Ah, my friends, Isaiah saw all this but dimly and afar off. He saw as
through a glass darkly. He perhaps thought at times—indeed we can have
little doubt that he thought—that the good young Prince Hezekiah, “The
might of God,” as his name means, who was growing up in his day to be a
deliverer and a righteous king over the Jews, was to set the world right.
No doubt he had Hezekiah in his mind when he said that a Child was born
to the Jews, and a Son given to them; just as, of course, he meant his
own son, who was born to him by the virgin prophetess, when he called his
name Emmanuel, that is to say, God with us. But he felt that there was
more in both things than that. He felt that his young wife’s conceiving
and bearing a son, was a sign to him that some day or other a more
blessed virgin would conceive and bear a mightier Son. And so he felt
that whether or not Hezekiah delivered the Jews from their sin, and
misery, and ignorance, God Himself would deliver them. He knew, by the
Spirit of God, that his prophecy would come true, and remain true for
ever. And so he died in faith, not having received the promises, God
having prepared some better King for us, and having fulfilled the words
of His prophet in a way of which, as far as we can see, he never dreamed.
Yes. Hezekiah failed to save the nation of the Jews. Instead of being
the “father of an everlasting age,” and having “no end of his family on
the throne of David,” his great-grandchildren and the whole nation of the
Jews were swept away into captivity by the Babylonians, and no man of his
house, as Jeremiah prophesied, has ever since prospered or sat on the
throne of David. But still Isaiah’s prophecy was true. True for us who
are assembled here this day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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