II. An assertion of His Divinity. “This is our God,”—not merely a prophet, a priest, a king, chosen by Jehovah from among His people, and commissioned to give laws and statutes, as Moses was, or to assert Jehovah’s authority and punish idolatry, as Elijah was, or to denounce His wrath against an apostate people and at the same time to foreshadow a great deliverance to come, as Isaiah was himself, or Jeremiah or any other of those holy men who spake in old times by the Holy Ghost; but this is our God, this is Emmanuel—God with us—God manifest in the flesh.
III. A declaration of His atoning work. How vast that work He took on Himself to execute,—the reconciliation in His own person of sinful man to an offended God, the overthrow of the kingdom of Satan, and the abolition of death! No man could have performed it (Ps. xlix. 7). Could any of the angels, then, have taken in hand this enterprise? Beyond the power, above the conception of any being of limited goodness, knowledge and power, it could only be accomplished by the Divine Son of God. It was God’s work, devised and executed by Omnipotence.
IV. A recognition of the second coming of Christ. We are admonished by the Church that there is a Second Coming of Christ, for which the Church is waiting, and for which we, with every member of the Church, ought to be looking with earnest and anxious expectation. Is our language, “How long, O Lord?” Our answer is, How long the final triumph of the Saviour may be deferred, how long a period may elapse before the world is ripe for judgment, is one of those secrets which God has reserved to Himself (Acts i. 7). The end of all things, it may be not in the literal sense of the word, at hand, is every year and every day and every moment drawing nearer to each of us. We are all in silent but unceasing movement towards the judgment-hall of Christ. In this point of view, the moment of our death may be regarded as placing us at once before His awful tribunal, for the space between the two, as it affects our eternal destination, will be to us as nothing. When the judgment is set, the books opened, we shall suddenly stand before the Judge, precisely in that state of preparation in which we were found at the moment of our departure out of life. Those who have lived as children of God, as servants of Jesus Christ, under the solemn, yet not fearful, expectation of that day, will then be able to lift up their heads and raise the song of joyful recognition.
Application.—If ever there was a great practical truth, this is one. If we do not wait for the great day of the Lord in such a spirit of carefulness and circumspection as to refer to it all our actions, words, and thoughts, then it is perfectly certain that we shall be surprised at its coming and be taken utterly unprepared. It will come on us as a thief in the night, and we shall sink into everlasting perdition; not for the want of means and opportunities of being saved, but for want of common prudence and forethought in the most momentous of all concerns. What, then is the conclusion? Live like men that are waiting for their Lord, then when He arrives, He may be welcomed. Accustom yourselves to His presence, in His sanctuary, at His table, in His word, in secret communings with Him in the temple of a purified heart. So when this solemn day shall have come the glad response may be, “Lo, this is our God, we have waited for Him; He will come and save us!”—C. J. Blomfield, D.D.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] It was no ordinary day that saw the discomfiture of the Assyrian host before the walls of Jerusalem. We can scarcely understand the terror and dismay with which a religious Jew must have watched the growth of those mighty Oriental despotisms which, rising one after the other in the valley of the Euphrates and of the Tigris, aspired to nothing less than the conquest of the known world. The victory of a conqueror like Sennacherib meant the extinction of national life and of personal liberty in the conquered people; it meant often enough violent transportation from their homes, separation from their families, with all the degrading and penal accompaniments of complete subjugation. It meant this to the conquered pagan cities; for Jerusalem it meant this and more. The knowledge and worship of God, by institutions of Divine appointment, maintained only in that little corner of the wide world, were linked on to the fortunes of the Jewish state, and in the victory of Sennacherib would be involved not merely political humiliation, but religious darkness. When, then, his armies advanced across the continent again and again, making of a city a heap, and of a fenced city a ruin, and at last appeared before Jerusalem, when the blast of the terrible men was as a storm against the wall, there was natural dismay in every religious and patriotic soul. It seemed as though a veil or covering, like that which was spread over the holy things in the Jewish ritual, was being spread more and more completely over all nations at each step of the Assyrian monarch’s advance, and in those hours of darkness all true-hearted men in Jerusalem waited for God. He had delivered them from Egyptian slavery; He had given them the realm of David and Solomon. He who had done so much for them would not desert them now. In His own way He would rebuke this insolent enemy of his truth and His people, and this passionate longing for His intervention quickened the eye and welled the heart of Jerusalem when at last it came. The destruction of Sennacherib’s host was one of those supreme moments in the history of a people which can never be lived over again by posterity. The sense of deliverance was proportioned to the agony which had preceded it. To Isaiah and his contemporaries it seemed as though a canopy of thick darkness was lifted from the face of the world, as though the recollections of slaughter and of death were entirely swallowed up in the absorbing sense of deliverance, as though the tears of the city had been wiped away and the rebuke of God’s people was taken from earth, and therefore from the heart of Israel there burst forth a welcome proportioned to the anxious longing that had preceded it, “Lo, this is our God; we have waited for Him; He will save us.”—Liddon.
The Protecting Hand.
xxv. 10. For in this mountain shall the hand of the Lord rest.
“Rest!” As a father’s hand on the head of his first-born, blessing and protecting his child. That mountain is impregnable which rests under the shadow of God’s hand.
I. Of every enterprise we should ask, “Is it right?” If wickedness be in “the mountain,” God’s protecting hand will not rest upon it. A just cause creates a good conscience, and hence inspires strength. It is only the just man who feels that God “teaches his hands to war and his fingers to fight, so that a bow of steel is broken by his arms.” “The righteous is bold as a lion.” The good man can patiently wait and confidently expect God’s blessing (James v. 7).