My wife reminded me immediately after the service
was over this morning that I had omitted
commenting on the very chapter that I was
leading up to.
But somewhere or another in my blindness I
overlooked it and I was thinking I was
on the last chapter of that section when
I wasn't.
But you know the contents of the final
chapter, 35, wasn't it?
35, the wilderness and the sultry place shall
be glad for them, and so on.
It's a wonderful picture of the blessing of
Messiah's kingdom, the peace and the gladness that
will come to earth, the joy that men
will have under the personal reign of our
Lord Jesus Christ.
So actually it doesn't require perhaps much further
comment than that which was made in a
general way regarding that kingdom as we consider
this entire portion for it's all one complete
section as we saw this morning.
And now that leads us up to the
next section, four chapters, 36, 37, 38, and
39.
And these, as you know, are of an
altogether different character to all the rest of
the book.
In fact, you may find them duplicated almost
exactly in both 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles,
and that would lead us to believe that
in all likelihood it was Isaiah who was
the chosen scribe who kept the kingdom records
during the reign of King Hezekiah.
That would give him, of course, perfect right
without what we call plagiarism to lift a
portion of his own writing out of the
connection in which it had first been found
and bring it over here.
That's something that those of us who try
to write books frequently do.
We're writing on some subject and then perhaps
we're just picking up another and yet a
reference comes to that and we feel perfectly
free to pick up what we had written
in the other book or in some special
article and just bring it over and make
it a part of the new one.
And so Isaiah, guided by the inspiration of
the Holy Spirit, no doubt did that.
Now, there was a very special reason, I
take it, for giving us these four historical
chapters.
They all have to do with a son
of David who came down to the very
verge of death but was raised up again
in order that the purpose of God might
be fulfilled.
And that, of course, points forward to our
Lord Jesus Christ who went down into death,
actually, and was raised up again to carry
out God's counsel.
The four chapters have to do with certain
events in the life of King Hezekiah.
Now, King Hezekiah was one of the godliest
men that ever sat upon the throne of
Judah, but he was just like other men
in one respect.
He was likely to give way at times
to discouragement and to doubt and fear, but
he had a very faithful mentor in Isaiah,
the prophet himself, to whom he turned from
time to time for help and encouragement.
In the first chapter of this section, we
find the armies of Sennacherib led by Rabshaker,
one of his generals, marching down upon the
land of Palestine and surrounding the city of
Jerusalem.
Hezekiah, knowing of the coming of the enemy,
had taken all proper precautions to cut off
supplies.
For instance, he had stocked certain pounds of
water and had turned aside others in order
that Jerusalem itself might be properly supplied with
water, but that the Assyrian army, it's difficult
sometimes to keep those two in mind, one
the Assyrian, the other the Assyrian.
The Assyrian was from the north, the Assyrian
from the northeast.
And in order that they might not find
water, he stocked certain of the water courses.
And so he took other precautions, strengthening the
walls of the city and so on.
But the armies of the Assyrians surrounded the
city and prepared to assault it.
And Rabshaker, the general, called upon the leaders
of Israel to surrender the city without undergoing
the horrors of the bombardment of battering lambs
and so on, and promising them a certain
measure of immunity from punishment if they did.
The king of Syria, he said, would simply
carry them away to other lands, but their
lives would be spared, otherwise they would be
completely destroyed.
He warned them not to listen to any
proclamation made by King Hezekiah that the God
in whom they trusted would be able to
deliver them.
For he said, you know what Hezekiah has
done.
He's gone all through the country destroying the
shrines of the gods, and instead of delivering
them, the gods will be against him.
Have the gods of any of the other
lands delivered their people?
And they called upon him, our king, and
his mighty armies of triumph over all their
gods.
Rabshaker, of course, didn't understand that the shrines
and idols that had been destroyed were not
representatives of the true God of Israel and
Judah, but that these were idols and symbols
of idolatry that had been brought over from
the nation.
Hezekiah had gone all through the land destroying
these shrines, breaking down these idols, and seeking
to call the people back to the worship
of the one true and living God.
As Rabshaker went on talking and blaspheming the
God of Israel, the Jewish leaders begged him
not to speak in the Jewish language which
the ordinary people could understand, but to speak
to them in the Assyrian which they were
able to understand.
But he angrily declared, no, he wanted the
people to understand.
