="Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.  Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned; that she hath received of the Lord’s hand double for all her sins."=

With words that sing like a beautiful instrument of music he tells the people that God has not forgotten them; that the scattered exiles will be brought back to the home land; that the ruined city, Jerusalem, will be rebuilt and made more lovely than before; that a rule of justice will be established; and that the blessings of peace and happiness will come to all.

=The greatness of service.=—­Even better than these promises of happiness, our unknown prophet helped the people to understand more clearly what it means to be a great nation.  He did not believe that the God of heaven and earth would make a favorite of any one nation.  Instead he taught that Jehovah had chosen Israel to be a servant nation for him, to serve all other nations by teaching them about the true God.

    ="I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that
    thou mayest be my salvation to the end of the earth."=

He explained in this way even the undeserved suffering which many of the best people of Israel were enduring.  Israel thus became a type of Him who was “despised and rejected of men.”  To be chastised and afflicted and oppressed is not so hard to bear if it is all a part of Jehovah’s plan for men.  The ideal in the Old Testament becomes a reality in the New.

So for the first time the idea came into the world that Abraham’s dreams of a greater and nobler nation and God’s promises to Abraham, Moses, David and the rest were not for the Hebrew people only, but for all men; that beginning with this little nation God was making a better world; a world of love, instead of selfishness and hate; of happy work and play, instead of misery and hopelessness and war.

Of course very few of the prophet’s hearers understood him.  But more and more the Jews were filled with the thought that somehow God had a great future for them.  Boys and girls, as they grew up, wondered if they might not become leaders, a new Moses, a second David, or Elijah, to play some part in bringing the great future which God had promised.

STUDY TOPICS

1.  Read Isaiah 40 or 49 for a taste of the writing of the “Great Unknown.”

2.  Read Ezekiel 2. 1-7, or 14, for a similar taste of this prophet’s message and style.

3.  Which of these two prophets do you consider the greater?

4.  Is there evidence to-day that the Jews still believe in a restored nation?

CHAPTER XXIII

THE GOOD DAYS OF NEHEMIAH