THE CHURCH’S MARRIAGE TO HER SONS, AND TO HER GOD.
Isa. lxii. 4, 5.
Thy land shall be married. For as a young man marrieth a virgin, so shall thy sons marry thee; and as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee.
In the midst of many blessed promises that God makes to his church—in this and the preceding and following chapters—of advancement to a state of great peace, comfort, honor, and joy, after long-continued affliction, we have the sum of all contained in these two verses. In the fourth verse God says to his church, “Thou shalt no more be termed, Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzi-bah, and thy land, Beulah: for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married. 1 ” When it is said, “Thy land shall be married,” we are to understand, “the body of thy people, thy whole race,” the land—by a metonymy, very usual in Scripture—being put for the people that inhabit the land.—The fifth verse explains how this should be accomplished in two things, viz. in being married to her sons, and married to her God.
1. It is promised that she should be married to her sons, or that her sons should marry her? “For as a young man marrieth a virgin, so shall thy sons marry thee. 2 ” Or, as the words might have been more literally translated from the original: “As a young man is married to a virgin, so shall thy sons be married to thee.” Some by this understand a promise, that the posterity of the captivated Jews should return again from Babylon to the land of Canaan, and should be, as it were, married or wedded to their own land; i.e. they should be reunited to their own land, and should have great comfort and joy in it, as a young man in a virgin that he marries. But when it is said, “So shall thy sons marry thee, 3 ” God does not direct his speech to the land itself, but to the church whose land it was; the pronoun thee being applied to the same mystical person in this former part of the verse, as in the words immediately following in the latter part of the same sentence, “And as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee. 4 ” It is the church, and not the hills and valleys of the land of Canaan, that is God’s bride, or the Lamb’s wife. It is also manifest, that when God says, “So shall thy sons marry thee,” he continues to speak to her to whom he had spoken in the three preceding verses; but there it is not the land of Canaan, but the church, that he speaks to when he says, 5 “The Gentiles shall see thy righteousness, and all kings thy glory: and thou shalt be called by a new name, which the mouth of the Lord shall name. Thou shalt also be a crown of glory in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of thy God. Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken,” &c And to represent the land itself as a bride, and the subject of espousals and marriage, would be a figure of speech very unnatural, and not known in Scripture; but for the church of God to be thus represented is very usual from the beginning to the end of the Bible. And then it is manifest that the return of the Jews to the land of Canaan from the Babylonian captivity, is not the event mainly intended by the prophecy of which these words are a part. That was not the time fulfilled in the second verse of this chapter, “And the Gentiles shall see thy righteousness, and all kings thy glory: and thou shalt be called by a new name, which the mouth of the Lord shall name. 6 ” That was not the time spoken of in the preceding chapters, with which this chapter is one continued prophecy. That was not the time spoken of in the last words of the forgoing chapter, when the Lord would cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all nations: nor was it the time spoken of in the fifth, sixth, and ninth verses of that chapter, when “strangers should stand and feed the flocks of God’s people, and the sons of the alien should be their ploughmen, and vine-dressers; but they should be named the priests of the Lord, and men should call them the ministers of God; when they should eat the riches of the Gentiles, and in their glory boast themselves, and their seed should be known among the Gentiles, and their offspring among the people; and all that should see them should acknowledge them, that they are the seed which the Lord hath blessed. 7 ” Nor was that the time spoken of in the chapter preceding that “when the abundance of the sea should be converted unto the church; when the isles should wait for God, and the ships of Tarshish to bring her sons from far, and their silver and gold with them; when the forces of the Gentiles and their kings should be brought; when the church should suck the milk of the Gentiles, and suck the breast of kings; and when that nation and kingdom that would not serve her should perish and be utterly wasted: and when the sun should be no more her light by day, neither for brightness should the moon give light unto her, but the Lord should be unto her an everlasting light, and her God her glory; and her sun should no more go down, nor her moon withdraw itself, because the Lord should be her everlasting light, and the days of her mourning should be ended. 8 ” These things manifestly have respect to the Christian church in her most perfect and glorious state on earth in the last ages of the world; when the church should be so far from being confined to the land of Canaan, that she should fill the whole earth, and all lands should be alike holy.