Religious Studies, Sketches and Poems

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

In this Psalm, written more than a thousand years before he came into the world, our Lord beheld ever before him the scenes of his own crucifixion; he could see the heartless stare of idle, malignant curiosity around his cross; he could hear the very words of the taunts and revilings, and a part of the language of this Psalm was among his last utterances. While the shadows of the great darkness were gathering around his cross he cried, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" It would seem as if the words so bitterly fulfilled passed through his mind, as one by one the agonies and indignities followed each other, till at last he bowed his head and said, "It is finished."

As time rolled on, this mingled chant of triumph and of suffering swelled clearer and plainer. In the grand soul of Isaiah, the Messiah and his kingdom were ever the outcome of every event that suggested itself. When the kingdom of Judah was threatened by foreign invasion, the prophet breaks out with the promise of a Deliverer:—

"Behold, the Lord himself shall give you a sign. Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bring forth a son and shall call his name Immanuel [God with us]."

Again he bursts forth as if he beheld the triumph as a present reality:—

"Unto us a child is born
Unto us a son is given.
The government shall be upon his shoulders.
His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor,
Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of his government and of peace there shall be no end,
Upon the throne of David and his kingdom,
To establish it with justice from henceforth and forever.
The zeal of the Lord of Hosts will perform this."

Again, a few chapters further on, he sings:—

"There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse
A Branch shall grow out of his roots.
The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him;
The spirit of wisdom and understanding,
The spirit of counsel and might,
The spirit of knowledge, and fear of the Lord.
With righteousness shall he judge the poor,
And reprove with equity for the meek of the earth."

Then follow vivid pictures of a golden age on earth, beneath his sway, when all enmities and ferocities even of the inferior animals shall cease, and universal love and joy pervade the earth.

In the fifty-third of Isaiah we have again the sable thread of humiliation and sorrow; the Messiah is to be "despised and rejected of men;" his nation "hide their faces from him;" he "bears their griefs, and carries their sorrows," is "wounded for their transgressions," is "brought as a lamb to the slaughter," is "dumb before his accusers," is "taken from prison to judgment," is "cut off out of the land of the living," "makes his grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death," and thence is "raised again to an endless kingdom."

Thus far the tide of prophecy had rolled; thus distinct and luminous had grown the conception of a future suffering, victorious Lord and leader, when the Jewish nation, for its sins and unfaithfulness, was suffered to go to wreck. The temple was destroyed and the nation swept into captivity in a foreign land.