'As birds flying, so will the Lord of hosts defend Jerusalem; defending
also He will deliver it; and passing over He will preserve it'--ISAIAH
xxxi. 5.
The immediate occasion of this very remarkable promise is, of course,
the peril in which Jerusalem was placed by Sennacherib's invasion; and
the fulfilment of the promise was the destruction of his army before
its gates. But the promise here, like all God's promises, is eternal in
substance, and applies to a community only because it applies to each
member of that community. Jerusalem was saved, and that meant that
every house in Jerusalem was saved, and every man in it the separate
object of the divine protection So that all the histories of Scripture,
and all the histories of men in the world, are but transitory
illustrations of perennial principles, and every atom of the
consolation and triumph of this verse comes to each of us, as truly as
it did to the men that with tremulous heart began to take cheer, as
they listened to Isaiah. There is a wonderful saying in one of the
other prophets which carries that lesson, where, bringing down the
story of Jacob's struggle with the angel of Peniel to the encouragement
of the existing generation, he says,' He spake to _us_.' They were
hundreds of years after the patriarch, and yet had fallen heirs to all
that God had ever said to him So, from that point of view, I am not
spiritualising, or forcing the meaning of these words, when I bring
them direct into the lives of each one of ourselves.
I. And, first, I would note the very striking and beautiful pictures
that are given in these verses.
There are three of them, on each of which I must touch briefly. 'As
birds flying, so will the Lord of hosts defend Jerusalem.' The form of
the words in the original shows that it is the mother-bird that is
thought about. And the picture rises at once of her fluttering over the
nest, where the callow chickens are, unable to fly and to help
themselves. It is a kind of echo of the grand metaphor in the song that
is attributed to Moses, which speaks of the eagle fluttering over her
nest, and taking care of her young. Jerusalem was as a nest on which,
for long centuries, that infinite divine love had brooded. It was but a
poor brood that had been hatched out, but yet 'as birds flying' He had
watched over the city. Can you not almost see the mother-bird, made
bold by maternal love, swooping down upon the intruder that sought to
rob the nest, and spreading her broad pinion over the callow fledglings
that lie below? That is what God does with us. As I said, it is a poor
brood that is hatched out. That does not matter; still the Love bends
down and helps. Nobody but a prophet could have ventured on such a
metaphor as that, and nobody but Jesus Christ would have ventured to
mend it and say, 'As a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings,'
when there are hawks in the sky. So He, in all the past ages, was the
One that 'as birds flying ... defended' His people, and would have
gathered them under His wings, only they would not.
Now, beautiful as this metaphor is, as it stands, it seems to me, like
some brilliant piece of colouring, to derive additional beauty from its
connection with the background upon which it stands out. For just a
verse before the prophet has given another emblem of what God is and
does, and if you will carry with you all those thoughts of tenderness
and maternal care and solicitude, and then connect them with that
verse, I think the thought of His tenderness will start up into new
beauty. For here is what precedes the text: 'Like as a lion, and the
young lion roaring on his prey when a multitude of shepherds is called
forth against him, he will not be afraid of their voice, nor bow
himself for the noise of them. So shall the Lord of hosts come down to
fight for Mount Zion.' Look at these two pictures side by side, on the
one hand the lion, with his paw on his prey, and the angry growl that
answers when the shepherds vainly try to drag it away from him. That is
God. Ay! but that is only an aspect of God. 'As birds flying, so the
Lord will defend Jerusalem.' We have to take that into account too.
This generation is very fond of talking about God's love; does it
believe in God's wrath? It is very fond of speaking about the
gentleness of Jesus; has it pondered that tremendous phrase, 'the wrath
of the Lamb'? The lion that growls, and the mother-bird that
hovers--God is like them both. That is the first picture that is here.
The second one is not so obvious to English readers, but it is equally
striking, though I do not mean to dwell upon it. The word that is
translated in our text twice, 'defend' and 'defending'--'So will the
Lord of hosts defend Jerusalem, and defending will deliver'--means,
literally, 'shielding.' Thus we have the same general idea as that in
the previous metaphor of the mother-bird hovering above the nest: God
is like a shield held over us, and so flinging off front the broad and
burnished surface of the Almighty buckler, all the darts that any foe
can launch against as. 'Our God is a Sun and Shield.' I need not
enlarge on this familiar metaphor.
But the third picture I wish to point to in more detail: 'Passing over,
He will deliver.' Now, the word that is there rendered 'passing over,'
is almost a technical word in the Old Testament, because it is that
employed in reference to the Passover. And so you see the swiftness of
genius with which the prophet changes his whole scene. We had the nest
and the mother-bird, we had the battlefield and the shield; now we are
swept away back to that night when the Destroying Angel stalked through
the land, and 'passed over' the doors on which the blood had been
sprinkled. And thus this God, who in one aspect may be likened to the
mother-bird hovering with her little breast full of tenderness, and
made brave by maternal love conquering natural timidity, and in another
aspect may be likened to the broad shield behind which a man stands
safe, may also be likened to that Destroying Angel that went through
Egypt, and smote wherever there were not the tokens of the blood on the
lintels, and 'passed over' wherever there were. Of course, the original
fulfilment of this third picture is the historical case of the army of
Sennacherib; outside the walls, widespread desolation; inside the
walls, an untroubled night of peace. That night in Egypt is paralleled,
in the old Jewish hymn that is still sung at the Passover, with the
other night when Sennacherib's men were slain; and the parallel is
based on our text. So, then, here is another illustration of what I
started with saying, that the past events of Scripture are transient
expressions of perennial principles and tendencies. For the Passover
night was not to be to the contemporaries of the prophet an event
receding ever further into the dim distance, but it was a present
event, and to be reproduced in that catastrophe when 'in the morning
when they arose, they were all dead corpses.' And the event is being
repeated to-day, and will be for each of us, if we will.
So, then, there are these three pictures--the Nest and the Mother-bird,
the Battlefield and the Shield, Egypt and the Destroying Angel.