Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Isaiah 33:17
Thine eyes shall see the king in his beauty: they shall behold the land that is very far off.
17. the (or a) king in his beauty ] The reluctance of many expositors to interpret this phrase of the Messiah is incomprehensible. Delitzsch says that “the king of Isa 33:17 is no more the Messiah than the Messiah in Mic 5:1 [E.V. Isa 33:2 ] is the same person as the king who is smitten on the cheek in Isa 4:14 [E.V. Isa 33:1 ].” But in Micah the humiliated king is replaced by the Messiah, and surely the same conception would be in place here. That the king is Jehovah (Vitringa) is no doubt a possible alternative in view of Isa 33:22, but since whatever be the date of the passage the Messianic hope must have been a living idea of Jewish religion, there seems no reason for trying to evade what seems the most natural explanation. On the “beauty” of the king see Psa 45:2.
the land that is very far off ] Rather as R.V., a far stretching land (lit. “a land of distances”), the spacious and ever-extending dominions of the Messiah. Few verses of the O.T. have been more misapplied than this.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
17 24. The idea of the perfect security of the righteous man leads by an easy transition to more positive features of the golden age.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
Thine eyes – The eyes of the righteous, described in Isa 33:15.
Shall see the king in his beauty – Some understand this of the Assyrian king. Thus Kimchi understands it, and supposes it means that they shall see him at the walls of Jerusalem; that is, shall see him destroyed. Vitringa supposes it means Yahweh himself as the king of his people, and that they should see him in his glory. Others suppose it relates to the Messiah. But the immediate connection requires us to understand it of Hezekiah (compare the note at Isa 32:1-2). The sense is, You shall be defended from the hostile army of the Assyrian. You shall be permitted to live under the peaceful and prosperous reign of your pious monarch, and shall see him, not with diminished territory and resources, but with the appropriate magnificence which becomes a monarch of Israel.
The land that is very far off – You shall be permitted to look to the remotest part of the land of Judea as delivered from enemies, and as still under the happy scepter of your king. You shall not be confined by a siege, and straitened within the narrow walls of Jerusalem. The empire of Hezekiah shall be extended over the wide dominions that appropriately belong to him, and you shall be permitted to range freely over the whole land, even over the parts that are now occupied by the forces of the Assyrian. Virgil has a beautiful passage remarkably similar to this:
– jurat ire, et Dorica castra,
Desertosque videre locos, litusque relicturn.
AEn. ii. 28.
Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible
Isa 33:17
Thine eyes shall see the King in ms beauty
The King in His beauty
Jerusalem was surrounded by the army of Sennacherib.
The relief gained when Hezekiah paid over the three hundred talents of silver and the thirty talents of gold, emptying thereby the royal treasury and stripping the gold from the doors and pillars of the Temple, had not lasted long. Rabshakeh, the chief envoy of Assyria, had been sent with another army to demand the unconditional surrender of the city. A great change, however, had taken place in the spirit and faith of the people. No further mention was made of an alliance with Egypt. The prophet Isaiah, instead of being ridiculed and despised, was at once appealed to by the king, and his counsel followed. Hope and confidence in Jehovah had been restored, and this second attack of the treacherous Assyrian, instead of plunging the nation into despair, seemed rather to rouse them to defiance. It was Gods forgiveness which had wrought the change. The departure of the Assyrian, at a time when Jerusalem was absolutely in his power, was a manifest proof of Gods forgiving mercy and a striking confirmation of Isaiahs words. So, though the enemy returned, the prophets encouraging and reassuring messages did not fall upon deaf ears. The chapter opens with a plain forecast of the speedy destruction that should overtake the treacherous spoiler of Gods people. Then follows a graphic picture of the disappointment of the ambassadors of peace, and the deserted and downtrodden state of the country districts that had resulted from Sennacheribs breach of the covenant of peace. But from verse 10 to the end the sufficiency of the championship of Jehovah is unfolded, and the chapter closes with promises of victory and pardon, the lame shall take the prey, the people shall be forgiven their iniquity. Yes, the presence and leadership of Jehovah would change everything. The glorious Lord would be unto them a place of broad rivers and streams. But as we read these Scriptures, Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty; thine eyes shall see Jerusalem a quiet habitation, we feel that their primary application by no means exhausts their full meaning. A greater than Hezekiah is here. The King in His beauty is for us the very Prince of Peace Himself. Once for our sakes He was covered with shame, mocked and buffeted and handcuffed. Now by faith we see Him crowned with glory and honour, and one day our eyes shall see Him as He is in His beauty. As yet the new Jerusalem is hemmed in by foes. Enemies far more treacherous and destructive than the Assyrians are seeking to enslave and despoil the people of God. But our eyes shall see Jerusalem a quiet habitation, a tabernacle so peaceful and steadfast that not one of the stakes thereof shall be removed nor any of its cords broken. Yes, the story of the siege of Jerusalem is only a parable of the life of God in the soul of man. Gods forgiveness is much more than a clean slate. It brings His people into the joy and strength of a living union with Himself. It gave new national life to Judah. It gives new spiritual life to the pardoned sinner. Once the Divine forgiveness is realised the whole man is born again. But this does not make us free from temptation. The Assyrians will surely return and menace the city. But the Lord is our sure defence.
1. The beauty of the King passes all mans understanding. There is the beauty of His personal character. It is unfolded to us in the Gospel story. There we see His goodness and truth. His purity is so strong and incandescent with the fire of love that it cannot be marred by the defilements of earth. His sympathy and compassion are so tender and real that the most needy and outcast are attracted to Him. Christ has no beauty in the eyes of the carnal and worldly. He pours contempt on the wisdom of the flesh, the wisdom of this world. Have ye eyes to see the beauty in Jesus? There is the beauty, too, of His perfect sacrifice. This was set forth in the Old Testament Scriptures in the passover lamb, in the brazen serpent, and in all the sacrifices connected with the old covenant. The Lamb without spot or blemish was slain that His atoning blood might cover our sins. The beauty and perfection of the personal character secures the beauty and perfection of the precious sacrifice. Is that blood-stained Cross the most beautiful sight in the world to you? Have you seen the love of God triumphing there over the sin of man, and the Son of God reconciling God and man by the sacrifice of Himself, and laying a righteous foundation for the exercise towards guilty sinners of Gods sovereign mercy and grace? But, again, there is the beauty of His perpetual intercession and His abiding presence in our hearts. Christ is no longer on the Cross–He is on the Throne, seated at the right hand of God. From that vantage ground of infinite power and resource He watches all that transpires here below. And He not only watches from a distance, He is with us to save and succour and defend. Have you seen the King in His beauty as He walks with us along lifes highway? Or are your eyes still holden?
2. To see the King in His beauty is the essence of all true religion. The world cannot understand the things of God. It cannot receive the Comforter because it seeth Him not. The veil of sense shuts out the glories of the unseen world. Have you seen the Son and believed on Him? Or is there still some veil or prejudice or disobedience upon your heart? Is personal religion still a mystery to you? Does conversion seem to you a strange and doubtful experience? Does the earnestness of some Christians seem altogether extravagant and fanatical? When you have truly seen the King you will find it impossible to exaggerate His beauty, and you will find it equally impossible to set a limit to your obedience. The King must have all. Loyalty cannot measure out its service. It delights in sacrifice. As the veil of sense is penetrated by the vision of faith the victory of life begins. This is the object of all the means of grace. They are to help us to see the King. All life becomes worth living when the humblest duty performed aright may be rewarded with a sight of Him whom you love. This gives new zest to worship. For this we pray and study our Bibles, for this we come to church and join in the Lords Supper, that we may see the King. This helps us to live a detached and separate life. (F. S. Webster, M. A.)
The heavenly King and the privileges of His subjects
I. THE CHARACTER OF THE KING.
1. The situation of a king is most respectable; he is the head of his people. God is Head of all things; King of kings, and Lord of lords.
2. Kings ought to be wise men, to rule in wisdom. God is all-wise, omniscient.
3. Kings ought to possess power, to be ready to oppose any foe of their people. God is Almighty.
4. Kings should he good men, kind and benevolent. God is good and kind; He feeds, clothes, &c., He is the Fountain of goodness.
5. Kings should be just men, to enforce the laws and punish offenders. God is just, and will not suffer His laws to be infringed, but will punish the guilty.
II. THE EXTENT OF HIS DOMINION.
1. Heaven is His throne; here He manifests His glorious presence; angels, &c., are His servants.
2. Earth is His foot-stool; things animate and inanimate are subject to His control.
3. Hell is His prison, where He confines His foes, and here He is enthroned in vengeance.
4. He has a kingdom among men; this is His universal Church, all who fear God, and work righteousness.
5. He has a kingdom in men; every true believer is a little kingdom in himself, the heart is His throne, and the passions and affections are the subjects.
6. He reigns that He may conquer all, save all.
III. THE PERSONS THIS DECLARATION MAY BE APPLIED TO. THEY.
1. Those who have an experimental knowledge of the Kings favour.
2. Such as feel a profound reverence towards Him.
3. Who love Him, from a sense of His love to them.
4. And obey Him from this principle of love.
IV. WHAT IS IMPLIED BY THE DECLARATION, They shall see the King.
1. Not with their bodily eye. God is a Spirit.
2. If we could see Him as a Spirit with our bodily eye, yet we could not as God. He is immensity.
3. They shall see Him by the eye of faith–in creation, providence and grace. (John Overton.)
The blessedness of heaven
These words may more immediately refer to the restoration of Hezekiah to his former splendour and dignity, by the destruction of Sennacheribs army, which would establish peace in the land of Judea, and enable the exiles to return home, without fear or danger. But the Holy Spirit in this passage seems also to refer to the initial happiness of all true believers in this world, and their complete felicity in the world to come.
I. THE SOURCES OF HAPPINESS PROVIDED FOR TRUE BELIEVERS. These in general are two–
1. The King in His beauty. All that is to be seen of God with joy and satisfaction, is visible only in the Mediator.
2. The land that is very far off. In the present life our chief happiness arises from hope; hereafter it will consist in vision, and in full fruition. The heavenly glory is here compared to the land of promise, which abounded in population, and yet was so fruitful as to be well able to support all its inhabitants.
(1) It is a land that is very far off from the earth, and farther still from hell.
(2) The views which good people have of the Land of Promise are at present very distant and imperfect.
II. THE MANNER IN WHICH THE SAINTS SHALL ENJOY THE BLISS THAT IS PREPARED FOR THEM. They shall see and behold it.
1. This may either refer to the partial view which Christians have of future glory upon earth, or to the beatific vision of heaven. We see something of God in the works of creation and providence, and especially in the great work of human redemption. We have also seen the power and glory of God in the sanctuary, in the Word and ordinances, and have sometimes been filled with joy unspeakable and full of glory. But these views, however refreshing, are not only transient, but very narrow and contracted, in comparison of what they will be hereafter. Then the powers of perception will be raised to the highest pitch, our contracted minds will be enlarged and rendered more retentive, and we shall be able to gaze in thought on what all thought transcends.
2. The sight which believers have of spiritual objects is essentially different from that of the unregenerate, either in this world or that which is to come.
3. There is an intuitive certainty in the knowledge which Christians have of invisible realities, and which is peculiar to themselves only.
4. A sight of the King in His beauty will be attended with a clearness and a comprehension far surpassing all that we have experienced in the present life.
5. The celestial vision will be ardent and intense.
6. Views of heaven will take place immediately after death, and more fully after the resurrection.
7. There will also be a possessive intuition, or such a sight as includes converse and enjoyment.
8. The vision will be perpetual and without end. There is an entrance into heaven, but no exit out of it. (B. Beddome, M. A.)
Christs life a poem
There are human lives which are poems, as there are lives which are prose. They give pleasure, as poetry gives it by the expression of the beautiful. Such a life, at its very highest range, was the life of Christ. We seek its poetry to-day, and we weave our thoughts of it round that profound phrase of Miltons, that poetry must be simple, sensuous, and passionate.
I. That which is SIMPLICITY in art is purity in a perfect character. The beauty of Christs purity was in this–
1. That those who saw it saw in it the glory of moral victory.
2. From this purity, so tried and so victorious, arose two other elements of moral beauty–perfect justice and perfect mercy.
II. The word SENSUOUSNESS, in Miltons sense of it, was entirely noble in meaning. As the poet produces beautiful work out of the multitudinous world of images and things which he has received, so the exquisiteness of the parables and of the words of Christ, both in form and expression, was the direct result of the knowledge He had gained from the quality of sensibility.
III. The third element of great poetry is PASSION. We may transfer it directly to a character as an element of beauty. It is best defined as the power of intense feeling capable of perfect expression. It was intense feeling of the weakness and sin of man, and intense joy in His Fathers power to redeem, which produced the story of the Prodigal Son, where every word is on fire with tender passion. See how it comes home, even now, to men; see how its profound humanity has made it universal! Come unto Me, all ye that are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. How that goes home to the deepest want of the race; how deep the passion which generalised that want into a single sentence; how intense, yet how pathetic, the expression of it; how noble the temperance which stayed at the single sentence and felt that it was enough! (Stopford A. Brooke, D. D.)
The beautiful God
The blessed God who infinitely possesses every amiable excellency, and from whom proceeds all that is lovely in the universe, must Himself be adorned with the most exquisite beauty. In Him is concentred the sweetest assemblage of every Divine perfection. In Him, they all shine forth with the brightest lustre, without any superfluity or deficiency. He is consummately righteous, yet full of compassion; He is perfectly holy, yet rich in mercy; He is supreme in majesty, yet infinitely gracious; wisdom, power, and faithfulness, with every glorious attribute that can excite admiration and love, are united in the supreme Lord of heaven and earth. In the various important characters He sustains, He acts with the most endearing condescension and approved fidelity, assiduously performing every office and duty that love can dictate. (R. Macculloch.)
Is beauty ascribed to Jehovah?
Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty. Cheyne asserts that this king cannot be Jehovah, for beauty is never ascribed to Him. This is a shallow argument. Can an epithet never be given to God once, but must every epithet be repeated in order to be true? But if one sees Jehovah in Jesus there will be no trouble in finding beauty ascribed to the Messiah, and so to Jehovah Jesus is Jehovah, and we find in the Messiah every form of beauty ascribed to Him in the Canticles, which the Church has always cherished as the song of Christs love and loveliness to His redeemed people. Again in the forty-fifth Psalm we find the King Messiah described as fairer than the children of men; and there is no great difference between assigning beauty to holiness (Psa 29:2; Psa 96:9) and assigning beauty to the holy God. Moreover, in Zec 9:17 we find Jehovah thus referred to by the prophet, How great is Hisgoodness, and how great is His beauty. Here the identical word is used (yephi) that is found in our Isaiah text. In this last passage to refer the singular pronoun to Gods people when they are spoken of with plural pronouns and verbs in the whole context is hardly a fair way to prove the proposition that beauty is never ascribed to Jehovah, But even if beauty is never ascribed to Jehovah anywhere else, is that a substantial reason why it cannot be here so ascribed? (H. Crosby, D. D.)
The beautiful Christ
I cannot but regard it as a great misfortune that in all ages the art, the literature, and the worship of the Churches should not only have fallen so far short of the true ideal of our blessed Lord and Master, but should even have gone so far astray in their conceptions of Him. They have represented Him as a partial Christ, whereas He is the universal Christ; as an ecclesiastical Christ, whereas He is a spiritual Christ; as a Christ of gloom and anguish, whereas He is a Christ of love, and joy, and peace in believing; as a dead Christ, whereas He is the risen, the living, the ascended Saviour; as a distant Christ, a Christ who has gone far away into the dim realms of space, whereas He is a present Christ, with us now, with us always, with us individually, with us as a perpetual comforter, a very present help in trouble, with us even to the end of the world; as a Christ of wrath, and vengeance, and dreadfulness, whereas He is loving, tender, and of infinite compassion. (F. W. Farrar, D. D.)
The King in His beauty
The King is probably the Messiah They shall behold a far-stretching land–Messiahs kingdom is from sea to sea. (Prof. A. B. Davidson, LL. D.)
The Jews deliverance from the Assyrian invasion
When the Assyrians had invaded Judea with an immense army, and were about to attack Jerusalem, Rabshakeh was sent with a railing message to the king and his people. When Hezekiah heard of the blasphemies of the proud Assyrian, he rent his clothes and put on sackcloth, and went into the house of the Lord, and sent the elders of the priests covered with sackcloth to consult with Isaiah the prophet. The people of Jerusalem, therefore, had seen their king in most mournful array, wearing the garments of sorrow, and the weeds of mourning; they were, however, cheered by the promise that there should be so complete a defeat to Sennacherib, that the king should again adorn himself with the robes of state, and appear with a smiling countenance in all the beauty of joy. Moreover, through the invasion of Sennacherib, the people had not been able to travel; they had been cooped up within the walls of Jerusalem like prisoners. No journeys had been made, either in the direction of Dan or Beersheba, even the nearest villages could not be reached; but the promise is given, that so completely should the country be rid of the enemy, that wayfarers should be able to see the whole of their territory, even that part of the land which was very far off; it should be safe for them to make the longest voyages; they should no longer be afraid of the oppressor, but should find the highways, which once lay waste, to be again open and safe for traffic. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Christ victorious: His people free
We have seen our well-beloved Monarch, in the days of His flesh, humiliated and sore vexed; for He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. He whose brightness is as the morning, wore the sackcloth of sorrow as His daily dress; shame was His mantle, and reproach was His vesture. None more afflicted and sorrowful than He. Yet now, inasmuch as He has triumphed over all the powers of darkness upon the bloody tree, our faith beholds our King in His beauty, returning with dyed garments from Edom, robed in the splendour of victory. We also, His joyful subjects who were once shut up and could not come forth, are now possessed of boundless Gospel liberty. Now that we see Jesus crowned with glory and honour, we freely possess to its utmost bounds the covenant blessings which He has given to us; and we rejoice that if the land of happiness should sometimes seem to be very far off, it is nevertheless our own, and we shall stand in our lot in the end of the days. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The King in His beauty
I. WE HAIL THE LORD JESUS CHRIST AS OUR KING.
1. His right to royalty lies in His exalted nature as the Son of God.
2. Jesus has a right to reign because He is the Creator.
3. The Preserver of all men.
4. He governs by virtue of His Headship of the mediatorial kingdom.
5. He has the rights of Divine designation, for God has made Him King.
6. Certain princes have delighted to call themselves kings by the popular will, and certainly our Lord Jesus Christ is such in His Church. Now it behoves us, since we thus verbally acknowledge Him to be King, distinctly to understand what this involves.
(1) We look upon the Lord Jesus as being to us the fountain of all spiritual legislation. He is a King in His own right–no limited monarch–but an autocrat in the midst of His Church, and in the Church all laws proceed from Christ and Christ only.
(2) He alone gives authority to that legislation.
(3) He is the Captain in all our warfare.
II. WE DELIGHT TO KNOW THAT OUR KING POSSESSES SUPERLATIVE BEAUTY.
III. THERE ARE SEASONS WHEN WE SEE THE KING IN HIS BEAUTY.
1. We saw Him in that day when He pardoned all our sins.
2. Jesus Christ was in His beauty seen by us more fully, when, after being pardoned, we found how much He had done for us.
3. There are times when, in our contemplations, we see His beauty.
4. It is very probable that we shall have such a sight of our glorious King as we never had before, when we come to die.
IV. THE EXCEEDING GLORY OF THIS SIGHT.
V. THIS SIGHT OF CHRIST EMINENTLY AFFORDS LIBERTY TO THE SOUL. (C. H.Spurgeon.)
Seeing the King in His beauty
These words plainly promise to every follower of Christ, if he shall persevere unto the end, that in the resurrection he shall see the Lord Jesus Christ in His beauty, and in the glory of His kingdom. What, then, is this beauty which shall be revealed to all who attain that world and the resurrection of the holy dead?
I. It would seem to be THE BEAUTY OF HIS HEAVENLY COURT. About Him and before Him are the companies of heaven, the hosts and hierarchies of the blessed, and the saintly multitude of Gods new creation. Armies of martyrs, companies of prophets, the majesty of patriarchs, the glory of apostles, each one in the full transfigured beauty of his own perfect spirit, and all revealing the warfare of faith, the triumph of the Church, the power of the Cross, the election of God,–these are the degrees and ascents leading upward to the throne of bliss.
II. But if such be the beauty of the Kings court, what is THE BEAUTY OF THE KING HIMSELF? We shall not be dangerously out of the way if we believe that He who is the brightness of His Fathers glory and the express image of His person, did take unto Himself our manhood as His revealed presence for ever, in its most perfect image and likeness; that in Him two natures were united, and both were perfect, both were beautiful. There is a beauty we know Him to possess in fulness–the beauty of perfect love. In His face will be revealed all the love of His holy incarnation, of His life of sorrow, of His agony and passion, of His cross and death. The wounds of His hands and feet and of His pierced side are eternal seals and countersigns of the love which has redeemed us for Himself.
1. The King whose beauty is the bliss of heaven is ever drawing and preparing us for His presence by all the mysteries of His Church.
2. By a special and particular discipline, varied and measured for the necessities of every faithful soul, He is making us ready for the vision of His presence. (H. E. Manning, D. D.)
The beautiful King and the far-off land
I. THE SUPREME OBJECT OF VISION. The King in His beauty.
II. THE ULTIMATE POSSESSION. The land that is very far off. (F. Ferguson, D. D.)
The King in His beauty
It is astonishing how much comfort can be packed up in a few words. If one were asked to put into a single sentence the entire body of Scriptural prophecy, of Old and New Testament prophecy combined, he could not easily find a more complete condensation of the whole than in the text. There are two points of view from which we may look at the text.
I. THE OBJECTIVE ASPECT, or the vision as it is set before us; the moral and spiritual ideal yet to be realised.
1. The text is a prediction as to a glorious Person and a far-off land, both of them entirely beyond the calculations of men. The King in His beauty is Jesus Christ, The words are striking. It is not exactly the King in His majesty, or grandeur, or glory, or power, but the King in His beauty. We speak of the good and the beautiful and the true. And there is a singular accordance between those three super-excellent realities. We think of them in connection with the Persons in the Godhead. While it is true that all glory and power of the one aspect of the Divine Being belongs to the other, still we are permitted to make a distinction in our thoughts, and we think of the Father as that One in whom we see pre-eminently the good; and the Son as that One in whom we see specifically the beautiful; and the Spirit as that One in whom we see pre-eminently the true.
2. When we turn our thoughts to the beautiful alone, we are met by this conception–that the beautiful is but another word for the becoming. A beautiful action is an action which it becomes one to do. A beautiful character is one, all the elements of which are in sweet accordance; when part is adapted to part, as the colours of the rainbow blend together; when one line of the form gracefully runs into another; when one sound is the harmonious concomitant and perfect sequel of another–there you have beauty, the beauty as a spirit breathing through the whole and informing all its parts–such a whole that one part may become the other, and pass and repass into the other. The beauty is translucent, elastic, perfect. Now apply this conception to Jesus Christ, and you will see with what amazing propriety the beautiful in Him is the same as the becoming. Consider the harmony of the Divine Being as the eternal source of all the beauty we can ever know. Consider the essential beauty of our human nature as made in the image and after the likeness of God; consider, further, the absolutely harmonious combination and indissoluble union of those two natures in
Christ with the amazing self-sacrifice of the Son of God for our redemption, and the adaptation of His work to all the wants of our case, and you have such a conception of the becoming–of all that it becomes both God and man to do–as explains to us the emphasis and the propriety with which Christ is spoken of as the King in His beauty. No one can be beautiful apart from Him.
3. Society is at present a hideous discord, at least to a very large extent. We cannot say that it is beautiful. But it is not more certain that Jesus Christ is King; it is not more certain that He is the centre of heavens harmony, than it is certain that the far-off land will yet be brought nigh and made visible upon the earth; and that Gods will shall be done upon the earth, even as it is done in heaven.
II. THE SUBJECTIVE ASPECT, or what is implied in seeing the vision, in realising the ideal. The time is coming when every human being shall actually look upon Jesus Christ. But to look is not always to see all that can be seen. To see the King in His beauty implies a deeper seeing than that of merely looking upon Him. It implies a being made like Him. In order to see the kingdom of God, or to enter into it, we must actually be born again. We must ourselves (in other words) be a part of that which we truly see. We shall see Him at last because we shall have been made like Him. It is the pure in heart who see God This seeing of God is our heaven in its highest and most complete form; and it is by faith in Christ that we are brought to this perception. As faith grows and develops, as it passes into the life, it turns the abstract ideal into the concrete reality. On the other hand, the result is certain from the Divine side. It is secured by the fact that the King in His beauty is there. The heavenly Bridegroom is waiting for the perfection of His Bride. And as He waits He works, tie rules over all things for the accomplishment of the Divine purpose. Make, then, the goal of your life quite clear, and lay down all your lines of thought and action directly for that goal. Let us thank God that such is the Christianity of Jesus Christ. (F. Ferguson, D. D.)
Reverence, a belief in Gods presence
1. Though Moses was not permitted to enter the land of promise, he was vouchsafed a sight of it from a distance. We too, though as yet we are not admitted to heavenly glory, yet are given to see much, in preparation for seeing more. Christ dwells among us in His Church really though invisibly, and through its Ordinances fulfils towards us, in a true and sufficient sense, the promise of the text. We are even now permitted to see the King in His beauty, to behold the land that is very far off. The words of the Prophet relate to our present state as well as to the state of saints hereafter. Of the future glory it is said by St. John, They shall see His face, and His name shall be in their foreheads. And of the present, Isaiah himself speaks in passages which may be taken in explanation of the text: The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together; and again, They shall see the glory of the Lord and the excellency of our God.
2. Such a view is strange to most men; they do not realise the presence of Christ, nor admit the duty of realising it. Even those who are not without habits of seriousness, have almost or quite forgotten the duty. This is plain at once: for, unless they had, they would not be so very deficient in reverence as they are. There are two classes of men who are deficient in awe and fear, and, lamentable to say, taken together, they go far to make up the religious portion of the community. It is not wonderful that sinners should live without the fear of God; but what shall we say of an age or country in which even the more serious classes maintain, or at least act as if they maintained, that the spirit of Gods holy fear is no part of religion?
(1) Those who think that they never were greatly under Gods displeasure.
(2) Those who think that, though they once were, they are net at all now, for all sin has been forgiven them;–those on the one hand who consider that sin is no great evil in itself, those on the other who consider that it is no great evil in them, because their persons are accepted in Christ for their faiths sake. (J. H. Newman, B. D.)
The land that is very far off
The land that is very far off
A far-stretching land, i.e., a land no longer diminished (to use Sennacheribs own expression) by spoliation or hemmed in by foes. (Prof. S. R. Driver, D. D.)
The distant land
As it is in the margin, the land of far distances. A land cleared of enemies as far as the eye can reach and the foot carry.
I. THIS WILL APPLY TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD, WHICH THE REDEEMED SOUL SHALL POSSESS IN HEAVEN. Here we know but little of the great Father of our spirits. But in heaven we shall know God more fully. Know Him not in His essence, but in the glorified human nature of Christ; in His relation to ourselves and the universe.
II. THIS WILL APPLY TO THE VIEWS WHICH HEAVEN WILL GIVE US OF THE REDEEMING WORK OF CHRIST. At present there are many questions which the devout soul proposes in relation to this mighty work, but no response is given. What disclosures will heaven make on these points!
III. THIS WILL APPLY TO THE EXPLANATIONS WHICH HEAVEN WILL AFFORD OF THE SECRETS OF NATURE. Nature, like the fabled traveller, has given the casket to the highwayman, but kept the jewels. She has given us names, but kept the power.
IV. THIS WILL APPLY TO THE SOLUTION WHICH HEAVEN WILL GIVE OF THE MYSTERIES OF PROVIDENCE.
V. THIS WILL APPLY TO OUR EXPERIENCE OF DIVINE GOODNESS. Here the vessel is narrowed by its conditions. It cannot receive much, it cannot bear much. Here we sip of the river of God, there we shall drink of its fulness.
