ed. If the Church does not comply with
the command: [Greek: exareite ton poneron ex humon auton], 1 Cor. v.
13; Deut. xiii. 6 (5), God himself will enforce His authority by His
Spirit, who carries out the judgments of the avenging God, just as He
carries out every influence of the Creator upon the created. On the
"Spirit of the Lord," comp. my remarks on Rev. i. 4.

Ver. 5. The image is here taken from the journey of Israel through the
wilderness. During that journey, they were guided and protected by a
symbol of God's presence, which by day presented itself as smoke, and
by night assumed the form of flaming fire. By this symbol the God of
Israel was designated as the jealous God, as the living, personal
energy, energetic in His love for His people, energetic in wrath
against His and their enemies. Comp. especially Exod. xiii. 21: "And
the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud to lead them on
the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light;" and xl.
38: "For a cloud was upon the tabernacle by day, and fire was on it by
night;" comp. Numb. ix. 15, 16. The same phenomenon is to be repeated
in future, although in a different form. In a manner the most real, the
Lord will manifest himself as the living energy of His Church, dwelling
in the midst of her, and ruling over her as a protector, so that the
world's power can no longer injure her. That such will be done in and
by His _Sprout_, in Christ, appears from the relation of the verse
under consideration to ver. 2; for the verse before us still belongs to
the expansion of the proposition placed at the head of the whole: "The
_Sprout_ of the Lord becomes for beauty and glory, and the fruit of the
land for exaltation and ornament to the escaped of Israel." Christ in
His person and Spirit is the true Shechinah, the true indwelling of God
in His Church. This indwelling is, even in the Law, designated as the
highest privilege of the covenant-people; its being raised to a higher
power is therefore to the Prophet the highest blessing of the future,
the source from which all other blessings flow. That which the heathen
in vain longed [Pg 24] for and imagined; that which Israel hitherto
possessed only very imperfectly, a _praesens numen_, whereby the
antithesis of heaven and earth is done away with, and earth is
glorified into a heaven;--that, the purified Church of the Lord
possesses in the most perfect and real manner, and in it, absolute
security agains