In a little more than a year you will tremble, O secure ones. For the grape harvest will fail and the fruit harvest will not arrive. Sermons
I. UNTIL THEN - WHAT? The women are addressed, the daughters of Zion. The manners of the women must be a sure index of the state of a nation. New religious feeling kindles quickly in their hearts; they welcome and further revivals. Their indifference to spiritual things seems to belie their nature; atheism in woman is monstrous. The Jewish women are in a state of careless unconcern. This attitude of "ease," of apathetic nonchalance, arouses the indignation and the alarm of the prophets, perhaps more than vivacity in sin. It is an ominous symptom in the bodily life, not less so in the soul. It offers a dull prosaic resistance to enthusiasm of any kind, which it holds in smiling, sensuous contempt. A psalmist's soul is "exceedingly filled" with perturbation at this attitude (Psalm 123:4); Amos denounces woe (Amos 6:1), and Zechariah the great displeasure of Jehovah against them that "are at ease." Perhaps the vintage-harvest was over when the prophet spoke. The time would come when a shudder would pass through those luxurious frames; the outer garment would be torn off, the sackcloth assumed, the breasts that once heaved only with the sigh of pleasure be beaten in wild lament for the "days that are no more," for the pleasant fields and the fruitful vine. Those fields will be thorn and briar overgrown; the houses of the city deserted, its mirth quelled. The wild cattle will sport around the temple hill, the palaces be forsaken. Impossible to dissociate in our minds the desolation of once populous scenes from the sin of man and the withdrawal of the gracious Spirit of God. Take these descriptions as figures of the state of the soul; then power and beauty remain. The well-kept garden, the sweet fields in the harvest-time, the mirth of reapers and in-gatherers; these sights, these sounds, provide unsought expression for the soul that feels itself "at ease." The untilled fields, the signs of wild nature creeping to old ascendency over the works of man, - such sights carry symbolic meaning which depresses the most cheerful heart. "Until the Spirit be outpoured from on high" - that is our state, and that it must remain. II. AFTER THEN - WHAT? 1. "Justice shall inhabit the pasture-country, and righteousness shall dwell in the garden-land." "Men ought not to be like cattle, which seek nothing but plenty of food and abundance of outward things. We should not, like hogs in a sty, judge of the happiness of life by abundance of bread and wine (Calvin). Righteousness alone exalts, righteousness alone can uplift a fallen nation. 2. "The fruit of righteousness shall be peace." This is inwardly and outwardly, subjectively and objectively, true. Peace in the heart is the companion of rectitude; it flows from right order in the home and family, and from just administration in the state. Peace, quietness, confidence: a triple blooming in one; a threefold band of prosperity and condition of all welfare. "Homes of peace, dwellings of confidence, easeful resting-places, - these are the pictures that all men draw in fancy; this the life for which they dream they were made. Such a state depends upon piety, upon personal and social morality. "It is as true now as it was in the time of Isaiah. True religion would put an end to strifes and litigations; to riots and mobs; to oppressions and tumults; to alarms and robbery; to battle and murder and conflict among the nations." 3. These blessings cannot come without suffering. The hail of judgment will fall upon forest and upon city. The refuge of lies and the hiding-place of falsehood must be swept away. Renewing and reforming forces work destructively on one side, as creatively on the other. Upon whom these judgments will fall is not evident from the text. Hail is an image of Divine judgment (Isaiah 28:2, 17; Isaiah 30:30). 4. The happiness of the tiller. He sows beside all waters - a reference to the Oriental custom of casting the seed upon the waters of overflowing streams and rivers, so that, when the waters subside, it will be found again in the springing crop and the abundant harvest. The ox and the ass are employed to tread the moistened earth and prepare for the sowing (cf. Ecclesiastes 11:1, 6). In a figurative sense - happy those who go steadily on with useful work, the work that lies nearest them, the sowing which looks for a "far-off interest of good," amidst the most troubled times. No troubles of the lime should divert us from our daily task, or unsettle us from the habit of continuous useful labor. - J.
