n the
divine benevolence, Isaiah now sings another song, and ascends to
loftier heights. He is jubilant over the promised glories of God's
people; he speaks of the redemption of both Jew and Gentile. His
prophetic mission is now more distinctly unfolded. He blends the
forgiveness of sins with the promised Deliverer; he unfolds the advent
of the Messiah. He even foretells in what form He shall come; he
predicts the main facts of His personal history. Not only shall there
"come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch out of its
roots," but he shall be "a man despised and rejected, a man of sorrows
and acquainted with grief; who shall be wounded for our transgressions
and bruised for our iniquities, brought as a lamb to the slaughter, cut
off from the living, making his grave with the wicked and with the rich
in his death; yet bruised because it pleased the Lord, and because he
made his soul an offering for sin, and made intercession with the
transgressors." Who is this stricken, persecuted, martyred personage,
bearing the iniquity of the race, and thus providing a way for future
salvation? Isaiah, with transcendent majesty of style, clear and
luminous as it is poetical, declares that this person who is still
unborn, this light which shall appear in Galilee, is no less than he on
whose shoulders shall be the government, "whose name shall be called
Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the
Prince of Peace; of the increase of whose kingdom and peace there shall
be no end, upon the throne of David and upon his kingdom, to order it,
and to establish it with judgment and justice forever."

Only in some of the Messianic Psalms do we meet with kindred passages,
indicating the reign of the Christ upon the earth, expressed with such
emphatic clearness. How marvellous and wonderful this prophecy! Seven
hundred years before its fulfilment, it is expressed with such
minuteness, that, had the prophet lived in the Apostolic age, he could
not have described the Messiah more accurately. The devout Jew,
especially after the Captivity, believed in a future deliverer, who
should arise from the seed of David, establish a great empire, and reign
as a temporal monarch; but he had no lofty and spiritual views of this
predicted reign. To Isaiah, more even than to Abraham or David or any
other person in Jewish history, was it revealed that the reign of the
Christ was to be spiritual; that he was not to be a temp