_OUR GOD A CONSUMING FIRE._
ISAIAH xxxiii. (701 B.C.).
We have seen how the sense of forgiveness and the exultant confidence,
which fill chap. xxxiii., were brought about within a few months after
the sentence of death, that cast so deep a gloom on chap. xxii. We have
expounded some of the contents of chap. xxxiii., but have not exhausted
the chapter; and in particular we have not touched one of Isaiah's
principles, which there finds perhaps its finest expression: the
consuming righteousness of God.
There is no doubt that chap. xxxiii. refers to the sudden disappearance
of the Assyrian from the walls of Jerusalem. It was written, part
perhaps on the eve of that deliverance, part immediately after morning
broke upon the vanished host. Before those verses which picture the
disappearance of the investing army, we ought in strict chronological
order to take the narrative in chaps. xxxvi. and xxxvii.--the return of
the besiegers, the insolence of the Rabshakeh, the prostration of
Hezekiah, Isaiah's solitary faith, and the sudden disappearance of the
Assyrian. It will be more convenient, however, since we have already
entered chap. xxxiii., to finish it, and then to take the narrative of
the events which led up to it.
The opening verses of chap. xxxiii. fit the very moment of the crisis,
as if Isaiah had flung them across the walls in the teeth of the
Rabshakeh and the second embassy from Sennacherib, who had returned to
demand the surrender of the city in spite of Hezekiah's tribute for her
integrity: _Woe to thee, thou spoiler, and thou wast not spoiled, thou
treacherous dealer, and they did not deal treacherously with thee_!
_When thou ceasest to spoil, thou shalt be spoiled; and when thou makest
an end to deal treacherously, they shall deal treacherously with thee._
Then follows the prayer, as already quoted, and the confidence in the
security of Jerusalem (ver. 2). A new paragraph (vv. 7-12) describes
Rabshakeh and his company demanding the surrender of the city; the
disappointment of the ambassadors who had been sent to treat with
Sennacherib (ver. 7); the perfidy of the great king, who had broken the
covenant they had made with him and swept his armies back upon Judah
(ver. 8); the disheartening of the land under this new shock (ver. 9);
and the resolution of the Lord now to rise and scatter the invaders:
_Now will I arise, saith Jehovah; now will I lift up Myself; now will I
be exalted_. _Ye shall conceive chaff; ye shall bring forth stubble;
your breath is a fire, that shall devour you. And the peoples shall be
as the burnings of lime, as thorns cut down that are burned in the fire_
(vv. 10-12).
After an application of this same fire of God's righteousness to the
sinners _within_ Jerusalem, to which we shall presently return, the rest
of the chapter pictures the stunned populace awaking to the fact that
they are free. Is the Assyrian really gone, or do the Jews dream as they
crowd the walls, and see no trace of him? Have they all vanished--the
Rabshakeh, _by the conduit of the upper pool, with his loud voice_ and
insults; the scribes to whom they handed the tribute, and who prolonged
the agony by counting it under their eyes; the scouts and engineers
insolently walking about Zion and mapping out her walls for the assault;
the close investment of barbarian hordes, with their awesome speech and
uncouth looks! _Where is he that counted? where is he that weighed the
tribute? where is he that counted the towers? Thou shall not see the
fierce people, a people of a deep speech that thou canst not perceive,
of a strange tongue that thou canst not understand._ They have vanished.
Hezekiah may lift his head again. O people--sore at heart to see thy
king in sackcloth and ashes[63] as the enemy devoured province after
province of thy land and cooped thee up within the narrow walls, thou
scarcely didst dare to peep across--take courage, the terror is gone! _A
king in his beauty thine eyes shall see; they shall behold the land
spreading very far forth_ (ver. 17). We had thought to die in the
restlessness and horror of war, never again to know what stable life and
regular worship were, our Temple services interrupted, our home a
battlefield. But _look upon Zion_; behold again _she is the city of our
solemn diets; thine eyes shall see Jerusalem a quiet habitation, a tent
that shall not be removed, the stakes whereof shall never be plucked up,
neither shall the cords thereof be broken. But there Jehovah_, whom we
have known only for affliction, _shall be in majesty for us_. Other
peoples have their natural defences, Assyria and Egypt their Euphrates
and Nile; but God Himself shall be for us _a place of rivers, streams,
broad on both hands, on which never a galley shall go, nor gallant ship
shall pass upon it_. Without sign of battle, God shall be our refuge and
our strength. It was that marvellous deliverance of Jerusalem by the
hand of God, with no effort of human war, which caused Isaiah to invest
with such majesty the meagre rock, its squalid surroundings and paltry
defences. The insignificant and waterless city was glorious to the
prophet because God was in her. One of the richest imaginations which
patriot ever poured upon his fatherland was inspired by the simplest
faith saint ever breathed. Isaiah strikes again the old keynote (chap.
