day shall Jehovah of hosts be for a crown of glory and a diadem of beauty unto the residue of His people, and for a spirit of judgment to him that sitteth in judgment, and a spirit of strength to them that drive back the battle from the borders " (xxviii. 5, 6).  Jehovah is a true and perfect King, hence justice is His principal attribute and His chief demand.  And this justice is a purely forensic or social notion:  the righteousness of the Sermon on the Mount can only come into consideration when civil justice and order have come to be a matter of course—­which at that time they had not yet done.

The representative of Jehovah is the human king.  The earthly ruler is not in the way of the heavenly:  even the glorious kingdom of the future cannot dispense with him.  “Then a king shall reign in righteousness and princes shall rule in judgment; each of them shall be as an hiding-place from the wind and as a covert from the tempest; as rivers of waters in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land” (xxxii. 1, 2).  As the reigning king is in general unsatisfactory, Isaiah hopes for a new one who will answer the pattern of David of old, the Messiah.  “There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots:  and the spirit of Jehovah shall rest upon Him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and of warlike might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord; and His breath shall be drawn in the fear of Jehovah.  And He shall not judge after the sight of His eyes, nor decide by hearsay:  but with righteousness shall He judge the poor, and give sentence with equity for the meek of the earth; but He shall smite the scorners with the rod of His mouth, and with the breath of His lips shall He slay the wicked, so that righteousness shall be the girdle of His loins, and faithfulness the girdle of His reins.  Then the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid:  and the calf and the young lion together, and a little child shall lead them.  And the cow and the bear shall feed, their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox:  and the sucking child shall stroke the head of the adder, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the eye-ball of the basilisk.  They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain” (xi. 1-9) This is generally considered to be a prediction of a universal golden age on earth; but Isaiah only speaks of the holy mountain as the scene, meaning by this the whole city of David as the centre of his kingdom.  The just and strict government of the descendant of David is to bring it about that righteousness and truth kiss each other, and that the strong do not dare to injure the weak.  Fear of the severity of the law engenders general confidence; the lamb is no longer afraid of the wolf.  The opposite of this ideal is lawlessness and anarchy within, not war without; the hope is not that of international peace, as we see both from verse 1-5 and from verse 9.  The Messiah is adorned just with the virtues which befit a ruler; and this shows sufficiently what is the nature of the kingdom of which he is to be the head, i.e., what is the notion of the theocracy.