Behold, a King shall reign in righteousness. Such (Isaiah 31:8, 9) will be the ignominious end of the proud battalions of Assyria. For Judah a happier future immediately begins. There should be no break between the two chapters. The representation which follows (vers. 1-8) is the positive complement to Isaiah 31:6 f., and is parallel to Isaiah 30:23-26, completing under its ethical and spiritual aspects the picture of which the external material features were there delineated. Society, when the crisis is past, will be regenerated. Kings and nobles will be the devoted guardians of justice, and great men will be what their position demands that they should be — the willing and powerful protectors of the poor. All classes, in other words, will be pervaded by an increased sense of public duty. The spiritual and intellectual blindness (Isaiah 29:10) will have passed away (ver. 3); superficial and precipitate judgments will be replaced by discrimination (ver. 4a); hesitancy and vacillation will give way before the prompt and clear assertion of principle (ver. 4b). The present confusion of moral distinctions will cease; men and actions will be called by their right names.(Prof. S. R. Driver, D. D.) I. JUST GOVERNMENT IN BLESSING TO THE PEOPLE is the first good fruit (vers. 1, 2). II. The second is AN OPEN UNDERSTANDING AFTER THE CURSE OF HARDNESS (vers. 3, 4). III. A third good fruit is CALLING AND TREATING EVERYONE ACCORDING TO HIS TRUE CHARACTER (vers. 5-8). Nobility of birth and riches will give place to nobility of disposition, so that the former will not be found, nor find recognition without the latter. (F. Delitzsch.) I. THAT MAGISTRATES SHOULD DO THEIR DUTY IN THEIR PLACES, and the powers answer the great ends for which they were ordained of God (vers. 1, 2). 1. There shall be a king and princes that shall reign and rule; for it cannot go well when there is no king in Israel. 2. They shall use their power according to law, and not against it. 3. Thus they shall be great blessings to the people (ver. 2). "A man" — that man, that king that reigns in righteousness — "shall be as a hiding-place." II. THAT SUBJECTS SHALL DO THEIR DUTY IN THEIR PLACES. 1. They shall be willing to be taught, and to understand things aright (ver. 3). When this blessed work of reformation is set on foot, and men do their part towards it, God will not be wanting to do His. Then "the eyes of them that see" — of the prophets, the seers — "shall not be dim," &c. 2. There shall be a wonderful change wrought in them by that which is taught them (ver. 4).(1) They shall have a clear head, and be able to discern things that differ, and distinguish concerning them.(2) They shall have a ready utterance. 3. The differences between good and evil, virtue and vice, shall be kept up and no more confounded by those who put darkness for light, and light, for darkness (ver. 5). ( Matthew Henry.) Though Isaiah s words are only perfectly ful-filled in Jesus Christ, it was not concerning Christ that they were spoken. The prophet is speaking of the religious future and social progress of his people. He is presenting a picture of regenerated Judah. He points to the essential elements of all national stability and greatness. He speaks first of the righteousness that shall be exalted, and exemplified in the government of king and rulers; and then he goes on to speak of the moral conditions of real blessedness and progress, as they shall appear among the people. Great characters are the outstanding feature in the reformed society that he anticipates. Through them the progress of the nation is secured; in them the greatness of the nation will consist. But great characters can only exercise their full and proper influence when they move among those who are able to discern their greatness. Hence Isaiah declares that in that glorious time for which he confidently looks the moral blindness of the people, over which he had so often and so deeply mourned, the moral insensibility dulness, with all the confusion and false judgment it occasioned, shall have ceased (ver. 3). Men shall know true manhood when they see it, and honour the manhood that they see. They shall no longer debase the moral currency, and make false use of terms denoting moral qualities. The great men shall be seen in all their greatness, and shall raise others to a moral elevation like their own. They shall protect the weak, and encourage the faint-hearted; they shall foster the growth of all goodness, and be an unfailing source of noblest inspiration. As they stand there in all their moral grandeur, rooted and grounded in the eternal righteoushess, they are indeed — and they are known to be — "as a hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rook in a weary land."