Isaiah 14

Isaiah 14:32

"The Lord hath founded Zion;" this is the guarantee of His love and her stability. "The poor of her people shall trust in it" or, as the margin has it, shall betake themselves unto it this is one purpose of the Church's mission upon earth, the care, the teaching, the education, the guidance of the poor.

I. The strongest, most fundamental title of protection is creation. Even among ourselves, no one frames an object to destroy it; he who makes, makes that he may preserve. And if this be so in human nature, shall there be nothing to compare with it in the Divine? God, indeed, who is eternal, can require no successor to whom to devise His purposes of love; but all the claims that the thing framed can have on Him who framed it, hold with tenfold force when the object is not, as in our humbler works, the mere apposition of preexisting materials, in which nothing is ours except the order of arrangement, but is itself, alike in matter and in form, the direct offspring of His own inexhaustible power and goodness. (1) Behold, then, how as His own "God loved the world;" how as not only His own, but His own in pain and anguish, and endeared to His inmost heart as such, God hath loved His Church. He spoke to bid the one, He died to make the other, exist. (2) In this Church of His is His own honourpledged. He hath not covenanted with the world that now is to immortalise it; but He has passed His own word for the perpetuity of His Church. Nothing so framed was ever framed to perish; He has infused into it His own Spirit, and His Spirit is life. (3) Is not the Church in its ultimate perfection set forth as the very reward of all the sorrows of its Lord? and shall He be defrauded of His recompense? (4) There is more than creation to bind the Church to Christ, more than promise, more than reward; there is communion, oneness, identification. A man may desert his child; he cannot desert himself. With such a union there can be no separation; if Christ be immortal, the Church is so; when He dies she shall perish, but not till then.

II. The text predicts that this Zion of God shall be the resort of His poor, and the object of their trust. The Church of Christ is one vast institute for the benefit of the poor. He who loved all, eminently loved them; and His Church has ever, even in her darkest days, retained much of the character He thus impressed.

W. Archer Butler, Sermons Doctrinal and Practical,2nd series, p. 227.

At first sight the prediction which closes the fourteenth chapter of Isaiah seems of temporary interest only, and to speak of judgments which within a very few years were destined to fall upon one of the most inveterate enemies of God's ancient people; and yet I cannot but think those commentators right who, following the opinion of divers of the Fathers of the Church, have found in the passage an allusion to the Gospel and Church of Christ.

I. That the prophecy would be one of pressing and immediate interest to the contemporaries of the prophet is obvious from the manner in which it is ushered in: "In the year that king Ahaz died was this burden" (or, as we should nowadays say, this denunciation of wrath) against the Philistines. After bidding the inhabitants of Palestine howl for the judgments that were impending, Isaiah, speaking as he was moved by the Holy Ghost, makes the inquiry and gives the answer of the text. It was usual for neighbouring nations, who were friends and allies, to send ambassadors, and congratulate each other on success. When, therefore, the coming triumph over the Philistines should be known abroad, and the envoys of friendly states should inquire of Judah into the circumstances of his success, "Let this answer," said the prophet, "suffice: that the Lord hath founded Zion, and the poor of His people shall trust in it."

II. No one can read that promise and not feel that it was intended to have an ampler scope for its fulfilment than in the personal security of a handful of Jewish peasants; the whole turn of expression is redolent of Gospel times. Such words were never fully verified till Christ, the Son of David, had founded the Christian Church, and made His gracious offer to a world enslaved in the most cruel of all bondage: "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest."

F. E. Paget, Sermons for Special Occasions,p. 65.

References: Isaiah 14:10. Spurgeon, Morning by Morning,p. 178. Isaiah 16:1. J. M. Neale, Sermons on Passages from the Prophets,vol. i., pp. 35,46. Isaiah 17:10; Isaiah 17:11. A. Maclaren, Old Testament Outlines,p. 179.