Isaiah 26:19 Your dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, you that dwell in dust… Granted the pardon, the justice, the temple, and the God which the returning exiles now enjoyed, the possession of these only makes more painful the shortness of life itself. This life is too shallow and too frail a vessel to hold, peace and righteousness and worship and the love of God. St. Paul has said, "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable." What avails it to have been pardoned, to have regained the Holy Land and the face of God, if the dear dead are left behind in graves of exile, and all the living must soon pass into that captivity (Hezekiah's expression for death, Isaiah 38:12) from which there is no return? It must have been thoughts like these which led to the expression of one of the most abrupt and powerful of the few hopes of the resurrection which the Old Testament contains. This hope, which lightens Isaiah 25:7, 8, bursts through again — without logical connection with the context — in verses 14-19 of chap. 26. (Prof. G. A. Smith, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust: for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead. |
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