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| H.L. Ellison” Old Testament prophets IntraText CT - Text |
The universal belief in the Near East was that a god and his people were inextricably bound together. The god (or gods) needed his people as much as they needed him, for he needed the sacrifices they brought him — this view is violently attacked in Ps. 50:7-13. The conquest of his people meant the conquest of their god by the god of the conqueror, and he was bound to fade away into impotence, starved as he was by the ending of his sacrifices.
Unless we grasp that this view was shared by a large majority in Israel, we shall not understand the shock of the Babylonian exile and the peculiar difficulties that Jeremiah and Ezekiel had to face.
Isaiah meets the resultant spiritual despondency with two tremendous revelations of God, 40:1-11 and 40:12-31. The former is a message of comfort in which the main source of comfort is the very weakness of man (ver. 6ff). The deliverance is to be the work of God alone, and the assurance of it is based on God’s Word.
Fancy interpretations have been discovered for 40:2b, but they can all be ignored. For anyone making a dispassionate comparison of national guilt and punishment in Israel and the nations, it would have seemed that Israel had suffered double in proportion to the others. “Quite so,” says the prophet. God’s “firstborn” may expect double, whether blessing or punishment (cf. 61:7; Jer. 16:18). The fact of the double punishment is proof that Israel has not been cast off, but is still God’s firstborn!
The second is a hymn (40:12-31) which is one of the most wonderful descriptions of God’s power ever penned. The prophet’s vision of His greatness, surely not derived from human speculation, is seen even more strikingly when we consider man’s best concepts of God (ver. 18ff). A similar gulf exists between the Absolute of modern philosophic and liberal thought and Him who has been revealed as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. In the light of God’s greatness, the despondency of the exiles (ver. 27) is absurd.