The prophet on heathen worship.
Having described in brief the true religion as a "looking up to God" as Maker and Redeemer of Israel, the prophet with equal expressiveness characterizes the heathen worship around.
I. IT IS REVERENCE FOR THE OBJECT OF HUMAN ART. Contemptuous is the reference to "the work of his hands," and "that which his fingers have made"—altars and images. When the spiritual nerve of religion is weakened, the affections fix upon the symbols, forms, and accessories of religion. The soul that has lost its God must have some visible substitute, as a pet, a plaything, an idol. When the meaning of sacrifice is deeply realized and felt, any bare table will suffice for altar. But as the idea and feeling become extinct, all the more will men seek to supply the void by some beauty in the object. The shrine becomes more splendid as devotion becomes more cold. Perhaps the prophet is thinking of the case of King Ahaz. He went to Damascus to meet Tiglath-Pileser of Assyria, and there saw an altar' which so pleased him, that he sent the pattern of it to Urijah the priest, who built one to correspond. And this was a king who "sacrificed and burned incense in the high places, and on the hills, and under every green tree" (2 Kings 16:1-20.). And Manasseh, rejecting the good example of Hezekiah his father, set up altars to Baal, and made a grove, and plunged deeply into all manner of superstition (2 Kings 21:1-26.). The Prophet Hosea pointedly speaks of the tendency in the people generally: "Because Ephraim has made many altars to sin, altars shall be unto him to sin" (Hosea 8:2). The connection of this with luxury is pointed out by our prophet in Isaiah 2:7, Isaiah 2:8. But what strikes him especially with astonishment is the addiction to "art for art's sake." This has been a cant and, to some extent, a creed in our time. When carried out, it must mean the valuation of human genius and talent regardlessly of the subjects on which, and the ends for which, it is employed. No matter how seusualizing or otherwise debasing to feeling the painter's or the sculptor's theme, the cleverness with which he treats form and color, light and shade, is only worth attending to. These doctrines may be carried into the church, which may become a place for mere imaginative and sensuous enjoyment; and people may find they cannot "look up to God" in a building whose lines are incorrectly drawn, or where the latest fashion of ecclesiastical foppery is not kept up. By-and-by it will be discovered that the house of God has been turned into a theatre, containing, it is true, an altar, but, like the altar in the great theatre at Athens, serving for little more than a station of performers. Spiritual worship is extinct with us if we cannot lift up eye, and heart, and hand, and voice to the Eternal with equal joy, if need demand, in the barn as in the cathedral. But how wide-reaching the principle of idolatry! The delight in genius, the admiration for it, may enter into religious feeling as one of its richest elements; it may, on the other hand, be separated from religious feeling altogether, and be the principle of an idolatry.
II. IT IS IMPURE AND CRUEL. There is an allusion to the worship of Baal and Ashtoreth, and what we know of these deities indicates beings conceived by those worshippers as dark, wrathful, malignant, and lustful. Baal, often named in the plural Baalim, is closely related to, if not identical with, Moloch (see Jeremiah 7:31; Jeremiah 19:5; Jeremiah 32:35), whose terrible wrath was supposed to be manifested in the torrid heat of summer, and who exacted human sacrifices. In great dangers kings sacrificed to this Bel-Moloch their only sons (2 Kings 3:27); and this is sternly denounced in Le Isaiah 20:3. It would seem that Israelites in their declension confounded the nature of this heathen god with that of Jehovah ( 11:34; Numbers 25:4). Read the eloquent protest of Micah 6:7, and see how clearly in that animated passage the contrast is made between the merciful and holy religion of Jehovah and the cursed ritual of Baal or of Moloch. "To do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God,"—these are the requirements of true religion. By the side of Baal was Ashtoreth in Canaan ( 10:6) and in Syria. The Greeks called her Astarte. At Babylon she was known as Mylitta or Beltis, consort of Bel; and Herodotus describes the darkly superstitious and impure character of her worship, which involved the profanation of women. The religion of Israel knows no goddess; the people itself, when true to their faith, felt themselves to be as a people, the bride of Jehovah, and unfaithfulness to him is a crime analogous to unfaithfulness to the nuptial tie. "Israel my people, I their God," is the symbolic word of the covenant between spirit and Spirit, which religion ever is, in its truth and purity. There are lessons for us in all this. There are ever tendencies at work to degrade and defile the holy ideas of our religion. Sometimes it is wealth, sometimes it is ignorance, sometimes greed and other passions. Men would subdue the spirit of Christianity to their own liking, and bow down, if not to the work of their fingers, to the impure idols of an unchastened fancy. The preacher, the true prophet, must, on the other hand, be ever upholding the purity of doctrine, and exhibit those grand requirements to which the conscience must, however reluctantly, respond. And he must lay it to heart that the purer religion can never be the most fashionable. If the people turn aside to groves and altars more suited to their taste, at least let him make it his one concern to "save himself and them that hear him."—J.