He wanted them to know the terrible doom
that was coming upon them if they followed
King Hezekiah.
Well, Hezekiah, in his distress, laid the matter
before the Lord, went into the sanctuary of
Jehovah and prayed about it, and sent word
to Isaiah telling him all that had taken
place, inviting him to intercede on their behalf.
Then later there came to Hezekiah a letter
of blasphemy from the leaders of the Assyrian
army, a letter blaspheming the God of Judah,
and again demanding the surrender of the city.
We're told that Hezekiah went up into the
sanctuary of the Lord and he laid the
letter of blasphemy before the Lord.
He poured out his heart to God about
it, and God answered through Isaiah telling him
that the Assyrian army would be completely defeated,
in fact that the great bulk of them
would never leave the land of Judah but
would die there.
You remember what happened, you remember how that
army was gathered all about the city and
one evening as the people of Judah looked
over the walls, they could see the campfires
burning and the hosts of the Assyrians all
about them, so confident that within a very
short time they would be able to subdue
the city of Jerusalem as they had subdued
so many other capitals of the nations against
which they had fought.
Now, that night we're told that the angel
of the Lord went out through the camp
of the Assyrians and he smote them, so
that, and here's a rather peculiar grammatical form
in the scripture, if you'll notice it, it
says, When they awoke in the morning, behold,
they were all dead men.
Of course, it's the awkward way in which
the translators have rendered it.
Their point was that when the people of
Judah awoke in the morning and looked out
over the walls, the Assyrian hosts had been
smitten and dead.
I don't think anything finer has ever been
written in a poetical line than that wonderful
poem by Lord Byron, that poor young Muslim
who had such a miserably unhappy life and
died in the flower of his youth on
the battlefields of Greece.
You hope sometimes as you read his life
story that he got through to heaven.
I don't know.
But his, many of his poems indicate the
utter hopelessness of his life.
You remember he wrote, My days are in
the yellow leaf, the flower, he was only
27 when he wrote this, My days are
in the yellow leaf, the flower, the fruit
of life is gone, the worm, the canker,
and the grief of mine alone.
And he says, if he looks back over
his life, there rose not one day or
one hour when all that life or the
world could give could tempt me to live
on.
He was a mutterly disillusioned young man.
Everything had turned to ashes, it were, because
he'd lived for self and lived for pleasure,
lived to gratify every desire.
Yet he tried to redeem himself by offering
himself as a soldier to help the Greeks
in their fight against the Turks.
He wrote that poem, you remember, The Assyrian
came down like a wolf on the fold,
his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold
and so on.
The most graphic description of what we have
here in this chapter, you can see how
clearly he visualizes that great, heathen host and
their jubilation with the thought that they're going
to destroy the people of God and will
soon capture the temple of Jehovah as they've
captured other people's mother temples.
And then how the angel of the Lord
went forth and smote them and the whole
army was destroyed.
Well, that was the effect, that was the
result.
When King Hezekiah, receiving a letter of blasphemy,
went in and spread it out before the
Lord.
You know, when we get letters of that
kind, it's very natural to spread them out
before the Lord.
It's very natural to go to God about
them.
But as we go on in this story,
we find another letter came to Hezekiah later
on, a letter with a present, and he
didn't spread that out before the Lord.
And he brought grave trouble upon himself and
all the kingdom by his carelessness in that
regard.
We don't quite come to that for the
moment, so we'll just leave it until we
reach the last chapter.
Now then, following the, we have, you get
this history then three times recorded in the
Bible.
In the books of 2nd Kings, 2nd Chronicles,
and here in Isaiah.
And this very man, Sennacherib, this great monarch,
returning to his own land because of a
rumor that had come to him of a
rebellion.
He was slain by his own sons, and
so the campaign against Judah came to an
abrupt end.
And God interfered to save his people, even
as he had declared he would do from
the very beginning.
Then in the third chapter of this section,
we have something of very grave importance.
Something the importance of which we may not
see at first sight.
A manifest effort of Satan to destroy the
house of David, and then the marvelous way
in which God undertook to save it.
Hezekiah was sick, sickened to death.
The trouble seems to have been a terrible,
poisonous carbuncle.
If any of you have ever had the
joy of a carbuncle in the back of
your neck, you know something of it.
