_A REVIEW OF ISAIAH'S PREDICTIONS CONCERNING THE DELIVERANCE OF
JERUSALEM._
As we have gathered together all that Isaiah prophesied concerning the
Messiah, so it may be useful for closer students of his book if we now
summarise (even at the risk of a little repetition) the facts of his
marvellous prediction of the siege and delivery of Jerusalem. Such a
review, besides being historically interesting, ought to prove of
edification in so far as it instructs us in the kind of faith by which
the Holy Ghost inspired a prophet to foretell the future.
1. The primary conviction with which Isaiah felt himself inspired by the
Spirit of Jehovah was a purely moral one--that a devastation of Judah
was necessary for her people's sin, to which he shortly added a
religious one: that a remnant would be saved. He had this double
conviction as early as 740 B.C. (vi. 11-13).
2. Looking round the horizon for some phenomenon with which to identify
this promised judgement, Isaiah described the latter at first without
naming any single people as the invaders of Judah (v. 26 ff.). It may
have been that for a moment he hesitated between Assyria and Egypt. Once
he named them together as equally the Lord's instruments upon Judah
(vii. 18), but only once. When Ahaz resolved to call Assyria into the
Syrian quarrels, Isaiah exclusively designated the northern power as the
scourge he had predicted; and when in 732 the Assyrian armies had
overrun Samaria, he graphically described their necessary overflow into
Judah also (viii.). This invasion did not spread to Judah, but Isaiah's
combined moral and political conviction, for both elements of which he
claimed the inspiration of God's Spirit, seized him with renewed
strength in 725, when Salmanassar marched south upon Israel (xxviii.);
and in 721, when Sargon captured Samaria, Isaiah uttered a vivid
description of his speedy arrival before Jerusalem (x. 28 ff.). This
prediction was again disappointed. But Sargon's departure without
invading Judah, and her second escape from him on his return to Syria in
711, did not in the least induce Isaiah to relax either of his two
convictions. Judah he proclaimed to be as much in need of punishment as
ever (xxix.-xxxii.); and, though on Sargon's death all Palestine
revolted from Assyria to Egypt, he persisted that this would not save
her from Sennacherib (xiv. 29 ff.; xxix.-xxx.). The "dourness" with
which his countrymen believed in Egypt naturally caused the prophet to
fill his orations at this time with the _political_ side of his
conviction that Assyria was stronger than Egypt; but because Jerusalem's
Egyptian policy springs from a deceitful temper (xxx. 1, 9, 10) he is as
earnest as ever with his _moral_ conviction that judgement is coming.
After 705 his pictures of a siege of Jerusalem grow more definite
(xxix.; xxx.). He seems scorched by the nearness of the Assyrian
conflagration (xxx. 27 ff.). At last in 701, when Sennacherib comes to
Palestine, the siege is pictured as immediate--chaps. i. and xx., which
also show at its height the prophet's moral conviction of the necessity
of the siege for punishing his people.
3. But over against this _moral_ conviction, that Judah must be
devastated for her sin, and this _political_, that Assyria is to be the
instrument, even to the extreme of a siege of Jerusalem, the prophet
still holds strongly to the _religious_ assurance that God cannot allow
His shrine to be violated or His people to be exterminated. At first it
is only of the people that Isaiah speaks--_the remnant_ (vi.; viii. 18).
Jerusalem is not mentioned in the verses that describe the overflowing
of all Judah by Assyria (viii. 7). It is only when at last, in 721, the
prophet realizes how near a siege of Jerusalem may be (x. 11, 28-32),
that he also pictures the sudden destruction of the Assyrian on his
arrival within sight of her walls (x. 33). In 705, when the siege of the
sacred city once more becomes imminent, the prophet again reiterates to
the heathen that Zion alone shall stand among the cities of Syria (xiv.
32). To herself he says that, though she shall be besieged and brought
very low, she shall finally be delivered (xxix. 1-8; xxx. 19-26; xxxi.
1, 4, 5). It is true, this conviction seems to be broken--once by a
prophecy of uncertain date (xxxii. 14), which indicates a desolation of
the buildings of Jerusalem, and once by the prophet's sentence of death
upon the inhabitants in the hour of their profligacy (xxii.)--but when
the city has repented, and the enemy have perfidiously come back to
demand her surrender, Isaiah again asseverates, though all are hopeless,
that she shall not fall (xxxvii.).
4. Now, with regard to the method of Jerusalem's deliverance, Isaiah has
uniformly described this as happening not by human battle. From the
beginning he said that Israel should be delivered in the last extremity
of their weakness (vi. 13). On the Assyrian's arrival over against the
city, Jehovah is to lop him off (x. 33). When her enemies have invested
Jerusalem, Jehovah is to come down in thunder and a hurricane and sweep
them away (after 705, xxix. 5-8). They are to be suddenly disappointed,
like a hungry man waking from a dream of food. A beautiful promise is
given of the raising of the siege without mention of struggle or any
weapon (xxx. 20-26). The Assyrian is to be checked as a wild bull is
checked _with a lasso_, is to be slain _by the lighting down of the
Lord's arm, by the voice of the Lord_, through a judgement that shall be
like a solemn holocaust to God than a human battle (xxx. 30-33). When
the Assyrian comes back, and Hezekiah is crushed by the new demand for
surrender, Isaiah says that, by a Divinely inspired impulse,
Sennacherib, hearing bad news, shall suddenly return to his own land
(xxxviii. 7).
