Isaiah 33:17 Your eyes shall see the king in his beauty: they shall behold the land that is very far off. "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 Christ's 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 (Psalm 29:2 and Psalms 96:9) and assigning beauty to the holy God. Moreover, in Zechariah 9:17 we find Jehovah thus referred to by the prophet, "How great is His goodness, 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 God's 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.) Parallel Verses KJV: Thine eyes shall see the king in his beauty: they shall behold the land that is very far off.WEB: Your eyes will see the king in his beauty. They will see a distant land. |
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