Isaiah 4:1 And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, We will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel… This passage belongs to the two concluding verses of the last chapter; but as it is the most striking of the three, we may allow it to be our starting-point in gleaning the thoughts which the whole scene suggests. These are - I. EXTREME DESOLATION WROUGHT IN THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF. GOD. The land is stripped by war of its male population (Isaiah 3:25); those who gather at the gates bewail the humiliation under which they smart, the privation to which they are reduced. "Her gates shall lament," etc. (Isaiah 3:26). Jerusalem can no longer stand in her strength and honor; she is prostrate in weakness and in her shame; desolate, she sits upon the ground. Such is the havoc which war has made, that the virgin daughters of the land, instead of waiting modestly to be addressed, go out in numbers to find themselves husbands under any unnatural condition, so that the reproach of perpetual virginity and childlessness may be somehow removed (text). In the righteous rule of God, sin ends in utter desolation. It may be the history of the nation, as in this instance. Its stages are these: departure from the will and Word of God; luxury and corruption; effeminacy and weakness; strife and defeat; exile, poverty, loneliness, attempts to gratify hope and ambition by unnatural and pitiable methods. But this may be the experience of the individual. "Evil shall slay the wicked, and they that hate the righteous shall be desolate" (Psalm 34:21). Sin is likely, if indeed it is not sure, to lead down to this sad estate. It manifests itself in folly and, through folly, conducts to loss, privation, loneliness, desolation. And the last scene of all is one like this of the text; it resorts to unnatural and wholly unsatisfactory means to fill its heart and restore its life. II. A SIGNIFICANT PROVISION ORDERED IN THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD. The abnormal circumstance suggests the normal. In the absence of such a scourge as that of ward and for this our sin is entirely responsible - there would be found to be a virtual equality in the number of the sexes. For nearly every son of man a daughter is born into the world. Surely this points to the Divine intention that man and wife should dwell together in bonds of conjugal affection. It places no stigma on single life, but it indicates the purpose of our kind Creator, that one human heart should comfort and sustain another, with reciprocated love and complementary succor, along the path of human life. It says to those who have ears to hear it that polygamy is not according to the Divine will; that the celibacy of a class, or order, or community is not of Divine appointment; that the home where one husband and one wife dwell in undisturbed and ever-deepening attachment - the providing hand of the one clasping the dispensing hand of the other - is the realization of the Divine design. III. AN HONORABLE INSTINCT PLANTED BY THE HAND OF GOD. Similar passages (Genesis 30:23; 1 Samuel 1:6; Isaiah 54:1; Luke 1:25) suggest that the "reproach" which the women desired to have removed was that of childlessness rather than that of virginity. Jewish women, we know, earnestly desired to be mothers; they may have cherished the hope that of them the Messiah would be born. In any case it was an honorable ambition. The real reproach rests with those who wish to be childless that they may be saved the anxieties, responsibilities, and labors that devolve on the faithful mother. There cannot be a more desirable or excellent aspiration for the parent to indulge than that of so training her (his) children that they shall become men and women whom the Lord will love, and for whom the Church and nation will give thanks. - C. Parallel Verses KJV: And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, We will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel: only let us be called by thy name, to take away our reproach. |
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