18They don’t know, neither do they consider: for he has shut their eyes, that they can’t see; and their hearts, that they can’t understand.
19No one thinks, neither is there knowledge nor understanding to say, “I have burned part of it in the fire. Yes, I have also baked bread on its coals. I have roasted meat and eaten it. Shall I make the rest of it into an abomination? Shall I bow down to a tree trunk?”
20He feeds on ashes. A deceived heart has turned him aside; and he can’t deliver his soul, nor say, “Isn’t there a lie in my right hand?”
18 They don’t know, neither do they consider: for he has shut their eyes, that they can’t see; and their hearts, that they can’t understand.
19 No one thinks, neither is there knowledge nor understanding to say, “I have burned part of it in the fire. Yes, I have also baked bread on its coals. I have roasted meat and eaten it. Shall I make the rest of it into an abomination? Shall I bow down to a tree trunk?”
20 He feeds on ashes. A deceived heart has turned him aside; and he can’t deliver his soul, nor say, “Isn’t there a lie in my right hand?”
KJVKing James Version
18 They have not known nor understood: for he hath shut their eyes, that they cannot see; and their hearts, that they cannot understand.
19 And none considereth in his heart, neither is there knowledge nor understanding to say, I have burned part of it in the fire; yea, also I have baked bread upon the coals thereof; I have roasted flesh, and eaten it: and shall I make the residue thereof an abomination? shall I fall down to the stock of a tree?
20 He feedeth on ashes: a deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand?
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JPSJPS Tanakh (1917)
18 They know not, neither do they understand; for their eyes are bedaubed, that they cannot see, and their hearts, that they cannot understand.
19 And none considereth in his heart, neither is there knowledge nor understanding to say: 'I have burned the half of it in the fire; yea, also I have baked bread upon the coals thereof; I have roasted flesh and eaten it; and shall I make the residue thereof an abomination? Shall I fall down to the stock of a tree?'
20 He striveth after ashes, a deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say: 'Is there not a lie in my right hand?'
Isaiah 6:9-10(v18)He said, “Go, and tell this people, ‘You hear indeed, but don’t understand. You see indeed, but don’t perceive.’ Make the heart of this…
2 Corinthians 4:3-4(v18)Even if our Good News is veiled, it is veiled in those who are dying, in whom the god of this world has blinded the minds of the…
John 12:39-40(v18)For this cause they couldn’t believe, for Isaiah said again, “He has blinded their eyes and he hardened their heart, lest they should see…
2 Thessalonians 2:9-12(v18)even he whose coming is according to the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deception of wickedness…
Jeremiah 5:21(v18)‘Hear this now, foolish people without understanding, who have eyes, and don’t see, who have ears, and don’t hear:
Show all 63 cross-references
Psalms 81:12(v18)So I let them go after the stubbornness of their hearts, that they might walk in their own counsels.
Proverbs 2:5-9(v18)then you will understand the fear of Yahweh, and find the knowledge of God. For Yahweh gives wisdom. Out of his mouth comes knowledge and…
Matthew 13:14-15(v18)In them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, which says, ‘By hearing you will hear, and will in no way understand; Seeing you will see, and…
John 5:44(v18)How can you believe, who receive glory from one another, and you don’t seek the glory that comes from the only God?
Romans 1:21-23(v18)Because knowing God, they didn’t glorify him as God, and didn’t give thanks, but became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless heart…
John 8:43(v18)Why don’t you understand my speech? Because you can’t hear my word.
Isaiah 29:10(v18)For Yahweh has poured out on you a spirit of deep sleep, and has closed your eyes, the prophets; and he has covered your heads, the seers.
Romans 1:28(vv18, 20)Even as they refused to have God in their knowledge, God gave them up to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting;
Daniel 12:10(v18)Many will purify themselves, and make themselves white, and be refined; but the wicked will do wickedly; and none of the wicked will…
Romans 11:8-10(v18)According as it is written, “God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear, to this…
Proverbs 28:5(v18)Evil men don’t understand justice; but those who seek Yahweh understand it fully.
Isaiah 1:3(v18)The ox knows his owner, and the donkey his master’s crib; but Israel doesn’t know. My people don’t consider.”
Isaiah 44:20(v18)He feeds on ashes. A deceived heart has turned him aside; and he can’t deliver his soul, nor say, “Isn’t there a lie in my right hand?”
Jeremiah 10:14(v18)Every man has become brutish and without knowledge. Every goldsmith is disappointed by his engraved image; for his molten image is…
Isaiah 45:20(vv18–19)“Assemble yourselves and come. Draw near together, you who have escaped from the nations. Those have no knowledge who carry the wood of…
Acts 14:16(v18)who in the generations gone by allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways.
Isaiah 56:11(v18)Yes, the dogs are greedy. They can never have enough. They are shepherds who can’t understand. They have all turned to their own way, each…
Jeremiah 10:8(v18)But they are together brutish and foolish, instructed by idols! It is just wood.
Hosea 14:9(v18)Who is wise, that he may understand these things? Who is prudent, that he may know them? For the ways of Yahweh are right, and the…
Matthew 12:34(v18)You offspring of vipers, how can you, being evil, speak good things? For out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.
Psalms 92:6(v18)A senseless man doesn’t know, neither does a fool understand this:
Isaiah 44:9(v18)Everyone who makes a carved image is vain. The things that they delight in will not profit. Their own witnesses don’t see, nor know, that…
Isaiah 46:7-8(v18)They bear it on their shoulder. They carry it, and set it in its place, and it stands there. It cannot move from its place. Yes, one may…
2 Peter 2:14(v18)having eyes full of adultery, and who can’t cease from sin; enticing unsettled souls; having a heart trained in greed; children of cursing;
Deuteronomy 27:15(v19)‘Cursed is the man who makes an engraved or molten image, an abomination to Yahweh, the work of the hands of the craftsman, and sets it up…
1 Kings 11:5(v19)For Solomon went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, and after Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites.
