Isaiah 29:1-24

The Doom of Ariel

Isaiah 29:0

This is a mysterious chapter, and has been left practically unexplained. No one can say what "Ariel" means, definitely; though there are some etymological suggestions which are not wanting in value. It is a poetical term. The best conjecture is that it signifies Jerusalem. Men have often to speak and to write in cipher; especially in Scriptural days had men to do the best they could with their meaning, owing to circumstances of a hostile nature. The Bible is full of cipher. These wonderful love-letters could only be understood in some parts by the people who had the corresponding code. We have codes of business: why not codes of love? The Apocalypse is full of cipher, and commentators who have not the key make strange discord out of that sacred music. The people to whom the Apocalypse was written knew it, in all its range of thought and meaning, because they had the keywords; they knew what the writer meant when he said "Babylon." But in days when tyrants ruled, and men had to apologise for their faith with their blood, it was well to have some masonry, some signs which could only be understood by the initiated; then one little line stood for a whole volume of meaning; every word had an alias which was understood by the reader; so that words which are very mysterious to modern students were charged with light and music and heart passion to those to whom they were originally addressed. Still, it is wonderful how with all the ciphers men can use, the love of God will overflow them all, and assert itself in many a flash or whisper or spectral outline to be seen only when the eyes are shut. David dwelt or encamped which is a better rendering in the fortress of Zion. That gives us some hint as to the locality that is indicated by this poetical or symbolical terra Ariel lion-heart; or, variously, and sharply different, hearthstone, a place made warm by altar-fire, the innermost chamber of the divine home, where wanderers felt the glow of divine hospitality and the secureness of divine protection. Great distress was to come upon Ariel: for the Lord has never spared the elect. Election gives him rights of discipline. We may inflict punishment upon those who are ours, when we may not lay the hand of chastisement upon those who do not belong to us. Love has its own law-court, but there is the open public market-place for the administration of common justice to those who are not ours by right of blood or love or pledged resolution of mutual loyalty.

Yet with all the distress there was a sense of protection. The close of the second verse does not read very rhythmically

"Yet I will distress Ariel, and there shall be heaviness and sorrow: and it shall be unto me as Ariel." ( Isa 29:2 )

If we put one word into the last part of the verse that word will be key and explanation, light and relief at once, namely, the word "yet"; then the latter part of the verse will read "and yet it shall be unto me as Ariel," bleeding because of the rod, swallowed up and greatly distressed, yea, loaded with sorrow, it shall still be Jerusalem, it shall still be the darling of God. It is so with the whole world. God cannot leave it. He rends it with earthquakes, and comes back to seal up the chasms, to grow green beauty on the rips and rents which the terrific energy has made. He withdraws from the world for a year, and then comes back with two years at a time. It would seem as if he repented first, as if love could not hold out, but must yield, at least make some approach in renewed goodness, in illuminated providence, if haply at the very last obstinacy may be subdued, and rebellion may be changed to loyalty. God is still conducting this ministry of approach and appeal and gracious offer. Behold, his hand is still stretched down out of heaven, and his fingers are laid upon the children of men.

What resources of humiliation God owns! Even Ariel was to be brought down, and was to speak out of the ground, and the speech of Ariel was to be low out of the dust, and the voice of Ariel was to be, as one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and Ariel's speech was to be like a whisper out of the dust ( Isa 29:4 ). The tone that was once so clarion-like, so musical, that was heard as might be heard the voice of silver bells, was to be sunk to a whisper, a sigh scarcely audible because of the gathering dust. See Ariel humiliated! To have seen her taken up and thrown away by Omnipotence would have been a spectacle not wholly without dignity; but to see sweet Ariel, the great lion-heart, or the word once significant of home and warmth and comfort and protection, to see Ariel thrust away in the dust muttering like one half-buried from a grave half-filled, is humiliation hardly to be borne.

There were great assaults as well as great humiliations

"Thou shalt be visited of the Lord of hosts with thunder, and with earthquake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire" ( Isa 29:6 ).

The mercy soon comes in this chapter

"And the multitude of all the nations that fight against Ariel, even all that fight against her and her munition, and that distress her, shall be as a dream of a night vision" ( Isa 29:7 ).

