Isaiah 46:4 And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry… Even to boar hairs will I carry you. Reference is made more especially to the prolonged life and varied experience of the nation; but the promise and assurance are equally applicable to the individual - they exactly match other assurances which are addressed to individuals. And Israel may always be regarded as the type of the godly man. For us all life is full of changes, surprises, and calamities. We have nothing absolutely stable and unchangeable, nothing always true and trustworthy, unless God is such. In an exquisite fragment of autobiography, - by Dr. Horace Bushnell, found dimly pencilled on a stray sheet of paper, is the following indication of the rest a soul finds in the permanence, the unchangeableness, of God: "My mother's loving instinct was from God, and God was in love to me first therefore; which love was deeper than hers, and more protracted. Long years ago she vanished, but God stays by me still, embracing me in my grey hairs, as tenderly and carefully as she did in my infancy, anti giving to me as my joy and the principal glory of my life that he lets me know him, and helps me, with real confidence, to call him my Father." This truth of God's permanent gracious relations with those who put their trust in him was stated in its Christian form by the Apostle John (John 13:1), when, speaking of his Master, he said, "Those whom he loveth, he loveth unto the end. It may be noticed that, while mother's love and interest never flags or fails, mother's work, of bearing, tending, carrying, does change and pass as the children grow older. So even with a mother God may be contrasted; for he tends even to old age, even to the end. Opening the general topic suggested by the text, we may observe that the promise - I. ASSUMES US TO BE IN GRACIOUS RELATIONS WITH GOD. Sometimes those relations are presented under the figure of a covenant." At other times they are seen as relations brought about by "redemption"-work in our behalf. Here the closer, more natural, more personal, relations of parents and children are referred to. God is represented as feeling towards us like the mother who bore us. Compare the psalmist's sense of the motherly relation in his plea, "When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up." II. DECLARES THAT THE RELATION SHALL BE KEPT UP TO THE END. Such an assurance is necessary, not because we fear any changeableness in God, but because we fear that the wilfulness and changeableness in us may grieve him, and lead him to remove his grace from us. The comfort of the promise of the text lies in the confidence it gives us that our waywardness will not outweary our God. "Though we believe not, yet he abideth faithful." III. INVOLVES GRACE SUFFICIENT FOR MAINTAINING THE RELATION. It is not a promise of grace at the end, but unto the end. All along the way we may be quite sure of adaptations of Divine grace such as may go into the words "carry," "bear," "deliver." - R.T. Parallel Verses KJV: And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you. |
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