1. Learn the limitations of this life. We know in part. It doth not yet appear what we shall be.
2. The boundless wisdom and goodness of God. The best things are yet in store.
3. See here the encouragements to a life of faith (J. Hoyle.)
Glances at the future
Do you ask what are the waving outlines of this land of far distances that begins directly a man begins to live a Christly life, and that stretches away after death into the Infinite? I answer–
I. UNENDING EXISTENCE.
II. UNDECAYING ACTIVITY. Our work here is bounded by many things.
1. There is the finishing of the enterprise.
2. There is the failure of our powers.
3. There is the ceasing of inclination.
Sometimes fuel has not been added to fire of flickering motive; sometimes fellow-workers have been cold, unwelcome, or harshly discouraging; sometimes repeated failure and mocking disappointments have driven a man back from seeking his own higher education or the worlds welfare, and desire ceases, and there is an end of work. But in contrast with all this that is of the earth earthy, the true worker for himself and for others, yearns after and will inherit a land of far distances. There the work will never be completed, for a universe is the sphere of labour, eternity is the period, and the infinite the problem. Labour–the putting forth of power: sacrificial labour–the putting forth of power in the spirit of the Lamb, who is the central life of the heavenly world; this is the far-reaching hope of every Christly soul. And this without the decay of powers, for then will be fulfilled the promise of perpetual morning dew, immortal youth, a world without pain, and never needing a night. Nor will want of inclination bring these occupations to an end, for there is realised the full power of the quenchless inspiration of love to the Lamb who was slain. So, for our highest, noblest labours, there is a limitless hope.
III. UNFETTERED THOUGHT. For the inquirer this human life is not a land of far distances. Thinkers often weep in their sense of mental poverty. But we are to believe in the lifting of veil after veil as we go on through the ages, till the fair face of Truth shall be seen in Divinest beauty.
IV. UNBOUNDED AFFECTIONS. (U. R. Thomas, B. A.)
The King in His beauty
I. Our first concern is with THE HISTORICAL SETTING of this verse.
II. THE SPIRITUAL PARALLEL. To see the King,–Jesus, I mean,–is one of the best blessings of His people. There is a further promise, Thine eyes shall behold the land that is very far off, i.e., a far-stretching tract of country. We must abide by the metaphor; this stands, I think, for the great multitude of exceeding great and precious privileges which God has given us in Jesus Christ.
III. THE FINAL FULFILMENT OR THIS PROMISE. All the things Gods people know on earth are but feeble foretastes of the joys of heaven. (Thos. Spurgeon.)
Heaven anticipated
It is recorded of the celebrated John Howe, that in his latter days he greatly desired to attain such a knowledge of Christ, and feel such a sense of His love, as might be a foretaste of the joys of heaven. After his death, a paper was found in his Bible recording how God had answered his prayer. One morning (and he noted the day) he awoke, with his eyes swimming with tears, overwhelmed with a sense of Gods goodness in shedding down His grace into the hearts of men. He never could forget the joy of these moments: they made him long still more ardently for that heaven which, from his youth, he had panted to behold. (Light in the Dwelling.)
Samuel Rutherfords dying utterances
Some days before he died, he said: I shall shine, I shall see Him as He is, I shall see Him reign, and all His fair company with Him; and I shall have my large share, my eyes shall see my Redeemer, these very eyes of mine, and no other for me; this may seem a wide word, but it is no fancy or delusion; it is true, it is true; let my Lords name be exalted, and if He will, let my name be grinded to pieces, that He may be all in all. If He should slay me ten thousand times ten thousand times, Ill trust. One of his friends, Mr. Robert Blair, who stood by, his bed, said to him: What think ye now of Christ? To this he replied: I shall live and adore Him; glory, glory, to my Creator, and to my Redeemer for ever; glory shines in Immanuels land. In the afternoon of the same day he said: Oh, that all my brethren in the public may know what a Master I have served, and what peace I have this day; I shall sleep in Christ, and when I awake I shall be satisfied with His likeness. This night shall close the door, and put my anchor within the veil, and I shall go away in a sleep by five of the clock in the morning. Words which received their exact fulfilment. His soul was filled with rapture as he lay dying, and he cried, Oh, for arms to embrace Him! Oh, for a well-tuned harp! So he passed away, declaring as he went that in the love and presence of his Lord he had found heaven before he entered within the gates. (Kings Highway.)
Not all over”
When a medical man visited a young woman who was on her death-bed, he uttered the common thought of the world when he said to her weeping mother as he grasped her hand, It will soon be all over with your daughter. She who was about to depart heard the announcement, and, raising herself on her arm, drew aside the curtain, and looking into the face of the doctor with that peculiar look that characterises those who are being loosened from the hither side of existence said, All over, sir! all over–no, mother, believe him not. When I die, it will not be all over with your daughter, it will only be all beginning. For this present span of existence is not worthy of being compared with the life which shall thrill my whole being in the presence of Him who sits on the throne, and the Lamb. (W. Adamson, D. D.)
Death a mean, of vision
One Sunday morning a friend–a deacon of my church–came to me and said, speaking of his father, a dear old minister and a blind man, My father can see this morning. I congratulate you! I exclaimed; I am glad and surprised to hear it. Ah, he replied, you misunderstand me. My father is dead. (R. J. Campbell, M. A.)
The beautiful God
How beautiful it is to be with God! Miss Willard whispered as she died.
Miss Havergals experience
A most interesting chapter in the biography describes her visit to Switzerland. On her return home she had typhoid fever, and was laid aside for a long time. This is how she talked of her experience during her illness: F. Sometimes I could not quite see His face; yet there was His promise, I will never leave thee. I knew He said it, and that He was there. M. Had you any fear at all to die? F. Oh no, not a shadow. It was on the first day of this illness I dictated to Constance, Just as Thou wilt, O Master, call! M. Then was it delightful to think you were going home, dear Fan? F. No, it was not the idea of going home, but that He was coming for me, and that I should see my King. I never thought of death as going through the dark valley or down to the river; it often seemed to me a going up to the golden gates and lying there in the brightness, just waiting for the gate to open for me. She was brought back, in answer to many prayers, from the gates of the grave. (Kings Highway.)
The Delectable Mountain
Then they went on till they came to the Delectable Mountains, which belong to the Lord of the country towards which they were journeying. So they went up the mountains to behold the gardens and orchards, the vineyards and fountains of water. Now there were on the top of these mountains shepherds feeding their flocks. The pilgrims, therefore, went to them and asked: Whose Delectable Mountains are these? and whose sheep be they that feed on them? And the shepherds answered These mountains are Emmanuels Land: and they are within sight of His city; the sheep are His. He laid down His life for them. Then said the shepherds one to another, Let us show the pilgrims the gates to the celestial city, if they have skill to look through our perspective-glass. Then the pilgrims lovingly accepted the motion; so they led them to the top of a hill called Clear, and gave them the glass to look through. Then they tried to look; but the remembrance of the last things that the shepherds had showed them made their hands shake; by means of which impediment they could not look steadily through the glass: yet they thought they saw something like the gate, and also some of the glory of the place. (Bunyans Pilgrims Progress.)
Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell
Shall see the king; first Hezekiah, and then Christ, as before.
In his beauty; triumphing over all enemies, and ruling his own people with righteousness; in which two things the beauty and glory of a king and kingdom doth chiefly consist.
They shall behold the land that is very far off; thou shalt not be shut up in Jerusalem, and confined to thine own narrow borders, as thou hast been; but thou shalt have free liberty to go abroad with honour and safety, where thou pleasest, even into the remotest countries, because of the great renown of thy king, and the enlargement of his dominions.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
17. Thinethe saints’.
king in . . . beautynotas now, Hezekiah in sackcloth, oppressed by the enemy, but KingMessiah (Isa 32:1) “in Hisbeauty” (Son 5:10; Son 5:16;Rev 4:3).
land . . . very faroffrather, “the land in its remotest extent” (nolonger pent up as Hezekiah was with the siege); see Margin.For Jerusalem is made the scene of the king’s glory (Isa33:20, c.), and it could not be said to be “very far off,”unless the far-off land be heaven, the Jerusalem above, whichis to follow the earthly reign of Messiah at literal Jerusalem(Isa 65:17-19 Jer 3:17;Rev 21:1; Rev 21:2;Rev 21:10).
Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty,…. Not merely Hezekiah in his royal robes, and with a cheerful countenance, having put off his sackcloth and his sadness, upon the breaking up of the siege; but a greater than he, even the King Messiah, in the glory of his person and office, especially as a King reigning gloriously before his ancients in Jerusalem: the apostles saw him in his glory, in the days of his flesh, corporeally and spiritually; believers now see him by faith, crowded with glory and honour, as well as see his beauty, fulness, and suitableness, as a Saviour; and, before long, their eyes shall see him personally in his own and his Father’s glory. This is to be understood of the eyes of good men, before described. The Targum is,
“thine eyes shall see the glory of the Majesty of the King of worlds in his praise;”
and Jarchi interprets it of the glory of the Majesty of God; so, according to both, a divine Person is meant, and indeed no other than Christ:
they shall behold the land that is very far off; not the land of hell, as the Targum, which paraphrases it thus;
“thou shalt behold and see those that go down into the land of hell;”
but rather the heavenly country, the better one, the land of uprightness, typified by the land of Canaan; and may be said to be “a land afar off”, with respect to the earth on which the saints now are, and with regard to the present sight of it, which is a distant one, and will be always afar off to wicked men; this now the saints have at times a view of by faith, which is very delightful, and greatly supports them under their present trials: though it may be that an enlargement of Christ’s kingdom all over the world, to the distant parts of it, may be here meant; which may be called, as the words may be rendered, “a land of distances”, or “of far distances” d; that reaches far and near, from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth; which will be the case when the kingdoms of this world shall become Christ’s, and the kingdom, and the greatness of it under the whole heaven, shall be given to the saints of the most High; a glorious sight this will be. And this sense agrees with the context, and declares what will be after the destruction of antichrist.
d “terram distantiarum”, Vatablus, Montanus, Gataker.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
Over this picture the prophet forgets the sinners in Zion, and greets with words of promise the thriving church of the future. “Thine eyes will see the king in his beauty, will see a land that is very far off.” The king of Judah, hitherto so deeply humbled, and, as Micah instances by way of example, “smitten upon the cheeks,” is then glorified by the victory of his God; and the nation, constituted as described in Isa 33:15, Isa 33:16, will see him in his God-given beauty, and see the land of promise, cleared of enemies as far as the eye can reach and the foot carry, restored to Israel without reserve, and under the dominion of this sovereign enjoying all the blessedness of peace.
Fuente: Keil & Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament
Vs. 17-24: THE KING IN HIS BEAUTY – A MILLENNIAL PREVIEW
1. The eyes of the holy remnant will see the King in all His beauty – the beauty of holiness, (Psa 27:4; Psa 110:2-3); and the borders of their land will be extended wide, (vs. 17; Isa 6:5; Isa 24:23; Isa 26:15).
2. The enemy, with his strange language, will pass away, (vs. 18-19; comp. Isa 37:33; 2Ki 19:32-34).
3. Attention is then called to Zion (Psa 48:12), and the prophet pictures the Holy City in all its glory – peaceful, prosperous and permanent; every blessing being derived from Him Who is her Deliverer, Lawgiver, Judge, King and Saviour, (vs. 20-22; Gen 49:10; Isa 51:4; Isa 51:7-8; Isa 2:3-4; Isa 11:4; Psa 89:18; Hos 13:10; Isa 43:3; Isa 43:11; Act 13:23; Eph 5:23; 1Jn 4:14), Who now dwells therein forevermore, (Isa 16:5; Act 15:16; Rev 21:3).
4. Out of weakness they were made strong – their needs supplied, their health restored, their sins forgiven, and their joy in God’s fellowship and love complete, (vs. 23-24; 2Co 12:9-10; Php_4:19; Isa 58:8; Isa 44:22; Isa 25:9; Rom 8:35-37).
Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary
17. The king in his beauty. Although the Prophet changes the person, yet this verse must be connected with the preceding verse; for he addresses the sincere worshippers of God, to whom he promises this additional blessing, Thou shalt see the king in his beauty This promise was highly necessary for supporting the hearts of believers, when the state of affairs in Judea was so lamentable and so desperate. When Jerusalem was besieged, the king shut up within the city and surrounded by treacherous counsellors, the people unsteady and seditious, and everything hastening to ruin, there appeared to be no hope left. Still the royal authority in the family of David was a remarkable pledge of the love of God. Isaiah, therefore, meets this danger by saying, that though they behold their king covered with filthy garments, yet he shall be restored to his former rank and splendor.
First, it ought to be observed how invaluable is the kindness of God, when the commonwealth is at peace, and enjoys good princes, by whom everthing is administered justly and faithfully; for by their agency God rules over us. Since, therefore, this happiness is not inconsiderable, the Prophet was unwilling to leave out this part, in promising prosperity to the worshippers of God. Yet it, ought also to be observed, that that kingdom was a type of the kingdom of Christ, whose image Hezekiah bore; for there would be a slight fulfillment of this promise, if we did not trace it to Christ, to whom all these things must be understood to refer. Let no man imagine that I am here pursuing allegories, to which I am averse, and that this is the reason why I do not interpret the passage as relating directly to Christ; but, because in Christ alone is found the stability of that frail kingdom, the likeness which Hezekiah bore leads us to Christ, as it were, by the hand. I am, therefore, disposed to view Hezekiah as a figure of Christ, that we may learn how great will be his beauty. In a word, Isaiah here promises the restoration of the Church.
