Isaiah 1:4

INIQUITY A BURDEN

Isaiah 1:4. A people laden with iniquity.

A very surprising description: “A people laden with iniquity.” On account of their punctilious and costly observance of the Mosaic ritual (see Isaiah 1:11), the Jews imagined that they deserved the commendation of Heaven; but God pronounced them to be “a people laden with iniquity.” Men often form very different estimates of the same thing; e.g., buyer and seller (Proverbs 20:14). There is often as marked a difference between the divine and human estimates of character (Luke 18:11; Revelation 3:17). This is so because God and men judge by different standards; men take into account only their occasional good actions; God judges by that feature of their character which is predominant [195] So judging, He condemned those most “religious” Jews. What is His estimate of us?

[195] Men are to be estimated, as Johnson says, by the mass of character. A block of tin may have a grain of silver, but still it is tin; and a block of silver may have an alloy of tin, but still it is silver. The mass of Elijah’s character was excellence; yet he was not without the alloy. The mass of Jehu’s character was base; yet he had a portion of zeal which was directed by God to great ends.—Cecil.

A very instructive description: “A people laden with iniquity.” The conception is that of a nation that has gone on adding sin to sin, as a man gathering sticks in the forest adds fagot to fagot, until he staggers beneath the load; that which was eagerly sought after becomes an oppressive burden. How true this is! There are many national burdens; despotism, an incapable government, excessive taxation, &c., but the worst and most oppressive of all is a nation’s iniquities.

The iniquities of a nation constitute a burden that impede it—

1. In its pursuit of material prosperity. With what desperate intensity this English nation toils! and for what end? Chiefly that it may accumulate wealth. How greatly it is impeded in this pursuit by its costly government! But how much more by its costly vices! On strong drink alone this nation expends a larger sum than the whole amount both of imperial and local taxation—more than one hundred millions annually! Other vices that are nameless, how much they cost, and what a hindrance they are to the nation in its pursuit of wealth!

2. In its pursuit of social happiness. What a crushing burden of sorrow the nation’s iniquities impose upon it!

3. In its pursuit of moral and intellectual improvement. According to a monkish legend, the church of St. Brannock’s, in Braunton, Devon, could not be erected on its original site, because as fast as the builders reared up the walls by day, by night the stones were carried away by invisible hands. A like contest goes on in our own land. The nation’s virtues are toiling to elevate the national character morally and intellectually, using as their instruments the school, the church, the press; but as fast as the virtues build, the vices pull down. In all these respects the nation’s iniquities constitute its heaviest burden.

Consequently,

1. To give a legal sanction to vices, or to connive at what promotes them, for the sake of certain additions to the national revenues, is suicidal folly of the grossest kind.
2. Those are the truest national benefactors who do most to abate the national iniquities. The palm for truest patriotism must be awarded, not to “active politicians,” but to faithful preachers, Sunday-school teachers, temperance reformers, &c.
3. Vices of all kinds should be branded, not only as sins against God, but as treasons against society; and all good men should, in self-defence, as well as in a spirit of enlightened patriotism, band themselves together for their overthrow. That is a mistaken spirituality which leads some good men to leave imperial and local affairs in the hands of the worldly and the vicious. We are bound to labour as well as to pray that God’s will may be done “on earth as it is in heaven,” and that “His kingdom” may come in our own land [198]

[198] As Christians are to think of living for awhile in the world, it is not unreasonable for them to be affected with its occurrences and changes. Some plead for a kind of abstracted and sublimated devotion, which the circumstances they are placed in by their Creator render equally impracticable and absurd. They are never to notice the affairs of government, or the measures of administration; war, or peace; liberty, or slavery; plenty, or scarcity,—all is to be equally indifferent to them; they are to leave these carnal and worldly things to others. But have they not bodies? Have they not families? Is religion founded on the ruins of humanity? When a man becomes a Christian, does he cease to be a member of civil society? Allowing that he be not the owner of the ship, but only a passenger in it, has he nothing to awaken his concern in the voyage! If he be only a traveller towards a belter country, is he to be told that because he is at an inn which he is soon to leave, it should not excite any emotion in him whether it be invaded by robbers or consumed by flames before the morning! In the peace thereof ye shall have peace: and are not Christians to provide things honest in the sight of all men? Are they to detach themselves while here from the interests of their fellow-creatures; or to rejoice with them that rejoice, and weep with them that weep? Is not religion variously affected by public transactions? Can a Christian, for instance, be indifferent to the cause of freedom, even on a pious principle? Does not civil liberty necessarily include religious? and is it not necessary to the exertions of ministers, and the spreading of the gospel?—Jay.