viii.) about the waterlessness of Jerusalem. We have to keep in mind the
Jews' complaints of this, in order to understand what the forty-sixth
Psalm means when it says, _There is a river the streams whereof make
glad the city of our God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the Most
High_--or what Isaiah means when he says, _Glorious shall Jehovah be
unto us, a place of broad rivers and streams_. Yea, he adds, Jehovah is
everything to us: Jehovah is our Judge; Jehovah is our Lawgiver; Jehovah
is our King: He will save us.
[63] Chap. xxxvii.
* * * * *
Such were the feelings aroused in Jerusalem by the sudden relief of the
city. Some of the verses, which we have scarcely touched, we will now
consider more fully as the expression of a doctrine which runs
throughout Isaiah, and indeed is one of his two or three fundamental
truths--that the righteousness of God is an all-pervading atmosphere, an
atmosphere that wears and burns.
For forty years the prophet had been preaching to the Jews his gospel,
_God-with-us_; but they never awakened to the reality of the Divine
presence till they saw it in the dispersion of the Assyrian army. Then
God became real to them (ver. 14). The justice of God, preached so long
by Isaiah, had always seemed something abstract. Now they saw how
concrete it was. It was not only a doctrine: it was a fact. It was a
fact that was a fire. Isaiah had often called it a fire; they thought
this was rhetoric. But now they saw the actual burning--_the peoples as
the burning of lime, as thorns cut down that are burned in the fire_.
And when they felt the fire so near, each sinner of them awoke to the
fact that he had something burnable in himself, something which could as
little stand the fire as the Assyrians could. There was no difference in
this fire outside and inside the walls. What it burned there it would
burn here. Nay, was not Jerusalem the dwelling-place of God, and Ariel
the very hearth and furnace of the fire which they saw consume the
Assyrians? _Who_, they cried in their terror--_Who among us shall dwell
with the devouring fire? Who among us shall dwell with everlasting
burnings?_
We are familiar with Isaiah's fundamental God-with-us, and how it was
spoken not for mercy only, but for judgement (chap. viii.). If
_God-with-us_ meant love with us, salvation with us, it meant also
holiness with us, judgement with us, the jealousy of God breathing upon
what is impure, false and proud. Isaiah felt this so hotly, that his
sense of it has broken out into some of the fieriest words in all
prophecy. In his younger days he told the citizens not _to provoke the
eyes of God's glory_, as if Heaven had fastened on their life two
gleaming orbs, not only to pierce them with its vision, but to consume
them with its wrath. Again, in the lowering cloud of calamity he had
seen _lips of indignation, a tongue as a devouring fire_, and in the
overflowing stream which finally issued from it the hot _breath of the
Almighty_. These are unforgettable descriptions of the ceaseless
activity of Divine righteousness in the life of man. They set our
imaginations on fire with the prophet's burning belief in this. But they
are excelled by another, more frequently used by Isaiah, wherein he
likens the holiness of God to an universal and constant fire. To Isaiah
life was so penetrated by the active justice of God, that he described
it as bathed in fire, as blown through with fire. Righteousness was no
mere doctrine to this prophet: it was the most real thing in history; it
was the presence which pervaded and explained all phenomena. We shall
understand the difference between Isaiah and his people if we have ever
for our eyes' sake looked at a great conflagration through a coloured
glass which allowed us to see the solid materials--stone, wood and
iron--but prevented us from perceiving the flames and shimmering heat.
To look thus is to see pillars, lintels and cross-beams twist and fall,
crumble and fade; but how inexplicable the process seems! Take away the
glass, and everything is clear. The fiery element is filling all the
interstices, that were blank to us before, and beating upon the solid
material. The heat becomes visible, shimmering even where there is no
flame. Just so had it been with the sinners in Judah these forty years.
