Sing, O Barren!
“‘ Howbeit, all is not lost.
The warm noon ends in frost...
Yet through the silence shall
Pierce the Death-Angel’s call,
And ‘Come up hither,’ recover all.
Heart, wilt thou go? — — ‘ I go:
Broken hearts triumph sol’”
E. B. BROWNING,
ISAIAH liv. 1.)
N the previous chapters we have heard the exiles summoned to leave Babylon, and beheld the Divine Servant becoming the Sin-Bearer for them and for the world. Here our attention is startlingly recalled to the desolate city of Jerusalem. “Barren”; “Forsaken”; “Desolate”” — such are the terms applied to her by One who cannot err. And they are corroborated by the testimony of a contemporary. “Then said I unto them,” is the faithful record of Nehemiah, “Ye see the evil case that we are in, how Jerusalem lieth waste, and the gates thereof are burned with fire” (Neh. i. 3; ii. 3, 13-17).
But how is this? Have we not learnt that the Mediator has put away sin at the cost to Himself of wounds and bruises, stripes and death? How then does this city lie as an open sore on the face of the earth? Cannot God’s forgiveness, that has triumphed over sin, also triumph over the wreck and ruin that sin has caused? Is that redemption complete which fails to grapple with all the results and consequences of wrong-doing?
This opens up a great subject, and one that touches us all. We are conscious that though our sin is forgiven, yet certain consequences remain, of which that ruined city isatype. We cannot undo the past; God Himself cannot undo it. It can
never be as though it had never been. The seventy years of captivity, the shame, the sorrow, the anguish to God, the forfeited opportunities, the thistledown so thoughtlessly scattered!
Ah me! God can forgive; but these things cannot be altered
now. But what is meant by that word Redeemer? What is
the meaning of the passage which asserts that where sin
reigned unto death, ¢Heve grace would reign unto eternal life?
What is meant by the promise of fir-trees instead of thorns, of myrtles instead of briars? These questions are often asked in
spirit, if not in so many words; and it is well to attempt an
answer. They open up the great subject of the natural conse- quences of sin, and how God deals with them.
I, THE NATURAL CONSEQUENCES OF SIN. — (1) We must distinguish between them and the punitive or penal. Suppose that a man is taken into custody for being drunk and disorderly. There are two results of that outbreak of uncontrolled passion; on the one hand he has broken the law of his country, for which a penalty of imprisonment or fine must be inflicted; but on the other, and in addition, he has brought on himself the racking headache, the depression of spirits, the awful nervous reaction, which is the natural and inevitable result. These will pursue and scourge him as with the whip of the furies, even when his standing is adjusted with his country’s laws.
So, when we sin against God, two consequences accrue. Our sin cries against us, as Abel’s blood against Cain; its voice goes up to high heaven, and can only be stilled and hushed by the pleading of the blood of Jesus. It is only as we take that precious blood in hand, and bear it with us into the holiest, presenting it as our propitiation, that we find peace, and rest, and deliverance, both from the guilt and the penalty that would otherwise accrue to us. But when this has been effected, and we are forgiven, accepted, and blessed, there are yet other results to be faced. The drunkard may be forgiven; but his health is undermined, his fortune impaired: he can never be what he would have been had he lived soberly. -
Take the case of a man who, in his devotion to politics or s society, has sinned against the laws of the home. Night after night he has been away from his young children, till they regard him as a stranger. There is none of that wholesome companionship, that abandonment of trust, which are such sacred ties, and make the man the house-band. The mother cannot supply the firmness and strength which the young life needs. Almost insensibly the family grows away from him; and after a few years, when disappointment drives him back, he finds, to his infinite regret, that the love of the children has gone beyond recall. The boys are now men, and seek their pleasures outside the home; the girls think it irksome to while away his weary hours by their society. Now he sees his mistake, and tries to remedy it; but he is too late. He is forgiven by his God, and his wife, who never ceased to cling to him; but he cannot get back that forfeited love. This is his ruined Jerusalem.
