Isaiah 25:8 He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from off all faces… The prophet speaks of death as "a veil" which dims the perceptions of men, or even blinds their eyes to facts which it is essential to their welfare that they should know; and as "a web" in which their active powers are entangled and paralysed; and he declares that in the day on which God, instead of asking feasts and sacrifices of men, shall Himself provide a sacrifice and feast for the world, this blinding "veil, this fettering and thwarting net, shall be finally and utterly destroyed." He shall destroy death forever. How true these figurative descriptions of death are to human experience, what a fine poetic insight and firm imaginative grasp they disclose — as of one with both eye and hand on the fact — is obvious at a glance, and becomes the more obvious the more we meditate upon them. Always the veil which darkens the eyes is also a web which entangles the feet, as we have only to watch the motions of any blind man to know. Failing sight and impaired activity go together of necessity; while blindness involves, at least, a partial paralysis of all the active powers. As to be without God is to be without hope, so to be without the hope of immortality is to suffer a mental eclipse which cannot fail to limit our scope and impair our moral energies. We have only to consider the moral conditions, the moral collapse of men and nations, from whom the future life has been hidden, or over whom it had no practical power, to learn how terribly, in the absence of this hope, the moral ideal is degraded and the moral energies enfeebled. I am far from denying that even men to whom this life is all have risen, by a marvellous and most admirable feat of wisdom and natural goodness, into the conviction that to be wise is better than to be rich, to be good better than to be wise, to live for others better than to live for one's self. But not only are such men as these rare and heroic exceptions to the general strain, but even they themselves, admirable as their spirit may be, can know no settled cheerfulness, no abiding peace. Human life is and must be full of injustice, as well as misery, to those who do not believe in a hereafter in which all wrongs are to be righted, all sorrows turned into joy, all loss into gain. And when they bury their dead out of their sight, with what bitter and hopeless pangs must their hearts be torn! how horrible must be the darkness, unbroken and unrelieved, which settles down upon them! (S. Cox, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from off all faces; and the rebuke of his people shall he take away from off all the earth: for the LORD hath spoken it. |
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