1 Kings 11:7(v19)Then Solomon built a high place for Chemosh the abomination of Moab, on the mountain that is before Jerusalem, and for Molech the…
Job 15:31(v20)Let him not trust in emptiness, deceiving himself; for emptiness will be his reward.
Psalms 102:9(v20)For I have eaten ashes like bread, and mixed my drink with tears,
Hosea 12:1(v20)Ephraim feeds on wind, and chases the east wind. He continually multiplies lies and desolation. They make a covenant with Assyria, and oil…
Exodus 7:23(v19)Pharaoh turned and went into his house, and he didn’t even take this to heart.
Deuteronomy 32:46(v19)He said to them, “Set your heart to all the words which I testify to you today, which you shall command your children to observe to do, all…
2 Kings 23:13(v19)The king defiled the high places that were before Jerusalem, which were on the right hand of the mountain of corruption, which Solomon the…
Isaiah 5:13(v19)Therefore my people go into captivity for lack of knowledge. Their honorable men are famished, and their multitudes are parched with thirst.
Ezekiel 40:4(v19)The man said to me, “Son of man, see with your eyes, and hear with your ears, and set your heart on all that I will show you; for you have…
Hosea 4:12(v20)My people consult with their wooden idol, and answer to a stick of wood. Indeed the spirit of prostitution has led them astray, and they…
Hosea 7:2(v19)They don’t consider in their hearts that I remember all their wickedness. Now their own deeds have engulfed them. They are before my face.
Romans 1:25(v20)who exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.
2 Timothy 2:13(v20)If we are faithless, he remains faithful; for he can’t deny himself.”
1 Kings 22:20-23(v20)Yahweh said, ‘Who will entice Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth Gilead?’ One said one thing; and another said another. A spirit…
Job 15:2(v20)“Should a wise man answer with vain knowledge, and fill himself with the east wind?
Proverbs 15:14(v20)The heart of one who has understanding seeks knowledge, but the mouths of fools feed on folly.
Isaiah 28:15-17(v20)“Because you have said, ‘We have made a covenant with death, and we are in agreement with Sheol. When the overflowing scourge passes…
Isaiah 46:8(v19)“Remember this, and show yourselves men. Bring it to mind again, you transgressors.
Isaiah 59:3-4(v20)For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity. Your lips have spoken lies. Your tongue mutters wickedness. No one…
Isaiah 59:13(v20)transgressing and denying Yahweh, and turning away from following our God, speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering from the…
Jeremiah 16:19(v20)Yahweh, my strength, and my stronghold, and my refuge in the day of affliction, the nations will come to you from the ends of the earth,…
Habakkuk 2:18(v20)“What value does the engraved image have, that its maker has engraved it; the molten image, even the teacher of lies, that he who fashions…
Haggai 1:5(v19)Now therefore this is what Yahweh of Armies says: Consider your ways.
Luke 15:16(v20)He wanted to fill his belly with the husks that the pigs ate, but no one gave him any.
Romans 1:20-22(v20)For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even…
2 Thessalonians 2:9-11(v20)even he whose coming is according to the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deception of wickedness…
1 Timothy 4:2(v20)through the hypocrisy of men who speak lies, branded in their own conscience as with a hot iron,
2 Timothy 3:13(v20)But evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived.
Revelation 12:9(v20)The great dragon was thrown down, the old serpent, he who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world. He was thrown…
Revelation 13:14(v20)He deceives my own people who dwell on the earth because of the signs he was granted to do in front of the beast, saying to those who dwell…
Revelation 18:23(v20)The light of a lamp will shine no more at all in you. The voice of the bridegroom and of the bride will be heard no more at all in you; for…
Revelation 20:3(v20)and cast him into the abyss, and shut it, and sealed it over him, that he should deceive the nations no more, until the thousand years were…
63 distinct cross-references across this passage (65 total citations).
Cross-references from openbible.info (CC BY 4.0)
Explain this passage (18 sources)
Historical commentary, presented as a primary source — not an endorsement.
Geneva Bible translators1599 · Public DomainOn vv18–20The Prophet giveth here an answer to all them…
The Prophet giveth here an answer to all them that wonder how it is possible that any should be so blind to commit such abomination, saying, that God hath blinded their eyes, and hardened their hearts.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp1656 · Public DomainOn vv18–20Isa 44:18 They have not known nor understood: for…
Isa 44:18 They have not known nor understood: for he hath shut their eyes, that they cannot see; [and] their hearts, that they cannot understand.
Ver. 18. They have not known nor understood.] How should they, say, when infatuated and given up to an injudicious mind, or reprobate sense, as those? {Rom 1:28}
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For he hath shut their eyes.] Heb., Daubed up their eyes from seeing, their hearts from understanding.
