Note 1 — ISAIAH. (continued 9)

It was no ordinary day that saw the discomfiture of the Assyrian host before the walls of Jerusalem. We can scarcely understand the terror and dismay with which a religious Jew must have watched the growth of those mighty Oriental despotisms which, rising one after the other in the valley of the Euphrates and of the Tigris, aspired to nothing less than the conquest of the known world. The victory of a conqueror like Sennacherib meant the extinction of national life and of personal liberty in the conquered people; it meant often enough violent transportation from their homes, separation from their families, with all the degrading and penal accompaniments of complete subjugation. It meant this to the conquered pagan cities; for Jerusalem it meant this and more. The knowledge and worship of God, by institutions of Divine appointment, maintained only in that little corner of the wide world, were linked on to the fortunes of the Jewish state, and in the victory of Sennacherib would be involved not merely political humiliation, but religious darkness. When, then, his armies advanced across the continent again and again, making of a city a heap, and of a fenced city a ruin, and at last appeared before Jerusalem, when the blast of the terrible men was as a storm against the wall, there was natural dismay in every religious and patriotic soul. It seemed as though a veil or covering, like that which was spread over the holy things in the Jewish ritual, was being spread more and more completely over all nations at each step of the Assyrian monarch’s advance, and in those hours of darkness all true-hearted men in Jerusalem waited for God. He had delivered them from Egyptian slavery; He had given them the realm of David and Solomon. He who had done so much for them would not desert them now. In His own way He would rebuke this insolent enemy of his truth and His people, and this passionate longing for His intervention quickened the eye and welled the heart of Jerusalem when at last it came. The destruction of Sennacherib’s host was one of those supreme moments in the history of a people which can never be lived over again by posterity. The sense of deliverance was proportioned to the agony which had preceded it. To Isaiah and his contemporaries it seemed as though a canopy of thick darkness was lifted from the face of the world, as though the recollections of slaughter and of death were entirely swallowed up in the absorbing sense of deliverance, as though the tears of the city had been wiped away and the rebuke of God’s people was taken from earth, and therefore from the heart of Israel there burst forth a welcome proportioned to the anxious longing that had preceded it, “Lo, this is our God; we have waited for Him; He will save us.”—Liddon.