Isaiah, Week 5, Days 4 & 5: Isaiah 25-26

Day 4   Read Isaiah 25

"Every believing man who is in Christ is as a man sitting down at a perpetual feast. Everyday is, in this sense, a feast day to him. Every day is a day upon which he is to be feeding upon Christ, and to be nourishing his soul with the rich and costly blessings of salvation. Better to have the feeblest faith than to be an unbeliever." -Andrew MacLaren

 1. For what does Isaiah praise God? For doing "wonderful things"(v1), thy counsels of old are "faithful and true" (v1).

 2. What will the Lord do for "all peoples" and where?  Remove the veil.

There will be

None of the other panaceas for the world’s evils even attempt to deal with that “shadow feared of man” that sits at the end of all our paths. Jesus Christ has dealt with it. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)

 Needy man and his moral provision

I. HUMANITY IS MORALLY FAMISHING—CHRISTIANITY HAS PROVISIONS. “A feast of fat things,” etc. The feverish restlessness and the earnest racing after something not yet attained, show the hungry and thirsty state of the soul. Christianity has the provisions, which are—

1. Adequate: “for all people.”
2. Varied: “wines and fat things full of marrow.”
3. Pleasant: “wines on the lees well refined.”

 II. WHERE DOES THE UNVEILING THAT GIVES LIGHT TO THE WORLD COME FROM? My text emphatically repeats, “in this mountain.” The pathetic picture that is implied here, of a dark pall that lies over the whole world, suggests the idea of mourning, but still more emphatically that of obscuration and gloom. The veil prevents vision and shuts out light, and that is the picture of humanity as it presents itself before this prophet—a world of men entangled in the folds of a dark pall that lay over their heads, and swathed them round about, and prevented them from seeing; shut them up in darkness and entangled their feet, so that they stumbled in the gloom. It is a pathetic picture, but it does not go beyond the realities of the case. There is a universal fact of human experience which answers to the figure, and that is sin. That is the black thing whose ebon folds hamper us, and darken us, and shut out the visions of God and blessedness, and all the glorious blue above us. The weak point of all these schemes and methods to which I have referred for helping humanity out of the slough, and making men happier, is that they underestimate the fact of sin. There is only one thing that deals radically with the fact of human transgression; and that is the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, and its result, the inspiration of the Spirit of life that was in Jesus Christ, breathed into us from the throne itself. -A. Maclaren

That the grace of the gospel should be a royal feast for all people; not like that of Ahasuerus, which was intended only to show the grandeur of the master of the feast (Est_1:4); for this is intended to gratify the guests, and therefore, whereas all there was for show, all here is for substance. -M Henry

VII. Because there can be no feast where the greatest enemy is in force, HE SWALLOWS UP DEATH IN VICTORY. (R. Sibbes, D. D.)

 3. What is the destiny of "the proud?"  They will be trodden down (v.10) and their walls laid low (v12).

 Day Five: Read Isaiah 26

 1. How does Isaiah describe the city and its people in verses 1-4?  Those who trust the Lord are at peace.  They are the righteous who walk through the open gates.

Andrew MacLaren woos us to be a part of this future city even today:

It is possible even here and now to have our citizenship in the heavens, and to feel that we belong to a great community beyond the sea of time, though our feet have never trodden its golden pavements, nor our eyes seen its happy glories.

In one aspect, it is ideal, but in truth it is more real than the intrusive and false things of this fleeting present, which call themselves realities. ‘The things which are’ are the things above. The things here are but shows and shadows.

I like this charge to the Church to pursue both individual and collective work:

How can we open or help to open these gates of national strength and saving health? For individual action the answer would be such as this: First, by loving truth and keeping righteousness ourselves; next, by doing all we can to help others to a life of godliness and righteousness; further, by earnest and frequent prayer to Him who gave of old the promise, “I will open to you the two-leaved gates”; and lastly, by the faithful exercise of the privileges of citizens, seeing to it that in the forming of our opinions, in the giving of our votes, in the use of all our influence, not selfish interest, or class interest, or even party interest, but the interests of righteousness and truth be the determining factor. But individual action is not enough. We must combine; we must bring our united force to bear. And here the main reliance must be on the Church of Christ, on which is laid the responsibility of carrying on His great work of salvation. (J. M.Gibson, D. D.)

 2. Contrast that city with the one described in 24:5-6
This city is brought low.  The foot shall tread it down.

3. From verses 7-11, compare the condition of the righteous with that of the wicked.
With regard to the righteous, they wait for the Lord's judgement (v 8), and the Lord weights their path (v 7). Their souls desire God and remember Him (v. 8). The righteous desire and seek Him in the night and early in the day (v.9).  In contrast, even though the wicked has been shown favor (v. 10) he will not deal justly.  The fire of their enemies will devour them (v. 11).

Isa 26:8  ESV In the path of your judgments, O LORD, we wait for you; your name and remembrance are the desire of our soul.

Isaiah 26:12  LORD, thou wilt ordain peace for us: for thou also hast wrought all our works in us.

R. Watson points out that there are different types of peace:

A third reason for gratitude with reference to the peace is, that it has been produced by the signal triumph of a righteous cause. Peace is not always a blessing. In some cases it is only a term for the stillness, the quiet of desolation and death. Peace is often the result of the superiority acquired by the aggressor. The cause of right does not always at once prevail.

We rejoice in peace as the completion of a course of providential dispensations highly conducive to the instruction of the world.  -BI

 4. What promise is found in verses 19-21?  "Thy dead men shall live (v19).  The Lord will punish the the inhabitants of the earth (v 21) and the earth shall disclose their blood (v21).

Regarding the promise and timing of the resurrection of the dead:

I. AGAINST DEPORTATION. Other dangers threaten the bodies of the dead. Being on the surface of the earth and mingled with its particles, they must necessarily be moved about. The winds may waft them to other regions; birds or animals or men may carry them abroad; the rivers may float them in their rapid currents; the ocean may heave them on its mighty billows. How then shall they be preserved? God has purposely made many of the seeds so that they are wafted on the winds, not that they may be destroyed, but may be brought into better positions for their preservation and subsequent prosperity. And shall we disbelieve the fact that the great God who performs these wonders in the ordinary operations of nature, is able and willing so to control winds, and birds, and beasts, and living men, and flowing rivers, and heaving oceans, as to preserve and carry to safer or better places the germs of those bodies which He has taught us shall rise at the resurrection of the last day?

III. AGAINST INTERMINGLING OR LOSS OF IDENTITY. Take the many hundreds of plants that exist about us—there are computed to be more than 80,000 kinds on the globe—with their millions of seeds. The God of nature never mixes them up. Whatever may be true about the amalgamation of growing plants, when their seeds or germs are perfected it is impossible so to mix them as to confound them. And think you that the God who works such wonders of infallible certainty in the identification of the untold millions of these varieties of plant seeds, every year and through so many centuries, however they may be mixed up, cannot or will not, even when He has promised it, preserve the identity of each different human body, so that it shall be enstamped with all the characteristics of its own individuality, though it be mingled with so many other human bodies through so many centuries? 

“There is a law of germination and growth belonging to those acorns; and whenever you bring them into the position where that law is met, they will grow.” We are ignorant equally of the facts in what the identity or germ of a human dead body consists, and what conditions are necessary to bring it into active resurrection life; these are the affairs of the Author of existence. But we do know, that whatever it is that constitutes the identity of the dead body’s existence, cannot and will not develop itself in a resurrection life power, until the great Keeper of man brings it into a position and condition where the laws of its development are fulfilled. (N. D. Williamson.)