Then the king's very life was draining away
with this awful boil or carbuncle.
And he sent word to Isaiah, and Isaiah
sent the word back to him, Set thine
house in order, for thou shalt surely die.
Now, that was a very serious thing.
You see, God had declared that the Messiah,
the Savior, was coming through the house of
David.
Hezekiah was the defendant of the house of
David.
That at this time, if he had died
at this time, he would have left no
one to take his place.
He had no son.
And therefore, if his death had ensued as
a result of this illness, the promise made
to David would seem to be defeated.
Now, God, of course, might have had other
resources.
Just as the Blessed Virgin Mary came through
the line of Nathan and not through Solomon,
and still was of the house of David,
so God might have had someone else in
reserve.
But there's no record of that.
Hezekiah was the true son of David in
the direct Messianic line.
And here he was at the point of
death.
It looks as though God's plan was going
to fail.
And then the amazing thing was that God,
for the moment, seemed to acquiesce in it.
For when Hezekiah sent messengers to Isaiah begging
him to pray for his deliverance, that answer
came back.
Set thine house in order, for thou shalt
surely die and not live.
Now we get an instance of how little
Old Testament saints, the best of them, appreciated
the true meaning of the grace and goodness
of God.
When Hezekiah got that message, instead of being
able to rejoice in view of death, as
Christians can do today if they're in fellowship
with God, he turned his face to the
wall, and he said, while the child lives,
I prayed that if it pleased God he
might still heal the child, but now he's
gone.
He cannot return to me, but I shall
go to him, showing clear belief and faith
in immortality.
I shall go to him.
And there are other intimations in the Old
Testament showing that Old Testament saints did have
a measure of light in regard to life
beyond the grave and, eventually, resurrection.
But, as a rule, these things weren't clear
to people, and Hezekiah was in dire distress
when he learned that he was to die
and not live.
And he prayed, and he wept, and he
pleaded with God to prolong his life.
You know, I don't know that what Hezekiah
is just as good in that regard as
a good many of us.
We talk about being ready to go to
heaven and longing for heaven, but most of
us, you know, if something suddenly struck us
and we thought we might go to heaven
before morning, we'd want every doctor in the
town to try to keep us out of
it just as long as possible.
That's the way we go at it, you
know.
I remember a rather amusing incident last year
up at Mount Rose.
Two years?
Yes, last year up at Mount Rose.
Our good brother George Edson, the singer, had
been singing a song one evening.
I often am homesick for heaven.
You know that song.
There'll be no disappointment in heaven.
And people were quite moved at the pathetic
way in which he sang, I often am
homesick for heaven.
The dear fellow looked as though he was
just about to leave the platform and soar
to realms of glory.
But that night, while a few of them
were in the tea room, something had happened.
The disconcerted them.
It happened that a boy, playing with one
of the ketchup containers, had ground the top
of it so that the glass had broken
and was all scattered through the ketchup.
And several of the folks putting the ketchup
on their hamburgers found they were chewing broken
glass.
And when George found that, he said, My,
I wish I could get a doctor.
I don't feel near as homesick for heaven
as I was.
And I think, you know, most of us,
a lot of our talk about longing to
go to heaven is just a kind of
mere sentimentalism.
We really want to live.
And it's perfectly right that we should desire
to live.
If to live means to glorify God.
For the apostle Paul tells us in the
5th chapter of 2nd Corinthians that we that
are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened,
not that we would be unclothed.
We don't long to die, but clothed upon
with our house which is from heaven.
That's the real thing.
We long for the coming again of the
Lord Jesus Christ.
And while we wait for that glorious event,
we can thank God for prolonged lives here
on earth if those lives mean greater opportunity
to glorify God, greater opportunity to reach others
with the gospel, and be a means of
blessing to a poor, needy world.
But here was Hezekiah, and after his godly
life, and after the real revival and blessing
that had come to Judah through his leadership,
now when he hears he's going to die,
he seems to be in utter despair.
It wasn't that he thought his soul was
lost, but he felt as though to leave
this world, to give up his work here,
meant that practically for him everything was over.
And so, in his distress, he cried to
God, and God heard him.
You see, there was something important there, and
that was this.
There was no heir to the throne, and
so God heard him, and He sent a
word by Isaiah saying to him, The Lord
hath added unto thy life fifteen years.
