The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Isaiah, Volume 2 (of 2)Smith, George Adam
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Isaiah, Volume 2 (of 2)
Smith, George Adam
Bible. Isaiah -- Commentaries
Is this lesson of our prophet's art not needed? Men have always been
apt to think of vicarious suffering, and of its function in their
salvation, as something above and apart from their moral nature, with a
value known only to God and not calculable in the terms of conscience
or of man's moral experience; nay, rather as something that conflicts
with man's ideas of morality and justice. Whereas both the fact and
the virtue of vicarious suffering come upon us all, as these speakers
describe the vicarious sufferings of the Servant to have come upon
them, as a part of inevitable experience. If it be natural, as we saw,
for men to be bewildered by the first sight of suffering, to scorn it
as futile and to count it the fault of the sufferer himself, it is
equally natural and inevitable that these first and hasty theories
should be dispelled by the longer experience of life and the more
thorough working of conscience. The stricken are not always bearing
their own sin. "Suffering is the minister of justice. This is true in
part, yet it also is inadequate to explain the facts. Of all the sorrow
which befalls humanity, how small a part falls upon the specially
guilty; how much seems rather to seek out the good! We might almost
ask whether it is not weakness rather than wrong that is punished in
this world."[225] In every nation, in every family, the innocent suffer
for the guilty. Vicarious suffering is not arbitrary or accidental;
it comes with our growth; it is of the very nature of things. It is
that part of the Service of Man, to which we are all born, and of the
reality of which we daily grow more aware.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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