That which is true of nations is true also of individuals; the heaviest burdens which men can take upon themselves are vices. Vices lay upon men a burden—

1. Of expense. Even so-called “indulgences” are costly; many professing Christians spend more annually on tobacco than they give to the cause of missions. Vices keep millions poor all their lives [201]

2. Of discredit.

3. Of sorrow, clouding all the present.

4. Of fear, darkening all the future.

[201] “What are you going to take that for?” said an old labourer to a young one who was about to drink a glass of ale. “To make me work,” was the reply. “Yes,” answered the old man, “you are right; that is just what it will do for a certainty: I began to drink ale when I was about your age, and it has made me work until now!”

There is this terrific feature about the burden of iniquity—there is none so hard to be got rid of. It is hard to inspire a nation or a man with the desire to get rid of it. How nations and men hug their vices, notwithstanding the miseries they entail! It is still harder to accomplish the desire! Society is full of men who stagger and groan under this burden, from which they strive in vain to free themselves. In them the fable of Sinbad, unable to rid himself of the old man whom he has taken upon his shoulders, has a melancholy realisation. These men feel themselves to be helpless, and their case would indeed be hopeless were it not that God has laid help for us on One who is mighty to save. Cry to Him, ye burdened ones, and obtain release!

TRANSMITTED DEPRAVITY

Isaiah 1:4. A seed of evil-doers, children that are corrupters.

Transmitted depravity is—
I. A doctrine of Scripture.

II. A fact in human life [204] Application.—

1. God will not fail to make allowance for it in dealing with us.
2. We should make allowance for it in judging our fellow-men. Our censures should be mingled with compassion.
3. By self-restraint and a life of virtue we should endeavour as far as is possible to cut off from our children this sad entail. A bias towards good may be transmitted as well as a bias towards evil [207]

4. In the education of our children, we should be especially solicitous to check and prevent the development of the faults we have transmitted to them, that so, though they are “a seed of evil-doers,” they may not themselves be “corrupters.”

[204] As colour and favour, and proportion of hair and face and lineament, and as diseases and infirmities of the body, so, commonly, the liabilities and dispositions and tempers of the mind and affections become hereditary, and run in the blood. An evil bird hatches an evil egg, and one viper will breed a generation of vipers. Most sins pass along from the father to the son, and so downward, by a kind of lineal descent, from predecessors to posterity, and that for the most part with advantage and increase, whole families being tainted with the special vices of their stock. John the Baptist speaks of “a generation of vipers;” and if we should but observe the condition of some families in a long line of succession, might we not espy here and there even whole generations of drunkards, and generations of swearers, and generations of idolaters, and generations of worldlings, and generations of seditious, and of envious, and of riotous, and of haughty, and of unclean persons, and of sinners in other kinds.—Sanderson, 1587–1662.

[207] Where children are the children of Christian parents, as they were children of Christian parents, the presumptions are that they will turn out right; not without parental training, but, that being implied, the presumptions are that they will, by the force of natural law, tend in that direction. All the presumptions are that the children of moral and sensible parents will become moral and sensible. Only the grossest neglect and the most culpable exposure to temptation will overrule the presumption and likelihood that the children of good parents will be good. There may be opposing influences; there may be temptations and perversions that shall interrupt the natural course of things; but this does not invalidate the truth that there is a great law by which like produces like. And I say that under this law the Christian parent has a right to this comforting presumption—“My children have all the chances in their favour by reason of the moral constitution which they have inherited.”

I know multitudes of families in which the moral element is hereditary; and it is not surprising that the children of those families are moral. Moral qualities are as transmissible as mental traits or physical traits. The same principle applies to every part of the human constitution. And where families have been from generation to generation God-fearing, passion-restraining, truth-telling, and conscience-obeying, the chances are ninety-nine in every hundred in favour of the children.—Beecher.

