Post by Lee on May 21, 2014 2:29:39 GMT
“LOPPING THE BOUGH WITH TERROR.”
Thus, by modern exploration, we are enabled to get quite a vivid picture of the advance of the Assyrian through the Prince’s portion of the land (Ezek. 48) upon the city of the Great King.
At Nob, however, the divine command was: HALT! “This very day shall he halt at Nob” (5:32 R.V.). Nob is not certainly identified; but it seems to have been situated about two miles north of Jerusalem. It was a Levitical city, the place where David ate the shew bread, and the scene of the slaving of the Lord’s priests by Saul. If Shafat be the site, it is on the main road to Jerusalem from the north, and about two miles distant from the city, which is visible from it. Here the Assyrian was to camp and “shake his hand against the mount of the daughter of Zion, the hill of Jerusalem.”
The history of the fulfilment of the prophecy shortly afterwards, in Hezekiah’s days, is recorded in 2 Kings 19, and incorporated in Isaiah 36 and 37. At that time, God consoled Hezekiah by an assurance of deliverance from the invader, and a sentence of judgment upon the boastful king: “He shall not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow there, nor come before it with a shield, nor cast a bank against it.” And so it came to pass; for, without striking a blow, he left the dead bodies of his host of 185,000 men, slain by the angel of the Lord “that night,” and returned in disgrace to Nineveh, where he was slain by his own sons in the presence of his god Nisroch, in whose strength he trusted to prevail against “the God of Jerusalem.”
This stroke of judgment is figuratively foretold in the last two verses of Isaiah 10, “Behold, the Lord, the LORD of Hosts (that is, ‘the angel of the Lord’ as the history shows), shall lop the bough with terror; and the high ones of stature shall be hewn down, and the haughty shall be humbled. And he shall cut down the thickets of the forest with iron, and Lebanon shall fall by a mighty one.” From this symbolic language, and the literal description of its import that is available, we may estimate the judgments that are yet in store for the world. The book of Revelation (ch. 14) gives us a picture of the Son of Man sitting crowned upon a white cloud and armed with a sharp sickle. Angels of the temple, likewise sickle-armed, assist him in the terrible process of reaping the ripe harvest of the earth, “gathering the clusters of the vine of the earth.” The work being accomplished, the clusters were “cast into the great wine-press of the wrath of God. And the wine-press was trodden without the city, and blood came out of the wine-press: even unto the horse bridles by the space of a thousand six hundred furlongs.” The terrible judgments thus portrayed have to do with anti-typical Babylon (Rev. 14:8), the Roman corruption of God’s “way,” that is as obnoxious to Him as was the aggressive Assyrian of two thousand five hundred years ago.
Robert Roberts, & Walker, C. C. (1907). The Ministry of the Prophets: Isaiah (197–198). The Publishing Commitee, Christadelphian Old Paths Ecclesia.