Behold, a king will reign in righteousness, and princes will rule with justice. Sermons
I. ROYALTY WILL BE SYNONYMOUS WITH RIGHTEOUSNESS. The King will be seen in his beauty - not the splendor of purple robes and lofty throne and brilliant court, but that of the equity and justice which imitate Heaven. God will call him by his name, will make him rich with hidden possessions, will go before him to make the crooked ways straight (Isaiah 45:1-4). In spite of all the failings of kings, the mass of the people bear a deep reverence and affection to royalty. Even in the counterfeit they recognize some relation to the real thing. "A divinity doth hedge a king;" this is not only poetically, but religiously true, if the king in any sort answer to the truth of his position. In happier days he will so answer. II. THE UPPER CLASSES WILL BE THE SPIRITUAL SUPERIORS OF THE PEOPLE. Aristocracy began with personal worth, and by it only can be maintained. We see from the description what the nobility ought to be in relation to the people. Patrons, protectors; "hiding-places from the wind," a "covert from the rain-storm, rivulets in a parched land, the shadow of a huge cliff in a thirsty land." Noblesse oblige. They should be looked up to; every popular cause should find in them its defenders and active advocates; every philanthropic scheme in them its leaders; every misery of the poor in them its zealous redressers. High place without high qualities is a mockery; lofty station coupled with low manners, a scandal and an abuse. Alas! too often in the history of the "ruling classes" these truths have been forgotten, these relations have been reversed. Again and again God has called them to judgment: "You have eaten up the vineyards, the plunder of the afflicted is in your houses. What mean ye that crush my people, and grind the face of the afflicted?" Notably so at the time of the great French Revolution. III. THE RESULTS OF A SPIRITUAL CHANGE. No reformation of manners, no happy reconciliation of class with class can come about, except by a change of mind and heart. And that change itself can only come whence all changes in the realm of nature and spirit come - from the creative, the re-creative energy of God. The body is the organ of the spirit in its manifold activities. Any fresh sensibility of the physical organs is typical, therefore, of an awakened and living conscience. The closed eye is typical of the blindness of those who will not see. To shut the eye to evil, to turn the head away from what disgusts, - this may seem for a time equivalent to canceling the evil itself. Not so; and reformation sets in from that hour when men are willing to face the most painful facts, to let the light into the darkest corners of existence. Ears were made to listen, not to be stopped. Let the bitter cry be hearkened to; its tones thrill through every fiber of our sympathetic being; nor let its pleading be dismissed until the question, What can I do? has found some distinct answer. The tongue was made, not to stammer, but to flow with truthful and gracious speech. Silence may mean that we have no help to offer; stuttering accents that we are of a divided mind, of obscure habits of thought. Lucidity is what we need - the lucidity of the single eye, the sensitive organism filled through and through with light. And what does our haste and feverish precipitation signify, but want of that deliberate forethought and that circumspection which is a constant duty? "The heart of the hasty shall perceive distinctly." Although we cannot refer all sin, like Socrates, to want of insight, yet no sin but implies that want. God's deepest, most far-reaching blessings must ever be for the heart, in that large sense in which Scripture uses the word - including every mental faculty or activity. Material improvements are not to be neglected. The sanity and weal of the body have a direct bearing on the weal of mind; yet, on the other hand, there will be no material improvements until the improving mind has been awakened and truly educated. IV. THE CONSTITUTION OF THINGS NEEDING REFORMATION. It is a confusion which needs to be removed. It is a world turned upside down which needs to be righted. The foot and the knave may designate the ruling classes of the time. Fool! how weighty the condemnation, how deep-burning the brand, which belongs to the use of the word in Scripture! The world may call him par excellence the fool who minds all business but his own; the prophet calls him the fool who thinks of self, but forgets his God. The sinner, in short, is the fool. His is the worst and least excusable ignorance. He may be called "noble" in the convention of society, he is contemptible in the judgment of God. The characteristics of the fool are that he speaks folly, and this "out of the abundance" of a wicked heart - a forge and workshop where the production of evil is ever going on; that he delights to propagate heresy and atheism as a center of religious darkness. Hungry souls look to those Nabals, and are not fed, but deprived of their sustenance; and the waters they point out prove to be as the mirage of the desert on near approach. The denunciation of such spurious leaders of the people reminds of Milton's invective - "The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed;
Behold, a King shall reign in righteousness. Such (Isaiah 31:8, 9) will be the ignominious end of the proud battalions of Assyria. For Judah a happier future immediately begins. There should be no break between the two chapters. The representation which follows (vers. 1-8) is the positive complement to Isaiah 31:6 f., and is parallel to Isaiah 30:23-26, completing under its ethical and spiritual aspects the picture of which the external material features were there delineated. Society, when the crisis is past, will be regenerated. Kings and nobles will be the devoted guardians of justice, and great men will be what their position demands that they should be — the willing and powerful protectors of the poor. All classes, in other words, will be pervaded by an increased sense of public duty. The spiritual and intellectual blindness (Isaiah 29:10) will have passed away (ver. 3); superficial and precipitate judgments will be replaced by discrimination (ver. 4a); hesitancy and vacillation will give way before the prompt and clear assertion of principle (ver. 4b). The present confusion of moral distinctions will cease; men and actions will be called by their right names.