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 temporal deliverer, but a Saviour redeeming mankind from the curse of sin.  Hence Isaiah is quoted more than all the other prophets combined, especially by the writers of the New Testament.

Having announced this glorious prediction of the advent into our world of a divine Redeemer in the form of a man, by whose life and suffering and death the world should be saved, the prophet-poet breaks out in rhapsodies.  He cannot contain his exultation.  He loses sight of the judgments he had declared, in his unbounded rejoicings that there was to be a deliverance; that not only a remnant would return to Jerusalem and become a renewed power, but that the Messiah should ultimately reign over all the nations of the earth, should establish a reign of peace, so that warriors “should beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks.”  Heretofore the history of kings had been a history of wars,—­of oppression, of injustice, of cruelty.  Miseries overspread the earth from this scourge more than from all other causes combined.  The world was decimated by war, producing not only wholesale slaughter, but captivity and slavery, the utter extinction of nations.  Isaiah had himself dwelt upon the woes to be visited on mankind by war more than any other prophet who had preceded him.  All the leading nations and capitals were to be utterly destroyed or severely punished; calamity and misery should be nearly universal; only “a remnant should be saved.”  Now, however, he takes the most cheerful and joyous views.  So marked is the contrast between the first and latter parts of the Book of Isaiah, that many great critics suppose that they were written by different persons and at different times.  But whether there were two persons or one, the most comforting and cheering doctrines to be found in the Scriptures, before the Sermon on the Mount was preached, are declared by Isaiah.  The breadth and catholicity of them are amazing from the pen of a Jew.  The whole world was to share with him in the promises of a Saviour; the whole world was to be finally redeemed.  As recipients of divine privileges there was to be no difference between Jew and Gentile.  Paul himself shows no greater mental illumination.  “The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it.”