And then he said, now if you want
to be assured of this, ask a sign
of the Lord.
Shall the shadow on the dial of Ahaz...
Ahaz was his father, and he evidently had
made a dial, a sundial, and placed it
in the garden of the palace.
Now he said, shall the shadow on the
dial of Ahaz go forward or backward a
certain number of degrees?
And Hezekiah said, well, it wouldn't mean so
much if it went forward.
The sun might be so clouded, you know,
that perhaps the shadow would go forward.
But if it goes backward, then I would
know it was a direct act of God.
And God answered him.
I can't explain that.
Don't come to me after a meeting and
say, what do you know about the dial
of Ahaz?
Go to Harry Rimmer, he knows all about
it.
I've heard him make it all very clear.
He understands the whole thing.
He understands all about the long days of
Joshua.
Everything like that.
But I don't.
I haven't got the scientific knowledge that Harry
Rimmer has, and maybe it's, and I haven't
got the imagination either.
It takes very keen imagination sometimes to explain
some things.
But I'll tell you what I can do.
I can believe God.
And God's word tells me that the shadow
went backward on the dial of Ahaz.
And what follows afterwards shows that it was
something that took place in the universe that
was known not only in the land of
Judah, but as far away as in the
city of Babylon.
And Babylon was celebrated for its stargazers, its
astronomers, and its astrologers.
And so they saw, they heard all about
this.
And eventually, as we shall see, they sent
to inquire.
Well, Hezekiah then came back from the dead,
as it were.
God raised up this son of David from
the very brink of the grave in order
to fulfill his word.
And yet now, see how there are wheels
within wheels in the divine government.
Ezekiel pictures that in the most remarkable way.
The house of David must be preserved.
There must be a series of children of
sons born in the regular line of succession,
the line of succession to the throne of
David.
And yet, and so the Lord permitted Hezekiah
to live.
And it was during these 15 years, in
the first of them, that Manasseh was born.
And now see the other side of it.
Manasseh became the wickedest king that ever sat
upon the throne of Judah.
So, looking at it from one standpoint, one
could say it would have been well for
the kingdom of Judah if Hezekiah had died
at the time that he was so ill
because of this boy, the Carbuncle.
It would have been well for the kingdom
of Judah if he had gone home to
heaven at that time.
But on the other hand, the line then
would have been broken.
And God, may I put it this way
without seeming to be irreverent, and will you
not misunderstand, God took the risk of allowing
Hezekiah's life to be prolonged, and a son
to be born, knowing full well that that
son would become the wickedest king that ever
sat upon the throne of Judah.
He tried to undo everything that his father
had done.
Hezekiah had destroyed the altars of idolatry, had
swept the land clear of idols.
Manasseh brought in more forms of idolatry than
is ever known before, and he went to
spiritist mediums and filled the land with those
who professed to be able to talk with
the dead, and so on.
And he brought down the indignation of God
upon Judah because of the corruption and sins
committed.
Yet, isn't it wonderful to think of the
mercy of God?
At last an old man, some fifty years
of age, and almost facing eternity, God brought
that godless king to repentance.
Manasseh broke down, confessed the sins of a
long ungodly life, undertook again to try to
cleanse the land from its idols, tried to
bring about a reformation that was too late.
He did his part so far as he
could, but it was too late to recover
the people.
His son Amon went right on in the
sins of the father.
But in the next generation, God came in
in wondrous grace again and raised up another
son of David, King Josiah, who honored the
Lord from his very youth and was the
means of bringing about a great revival in
Judah.
Well, sometime after this, that is, after the
raising up of King Hezekiah from the dead,
then you notice how God used means for
that.
Sometimes we're told by certain people that God
is the healer and we must never use
any kind of remedy, medicines or anything.
Now, I believe in the healing power of
God, and I'm not ashamed to say, and
I tell people that, that I'm praying earnestly
that God will heal my eyes, and if
he does, I'll give him the glory openly
for healing my eyes without my having to
take time off to go through an operation
for it.
But I'm not neglectful of remedies.
I'm using certain remedies which already I realize
have begun to help me.
I can do today what I couldn't do
just five days ago.
When I stood up here five days ago,
about the only people whom I could see
were those in the front row.
Today I can see you're back to the
fifth row, so you better behave that way.
