Verse of the day · September 12
Whose treasure is the fear of the LORD in Isaiah 33:6?
The envoys sent to negotiate came back weeping like children. The king was promised settled times.
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And wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times, and strength of salvation: the fear of the LORD is his treasure.
Isaiah 33:6
An army is loose in the country, and it has broken a treaty of peace with the people it is spoiling. It took cities that never provoked it, and it makes itself master of the fenced towns so easily that it despises them. The king in Jerusalem sends men out to negotiate, and the prophecy has them coming home weeping like children, with no expedient left that could pacify a commander who neither fears God nor regards man. The roads are unsafe and empty, the fields lie trodden like highways and the highways lie untrodden like fields.
Inside the walls the praying is exact. The men of war get a petition of their own, and everyone else — the people who sit still and do not venture into the high places of the field — gets this: be thou our salvation in the time of trouble. Reading the chapter through, Matthew Henry hears them asking for God not only as their Saviour, to work deliverance for them, but as their salvation itself, reckoning themselves safe whatever became of their secular interests if they had him for their God. Men are cruel, so be thou gracious; they had no confidence in the Egyptians and had waited for him only.
The prayer was answered, and then outdone. They had asked to be delivered from their enemies; what came was a destroying angel in the camp. Sennacherib was murdered afterwards at his devotions by two of his own sons — the righteous God, Henry writes, often paying sinners in their own coin.
Then the prophet stops on God himself, exalted and dwelling on high, out of the reach of the invaders' blasphemies, and what comes next is set down for Hezekiah and his people to stay themselves upon. Thy times, the Geneva Notes say, means the days of Hezekiah. Two goods are named, and they answer to the two halves of the trouble — the stability of thy times, meaning things not disturbed and unhinged at home, and the strength of salvation, meaning deliverance from and success against enemies abroad. The way to both is wisdom and knowledge, not only piety but prudence, the sort that sacrifices private interests to a public good and fortifies the bulwarks of truth and peace.
Albert Barnes takes the whole verse as a direct address to the king. Stability, on his reading, denotes firmness, steadiness, constancy: knowledge and the fear of the LORD settled on a firm foundation in his times. Strength of salvation he renders saving strength, and the times so described are marked out for great reforms. The reign would be distinguished, Barnes says, not for wars and conquests, for commercial enterprise or for external splendour, but for the prevalence of piety and the fear of the LORD.
The last clause hands the treasure to somebody the sentence never names. JFB put that down to Hebrew poetry, where a possessive slides from the second person to the third without warning, and take both pronouns for one owner — Hezekiah's, or rather Judea's, whose riches are constituted not so much by material wealth as by piety. It may be Hezekiah's, John Gill allows, who esteemed the fear of the LORD above all his treasure. Best of all, in Gill's own judgment, it is the church's treasure and every true believer's, the best of riches and the more enduring substance. Henry weighs whether the treasure is God's or the prince's and comes down on the prince's: a good prince accounts wisdom better than gold, and he shall find it so.
The horizon Gill himself watches lies well past this siege: he takes the words as an apostrophe to the Messiah. He also collects the Hebrew accents, which allow another rendering — he, that is, the Lord, shall be the stability of thy times, and the strength of salvations shall be wisdom and knowledge. On that construction the stability of a kingdom is a person, the one just called exalted. Henry reads the last clause as a pious maxim of state: it is the interest of a people to take heed of everything that threatens to hinder the fear of the LORD among them.
The spoil in this chapter changes hands twice. The cities of Judah are stripped, and then the camp that stripped them is stripped in turn, plundered by the very people it had made a prey of, as fast as caterpillars strip a field bare. Everything else moves too — the roads, the harvests, and Lebanon and Sharon and Bashan and Carmel, ashamed to be called by their old names. Against all that traffic, a besieged king is told where his wealth sits, and it sits in the one thing an army cannot carry off. He was to steady himself on that while the invader was still inside the borders. Read back afterwards, the history of that reign says the promise was kept.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary, Albert Barnes and the Geneva Bible notes. How these teachings are made