CHAPTER XXI
The Shadow Christ--Isaiah
Isaiah 40-64.
Agnes M. Lawson
Hints
to Bible Study
The Colorado College of Divine
Science
Denver, 1920.
To attempt
to appraise this Herald of the New
Time--which is not new at all, but a
proclamation of the “Ancient
Days,” the eternal Real, knowing
neither time nor space--requires a pen
tipped with Light. Not a vestige of the
personality of this prophet appears; he
is just a Voice speaking from the latter
end of the captivity in Babylon to his
fellow captives; looking across the
desert to Jerusalem--then a city which
lay in ruins, to be rebuilt by the soul
of the nation which through suffering had
found itself--and from thence to the
“ends of the earth.”
As Jeremiah
had sung the swan song of the old time,
the “Great Unknown” sings the
trumpet song of the new time--proclaiming
the advent of the reign of Righteousness.
So modest is this greatest of all Hebrew
writers that we find his book attached to
that of Isaiah, possibly because the
optimism which is the keynote of each
made their association inevitable, or
maybe because this is the fulfillment of
Isaiah’s vision. The writer who
begins his book with the words,
“Comfort ye, comfort ye my people,
saith your God,” sees farther than
he whose vision climaxed with the One who
should be born of the house of David, and
who would establish what would be still a
typically Hebrew kingdom; this seer
visions a people going out to conquer the
whole world with no other instruments of
warfare than gentleness and light.
“Behold my servant, whom I uphold;
my chosen, in whom my soul delighteth; I
have put my spirit upon him; he shall
bring forth judgment to the nations. He
shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his
voice to be heard in the street. A
bruised reed shall he not break, and the
smoking flax shall he not quench; he
shall bring forth judgment in truth. He
shall not burn dimly nor be bruised, till
he have set judgment in the earth; and
the isles shall wait for his law.”
O, Jewish and Christian nations who have
persecuted each other, how far short ye
have fallen of his ideal! Ye have slain
each other, fought religious (?) wars,
and martyred the prophets of light. Yet
steady and persistent has his light
shone, and the One, who personified
himself with the vision, was bathed in
his light. Yet this prophet’s ideal
is not limited to one man; he saw a
people, those whom he called the
“Suffering Servant of
Jehovah,” resplendent with the
spirit that had been put upon them,
redeeming a world by shining through
it.
Instead of
writing this article I was strongly
tempted to say to the readers,
“Procure a ‘Modern
Reader’s Bible,’ read the
notes to the book and the book
itself--’The Rhapsody of Zion
Redeemed’.” I am conscious of
a feeling of humility in approaching this
prophet; and I write about him because,
among Biblical characters, this, which is
neither a man nor a character, so far as
we can trace, but a Light, is so
insistent that all before his time leads
up to him--and all after his time must
look back to him. In my own Bible, the
one used when I first became a student,
and clung to for both comfort and
healing, this prophet’s pages are
more marked than any other in the whole
book, and that which is most sacred to us
we are most reluctant to speak about,
because words are so impotent to convey
the feelings aroused by one who has been
a great inspiration.
Christianity
was born in the consciousness of Isaiah
but it culminates in him who has been
called “The Second Isaiah.”
His vision is no longer confined to the
Hebrew, but sweeps out into the
human race. It is a light of
“irresistible illumination, which
shall not burn dimly until it reach the
farthest ends of the earth.”
Rhapsody is a word borrowed from music by
Professor Moulton to express something
which “is not paralleled in other
literature. They are spiritual dramas, a
fusion of all literary forms.” Of
this particular book he says: “It
may be safely asserted that nowhere else
in the literature of the world have so
many colossal ideas been brought together
within the limits of a single
work.”
Furthermore:
“It is the boast of both England
and America that its higher education is
religious in its spirit; why is it then
that our youth are taught to associate
exquisiteness of expression, force of
presentation, brilliance of imaginative
picturing, only with literature in which
the prevailing matter and thought is on a
low moral plane? Such a paradox is part
of the paganism which came in with the
Renaissance, and which our higher
education is still too conservative to
shake off. The friends of literary
education who rebel against the thought
of so one-sided a culture have a definite
issue to contend for; that at least
Isaiah and Job should take their place
beside Plato and Homer in the curricula
of our colleges and schools.”