“ Mons oblita Dei, vitiorumque oblita caeno. ”
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole1685 · Public DomainOn vv18–20They have not known or understood: this showeth that…
They have not known or understood: this showeth that they want common discretion, and have not the understanding of a man in them. He, to wit, God; who is easily understood, and is oft expressed by this pronoun he; and to whom this very act is frequently ascribed in other places of Scripture. And therefore men need not to be shy in ascribing it to God here. Which yet is to be soberly understood; not as if God did make men wicked, but only permits them so to be, and orders and overrules their wickedness to his own glorious ends. And such passages as these are added in such cases to give an account of the prodigious madness of sinners herein; because, as they wilfully shut their own eyes, and harden their own hearts, so God judicially blinds and hardens them, and sends strong delusions upon them, and gives them up to believe lies, and then it is no wonder if they fall into such dotages.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
John Gill1763 · Public DomainOn vv18–20They have not known nor understood,.... Who the true…
They have not known nor understood,.... Who the true God is, nor the worship that is due to him alone; they do not know nor understand divine and spiritual things; nay, they have not the knowledge and understanding of men; they want common sense that can do and say such things as before mentioned, both idol makers and idol worshippers:
for he hath shut their eyes that they cannot see, and their heart that they cannot understand; either the devil, as some think, the god of this world, that blinds their eyes from seeing the folly of such gross idolatry, which he, deceiving them, leads them into; or rather God himself, who, because they like not to retain him in their knowledge, gives them up to a reprobate and injudicious mind, to believe a lie, and worship a false god; this he permits, orders, and overrules to some good ends and purposes: this is to be understood of the eyes of the understanding, which, as the word (i) signifies, are "daubed" and plastered over, that there is no opening of them, and seeing with them; which is the judicial blindness and hardness of heart, which God sometimes in righteous judgment gives up men unto; see Rom 1:28.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley1765 · Public DomainOn vv18, 20Not known - This shews that they have not…
Not known - This shews that they have not the understanding of a man. For he - God. Not as if God did make men wicked; he only permits them so to be, and orders, and over-rules their wickedness to his own glorious ends.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke1810 · Public DomainOn vv18, 20Verse 18. He hath shut their eyes - "Their…
Verse 18. He hath shut their eyes - "Their eyes are closed up"] The Septuagint, Chaldee, and Vulgate, for טח tach, read טחו, tachu. See Clarke on Isa 6:10.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson1811 · Public DomainOn v18Isa 44:18-20. They have not known, &c. — They…
Isa 44:18-20. They have not known, &c. — They want common discretion, and have not the understanding of a rational being in them. For what an absurdity is it for a man to dress his meat and make his god with the same piece of wood! Or to think that a log of timber hath any more divinity in it than it had before, because of the form man can give it, or any thing he can do to it! “When,” says Minutius Felix, “does it become a god! Behold, it is cast, fashioned, and carved! It is not yet a god. It is soldered, put together, and set up. Neither is it yet a god. Behold, it is adorned, consecrated, and prayed to! Then at length it is a god when men have chosen and dedicated it.” He hath shut their eyes — God hath. Not as if God made men wicked; he only permits them so to be, and orders and overrules their wickedness to his own glorious ends. And none considereth in his heart — By which the prophet implies, that the true cause of this, as well as of other absurd and brutish practices of sinners, is the neglect of serious and impartial consideration. He feedeth on ashes — An unprofitable and pernicious food, and no less unsatisfying and mischievous is the worship of idols. A deceived heart — A mind corrupted and deceived by deep prejudice, gross error, and especially by his own lusts; hath turned him aside — From the way of truth, from the knowledge and worship of the true God, unto this irrational and foolish idolatry; that he cannot deliver his soul — From this error, and the vengeance that will follow upon it; nor say, Is there not a lie, &c. — Is not this idol which I honour and trust to a mere fiction and delusion which will deceive me?
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes1834 · Public DomainOn vv18–20They have not known nor understood - They are…
They have not known nor understood - They are stupid, ignorant, and blind. Nothing could more strikingly show their ignorance and stupidity than this idol worship.
He hath shut their eyes - God hath closed their eyes. Margin, ‘Daubed.’ The word used here, טה ṭah from טוה ṭûah denotes properly “to spread over”; to besmear; to plaster; as, e. g., a wall with mortar Lev 14:42; 1Ch 29:4; Eze 13:10; Eze 22:28. Here it means to cover over the eyes so as to prevent vision; and hence, metaphorically, to make them stupid, ignorant, dull. It is attributed to God in accordance with the common statement of the Scriptures, that he does what he permits to be done (see the notes at Isa 6:9-10). It does not mean that God had done it by any physical, or direct agency, but that it had occurred under the administration of his Providence. It is also true that the Hebrew writers sometimes employ an active verb when the signification is passive, and when the main idea is, that anything was in fact done. Here the main point is not the agent by which this was done, but the fact that their eyes were blinded - and perhaps all the force of the verb טה ṭah used here would be expressed if it was rendered in an impersonal, or in a passive form, ‘it is covered as to their eyes,’ that is, their eyes are shut, without suggesting that it was done by God. So the Septuagint renders it, Ἀπημαυρώθησαν Apēmaurōthēsan - ‘They are blind,’ or involved in darkness.
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So the Chaldee, מטמטמן meṭmeṭemân (also in the plural) - ‘Their eyes are obscured’ or blind. It cannot be proved from this text that God is, by direct agency, the author by whom it was done. It was not uncommon to shut up, or seal up the eyes for various purposes in the East, and unquestionably the prophet alludes to some such custom. ‘It is one of the solemnities at a Jewish wedding at Aleppo, according to Dr. Russell, who mentions it as the most remarkable thing in their ceremonies at that time. It is done by fastening the eyelids together with a gum, and the bridegroom is the person, he says, if he remembered right, that opens the bride’s eyes at the appointed time. It is also used as a punishment in those countries. So Sir Thomas Roe’s chaplain, in his account of his voyages to East India, tells us of a son of the Great Mogul, whom he had seen, and with whom Sir Thomas had conversed, that had before that time been cast into prison by his father, where his eyes were sealed up, by something put before them, which might not be taken off for three years; after which time the seal was taken away, that he might with freedom enjoy the light, though not his liberty.’ (Harmer’s Obs. vol. iii., pp. 507, 508. Ed. Lond. 8vo, 1808.)
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary1859 · Public DomainOn vv18, 20Covered. Septuagint, "darkened." Are Catholics in the same predicament?…
Covered. Septuagint, "darkened." Are Catholics in the same predicament? (Chap. xl. 18.) (Haydock)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown1871 · Public DomainOn vv18–20he, &c.--God hath given them over to judicial blindness;…
he, &c.--God hath given them over to judicial blindness; not His direct physical, but His providential agency in administering His moral government, is meant (Isa 6:9-10). "Shut," literally, "daubed," plastered up; it is an Eastern custom in some cases to seal up the eyes of offenders.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon1874 · Public DomainOn v1818-20. The whole system of idol religion, in like…
18-20. The whole system of idol religion, in like manner, is simply foolish. Its votaries embrace it only to be blinded in conscience and reason. The makers and worshippers of idols are alike fools. And the sarcastic prophet cannot lament the dementing effects of the idol system in language more fitting than in the exactly literal words of Isa_44:19-20, which sufficiently explain themselves.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges1878 · Public DomainOn vv18–2018–20. But such is the infatuation of idolatry, that…
18–20. But such is the infatuation of idolatry, that its blinded votaries never pause to reflect on their actions; the idolater has not sense enough to say to himself in plain words what he has done.
