Beautiful Visions Exchanged for Realities.
xxxv. 7. And the parched ground shall become a pool.
Read for “parched ground” mirage,[1] and it suggests the inquiry, what would be the feelings of a wearied traveller if the mirage he was vainly pursuing should suddenly become a pool? It would be new life to him; if the vision became a reality, it would be enough. But it is not only the traveller in southern deserts beneath the burning sky that sees visions of beauty floating before his gaze. Countless thousands thirst for something better and nobler than they have. So it has been from the beginning; and 2500 years ago the prophet declared that in the days of the Messiah the soul’s desires should be satisfied, that that which had been only a vision should become a reality, the mirage should become a pool.
I. Past prediction has become actual fact: in Christ ideal visions have become realities.
1. In bygone days some nobler souls dreamed dreams of a perfect human character. The “Phædo” of Plato is an illustration of this. But the dream remained a dream until Jesus of Nazareth lived among men. In Him all excellences that were scattered were localised, focused, centralised; and in Him we see of what nobleness our nature is capable. 2. The yearning of some is for truth, pure truth, stripped of all human accretions and confusions. How earnestly search has been made for it! In this search philosophy and theology have been traversed and ransacked. But it is to be found only in Christ. He Himself declared, not vainly, “I am the truth.” In Him are “hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” 3. In others, conscience is the most active faculty. Sin is to them a burden and a torment. They yearn for peace of conscience. No suffering seems to them too great if this can be attained. But they never find it until they seek it in Christ. Coming to Him, they are filled with “the peace of God, which passeth all understanding.” The vision has become a reality; the reality goes beyond the vision. 4. There are others led on by visions of a strong virtue and a noble life. They struggle against their passions and the allurements of the world. But alas! how numerous and lamentable are their defects! They never learn the secret of victory until they come to Christ; but when they have done this, presently they find that with truth they can say, “I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me.” 5. Happiness. Who has not had visions of it? Who has not sought it? But, alas! the confession to which we are all brought is that of Solomon: “Vanity of vanities! all is vanity!” And yet even this thirst is satisfied in Christ—profoundly, exultantly satisfied. In Him we find a happiness that breaks forth in song, and triumphs over the pains and sorrows of this mortal life. The mirage has become a pool.
II. Actual fact is present prediction; in Christ ideal vision will become realities. The soul still thirsts—1. For perfect purity; 2. For perfect rest from the carking cares of earth, and infinite calm in Jesus’ love; 3. For the perfect communion of saints. In vision John saw all this in the new Jerusalem; and to all who are Christ’s indeed they shall all become realities (1 Cor. ii. 9).
1. Let those to whom the prediction of our text has been fulfilled tell the glad news to others. 2. All for those who have had these visions all their lives, but up to this moment have been utterly disappointed, (1) let them learn from the experience of others, who tell them they never knew truth and happiness until they sought them in Christ; (2) let them listen to the voice of rest; (3) let them be sure that until they do come to Christ, the parched ground will never become a pool. The soul needs more than the vision, however bright and beautiful it may be; it needs the reality, and the reality can be found only in Christ.—Clement Clemance, D.D.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The word sharab, “parched ground,” A.V., more exactly “looming sand-waste,” refers to the mirage, of which it is the Arabic name. The vain shadows of the world, which deceive and never satisfy, are to be replaced by the enduring joys of the kingdom of God.—Birks.
Some years ago we were riding over a desert in intense and almost distressing heat. We could but lie still and endure it. We turned our eyes to the south, and, lo! in the horizon there suddenly appeared a beautiful lake, which appeared studded with islands of palms! But it was only appearance, there was no water; and had we been perishing from thirst, the beautiful vision would but have mocked our need.—Clemance.
No one can imagine, without actual experience, the delight and eager expectation (when the vision first is seen), or the intense and bitter disappointment which the appearance of a mirage occasions to travellers, specially when their supply of water is spent.
“Still the same burning sun! No cloud in heaven!
The hot air quivers, and the sultry mist
Floats o’er the desert, with a show
Of distant waters mocking their distress.”—Kitto.
The word sharab, here rendered “parched ground,” is the same that in Isaiah xlix. 10 is translated heat: “They shall hunger no more, they shall thirst no more; the sharab, nor the sun, shall never smite them more.”
The primary sense of sharab, giving the key to both applications, is the dazzling, vibrating, noonday heat. Thence it is here taken as a name for its effect, of the mirage in the desert caused by the intense meridian rarefaction and refraction. It is a well-known delusive appearance, arising from the motions of the heated atmosphere, taking great varieties of form, but especially suggesting pictures of grove and fountain scenery—lakes, rivers, green valleys, waving trees, cool and sequestered shades, with every image most grateful to the imagination of the wearied traveller. These often seem so vivid as to be mistaken for realities.
The very common use of the same word (sarab) by the Arabian poets, in this mirage sense, makes certain the real meaning here. It gives it, too, a glorious significance of which our translation, though etymologically correct, and, to a certain extent, quite plausible, falls far short. It should be rendered: “The mirage shall become a lake (a real lake, not a mere mockery of one), and the thirsty land springs of water.” For the expressive meaning of the word rendered “thirsty-land,” see Deut. viii. 15—“that great and terrible wilderness.” So Gesenius, very happily: Et desertum aquœ speciem referens commutabitur in lacum—in veram aquam. (And the desert having the appearance of water shall be changed into a lake—into true water.)