(Prof. S. R. Driver, D. D.) I. JUST GOVERNMENT IN BLESSING TO THE PEOPLE is the first good fruit (vers. 1, 2). II. The second is AN OPEN UNDERSTANDING AFTER THE CURSE OF HARDNESS (vers. 3, 4). III. A third good fruit is CALLING AND TREATING EVERYONE ACCORDING TO HIS TRUE CHARACTER (vers. 5-8). Nobility of birth and riches will give place to nobility of disposition, so that the former will not be found, nor find recognition without the latter. (F. Delitzsch.) I. THAT MAGISTRATES SHOULD DO THEIR DUTY IN THEIR PLACES, and the powers answer the great ends for which they were ordained of God (vers. 1, 2). 1. There shall be a king and princes that shall reign and rule; for it cannot go well when there is no king in Israel. 2. They shall use their power according to law, and not against it. 3. Thus they shall be great blessings to the people (ver. 2). "A man" — that man, that king that reigns in righteousness — "shall be as a hiding-place." II. THAT SUBJECTS SHALL DO THEIR DUTY IN THEIR PLACES. 1. They shall be willing to be taught, and to understand things aright (ver. 3). When this blessed work of reformation is set on foot, and men do their part towards it, God will not be wanting to do His. Then "the eyes of them that see" — of the prophets, the seers — "shall not be dim," &c. 2. There shall be a wonderful change wrought in them by that which is taught them (ver. 4).(1) They shall have a clear head, and be able to discern things that differ, and distinguish concerning them.(2) They shall have a ready utterance. 3. The differences between good and evil, virtue and vice, shall be kept up and no more confounded by those who put darkness for light, and light, for darkness (ver. 5). ( Matthew Henry.) Though Isaiah s words are only perfectly ful-filled in Jesus Christ, it was not concerning Christ that they were spoken. The prophet is speaking of the religious future and social progress of his people. He is presenting a picture of regenerated Judah. He points to the essential elements of all national stability and greatness. He speaks first of the righteousness that shall be exalted, and exemplified in the government of king and rulers; and then he goes on to speak of the moral conditions of real blessedness and progress, as they shall appear among the people. Great characters are the outstanding feature in the reformed society that he anticipates. Through them the progress of the nation is secured; in them the greatness of the nation will consist. But great characters can only exercise their full and proper influence when they move among those who are able to discern their greatness. Hence Isaiah declares that in that glorious time for which he confidently looks the moral blindness of the people, over which he had so often and so deeply mourned, the moral insensibility dulness, with all the confusion and false judgment it occasioned, shall have ceased (ver. 3). Men shall know true manhood when they see it, and honour the manhood that they see. They shall no longer debase the moral currency, and make false use of terms denoting moral qualities. The great men shall be seen in all their greatness, and shall raise others to a moral elevation like their own. They shall protect the weak, and encourage the faint-hearted; they shall foster the growth of all goodness, and be an unfailing source of noblest inspiration. As they stand there in all their moral grandeur, rooted and grounded in the eternal righteoushess, they are indeed — and they are known to be — "as a hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rook in a weary land."(E. A. Lawrence.) The first eight verses of this chapter are like the sudden opening of a window. The hall behind you resounds with the clamour of fierce contentions; the window before you frames in the prospect of a fair country, all bathed in rosy light, a land of corn and wine and oil, a land of plenty and peace. Isaiah is not the only politician who has found relief from the anxieties of a stormy time in a Utopia of his own imagining. The air was full of the noise of change, the Reformation was in full career on the Continent, and the ground-swell of the great movement already trembling on the shores of England, when Sir Thomas More wrote his description of the ideal state. When, as they think, everything is going wrong, men often have brightest visions of what the world would be if everything were going right. Isaiah's Utopia has three grand characteristics:1. The triumph of righteousness in government. His programme for the ruling power is this: "A king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment." 2. The new state shall be broad-based, not upon the people's will, but upon the people's character. Men shall not be, as they have been, weak and unstable, and ungenerous; but, rock-like and river-like, they shall be strong and bountiful. 3. The ideal Israel, themselves judged justly, shall be just judges of others. They shall be able to discriminate character, and to recognise and honour the truly good. "The quack and the dupe," says Carlyle, "are upper and under side of the same substance." So, in the kingdom of the future, "the vile person shall be no more called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful." There will be no quacks, because there will be no dupes. Those who are liberal themselves are not likely to err in what constitutes liberality in others. (W. B. Dalby.) People IsaiahPlaces JerusalemTopics Behold, Chiefs, Decisions, Judgment, Justice, Justly, Princes, Reign, Righteously, Righteousness, Rule, Rulers, RulingOutline 1. The blessings of Christ's kingdom9. Desolation is foreshown 14. Restoration is promised to succeed Dictionary of Bible Themes Isaiah 32:1 2042 Christ, justice of Library The Hiding-Place'And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.'--ISAIAH xxxii. 2. We may well say, Of whom speaketh the prophet this? Here are distinctly attributed to one of ourselves, if we take the words in their simplicity and fulness, functions and powers which universal experience has taught us not to look for in humanity. And there have been a great many attempts--as it seems to me, altogether … Alexander Maclaren—Expositions of Holy Scripture Sowing Beside all Waters. Sureness Peace on Earth through Righteousness The Cloven Rock Under his Shadow. A vision of the King. The Second Continental Journey. The First Ministry of the Baptist. Have Read the Letter which You in Your Wisdom have Written Me. You Inveigh against Me St. Malachy's Apostolic Labours, Praises and Miracles. The Outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Letter xxvi. (Circa A. D. 1127) to the Same His Future Work Question of the Contemplative Life Assurance How the Silent and the Talkative are to be Admonished. The Plan for the Coming of Jesus. How to Make Use of Christ as the Truth, that we May Get Our Case and Condition Cleared up to Us. The Gospel of the Kingdom. How Christ is to be Made Use of as Our Life, in Case of Heartlessness and Fainting through Discouragements. 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