that same year:
_Come now and let us bring our reasoning to a close; though your sins be
as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow: though they be red like
crimson, they shall be as wool_. If man is to have a future, this must
be the conclusion of all his past.
[62] Didron _Christian Iconography_, fig. 52.
But the absoluteness of God's pardon, making the past as though it had
not been, is not the only lesson which the spiritual experience of
Jerusalem in that awful year of 701 has for us. Isaiah's gospel of
forgiveness is nothing less than this: that when God gives pardon He
gives Himself. The name of the blessed future, which is entered through
pardon--as in that miniature, a child--is Immanuel: _God-with-us_. And
if it be correct that we owe the forty-sixth Psalm to these months when
the Assyrian came back upon Jerusalem, then we see how the city, that
had abandoned God, is yet able to sing when she is pardoned, _God is our
refuge and our strength, a very present help in the midst of troubles_.
And this gospel of forgiveness is not only Isaiah's. According to the
whole Bible, there is but one thing which separates man from God--that
is sin, and when sin is done away with, God cannot be kept from man. In
giving pardon to man, God gives back to man Himself. How gloriously
evident this truth becomes in the New Testament! Christ, who is set
before us as the Lamb of God, who beareth the sins of the world, is also
Immanuel--God-with-us. The Sacrament, which most plainly seals to the
believer the value of the One Sacrifice for sin, is the Sacrament in
which the believer feeds upon Christ and appropriates Him. The sinner,
who comes to Christ, not only receives pardon for Christ's sake, but
receives Christ. Forgiveness means nothing less than this: that in
giving pardon God gives Himself.
But if forgiveness mean all this, then the objections frequently brought
against a conveyance of it so unconditioned as that of Isaiah fall to
the ground. Forgiveness of such a kind cannot be either unjust or
demoralising. On the contrary, we see Jerusalem permoralised by it. At
first, it is true, the sense of weakness and fear abounds, as we learn
from the narrative in chaps. xxxvi. and xxxvii. But where there was
vanity, recklessness and despair, giving way to dissipation, there is
now humility, discipline and a leaning upon God, that are led up to
confidence and exultation. Jerusalem's experience is just another proof
that any moral results are possible to so great a process as the return
of God to the soul. Awful is the responsibility of them who receive such
a Gift and such a Guest; but the sense of that awfulness is the
atmosphere, in which obedience and holiness and the courage that is born
of both love best to grow. One can understand men scoffing at messages
of pardon so unconditioned as Isaiah's, who think they "mean no more
than a clean slate." Taken in this sense, the gospel of forgiveness must
prove a savour of death unto death. But just as Jerusalem interpreted
the message of her pardon to mean that _God is in the midst of her; she
shall not be moved_, and straightway obedience was in all her hearts,
and courage upon all her walls, so neither to us can be futile the New
Testament form of the same gospel, which makes our pardoned soul the
friend of God, accepted in the Beloved, and our body His holy temple.
Upon one other point connected with the forgiveness of sins we get
instruction from the experience of Jerusalem. A man has difficulty in
squaring his sense of forgiveness with the return on the back of it of
his old temptations and trials, with the hostility of fortune and with
the inexorableness of nature. Grace has spoken to his heart, but
Providence bears more hard upon him than ever. Pardon does not change
the outside of life; it does not immediately modify the movements of
history, or suspend the laws of nature. Although God has forgiven
Jerusalem, Assyria comes back to besiege her. Although the penitent be
truly reconciled to God, the constitutional results of his fall remain:
the frequency of temptation, the power of habit, the bias and facility
downwards, the physical and social consequences. Pardon changes none of
these things. It does not keep off the Assyrians.
But if pardon means the return of God to the soul, then in this we have
the secret of the return of the foe. Men could not try nor develop a
sense of the former except by their experience of the latter. We have
seen why Isaiah must have welcomed the perfidious reappearance of the
Assyrians after he had helped to buy them off. Nothing could better test
the sincerity of Jerusalem's repentance, or rally her dissipated forces.
Had the Assyrians not returned, the Jews would have had no experimental
proof of God's restored presence, and the great miracle would never
have happened that rang through human history for evermore--a
trumpet-call to faith in the God of Israel. And so still _the Lord
scourgeth every son whom He receiveth_, because He would put our
penitence to the test; because He would discipline our disorganised
affections, and give conscience and will a chance of wiping out defeat
by victory; because He would baptize us with the most powerful baptism
possible--the sense of being trusted once more to face the enemy upon
the fields of our disgrace.
That is why the Assyrians came back to Jerusalem, and that is why
temptations and penalties still pursue the penitent and forgiven.