They have not … understood] Better, as R.V. they know not, neither do they consider. he hath shut their eyes] Rather: their eyes are besmeared, as it were plastered over, so that they cannot see (a different verb, however, from that used by Isaiah in Isa_6:10, &c.).
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers1878 · Public DomainOn vv18, 20(18) He hath shut their eyes.—Better, their eyes are…
(18) He hath shut their eyes.—Better, their eyes are smeared over. The state described is the judicial blindness of Rom_1:20-25. It will be remembered that blindness thus inflicted was one of the tortures of Eastern cruelty.
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary1880 · Public DomainOn vv18–20They have not known nor understood. The cause of…
They have not known nor understood. The cause of all this folly is a Minding of the understanding, divinely caused in the way of punishment, on account of their having wilfully closed their eyes to the truth. Because they "did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them up to a reprobate (or, undistinguishing) mind". (Rom_1:28; comp. Isa_29:10) He hath shut; or, One hath shut. But the reference is in either case to God. The word translated shut" means literally plastered" or "smeared."
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator1887 · Public DomainOn v20He feedeth on ashes
Isa_44:20
He feedeth on ashes
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Earth used as food
One of the most extraordinary examples of depraved or perverted appetite is the use of earth for food.
This propensity is not an occasional freak, but a common custom, and is found among so large a number and variety of tribes that it may be regarded as co-extensive with the human race. From time immemorial the Chinese have been in the habit of using various kinds of edible earth as substitutes for bread in times of scarcity; and their imperial annals have always religiously noticed the discovery of such bread-stones, or stone-meal, as they are called. On the western coast of Africa a yellowish kind of earth, called caouac, is so highly relished, and so constantly consumed by the negroes, that it has become to them a necessary of life. In the island of Java, and in various parts of the hill-country of India, a reddish earth is baked into cakes and sold in the village markets for food; while on the banks of the Orinoco, in South America, Humboldt mentions that the native Indians find a species of unctuous clay, which they knead into balls, and store up in heaps in their huts as a provision for the winter or rainy season. They are not compelled by famine to have recourse to this clay; for even when fish, game, and fruit are plentiful they still eat it after their food as a luxury. This practice of eating earth is not confined solely to the inhabitants of the Tropics. In the north of Norway and in Swedish Lapland a kind of white powdery earth, called mountain-meal, found under beds of decayed moss, is consumed in immense quantities every year. It is mixed by the people with their bread in times of scarcity; and even in Germany it has been frequently used as a means of allaying hunger. All these examples of the use of earth as food are so contrary to our experience that they might seem incredible were it not that they are thoroughly authenticated. Such an unnatural custom must, in the long run, prove injurious to the constitution of those who indulge in it, although it is wonderful how long it can be carried on by some individuals apparently with impunity. (H. Macmillan, LL. D.)
Feeding on ashes:
In the spiritual world there are many who feed upon ashes. The prophet is speaking of the idolater.
I. WHO IS THE IDOLATER--who is the he that is said to feed on ashes? The prophet had a definite audience before him. He was prophesying to the children of Israel. Notwithstanding the purity and sublimity of their own monotheistic creed, and the awful threatenings and sanctions with which it was guarded, we can trace throughout their entire history, as a marked feature of their character, a propensity to blend a theoretical belief in the true God with an accommodating reverence to the idols of the heathen Pantheon. Except when under the immediate spell of some special revelation of Jehovah, they craved for some visible shape or outward sign of the divinity--a craving which was satisfied for a time by the erection of the tabernacle and temple, and the establishment of the worship connected with them, but which soon overleaped barriers thus imposed upon it, and sought for novel sensations in the tabernacle of Moloch and in the star of the god Remphan--figures which they made to worship them. The very priests and Levites, who were most concerned in keeping the worship of Jehovah pure, were the leaders of the various national apostasies. Isaiah deeply deplored this national fickleness and spiritual inconstancy. In the passage under consideration he seeks to overwhelm it with contempt. Were Isaiah addressing us in these days his ideas would be the same, though the form in which he would present them would be different. Material idolatry, in its literal import, has passed away among civilised nations. But the essence of the temptation remains the same. Human society is changed, but human nature is unchanged. The impulse which led to idolatry is therefore as strong at the present day as it was in the time of Isaiah; and images are set up and worshipped now as fantastic as any pagan fetich or joss. The New Testament form of the Second Commandment, Be not conformed to this world, requires to be frequently and urgently enforced. If I were to sum up all spiritual idolatry in these days in one form, I should call it worldliness, for everything else is but a phase of this. And this worldly conformity leads speedily, in most instances, to a low moral standard, and to a weak and corrupt form of religion, and produces the same humiliating results which flowed from the idolatry of ancient times.
II. WHAT IS IDOLATRY? It is a perverted spiritual appetite. In certain diseased states of the brain there is an unnatural craving for the most extraordinary and unwholesome substances. Men and women under such morbid influences have been known to eat cinders and sand with apparent relish, and even to prefer them to the richest dainties. In such cases it is not the appetite that is at fault. The controlling power of the brain, which chooses the proper food, is impaired, and this healthy appetite is set to work upon substances which are altogether unsuitable. In like manner idolatry arises from a natural craving of the soul, which was made for God, for His worship and enjoyment. It finds that it must go out of itself for the blessedness it needs. This spiritual appetite is a God-given instinct of our nature. It is the soul seeking its highest good. It is healthy and natural. But when, under the guidance and power of a deceived heart, it seeks its gratification in earthly things to the exclusion altogether of God, it affords a most melancholy example of a perverted spiritual appetite.