(2) This distinction ts Scriptural. One illustration will be sufficient. When, in response to Nathan’s parable, David broke the long silence, and cried, “I have sinned!” the prophet immediately answered, “The Lord hath put away thy sin”; but he added, “The sword shall never depart out of thy house.” So far as the sin lay between God and David’s soul, it was removed immediately on his confession; but, so far as
the natural consequences were concerned, they followed him
for many a long year. The death of Bathsheba’s babe, the murder of Amnon, the revolt of Absalom, the rending of the kingdom, were the harvest of which that sin was the autumn sowing.
We need not reiterate tie lesson of this chapter; but only recall the assurance of the fortieth chapter, that Jerusalem’s iniquity has been pardoned, and contrast it with the allusions of this chapter to its desolate ruins and waste. It is clear then that we may; through penitence and faith, realize the perfect pardon of our Saviour; and yet there may be the hideous waste, the scar, the lost years, of which this ruined city was so significant.
(3) These natural consequences are bitter to bear. The
enumeration, as given here, reminds us of Marah, before the M tree — true emblem of the cross — had, by the Divine direction, been cast into the waters. To bear no children; to work without result; to have little sense of the presence of God; to suffer in mind, or nerve, or circumstance, or, worse than all, in the lives of others — these are among the natural consequences of sin, and are fraught with anguish sometimes through long years. Let us remember the inevitableness and bitterness of these results, when tempted to the indulgence of passion. It is quite true that one look of confession and faith will secure reinstatement in the favour of God; but it is also true that what a man sows he must reap. And though he be a Christian, accepted and forgiven, if he sows of the flesh, he must reap.
II. How God OVERRULES SIN’s NATURAL CONSE-QUENCES. — Jehovah says, “Szug.” “Sing, O barren; break forth into singing, and cry aloud!”
“How can I sing?” says Israel; “my city is in ruins; my temple burned with fire; my precious things laid waste. How can I sing?”
“Nevertheless,” is the Divine reply, “the time for singing is come. Sing, not because of what thou hast; but of what I have promised to give. Enlarge the place of thy tent; lengthen thy cords; strengthen thy stakes; make room for the incoming of a great host that shall own thee mother.”
“But the results of our backslidings remain. Thou canst not undo them, though Thou mayest forgive. Thou canst not give us back the seventy years of exile. Thou canst not obliterate the scar of bruise and wound and sore. Thou canst not intercept the inevitable recoil of our sins.”
Yet Jehovah answers, “O barren one! thou must sing as thou didst when thou camest from Egypt. Not with the same exuberant joy; but with a deeper insight into that grace which, in addition to its abundant pardon, can transform the irreparable past, transmuting its briars to myrtles, and its thorns to fir-trees, bringing good out of evil, transforming ‘Benonis,’ sons of sorrow, into ‘Benjamins,’ sons of the 2 Tight hand.”
So God our Father is able to make men and women in middle life sing again, as in the days of their youth, with a joy chastened by their memory of the failures and transgressions, which yet have yielded honey like the carcase of Samson’s lion. As in the great world, Adam’s sin has been overruled to the great enrichment of the race, so in the small world of our individual experience, we rise by our falls; triumph in our defeats; and through the experience of the wilderness enter
- into the land of rest.
Let us illustrate this in the history of the exile. Terrible as
-was the immediate loss inflicted by the national backsliding,
demanding the penalty of the captivity, yet in three respects that captivity was overruled to enrich the religious life of the chosen people, and ultimately of the world.
(1) They conceived new and enlarged ideas of God. Before that time, they had thought of Him as a local and national Deity, like the gods of the nations around; now they learnt that the Holy One of Israel should be called the God of the whole earth (verse 5).
(2) They understood better the nature of true religion. Before the captivity, in the estimation of the majority of the Jewish people, it consisted in rites and ceremonies and outward observances; but when there was no temple, altar, or priest, and still the prophets exhorted them to godliness, it became apparent to the least thoughtful, that true and undefiled religion was independent of the material and sensuous, and demanded only God and the soul. In the captivity we first meet with the institution of the synagogue, where devout souls could worship God in simplicity and spirituality.
