Isaiah 55:1,2

The invitation. The message of the Gospel its freeness, its appeal to the individual, its answer to the cravings of the heart is nowhere in the O.T. more clearly foreshadowed than in this truly evangelical passage (cf. John 4:10 ff; John 6:35 ff; John 7:37 f.; Revelation 21:6; Revelation 22:17; also Proverbs 9:1 ff.; Sir 15:3). The promises are of course not to be materialised, as if water, bread, wine, milk were meant literally, or merely as symbols of comfortable earthly existence in Palestine. At the same time when we seek to recover the original historical sense of the words, there is a possibility of spiritualising over-much. The images used do, indeed, typify the blessings of salvation; but salvation itself in the O.T. is never without a national and therefore earthly element. Those here addressed are exiles (see Isaiah 55:12), many of whom had doubtless carried out only too thoroughly the injunction of Jeremiah to "build houses and dwell in them; to plant gardens and eat the fruit of them; to take wives &c." in Babylon (Jeremiah 29:6). They were in danger of losing their nationality, and with it their religion and their own souls through devotion to selfish and material aims. This is the fate against which the prophet warns them in Isaiah 55:2; and the salvation he offers is a personal interest in the new covenant, or membership in the kingdom of God. To this they are freely invited, with the assurance that there they shall find the satisfaction and blessedness that a life of worldliness can never yield.