The land very far off. The restoration of the Church consists of two parts; first, that “the king shall be seen in his beauty;” and secondly, that the boundaries of the kingdom shall be extended. We know that the appearance of Christ is so disfigured as to be contemptible in the eyes of the world, because “no beauty or loveliness” (Isa 53:2) is seen in him; but at length, his majesty and splendor and beauty shall be openly displayed, his kingdom shall flourish and be extended far and. wide. Although at present wicked men have everything in their power, and oppress the true servants of God, so that they scarcely have a spot on which they can plant their foot in safety, yet. with firm hope we ought to look for our King, who will at length sit down on his bright and magnificent throne, and will gloriously enrich his people.
Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary
THE PROSPECT OF THE GODLY
Isa. 33:17. Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty; they shall behold the land that is very far off.
The literal application of this prophecy is generally supposed to have reference to the deliverance of the Jews from the Assyrian army. They would then have the joy of seeing Hezekiah in his goodly apparel, and, freed from the presence of the invader, would be left at liberty to enjoy their own pleasant and goodly land. The deliverance was accomplished (2Ch. 32:21). But there is another application of the textto the beatific vision of the King of kings in the heavenly land. Let us then consider
I. THE GLORIOUS PROSPECT BEFORE THE CHILDREN OF GOD. Thine eyes, &c. The prospect respects
1. The vision of Christ. Christ is King. Of Him Melchisedec, David, and Solomon were types (Psa. 2:6, &c.; Joh. 18:36; Heb. 2:9; Rev. 1:5; 1Ti. 6:10). Patriarchs and prophets saw Him in human form. The Jews saw Him in His humiliation, as a man of sorrows, &c. The apostles and disciples saw Him in His risen glory. John saw Him in the vision of Patmos (Rev. 1:13, &c.) Hereafter all His people shall see Him in His beauty, in all His regal splendour and magnificence. They shall see Him clearly, fully, eternally.
2. The vision of heaven. The land, &c. Of heaven Canaan was a type. It was a land of beauty and abundance; of freedom, after the slavery of Egypt; of triumph, after warfare; of rest, after the toils of the desert. Its crowning distinction was the Temple, which God filled with His presence and glory. But heaven is all temple.
II. THE CERTAINTY OF ITS REALISATION. Thine eyes shall, &c.
1. This was contemplated by Christ in our redemption. He designed our emancipation from the dominion of sin, our deliverance from this present evil world, and also our elevation to His glorious kingdom (Heb. 2:10; Joh. 17:24).
2. This is repeatedly the subject of the Divine promises (Luk. 22:29; Luk. 12:32; Joh. 14:2-3, &c.)
3. To this tends the work of grace in all its influences on the soul. See what our calling is (1Pe. 5:10); to what we are begotten (1Pe. 1:3-4); why we are sanctified (Rev. 3:4).
4. A goodly number are now enjoying the fulfilment of these promises (Rev. 7:9; Rev. 7:14).
5. The glory and joy of Christ would not be complete without the eternal salvation of His people (Isa. 53:11).
III. THE PREPARATION NECESSARY FOR ITS ENJOYMENT. Nothing is necessary in the way of merit, price, or self-righteousness. But if we would see the King, we must make Him the object of our believing, affectionate regard now.
2. If we would see the land, &c., we must seek and labour for its attainment (Heb. 11:16; Heb. 4:10).Jabez Burns, D.D.: Pulpit Cyclopdia, vol. ii. pp. 154157).
THE BEAUTY OF CHRISTS CHARACTER
Isa. 33:17. Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty.
There is a difference between the worthiness and the beauty of a character. A poetic beauty adorns the worth of Christs character.
WHAT ARE THE ELEMENTS OF THE SUPREMELY BEAUTIFUL CHARACTER OF CHRIST?
I. Sensibility. This is a word to be preferred to sensitiveness, for it includes sensitiveness; it has the passive quality of sensitiveness with activity of soul in addition exercised upon the impressions received. The more perfect the manhood, the more perfect is this sensibility. The total absence of it is the essence of vulgarity. The presence of it in its several degrees endows its possessor, according to the proportion of it, with what Chaucer meant by gentilness.
(1.) It does not seem wrong to say that there was in Christ the sensibility to natural beauty. He also, like us, wished and sought that Nature should send its own deep quiet to restore His heart. We find His common teaching employed about the vineyard and the wandering sheep, the whitening corn and the living well, the summer rain and the wintry flood and storm.
(2.) Still higher in Him was an intense sensibility to human feeling. He saw Nathaniel coming to Him, and in a moment frankly granted the meed of praise (Joh. 1:47); when the malefactor on the cross appealed to Him, Christ saw at once that the fountain of a noble life had begun to flow (Luk. 23:43). It was the same with bodies of men as with men; He wove into one instrument of work the various characters of the Apostles; day by day He held together vast multitudes by feeling their hearts within His own; He shamed and confuted His enemies by an instinct of their objections and their whispers; men, women, and children ran to Him, as a child to its mother.
How did the sensibility of Christ become active?
1. As sympathy with Nature. There are many who never employ either intellect or imagination on the impressions which they receive. Remaining passive, they only permit the tide of the worlds beauty to flow in and out of their mind; they do nothing with it. In Wordsworth, each feeling took form as a poem. As Christ walked silently along, He lifted up His eyes and saw the fields whitening already to harvest; and immediately He seized on the impression and expressed it in words. It marks a beautiful character to be so rapidly and delicately impressed; but the beauty becomes vital beauty when, through sympathy with and love of what is felt, one becomes himself creative of new thought. Sometimes such sympathy is shown through the imagination, as when Christ, seeing the cornfield by the shore of the lake while He was teaching, looked on the whole career of the field, and combined impressions taken up by the imagination into the Parable of the Sower. Sensibility becoming sympathy is discriminating. Praise without distinctiveness is wearisome. We find perfect discrimination in the illustrations Christ drew from Nature. How exquisite the passage beginning, Consider the lilies! This distinctiveness appears still more in the choice of places for certain moods of mind,the temptation in the wilderness, the hill-side for prayer. In all this, Christ recognises natural religion as His own, and bids us believe in its beauty, and add it to the spiritual.
2. As sympathy with human feeling. Examples of this are numerous. His tenderness stayed Him on the wayside to satisfy the mothers heart and to bless the children; touched by the widows weeping, He gave her back her son. Jesus wept even at the moment when He was about to give back the lost, because those He loved were weeping. How discriminating the sympathy which gave to Martha and Mary their several meed of praise! How unspeakably beautiful the words, Woman, behold thy son! Friend, behold thy mother!
This, then, is loveliness of character.
Remember, we have no right to boast of our sensibility to the feelings of others; nay, it is hateful in us till we lift it into the beauty of sympathising action. Remember, too, its wise discrimination. Christ, while feeling with all the world, sanctified distinctiveness in friendship and love.
II. Simplicity. Milton tells us that poetry must be simple. The beautiful character must also possess this quality. But by simplicity is not meant here the simplicity of Christs teaching. What is meant is the quality in His character which corresponds to that which we call simplicity in poetry; and that which is simplicity in art is purity in a perfect character. The beauty of Christs purity was first in this, that those who saw it saw in it the glory of moral victory. His purity was not the beauty of innocence in a child; it was purity which had been subject to the storm, which had known evil and overcome it. And from this purity, so tried and victorious, arose two other elements of moral beautyperfect justice and perfect mercy. Innocence cannot be just, nor is the untempted saint fit to judge; but Christ is able to be just and yet merciful, because He is entirely pure.
III. Passion, defined as the power of intense feeling capable of perfect expression. Milton tells us that poetry must be passionate. We may transfer it directly to character as an element of beauty. It was intense feeling of the weakness and sin of man, and intense joy in His Fathers power to redeem, that produced the story of the Prodigal Son. Come unto Me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. How that goes home! How deep the passion which generalised that want into a single sentence! It is a beauty of character, whether seen in words or action, which passes into and assumes the diadem of sublimity. Christs words to the Pharisees have all the marks of indignation and none of the marks of anger. Passion and energy limited by temperance imply repose of character. Activity in repose, calm in the heart of passion, these things are of the essence of beauty. And in Him in whom we have found the King in His beauty, this peacefulness was profound. This is the final touch of beauty, which gathers into itself and harmonises all the others, and hence no words are so beautiful as those in which Christ bestows it as His dying legacy on men, Peace I leave with you, and repeats it as His resurrection gift, Peace be unto you. All moral and spiritual loveliness lies in knowing what He meant when He said, Come unto Me and I will give you rest.Rev. Stopford A. Brooke, M.A.: Christ in Modern Life (Three Sermons, pp. 89131).
Fuente: The Preacher’s Complete Homiletical Commentary Edited by Joseph S. Exell
(17) Thine eyes shall see the king in his beauty . . .Torn from their context, the words have been not unfitly used to describe the beatific vision of the saints of God in the far-off land of heaven. So the Targum gives Thine eyes shall see the Shekinah of the King of Ages. Their primary meaning is, however, obviously historical. The king is Hezekiah, who shall be seen no longer in sackcloth and ashes, and with downcast eyes (Isa. 37:1), but in all the beauty of triumph and of majesty, of a youth and health renewed like the eagle; and the land that is very far off is the whole land of Israel, all prosperous and peaceful, as contrasted with the narrow range of view which the people had had during the siege, pent up within the walls of Jerusalem. (Comp. Gen. 13:14-15.) Comp. as to form, Isa. 29:18; Isa. 30:20.
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
17. The good king, Hezekiah, hitherto so depressed by apparently inevitable destruction before him, puts on an aspect humble, yet cheerful and gladsome, and thine eyes all eyes in Jerusalem shall see him thus elevated to grander faith through Jehovah’s victory wrought for him and the people.
The land that is very far off Possibly a typical view, this, of the future oppressed Messiah’s victory and of the glorious land of promise yet to be seen extended over all lands, all cleared of enemies, and the sovereignty of Messiah remaining undisputed.
Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
The Glory That Is Coming ( Isa 33:17-20 ).
In stark contrast with all that has gone before is the destiny of God’s true people. For them the future holds the promise of a permanent existence in the presence of God, of a permanent beholding of His glory, of a permanent experience of His presence, when all that is of the past will have been done away, and He has become all in all.
Analysis.
a Your eyes will see the king in his beauty. They will behold a spacious land (a land of far distances) (Isa 33:17).
b Your heart will muse on the terror. Where is he who assessed? Where is he who weighed? Where is he who counted the towers? (Isa 33:18).
b You will not see the fierce people, a people of a deep speech which you cannot interpret, of a gibberish tongue that you cannot understand (Isa 33:19).
a Look upon Zion, the city of our solemnities. Your eyes will see Jerusalem, a quiet habitation, a tent that will not be removed, the pegs of which will never be plucked up, nor will any of its guy ropes be broken (Isa 33:20).
In ‘a’ their eyes will see the King in His beauty, and in the parallel they will see Jerusalem a quiet habitation which is perfectly safe and secure. In ‘b’ they will recognise that they have nothing to fear from anyone any more, and in the parallel this includes strange foreign invaders.
Isa 33:17-19
‘Your eyes will see the king in his beauty.
They will behold a spacious land (a land of far distances).
Your heart will muse on the terror. Where is he who assessed?
Where is he who weighed? Where is he who counted the towers?
You will not see the fierce people,
A people of a deep speech which you cannot interpret,
Of a gibberish tongue that you cannot understand.’
This promise to the godly man sums up the future for the godly remnant. They will see the coming King in the splendour of His glorious beauty (compare Psa 45:2), the king of Isa 32:1-2. They will behold a land spacious and free (in contrast with the tiny area then ruled from Jerusalem). They will look back and muse without fear on those of whom men were in terror, wondering how they could ever have been afraid of them, such as those fearsome men who assessed men to take them into captivity, those who weighed the tribute and decided what each would pay, making the burden heavy, those who elected which buildings should be destroyed, for to the godly man none of this will matter any more. He will be beyond it. To him these things will have become a thing of the past. For His trust is in God. And he will then have no involvement with foreign invaders and masters in exile and tribute collectors, who speak a gibberish tongue. He will finally be delivered from it all.
Intrinsically this looks first to the coming of the King and the deliverance He would bring. As they take His yoke on them and learn of Him, they will find rest to their souls (Mat 11:28-30), but in the final analysis it looks to the coming to the everlasting kingdom, to the complete salvation of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Messianic king, and the glorious spaciousness of the new heaven and the new earth. While not stating so, this assumes the heavenly kingdom, and the resurrection of the dead in Isa 26:19, for Isaiah knew that all this could only be when Assyria had been destroyed and Babylon itself had been defeated and finally destroyed, and yet he promised it to the godly of his day who walked righteously and spoke uprightly. Thus it had to be after the resurrection he had described.
Isa 33:20
‘Look upon Zion, the city of our solemnities.
Your eyes will see Jerusalem, a quiet habitation,
A tent that will not be removed, the pegs of which will never be plucked up,
Nor will any of its guy ropes be broken.
This further description confirms that we are speaking of the heavenly Jerusalem. Ezekiel thought in terms of a heavenly temple set on ‘a very high mountain’ well away from Jerusalem, reaching up to heaven, with the city itself on the very outskirts of a ‘holy area’ (40-48, see especially Isa 45:1-6). Isaiah has not quite reached that depth of vision but his wording suggests something similar, in as far as it was possible for someone with no real conception of a Heaven above to which men could go. Somehow he knew that this could be no earthly city. So Jerusalem has here gone back to being the Tent in the wilderness, but as having a heavenly permanence. It is the eternal dwellingplace of Yahweh.
And this was Zion/Jerusalem. ‘The city of our solemnities’ connects it in thought with the earthly Jerusalem, for he is in these words speaking of the city where they celebrated their sacred feasts, the city of worship, but it has become something other than itself. Instead of a place of buildings it will have become a quiet dwellingplace, away from a tumultuous world, an everlasting tent, a new tabernacle where those who are holy meet with God (compare Isa 4:3-6). It will be a place apart from the earth as the tabernacle was apart from the camp, and yet a tent so permanent that its guy ropes will never break. It will be a permanent tabernacle which never moves from its site, for its pegs will never be uprooted. Once they see it they will have passed through the wilderness of history and have reached their final home.
