Isaiah 52:1, 2 Awake, awake; put on your strength, O Zion; put on your beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city… Arise, and sit down... O captive daughter of Zion. "The verses are a poetical description of the liberation of a female captive from degrading slavery, and it is designed to represent the complete emancipation of the Church from tyranny and persecution." The call is peculiar as judged by Western associations, but quite natural in view of Eastern habits. The female is pictured as crouching on the ground, huddled in the dust, in the depressed and miserable attitude of the slave. She is called to "arise," shake off the dust of her degradation, put on beautiful garments, and sit down like a lady. Jerusalem, or Zion, as it is called, is regarded as a "castaway," given over for a time, by God, into the power of the Babylonians. Now her restoring-time has come. She is to put on again the garments of beauty, which belonged to her as the priestly queen of cities. Jowett puts the point of these verses in the following sentences: "The captive daughter of Zion, brought down to the dust of suffering and oppression, is commanded to arise and shake herself from that dust; and then, with grace, and dignity, and composure, and security, to sit down; to take, as it were, again her seat and rank amid the company of the nations of the earth, which had before afflicted her and trampled her to the earth." Dealing with the truths suggested in their applications to us, we consider - I. GOD IS THE STERN EXPERIENCES OF LIFE. We lose much by not carefully discriminating the kinds of things that are gathered up into the word "affliction." Disasters and failures - the various forms of trouble that come in our outward sphere of relations - give us, and are intended to give us, quite other ideas of God than we get from bodily pains or bereavements. To see God in a captivity, a slavery, a business ruin, is an altogether harder thing than to see God in a disease or a family anxiety. The danger of Israel while in Babylon was that it might wrongly regard God's stern dealing, and, helplessly, hopelessly grovel in the dust of despair. And still there is the grave danger of our responding by hardness, stubbornness, self-willedness, when God's ways with us seem stern. But the stern may be the precise expression of perfect love finding adaptations and adjustments. A distinction may be helpfully made between God's work of softening and God's work of humbling. We may see the softening work illustrated in Job or in Hezekiah. We may see the humbling work illustrated in Manasseh, who must be dragged off into captivity, and feel the bitterness of the prison-house; or in Israel as a corrupt, self-willed nation, which must feel what it was for the Babylonian "iron to eat into its soul." II. GOD LIMITING THE STERN EXPERIENCES OF LIFE. As a rule, such Divine dealings are not greatly prolonged. It is, indeed, in the very nature of them that they should not be long continued. They are like punishment by whipping, which is soon over and clone with. Relatively to the life of a nation, seventy years of captivity is only a "little while." And in a later verse of this prophecy we find God exactly expressing how limited his stern experiences had been: "In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment." And the expression of the apostle most strictly applies to this class of Divine dealings: "Our light affliction, which is but for a moment." If we come, then, into God's stern hands, they are our Father's hands, and love will strictly limit the stern dealings to the "needs be;" and this great confidence may quiet our souls and give peace, even while we suffer, or endure, or struggle. III. GOD RESTORING FROM THE STERN EXPERIENCES OF LIFE. Zion is restored; Jerusalem is rebuilt; Manasseh comes back to his throne; Job's latter end is brighter than his beginning. Justice is God's strange work, mercy is his delight. Above everything else he is the Redeemer, the Restorer, finding ever more joy in restoring than we can find in being restored. It is as if he were glad with infinite gladness when he can take the cloud away, and let his smile break through again upon us. What seem to us extravagant, ecstatic pictures of the restored glory of the Jewish nation, are really intended to impress on us what a joy God finds in his redeemings. This is expressed for us in the assurance of the Lord Jesus, that "there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that rcpenteth." And so far as we are really good, and like God, we find singular pleasure in putting things straight again, in reconciliations, in helping others to recover themselves and start afresh. IV. MAN RESPONDING GLADLY TO THE NEW JOY OF GOD'S RESTORATIONS. To this God calls in our text. It is as if he had said, "I am glad; now be you glad." There could be restorings, accept them at once, and lovingly and thankfully. Rise up out of all those depressions and despairings of captivity. Shake the very dust of the old troubles off. Dress in festal robes. Sing joy-songs. Realize your swiftly coming honours. "Lift up your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh." Sit down in stately, royal style, as if the promise were possession, and you entered on it when God gave his assurances. How sadly we fail in hesitating about the acceptance of what God gives! - R.T. Parallel Verses KJV: Awake, awake; put on thy strength, O Zion; put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city: for henceforth there shall no more come into thee the uncircumcised and the unclean. |
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