Their society and politics, individual fortunes and careers, personal
and national habits--the home, the Church, the State--common outlines
and shapes of life--were patent to every eye, but no man could explain
the constant decay and diminution, because all were looking at life
through a glass darkly. Isaiah alone faced life with open vision, which
filled up for him the interstices of experience and gave terrible
explanation to fate. It was a vision that nearly scorched the eyes out
of him. Life as he saw it was steeped in flame--the glowing
righteousness of God. Jerusalem was full _of the spirit of justice, the
spirit of burning. The light of Israel is for a fire, and his Holy One
for a flame._ The Assyrian empire, that vast erection which the strong
hands of kings had reared, was simply their pyre, made ready for the
burning. _For a Topheth is prepared of old; yea, for the king it is made
ready; He hath made it deep and large; the pile thereof is fire and much
wood; the breath of Jehovah, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle
it._[64] So Isaiah saw life, and flashed it on his countrymen. At last
the glass fell from their eyes also, and they cried aloud, _Who among us
shall dwell with the devouring fire? Who among us shall dwell with
everlasting burnings?_ Isaiah replied that there is one thing which can
survive the universal flame, and that is character: _He that walketh
righteously and speaketh uprightly; he that despiseth the gain of fraud,
that shaketh his hands from the holding of bribes, that stoppeth his
ears from the hearing of blood, and shutteth his eyes from looking on
evil, he shall dwell on high: his place of defence shall be the
munitions of rocks: his bread shall be given him: his water shall be
sure._
[64] Chaps. iv. 4; xxx. 33.
* * * * *
Isaiah's Vision of Fire suggests two thoughts to us.
1. Have we done well to confine our horror of the consuming fires of
righteousness to the next life? If we would but use the eyes which
Scripture lends us, the rifts of prophetic vision and awakened
conscience by which the fogs of this world and of our own hearts are
rent, we should see fires as fierce, a consumption as pitiless, about us
here as ever the conscience of a startled sinner fearfully looked for
across the grave. Nay, have not the fires, with which the darkness of
eternity has been made lurid, themselves been kindled at the burnings of
this life? Is it not because men have felt how hot this world was being
made for sin that they have had a _certain fearful expectation of
judgement and the fierceness of fire_? We shudder at the horrible
pictures of hell which some older theologians and poets have painted for
us; but it was not morbid fancy, nor the barbarism of their age nor
their own heart's cruelty that inspired these men. It was their hot
honour for the Divine holiness; it was their experience of how pitiless
to sin Providence is already in this life; it was their own scorched
senses and affections--brands, as many honest men among them felt
themselves, plucked from the burning. Our God _is_ a consuming
fire--here as well as yonder. Hell has borrowed her glare from the
imagination of men aflame with the real fieriness of life, and may
be--more truly than of old--pictured as the dead and hollow cinder left
by those fires, of which, as every true man's conscience is aware, this
life is full. It was not hell that created conscience; it was conscience
that created hell, and conscience was fired by the vision which fired
Isaiah--of all life aglow with the righteousness of God--_God with us_,
as He was with Jerusalem, _a spirit of burning and a spirit of justice_.
This is the pantheism of conscience, and it stands to reason. God is the
one power of life. What can exist beside Him except what is like Him?
Nothing--sooner or later nothing but what is like Him. The will that is
as His will, the heart that is pure, the character that is
transparent--only these dwell with the everlasting fire, and burning
with God, as the bush which Moses saw, are nevertheless not consumed.
Let us lay it to heart--Isaiah has nothing to tell us about hell-fire,
but a great deal about the pitiless justice of God in this life.
2. The second thought suggested by Isaiah's Vision of Life is a
comparison of it with the theory of life which is fashionable to-day.
Isaiah's figure for life was a burning. Ours is a battle, and at first
sight ours looks the truer. Seen through a formula which has become
everywhere fashionable, life is a fierce and fascinating warfare.
Civilised thought, when asked to describe any form of life or to account
for a death or survival, most monotonously replies, "The struggle for
existence." The sociologist has borrowed the phrase from the biologist,
and it is on everybody's lips to describe their idea of human life. It
is uttered by the historian when he would explain the disappearance of
this national type, the prevalence of that one. The economist traces
depression and failures, the fatal fevers of speculation, the cruelties
and bad humours of commercial life, to the same source. A merchant with
profits lessening and failure before him relieves his despair and
apologizes to his pride with the words, "It is all due to competition."
Even character and the spiritual graces are sometimes set down as
results of the same material process. Some have sought to deduce from it
all intelligence, others more audaciously all ethics; and it is certain
that in the silence of men's hearts after a moral defeat there is no
excuse more frequently offered to conscience by will than that the
battle was too hot.