The thought is not so much that of a return to the ‘ideal’ time in the wilderness, when Israel was holiness to Yahweh (Jer 2:2-3), although it includes that, but more that of a going on to something better and more permanent. Yet it is certainly not thinking of earthly permanence (compare Rev 21:3). The very nature of a tent is against earthly permanence. It is a rejection of the idea of ‘the city’. It is calling men apart to God to a purity of relationship that rejects ‘civilisation’. And there they will see Yahweh in the fullness of His majesty and will be with Him. The writer to the Hebrews described it as ‘the true Tabernacle which the Lord pitched, and not men’ (Heb 8:2).
We may see in it a twofold future reference. Firstly the entering in of those who come to believe in Jesus Christ the king, who thus come under the Kingly Rule of God (Isa 33:22) and enjoy His personal presence with them, for they become His tabernacle, His dwellingplace; no longer of ‘the city’; in the world but not of the world; temporary on earth and yet with a permanence in Heaven, for they are even now citizens of Heaven (Php 3:20). And secondly the full fulfilment in the heavenly kingdom, the new heaven and the new earth, when they are with Him for ever and enjoy the full glory of His majesty and presence (Rev 21:3).
Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett
Isa 33:17-18. Thine eyes shall see the king, &c. By the king to be seen in his beauty, Vitringa understands God himself, the king of the Jews, shewing himself with the brightest demonstrations of his majesty, in the deliverance and salvation of his believing people; temporal, under the Maccabees; spiritual, in and by the Messiah. For the ancient prophets generally speak of these two conjointly; because the external deliverance and salvation by the Maccabees was a type of the spiritual deliverance to be procured by the Messiah. The meaning of the verse is, that the people, thus delivered, should see and acknowledge their God and king, as the great judge and avenger, the sole support and protector of their church; and should behold their land extended; that is to say, no longer shut up and confined by their enemies, but extending its limits. See chap. Isa 26:15. The clause should be rendered, They shall behold the land which is of a large extent. He adds in the next verse, Thine heart shall meditate terror, or, the terror; that is to say, the terrible effect of the divine power and justice in the destruction of his enemies, which no mortal could have thought of, or have collected from his own reason? Where is the scribe? that is to say, “The man of carnal and worldly wisdom?” Where is the weigher, the balancer? that is to say, “The man of exercised understanding;” who is accustomed to weigh, in the balance of his judgment, the reasons of every thing, and is held more prudent than others? Where is he that counteth the towers? that is to say, “The subtle logician, who produces various arguments for the opinion which he espouses, and by these fortifies and strengthens his reasonings?” Our prophet calls arguments of this kind, strengths, strong arguments, chap. Isa 41:21. This worldly wisdom, says the prophet, God hath confounded and put to shame, by saving his church, contrary to the expectation of all such men.
They thought that there was no hope of salvation left; or if there were any, that it was to be sought for from other causes, and effected by other means. But God hath confounded and put to shame the wisdom of the wise. The three benefits referred to in these verses,seeing God in his beautythe land and church extendedand carnal wisdom put to shame, evidently refer to the Gospel period. See Luk 1:51-52. 1Co 1:20 and Vitringa.
Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke
Isa 33:17 Thine eyes shall see the king in his beauty: they shall behold the land that is very far off.
Ver. 17. Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty. ] Hezekiah in his pristine state and lustre; yea, more glorious and renowned than ever before. Jerome understandeth it of Christ reigning gloriously in heaven, and the saints looking from thence should see the earth afar off as little and contemptible, and say,
“ O quam angusti sunt mortalium termini!
O quam angusti sunt mortalium animi! ”
Augustine wished that he might have seen these three things, Romam in flore, Paulum in ore, Christum in corpore,
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
NASB (UPDATED) TEXT: Isa 33:17-24
17Your eyes will see the King in His beauty;
They will behold a far-distant land.
18Your heart will meditate on terror:
Where is he who counts?
Where is he who weighs?
Where is he who counts the towers?
19You will no longer see a fierce people,
A people of unintelligible speech which no one comprehends,
Of a stammering tongue which no one understands.
20Look upon Zion, the city of our appointed feasts;
Your eyes will see Jerusalem, an undisturbed habitation,
A tent which will not be folded;
Its stakes will never be pulled up,
Nor any of its cords be torn apart.
21But there the majestic One, the LORD, will be for us
A place of rivers and wide canals
On which no boat with oars will go,
And on which no mighty ship will pass –
22For the LORD is our judge,
The LORD is our lawgiver,
The LORD is our king;
He will save us –
23Your tackle hangs slack;
It cannot hold the base of its mast firmly,
Nor spread out the sail.
Then the prey of an abundant spoil will be divided;
The lame will take the plunder.
24And no resident will say, I am sick;
The people who dwell there will be forgiven their iniquity.
Isa 33:17 Your eyes will see This VERB (BDB 302, KB 301) is often used to refer to spiritual insight (cf. Isa 26:11; Isa 33:17; Isa 33:20; Isa 48:6; Job 23:8-9; Psa 46:8; Psa 63:2). Humans were created to function in two realms.
1. the physical (i.e., nephesh, this planet)
2. the spiritual (i.e., ruah, fellowship with God)
The Fall of Genesis 3 has disrupted both!
the King and his beauty This is a purposeful ambiguity, much like Isa 32:1, where the context fits both Hezekiah in his day and the coming Messiah of Isa 7:14.
Isa 33:18 Where is he who counts This refers to Assyrian scouts reconnoitering Jerusalem for the coming siege.
Isa 33:19 unintelligible speech This refers to the Assyrian language (cf. Isa 28:11).
Isa 33:20 This is Isaiah’s theology that Jerusalem will never fall (cf. Isaiah 36-37). For a full discussion of city see notes at Isa 24:10 and the chart at the Introduction to chapter 26, D. This prophecy must be understood in context because in Jeremiah’s day, God gave exactly the opposite prophecy.
The imagery of a tent is an anachronistic allusion back to the Exodus. It may also denote the tabernacle built as a portable tent. The same allusion (i.e., tent) is used in Isa 54:2 for a worldwide expansion.
Isa 33:21 The metaphor of rivers and sailing ships seems to be a play on their alliances with Egypt (cf. Isa 33:23). Instead of Egypt, YHWH (the Majestic One) will be their provider and protector (cf. Isa 33:22).
Isa 33:22 Jerusalem (cf. Isa 33:20) is again the city of the Great King (YHWH Himself) as represented in His righteous surrogate (the Davidic Messiah).
Isa 33:23 Poetry is ambiguous. This could refer to
1. the destruction of Assyria
2. the empowering of Jerusalem
3. or both
In Isa 33:17, both your eyes and they will behold have uncertain antecedents. Isa 33:18 seems to refer to Assyria checking out Jerusalem for invasion and siege. Isa 33:19 seems to allude to the strange-sounding language of the Assyrian invaders. Yet at Isa 33:20 the scene changes to an undisturbed Jerusalem. Therefore, Isa 33:21-22 could refer to Jerusalem, obviously Isa 33:24 does.
Some see the plunder (BDB 1021) in Isa 33:23 as related to the items that the Assyrian army abandoned before the walls of Jerusalem in 701 B.C. and not the sack of Nineveh itself, which occurred in 612 B.C.
Isa 33:24 YHWH is characterized as the healer. This is an allusion to chapter 1 where God’s people are characterized as ill (cf. Isa 1:5-6). Illness is a metaphor for sin and rebellion (cf. Psa 41:4; Psa 103:3; Isa 53:5). The NT continues the Jewish concept of sickness relating to sin (cf. Joh 5:14; Jas 5:14-15). The term save in the OT denotes physical deliverance (see Special Topic: Salvation [OT Term] ).
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
This is a study guide commentary, which means that you are responsible for your own interpretation of the Bible. Each of us must walk in the light we have. You, the Bible, and the Holy Spirit are priority in interpretation. You must not relinquish this to a commentator.
These discussion questions are provided to help you think through the major issues of this section of the book. They are meant to be thought-provoking, not definitive.
1. How are Isaiah 32, 33 related to Isaiah 28-31?
2. Are these two chapters Messianic or historical?
3. List the blessings of the Spirit described in Isa 32:15-18.
4. Give the historical context of Isa 33:7-9.
Fuente: You Can Understand the Bible: Study Guide Commentary Series by Bob Utley
the king. See Isa 33:22.
far off = far stretching.
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
Isa 33:17-24
Isa 33:17-24
“Thine eyes shall see the king in his beauty: they shall behold a land that reacheth afar. Thy heart shall muse on the terror: Where is he that counted, where is he that weighed the tribute? where is he that counted the towers? Thou shalt not see the fierce people, a people of a deep speech that thou canst not comprehend. Look upon Zion, the city of our solemnities: thine eyes shall see Jerusalem, a quiet habitation, a tent that shall not be removed, the stakes thereof shall never be plucked up, neither shall any of the cords thereof be broken. But there will Jehovah be with us in majesty, a place of broad rivers and streams, wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither shall gallant ship pass thereby. For Jehovah is our judge, Jehovah is our lawgiver, Jehovah is our king; he will save us. Thy tacklings are loosed; they could not strengthen the foot of their mast, they could not spread the sail: then was the prey of a great spoil divided; the lame took the prey. And the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick: the people that dwell therein shall be forgiven their iniquity.”
“The king in his beauty …” (Isa 33:17). Who is this? Some three different opinions are sustained by scholars. On account of the mention of Jehovah as the judge, lawgiver, and king in Isa 33:22, some believe the “king in his beauty” is a reference to Jehovah. Others suppose that the reference is to Hezekiah; and still others believe the reference is to the Messiah. We prefer the third interpretation; because (1) the Jerusalem of this passage is the capital of a worldwide land (Isa 33:17). (Palestine is not so), (2) she is a “quiet habitation” and inviolable (Isa 33:20), (3) God is the acknowledged ruler there (not so of the literal Jerusalem who officially declared that, “We have no king but Caesar” – Joh 19:15), (4) the Jerusalem of this passage was situated in a land of broad rivers and streams (Isa 33:21), which was never true of the literal Jerusalem, (5) The Jerusalem-Zion here spoken of was inviolable. Spoken of as a tent whose stakes could never be plucked up nor have any of its cords broken, the literal Jerusalem would last little more than a century before it would be utterly destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar and its peoples made captive for seventy years. (6) Finally, the citizens of the Jerusalem-Zion in view here would even have their sins forgiven (Isa 33:24), a blessing which is limited, absolutely, to the New Covenant.
“Therefore, the king of Isa 33:17 must be the Christ in his regal splendor, reigning over a worldwide domain.” The New Testament confirmation of this is: “In the regeneration (that is, in the times when people are being born again, in this present dispensation of the Lord Jesus Christ) when the Son of Man shall sit on the throne of his glory (Christ is now ruling over all things, Mat 28:18-20), ye also (the Twelve) shall sit upon twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Mat 19:28).
Hailey, it appears to us, is correct in his declaration that, “The total context of this passage (Isa 33:17-24) points to the Messiah.” Another statement in this paragraph which should be noted as more evidence that it was the times of the Messiah to which the passage points is the reference to the absence of any galley with oars or any gallant ship (Isa 33:21). These ships were obviously instruments of war; and their absence in that future Jerusalem-Zion shows that war shall not be a policy of Messiah’s holy Church. It will not even have any “Swiss Guards.” The thought here is parallel to the statement about beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks (Isa 2:4).
Despite this, there are vivid remembrances by the saints of God in all generations of the great deliverances and the mighty interpositions of God in human affairs for the protection and blessing of his people. Isa 33:18 in this passage is just such a remembrance by God’s people of God’s interposition in the case of Sennacherib.
“Where is he that counted?…that weighed the tribute? … that counted the towers? …” (Isa 33:18). He that counted refers to the clerk who marked off the 300 talents of silver and the 30 talents of gold on the tally sheets when Hezekiah’s ambassadors delivered all of that tribute to the servants of Sennacherib. The one who weighed the tribute was the one who weighed the silver and gold; and the one who counted the towers was the chief engineer who surveyed the walls and towers of Jerusalem as preliminary to their assault on the city, which they confidently expected to begin immediately. What a glorious thought that such hated and obnoxious characters, in the scene presented here, were no longer in existence! God’s people would not even see the fierce people.
Also, the harsh and brutal language with which God had threatened to speak to this people (Isa 28:11), a language they could not comprehend, could no longer be heard blaspheming the true God and demanding the surrender of their city.
“The inhabitant shall not say, I am sick …” (Isa 33:24) The scholars have little to say about this; and some have admitted the difficulty; and we must confess that we cannot tell exactly what it means. However, there is an interesting speculation about this, the origin of which this writer does not know, and therefore it must remain merely a speculation without any proof at all, repeated here merely because it is interesting. The destruction of Sennacherib’s army was due to a fatal sickness that struck instantly and was immediately fatal; and there were some of the “sinners in Zion” (perhaps those who sought the alliance with Egypt) who were also destroyed simultaneously with the invading army. If there was any truth in this, it would account for the fear and trembling mentioned in Isa 33:14. “I am not sick” would thus be a reference to the safety of the righteous.
Isa 33:17-22 PROVISIONAL: When man gets his life right with God then God has opportunity to provide what He wishes to provide always. God created man to live in perfect serenity, peace and harmony. God is able to provide that state for man but man is also created with the power to refuse such a state. When man trusts God enough to obey God, God provides it. The land of Judah had been almost totally occupied by Assyrians. Everywhere the people of Jerusalem looked their land no longer belonged to them. On every horizon there were Assyrians. But soon, because they now want Him, they shall see the King (Jehovah) in all His beauty. We think this refers to the manifestation of Gods majesty and beauty in the deliverance of Jerusalem from Sennacherib and not the Messiah because of Isa 33:21-22. When Jehovah-King comes and the Assyrians retreat in disgrace, the people of Jerusalem will once again look upon a land belonging to them as far as the eye can see-their horizons will once again extend to where the land meets the sky.
