Isaiah 14:32 What shall one then answer the messengers of the nation? That the LORD has founded Zion, and the poor of his people shall trust in it. I. "The Lord hath founded Zion"; THIS IS THE GUARANTEE OF HIS LOVE AND HER STABILITY. The strongest, most fundamental title of protection is creation. Even among ourselves, no one frames an object to destroy it; he who makes, makes that he may preserve. And if this be so in human nature, shall there be nothing to compare with it in the Divine? God, indeed, who is eternal, can require no successor to whom to devise His purposes of love; but all the claims that the thing framed can have on Him who framed it, hold with tenfold force when the object is not, as in our humbler works, the mere apposition of pre-existing materials, in which nothing is ours except the order of arrangement, but is itself, alike in matter and in form, the direct offspring of His own inexhaustible power and goodness. 1. Behold, then, how as His own "God loved the world"; how as not only His own, but His own in pain and anguish, and endeared to His inmost heart as such, God hath loved His Church. He spoke to bid the one, He died to make the other, exist. 2. In this Church of His is His own honour pledged. He hath not covenanted with the world that now is to immortalise it; but He has passed His own word for the perpetuity of His Church. Nothing so framed was ever framed to perish; He has infused into it His own Spirit, and His Spirit is life. 3. Is not the Church in its ultimate perfection set forth as the very reward of all the sorrows of its Lord; and shall He be defrauded of His recompense? 4. There is more than creation to bind the Church to Christ, more than promise, more than reward; there is communion, oneness, identification. A man may desert his child; he cannot desert himself. With such a union there can be no separation; if Christ be immortal, the Church is so; when He dies she shall perish, but not till then. II. "The poor of her people shall trust in it" — or, as the margin has it, shall betake themselves unto it: THIS IS ONE PURPOSE OF THE CHURCH'S MISSION UPON EARTH — the care, the teaching, the education, the guidance of the poor. (W. Archer Butler, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: What shall one then answer the messengers of the nation? That the LORD hath founded Zion, and the poor of his people shall trust in it. |
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