Isaiah 26

Isaiah 26:1

WHEREIN IS THE CITY’S ?Isaiah 26:1IT is one of the most blessed experiences of high spiritual living that all such as enjoy it get decided glimpses of coming good and glory. The prophets of all times have been able to foretell events, not so much because they were in appointment to prophetic office, as because they lived in the white light of God’s presence.Paul was caught up into the third heaven and permitted to hear unspeakable words which it is not lawful for man to utter, not because he was an Apostle, but because he was spiritually minded and lived godly in Christ Jesus. For the same reason John saw Heaven open, and in its larger light the earth’s future revealed. The men of the Old Testament were often on the Mount of God, and got visions there of far-off events.Isaiah, at the time of this text, was beholding the day that John saw from the isle of Patmos, and the city of Isaiah’s vision is the very same that John described as the Holy Jerusalem, descending out of Heaven from God, having the glory of God as its light, in which the nations of the saved walked.Henry Drummond, commenting on John’s speech, “I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of Heaven”, says: “The association of a blessed life with a city, the one place in the world from which Heaven seems most far away, is something wholly new in religious thought.”But Drummond is mistaken. The old prophets had just such a conception and hence, the words of our text. The Kingdom of God shall have come in this world when Christ has conquered the cities; when Minneapolis, with all her sisters, is at the Saviour’s feet, and salvation is the wall and the bulwark of each.There are many theories as to how this shall be accomplished, but I believe in only one—that is the theory of our text.It is interesting, however, to give a little study to other suggestions.

Some look toLAW AS THE OF THE CIVIC LUMPThere are not a few who say that law grows more strong in its letter of right, and becomes more and more able in enforcement, and these think that when its execution is more certain and just, crime will practically cease from our cities. That law has larger corrective powers than it has yet put forth, none doubt.

Every good citizen feels that our lawmakers and executors could accomplish much by law enforcement if they would. Now and then an honest official shows what a rod of correction law is.Years ago, Dr. Parkhurst took the execution of law into his own hands for the city of New York, and for a while there was a renascence of applied law; but the power was temporary, and long since the terrible reaction came. Our great city centers are more and more illustrating what the great dramatist made the Duke of Vienna to say of that city, “Corruption boils and bubbles till it o’erruns the stew; laws for all faults, but faults so countenanced that the strong statutes stand like the forfeits in a barber shop, as much in mock as mark.”That law is not sufficient to save, history illustrates. Rome, the city of the seven hills, was established by law, and her codes were so just and her execution so sure that all succeeding centuries and cities have copied; and yet, Dr. Joseph Parker, in his “Ecco Homo”, says of legal Rome: “Never did men live under such a crushing sense of degradation; never did they look back with more bitter regret; never were the vices that spring out of despair so rife; never was sensuality cultivated more methodically; never did poetry curdle so readily into satire; never was genius so much soured by cynicism; and never was calumny so abundant or so gross or easily believed.” If the city could be saved by law, Rome would have been the city of our text.THE POWER OF PUBLIC OPINIONThere are those who put all trust for civic redemption in it.This is neither unnatural, nor yet unreasonable.

So thoughtful a man and so good a student of social questions as Dr. Josiah Strong, in his book “The New Era”, declared: “The progress of nearly all reform depends upon the education of public opinion.” “The press,” he says, “has given a vastly enlarged meaning to publicity, and as its meaning has increased, so has its influence.

Men are growing more and more sensitive to public opinion. Even the autocrat of all the Russians and the sublime Porte are not insensible to it. Among Occidental peoples, government is, for the most part, government by public opinion, and in this country, where it is altogether so, evils of every sort are amenable to it. When the popular opinion, like the sun, is found to have its rays of heat as well as of light, and when they are focalized by pulpit or press upon some iniquity and steadily held there as a mighty burning glass, that evil, no matter how deeply intrenched in human ignorance, and prejudice, and selfishness, it may be, will, at length, scorch and writhe and smoke and consume away.” But, if we admit all this, and we do admit it, we still fail to find the sufficient saving power for the city in public opinion.In the first place, it is only once in a long while, and under circumstances of the most phenomenal provocation, that public opinion can be aroused to burning heat and held like a flame to flagrant evil.It took years of tragic traffic in girls in London to make possible William Stead’s appeal to a long-suffering public. Tammany ruled New York with an iron hand, and turned her offices into pockets for personal appropriation ere Parkhurst’s appeal to public opinion was effectual. In Chicago an out and out sale of every moral right of the better citizen to civic robbers hardly suffices to incite interest in one mass meeting; and so cities perish while public opinion sleeps, irresolute and inactive; and even if public opinion was open-eyed and constantly courageous, it could not save our cities.

While it burns itself out against one vice, another is undermining the very foundation. “That which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten; and that which the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpiller eaten”.On one occasion, in a great city, we went to a ward chairman of the Civic Federation, and asked his sympathy against the Sunday saloon. He answered, “Just now the Civic Federation is giving its attention to bad literature, and it cannot turn away from this to do anything else, lest we divide public attention and fail of all result.” He was right!

