Ahaz declines the offer by referring to Deut. vi. 16., and thus assuming the guise of reverence for God and His commandment. "He pretends," says _Calvin_, "to have faith in the words of the Prophet, and not to require anything besides the word." The same declarations of the Law, the Lord opposes to Satan, when the latter would induce Him to do something for which he had no word of God, Matt. iv. 7. That would really have been a tempting of God. Ahaz had no doubt that the miracle would really be performed; but he had a dislike to enter within the mystical sphere. Who knows whether the God who grants the miracle is really the highest God? comp. Is. x. 10, 11, xxxvi. 18-20, xxxvii. 10-12. Who knows whether He is not laying for him a trap; whether, by preventing him from seeking the help of man. He is not to bring upon him the destruction which his conscience tells him he has so richly deserved? At all events the affording of His help is clogged with a condition which he is resolved not to fulfil, viz., his conversion. A better and easier bargain, he thought, could be struck with the Assyrians; how insatiable soever they might be, they did not ask the heart. How many do even now-a-days rather perish in sin and misery, than be converted! Ver. 13. "_And he said: Hear ye now, O house of David: Is it too little for you to provoke man, that you provoke also my God?_" When Ahaz had before refused to believe in the simple announcement of the Prophet, his sin was more pardonable; for, inasmuch as Isaiah had not proved himself outwardly as a divine ambassador, Ahaz sinned to a certain degree against man only, against the Prophet only, by unjustly suspecting him of a deceitful pretension to a divine revelation. Hence, Isaiah continues mild and gentle. But when Ahaz declined the offered sign, _God himself_ was provoked by him, and his wickedness came evidently to light. It is substantially the same difference as that between the sin against the _Son of Man_, the Christ coming outwardly and as a man only (Bengel: _quo statu conspicu, quatenus aequo tum loco cum hominibus conversabatur_), and the sin against the Holy Ghost who powerfully glorifies Him outwardly and inwardly. It is the antithesis [Pg 43] of the relative ignorance of what one is doing, and of the absolute unwillingness which purposely hardens itself to the truth known, or easy to be known. We say _relative_ ignorance; for an element of obduracy and hardening already existed, if he did not believe the Prophet, even without a sign. For the fact that the Prophet was sent by God, and spoke God's word, was testified to all who would hear it, even by the inner voice, just as in every sin against the Son of Man there is always already an element of the sin against the Holy Ghost.--The truth that godlessness is the highest folly is here seen in a very evident manner. The same Ahaz who rejects the offer of the living God, who palpably wishes to reveal to him that He is a living God,