The American
writer who said, “I wish that every
young man and woman could go through
college, to find out how little they can
learn in them,” was probably right.
Personally I am an ardent advocate of the
higher education, but in meeting many
college trained men and women have found
their education to be what we call in
typing the pick-and-peck method. A scrap
of learning here, and a scrap there, no
beginning, no orderly unfoldment, no
climaxes. Thoughts, ideals, nations, do
appear, unfold, climax and pass away,
leaving their message in the human
consciousness, a leaven that never ceases
to work for the betterment of the race,
so that no matter what the seeming to
human outlook, to spiritual vision the
race is always “going straight
forward.”
The great
nameless prophet made a discovery,
hitherto unrecognized by preceding
prophets: Suffering, trials, temptations,
deprivations are not evidences of divine
displeasure; but divine educations and
opportunities to apply the spiritual
principles that one professes to believe
in. I find this misunderstood so largely
among students today. Those students who
wonder, Why this came to
me? It is a special opportunity to
demonstrate Truth. They get on the
underside of it by calling it a
trial instead of taking the
upperside by calling it an
opportunity.
In captivity
the nation had so grown in knowledge and
self-discipline that this prophet
foresees that they are to be called out
to a larger work than just saving
themselves: “It is too light a
thing that thou shouldst be my servant to
raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to
restore the preserved of Israel: I will
also give thee for a light to the
Gentiles, that thou mayest be my
salvation unto the ends of the
earth.”
In
Life’s own school are the beloved
of Jehovah educated; and the conditions
of life are the spiritual gymnasium in
which we develop the power to overcome
“all things.” In exile,
having lost its national life, the nation
had found its international Soul.
Jehovah could not take his
“wife” back, to whom he had
been compelled to give a “bill of
divorcement” because of her many
infidelities. The “ungrateful
foundling” now was a woman, with a
woman’s sense of responsibility,
and a woman’s soul looking out of
her clear eyes.
"Sing, O barren,
That thou didst not bear;
Break forth into singing and cry
aloud,
That thou didst not travail with child.
For more are
the children of the desolate than of the
married wife, saith the Lord. Enlarge the
place of thy tent, and let them stretch
forth the curtains of thy habitations;
spare not; lengthen thy cords, and
strengthen thy stakes. For thou shalt
spread abroad on the right hand and on
the left; and thy seed shall possess the
nations and make the desolate cities to
be inhabited.”
Not in
sheltered nooks and happy surroundings
does character grow broad and powerful.
Many a storm and tempest must the great
oak pass through before we can rest under
its comforting shelter, and only he knows
the power of his own soul who has been
tested to the uttermost and has found the
spiritual power sufficient to meet every
demand made upon it. One who has seen
only the happy side of life can never
touch the heights nor sound the depths of
the spiritual universe. Only the soul who
has been in the Vast Loneliness lets go
of itself in absolute self-surrender; and
only that soul that the Spirit finds
empty can it completely occupy.
According to
Luke, Jesus opened his great public
ministry with a reading from this
prophet, and was rejected by the Jews on
account of the interpretation that he
placed upon it. This new name for the
nation, “Jews,” came with the
Babylonian captivity, a contraction of
“men of Judah.” But it is not
this people, the Jews, that the
great prophet had foreseen, but those
that should be born from the soul of the
nation, the Christians.
Historic
research had not gone so deeply into the
making up of the Bible in the time of the
Nazarene as it has in our day; so when
following his baptism by John, Jesus
returned to Nazareth, “where he had
been brought up: and he entered as his
custom was, into the synagogue on the
sabbath day, and he stood up to read. And
there was delivered unto him the book of
the prophet Isaiah. And he opened the
book and found the place where it was
written, The Spirit of the Lord is
upon me, because he anointed me to preach
good tidings to the poor: he hath sent me
to proclaim release to the captives, and
recovering of sight to the blind, to set
at liberty them that are bruised, to
proclaim the acceptable year of the
Lord. And he closed the book and gave
it back to the attendant, and sat down:
and the eyes of all the synagogue were
fastened upon him. And he began to say
unto them, Today hath this Scripture
been fulfilled in your ears. And all
bear him witness at the words of grace,
which proceeded out of his mouth; and
they said, Is not this Joseph’s
son?”
