They had not utterly forgotten God, therefore a part of the nation shall be rescued from captivity.  So full of hope is Isaiah that the nation shall not utterly be destroyed, that he names his son Shear-jashub,—­“a remnant shall return.”  This is his watchword.  Certain is it that the Lord will have mercy on Jacob whom he hath chosen; his promises will not fail.  Judah shall be chastised; but a part of Judah shall return to Jerusalem, purified, wiser, and shall again in due time flourish as a nation.

Isaiah is the prophet of hope, of forgiveness, and of love.  Not only on Judah shall a blessing be bestowed, but upon the whole world.  Forgiveness is unbounded if there is repentance, no matter what the sin may be.  He almost anticipates the message of Jesus by saying, “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow.”  God’s mercy is past finding out.  “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters!” So full is he of the boundless love of God, extended to all created things, that he calls on the hills and the mountains to rejoice.  Here he soars beyond the Jew; he takes in the whole world in his rapturous expectation of deliverance.  He comforts all good people under chastisement.  He is as cheerful as Jeremiah is sad.

Having laid down the conditions of forgiveness, and expatiated on 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.”