(3) They realized their world-wide mission. On the thought of the chosen people rose the dawn of a new conception of the purposes of God in their calling and discipline: they were to be
as the dew of the Lord on the earth, disseminating everywhere
those blessed truths of which they were the Divinely-chosen custodians, and enlarging their tent to include the Gentiles (Gal. iv. 27). There was a sense, therefore, in which their casting-away was the reconciling of the world.
Such were the results of their exile, God’s grace touched the darkness and blackness of their righteously-deserved afflictions, and transmuted them to gold. So, still; the forgiven drunkard can never undo the ravage to health or fortune; but he is made humble, thoughtful, intent on saving those who are under the same spell as he was. The violator of the laws of the home-life becomes more tender, more unselfish, more refined and sensitive in the love he gives, than he would have been till disappointment and heart-hunger had done their perfect work. In those who have suffered from the results of their sins, there is a humility, tenderness, softness in speech, delicacy in understanding the temptations and failures of others, the soul of the prophet, the intercession of the priest, which are beyond price. The pardoned prodigal can talk of his Father’s love in a way that the elder son could never do; and as we hear him speak, we know that he is enriching us with spoils gathered by his experiences in the far country.
Whilst we mourn our sins, and bitterly lament their cost and pain, yet we can see how God is at work taking up the very waste of our lives and making it up again into the fairest fabrics; as rich dyes are made from the produce of gas-retorts, and white paper from old and disused rags. In our exile we get new thoughts of God, of religion, and of our mission among men. Probably we should have reached them in some other way had we never wandered; but we may have learnt them under conditions which will for ever give a special flavour and tone to our affirmation of these mighty truths.
III. Worpbs OF HELP TO ANY WHO MAY BE SUFFERING FROM THE RESULTS OF PAST WRONG-DOING. — The past cannot be altered; but it is a comfort to know that it can be forgiven, and the soul made white and clean. These great blessings should not be lost sight of amid the outburst of an infinite regret.
There is a world of difference also between punishment and chastisement. The one is for the Saviour, who bore the guilt and penalty for man on the cross; the other only is for us who are one with Him by a living faith. Let us not say we are being punished, when the recoil of past transgression strikes us with mailed hand: but that we are being chastened so as to escape condemnation with the world. The same circumstances that are punitive to the ungodly, are disciplinary to the child of God. Our Father chastens us for our profit, using as his rod the natural consequences of our sins.
At such times, God calls us back to Himself as a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit. He knows the disappointment and shame of the downcast soul (6). He waits to gather with great mercies, and to show mercy with everlasting kindness (7, 8). Let us heed his call, and return to Him; not allowing the sorrows and sufferings we endure to alienate us, but counting them as opportunities for claiming more of his aid.
We must also believe in his inalienable love. He is our Husband still, and cannot put us away from Him; the kindness with which He has had mercy on us is everlasting; He has even sworn that the waters of death and destruction shall not for ever separate us from Him; He has entered into a covenant of peace with us which shall outlast the mountains and the hills. We may grow apathetic and careless, bringing to ourselves pain and woe; grieving and dishonouring Him, and hindering the development of his purposes. But He cannot cease to love. His tender pity will still embrace us; grieving to see our self-inflicted sorrows, but using them as a furnace, the fervent heat of which will consume our bonds, whilst it leaves our skin unscorched, and the hairs of our head unsinged.
If I ascend into heaven, Thy love is there; but if I make my bed in hell, it is there also. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost part of the sea, placing it as a great gulf of separation between Thee and me, there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand uphold me. If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me, even the night shall be light around me; and through it Thou shalt follow every step, leading me back to Thyself, and through my very wanderings accomplishing the loftiest purposes for my purity and holiness. Such love is too wonderful for me, I cannot attain unto it; but I will lie down and rest in its everlasting arms.