Not only that, but when the Lord drives the enemy from their land they will retrospectively give much time to wonder and amazement at the miraculous deliverance wrought for them. They will remember the great and ferocious army of the Assyrians camped for miles around their city. They will remember the magnificence and pompousness of the Rabshakeh. They will remember all the foreign officials of the Rabshakeh as they counted the Jews in Jerusalem, counted the treasure of the Jews, counted the fortifications of the city as if they were cooly estimating exactly the amount of plunder they would soon be taking. They will remember the utter horror they felt as they reminded one another of the coldblooded cruelty of the Assyrians. All this remembering will impress more intensely in the minds of the people of Zion the divine nature of their deliverance. They will know it was provided by Jehovah and not by their own schemes. They will look back and remember the ferocity and insolence of the enemy that had surrounded them and come into their city to negotiate with their king. Their appearance was barbaric; their language was completely foreign and non-understandable. This writer remembers serving with the occupation forces in Japan immediately after World War II and the fear and suspicion felt when listening to the Japanese speak or whisper in their tongue while looking at him. One usually suspects, in those circumstances, a plot against him or a slur upon his character. This occupation by hundreds of thousands of foreigners jabbering in incomprehensible tongues will have completely vanished and Isaiah says the people of Zion will remember and marvel at it.
The prophet continues his prediction of the serenity God is going to provide. He predicts the people of Jerusalem will soon see their city peaceful and stable. When God sends the Assyrian away peace will return to Jerusalem and her political stability will be restored. This is predicated upon the continued repentance of the people. No long treatise is needed here to establish the fact that Gods promises of blessing or judgment are always conditional. That is a doctrine made abundantly clear in the Bible. Isaiah uses times coloring figures of speech (terminology contemporary with his own culture) to describe the stability that will come to Zion with the peoples repentance. He describes it as a tent which is not moved. In the culture of the Hebrew nomad-the herder of sheep and goats-they pulled up the stakes and untied the ropes and moved their tents from day to day. Jerusalems position was secure so long as its inhabitants trusted God. We know, from subsequent history (Micah, Zephaniah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel), her inhabitants did not continue to trust God. Jerusalem had her stakes pulled up and her ropes cut by Nebuchadnezzar and her inhabitants taken away to Babylon.
The prophet then turns to another figure of speech easily understood by his contemporaries. He likens Jerusalems security to a city surrounded by broad rivers which some ancient cities enjoyed as natural moats making them secure from attack by armies and, when attacked by navies, could be easily defended. The ancient cities of Thebes (Nah 3:8; Eze 30:16) and Tyre (Isa 23:1 ff; Eze 26:1 ff) were such cities. In Jerusalems case, the majestic power of Jehovah will be her moat.
Isa 33:22-24 PERVASIVE: The serenity provided by God and appropriated by mans penitence pervades the whole experience of man. These verses show Jehovahs influence in every area of mans nature. Man needs an arbiter (judge) to tell him what is right and wrong; man needs a lawgiver to give him a divine codification of behavior; man needs a ruler to be sovereign over all his aspirations, choices and motives. Only then can man be saved from destroying himself. Jerusalem needed to recognize her tacklings were loosed and her mast was so insecure she could not set sail. The ship of Zion was unseaworthy (as an old salt would say). She needed a shake down cruise to make her a taut ship again. She was a sick and ailing ship. When repentance came, she would be fitted to sail the stormy seas of life again with her captain at the helm steering her to safe harbors. Repentance makes forgiveness possible and forgiveness produces serenity within even though the storms rage without. Jerusalem would enjoy this serenity. She was also promised victory over her enemies (Isa 33:23). She would have complete victory-even the lame would be able to join in the spoils of victory.
This serenity and victory apparently did come in the latter days of Hezekiahs reign when the rulers and the people finally turned to Jehovah instead of Egypt for help against their enemies. But it did not last long for they were soon led back into sin and rebellion by Manasseh (son of Hezekiah) and eventually into captivity in Babylon.
Fuente: Old and New Testaments Restoration Commentary
The King and the Country
Thine eyes shall see the king in his beauty: they shall behold a far stretching land [R.V.m. a land of far distances].Isa 33:17.
The circumstances that gave rise to this saying were those connected with the memorable siege of Jerusalem in the days of Hezekiah. The tents of the Assyrians were blackening all the heights round the sacred city, and the inhabitants were reduced to the greatest straits. Hezekiah during this siege covered himself with sackcloth and ashes, and humbled himself before God. He was also disfigured with the boils of a severe and dangerous illness, and prayed earnestly for relief. In these trying circumstances, a cheering promise of deliverance came by the mouth of the prophet, conveyed in imagery derived from the circumstances of the siege. The fierce invader, Sennacherib, would be routed, the besieging troops would be withdrawn, and the inhabitants of Jerusalem would see the king in his beautyrestored to health, and clothed again with the gorgeous robes of state which he had laid aside during the period of his humiliation. They would also behold the land of farnesses. Hitherto, for a long period, they had been shut up in the besieged city; they were confined within the walls and closed gates of Jerusalem; their horizon was bounded by the narrow streets and houses around them; they could see nothing beyondno green tree, or field, or garden. But when the siege would be ended, they would be able to go out at will into the country, and feast their eyes upon its fair landscapes and far-extending prospects. They would be brought out into a free and large place, and their horizon would stretch into illimitable distances.
This, then, is the first application of the text; and so interpreted, what a beautiful image it is. But it has a further application than this. The text is undoubtedly Messianic, although, as Dr. Skinner says, some commentators have been unaccountably slow in perceiving this. And when we have reached the Messianic sphere, it is legitimate, even although it may be no part of the original prophecy, to pass yet further and use the text to introduce us to the beauty of the ascended Lord, and to the limitless stretches of that heaven where the redeemed dwell whom no man can number. Thus there will be three stages of exposition(1) the ideal kingly beauty of the commonplace and the enlargement of the narrow and the near; (2) the beauty of the Lord Jesus Christ on earth and the far-stretching Kingdom of God; (3) the beauty of the King of Glory and the emancipation of Heaven.
I
The Beauty of the Commonplace and the Enlargement of the Narrow
How persons or things appear to us depends as much upon our own eyesight as upon the persons or things themselves. While the people saw Hezekiah humiliated and unlovely, Isaiah saw him a king in his beauty. For the soul of Isaiah was emancipated from the earthly. His eye had the spiritual insight. This lifted him up so that he saw the king from a heavenly height, transformed in the purpose of God to the beauty of true kingliness. And at the same time he saw the kingdom ever widening till it fulfilled the utmost reach of the promisefrom sea to sea, and from the River unto the ends of the earth.
The bold aeronaut who ascends through the invisible air not only looks up and beholds the ever-nearing blue heavens, but he also looks down, and lo! because of his ascent, all he is leaving below him changes and becomes transfigured. Not only has the horizon of his outlook vastly extended, but the inequalities of level and the natural boundaries and differences of earth that seemed so insuperable when he walked thereon have vanished away. Hill and dale have melted into one dead level. City and country, field and moor, land and sea fade into each other. The towering mountain shrinks into a veritable molehill, and the broad, deep-flowing river dwindles to a silver thread. Such, I think, is no unfaithful symbol and picture of the inevitable twofold effect on those happy souls who ascend in the atmosphere of the spiritual. Nay, may I not go further in this analogy and say that just as the aeronaut proves and measures his ascent towards the blue sky by the altering appearance of the earth he looks down uponbeing so much nearer to the latter than he is to the formerso a mans upward approach to God is most surely measured by his altering view of humanity? We know that Isaiah had ascended into the heavenlies because he wrote this text.1 [Note: C. E. P. Antram.]
i. The King in His Beauty
What is beauty? The best definition is an old one. The essence of the beautiful consists in amplitude and order (Arist. Poet. vii.). The sublime and the pretty are two opposite modifications. The sublime is the beautiful with its amplitude pushed into indefinite vastness and the tender smile, which is the inevitable tribute, exchanged for a certain awe. The pretty is at the opposite end of the measurement. It is beauty so reduced on the scale as to want the nobility of seriousness; so petty that our admiration is not without a certain intermixture of contempt. The beautiful, when it approaches the verge of terror at one extreme or of contempt at the other, when it begins to be feared or patronised, may soon have to be called by another name. The soul and the actions of man are properly, and not merely by analogy, termed beautiful. There are natures so large and so conformed to moral harmony that we instinctively term them beautiful. There are actions which show so much of the beauty of the soul from which they proceed that we call them also beautiful.
To the carnal eye, John Bunyan dwelt within the narrow walls of Bedford jail, with only coarse and painful things to contemplate and suffer; but his spiritual imagination made him live in a country where it was summer the year round. He dwelt in the Palace Beautiful, climbed the Hill Beulah, heard golden trumpets, saw the city of gems and glass lighted with the glory of God.
1. We are so framed by God as to experience delight in the contemplation of objects which we term beautiful. Take, for instance, the beauties of nature, as they are called. With dimmed vision and burdened heart man can snatch from the faded loveliness of a sin-stained earth moments of refreshment that make him purer and stronger for the task he has to perform here. Who does not feel this? Who does not take pleasure in form and colour? Who does not love to look at a green field or a garden of flowers; at a clump of trees, or a stream of water gliding and sparkling through the thickness of overhanging leaves? Which of us has not been sometimes drawn away from busy or anxious thoughts to look at an evening sky when the sun went down amidst piles of clouds that glowed and glittered as if they were mountains of jewels, or the far-off pinnacles of the golden city?
2. The beauty of humanity transcends all other beauty, and in the human countenance God has, as it were, sealed up the sum of its perfection. There is nothing in visible nature, in earth or sky, so beautiful to look upon as a beautiful face. The feeling is common to man everywhere, and at all time; and it is a holy feeling. The admiration inspired by earthly beauty has something very sacred and mysterious in it, as all our deeper emotions have; although for us, who know the truth of the Incarnation, the union of our nature with the Divine in the person of Christ, the mystery is cleared.
3. What, then, is that aspect or attribute of the human soul from which outward beauty springs? It is not life only, nor mind, nor intellectual power. What is it? To answer this question we have only to consider what is the characteristic attribute of the soul itselfthat which is supreme over all others, which is inseparable from it, and belongs to its very essence. To us Christians, at any rate, the reply is at hand. That which distinguishes the soul, and makes it to be what it is, is its moral nature. Man was first created in the image of God, and when he lost it the Son of God became incarnate in order to restore it; and that image the Scripture describes as consisting in righteousness and true holiness. The central attribute of the soul, then, is its moral character, and in this at last we find the source of outward beauty. In a word, it is goodness, and goodness alone, that sheds over the countenance this Divine lustre which men call beauty.
4. Dare we advance higher? Nature is beautiful because it reveals thought; the human face is more beautiful because it reveals that moral goodness of which thought is only a condition; the soul is more beautiful, for in it dwells the goodness that lights the countenance; but all these, and the highest of them all, are but dim and broken reflections of a beauty which is beyond and above all, as it is the source of all. Thine eyes shall see the king in his beauty. To see the King in His beauty is to see the beauty of His glorified humanity taken for ever into the Godhead. It is to see that form which the Son of God took to Himself in the womb of the Virgin, bore while He dwelt on earth, raised from the grave, ascended with into heaven, and in which He now stands at the right hand of the Father. It is to see with the eyes the perfect manhood of God incarnate; it is to see the face of God; it is to see with the soul the beauty from which it derives any beautythe beauty of holiness, of purity, of truth, of love, of mercy, of justice, of wisdom, of all perfection. It is to see this, not through cloud, or in vision, or broken by any medium, but as directly as it is possible for the creature to see the uncreated. It is for the soul to see by participation, to see the more the more it partakes; to bathe in the abysses of that glory, beholding and becoming itself beautiful in beholding, even as the light of the sun imparts its light to the object it falls upon, and glorifies that on which it shines.
Shall we follow for a day one who has got the true perspective? Here is the outer side: a humble home, a narrow circle, measuring goods, chopping a typewriter, checking a ledger, feeding the swift machinery, tiresome examination papers; and all the rest of the endless, endless doing, day by day, of the commonplace treadmill things that must be done, that fill out the day of the great majority of human lives. This one whom we are following unseen is doing quietly, cheerily, his daily round, with a bit of sunshine in his face, a light in his eye, and lightness in his step. He is working for God. No, better, he is working with God. He has an unseen friend at his side. Now, hold your breath and look, for here is the inner side, where the larger work of life is being done. Here is the quiet bit of time alone with God. God Himself is here. The angels are here. This room opens out into, and is in direct touch with, a spirit space as wide as the earth. To-day a half-hour is spent in China, for its missionaries, its native Christians, its millions. And so this man pushes his spirit through Japan, India, Persia, the home-land, the city; in and out; out and in. This is the true Christian life. The true follower of Jesus has as broad a horizon as his Master.1 [Note: S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Prayer.]
Three worlds there are:the first of Sense
That sensuous earth which round us lies;
The next of Faiths Intelligence:
The third of Glory in the skies.
The first is palpable but base:
The second heavenly, but obscure;
The third is star-like in the face
But ah! remote that world as pure!
Yet, glancing through our misty clime,
Some sparkles from that loftier sphere
Make way to earth; then most what time
The annual spring flowers appear.
Amid the coarser needs of earth
All shapes of brightness, what are they
But wanderers, exiled from their birth,
Or pledges of a happier day?
Yea, what is beauty, judged aright,
But some surpassing transient gleam;
Some smile from Heaven, in waves of light,
Rippling oer lifes distempered dream?
Or broken memories of that bliss
Which rushed through first-born Natures blood
When He who ever was, and is,
Looked down and saw that all was good?2 [Note: Sir Aubrey de Vere.]
ii. The Land of Far Distances
The land of far distances was not for Isaiah in some foreign country, to which a long and toilsome pilgrimage had to be made. It was simply the region round Jerusalem, the fair open country, fading away in the far-off aerial perspective; the land of clear lights and distant views, as contrasted with the narrow streets and the strait boundaries of the besieged city. And all that was necessary to enable the inhabitants to see it was that the siege should be ended, and that they should be delivered and allowed to go out of the city to behold it. And so the spiritual land of far distances which it symbolises, is not a land removed from us into the remote depths of heaven, like a fixed star. It is round about us; our being is in it now; our souls are the inhabitants of it here. It is our Fatherland. This world itself is the land of far distances. Its things that are unseen and eternal are only eclipsed by the shadow of ourselves. All that is necessary is that our eyes should be opened, and that we should be delivered from the bondage of sin, and made heavenly-minded in order to see it.
