Isaiah 2:17

GOD EXALTED IN THE GREAT DAY
(Advent Sermon.)

Isaiah 2:17. The Lord alone shall be exalted in that day.

Two questions: What is “that day?” How shall the Lord then be exalted?
I. “That day.” “The first five verses of this chapter foretell the kingdom of the Messiah, the conversion of the Gentiles, and their admission into the Church. From the sixth verse to the end is foretold the punishment of the unbelieving Jews for their idolatrous practices, their confidence in their own strength, and distrust of God’s protection; and, moreover, the destruction of idolatry in consequence of the establishment of Messiah’s kingdom.”—Lowth. But here, as in many other portions of Scripture, a larger and remoter meaning looms beyond and behind the first sense of the expressions, which would otherwise be too big and swelling for the actual interpretation of them. Compare the description in which the text twice occurs with the almost parallel passages in chap. Isaiah 5:14. How magnificent! What startling terms! What emphatic iterations! Surely a want of fitness and congruity would almost be felt if expressions such as these referred only to some temporal calamity of the Jewish nation; surely we cannot mistake in looking onward to some mightier catastrophe, to some final exaltation of God and abasement of all creatures. By “that day,” therefore, we mean what is elsewhere called “the day,” “the great day,” “the day of judgment,” “the great and terrible day of the Lord”—the consummation of all things.

When that day shall come I do not know, and I am content to remain in ignorance. It may come suddenly, without warning, unannounced. Then it is for men always to have their lamps burning and their hearts in readiness, lest they be taken by surprise. It may come with great signs preceding and accompanying it. Then it is for men, according to their capacity, to note and discern those signs. It is the very uncertainty connected with it that is to make us watchful (Matthew 24:36; Matthew 24:42). We are to be vigilant and observant, without pretending to determine what God has left unrevealed. Such attempts have in all ages been made, and in all ages have been falsified. The failure of those attempts has not only covered those who made them or believed in them with ridicule, it has brought into discredit the sacred Book which the aim was to expound. It is our first duty and highest interest to be at every moment prepared; but a far other and better preparation may, and must be made for it, than in the futile endeavour to discover its precise date. [1294]

[1294] During the fifth century Chrysostom expressed himself in language which sounds almost like an anticipation of much that we hear at the present day. “No long time now remains until the consummation; but the world is hastening to its end. This the wars declare, this the afflictions, this the love which hath waxed cold. For as the body, when in its last gasp and near to death, draws to itself ten thousand sufferings; and as when a house is about to fall, many portions are wont to fall beforehand from the roofs and walls; so is the end of the world nigh and at the very doors, and, therefore, ten thousand woes are everywhere scattered abroad” (Homily xxxiv.) Towards the close of the tenth century, Bernhard, a hermit of Thuringia, and other persons, spread or encouraged the belief, that after the end of the thousandth year, the fetters of Satan were to be broken; and that, after the reign of Antichrist should be terminated, the world would be consumed by sudden conflagration. This wild and extraordinary delusion pervaded and possessed every rank of society. It seized on nobles, princes, and even bishops, as well as on the common people. Many renounced their pursuits and professions; abandoned their friends and families; gave themselves up to superstitious prayer and terrifying expectations, and made over all their substance to some adjacent church or monastery. Almost all the donations which were made to the Church in this century proceeded from this avowed motive, that the end of the world was drawing near. The form ran, “Appropinquante jam mundi termino,” &c. Others permitted their lands to lie waste, and their houses to decay; or betook themselves in hasty flight to the shelter of rocks and caverns, as if the temples of nature were destined to preservation amidst the wreck of man and his works.—Boone.

