Isaiah 66

1. Where is the house that ye build unto Me? These words plainly declare that the Mosaic ritual shall no longer be acceptable to God. Some, who regard this as written during the Captivity, suppose the reference to be to the Temple which the returning exiles were purposing to build in Jerusalem. The passage rebukes self-righteous and hypocritical formalists, as those of our Lord’s days, who gloried in the rebuilding of the Temple at the very time when God was superseding it: see John ii. 20.

2. For all those things hath Mine hand made. That is, heaven and earth (1). I need no temples made with hands; all creation is My dwelling. But My temple, the “place of My rest,” is the humble and obedient heart: comp. lvii. 15.

3. He that killeth an ox, etc. The various offerings of the Mosaic law are here classed with the sacrifices of heathenism. The most regular outward service, if the heart and life be not right, is as offensive to God as flagrant idolatry.

4 their delusions. Or, “calamities.”

5 said, Let the Lord be glorified. The words of the persecutors should probably be rendered as ironical, “Let Jehovah be glorified, that we may see your joy” (R.V.). Upon which the prophet adds, “But they shall be ashamed.”

6 from the city. That is, from Jerusalem. The prophet hears the roar of war in the city, even in the Temple itself. Jehovah, like a warrior (see xlii. 13), is taking vengeance on His enemies, who have cast out their brethren (5). This powerfully depicts the confusion and horrors which prevailed in Jerusalem (and even in the Temple) during its siege and capture by the Romans.

7. Before she travelled, she brought forth. i.e., the true Jerusalem, the Church of the Messiah, by which, even before the convulsions of the great crisis, a new spiritual Israel shall spring suddenly to life. At the first preaching of the apostles three thousand were converted in one day; and the Gospel was speedily propagated over almost the whole of the known world. And this was only a partial fulfilment of the prophecy.

11. That ye may suck, and be satisfied. Those who have sympathised with Zion in her sorrows shall partake of her abundance and her glory; nourished by the same truth, and comforted from the same sources of consolation.

12 be borne upon [her] sides. That is, as a child is by its mother: see xlix. 22; lx. 4.

17 purify themselves in the gardens. i.e., by idolatrous rites: see lxv. 3, 5. In the following clause, instead of the word “tree,” we should read, “the one in the midst”; the allusion being to an idolatrous procession, with the priest as the leader, through the midst of the garden or grove where the rites were celebrated.

the abomination. This term comprehends whatever was held as abominable in the law of God, such as creeping things and reptiles: see Lev. xi. 10.

18. I [know] their works and their thoughts. More probably, “And I [will punish] their deeds and their thoughts.” The verb is omitted, probably to give terseness and force to the sentence.

19 those that escape. i.e., those who shall have survived the judgements predicted; and who, by what they shall have witnessed, shall have been brought to acknowledge and receive the Messiah. These are to become missionaries to the world—“to far Spain, and the distances of Africa, towards the Black Sea and to Greece, a full round of the compass” (G. A. Smith).

20 upon horses, and in chariots. The description represents the ingathering of the Jews to the Church through the agency of the Gentiles.

23 from one new moon to another. Indicating the regularity and constancy with which the whole human family shall worship the true God.

24. And they shall go forth. The spiritual Israelites, offering perpetually their pure worship in the New Jerusalem, shall look down from its height upon Tophet, and see with abhorrence the death-fires and corruption of the apostate Israel of former days. Such is the solemn contrast with which the prophecy closes: selected by the Great Teacher Himself as His warning to the impenitent (Mark ix. 44).