The land of far distances! The image could only have originated in an Eastern country, where the atmosphere is so crystal clear that the remotest distances are visible. Our cloudy northern skies limit the horizon and circumscribe the view, and bring the heavens like a roof close to the earth. But in Eastern lands the brilliant sunshine and the translucent air give the feeling of vast aerial space, and the heavens ascend to an infinite height. It is a large, open, radiant world, where, as in the old description of the Celtic heaven, distance fades not on the sight, and nearness fatigues not the eye. Wandering recently over a moorland in Perthshire, on one of those perfect autumn days which are so rare in our climate, when earth seems a suburb of the celestial city, I saw, upwards of a hundred miles away, behind the blue hills that bounded the horizon, the summit of Ben Macdhui, which I had never seen before from this point, with the snow patches on it glancing white in the sun. That vision of the far-off mountain land glorified the whole landscape, introduced into it an element of grandeur and immensity before unknown. It reminded me irresistibly of the land of far distances of Isaiah, and gave a wonderful impressiveness to the beautiful image.1 [Note: 1 Hugh Macmillan.]
1. We live for the most part in a land that is narrow and confined. The walls of life hem us in. The freedom which the most favourably situated of us imagine we enjoy is only the length of our chain. We are limited by our natures, by our faculties, by our weaknesses, by our circumstances. Human nature, made in the image of God, and destined for eternity, is in itself a large thing, and it needs a large world to live in. But we are each shut up in a small world; and, small as it is at the best, we make it still smaller by our sins and our follies. We enclose ourselves in straits, and confine ourselves in prisons of our own making. We dwarf our natures and belittle our powers by the insect tasks to which we devote ourselves. We paralyse our faculty of enjoyment by undue indulgence. We lay waste our powers by over-exertion; we narrow our faculties by concentrating them upon the one aim and end of becoming successful in the world. We are short-sighted, looking only at the things that are seen and temporal.
It is one of our everyday trials,a trial that partly explains the modern passion for holidaysthat life consists so largely of foreground. It is the bane of the great city that it smothers backgrounds out of viewthe background of cloud and horizon, of large thought and quiet meditation, of great motives and high interests. We are imprisoned in the office, the alley, the day, the moment. So many people to see, so many things to be done, so many visits to pay, so many letters to be written, so many orders to be dispatched, so much domestic detail to be attended to,such is the daily routine of the majority of mankind. The best that Mr. Dick Swiveller could boast of, when trying to let his room to the little old gentleman, was that it afforded an uninterrupted view across the street.1 [Note: E. Griffith-Jones.]
2. How are we to have our horizon enlarged? Satan comes and promises that our eyes shall behold the land of far distances if we will only obey him. He took up our Lord to the top of an exceeding high mountain, and showed to Him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, and promised that they should be His if He would fall down and worship him. He offered to transport our first parents beyond the limits of their narrow garden and give them a godlike freedom to enjoy, if they would eat of the forbidden fruit. And as he tempted the first and the second Adam, so he tempts every man. He knows that the eye of man was made for far distancesthat the soul of man longs instinctively for wider and more varied experiences than can be found in the little round of daily life; and therefore he cunningly adapts his temptation to this godlike instinct. He offers a freer and a larger world. But the disenchantment soon comes. The eyes are opened, and they see that the promise of the vision is a mere mirage of the desert, which has changed for the moment the thirsty land and the arid air into the appearance of living waters and refreshing verdure. Instead of far distances and boundless prospects, the transgressor finds himself in straits which become narrower as he advances, until at last, like the prison-house of the medival storyconstructed with fiendish ingenuity to contract its walls every daythey close in upon him and crush him, and his prison becomes his grave. Sin inevitably cripples the energy and restricts the freedom of the human powers. To that longing for freedom and enlargement which is the chief element of fascination in every sin, the tempter has nothing to give but the experience of a drearier imprisonment.
3. The true enlargement comes only when the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus sets us free from the law of sin and death. Then are we brought out from the confining bars of the prison-house of the soul; then have we the vision and the faculty Divine, and become far-sighted indeed. We feel like one who has been transferred from the dark, dreary depths of a cavern to the summit of a lofty mountain, from which the eye takes in at a glance a boundless horizon. We have a sense of recovered freedom which quickens and enlarges the soul. Old familiar things acquire a new aspect and meaning. The vastness and glory of the universe fill us with joy, because it all belongs to our Father, and is ours by virtue of our Divine sonship. We behold the things that are unseen and eternal. Both worlds, the earthly and the heavenly, come within our horizon, and are visible in one view to the eye of faith. All things are ourslife and death, things present and things to come.
We speak of a prisoner being set at large; but we little realise what the phrase means to himthe new and thrilling sense of largeness around him; air and space and light, and Gods great world, with its lofty sky overhead; nothing confining his movements or intercepting his view but the horizon, which, in the far distance, comes down upon the earth with walls of blue air, opening up into farther distances as he moves on. His eye, hitherto accustomed to the semi-opaque gloom of the narrow prison-cell, beholds with rapture the wide, open country. In such new circumstances his soul expands within him, and he feels himself a part of the infinite light and liberty around.1 [Note: Hugh Macmillan.]
4. There is no promise more pronounced in the Scriptures than just this promise of the enlargement and intensification of the sight. We are to be delivered from petty outlooks, from narrow and confined horizons, and we are to see things in large relationships, and to behold the far-off issues. It is the will of our God that we should be spiritually endowed with a sort of prairie sight, with eyes that can scan mighty areas and see things when they are far away. Long sight is what the majority of us lack, and it is what we all need. It is essential to the healthiness of our spirits that we should be able to see things before they are quite at our doors.
(1) I want to be able to see temptation when it is a long way off. I need to distinguish sin in its small and apparently innocent beginnings. I want the perception which can detect it when it is in the germ, when it is a mere infant, when it is a playful cub. Yes, I need to be able to read the fatality that dwells in the cub long before it becomes a full-grown and overpowering beast. I am so easily deceived, and I hear the world say to me, There is no harm in it, and the specious utterance frequently leads to my undoing. I want long sight.
Some of you know the old Greek story describing how Ulysses slew the monster Proteus. You know how he had been forewarned that it would be of no use to kill it only in its first form, because the monster would change itself from shape to shape, appearing now as a seal, now as a lion, now as a bear. Only by recognising it in its first form, and killing it in each different shape, could he hope to conquer it in the end. And you remember how, by following this advice, Ulysses was able to conquer, though only after a very long struggle.
It is only an old Greek legend, I know; but perhaps it will bring out more clearly what we mean by sins in disguise. Sometimes a temptation to sin comes to youso small that it seems hardly worth your while to fight against it. But if you do not recognise it as a sin in its first form, and try to overcome it at once, then it, too, will change from shape to shape, until at last it will become a giant sin, bearing, perhaps, no likeness at all to the first little sin which as boys you allowed to enter your mind, but a giant sin so huge that you cannot cast it out.1 [Note: F. de W. Lushington, Sermons to the Young Boys, p. 19.]
It was only the other day that we read in the papers of conceit leading a man on to commit a brutal murder. When the actor William Terriss was killed, we thought at first that there must have been some strong motive for the crime: some cruel injustice, some secret wrong, had been done to the man; it would all come out at the inquest. But no, at the inquest no particular reason could be assigned. It was only that the man, Prince, from his boyhood up had thought of himself too highlyalways looking for admiration, and angry when he didnt get it; failing again and again, but always thinking his failure undeserved. At last this wrong idea of his power produced in him a distorted view of his abilities, a condition of mind which the doctors described as a form of madness, and led him to kill in cold blood a man who, he thought, had slighted him, but who had really done him no single wrong.1 [Note: F. de W. Lushington, Sermons to the Young Boys, p. 19.]
(2) I would like the power to see homesick prodigals when they are still away in the far country. This was the characteristic sight of the Father: When he was yet a great way off, his father saw him! It is the pathos and tragedy of the Church, and of so many of the Lords disciples, that we see the prodigal only when he knocks at the door and when the long return is over. We know him when he kneels at the penitent bench, or expresses himself in some outward confession. We do not see him before confession springs to his lips, and while a sullen indifference appears still to sit upon his face. I would have the sight which can see the beginnings of the better life, while the outside still seems violently antagonistic.
(3) I would like to have the power of seeing the far-off significance of seemingly insignificant events. I covet the gift of a sanctified imagination, which can look down long highways into distant futurity. For instance, when an apostle like Paul walks into imperial Rome, utterly unheeded and ignored, I would like the power of being able to foresee some of the amazing possibilities of that lonely entrance. When a few women are met together for prayer by the riverside at Philippi, entirely unnoticed in the busy, hurrying life of the great city, I would have the power of tracing in sanctified imagination the far-reaching, healthy currents proceeding from that consecrated circle. When James Gilmour crosses the frontier into Mongolia, and sets his single plough to the upturning of the soil in that mighty land, I would have the eyes that can see coming harvests, vast reaches of waving corn, shining ripe before the face of my Lord. When the New Testament is translated into a new language I would have the power of seeing the tremendous influence of the modest book, the light it will bring, and the warmth, and the moving air, and the genial liberty.
(4) I would like to see the distant and glorious possibilities which are the purposed inheritance of my children. When I look at my boy I want the eyes which can see beyond what he is to what he can be, and I want to live in the inspiration of that splendid prospect. It is altogether needful that I should see my child other than he is if I am to lead him into something better. My imagination must rivet itself upon the contemplation of his splendid possibilities, and I must work upon the immediate while I gaze upon the distant. With the ideal in my eyes I must turn to present training, and the strength and glory of the possibility will get into my moulding fingers and determine the quality of my immediate work. The far-away shall lend its influence to the near, and something of the glory of the goal shall shine upon the very beginnings.1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]
II
The text is now to be regarded in its application to the Messiah and the Messianic Kingdom.
i. The Beauty of the Son of Man
Christian thinkers have expressed two different conceptions of the personal presence of Jesus. Some have inferred from such words as those in the 53rd chapter of Isaiah, He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted, that the Messiah was weak and suffering, stricken with disease; nay, even, from the expression smitten of God, that He was a leper. But others again, seeking what they have felt to be a natural association between physical and moral beauty in the Divine life on earth, have pictured Him as fairer than the children of men, full of grace and glory, yea, altogether lovely. Perhaps the two lines of prophetic utterance are not wholly irreconcilable. It is difficult to believe that beauty of soul such as was seen in Him alone should not have expressed itself in physical attractiveness. There is no mention of His suffering from disease. Yet who can think of Himthe Man of Sorrowsthe Supreme Sufferer, except as showing in His physical aspect something of the burden of the worlds sinfulness? But it seems, if the Gospels are justly interpreted, that the mightthe majestyof His Divine Nature flashed ever and again through the vesture of His human life. Let us recall only the passage where St. John relates how the soldiers who came to arrest Him in Gethsemane, at His words, I am he, immediately went backward and fell to the ground. The evangelist may well have been thinking of that incident or of others like it, of which he had been an eye-witness, when he wrote in the preface of his Gospel: We beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father.
It is surely no light thing that the Christian world in its universal tradition of half a hundred generations, has piously and intimately believed that the second Adam, like the first, bore the outward signature of Gods perfect hand. It is not without some deep reason, dwelling in universal belief among those countless things which, if written, should have filled the whole world with Scriptures; or in the intuitions of the Spirit, or in the instinct of love, or in the self-evident harmonies of Gods works; it is not, I say, without some or all of these reasons, that the world has believed that prophets, psalmists, and seers knew what they spake, and spake what they beheld. It is a pardonable fault to take them in the letter of their words, and a harmless error to go astray with the belief of Christendom. We shall not be dangerously out of the way, if we lovingly and humbly believe that He who is the brightness of His Fathers glory, and the express image of His person, did take unto Himself our manhood as His revealed presence for ever, in its most perfect image and likeness; that where two natures were united, as both were perfect, so both were beautiful. I know not what he may be to whom such a thought is not blessed.1 [Note: H. E. Manning, Sermons, iii. p. 439.]
Among all the artists who represented Christs life, one stands alone for his unique, unconventional, and manifold treatment of it and its subject. Others have represented Him in the common humanities of life, but they have lacked the power to give with equal grandeur the awful moments in which His mission was concentrated. Others have represented Him ideally and with sublimity, but they have not been able to touch such subjects as the Supper at Cana without either making it too ideal or too vulgar. One man alone has mingled, without a trace of effort, and with a profound conception at the root of his work, the heavenly with the earthly, the Divine with the human, the common with the wonderful, the poetical with the prose of daily life, in his representation of the human existence of Christ. That man was Tintoret. In his Last Supper, for example, it is a common room in which the Apostles and the Master meet. Servants hurry to and fro; the evening has fallen dark, and the lamps are lit; those who eat the meal are really fishermen and unlearned men; here and there, there are incidents which prove that the artist wished to make us feel that it was just such a meal as was eaten that night by every one else in Jerusalem. We are in the midst of common human life. But the upper air of the chamber is filled with a drift of cherubim, and the haze of the lamp light takes that azure tint with which the artist afterwards filled the recesses of the Paradise, and the whole soft radiance of the lamp falls on and envelops the upright figure of Christ, worn and beautiful, and bending down to offer to one of His disciples the broken bread. It is common human life filled with the Divine. It is the conception of Christs personality which modern theology ought to possess, because it ought to be the ideal of our own life.1 [Note: Stopford A. Brooke.]
In his volume on Christ in Modern Life Stopford Brooke makes an effort to analyse the character of Jesus as a man. He finds that it contains these elements.