"It shall even be as when an hungry man dreameth, and, behold, he eateth; but he awaketh, and his soul is empty: or as when a thirsty man dreameth, and, behold, he drinketh; but he awaketh, and, behold, he is faint, and his soul hath appetite" ( Isa 29:8 ).

Now comes a very modern passage. The very thing that we imagined to be original, and the latest discovery of folly, is written down here without cipher, in the plainest, directest English:

"For the Lord hath poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep, and hath closed your eyes: the prophets and your rulers, the seers hath he covered. And the vision of all is become unto you as the words of a book that is sealed, which men deliver to one that is learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I cannot; for it is sealed: and the book is delivered to him that is not learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I am not learned" ( Isa 29:10-12 ).

Precisely the condition of religious civilisation today! On the one hand, we have that agnosticism that will not know, and on the other the agnosticism that has never had the chance of instruction. See how the case stands. First of all, the book is delivered to one that is learned learned in letters, in history, in philosophy, in science; and the appeal is "Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I cannot; for it is sealed;" I cannot read anything about God, for it is a mystery impenetrable; I cannot discover the secret of the universe, for it is sealed: we must not attempt to break the seal; whatever mystery there is must be left; let us confine ourselves to things we can handle, and properly appraise, and use under our own discretion, and let us leave alone sealed things, unknowable mysteries, doctrines that were never meant to have their equivalent in words. A wondrous thing indeed that this agnosticism should have been painted so vividly thousands of years ago! The men to whom the appeal was made were learned men, the scribes and teachers of their day; but they said, Here is a book which cannot be opened or read, for it is sealed: we must simply recognise its existence, and pass by it, leaving the opening and the solution as things quite beyond our immediate reach or understanding. This is what the most learned agnostic would say today to the humble inquirer who went to him with the question, What is God? what is the future? what is the destiny of man? or what are the worlds that shine above us? What is the meaning of spiritual inspiration, direction, government? what is it that provides the food we eat? or who kindles the light under which we do our work? what is there beyond? He would say, "I cannot read it; for it is sealed." The universe is like a musical instrument, he would continue and herein we quote almost the very words of the agnostic himself having so many keys: on the one hand you have all that is light, and lilting, and silvery, and cheerful; and on the other all that is deep, and profound, and solemn, and heavy, and dark, and thunderous; there between these points your arms may move, but beyond all is sealed. What, am I then seated on a stool, and have I nothing but arms that I can put out? Have I no imagination, no dream power, no speculation? Have I not at least something stirring within me which says, do not sit there; rise; use other faculties; the arms are but poor symbols of thy strength: thou art a soul, a spirit, a winged lite; go and claim the inheritance of the morning and the estate of the summer. It would seem to be extremely humble but there is a humility which no man believes that one should say, I cannot read this history or answer this enigma; for it is sealed. Then the inquirer turns to those who are really ignorant, saying, "Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I am not learned." He measures learning, however, by letters; he does not know that there is a learning which is independent of letters and forms, symbols and things that can be viewed spectacularly. There is a learning of the heart, and herein we find the sphere of inspired genius, inspired intuition that marvellous instinct, sagacity, soul-power, which knows without having been to school. "How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" There are people who never can get away from the idea that heaven is to be scaled by a ladder: they forget that there are wings. There are many ways to truth, to God, to rest, not known by those who live simply in the letter. When the Bible is fully opened, annotated from beginning to end as with light, it will be done by the meek soul, the modest spirit He will see most who first excludes the visible: then by pureness of heart and simplicity of motive, he may see God.

