Isaiah 62:5

For as a young man marrieth a virgin

Fervid devotion to a cause

It is difficult to see how any real parallel can exist between an intellectual interest or reasoned sense of duty to a public cause or institution, although prescribing exertion and even sacrifice, and the spontaneous, glowing, fervid devotion of a young man to his chosen bride.

Say you so? Then let me say that as yet you know not some salient features of human nature. As a matter of fact abstractions, as we call them, do provoke passion; the passion of love and the passion of hate, no less truly than do concrete and visible objects. Millions of human beings have worked, suffered, fought and died for these very abstractions; for a political or social doctrine, for the fame of a fallen dynasty, for the credit of some secret club or association, for a country that has been crushed out of existence, for some wild undemonstrable theory, for some baseless or grotesque superstition, no less than for a true and soul-inspiring faith or principle. (H. P. Liddon, D. D.)

Practical devotion to the Church of Christ

Isaiah’s comparison would suggest that the devotion of her sons to the city of God would have three characteristics.

I. AN UNRESERVED, WHOLE-HEARTED DEVOTION; a devotion which bestows on its object its best and its all. “With my body I thee worship; and with all my worldly goods I thee endow,” is the language not only of a Christian Church formulary, but of the human heart in its better mood, throughout all time; and it marks the first characteristic of that devotion to the Church of God which Isaiah saw in vision across the centuries. Undoubtedly a partial fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy may be recognized in the love and service which Israel after the flesh received from a long line of patriot children. Noblest among them were the Maccabees; but they were only samples of a spirit which was shared, in their day and afterwards, by thousands of their countrymen. That temper was indeed too often mingled with moral alloy that sullied its purity. But the men who saved their country from the cultured Paganism of Antiochus Epiphanes, and who even after the utter ruin of their sacred house by Titus, rose once and again to pour out their blood like water in an unavailing struggle with Imperial Rome at the epoch of its greatest military power, were assuredly not men only under the sway of a common or sordid motive. In their love to “Jerusalem the Holy,” whose name was stamped upon their coins, they surely exhibit the careless self-abandonment of the passion which gives itself without stint to the object of its choice. The Lord had chosen Zion to be a habitation for Himself, and this choice made her, to those who had faith in it, the object of a passionate attachment in some respects without a parallel in history. Now, our Lord proclaimed and founded, within the Jewish nation, yet with a capacity and, indeed, an internal necessity of passing beyond its bounds, a new Society, which was to be more to the intellect and heart of man than the Greek πόλις, or the Roman World Empire, or the Jewish theocracy itself, ever had been or could be; yet which should sanction and satisfy, in ample measure, those instincts of union, brotherhood, improvement, order, of which earlier forms of association among men were the outcome and assertion. This Society, in virtue of its origin, its object, and its compass, He named the Kingdom of Heaven. Certain is it that the Church of Christ has inspired millions of Christians with mingled love and enthusiasm. If we believe that Christ’s Church, though built upon the foundation of apostles and prophets, has for the chief cornerstone, Himself; if we see in her, not a self-formed collection of individuals who agree in following Him, but, as Scripture says, His Body, instinct with His life; if for her He shed His most precious blood that He might present her glorious and immaculate in the realms of purity; then, in making much of her, we surely are doing no wrong to Him. Only because, notwithstanding the sears and stains which mark her sojourn here below, she is yet so intimately His, should she be so precious to His servants;--drawing the noblest souls into the highest paths of service.

II. THE DEVOTION WHICH ISAIAH PREDICTS WILL BE DISINTERESTED. The truehearted bridegroom marries, not that he may win rank or wealth, or public recognition, or any outward advantages whatever., he weds his” bride” for her own sake, because she is what she is, because in wedding her he finds the joy and satisfaction of his heart. It is “for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health.” So was it also to be with the espousals of the soul. The Holy Bride is wooed for her own sake, and not for anything that she may bestow on those who would win her.

III. AND THE PROPHET’S COMPARISON SUGGESTS A DEVOTION THAT WILL LAST TILL DEATH. “Till death us do part.” Weariness, impaired health, diminished opportunities for usefulness may come with years; but the tie of sacred service to the cause and Church of Christ can only end with life. (H. P.Liddon, D. D.)