III. WHAT ARE THE EFFECTS OF IDOLATRY? How does idolatry affect the man guilty of it? There is a very striking and beautiful relation between the food of man and his digestive organs. He is omnivorous. He is the ruler of the world, and therefore the varied life of the world must throb in his veins. But all the varied food which she presents to him must be organic food. Phosphorus literally flames in the brain, that thoughts may breathe and words may burn; lime gives solidity to the bones; the alkaline salts promote the oxidation and removal of the effete materials of the body. Common minerals--iron, sulphur, soda, potash, and others--circulate in the blood, or are garnered in the various tissues. But all these inorganic materials are furnished, not from the earth directly, but in the food; the various vegetable and animal products containing them in varying quantities. Such being the law of mans nutrition, it will be seen at once that if he feeds directly upon ashes, he is feeding upon substances that are altogether incongruous, and unfitted to nourish him. His organs cannot digest or assimilate ashes. And is not the analogy between spiritual and natural things here very clear? If mans spiritual appetite can feed only on God, then if man seeks his portion only in the things of the world, what can you expect but spiritual indigestion and misery? It is true, indeed, that just as the body requires inorganic elements--salt, lime, and iron--as well as organic, for its proper nourishment, so man requires the things of the world as well as the things of faith for his spiritual welfare. But then we are to seek these temporal things, not directly from the world, but through the channel of communion with God. There are natures that, by a long course of feeding upon ashes, have become accustomed to this unnatural diet. Like the clay-eaters of South America, their digestive organs become assimilated to their food, and they are put to little inconvenience by it. We meet with persons who are satisfied with their portion in this world, who mind earthly things, and are contented with the nourishment for their souls which they find in them. But are such persons the truly great and noble ones of our race? How can an infinite hunger be appeased by a finite good? The soul wants organised food; food that has spiritual life in it; food that is redolent of the sunshine and permeated with the light of heaven; food that has drunk in all the impalpable virtues and forces of the things unseen and eternal; food that can gather up in itself these vitalising influences, and transfer them to us to glow within our veins and animate our nerves; and, instead of that, we get ashes out of which all the glow and the virtue have departed. Our sin will become our punishment; our idols our scourges. I have remarked that there are some who are satisfied with their worldly portion--who, though feeding upon clay, are not put to inconvenience by it. Such individuals, in the midst of their contentment, are in reality, if they only knew it, more to be pitied than those whose truer instincts are tortured by the unsuitable food by which they endeavour to appease their spiritual cravings. (H. Macmillan, LL. D.)
Feeding on ashes
I. THE VAIN OBJECTS TO WHICH MAN DIRECTS HIS ENERGIES. He feedeth on ashes.
II. THE REASON OF THIS PERVERTED CHOICE. A deceived heart hath turned him aside. Sin, in its very nature, has a tendency to harden the heart. When it first begins to make advances, there is resistance offered to it. Conscience speaks, expostulates, reproaches; but sin gets the mastery. Conscience becomes by degrees blunted; the heart at length gets callous, that it cannot feel; the eye is altogether darkened, that it cannot see; the ear heavy, that it cannot hear the instruction of wisdom. Thus the heart is in due time thoroughly deceived. It rejoices in evil, instead of in good; it has an exclusive appetite for the bitter instead of the sweet. But there is a diseased state of the heart where the fatal results do not appear so manifest to the eye of man. When the world is keenly loved and followed, when self is worshipped, when God is not supreme in the affection, the root must be looked for in the heart. The heart is deceived. How dangerous is this state of heart! How much does it need of watchfulness in the case of every one of us, so that we may not be ensnared by it.
III. THE DANGER OF THIS STATE, AND THE DIFFICULTY OF ITS REMEDY. He cannot deliver himself. When the heart has been once beguiled by the deceitfulness of sin, and its affections have been riveted and firmly fixed upon earthly things, it is not in man to deliver himself. God, indeed, has provided means whereby those who have banished themselves from Him may be brought home to His fold. In Him there resides power to cut asunder the chain, however firmly it may bind us down to the earth.
IV. SOME PRACTICAL QUESTIONS FOR OUR EXAMINATION. Is there not a lie in my right hand? (H. J. Hastings, M. A.)
I. WHAT THE SOUL PROPERLY REQUIRES. We cannot find food for the body in ourselves; we have to look for it in the animal or vegetable world. Our spiritual part--our intellect, conscience, affections--is every whit as dependent on extraneous supplies as our bodies are.
The deceived heart:
I propose to show--
II. HOW PERILOUSLY FAR SOME ARE FROM GIVING TO THEIR SOULS WHAT THEY REQUIRE. You see this magnificent provision; it is spread before your eyes. But the question is, are you feeding on it? Feeding implies taking it to yourself, appropriating it, masticating it with pleasure, receiving it into your digestion. It then becomes a part of you, and goes into your bones, your blood, your flesh, your marrow. We admit that you come to the feast, that you admire it, and that you intend to eat; but we cannot admit that you are feeding on it thus far. We cannot say you have the Word of God dwelling in you richly in all wisdom. (J. Bolton, B. A.)
A perverted appetite:
Two lessons were learnt by Israel in captivity--the all-sufficiency of God, and the absurdity of idols. It is on the latter of these that we are now to dwell. Why do men act with such inconceivable folly? The prophet knows nothing of the modern theory that men do not worship the stone or wood, but accept the effigy as a help to fixedness of thought and prayer; he would affirm that with the mass of men this is a fiction, and that the worship of the devotee stops short with what he can see and touch. The cause of idolatry lies deeper. He feedeth on ashes; a deceived heart hath turned him aside, &c.
