Isaiah 40:1 I. In our text there is a specification of one large class of medicine for spiritual disease; and therefore, by inference, one large class of sickness. "Comfort" is the staple of the prescription, and what was the condition of the patients? "Cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished... [ Continue Reading ]
Isaiah 40:3 I. The text teaches us that there are certain things which hinder the spread of the Redeemer's kingdom, spoken of here as valleys, hills, mountains, rough places, and crooked ways. The obstacles to the spread of the Redeemer's kingdom are so numerous, that I must not even attempt to name... [ Continue Reading ]
Isaiah 40:4 I. Rough places. (1) In general human history. (2) In individual human life. II. Rough places made plain. (1) The supreme power of Jesus Christ. (2) The supreme power of Jesus Christ used for the advantage of mankind. (3) The advantage of mankind identified with the coming kingdom of J... [ Continue Reading ]
Isaiah 40:5 Has this revelation of God's glory respect only to the past and to the present? Has it nothing to do with the future? We believe that Jesus Christ was that image of God whom prophets had been desiring to behold. He took flesh, and through His flesh showed forth the fulness of that glory... [ Continue Reading ]
Isaiah 40:6 I. The text is an assertion of the shortness and uncertainty of life. And we may naturally be surprised that there should be so sublime and startling a machinery for the delivery to us of so commonplace a truth. Here is a voice from the firmament. An invisible agency is brought to bear,... [ Continue Reading ]
Isaiah 40:8 The immediate, the historical purpose of these words is undoubtedly to reassure the Jews of the captivity. It was to men whose eyes were resting on the magnificence and power of Bablyon that Isaiah spoke, but of another land and out of an earlier age, the solemn words: "All flesh is gra... [ Continue Reading ]
Isaiah 40:27 I. Isaiah here reaches and rests upon the very foundations of the faith, trust, and hope of mankind the living God. Creation rests on His hand; man, the child of the higher creation, rests on His heart. What His power is to the material universe His moral nature and character are to th... [ Continue Reading ]
Isaiah 40:27 Notice: I. Isaiah's despondency. It arose from a twofold source. (1) The sense of a Divine desertion: "My way is hid from the Lord." (2) The absence of Divine recompense: "My judgment is passed over from my God." II. The truth that removed Isaiah's despondency. (1) The greatness of G... [ Continue Reading ]
Isaiah 40:28 I. We have, first, the prophet's appeal to the familiar thought of an unchangeable God as the antidote to all despondency and the foundation of all hope. The life of men and of creatures is like a river, with its source and its course and its end. The life of God is like the ocean, wit... [ Continue Reading ]
Isaiah 40:31 I. Consider, first, what it is to wait upon the Lord. Three things make it: service, expectation, patience. "Wait on the Lord." We must be as those Eastern maidens who, as they ply their needle or their distaff, look to the eye and wait upon the hand of their mistress, as their guide wh... [ Continue Reading ]