(E. A. Lawrence.) The first eight verses of this chapter are like the sudden opening of a window. The hall behind you resounds with the clamour of fierce contentions; the window before you frames in the prospect of a fair country, all bathed in rosy light, a land of corn and wine and oil, a land of plenty and peace. Isaiah is not the only politician who has found relief from the anxieties of a stormy time in a Utopia of his own imagining. The air was full of the noise of change, the Reformation was in full career on the Continent, and the ground-swell of the great movement already trembling on the shores of England, when Sir Thomas More wrote his description of the ideal state. When, as they think, everything is going wrong, men often have brightest visions of what the world would be if everything were going right. Isaiah's Utopia has three grand characteristics:1. The triumph of righteousness in government. His programme for the ruling power is this: "A king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment." 2. The new state shall be broad-based, not upon the people's will, but upon the people's character. Men shall not be, as they have been, weak and unstable, and ungenerous; but, rock-like and river-like, they shall be strong and bountiful. 3. The ideal Israel, themselves judged justly, shall be just judges of others. They shall be able to discriminate character, and to recognise and honour the truly good. "The quack and the dupe," says Carlyle, "are upper and under side of the same substance." So, in the kingdom of the future, "the vile person shall be no more called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful." There will be no quacks, because there will be no dupes. Those who are liberal themselves are not likely to err in what constitutes liberality in others. (W. B. Dalby.) People IsaiahPlaces JerusalemTopics Beyond, Careless, Complacent, Confident, Consumed, Cut, Daughters, Ended, Evil, Fail, Fruit, Gathering, Getting, Grape, Grapes, Harvest, Ingathering, O, Ones, Produce, Secure, Shudder, Tremble, Troubled, Vine-gardens, Vintage, Within, Women, Won'tOutline 1. The blessings of Christ's kingdom9. Desolation is foreshown 14. Restoration is promised to succeed Dictionary of Bible Themes Isaiah 32:10 4464 harvest Library The Hiding-Place'And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.'--ISAIAH xxxii. 2. We may well say, Of whom speaketh the prophet this? Here are distinctly attributed to one of ourselves, if we take the words in their simplicity and fulness, functions and powers which universal experience has taught us not to look for in humanity. And there have been a great many attempts--as it seems to me, altogether … Alexander Maclaren—Expositions of Holy Scripture Sowing Beside all Waters. Sureness Peace on Earth through Righteousness The Cloven Rock Under his Shadow. A vision of the King. The Second Continental Journey. The First Ministry of the Baptist. Have Read the Letter which You in Your Wisdom have Written Me. You Inveigh against Me St. Malachy's Apostolic Labours, Praises and Miracles. The Outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Letter xxvi. (Circa A. D. 1127) to the Same His Future Work Question of the Contemplative Life Assurance How the Silent and the Talkative are to be Admonished. The Plan for the Coming of Jesus. How to Make Use of Christ as the Truth, that we May Get Our Case and Condition Cleared up to Us. The Gospel of the Kingdom. How Christ is to be Made Use of as Our Life, in Case of Heartlessness and Fainting through Discouragements. Isaiah Links Isaiah 32:10 NIVIsaiah 32:10 NLT Isaiah 32:10 ESV Isaiah 32:10 NASB Isaiah 32:10 KJV Isaiah 32:10 Bible Apps Isaiah 32:10 Parallel Isaiah 32:10 Biblia Paralela Isaiah 32:10 Chinese Bible Isaiah 32:10 French Bible Isaiah 32:10 German Bible Isaiah 32:10 Commentaries Bible Hub |
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