I. THERE IS A HUNGER FOR THE DIVINE IN MAN.
1. It is universal.
2. It is significant. We can tell something of the composition of the human body by the materials which it needs for its sustenance. Similarly the true dignity of man betrays itself in the hunger which perpetually preys upon him. If man is only matter, if thought is only the movement of the grey matter of the brain, if there is no spirit and no beyond, how is it that the material world cannot supply the supreme good?
3. It is inevitable. The functions which food performs in our system are threefold. It is needed to replace the perpetual waste which is always wearing down the natural tissues; to maintain the temperature at some 98°; and to provide materials for growth. And each of these has a spiritual analogy. We need God, for the same three reasons as the body needs food.
(1) To replace the perpetual waste of our spiritual forces.
(2) For warmth and heat.
(3) For growth.
II. THIS APPETITE MAY BE PERVERTED. He feedeth on ashes. Men tamper with their natural appetite. But there is a close similarity in their treatment with that wonderful yearning after the unseen and eternal which is part of the very constitution of our being--a hunger after the ideal Food, the ideal Beauty, the ideal Truth, which may be resisted and ignored, but still claims satisfaction; and if it does not get it in God, it will seek it in the ashes of idolatry. Men worship idols yet. The man of the world worships money, rank, high office. The child of fashion worships in the temple of human opinion, and feeds on the ashes of human applause an appetite which was meant to satisfy itself on the Well done! of the Almighty. The student who questions or denies the Being of God, worships in the temple of learning; and feeds with the ashes of human opinion an appetite which was intended to be nourished by eternal truth. And in every case these substitutes for God, with which men try to satisfy themselves, are as incapable of satisfying the heart, as ashes of supporting the physical life.
III. THE TRUE BREAD.
1. It is the gift of God. My Father giveth the true Bread from heaven. God who made thee hunger for bread, made bread to grow for its appeasement. Other vegetables have their peculiar habitat. But the cornplant will make its home in every land, and grow on every soil. He has also provided beauty for our taste, truth for our thought, love for our heart; and has gathered all these and much more into His one Gift, Jesus Christ.
2. Nature yields her provision to man through death. So it is through death that Jesus has become the Food of men. We must assimilate our food. We must receive Jesus into our hearts by an act of spiritual apprehension. (F. B.Meyer, B. A.)
Feeding on ashes:
I shall speak of three classes of young men who are feeding on ashes.
I. Those who are giving themselves up to SENSUAL PLEASURE. There is no one on earth who has so much right to the pleasures of the world as the believer. I do not believe in asceticism. I do not believe in pious melancholy. But this innocent hilarity, which leaves no ill results behind, is good and healthful, and a very different thing from the emmaddening gaieties of the world.
II. I have a word to say to you who are setting up another idol for your worship. It is neither Venus nor Bacchus, but it is Plutus; it is WORLDLY SUBSTANCE; it is money. There is no sin in desiring to be rich, if your money comes to you honourably, and goes from you usefully. But what is all that, if that is all? Can you feed the immortal soul within you with bank cheques and good investments? Will all the gold in the Bank of England appease the hunger of your deathless spirit? No! But many seem to think it will. Such men are the most hopeless cases to deal with. I should be more sanguine of bringing to the feet of Jesus a poor bloated debauchee, than of doing any good to one of these hardened, wizened, shrivelled-up money-scrapers, who for twenty, thirty, or forty years have no other thought but this--to lay up gain.
III. There is a third class of men who are daily feeding on ashes, because a deceived heart has turned them aside. They have got hold of a lot of INFIDEL LITERATURE, and they are stuffing their souls with as weak and poisonous rubbish as it is possible to meet with. With the prophet, I invite you to something more palatable and nourishing; I bid you to a feast of milk and honey; hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness. (J. T. Davidson, D. D.)
Feeding on ashes:
Many to-day feed on the kind of ashes Isaiah has in mind.
1. False conceptions of God.
2. False conceptions of Christ.
3. False conceptions of religion.
4. False conceptions of the Church.
5. False conceptions of morality, life, and happiness.
Application:--
1. Upon the true or false conception of God and His relations to men conduct depends. The Christians conception of God is revealed in the incarnation, life, and atonement of His Son. He only is a true Christian who obeys Christs words, imitates His life, and becomes conformed to His image. He must be our ideal.
2. Again, we ask how comes it that men thus feed on ashes? A deceived heart hath turned him aside. (J. B. Nies, Ph. D.)
Feeding on ashes:
To-day we are told by a hundred voices that all religion begins at the bottom, and slowly struggles up to the top. Isaiah says the very opposite. The pure form is the primitive; the secondary form is the gross, which is a corruption. They tell us, too, that all religion pursues a process of evolution, and gradually clears itself of its more imperfect and carnal elements. Isaiah says He cannot deliver his soul, and no religion ever worked itself up, unless under the impulse of a revelation from without. That is Isaiahs philosophy of idolatry, and I expect it will be accepted as the true one some day.
I. A LIFE THAT SUBSTANTIALLY IGNORES GOD IS EMPTY OF ALL TRUE SATISFACTION. He feedeth on ashes. Very little imagination will realise the force of that picture. The gritty cinders will irritate the lips and tongue, will dry up the moisture of the mouth, will interfere with the breathing; and there will be no nourishment in a sackful of them. The underlying truth is this--God only is the food of a mans soul. You pick up the skeleton of a bird upon a moor; and if you know anything about osteology, you will see in the very make of its breast-bone and its wing-bones the declaration that its destiny is to soar into the blue. And written on you, as distinctly as flight on the bird, or swimming on the fish, is this, that you are meant, by your very make, to soar up into the heights of the glory of God, and to plunge deep into the abysses of His infinite love and wisdom. What does your heart want? A perfect, changeless, all-powerful love. And what does your mind want? Reliable, guiding, inexhaustible yet accessible truth. And what does your will want? Commandments which have an authoritative ring in their very utterance, and which will serve for infallible guides for your lives. And what do our weak, sinful natures want? Something that shall free our consciences, and deliver us from the burden of our transgressions, and calm our fears, and quicken and warrant our lofty hopes. And what do men whoso nature is to live for ever want but something that shall go with them through all changes of condition? We want a person to be everything to us. No accumulation of things will satisfy a man. God has not so blundered in making the world that He has surrounded us with things that are all lies, but He has so made it that whosoever flies in the face of the gracious commandment which is also an invitation, Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, has not only no security that the other things shall be added unto him, but has the certainty that though they were added to him, in degree beyond his dreams and highest hopes, they would avail nothing to satisfy the hunger of his heart.
