Isaiah 30:10

Isaiah 30:10

What was the utility of the Hebrew prophet, and what were the errors to which he was more particularly exposed?

I. It was the duty and the privilege of Israel to keep alive monotheism in the world. It was no less the duty of the prophetic school to preserve in the chosen nation itself the spirituality of religion. Both agents were in the same relative position a hopeless minority. And both had but an imperfect success. Yet the nation and the institution served each an important purpose. Monotheism languished, but did not die. And though the prophets were not very successful in imbuing the nation generally with their own spirituality, yet they kept the flame alive. They served to show to the people the true ideal of spiritual, not ritualistic, Judaism, and thus supplied a corrective to priest-taught Judaism.

II. What was the great source of error in the prophet's utterances? What was the great pressure that pushed, or tended to push, him aside from the path of duty? The text has told us: "Prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things." The desire of man king or peasant to hear from the prophet, or the courtier, or the demagogue, not truth, but flattery, it was that fatal longing which led them to put a pressure on the prophet which often crushed the truth within him.

III. Prophets exist no longer. But flattery exists still, and the appetite for it can be as strong in a people as ever it was in a king. If nations have not prophets to flatter them, they have those whom they trust as much. Far from attempting to correct their faults, the guides whom they trust are constantly labouring to impress on them that they are the most meritorious and the most ill-used nation in the world. Eyes blinded to present faults; eyes sharpened to past wrongs, there is no treatment which will more completely and more rapidly demoralise the nation which is subjected to it. There will be no improvement where there is no consciousness of fault; and no forgiveness where the mind is invited, almost compelled, to a constant brooding over wrong. With the growth of such feelings no nation can thrive; and he who encourages them is not the saviour but the destroyer of his country.

J. H. Jellett, The Elder Son, and Other Sermons,p. 114.