Original or birth sin is not merely a doctrine in religion, it is a fact in man’s world acknowledged by all, whether religious or not. Let a man be providing for an unborn child: in case of distribution of worldly property, he will take care to bind him by conditions and covenants which shall guard against his fraudulently helping himself to that which he is to hold for or to apportion to another. He never saw that child; he does not know but that child may be the most pure and perfect of men; but he knows it will not be safe to put temptation in his way, because he knows he will be born in sin, and liable to sin, and sure to commit sin.—Alford, 1810–1871.

FORSAKING THE LORD

Isaiah 1:4. They have forsaken the Lord.

How many souls are guilty of forsaking the Lord? They forsake Him by yielding to what are called “little sins” [210] Then they are further removed from Him by habitual wickedness.

[210] There is many a man who evinces, for a time, a steadfast attention to religion, walking with all care in the path of God’s commandments, &c., but who, after awhile, declines from spirituality, and is dead, though he may yet have a name to live. But how does it commonly happen that such a man falls away from the struggle for salvation? Is it ordinarily through some one powerful and undisguised assault that he is turned from the faith, or over one huge obstacle that he falls not to rise again? Not so. It is almost invariably through little things. He fails to take notice of little things, and they accumulate into great. He allows himself in little things, and thus forms a strong habit. He relaxes in little things, and thus in time loosens every bond. Because it is a little thing, he counts it of little moment, utterly forgetting that millions are made up of units, that immensity is constituted of atoms. Because it is only a stone, a pebble, against which his foot strikes, he makes light of the hindrance; not caring that he is contracting a habit of stumbling, or of observing that whenever he trips there must be some diminution in the speed with which he runs the way of God’s commandments, and that, however slowly, these diminutions are certainly bringing him to a stand.
The astronomer tells us, that, because they move in a resisting medium, which perhaps in a million of years destroys the millionth part of their velocity, the heavenly bodies will at length cease from their mighty march. May not, then, the theologian assure us that little roughnesses in the way, each retarding us, though in an imperceptible degree, will eventually destroy the onward movement, however vigorous and direct it may at one time have seemed? Would to God that we could persuade you of the peril of little offences! We are not half as much afraid of your hurting the head against a rock, as of your hurting the foot against a stone. There is a sort of continued attrition, resulting from our necessary intercourse with the world, which of itself deadens the movements of the soul; there is, moreover, a continued temptation to yield in little points, under the notion of conciliating; to indulge in little things, to forego little strictnesses, to omit little duties; and all with the idea that what looks so light cannot be of real moment. And by these littles, thousands, tens of thousands, perish If they do not come actually and openly to a stand, they stumble and stumble on, getting more and more careless, nearer and nearer to indifference, lowering the Christian standards, suffering religion to be peeled away by inches, persuading themselves that they can spare without injury such inconsiderable bits, and not perceiving that in stripping the bark they stop the sap.—Melvill.

I. This conduct is surprising. Is it not most surprising that men should forsake the great God, their Creator and Benefactor? He is all-powerful. He is all-wise. He is all-loving. The soul cannot have a better helper in difficulty, or a truer and wiser friend in sorrow. From the Godward aspect of the case nothing is more surprising than that man should forsake God; but from the manward aspect of things this is not surprising, for man is carnal, and the carnal mind is enmity against God. Satan draws the soul from God. It chases a phantom into the great darkness, and finds in the end that it has wandered from the Infinite Being.

II. This conduct is criminal. We should esteem it criminal to forsake a parent, to forsake a benefactor, to forsake a master. But this offence is small compared with that of the soul when it wanders from the Lord. It exhibits insubordination. It rejects the Supreme Moral Ruler of the universe. It exhibits ingratitude. It forsakes its Redeemer. It exhibits folly, for away from Christ the soul cannot obtain true rest.

III. This conduct is inexcusable. The soul can give no true reason, or valid excuse, for such unholy conduct. The Lord has dealt bountifully with it, and therefore it has no ground of complaint. He is attractive in character. He is winning in disposition. He is kindly in the discipline of life. He gives holy influences to draw the soul to Himself. Hence man has no excuse for forsaking God.

IV. This conduct is common. The world of humanity has forsaken God. One by one souls are returning, and are being welcomed to Christ and to heaven. Many agencies are at work for the return of souls to the heavenly kingdom. Let us seek to make them efficient. Let us pray that they may be successful. Have you forsaken God?—J. S. Exell.