This is, of course, a profound acknowledgment of man's free will. It is implied that men's conduct must remain an uncertain thing, and that in calling men God cannot adventure upon greater certainty than is implied in the trust of affection. If one asks, What, then, about God's foreknowledge, who alone knoweth the end of a thing from the beginning, and His sovereign grace, who chooseth whom He will? are you not logically bound to these?—then it can only be asked in return, Is it not better to be without logic for a little, if at the expense of it we obtain so true, so deep a glimpse into God's heart as this simple verse affords us? Which is better for us to know—that God is Wisdom which knows all, or Love that dares and ventures all? Surely, that God is Love which dares and ventures all with the worst, with the most hopeless of us. This is what makes this single verse of Scripture more powerful to move the heart than all creeds and catechisms. For where these speak of sovereign will, and often mock our affections with the bare and heavy (if legitimate) sceptre they sway, this calls forth our love, honour and obedience by the heart it betrays in God. Of what unsuspicious trust, of what chivalrous adventure of love, of what fatherly confidence, does it speak! What a religion is this of ours in the power of which a man may every morning rise and feel himself thrilled by the thought that God trusts him enough to work with His will for the day; in the power of which a man may look round and see the sordid, hopeless human life about him glorified by the truth, that for the salvation of such God did adventure Himself in a love that laid itself down in death. The attraction and power of such a religion can never die. Requiring no painful thought to argue it into reality, it leaps to light before the natural affection of man's heart; it takes his instincts immediately captive; it gives him a conscience, an honour and an obligation. No wonder that our prophet, having such a belief, should once more identify himself with the people, and adventure himself with the weight of their sin before God.
The other point of the prayer is the Fatherhood of God, concerning which all that is needful to say here is that the prophet, true to the rest of Old Testament teaching on the subject, applies it only to God's relation to the nation as a whole. In the Old Testament no one is called the son of God except Israel as a people, or some individual representative and head of Israel. And even of such the term was seldom employed. This was not because the Hebrew was without temptation to imagine his physical descent from the gods, for neighbouring nations indulged in such dreams for themselves and their heroes; nor because he was without appreciation of the intellectual kinship between the human and the Divine, for he knew that in the beginning God had said, Let us make man in our own image. But the same feeling prevailed with him in regard to this idea, as we have seen prevailed in regard to the kindred idea of God as the husband of His people.[288] The prophets were anxious to emphasize that it was a moral relation,—a moral relation, and one initiated from God's side by certain historical acts of His free, selecting, redeeming and adopting love. Israel was not God's son till God had evidently called and redeemed him. Look at how our prophet uses the word Father, and to what he makes it equivalent. The first time it is equivalent to Redeemer: Thou, O Lord, art our Father; our Redeemer from old is Thy name (lxiii. 16b). The second time it is illustrated by the work of the potter: But now, O Lord, Thou art our Father; we are the clay, and Thou our potter; and we are all the work of Thy hand (lxiv. 8). Could it be made plainer in what sense the Bible defines this relation between God and man? It is not a physical, nor is it an intellectual relation. The assurance and the virtue of it do not come to men with their blood or with the birth of their intellect, but in the course of moral experience, with the sense that God claims them from sin and from the world for Himself; with the gift of a calling and a destiny; with the formation of character, the perfecting of obedience, the growth in His knowledge and His grace. And because it is a moral relation time is needed to realise it, and only after long patience and effort may it be unhesitatingly claimed. And that is why Israel was so long in claiming it, and why the clearest, most undoubting cries to God the Father, which rise from the Greek in the earliest period of his history, reach our ears from Jewish lips only near the end of their long progress, only (as we see from our prayer) in a time of trial and affliction.
We have a New Testament echo of this Old Testament belief in the Fatherhood of God, as a moral and not a national relation, in Paul's writings, who in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians (vi. 17, 18) urges thus: Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, and will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be My sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.
On these grounds, then,—that God in His great love had already adventured Himself with this whole people, and already by historical acts of election and redemption proved Himself the Father of the nation as a whole,—does our prophet plead with Him to save them all again. The answer to this pleading he gets in ch. lxv.
