Isaiah 52:12 For you shall not go out with haste, nor go by flight: for the LORD will go before you; and the God of Israel will be your rear guard. No beaten rout of fugitives, but a band of kingly conquerors, robed and crowned, will assemble in heaven. I. THE ESSENTIALLY SYMBOLIC CHARACTER OF THE CAPTIVITIES AND DELIVERANCES OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE. The history of Israel is the Divine key to the history of man. Through all the confusion of human society, its wars, its movements, its industries, its woes, that history, rightly read, will guide us. There is no crisis, no confusion, no sad experience of society, of which we have not the pattern and the explanation in the Word of God. The history of their captivities is the history of man's captivity. There were two great captivities and two great deliverances. The people were born in the one captivity — it was the dark accident of nature; the other they earned by sin. These represent our natural bondage, and the self-earned serfdom of the soul. There is one Deliverer and one deliverance from both. The method of His deliverance was the same out of both captivities; a glorious manifestation of the might of the redeeming arm of God. But at first sight there is a contrast here as well as a likeness. Taking a superficial view of the Exodus, we should say that they did go out with haste and go forth by flight; and this visible contrast was before the prophet's mind when he wrote the words of our text (Deuteronomy 16:3; Exodus 12:31-39). But from Babylon they went forth in orderly array, with the king's good-will, by his royal command (Ezra 1). Yet under the surface the grand features were identical. In neither case did they steal away. They went because God would have them go; the Angel of His presence guided them, and His shattering judgments were on all who sought to withstand their march to their promised land. If the contrast occurred to the prophet as he wrote the first clause, surely the likeness stands out in the last, "The Lord shall go before you, and the God of Israel shall be your rereward" (Exodus 13:21, 22; Exodus 14:19, 20). II. WE HAVE THE IMAGE HERE OF THE GREAT DELIVERANCE WHICH IS FREELY OFFERED IN THE GOSPEL, wrought for us by His redeeming hand who "rules in righteousness, mighty to save." 1. The reason of our protracted discipline. God will not have us "Go out with haste, nor go forth by flight." I dare say there are few Christians of any earnestness who do not look back to some past season in their experience, and say, Would God that I had then been taken home. The soul was then full of a Divine serenity, with the clear heaven of God's love above it, and a clear assurance that the Rock was beneath it. It seemed to be attuned to heavenly fellowship. But it had been a young and immature deliverance, had God caught you then in the first freshness of your joy and hope to His home in heaven; not by the short, straight way, but by the long, weary, desert path God led His pilgrims; a band of trained veterans they entered at length into Canaan; able to hold it, and to hold to the national unity, through the stormy, struggling ages in which, but for their desert nurture and discipline, they must have been shattered to fragments, and lost to history for ever. It is this experience which at sore cost of pain God is laying up within us. 2. The Lord will go before you, and the God of Israel will be your rereward. The Lord has gone before us. It is this which makes our progress a triumph. He has gone before us(1) In bearing to the uttermost the penalty of sin. (2) In breaking the power of evil (John 14:27; John 16:33). (3) In the way of the wilderness, through life's protracted discipline, to glory (Hebrews 5:7-9). And the God of Israel shall be your rereward. He shall gather up the stragglers of the host. This promise seems to run parallel with Isaiah 40:10, 11. It shall be no crush or throng in which the weak ones shall be down-trodden, and the halting left hopelessly in the rear. The Lord has special tenderness for the timid, the trembling, the fainting; He is behind them to guard them from every pursuing foe. If you have faith but as a grain of mustard seed, fear not. (J. B. Brown, B.A.) Parallel Verses KJV: For ye shall not go out with haste, nor go by flight: for the LORD will go before you; and the God of Israel will be your rereward. |
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