Oracle concerning Asshur.
The fate of Sennacherib and his host appears to be introduced in order to confirm the solemn oracle just delivered concerning Babylon (see Exposition).
I. THE STRONG ASSURANCES OF JEHOVAH. He is represented here and in other passages as taking an oath that he will fulfill his Word. But in such oaths he can appeal to no mightier name, he can invoke no power more awful than his own. Homer makes Zeus swear by the Styx, the dark river of the underworld. And Zeus is himself subject to necessity, to fate. But the God of the Hebrews comprises in himself all the associations of woeful necessity, of irresistible fate; in a word, of law, of intelligence at one with will, of will equal to the execution of all the designs of intelligence. Where men are weak it is that the brain is separated from the hand and the foot. The thoughts that rise before them, they either cannot or they dare not translate immediately into fact. A chain of means, of secondary causes, lies between them and their ends. And so we have the great thinkers who cannot act, and the great actors who fail in thought. Magnificent poets, philosophers, dreamers, on the one side; on the other, magnificent conquerors—Alexanders, Napoleons; both stupendous failures. In God are united omniscience and omnipotence—the All-Thinker, the All-Doer. His purposes are equivalent to deeds; his deeds are living and visible thoughts.
II. THE DOOM OF THE ASSYRIAN. (See Isaiah 10:1-34.) The prophetic tense and the prophetic mode of contemplation may refer to the past; so here. The thought is expressed in Jeremiah 1:18, Jeremiah 1:19, "Behold, I will punish the King of Babylon and his land, as I have punished the King of Assyria." The one event was a pledge of the other (Delitzsch). Asshur had been broken in Canaan, had been subdued upon the mountains of the Holy Land, and the people been released from his yoke and his burdens.
"Like the leaves of the forest when summer is green,
The host with their banners at sunset were seen;
Like the leaves of the forest when autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay wither'd and strewn ….
And the widows of Asshnr were loud in their wail,
And the idols were broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!"
III. THE IMMUTABLE COUNSEL OF JEHOVAH.
1. Its contents. It is earth-embracing, and its symbol is the" hand stretched out over all the heathen." Assyria and Babylon destroyed, heathendom must vibrate through all its extent, and totter to its fall. Turning from the particular to the general—for only in this way can we reap the full instruction of such oracles—and standing amidst the ruins of fallen, or on the ground of now shaking empires, we may listen in awe to the ever-living voice of him who saith, "I will shake all nations, till their Desire come." About a thousand years later, and we find Rome shaking beneath that outstretched hand. We may see the mementoes of that shock to-day, in the ruins of the Palatine and the Forum and the Sacred Way. Yet a thousand years, and again she shakes, this time to her inmost conscience, beneath that hand, that voice of judgment. At the Reformation it might seem that the Almighty was about to make a short work in the earth. But a thousand years are in his sight but a day. "The mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small." Let us remember that the great cycles of history are repeated in small in the round of each man's life. The great world, the macrocosmos, is mirrored in the microcosmos, the small world of each conscience. Above every one of us the hand is outstretched—shall it be to bless or to curse? "Today if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts."
2. Its inflexibility. Who can break this counsel, who hinder or turn back that hand? And what people or confederacy of peoples, knit in closest alliance of arms and girt with all the furniture of war, can resist dissolution, when once his thought is against them, his hand upraised? "Take counsel together, and it shall come to naught; speak the word, and it shall not stand: for God is with us" (Isaiah 8:10). So may the lovers of the truth and the right confidently exclaim, "God is with us." What the superstitious man calls his luck or fortune, what the metaphysician obscurely designates as necessity, or the nature of things, or the supremacy of the moral Law, is to the religious man the inflexible will of a personal Being. The duty, the art, the wisdom, the salvation of life, is in obedience to that will. It is to know that we are here to be acted upon by that will rather than to act from our own self-center. We are "God's puppets." He gives to men and to nations a certain space Wherein to learn what freedom is, and what its soon-reached limits. Then comes the higher lesson, to know that freedom can only be secured by obedience; that in the choice of the supreme will for our own will, we recover that better freedom in which is strength and peace and stability forever.—J.