We know of no engine of power so sure to burn itself out before any big or lasting work can be accomplished as this of popular feeling. It is like the ocean’s tide. It reaches a high water mark not to hold it, but to. roll back to low tide before the rising of another sun.SOME SUPPOSE TO BE THE CITY’S The socialists of the great cities of the old world, and some of the cities of America, are communists, and insist upon a community of goods. They do not ask for a community where Christian men and women, akin in that noblest spirit and character, have “all things common; and sell their possessions and goods, and part them to all men, as every man has need”, but for a community of wealth, without reference to character or conduct; for a division of riches that shall disregard all personal weaknesses or worth, but leave none hungry or naked. If the communism of the New Testament Christians broke down before the very eyes of the Apostles who practiced and favored it; if Paul had to write to the Thessalonians, “if any would not work, neither should he eat”, there is absolutely no hope in communism with Christianity left out. Poverty is not the mother of most of our civic iniquities.

To make all men comfortable is not to make all men moral. Sinful hearts hatch out the vultures of hardship, and men of means are often godless and miserable.

If you have a better view of communism, and organize the social equality idea into a church, it won’t save the city. In fact, it will not survive. Mr. Stead once attempted that for London, and signally failed. The Bricklayers Hall of Chicago was not a success in civic redemption. Walter Walsh was right when, concerning the laboring class of London, he said: “This secularizing of the idea of life is at the lowest a doubtful and dangerous experiment.

Even assuming socialistic economics to be sound, to put ethics before religion and conduct before worship, to weaken the union of the human need and the Divine motive, to seek to reveal the fatherhood of God through the brotherhood of man, is to reverse all tried and tested ways of promoting human virtue and happiness. It is to plant the tree with its roots in the air, or to cause the stream to flow backward in its channel.” Christ affirmed that you cannot get an unregenerate man into the Kingdom of Grace, and by the strictest logic it follows that there can be no Kingdom of God in a city until men are made over, made anew, made holy, for, behold, the Kingdom of God is in you, if it exists at all for you.Communism based upon Christianity failed in Jerusalem.

Communism without Christianity is a foregone failure everywhere. What then is our hope? This text tells us.THE CITY’S TO CHRIST IS HER Paul said: “I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth”. What the Gospel can do for the man in redeeming him from sin and sorrow, it can work for the centers of population.When Phillip preached in Samaria, “unclean spirits, crying with loud voice, came out of many that were possessed with them: and many taken with palsies, and that were lame, were healed. And there was great joy in that city”. That is the Gospel for our city.

If, in the Name of Christ, unclean spirits are vanished, and by His power the palsied and the lame are made whole, Heaven will then begin here below and our song will be “We have a strong city; salvation will God appoint for walls and bulwarks”. There are no other such walls.

Christianity and that alone is the city’s safety.In the East the cities are surrounded by great walls, but they have gone down before the enemy. One frown from God and the walls of Jericho totter to their foundations and fall. One blast from the great guns, and the castles at Manila and Santiago must surrender; but one righteous man in Sodom preserves it from the flaming fire, and I don’t know but it is true that ten righteous men would save any city in the world from the wrath and destruction of God. Surely that was Senator Farewell’s idea when he declared that he would rather have Mr. Moody in Chicago preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as a force for civic righteousness, than to have the whole police force on duty and the state militia armed with the gatling guns of Haymarket days. But Drummond was also right in saying that the Christian man should be a man of action and practical citizen.

The trouble with the Christianity of our cities is its inactivity, its failure at the point of honest practice. There are enough of us in these great cities to exert a mighty saving and sanctifying power, if only we were sanctified ourselves.

I use the word in its original meaning viz., “set apart to sacred uses”.But the workers for God, how few after all! How many of us are moved, even in religion, by selfish motives. How many of us ask on Sunday morning, “Who is the most eloquent preacher in town? What church has the best singers? Where will I see the most beautiful architecture? In what sanctuary can I smell the sweetest flowers?” Did it ever occur to you that to make such inquiries discovers the utterly selfish motive in attending God’s House? Why not ask just the opposite question, if we be Christ’s? “To what church can I go today where my contribution will count the most? To what church can I go today where my singing can most assist?

To what service can I go today where my soul will be most fed? From what preacher can I receive today, inspiration to earnest living? By what means can I discover today how I may serve the city and snatch some of the sinking?” Oh, it is a shame, and it is a sin to profess Christ and then live in a city like this—indifferent to them that live about us without hope and without God.Once we read, as did many of you, the reports of the sinking of the Burgoyne, and were shocked to see that then, under such circumstances, selfishness controlled men. Helpless women and children were permitted to perish without an outstretched hand, and were even pushed to their death to make better the chances of salvation for the strong. I said, “That is humanity at its lowest.”But is Christianity at its highest, when, in a city like this, there are hundreds that sink daily, going down to deaths as much more dreadful than drowning, as destruction is more dreadful than sleep; when within their very reach are men and women that might lend a helping hand? Say what we please, we could, if we followed the commands of our Christ, accomplish mighty things for the metropolis.

We could, if we practiced the spirit of our Christ, see the salvation of multitudes, for Christ came into the world to seek and to save.Dr. Hurlburt used to tell of a celebrated painting named “The Great Conquerors” in which the artist has presented the world’s greatest warriors riding abreast: Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon and others, over a road made of dead men, and through a desert surrounded by a sea of blood.

That is the world’s empire; but that is not the triumph of our Christ. Where His chariots go, there are the living! Christ is the hope of sobriety; Christ is the settlement of social questions; Christ, and Christ alone, is the city’s salvation.