1. Sensibility.Not sensitiveness, which is too passive. Sensibility is sensitiveness with the addition of activity of soul exercised upon the impressions received. Jesus manifested (1) sensibility to natural beauty. He had watched the tall lilies arrayed more gloriously than Solomon; He had marked the reed shaken in the wind, and the tender green of the first shoot of the fig tree. (2) Sensibility to human feeling. This is the highest touch of beauty in a character. He saw Nathanael under the fig tree and recognised the long effort of the man to be true. He met Peter in the morning light, and seeing through all the surface impetuosity of his character deep into the strength of his nature, called him Cephas the rock.
2. Sympathy.When sensibility to human feeling is translated into action it becomes sympathy. The examples are innumerable. How discriminating was the sympathy which gave to Martha and to Mary their several meed of praise. With what forgetfulness of His own pain did He speak the distinctive word to mother and apostle: Behold thy son! Behold thy mother!
But, as Dr. Guthrie says, there is no sight in the wide world like Jesus Christ, with forgiveness on His lips, and a crown in His blessed hand! This is worth labouring for; praying for; living for; suffering for; dying for. You remember how the prophets servant climbed the steeps of Carmel. Three years, and never cloud had dappled the burning sky; three long years, and never a dewdrop had glistened on the grass, or wet the lips of a dying flower; but the cloud came at last. No bigger than a mans hand, it rose from the sea; it spread; and as he saw the first lightnings flash, and heard the first thunders roll, how did he forget all his toils! and would have climbed the hill, not seven but seventy times seven, to hail that welcome sight! It is so with sinners as soon as their eyes are gladdened with a believing sight of Christ; when they have got Christ; and with Him peace.
When the lights of life are gleaming,
Where its blossoms bud and bloom;
When each brow is bound with roses,
As we bask in their perfume:
Just beyond the smiles and sunshine,
All unseen the Master stands,
Waiting ever, ever waiting,
Holding out His pierced hands.
When the lights of life are darkened,
As its flowers fall and fade,
And we watch our loved ones vanish
Thro the silence, and the shade:
Then the Master draweth nearer,
Thro the circling shadow lands;
Waiting ever, ever waiting,
Holding out His pierced hands,
When the shades of night are falling,
Where each heart must stand alone,
And the world has left us nothing
We can call or claim our own:
Then we turn to meet the Master,
Where a halo lights the past,
Waiting ever, ever waiting,
Till we clasp His hands at last.
ii. The Far-stretching Kingdom
The text is to be considered as the great prophets vision of a Divine King who reigns over the earth from the heaven of heavens. It is the great foreshadowing of a universal empire, a kingdom bounded only to human view by the far-distant horizon of mans outlook. It foretells that blessed time yet to be when all the kingdoms of the world shall merge into that one abiding Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ, by the extinction of all racial differences in the one spiritual and enduring nationality of a new life through a new birth. The text is indeed but a poetic anticipation of those plain words of the King of kings Himself which He addressed to the astonished Jews in Mat 8:11 : And I say unto you, that many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven.
But the Kingdom of God is to be a kingdom of far distances, not only as it stretches geographically over the surface of the earth. More than that, there is to be an expansion of view and a deepening of experience on the part of every member of the kingdom.
1. An expansion of knowledge.There are godly men and women who never get beyond the first principles of the doctrine of Christ. The cross and resurrection, the victories of the Holy Ghost, the richness of the Christian hopethese are continents that lie waiting for their exploration.
2. The onward march of holiness.The character of the disciple of Christ is an unlimited and immeasurable Paradise. He never comes to its margin. However long he may have been crucifying the flesh and following hard after Jesus Christ, is there not still some lurking sin to be dragged out and slain? is there not still some grace in the incomparable Law to be appropriated and wrought into the fibre of his being?
3. The development of service.In teaching, in healing, in comforting, in seeking to make the rule of Christ a reality among those around us, in doing the will of the Father, what opportunities we have for ingenuity, for originality, for improving old enterprises, and for initiating plans untried before! Out of my love for Him, and my longing to win men to Him, I should be ambitious to strike forth in fresh directions, to pray more fervently, to give more liberally, to turn duty into delight, to spend and be spent.1 [Note: A. Smellie, In the Secret Place, p. 41.]
Life is a leaf of paper white
Whereon each one of us may write
Hs word or two, and then comes night.
Greatly begin! though thou have time
But for a line, be that sublime,
Not failure, but low aim, is crime.2 [Note: J. R. Lowell.]
III
If the streams are so sweet, what will the fountain be? If the King is beautiful in these His lower courts, what must He be when the veils are removed, and the pictures are at an end? Well may the poet sing
The King there in His beauty
Without a veil is seen;
It were a well-spent journey,
Though seven deaths lay between!
All the bright and blessed things Gods people know on earth are but feeble foretastes of the joys of heaven. Yes, I have a word of comfort for thee, aged pilgrim. Thine eyes, often so tear-stained, red with weeping, weary with anxiety, perhaps half-blinded with infirmity, or dim with age, thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty. And more than that they shall see the far-stretching land, the undulating plains of heaven, the hills and valleys of the glory-land.
1. Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty. Of all the senses, sight affords us the largest, the most perfect, and the purest fruition. By this marvellous faculty we seem to take actual possession of what we behold. To see what we desire is to enjoy it. It comes nearer than voice or touch; we inwardly embrace and hold it. The eyes dwell on, run over it, feast and are satisfied. What is the single wish of those who have been long separated but to see one another again? What was the exclamation of Jacob when he heard that his beloved and long-lost son was still living? It is enough; Joseph my son is yet alive: I will go and see him before I die. When the Queen of Sheba had seen all Solomons glorytype as that was of something infinitely higherThere was no more spirit in her. And she said to the king, It was a true report that I heard in mine own land of thy acts, and of thy wisdom. Howbeit I believed not their words, until I came, and mine eyes had seen it. When Simeon beheld the infant Saviour in the Temple, he said, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace. For mine eyes have seen thy salvation. To the pure in heart it is promised that they shall see God. When our Lord prayed for His elect before His Passion, He said, Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, may be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me. And St. John says, Now are we the sons of God; and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. To see Him, then, is the final consummation of all. There is nothing more held out to man, as nothing higher could be. For this great vision our whole life here is but a preparation. This is the end of creation, the end of redemption, the end of struggle and victory. They to whom it is vouchsafed will have reached the greatest height and the most perfect bliss that any creature can attain.
Dr. Matthews in his book about Madagascar, where he was for thirty years a missionary, describes this native custom: The prisoners were kept in chains, but they had to earn their own living, and were confined to prison only during the night. On the days, however, on which the Sovereign appeared they were not allowed to leave the prison; or if allowed out on these days, at noon, before the Sovereign was to appear, they had all to return to prison, were counted, and locked up. Why? Because if one of those criminals managed to secrete himself, and then emerged from his hiding-place to gaze at and salute the Sovereign as she passed, wearing her diadem and beautiful in the glory of her royal apparel, he was a free man, whatever his crime had been. His chains were at once struck off, for he had looked on the Sovereign in her beauty and saluted her, the salutation being, Is it well with you, my Sovereign? and no one could do that and still remain a prisoner.
2. They shall behold the far-stretching land. What is heaven? Everybody who cares to call himself a Christian hopes to go to heaven when he dies, and heaven means his idea of happiness. But if we try to get nearer peoples thoughts as to what they really understand by heaven, we soon find that it means a different thing to different people, and except to a very few has really only a negative meaning. For instance, people think of the sorrow and the trouble there is in the world, and they say, Thank God, in heaven there will be no more sorrow nor sighing, for God shall wipe away all tears from off all faces. Or again, they think of the toil and weariness which is the lot of many, and the unkindness which makes so many a life sad, and they look forward to that place, where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest. And I have heard, too, of people rejoicing in another of the negative joys of heaven, which, though not stated in the Bible, we all feel to be a fact. I have heard people say there will be no sects in heaven, no divisions or strifes, either religious or social. We feel at once that these cannot be where God is, for divisions are the work of sin and selfishness and self-assertion; and God is Love. And others, who feel a longing for knowledge, look forward to the fulfilment of the promise that there shall be no night there, none of those things which puzzle and confuse and distract us here, but that we shall have risen above and beyond our present partial knowledge, and shall rejoice in the Truth.
If we turn from these negative ideas and ask, What has God revealed to us by His Spirit? we find
1. Heaven is a happy place. There is no doubt about that. In thy presence is the fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore. It is natural, no doubt, that men should conceive of this happiness as the opposite of all that makes them unhappy here, let it be sorrow or suffering, or want or sin. But happiness has a deeper meaning. It is simply the condition of that created thing which is doing that for which God created it; realising, as we say, the idea of its being.
2. Heaven is a holy place. It is because it is holy that it is happy. Nothing that defileth can enter in. The Church triumphant, i.e. the Church in heaven, is adorned as a Bride for her husband. It is a glorious Church, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing.
3. And just as it is happy because it is holy, so it is holy because it is the presence-chamber of God. We return to the first part of our textThine eyes shall see the king in his beauty. See Him as He is, in all the majesty of holiness and the tenderness of perfect love. We shall all be with Him, and near Himnay, more than all, we shall be like him when we see him as he is. That, then, is the great central truth which God has revealed to us about heaven. All else follows from thisthe holiness, the happiness, the joy of heaven. In his Presence there is the fulness of joy.1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti.]
How know I that it looms lovely that land I have never seen,
With morning-glories and heartease and unexampled green,
With neither heat nor cold in the balm-redolent air?
Some of this, not all, I know; but this is so:
Christ is there.
How know I that blessedness befalls who dwell in Paradise,
The outwearied hearts refreshing, rekindling the worn-out eyes;
All souls singing, seeing, rejoicing everywhere?
Nay, much more than this I know: for this is so:
Christ is there.
O Lord Christ whom having not seen I love and desire to love,
O Lord Christ who lookest on me uncomely yet still Thy dove,
Take me to Thee in Paradise, Thine own made fair:
For whatever else I know, this thing is so:
Thou art there.
The King and the Country
Literature
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Fuente: The Great Texts of the Bible
eyes: Isa 32:1, Isa 32:2, Isa 37:1, 2Ch 32:23, Psa 45:2, Son 5:10, Zec 9:17, Mat 17:2, Joh 1:14, Joh 14:21, Joh 17:24, 1Jo 3:2
that is very far off: Heb. of far distances, Psa 31:8, 2Co 4:18, Heb 11:13-15
Reciprocal: Deu 32:49 – and behold Isa 6:5 – mine eyes Mat 17:4 – it is Mar 9:2 – transfigured Luk 9:29 – General Rev 22:4 – they
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Isa 33:17-18. Thine eyes shall see the king in his beauty Hezekiah, in a more prosperous condition than formerly. Having put off his sackcloth, and all the sadness of his countenance, he shall appear publicly in his beauty, in his royal robes, and with a pleasing aspect, to the great joy of all his loving subjects. Thine eyes shall see the King Messiah, (typified by Hezekiah,) triumphing over all his enemies, and ruling his own people with righteousness. Those that walk uprightly shall not only have bread given them, and their water sure, but they shall see, by faith, the King of kings, in his beauty, the beauty of holiness, and that beauty shall be upon them. They shall behold the land that is very far off The siege being raised, by which they were kept close within the walls of Jerusalem, they shall be at liberty to go abroad without danger of falling into the enemies hands, and they shall visit the utmost corners of the nation, and take a prospect of the adjacent country, which will be the more pleasant after so long a confinement. Bishop Lowth renders it, They (thine eyes) shall see thine own land far extended. We may apply the words to the heavenly Canaan, that land which is very far off, which believers behold by faith, and comfort themselves with the prospect of it in evil times. Thy heart shall meditate terror Bishop Lowth reads, Thy heart shall reflect on the past terror. Thou shalt call to mind, with delight and thankfulness, the former troubles and distresses in which thou wast involved. Where is the scribe, &c. Every one shall, with pleasure, reflect on the dangers they have escaped, and shall ask, in a triumphant manner, Where is the scribe, or muster-master, of the Assyrian army? Where is the receiver Their weigher, or treasurer? Where is he that counted the towers That is, says Bishop Lowth, The commander of the enemys forces, who surveyed the fortifications of the city, and took an account of the height, strength, and situation of the walls and towers; that he might know where to make the assault with the greatest advantage. Thus understood, the words are considered as containing Jerusalems triumph over the vanquished army of the Assyrians; and the rather, because the apostle alludes to them in his triumphs over the learning of this world; when it was baffled by the gospel of Christ, 1Co 1:20. The virgin, the daughter of Zion, despises all their military preparations. Poole, however, with some others, thinks these words are rather to be considered as the language of the Jews in the time of their distress, and that they are here recorded to give a lively representation of it; the officers here mentioned not seeming to be those of the Assyrian army, but rather those of the Jews, who, upon the approach of the Assyrians, began to be more active in making military preparations for the defence of the city, and to choose such officers as were necessary and useful for that end, such as these, here mentioned were; namely, the scribe, or, muster-master, who was to make and keep a list of the soldiers, and to call them together as occasion required; the receiver, who received and laid out the money for the charges of the war, and he that counted the towers, who surveyed all the parts of the city, and considered what towers or fortifications were to be made or repaired for the security of it. And unto these several officers the people resorted with great distraction and confusion, to acquaint them with all occurrences, or to transact business with them, as occasion required.
Fuente: Joseph Bensons Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
33:17 Thy eyes shall {u} see the king in his beauty: they shall behold the {x} land that is very far off.
(u) They will see Hezekiah delivered from his enemies and restored to honour and glory.
(x) They will be no more shut in as they were by Sennacherib, but go where it pleases them.
Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes
The King of Zion 33:17-24
The subject now shifts from the people who will inhabit the future Zion to the king who will rule there. This is a revelation of Messiah’s universal rule. It is a picture that stands in stark contrast to the one Isaiah painted of the present Jerusalem in chapters 28-31.
Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)
The prophet now assumed that his audience was righteous. Not only will the righteous be with God in the future (Isa 33:16), but they will even see the excellent king (cf. Psa 45:3). They will also see a broad land in which there can be freedom of movement. An amillennial interpretation follows.
"It is the Messiah in the glory of His wondrous reign over His Church that is here in view." [Note: Young, 2:421.]