Our chapter is not a long one, but it will be found filled with interest and refreshment if we can trace in it the path of our Lord Jesus Christ from His early home in Nazareth, till in a day, yet future, He finds a dwelling with His beloved Israel in a land itself resting under His beams as the Sun of Righteousness.
The division is so clearly a threefold one that it could not be mistaken:
1. The threefold ministry of the Lord, first in grace (rejected); in judgment; then in healing (vv. 1-3).
2. Israel in millennial blessedness (vv. 4-9).
3. Messiah rejoices with His rejoicing people (vv. 10-11).
This chapter should be of supreme interest to us, for almost 2,000 years ago a laborer about thirty years of age might have been seen standing up amid a Jewish congregation in a village of a despised district in a despised country, as though He desired to address those present. We are told nothing of His personal appearance, but evidently He was not of any exalted social standing. His clothing must have been that of an ordinary artisan, for He was but a carpenter. The villagers among whom He had grown up assumed that they were thoroughly acquainted with Him and all His relatives.
Yet He was respected, or they would not have handed Him the Scriptures from which to read. As He stands there, He unrolls the book, not carelessly, taking the first page that comes, or the first text that strikes His eye. Instead, He finds the place where it is written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,” and having read a few words only, He resumes His seat. There is a pause while the eyes of all the congregation are expectantly fastened on Him, to hear His comment.
Now mark the astonishment that comes over every face as He–the son of Joseph (as they think)–says, “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears,” and quietly assumes the place of being Himself the speaker in the prophecy of Isaiah!
PART ONE: THE LORD’S MINISTRY
As He takes every sentence and applies it to Himself, amazement sweeps over the congregation. Had we been there, would we not have shared that amazement? He, our neighbor who has been among us for thirty years, now claims to have been divinely anointed “to preach the glad tidings to penitent poor, to heal the heart-broken: to cry to the slaves: Ye are free! Prison door open to the fettered: to cry: ‘Tis the year of Jehovah’s good will.”
Can you see the agitated crowd? Yet what gracious words! Between two general proclamations of “preaching the gospel” and “the acceptable year,” are three specific forms of grace.
THE HEART-BROKEN & CAPTIVES
First, the “heart-broken,” those who no longer stout-heartedly insist that they have “done their best,” but, finding tender love where they expected a curse, are filled with self-abhorrence. These must be healed.
Next, and along the same line, men have dark and false views of God. “I,” says the speaker, “am going to give them light as to that, and proclaim Him by a Name that shall draw their heart’s confidence to Him in joyous liberty, making them free indeed” (Jn. 8:36).
In a word, it is the year of jubilee, when the sound of the silver trumpet sweeps over the hills and vales. As those notes reach the ear of every bondman, he springs up free, and hastens to resume the patrimonial inheritance that he had forfeited. It is a picture too beautiful to be spoiled by human comment, for it tells of man’s place in the very heart of God, forfeited, but by that speaker regained, and more than regained, for it is never again to be lost.
THE MISSING PHRASE
But here the Reader stops. Not that the “day of vengeance” does not in itself mean “the acceptable year” for Israel; it surely does. The only deliverance for the Jew on this earth will be by retributive justice on the oppressing nations. That vengeance was in the mind of Isaiah, who made no pause; to him the two things were indissolubly linked. But the Prophet of Luke 4, foretelling that He would be rejected by “His own” (and the hill of Nazareth soon witnessed that rejection, foreshadowing Calvary), also foretold that these spiritual blessings should go forth to “every creature under heaven,” and His stopping in the middle of the verse leaves room for the heavenly calling of the Church.
THE MOURNERS
Have you not been struck with God’s appreciation of mourners? The beatitudes seem to affix blessing to what worldly Christianity ridicules as pessimism. “Blessed are the poor,” “Blessed are they that mourn,” “Blessed are ye that weep now!” Is that the language of the present day? “Laugh and the world laughs with you; weep and you weep alone,” is this world’s way. “But,” you say, “we are told to rejoice in the Lord alway,” which seems to forbid, rather than to approve of, mourning.