The people are rebuked who turn things upside down. This is the teaching of the sixteenth verse. By turning things upside down is meant putting things into false relations, taking hold of things by the wrong end, confounding the potter with the clay, and instead of setting the vessel down setting the potter down. This is wise unwisdom, blind sagacity, the kind of intellectual audacity that leads to defiance, not to courage. Are there not men who are gifted with the genius of inversion men who through satire, or love of sarcasm, or recklessness of mind, pervert and invert all the harmonies and purposes of God, violating divine proportions, and reversing eternal decrees, so far as their limited power will permit? Such men cannot read the Bible aright; they always open at the wrong place; they always fasten upon the wrong question. There are so many men anxious to know who wrote the Pentateuch that they never read the book itself. There are so many persons who are profoundly busy in reading the address on the outside of the letter that they never open the envelope; they have been fighting for centuries about the envelope, and the address, and the local stamp, and wondering how old the postman was that stamped that letter, and what will become of him in two thousand years from this day; and the family is in contention and tumult and unrest; every morning that letter is produced to have the envelope rediscussed and the writing re-examined through the latest microscope that can be borrowed. Why not open the letter? It may contain something; it may be self-explanatory; there may be a banknote in it. Let us open the letter; let us read the Pentateuch; and if we find in it light, and music, and truth, and drama conforming to our own experience of life, we may be able by such a process to get back to all that is really valuable in authorship. The value is in the thing that is said, and not in the signature which it bears. If men would thus read the Bible, take hold of it by the right side, and take care never to turn it upside down, they would be able themselves to sign the book, and they might be forgiven if they said they had written the twenty-third psalm. We have all written it; that is to say, we would have written it had we been blessed with the genius of expression, for we have all felt it; so that when the divinely-gifted minstrel sang the psalm first in our hearing we said, Sing it again; that is what we have been waiting for: blessed art thou, for thou hast a necromancy in the use of words, and thou hast translated the dumb meaning of all souls. Thus we must seize the moral purpose of the Bible, and work from that purpose backward and forward into all related, to minor and comparatively insignificant, questions.

The prophet complains of people who made him "an offender for a word" ( Isa 29:21 ). That is to say, they condemned him as unpatriotic because he pronounced publicly against the sins of the city. He intimates his public character in the peculiar expression in the twenty-first verse "that reproveth in the gate." The literal meaning is that he was an open-air speaker. He could not be enclosed by walls; he could not be roofed in: he was an open-air preacher, a man whose pulpit was always ready, a man who required a great church, for he had a great message to deliver. It is precisely so today. Men are made offenders for a word in various ways, and not least in a moral way for being too critical upon their age. We love criticism only when it is directed to others. Yet are there not men who make prophets and preachers and poets and teachers offenders because of a word? The fault is a little one, but it is magnified, it is distorted, it is put in false lights, it is aggravated into a kind of burden of guilt. Do we not need open-air preachers? We do. But the climate is against us! We are quite willing to condemn the absentees, but who will stand on the steps of the Stock Exchange and say Oh, generation of bloodsuckers, vipers, children of the devil! The only remedy for that is, alas, an indictment for nuisance! The prophet is dead, or if he be not dead he is in the wilderness, where he has abundance of open air but no audience. Who will say that Isaiah is an ancient prophet, that his prophecies are an ancient book? Jesus Christ quoted from them. Who can wonder that another said, "Esaias is very bold"? He was bold because he knew his ground, he knew his age, he knew the truth he had to deliver, and knowledge of truth gives a man confidence as knowledge of language does. He who knows the language he speaks, speaks in all companies with perfect confidence and therefore with perfect ease. It is the uncertain grammarian that sits in silence, or picks his way daintily and inoffensively over commonplaces which nobody can remember. The prophet who knows the language of God in other terms, the truth and purpose of God speaks at the gate, in the open air, by night, by day, in the long summer, in the cold winter, and his cry is magnified because his conviction is strong.

Prayer

Almighty God, we are saved by hope. In the spirit of hope we live and work and suffer. Hope destroys time and distance and hindrance, and brings thee near to us with sacred realisation. We have the things we hope for when we hope according to thy will; we are already in heaven, though we know it not, when we do thy bidding and follow all the spirit of the blessed Christ. We have our reward; we have it now, in beginning, and sign, and hint; we shall have it wholly, in the absoluteness of its perfection, in thine own due time, when we obey the summons to arise because the Master is come and waiteth for us. Thou hast spoken comfortably unto our hearts in many voices, in many tones, in thy providence day by day, in all the miracle of our poor human life which thou hast brought onward from stage to stage unto this present, raising us up from many dejections, leading us forth from many humiliations, and giving us unexpected strength and unlooked-for delight. But what hast thou done in the Cross of Jesus Christ thy Son but shown all the miracles of eternity, all the wonders of almightiness, all the glory and wealth of heaven? We gaze upon that Cross, and our eyes are filled with tears; we look again, and our eyes are charged with light; we look again, and behold whilst we look the dying One lives and gives life, and is already more than conqueror. May we live in the spirit of Christ, then we shall have daily comfort; may we be crucified with Christ, then we can have no other pain; may we lean our little crosses against the tree on which he bore his woe. Amen.