Equally unwise is the disposition to specify with a minute particularity the events which are to usher in the great day of the Lord, or the convulsions of nature which shall herald and proclaim it, or the astonishing circumstances with which it shall be arrayed. God has chosen to involve them in a mysterious and solemn indistinctness. In bold and sublime figures the inspired writers have delineated a scene which must stand singular and by itself, without any precedent or parallel, and which, therefore, neither human language can directly express nor human understanding adequately comprehend. Instead of endeavouring to explain the images and symbols employed, prudence will lead us to confine ourselves to the very words of Scripture, such as Daniel 12:2; Joel 3:11; 2 Corinthians 5:10; Matthew 25:31; Revelation 20:11; 1 Corinthians 15:51. [1297] On these declarations we should meditate with serious and chastened minds, for if Scripture be true these words cannot be without a real and solemn meaning, and that meaning can only be that there shall be a day in which the world shall be judged by God in Christ, and that from before the Divine tribunal the good and the evil, separated from each other, shall depart to destinies final and irreversible (P. D. 2109).

[1297] I forbear to expatiate on the phenomena or the tokens which shall be premonitory of the Millennium or of the day of judgment. God has not seen fit, even in Scripture, to withdraw the curtain of obscurity from between us and that supreme future. We may well be content that our apprehensions should be vague, when the language of the Bible is not definite, and when we find rather the sublime and half-luminous gloom with which poetry or painting can invest its delineations, than the sharp and precise outline which the chisel can carve.—Boone.

II. In that day the Lord alone shall be exalted.

1. How is this possible? Is not God always exalted far above all blessing and praise? He will then be exalted in the sense in which He is now said to be glorified. He will be exalted in the visible homage and submission of an assembled universe. He will be exalted by the full manifestation of His attributes, in their unclouded and effulgent lustre, by the exhibition, before men and angels, of His omnipotence and justice, His wisdom and truth, His love and mercy, of the holiness of His law, the equity of His administration, the abundance of His grace, so that all hearts shall be bowed down at His footstool, and every mouth shall be stopped.
2. In that day God shall be exalted alone.

(1) The text may lead our minds to other deities as opposed to Jehovah. They shall indeed be gone; in that day they shall be seen to be less than the least of all their worshippers.
(2) It will be the great day of the disclosure of all things; and all creatures shall see the Lord as He is, and themselves also as they are. Therefore shall all the highest orders of celestial intelligences, the cherubim and seraphim, and all the ranks of existence which may occupy the interval between man and his Maker, veil their faces before His throne; they shall be as nothing in His sight. Then shall all creatureship fall low before the one Creator; all derived, dependent being shall shrink into its true dimensions before the Absolute, the Eternal, the I AM.

(3) Even Christ Himself, His office as the Messiah having been accomplished, and His administration of the Church, in His human character, being brought to a close, shall resign His mediatorial sway (1 Corinthians 15:24; H. E. I. 985).

(4) But our chief concern, as we are men, is with humanity: “The lofty looks of man shall be humbled, and the haughtiness of man shall be bowed down; and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day.”

That day shall indeed declare the impotence of human power, the emptiness of human ambition, the nothingness of human renown. [1300] The very circumstances on account of which men have most lifted themselves up in their lifetime will be the occasions of their profoundest humiliation then.

[1300] What shall they all be, the strong rivalries and contentions, which shall have been hushed in the grave; the towering structures of vanity and earthly hope, which shall have been crushed before the moth; the schemes and plottings, the contrivances and expectations, the struggles and triumphs, which shall have been dropped into the burial-place where the worm is feeding on them! Oh, the thrones and dominions of mortality, the crowns and sceptres, the regal splendours and the imperial sway, how shall they then be reduced to their real and intrinsic insignificance! The victories of the warrior who conquered in a hundred fights, and the projects of the politician, whose statesmanship could grasp the globe; the famous men and heroes of the earth, with the poets who celebrated them, and the historians who recounted their exploits, what shall they be before the word of Omnipotence! The learning and science of the philosophers who framed their system of the universe for the admiration of posterity, what shall they be, before the blaze of illumination which shall be poured upon us in another world! The pageantries of courts and palaces; the banquets and the wine-cups, the spectacles and the entertainments, the mirrors and the lamps, the golden furniture of pomp, and the flowing robe of luxury; the great and the affluent, whose patronage was requested for busy undertakings, who were besieged with flattery and obsequiousness from morning to night; the noble and the beautiful, who gathered homage as they moved; the writers and the orators, whose popularity was unbounded, and who lived amidst the incense of human applause; they, and all that appertained to them, where and what shall they be, as we stand poor, and naked, and miserable before Him with whom we have to do! They, the heedless and the selfish, swimming in pleasure, who thought that the whole voyage of life was to be like Cleopatra’s passage along the Cydnus, one scene of mirth and gorgeousness; of prodigal dissipation and fatal revelry, with soft music and delicate odours floating in the air; what shall become of them! How black and cold shall be the cinders of their joy!