II. God's Answer to the Prophet's Intercession (ch. lxv.).
God's answer to his prophet's intercession is twofold. First, He says that He has already all this time been trying them with love, meeting them with salvation; but they have not turned to Him. The prophet has asked, Where is Thy zeal? the yearning of Thy bowels and Thy compassions are restrained towards me. Thou hast hid Thy face far from us. Wilt Thou refrain Thyself for these things, O Jehovah? wilt Thou hold Thy peace and afflict us very sore. And now, in the beginning of ch. lxv., Jehovah answers, not with that confusion of tenses and irrelevancy of words with which the English version makes Him speak; but suitably, relevantly and convincingly. I have been to be inquired of those who asked not for Me. I have been to be found of them that sought Me not. I have been saying, I am here, I am here, to a nation that did not call on My name. I have stretched out My hands all the day to a people turning away, who walk in a way that is not good, after their own thoughts; a people that have been provoking Me to My face continually,—and then He details their idolatry. This, then, is the answer of the Lord to the prophet's appeal. "In this I have not all power. It is wrong to talk of Me as the potter and of man as the clay, as if all the active share in salvation lay with Me. Man is free,—free to withhold himself from My urgent affection; free to turn from My outstretched hands; free to choose before Me the abomination of idolatry. And this the mass of Israel have done, clinging, fanatical and self-satisfied, to their unclean and morbid imaginations of the Divine, all the time that My great prophecy by you has been appealing to them." This is a sufficient answer to the prophet's prayer. Love is not omnipotent; if men disregard so open an appeal of the Love of God, they are hopeless; nothing else can save them. The sin against such love is like the sin against the Holy Ghost, of which our Lord speaks so hopelessly. Even God cannot help the despisers and abusers of Grace.
The rest of God's answer to His prophet's intercession emphasizes that the nation shall be saved for the sake of a faithful remnant in it (vv. 8-10). But the idolaters shall perish (vv. 11, 12). They cannot possibly expect the same fare, the same experience, the same fate, as God's faithful servants (vv. 13-15). But those who are true and faithful Israelites, surviving and experiencing the promised salvation, shall find that God is true, and shall acknowledge Him as the God of Amen, because the former troubles are forgotten—those felt so keenly in the prophet's prayer in ch. lxiv.—and because they are hid from Mine eyes. The rest of the answer describes a state of serenity and happiness wherein there shall be no premature death, nor loss of property, nor vain labour, nor miscarriage, nor disappointment of prayer nor delay in its answer, nor strife between man and the beasts, nor any hurt or harm in Jehovah's Holy Mountain. Truly a prospect worthy of being named as the prophet names it, a new heaven and a new earth!
Ch. lxv. is thus closely connected, both by circumstance and logic, with the long prayer which precedes it. The tendency of recent criticism has been to deny this connection, especially on the line of circumstance. Ch. lxv. does not, it is argued, reflect the Babylonish captivity as ch. lxiii. 7-lxiv. so clearly does; but, on the contrary, "while some passages presuppose the Exile as past, others refer to circumstances characteristic of Jewish life in Canaan."[289] But this view is only possible through straining some features of the chapter adaptable either to Palestine or Babylon, and overlooking others which are obviously Babylonian. Sacrificing in gardens and burning incense on tiles were practices pursued in Jerusalem before the Exile, but the latter was introduced there from Babylon, and the former was universal in heathendom. The practices in ver. 5 are never attributed to the people before the Exile, were all possible in Babylonia, and some we know to have been actual there.[290] The other charge of idolatry in ver. 11 "suits Babylonia," Cheyne admits, "as well as (probably) Palestine."[291] But what seems decisive for the exilic origin of ch. lxv. is that the possession of Judah and Zion by the seed of Jacob is still implied as future (ver. 9). Moreover the holy land is alluded to by the name common among the exiles in flat Mesopotamia, My mountains, and in contrast with the idolatry of which the present generation is guilty the idolatry of their fathers is characterised as having been upon the mountains and upon the hills, and again the people is charged with forgetting My holy mountain, a phrase reminiscent of Psalm cxxxvii., ver. 4, and more appropriate to a time of exile, than when the people were gathered about Zion. All these resemblances in circumstance corroborate the strong logical connection which we have found between ch. lxiv. and ch. lxv., and leave us no reason for taking the latter away from the main author of "Second Isaiah," though he may have worked up into it recollections and remains of an older time.
III. The Last Judgement (ch. lxvi.).