True, but there are strange paradoxes in the life of a Christian. Not the least of the apostles wrote that he himself was “sorrowful yet always rejoicing” (2 Cor. 6:10). And today, as long as the Holy Spirit is with us to take of the things of Christ and show them to us, we rejoice in all we have in Him. Yet that same Spirit would undoubtedly lead to sincere mourning at the appalling condition of Christendom, and the wave of apostasy that is sweeping over it. Let us not shrink from the taunt of “pessimism,” but confess ourselves to be pessimists indeed as to all that depends on the “first man,” but optimists without limit as to all that depends on the “Second Man,” for He always does all things well.
But Isaiah had to do with the Jew, who today is going back to his land, an indistinguishable mass of unbelief in the true Messiah, Jesus. Soon a sharp dividing line will be drawn. On one side will be some who mourn, “as the mourning of Hadad-rimmon in the valley of Megiddo” (Zech. 12:11); and on the other, a mass of impenitent, who are morally gathered at Har-mageddon which is in the English tongue, “the gathering place of the lofty.”
PART TWO: ISRAEL’S MILLENNIAL BLESSEDNESS
It has become increasingly clear that the prophecies of this book have a double application. First, they were addressed through a Jew to the nation of the Jews, and therefore their scope is earth and not heaven. The penalty threatened is reprobation on the earth. But it is equally clear that the first words of this chapter must have a wider and more spiritual application to the present–a day unknown to the Old Testament prophet.
Yet as we come to verses 4-9, it becomes increasingly difficult to apply such words to the Church. I do not say that the professing Church, as left to man, is not in a ruin that corresponds with Israel. It is, and there are indeed many “waste places;” but the end of that faithless witness is not for those waste places to be restored, or the ruins rebuilt, but (the true having been caught up to be forever with the Lord) absolute reprobation as a vile thing to be spewed out of the Lord’s mouth–no longer owned as His witness at all. That is not a rebuilding as is promised here, nor any form of restoration.
Apply the prophecy to the literal nation of Israel, and how simple it all is. Its cities shall be rebuilt; its wastes covered with fertile beauty, and its desolations throbbing with life. Foreigners shall do the servile work, while Israel’s own people shall be known as having peculiar access to God, a nation of priests. The very wealth of the nations shall be the glory of Israel and their joy shall flow perennially in unbroken song.
Jehovah’s character is the basis of His dealings with men. He loves righteousness. Every act of His, then, must be in strict accord with it. But robbery–the assumption of that to which the pretender has no right–is in view here, as when the devil would be as the Most High, or man, his dupe, would claim to be God (2 Thess. 2). That is robbery of such a transcendent character that it is called “robbery with iniquity” and is hateful indeed.
There was One to whom even such a claim was no robbery. It was He whose mind was to go to the lowest place on earth, and that is the mind His Spirit works in His people (Phil. 2).
In that day, no longer shall the word Jew be a reproach, but as in 25:8, every Israelite shall be honored as one of a people peculiarly blessed.
PART THREE: MESSIAH REJOICES
Here we listen to the song of Messiah as He identifies Himself with His beloved Israel. He leads their joyful singing; His joy is one with theirs; nor surely less so with ours. Here we see the fulfillment of the word: “In the midst of the congregation will I praise Thee” (Ps. 22:22). On the feeblest of us, too, are the garments of salvation, and the very righteousness of God covers us, for it is “on all those who believe” (Rom. 3:22).
Again, what a beautiful figure, not as a lightning-flash, gone as soon as seen, but as a garden sprouts with what is to be long enjoyed–in this case, forever. Thus the Jew is no longer despised, but is the object of praise of all nations, as flowers cover a garden.
It is the knowledge of love to us poor, wrath-deserving sinners that results in practical holiness. Not legal endeavor, but finding out that love has provided for all our helplessness in the Son. The Spirit’s law is that our true life, with all its power, is alone in Christ, and the righteousness of the law is fulfilled in us “who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit” (Rom. 8:4).