'And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called the
way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be
for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein. No
lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon, it
shall not be found there; but the redeemed shall walk there.'--ISAIAH
xxxv. 8, 9.
We can fancy what it is to be lost in a forest where a traveller may
ride round in a circle, thinking he is advancing, till he dies. But it
is as easy to be lost in a wilderness, where there is nothing to see,
as in a wood where one can see nothing. And there is something even
more ghastly in being lost below the broad heavens in the open face of
day than 'in the close covert of innumerous boughs.' The monotonous
swells of the sand-heaps, the weary expanse stretching right away to
the horizon, no land-marks but the bleaching bones of former victims,
the gigantic sameness, the useless light streaming down, and in the
centre one tiny, black speck toiling vainly, rushing madly hither and
thither--a lost man--till he desperately flings himself down and lets
death bury him, that is the one picture suggested by the text. The
other is of that same wilderness, but across it a mighty king has flung
up a broad, lofty embankment, a highway raised above the sands, cutting
across them so conspicuously that even an idiot could not help seeing
it, so high above the land around that the lion's spring falls far
beneath it, and the supple tiger skulks baffled at its base. It is like
one of those roads which the terrible energy of conquering Rome carried
straight as an arrow from the milestone in the Forum over mountains,
across rivers and deserts, morasses and forests, to flash along them
the lightning of her legions, and over whose solid blocks we travel
to-day in many a land.
The prophet has seen in his vision the blind and deaf cured, the
capacities of human nature destroyed by sin restored. He has told us
that this miraculous change has come from the opening of a spring of
new life in the midst of man's thirsty desert, and now he gets before
us, in yet another image, another aspect of the glorious change which
is to follow that coming of the Lord to save, which filled the farthest
horizon of his vision. The desert shall have a plain path on which
those diseased men who have been healed journey. Life shall no longer
be trackless, but God will, by His coming, prepare paths that we should
walk in them; and as He has given the lame man power to walk, so will
he also provide the way by which His happy pilgrims will journey to
their home.