If the
preceding prophets had seen that Jehovah
could raise up enemy powers to punish a
sinful nation, this one sees that He can
also raise up another foreign power to
deliver his oppressed people. In the rise
of Persia under Cyrus the Great, he sees
an instrument which God will use to save
the nation. As men and conditions are
always to us what we name them, no doubt
can exist in the minds of those who
understand the laws of mind that this
prophet’s thought influenced that
of Cyrus, and the privileges given to the
Jews under this king were the result of
his thought of him. By an inevitable law
people respond to us from the dominant
conviction of our consciousness, truly if
the thought be true, wrongfully if the
thought of them be doubtful or
condemnatory.
The strength
of the Hebrew prophets lies in their
centralization of power. There was to
them no power but God. “Before me
there was no God formed, neither shall
there be any after me. I, even I, am the
Lord: and beside me there is no saviour.
Thus saith the Lord to his anointed
Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to
subdue nations before him, and the gates
shall not be shut; I will go before thee
to make the rugged places plain; I will
break in pieces the doors of brass, and
cut in sunder the bars of iron. I will
gird thee though thou hast not known
me.”
The worship
of one God is established in this
rhapsody; and scorn is shown for all
idolatry. History is an endless
repetition of itself and not yet have the
nations which we consider civilized
outgrown idolatry though the fashion of
it be changed. Still we find Christians
believing that health may be found in
medicines, deliverance and freedom in the
accumulation of wealth, and satisfaction
in gaining some social position and in
gratification of the senses. Contempt for
idols fashioned by hand and carried in
processions we easily can transfer, to
suit the times, into idols fashioned in
man’s thought and laboriously
carried around as dead weight to their
makers. Jehovah announces himself through
this seer as not being something we can
carry as we do false gods, but as
One who having made man HE CARRIES
HIM.
A complete
reversal of thought is given here, which
this age has not yet caught up with: it
means absolutely yielding our lives to
the Supreme One, as the earth has yielded
itself to the power that carries it in
its orbit around the sun. We do not
choose our God, He has chosen us, our
work, our whole life, are His and He
carries us through to completion.
There is nothing for us to do but
accept and permit ourselves to be carried
out into His ideal of us. This which
is our work is anything, however, but
spineless acceptance of all that comes to
us; it is positive rejection of all evil
and perfect faith in the power of God to
carry us through all the trials and
temptations of life to a triumphant
climax.
Is not the
whole work of man given in the first
chapter of the Shadow Christ, Isaiah
40:3-6?
“Prepare ye, in the wilderness
the way of the Lord,
Make straight in the deserts a highway
for our God.
Every valley shall be exalted,
And every mountain and hill shall be
made low;
The crooked shall be made
straight,
And the rough places plain:
And the glory of the Lord shall be
revealed,
And all flesh shall see it
together:
For the mouth of the Lord hath spoken
it.”
There is
only One Mind and One Thinker; our work
is to make way for it. This is done as we
rest in the Truth and let this Mind know
in us. This pure knowing is what makes us
free.
Could
anything be more comforting than this,
the twenty-eighth to the thirty-first
verses of the same chapter?
“Hast
thou not known? hast thou not heard? the
everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of
the ends of the earth, fainteth not,
neither is weary; there is no searching
of his understanding. He giveth power to
the faint; and to him that hath no might
he increaseth strength; they shall mount
up with the wings of eagles; they shall
run and not be weary; they shall walk and
not faint.”
Today, Great
Prophet, thy people are seeing that light
from thy consciousness, which has never
burned dimly since thou hast spoken thy
words of living truth. When we look into
the eyes of companions who are
comprehending thy truth, we know at last
it is penetrating the consciousness of
man universal, and our hearts are
comforted, and each holding aloft his own
torch and marching forward knows that at
last thy vision is fulfilled, it is
reaching the “farthest ends of the
earth.”
* * * * *
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