But I'm using remedies, and yet I'm asking
the Lord to do the work.
God gave the remedy, and God works through
remedies, and the Lord Jesus said, they that
are whole need not a physician, but they
that are sick.
Well, supply the predicate, they that are sick
need a physician.
They that are sick do need a physician.
The Lord said that.
You remember that story of the old, the
man who got up in a meeting once,
and he said, my friends, the Lord is
my physician, but I don't need any other
doctor.
And the little old Scotch lady sitting in
the front seat and noticing the gold in
his teeth, looked up and said, aye, but
who's your dentist?
You see, when I get the redemption of
my body, when I get the redemption of
my body, which I shall have at the
coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, I won't
need a dentist any more than I need
a doctor.
I'll have a perfect body in every particular.
Now I need the dentist, and I need
the doctor.
And so when Isaiah sent the word that
the Lord was going to raise up Hezekiah,
he didn't just say to him, now you
claim it by faith and jump off the
bed and say you're healed.
But he said, make a poultice of figs
and put it upon the boil.
And if you ever had anything like that,
and tried a poultice of figs, you know
how it can draw.
It's one of the very best remedies for
pulling the filth out of the boil.
And so God used that remedy for the
healing of the king.
Well, the word of this healing got a
way over to Madison.
And they learned there of the wonder done
in the land, of the going back of
the dial of Ahaz, of the shadow on
the dial of Ahaz.
And so we're told in the last chapter
of this section that there came ambassadors from
the king of Babylon.
And they came, you know, with a smile.
They came with outstretched hands.
They came in a friendly way.
And they came bringing a letter and a
present from the king of Babylon.
And who was the king of Babylon?
Well, we've already seen he was Satan's direct
representative here on the earth.
Just as the king on the throne of
David was God's representative, so the king of
Babylon was Satan's representative.
And the day was to come when all
the power of Babylon would be brought against
Judah.
But this time, you see, they come in
this insinuating way.
How characteristic that is of the devil.
He doesn't always come against every one of
us as a roaring lion.
He's more likely to come, first of all,
as an angel of light.
And so these ambassadors came from the king
of Babylon.
And they came bringing a letter.
And a present was the letter.
And what happened?
Oh, as a coward, he's like, shut up.
I think he says to himself, my, this
is interesting.
The king of Babylon, he recognizes what an
important person I am.
See the nice letter he sent.
I think he goes into his wife and
he says, my dear, would you look at
that?
Why?
Because that's from the king of Babylon.
And look at the beautiful text.
Aren't these things love?
As you know, they blinded his eyes to
the true nature of the ambassadors from Babylon.
When he got the letter of blasphemy, he
spread it out before the Lord.
When he got the letter and the present,
he chuckled over it and said, this is
wonderful.
And he wasn't on his guard.
And so then he called the ambassadors of
Babylon.
He says, I want to show you what
I've got here.
And I think he took real pride in
going about this with it all.
Isn't this wonderful?
And they looked at it and they gasped,
oh my, that's great.
And in their hearts they're saying, someday we'll
get it all ourselves.
And he went all through the palace showing
them all these things, you know, gloating over
his treasures.
And he didn't realize what a fool he
was making of himself.
I was reminded of the time when St.
Thomas Aquinas, the great Roman Catholic theologian, and
I think you'll see St. Thomas in heaven
even though he wasn't Roman Catholic.
But St. Thomas Aquinas came to see the
Pope of his day.
And you know, the Pope did just the
very thing Hezekiah did.
He took St. Thomas all through the papal
palace and he showed him the paintings and
he showed him the tapestries and he showed
him the treasures and the magnificent furniture.
And he took him into his treasury and
he opened up great trunks and showed him
trunks full of silver and gold and of
costly pearls and gems of all kinds.
And St. Thomas with his bare feet and
his shaggy robes was there looking on.
And the Pope turned to him and he
said, you see Thomas, we can't say today
as the first Pope said, silver and gold
have our number.
Thomas said, no, neither can you say as
he said, but in the name of Jesus
Christ rise up and walk.
There's a rebuke to the man who had
just gathered together all this wealth and was
gloating over it, but he only had a
religion without power.
Well, poor Hezekiah, he's literally carried away, you
see, by the articulation of these men.
He shows them everything that's in the house.
And then he sends them away.
He just loads it down with presents back
to their own land.
