Isaiah 45:17 But Israel shall be saved in the LORD with an everlasting salvation: you shall not be ashamed nor confounded world without end. He foresaw the redemption of suffering Israel by the hand of Cyrus, but uses terms that it would be a misleading and inexcusable blunder to employ if they are intended to be restricted to those small bands of immigrants returning under Ezra and Nehemiah, whose descendants rejected the Christ, and went forth into the great and long-ending dispersion after the Romans had destroyed the rebuilt city. Standing once, at sunrise, on a lower height of the Himalayas — lower, though still 10,000 feet above the plains — we saw beneath us, stretching away into the blue distance, leagues upon leagues of rolling country clothed with evergreen forests of tree ferns, tree rhododendrons and magnolias, till the view was lost in cloudland. But, behold, even as we watched, the clouds broke and scattered, trooping away into the vault of heaven like hosts of white-robed angels. Between their ranks were revealed, one after another, the mighty flanks of Kinchinjunga and her sister mountains; then their snow-peaks and glaciers. Another few minutes, and the last cloud had vanished, and the glittering crest of Mount Everest, the loftiest summit in the world — we know not how many hundreds of miles afield — flashed upon the horizon. The lower and nearer landscape was not lost, it was there still, in all its beauty and verdure, but we had no longer any eyes for it because of the glory that exceeded. Something like that would have been the prospect unfolded to the "rapt Isaiah's" spiritual eyesight, could he have understood all that was involved in his prophecies. He must have had at least a partial understanding of their meaning, for we read that "these things said Isaiah because he saw [Christ's] glory, and he spake of Him." Nevertheless, it is reserved for us to see most distinctly the full extent of the prophetic landscape, because from before our eyes even the remotest clouds that linger on the horizon have been lifted by the sun-rising of New Testament teaching. (F. Sessions.) Parallel Verses KJV: But Israel shall be saved in the LORD with an everlasting salvation: ye shall not be ashamed nor confounded world without end. |
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