Isaiah 28:11-13

For with stammering lips, &c.— Instead of refreshing, in Isaiah 28:12 we may read, happy place; and the 13th may be rendered, But the word of the Lord shall be unto them,—that they may go, &c. These verses contain the spiritual punishment consequent upon the fault before specified. When the teachers of the church, says Vitringa, little regard the wholesome doctrine of the word of God, but follow their own simple and trifling ideas, God interposes with his judgment, and permits them to be alienated more and more from the sound and salutary doctrine of faith, which alone brings comfort to the conscience; and to be delivered up to the vanity of their own understandings, to the destruction of their souls; an example whereof the prophet here proposes in the Pharisees, but which is often verified among Christians themselves, so called. God had said to this people, (that is to say, those of Jerusalem, as appears from Isaiah 28:14.) This is the rest, &c. that is, the doctrine of grace and remission of sins through Jesus Christ: See Matthew 11:28. But they would not hear; they (the Pharisees and teachers of those times) rejected the counsel of God towards themselves; their sins therefore, as it is usual with the divine justice, were turned into their punishment, as is expressed metaphorically in the 11th verse, and properly in the 13th; the meaning whereof is, that as the Pharisees and teachers of those times preferred their own blind and foolish doctrines to the pure word of grace, God would give them up to the blindness and belief of those doctrines; and hence their Talmuds, Cabbalas, and all the foolishness and profaneness of those doctrines which they had preferred to the genuine truths of the Gospel, and which have caused all those evils denounced at the latter end of the 13th verse. See chap. Isaiah 8:14. Concerning the more elevated and mystical sense which the apostle has given to the words of the 11th verse, we shall speak when we come to 1 Corinthians 14:21. In the mean time we refer to Vitringa.