II. A LIFE WHICH THUS IGNORES GOD IS TRAGICALLY UNAWARE OF ITS OWN EMPTINESS. A deceived heart hath turned him aside. That explains how the man comes to fancy that ashes are food. His whole nature is perverted, his vision distorted, his power of judgment marred. That explains, too, why men persist in this feeding on ashes after all experience. You will see a dog chasing a sparrow. It has chased hundreds before and never caught one. Yet, when the creature rises from the ground, away it goes after it once more, with eager yelp and rush, to meet the old experience. That is like what a great many of you are doing, and you have not the same excuse that the dog has. And that deceived heart, stronger than experience, is also stronger than conscience. How is it that this hallucination that you have fed full and been satisfied, when all the while your hunger has not been appeased, can continue to act on us? For the very plain reason that every one of us has in himself a higher and a lower self, a set of desires of the grosser, more earthly, and, using the word in its proper sense, worldly sort--that is to say, directed towards material things, and a higher set which look right up to God if they are allowed fair play. And of these two sets--which really are one at bottom, if a man would only see it--the lower gets the upper hand, and suppresses the higher and the nobler.And so in many a man and woman the longing for God is crushed out by the gross delights of sense.
III. A LIFE THUS IGNORING GOD NEEDS A POWER FROM WITHOUT TO SET IT FREE. He cannot deliver his soul. There is nothing more awful in life than the influence of habit. There is something more wanted than yourselves to break this chain. It is the Christ who is the Bread of God that came down from heaven; who can deliver any soul from the most obstinate and long continued grovelling amongst the transitory things of this limited world, and the superficial delights of sense and gratified bodily life; who can bring the forgiveness which is essential, the deliverance from the power of evil which is not less essential, and who can fill our hearts with Himself, the food of the world. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
The deceived heart:
I. THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE WHO ARE ENTIRELY DECEIVED IN THEIR RELIGION.
1. The idolater.
2. The Romanist.
3. Freethinkers.
4. False professors.
II. ALTHOUGH THERE ARE MANY PERSONS THUS DECEIVED IN RELIGION, WE ARE NOT TO SUPPOSE THAT ANY OF THEM ARE REALLY CONTENTED IN HEART WITH THEIR RELIGION.
III. IT IS A STRANGE THING THAT ALL THESE PEOPLE SEEM VERY WELL CONTENTED WITH THEIR FALSE RELIGIONS.
IV. I WANT TO SPEAK TO THOSE WHO ARE PROFESSORS OF RELIGION BUT WHO DO NOT POSSESS IT. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The deceitfulness of the heart in embracing false confidences
The heart discovers its deceitfulness--
I. BY ITS STRONG PROPENSITY TO RECEIVE ANY ERROR MORE READILY THAN TRUTH.
II. BY ITS EXTREME RELUCTANCE TO THE ONLY WAY OF SALVATION, AND BY ITS VIOLENT PROPENSITY TO EVERY LYING REFUGE. More particularly we observe--
1. That multitudes betake themselves to the general mercy of God.
2. The heart often disposes one to look into itself for something good.
3. Others found their hope on resolutions of reformation.
4. Partial and outward reformation is the confidence of many.
5. Many confide in a bare profession of religion and observation of the form of duties.
6. Others deceive themselves into a reliance on their Church privileges.
7. Some confide in their gifts, or in their usefulness by means of them.
8. Some may trust to a work of the law, as if it were in itself saving.
9. This principle of deceit is discovered by the sinners endeavours to obtain justification by moral duties.
10. Many trust to their sincerity in religion. But what is this sincerity in which you make your boast before God? Do you not confide in it as the ground of your justification? If so, it must be the sincerity of a person who is not yet justified; that is, of one still under the curse of the law.
11. Another false confidence, which many fly to, is the observance of superstitious rites.
12. Some may rest on their sufferings in the cause of Christ.
13. Others may depend on a notional faith. Some are persuaded of the truth of the Gospel. But they prove that their faith is not Divine, because it is unfruitful.
14. The deceitfulness of the heart operates in others, by making them rest upon supposed attainments in holiness. There is a question the solution of which materially affects every one of us before God. If false professors may have so eminent attainments, and so remarkable a resemblance to true holiness, how may we distinguish between such attainments as are the fruit of the Spirits saving work and those which only flow from natural affections or from a common operation?
(1) These attainments, which are saving, have always a humbling tendency.
(2) Saving attainments are consistent with a godly jealousy.
(3) The fruit of solid Christian attainments is thankfulness to God.
(4) The Christian disclaims all his attainments with respect to justification.
(5) Saving attainments leave a lasting impression on the heart.
(6) The real believer loses not his confidence in God, even under severe afflictions.
(7) The real Christian does not wish to stop short in his attainments.
(8) The believer is equal, or at least consistent, in his attainments. While he makes progress in duty, in the exercise of grace, in liveliness and spirituality of affections, he at the same time advances in the mortification of sin.
(9) All true Christians have a real love to holiness, (J. Jamieson, M. A.)