All human dynasties will then have crumbled to pieces, and all the gradations in the scale of human rank will then have been blotted out; for all must be dwarfed and prostrated before the ineffable majesty of the Most High God. All other differences must fade when the Divine summits are placed in contrast with them; as from the top of an exceeding high mountain the whole ground beneath is as a level plain, because from that vast altitude all smaller elevations are lost, all minuter inequalities of surface vanish. Human celebrity will then be as a sound, the very echoes of which will have departed. The pompous titles with which the vanity of man was pampered; the distinctions which kings could confer, or heraldry emblazon; privileges of caste, nobility of blood, the pride of ancestry, the blaze of reputation, the splendour of talents, shall then be confounded, one and all, as frivolous toys and trifling baubles. The mighty ones of the earth shall be no more than they who were of the poorest condition; the great shall stand abashed with the mean, the learned with the ignorant, monarchs with their subjects, senators and princes, commanders of fleets and armies, the loftiest and most renowned by the side of the husbandman and the labourer; for what shall they all be in contrast with Him, the Universal Creator, whose dwelling-place is eternity, and to whom belong, throughout all ages, all glory and dominion, sovereignty and praise?—Boone.

In that day our sinfulnesses shall sink us into the dust, and cover us with shame and confusion even more than our vanities. Shall any one of us hope then to be exalted, when the memories of us all shall retrace so many sterile and unproductive intentions, so many good impressions never fostered and ripened into fruits of righteousness, so many talents misused by our iniquity, or buried by our idleness? Then there shall be no more concealments, no more deceits, no more false excuses, no more of those pretences, equivocations, subterfuges, and sophisms which our reason is now so fatally ingenious in playing off upon itself (P. D. 661, 2106). Oh, think of these things, and let not your sins be dearer to you than your salvation. Think of them ere the night cometh, and the sun of your probation has quite gone down.

“The Lord alone shall be exalted in that day.” Will He then confound the righteous with the wicked? As compared with God there shall be no distinctions between men. All men on that great day at the bar of the Omniscient and the All Holy shall have upon them a universal sense of imperfection, unworthiness, insufficiency, nothingness. But as compared with each other there will be immense differences between them. It is one purpose of the great day to make manifest to all orders of being the infinite value and superiority of moral goodness, the infinite preciousness of a holy obedience above and beyond all else; then God, who sees it in secret, will reward it openly. When the wicked shall be turned into hell, with all the people that forget God, the righteous shall shine forth as the stars of heaven. Therefore estimate all things now as you will estimate them then. Lean less upon earth and man and the things present, set your affections more upon the things to come, upon heaven, and upon the Ruler of heaven. Cultivate diligently those dispositions which are pleasing in His sight. For then, when all social forms shall have vanished away, when all material substances shall have been obliterated, as the shapes in a cloud, and dissipated as the morning dew, your moral temper will abide with you, and your spiritual state, as discerned by the unerring Judge, will decide, and will attend, your immortal destiny (H. E. I. 720).—James Shergold Boone, M.A.: Sermons, pp. 359–399.