And a little later, I think there's a
knock at the door.
Somebody comes in and says to the King,
Your Majesty, Isaiah the Pope.
Oh, yes.
I think you've got a little bit of
it.
And in comes the old man.
And he says to him, see you've been
having visitors.
He said, who were they?
Well, it was an ambushage from the King
of Babylon.
Look what they've given me.
Oh, my, they brought me a letter and
they brought me all these things.
And what did they see in your house?
Oh, they've seen everything.
I just took them through the whole thing.
You haven't seen it.
I apologize, you know, as they saw the
wonderful things I have here.
I just showed them that.
You just showed them that.
Well, I've got a message from the Lord
for you.
The day is coming when everything that's in
your house will be carried away to Babylon.
You've just been exposing your own weakness.
Everything will be carried away to Babylon.
And then he went on to tell him
of the judgments that were coming in Judah
through that very people.
Oh, the old man said, I don't know
what to say.
But he finally says, well, bless the Lord.
Anyway, it won't come in my lifetime.
It's better him because he's seen some good
in him.
And it was coming after days.
It's kind of a case of after us
today.
And so Hezekiah just accepted it with the
best grace that he could.
But what a lesson there is in it
for us today.
I repeat, it's so easy.
If a letter of blasphemy comes, it's spread
about before the Lord.
On the other hand, we're so apt to
be deceived and misled.
If it's a letter with a prayer.
You know, you're taking connection with the work
of the Lord.
So often all kinds of dates are offered
to preachers in order to get them to
fall in with certain combinations and certain systems
and things and all that kind of thing.
And men who can stand against the most
violent opposition to the truths of God's word
have often succumbed to flackery and to the
offer of place and power if they would
only fall in with existing conditions.
How we need to remember that we can
trust our own judgment.
We need to depend fully and wholly upon
God.
And it's just as important to refer that
letter that offers you a church with a
salary of five to ten thousand dollars a
year for the Lord as it is to
refer that matter as to whether you'll go
to that little country place and preach where
perhaps you'll get fifty dollars a week and
a few dozen eggs and a couple of
chickens from the farmers around.
The thing is to lay everything before the
Lord and let him guide and direct.
The Lord Jesus says, I'm he that openeth
and no man shutteth and shutteth and no
man openeth.
Well this brings us then to the close
of the first part of the book of
Isaiah.
And so next week we go in for
the last part which deals in a very
wonderful way with the glory of the coming
kingdom.
Now we turn to the book of Isaiah
again and today we begin to study the
second part of this book.
Actually in a sense the third part because
we've already considered the first part of the
book of Isaiah divided into two.
One the prophetic and the other historical.
But now we take up the last chapters
beginning with chapter forty and going on of
course eventually to chapter sixty-six.
I do feel sorry that I can't see
clearly enough to read in public.
It's a strange thing I can sit down
in my room and with the aid of
a glass read.
The minute I stand up here somewhere or
another everything blurs.
I don't know why.
And so I still have to depend on
my wife to do the reading.
You know of course that the critics long
ago decided that the second part, this part
beginning with chapter forty, was not written by
Isaiah the prophet but was written by one
whom they call the great unknown.
They insist that there are some differences in
the literary style, though I don't think that
very much could be said in that scope.
I'm sure that several of the chapters in
the first part rise to the same high
poetic heights that the chapters of this part
do.
They also object, they also claim that it
could not be the work of a man
who lived in the days of Uzziah Jotham,
Ahaz, and Hezekiah because of the fact that
he speaks definitely of Cyrus, King Cyrus, through
whom the remnant of Israel were to be
restored to Jerusalem, calls him even by name.
And these critics, not believing in the spirit
of prophecy, insist that therefore the man who
wrote this part of the book must have
lived after the days of Cyrus and after
the return to the land.
Well, they've never been able to prove their
contention, and our Lord himself definitely refers to
this portion of the book and speaks of
it as the work of Isaiah the prophet.
And the Holy Spirit says that when he
entered into the synagogue of Nazareth, it was
delivered unto him the book of Isaiah to
read, and it quotes from this part of
the book.
Of course, on the other hand, one has
to recognize the fact that even some very
able Christian teachers have accepted the idea that
it may be that this last part of
the book was written by someone whose name
has now been lost.