It is only in very little details that these predictions differ. The
thunderstorm and torrents of fire are, of course, but poetic variations.
In 721, however, the prophet hardly anticipates the very close siege,
which he pictures after 705; and while from 705 to 702 he identifies the
relief of Jerusalem with a great calamity to the Assyrian army about to
invade Judah, yet in 701, when the Assyrians are actually on the spot,
he suggests that nothing but a rumour shall cause their retreat and so
leave Jerusalem free of them.
5. In all this we see a certain FIXITY and a certain FREEDOM. The
freedom, the changes and inconsistencies in the prediction, are entirely
limited to those of Isaiah's convictions which we have called political,
and which the prophet evidently gathered from his observation of
political circumstances as these developed before his eyes from year to
year. But what was fixed and unalterable to Isaiah, he drew from the
moral and religious convictions to which his political observation was
subservient; viz., Judah's very sore punishment for sin, the survival of
a people of God in the world, and their deliverance by His own act.
6. This "Bible-reading" in Isaiah's predictive prophecies reveals very
clearly the nature of inspiration under the old covenant. To Isaiah
inspiration was nothing more nor less than the possession of certain
strong moral and religious convictions, which he felt he owed to the
communication of the Spirit of God, and according to which he
interpreted, and even dared to foretell, the history of his people and
the world. Our study completely dispels, on the evidence of the Bible
itself, that view of inspiration and prediction, so long held in the
Church, which it is difficult to define, but which means something like
this: that the prophet beheld a vision of the future in its actual
detail and read this off as a man may read the history of the past out
of a book or a clear memory. This is a very simple view, but too simple
either to meet the facts of the Bible, or to afford to men any of that
intellectual and spiritual satisfaction which the discovery of the
Divine methods is sure to afford. The literal view of inspiration is too
simple to be true, and too simple to be edifying. On the other hand, how
profitable, how edifying, is the Bible's own account of its inspiration!
To know that men interpreted, predicted and controlled history in the
power of the purest moral and religious convictions--in the knowledge
of, and the loyalty to, certain fundamental laws of God--is to receive
an account of inspiration, which is not only as satisfying to the reason
as it is true to the facts of the Bible, but is spiritually very
helpful by the lofty example and reward it sets before our own faith. By
faith differing in degree, but not in kind, from ours, _faith which is
the substance of things hoped for_, these men became prophets of God,
and received the testimony of history that they spoke from Him. Isaiah
prophesied and predicted all he did from loyalty to two simple truths,
which he tells us he received from God Himself: that sin must be
punished, and that the people of God must be saved. This simple faith,
acting along with a wonderful knowledge of human nature and ceaseless
vigilance of affairs, constituted inspiration for Isaiah.
There is thus, with great modifications, an analogy between the prophet
and the scientific observer of the present day. Men of science are able
to affirm the certainty of natural phenomena by their knowledge of the
laws and principles of nature. Certain forces being present, certain
results must come to pass. The Old Testament prophets, working in
history, a sphere where the problems were infinitely more complicated by
the presence and powerful operation of man's free-will, seized hold of
principles as conspicuous and certain to them as the laws of nature are
to the scientist; and out of their conviction of these they proclaimed
the necessity of certain events. God is inflexibly righteous, He cannot
utterly destroy His people or the witness of Himself among men: these
were the laws. Judah shall be punished, Israel shall continue to exist:
these were the certainties deduced from the laws. But for the exact
conditions and forms both of the punishment and its relief the prophets
depended upon their knowledge of the world, of which, as these pages
testify, they were the keenest and largest-hearted observers that ever
appeared.
This account of prophecy may be offered with advantage to those who are
prejudiced against prophecy as full of materials, which are inexplicable
to minds accustomed to find a law and reason for everything. Grant the
truths of the spiritual doctrines, which the prophets made their
premises, and you must admit that their predictions are neither
arbitrary nor bewildering. Or begin at the other end: verify that these
facts took place, and that the prophets actually predicted them; and if
you are true to your own scientific methods, you will not be able to
resist the conclusion that the spiritual laws and principles, by which
the predictions were made, are as real as those by which in the realm of
nature you proclaim the necessity of certain physical phenomena--and all
this in spite of there being at work in the prophets' sphere a force,
the free-will of man, which cannot interfere with the laws you work by,
as it can with those on which they depend.
But, to turn from the apologetic value of this account of prophecy to
the experimental, we maintain that it brings out a new sacredness upon
common life. If it be true that Isaiah had no magical means for
foretelling the future, but simply his own spiritual convictions and his
observation of history, that may, of course, deprive some eyes of a
light which they fancied they saw bursting from heaven. But, on the
other hand, does it not cast a greater glory upon daily life and
history, to have seen in Isaiah this close connection between spiritual
conviction and political event? Does it not teach us that life is
governed by faith; that the truths we profess are the things that make
history; that we carry the future in our hearts; that not an event
happens but is to be used by us as meaning the effect of some law of
God, and not a fact appears but is the symbol and sacrament of His
truth?