Man's preparations for receiving God's pardon.
Two things have to be clearly recognized, and harmoniously set together.
1. God's pardon and favour are absolutely free and priceless; they are sovereign gifts, based on no condition, won by no payment, responsive to no merit in us. He saves us purely for his "own Name's sake."
2. And yet there are conditions which those who receive the grace are reasonably required to be in, if they are to be recipients, and make right use of the grace received. These conditions are absolutely necessary, and yet there are in no sense at all any merit, or price, on which the grace is obtained. The harmonizing of the two things is not difficult. When we bestow a gift we look for a proper recipiency in those who receive. It would be to waste our gifts to bestow them where there was no preparedness to use them rightly. In this verse the preparation takes a threefold form.
I. THERE MUST BE THE PUTTING AWAY OF ALL WRONG-DOING. It would be insult for a child to ask pardon of a father while he kept on doing the disobedient thing that grieved his father. Sincerity of desire for pardon is shown in separating ourselves from the sin. Sense of the evil of the act is indicated in resolutely putting it away. This is the first thing God looks for in all who seek him. Kept sin, always and everywhere, keeps off the "grace."
II. THERE MUST BE A CLEANSING OF THOUGHT AND HEART. The love of sinning must go, and the act of sinning must cease. In the view of God, sin is not merely some positive act done. The Heart-searcher knows that the act was but the expression of evil thought, biassed will, selfish purpose. And so a man is not ready for forgiveness until his thought is changed, and exactly that changed thought is what we put into the word "repentance." Reformation of life and repentance of heart must go together to make the proper recipient attitude.
III. THERE MUST BE A POSITIVE TURNING TOWARDS GOD. The difference between evangelical repentance and worldly remorse is that repentance draws us toward God in hope, and remorse drives us from God in despair. It is distinctly expected that man will make positive efforts; and therefore we find the plea, "Come, and let us return unto the Lord." Bishop Wordsworth says, "In proclaiming God's loving promises, and the free offers of Divine grace, the prophet does not forget man's duties both in will and work." H. Ward Beecher gives the following illustration: "Every day, from my window, I see the gulls making circuits and beating against the north wind. Now they mount high above the masts of the vessels in the stream, and then suddenly drop to the water's edge, seeking to find some eddy unobstructed by the steady-blowing blast; till at length, abandoning their efforts, they turn and fly with the wind; and then how like a gleam of light do their white wings flash down the bay, faster than the eye can follow! So, when we cease to resist God's influences, and, turning towards him, our thought and feelings are upborne by the breath of the Spirit, how do they make such swift heavenward flight as no words can overtake!" When these three preparations indicate to God a readiness to receive his grace, then will that grace overflow, and he will "abundantly pardon."—R.T.
God is like yet unlike man.
We are made in his image. We are called to be "perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect." The hope of the future is that we "shall be like him." And yet we must keep up the conviction that we are but faint copies of him, and be is altogether better than we, the Infinite that is ever high above us, at once our inspiration and our despair. Apply God's unlikeness to us especially in the matter of redemption.
I. GOD CAN FORGIVE. This man finds it hard to do.
II. GOD CAN RESTORE. This man cannot do.
III. GOD CAN BLESS, HOPING FOR NOTHING IN RETURN. Man never very certainly succeeds in doing anything save for pay (see Acts 8:20).
IV. GOD CAN ABSOLUTELY KEEP HIS WORD OF PROMISE. Man is ever swift to promise, slow to perform. "The point of the comparison, in Isaiah 55:11, is that the predominance of fertility in the natural world, in spite of partial or apparent failures, is the pledge of a like triumph, in the long run, of the purposes of God for man's good over resistance. It does not exclude the partial, or even total, failure of many; it asserts that the saved are more than the lost." The betterness of God is the ground of our admiration, trust, and love; it is the incitement of a perpetual imitation. Perfection, for those who know God, is to be like God.—R.T.
Change and permanence in God's Word.
Dr. George Dana Boardman sees, in these verses, an unconscious anticipation of two great doctrines of modem science—the doctrine of convertibility of energies, or correlation of forces; and the doctrine of conservation of energy, or indestructibility of force. "We are now taught that heat, light, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity, etc; are modes of motion, and, as such, mutually interchangeable. And we are also taught that there is no evidence of any atom of matter having ever been annihilated. Disintegration is not annihilation."
I. GOD'S WORD IS CAPABLE OF ENDLESS TRANSFORMATIONS. God's truth, coming down like rain or snow from heaven, does not return to him void, but is transfigured into Christian character. Truth, like force, undergoes metamorphosis. For instance, the motion of enterprise glides into the heat of enthusiasm; the heat of enthusiasm into the light of influence; the light of influence into the magnetism of love, and so on. The history of Christianity itself, what is it but the history of the grace of God metamorphosed into various virtues?
II. GOD'S WORD IS INDESTRUCTIBLE. "What though rain falls on barren ledges? Not a drop is lost; for the rain trickles down into rills, the rills grow into brooks, the brooks swell into rivers, the rivers broaden into the sea, and the sea forms the international exchange of the world's commodities. What though snow mantles desolate deserts? Not a flake is a failure; for the snow melts, percolates the sands, feeds unseen springs, re-emerges as the bearded wheat of autumn." We may hopefully engage in the teaching and preaching of God's Word; for not one lesson can be really lost.—R.T.
Isaiah 54
Isaiah
Isaiah 56
Isaiah 55 - isaiah-55 - worlddic.com