I was rather surprised years ago, when I
used to denominate everybody a heretic who believed
that, to find that Bishop Handley Mao believed
it, and that Sir Robert Anderson of all
persons believed that Isaiah had been written by
two different people.
I don't know how they came to that
conclusion in the light of our Lord's words,
as I mentioned in the Gospels, but they
did, of course, it would be heresy to
call Sir Robert Anderson a heretic.
And Bishop Mao was his great tutor, and
of course we wouldn't think of Bishop Mao
as a heretic.
There are some things on which good men
differ, and we need to remember that.
The only men who are absolutely sure of
everything, as a rule, are first-year Bible
Institute men.
They know everything.
But from that on, of course, people have
to realize that there are some things that
may still be debatable, and therefore that we
must be rather slow in forming judgments of
people who may differ with us.
Personally, I have no question that the second
part of this book was written by the
same Isaiah as the one who wrote the
first part.
I remember years ago hearing Dr. Lyman Abbott,
who was one of the most pronounced of
the higher critics in the old days, before
we used the term modernist, I heard him
lecturing to a group of theological students in
Berkeley, California.
And while he took a very definite stand
in favor of higher criticism, he was warning
these young men about going into the pulpit
and talking about the assured results of higher
criticism.
I remember his saying about these words that,
I suppose, young gentlemen, that I am as
familiar with the higher criticism as any man
in America.
And I can say to you that the
only thing that we are absolutely assured of
is that the Pentateuch, for instance, was written
by Moses, or by some other man named
Moses.
And so we may be very sure that
the entire book of Isaiah was written by
Isaiah, or by some other man named Isaiah.
And with that, we don't need to raise
any question in that regard.
Anyone who has questions, I think, will find
the matter pretty fully gone into in William
Kelly's book on Isaiah, and doubtless in many
others that perhaps I'm not familiar with.
Now, this great section, beginning with chapter 40,
divides into three parts.
In chapters 40 to 48, we have Jehovah's
controversy with Israel because of idolatry, and that
section ends with the words, "...there is no
peace, saith Jehovah, to the wicked."
All throughout that section, through those nine chapters,
Jehovah is put in contrast with the idols
to which many of the people had turned.
And the conclusion is, there's no peace, saith
Jehovah, to the wicked.
Then, beginning with chapter 29, and going on
through chapter...
I don't know, it's just slipped my mind...
58 or 57?
57, thank you.
I've got a good pair of eyes to
help me out.
The Lord is awful good to a blind
old man.
From chapter 49 to 57, we have Jehovah's
controversy with Israel concerning their attitude toward the
Messiah.
That's looking a way on into the future,
and God is speaking to them in regard
to the coming of Messiah and their rejection
of him.
And that ends with the words, "...there is
no peace, saith my God, to the wicked."
So you see, there's no peace...
There's no peace for the one who puts
anything else in the place of the one
proven living God.
And there's no peace for the one who
rejects the Savior that God has provided.
Now, if I can, this morning and this
afternoon, I would like to cover chapters 40
through 48.
And perhaps this morning, chapters 40 through 44.
The section commences with the words, "...comfort ye
my people."
"...Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem.
Tell her that her warfare is accomplished.
She has received at the Lord's hand double
for all her sins."
God is going to comfort people, but in
comforting people, you find out as you go
on that he has to bring before them
very definitely their true condition in his sight.
And then he shows them the remedy that
he has for that condition.
So, there's quite a little in the first
part of this chapter that may not sound
very comforting.
And yet, God has to begin that way.
He wounds that he may heal.
He kills that he may make alive.
So, today, if God is going to give
people the comfort of the knowledge of forgiveness
of sins and of the salvation of the
soul, he begins by stressing and bringing before
people their utterly lost condition, their helplessness, their
sinfulness, thus leading them to take their true
place before God in repentance as confessing and
acknowledging their iniquities.
He looks forward here to the time, however,
when Israel's iniquities will all be put away.
He says, "...speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and
tell her that her warfare, her long conflict,
is accomplished, and God, for God the Lord,
hath returned unto her double for all her
sins."
Now, that doesn't mean that, in the end,
Israel will have been punished twice as much
as her sins deserve.
The Lord has rewarded double for all her
sins.
God will never...
Elijah is very clear about that in speaking
to Job, you remember, where he says that
God will not lay...