Salvation to the uttermost.
"Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." The previous verses show that the Jews had mistaken the ideal of Divine services; they had turned them into a correct ritual, to a multitude of sacrifices without purpose. And purpose or motive is the very heart of religion. They were devotional, but cruel. "When ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood." It was all empty ceremony. The solemn meeting even was iniquity. A change must come. And it must bean in character. "Cease to do evil." Yes; but that is not enough. Negation is not salvation. There must be life unto God as well as death unto sin. "Learn to do well." Then come the words of our text. They sound a strange note at first; they speak of what man cannot do and what God can.
I. HERE IS THE GOSPEL IN ISAIAH. Free, full, perfect redemption. We see in these words Gethsemane and Calvary. There God's purpose was fulfilled; but it is in his heart when these words are spoken, for "the Lamb was slain before the foundation of the world." It is a glorious gospel—God giving himself for the world. And now, as we read Israel's sins in this record, we may see even then that, where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.
II. HERE IS THE REASONABLENESS OF RELIGION. How condescending! Let us—the Infinite and the finite, the immaculate and the evil. Yet so it is. God says, "While you are stained with blood and cloaked with hypocrisy, I can have nothing to say to you or to do with you." It cannot be that light should have fellowship with darkness. That is reasonable surely. But how can the sins of Judah and Jerusalem be purged away? Amendment is not atonement. And God is their Ransom, the high God is their Redeemer!
III. HERE IS THE CHARTER OF THE CHURCH'S LIBERTY. These words will never be forgotten. They have comforted millions. It is not liberty to sin, but salvation from all sin, and from the punishment of sin. Not from punishment only, but from sin itself, in all its forms, all its depths, all its degrees! For the colors are chosen as the symbols of the most marked and malignant evil—scarlet and crimson. Yet God is able to save to the uttermost. The words are best understood beneath the cross and in the history of redeemed men in every age.—W.M.S.
HOMILIES BY W. CLARKSON
Ingratitude and intervention.
The "vision of Isaiah" during the reigns of four kings of Judah (verse 1), and the declaration (verse 2) that "the Lord hath spoken" (or speaketh), suggests—
I. THE FACT THAT GOD HAS INTERVENED AND DOES INTERVENE IN HUMAN AFFAIRS.
1. Such Divine intervention ought not to have been necessary. For God has so ordered everything around us, and has so constituted us ourselves, that there were abundant sources of truth and heavenly wisdom without it. All visible nature (Romans 1:20); the bounties of Divine providence (Acts 14:17); the manifestations of Divine pleasure and displeasure in the events and issues of life (Psalms 34:15, Psalms 34:16); the conscience that speaks and strikes within the soul—the moral judgment of which our spiritual nature is capable (Proverbs 20:27; Acts 24:16; Romans 2:15);—these should have sufficed for man's instruction, integrity, perfection. But we find, from the religious history of our race, that these sources of enlightenment and influence have not been sufficient.
2. There has been needed, and there has been granted, special intervention from God. "The Lord hath spoken" to mankind:
II. HUMAN INGRATITUDE THE OCCASION OF THE DIVINE INTERVENTION. What is it that calls forth the Divine utterance? It is the shameful ingratitude of his own sons. "I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me." There are great and terrible crimes which have to be recorded against the human race; there are evil and shameful wrong-doings which stain and darken many individual lives; but there is one common and inexcusable wrong, to which all people and all souls must plead guilty, one common sin, with which we have all to reproach ourselves,—it is that with which God himself reproaches Israel—heinous and aggravated ingratitude.
1. God has done everything to attach us to himself. He has closely related us to himself; he has made us his children; he has expended upon us the lavish love, the patient care, the multiplied bounties, of a Father's heart, of a Father's hand.
2. We have broken away from his benignant rule. We "have rebelled against him;" our rebellion includes forgetfulness, inattention, dislike, insubmissiveness, disobedience. To whom we owe everything we are and have, to him we have rendered nothing for which he has been looking, everything which has been grievous in his sight.
III. OUR FITTING ATTITUDE WHEN GOD IS SPEAKING. When God speaks, let every voice be hushed; let all things everywhere, even the greatest and most majestic of all, lend their reverent attention. "Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth." There are