The spiritual idea which the passage, thus interpreted, suggests is most striking, whilst at the same time commending itself as having a solid basis, and far removed from the character of an arbitrary sentimentalism. It has a substantial philological support, and comes so directly from the peculiar word employed, that we are compelled to regard it as entering into the prophet’s conception.
The primary reference is to the exiles returning from captivity, passing through the land of drought, the valley of Baca (Ps. lxxxiv. 6), and refreshing themselves at “the wells of salvation;” but there is a glow and a glory in the language, as in so many other parts of the Scriptures, that carries it far beyond this, though the Rationalist, if he chooses, may rest in the lower sense, and maintain it on undeniable exegetical grounds. The spiritually-minded reader finds something more—something which alone comes up to the splendour of the style, and without which the hyperbole, beautiful as it is, would seem tumid and extravagant. It is a mounting sense, as we may call it, rather than a “double” or enigmatical representation. The lower is the basis, undoubtedly, but we cannot rest in it. As elsewhere, in the Prophets and in the Psalms, the earthly salvation is described in terms and figures powerfully suggestive of higher spiritual realities. The exegesis, therefore, that comes from this is not arbitrary. To the mind in spiritual harmony, it seems to be the only one that truly satisfies the emotional glow and fervour of the language. The mirage of this world in the highest reality it can claim—still more the mirage our “vain imaginations” create in it—is worse than the dry desert itself; its delusions, when discovered, produce more pain; the disappointment intensifies the thirst. Hence the exceeding impressiveness of the prophet’s figure when rightly understood. The unreal shall vanish; truth, substance, eternal reality shall take the place of all that is false. Man shall cease “walking in a vain show” (betselem), an image, a shadow (Ps. xxxix. 6). This mirage of time shall become a fountain of real water, of “living water, springing up to everlasting life.” “With joy shall ye draw water from the wells of salvation” (Isa. xii. 3).
“The shadows are gone, truth has come.” Mohammed seems to have, in some way, caught a spark from the prophetic inspiration, when he represents the righteous saying this, as they lift up their hands in the morning of the resurrection. In the Arabic, as in the Hebrew, the power comes from the graphic mode which both languages possess, in so high a degree, of picturing the future in the present, and even in the past. “Joy and triumph are overtaking them, sorrow and sighing have fled away.” This is not the land of reality. The idea comes down from the pilgrim language of the patriarchs, who so pathetically declared themselves to be but “travellers and sojourners upon the earth.” They were looking for “the better country,” the real home, the “city which hath foundations,” firm and everlasting. Something of the same idea, and from the same early source, perhaps, may be traced in the most ancient Arabian poets who lived before the days of Mohammed. From them he most probably borrowed the striking similar figure we find in the Koran (Sura xxiv. 29), entitled “Light.” It has the same word (sharab), and, in other respects is immediately suggestive of the passage in Isaiah: “As for the unbelieving, their works are like the sarab, the mirage of the plain. The thirsty traveller thinks there is water there; but lo, he comes and finds it nothing.“ The latter parts remind us of the description in Job vi. 17, which may be cited, too, as one of the examples of its Arabian imagery. It is a picture of the thirsty traveller sustained by the hope of finding the refreshing wady stream; but instead of the imagined reality, nothing meets the eye but dried-up bed whose waters have vanished, “gone up to tohu,” the formless void, as the Hebrew so graphically expresses it
“What time they shrink deserted of their springs,
As quenched in heat they vanish from their place;
’Tis then their wonted ways are turned aside:
Their streams are lost, gone up in emptiness.
The caravans of Tema look for them;
The companies of Sheba hope in vain;
Confounded are they where they once did trust;
They reach the spot and stand in helpless maze.”
Another very striking passage, where the same word is used, may be found in the Koran (Sura lxxviii. 20): “When the hills are set in motion, and become like the sarab”—the vanishing mirage. It is a description of the day of judgment, when the world will be found to have been a sarab, a departing dream. Or it may represent its exceeding transitoriness, like that other name ajalun, the rolling, hastening, passing world, which the Koran and the early Arabian poets give to this present mundane system as compared with the reality of Paradise. Hence the word sarab becomes a common or proverbial expression, pro re evanida, for anything light, transient, and unsubstantial. There is a beautiful allusion to it in the very ancient poem of Lebid (Moallaka de Lebid, De Sacy’s ed., p. 294). See also the account of the phenomenon as given by Diodorus Siculus, lib. iii. ch. 50. It differs, however, from the picture usually presented by the Arabian poets, in that the appearances are those of animals and wild beasts, rather than of rivers and fountains. The particular kind of phantoms, however, would depend very much on the kind of imagination possessed by the travellers, and the circumstances by which it was excited. It is, in any way, an apt representation of a delusive world, whether in its images of terror or of attraction. That the word is thus frequently used in the Arabic, and that it corresponds well to its ancient Hebrew etymology, is sufficient to warrant us in thus interpreting the idea the prophet so impressively sets forth.—Taylor Lewis.