But fascinating as life is when seen through this formula, does not the
formula act on our vision precisely as the glass we supposed, which when
we look through it on a conflagration shows us the solid matter and the
changes through which this passes, but hides from us the real agent? One
need not deny the reality of the struggle for existence, or that its
results are enormous. We struggle with each other, and affect each other
for good and for evil, sometimes past all calculation. But we do not
fight in a vacuum. Let Isaiah's vision be the complement of our own
feeling. We fight in an atmosphere that affects every one of us far more
powerfully than the opposing wits or wills of our fellow-men. Around us
and through us, within and without as we fight, is the all-pervading
righteousness of God; and it is far oftener the effects of this which we
see in the falls and the changes of life than the effects of our
struggle with each other, enormous though these may be. On this point
there is an exact parallel between our days and the days of Isaiah. Then
the politicians of Judah, looking through their darkened glass at life,
said, Life is simply a war in which the strongest prevail, a game which
the most cunning win. So they made fast their alliances, and were ready
to meet the Assyrian, or they fled in panic before him, according as
Egypt or he seemed the stronger. Isaiah saw that with Assyrian and Jew
another Power was present--the real reason of every change in politics,
collapse or crash in either of the empires--the active righteousness of
God. Assyrian and Jew had not only to contend with each other. They were
at strife with Him. We now see plainly that Isaiah was right. Far more
operative than the intrigues of politicians or the pride of Assyria,
because it used these simply as its mines and its fuel, was the law of
righteousness, the spiritual force which is as impalpable as the
atmosphere, yet strong to burn and try as a furnace seven times heated.
And Isaiah is equally right for to-day. As we look at life through our
fashionable formula it does seem a mass of struggle, in which we catch
only now and then a glimpse of the decisions of righteousness, but the
prevailing lawlessness of which we do not hesitate to make the reason of
all that happens, and in particular the excuse of our own defeats. We
are wrong. Righteousness is not an occasional spark; righteousness is
the atmosphere. Though our dull eyes see it only now and then strike
into flame in the battle of life, and take for granted that it is but
the flash of meeting wits or of steel on steel, God's justice is
everywhere, pervasive and pitiless, affecting the combatants far more
than they have power to affect one another.
We shall best learn the truth of this in the way the sinners in
Jerusalem learned it--each man first looking into himself. _Who among us
shall dwell with the everlasting burnings?_ Can we attribute all our
defeats to the opposition that was upon us at the moment they occurred?
When our temper failed, when our charity relaxed, when our resoluteness
gave way, was it the hotness of debate, was it the pressure of the
crowd, was it the sneer of the scorner, that was to blame? We all know
that these were only the occasions of our defeats. Conscience tells us
that the cause lay in a slothful or self-indulgent heart, which the
corrosive atmosphere of Divine righteousness had been consuming, and
which, sapped and hollow by its effect, gave way at every material
shock.
With the knowledge that conscience gives us, let us now look at a kind
of figure which must be within the horizon of all of us. Once it was the
most commanding stature among its fellows, the straight back and broad
brow of a king of men. But now what is the last sight of him that will
remain with us, flung out there against the evening skies of his life? A
bent back (we speak of character), a stooping face, the shrinking
outlines of a man ready to collapse. It was not the struggle for
existence that killed him, for he was born to prevail in it. It was the
atmosphere that told on him. He carried in him that on which the
atmosphere could not but tell. A low selfishness or passion inhabited
him, and became the predominant part of him, so that his outward life
was only its shell; and when the fire of God at last pierced this, he
was as thorns cut down, that are burned in the fire.
We can explain much with the outward eye, but the most of the
explanation lies beyond. Where our knowledge of a man's life ends, the
great meaning of it often only begins. All the vacancy beyond the
outline we see is full of that meaning. God is there, and _God is a
consuming fire_. Let us not seek to explain lives only by what we see of
them, the visible strife of man with man and nature. It is the invisible
that contains the secret of what is seen. We see the shoulders stoop,
but not the burden upon them; the face darken, but look in vain for what
casts the shadow; the light sparkle in the eye, but cannot tell what
star of hope its glance has caught. And even so when we behold fortune
and character go down in the warfare of this world, we ought to remember
that it is not always the things we see that are to blame for the fall,
but that awful flame which, unseen by common man, has been revealed to
the prophets of God.
Righteousness and retribution, then, are an atmosphere--not lines or
laws that we may happen to stumble upon, not explosives, that, being
touched, burst out on us, but the atmosphere--always about us and always
at work, invisible and yet more mighty than aught we see. _God, in whom
we live and move and have our being, is a consuming fire._