Perverted spiritual appetites:
Drunkenness is a perverted spiritual appetite, a seeking in the creature what God alone can give, the longing of the soul for higher and purer happiness than the hard round of daily life and the weary sorrowful circle of the world can give. So, too, covetousness, if analysed in the same way, will be found to be a perverted spiritual appetite, a misdirected worship. Covetousness is identified in Scripture with idolatry: Covetousness which is idolatry, says St. Paul. No covetous man, who is an idolater, hath an inheritance in the kingdom of God. The love of money, as it has been well said, is the love of God run wild, the diseased action of a spiritual appetite, the aberration of a nature that was made for God. Wealth is the mystic shadow of God, which the soul is unconsciously groping after and craving for. It presents some faint features of resemblance to Him. It seems omnipotent, able to do all things; omnipresent, showing signs of itself everywhere; beneficent, supplying our present wants, providing for our future, procuring for us an endless variety of blessings, and giving us almost all that our hearts can desire. And because it presents these superficial resemblances to God, it becomes a religion to many, a worship loud in praise and aspiration as any that ever filled a church. And so is it with every form of idolatry of which man in these enlightened days can be guilty. It is the soul, in its restless pursuit of happiness, mistaking the true object of which it is in quest. (H. Macmillan, LL. D.)
Arsenical poisoning:
The peasant women of Styria are in the habit of constantly eating a certain quantity of arsenic, in order to enhance their personal charms. It imparts a beautiful bloom to the complexion, and gives a full and rounded appearance to the face and body. For years they persevere in this dangerous practice; but if they intermit it for a single day, they experience all the symptoms of arsenical poisoning. The complexion fades, the features become worn and haggard, and the body loses its plumpness and becomes angular and emaciated. Having once begun, therefore, to use this cosmetic, they must in self-defence go on, constantly increasing the dose in order to keep up the effect. At last the constitution is undermined; the limit of safety is overpassed; and the victim of foolish vanity perishes miserably in the very prime of life. And is it not so with those who feed upon the poison of the worlds idolatries? They may seem to thrive upon this insidious and dangerous diet, but all the time it is permanently impairing their spiritual health, and rendering them unfit for spiritual communion. The more they indulge in it, the more they must surrender themselves to it; and the jaded appetite is stimulated on to greater excesses, until at last every lingering vestige of spiritual vitality is destroyed, and the soul becomes a loathsome moral wreck, poisoned by its own food. (H. Macmillan, LL. D.)
Unsuitable food:
There is such a thing as a wasting of the body from insufficient nutrition, even when the appetite is satisfied and the stomach content. A strange plant, called the nardoo, with clover-like leaves, closely allied to the fern tribe, grows in the deserts of Central Australia. A melancholy interest is connected with it, owing to the fact that its seeds formed for several months almost the sole food of the party of explorers who a few years ago crossed the continent. This nardoo satisfied their hunger; it produced a pleasant feeling of comfort and repletion. The natives were accustomed to eat it in the absence of their usual roots and fruits, not only without injury, but apparently with positive benefit to their health. And yet, day after day, Burke and Wills became weaker and more emaciated upon this diet. Their flesh wasted from their bones, their strength was reduced to an infants feebleness, and they could only crawl painfully a mile or two in a day. At last, when nearing the bourne of their hopes, the explorers perished one by one of starvation; a solitary survivor being found in the last extremity under a tree, where he had laid him down to die, by a party sent out in search of the missing expedition. When analysed, the nardoo bread was ascertained to be destitute of certain nutritious elements indispensable to the support of a European, though an Australian savage might for a while find it beneficial as an alternative. And thus it happened that these poor unfortunate Englishmen perished of starvation, even while feeding fully day by day upon food that seemed to satisfy their hunger. Now, is it not precisely so in the experience of those who are seeking and finding their portion in earthly things? They are contented with it, and yet their hunger is in reality unappeased. Their desires are crowned, and yet they are actually perishing of want. God gives them their request, but sends leanness to their souls. Is it not far more dreadful to perish by slow degrees of this spiritual atrophy, under the delusive belief that all is well, and therefore seeking no change of food, than to be tortured by the indigestion of feeding on ashes, if by this misery the poor victim can be urged to seek for food convenient for him? (H. Macmillan, LL. D.)
He feedeth on ashes:
Is not the very term most significant? What are ashes? They are the last solid products of matter that has been used up--the relics that remain after all that is useful and nutritious has been consumed. You burn a piece of wood or a handful of corn, and its grosser particles fall to the ground, while all its ethereal parts--its carbon and hydrogen--mount to the skies and disappear. It is a sad thing to gaze upon the ashes of the commonest fire; for in them there is an image of utter death and ruin--of something that has been bright and beautiful, and is now but dull, cold, barren dust. And what are earthly, created things, upon which so many are feeding the hunger of their immortal souls, but ashes?
They were once bright and beautiful. Gods blessing was upon them, and they were very good. But sin has consumed all their goodness and beauty, has burned up all in them that was capable of ministering to the spiritual wants of men, and left nothing behind but dust and ashes. We can apply this truth to all the world, so far as it is made the portion of the soul. In a moral sense, the whole world, which was once capable of ministering to mans spiritual wants, is now a mere heap of cinders. Its beauty has gone with its goodness, and its sufficing power with its holiness. It has become spiritually oxidised by combination with the all-devouring element of sin. The man that loves the world now feeds on ashes; not upon earth, for there is a degree of nourishment in soil, owing to the remains of former life, and the worm and the plant feed upon it; not upon clay, for the clay which the American-Indians eat is found to consist of microscopic plants with silicious envelopes, called diatoms, containing a small portion of organic matter sufficient to sustain existence;--no, but on dry, white, dusty ashes, utterly destitute of any nutritious element whatever, upon which no creature can live, and upon which almost no plant can grow--the refuse of everything that is good. (H. Macmillan, LL. D.)
Unsuitable food:
Some time ago, I read in the papers of a little boy who for months had been gathering up prune-stones, being fond of the kernel; so, wishing to prepare for himself a great treat, he laid up quite a large store: at last came the day of anticipated enjoyment; he ate them all, and, after hours of agony, died! So I have seen men who have given up their whole life to one aim, to amass wealth; preparing a banquet of enjoyment for the evening of their days; and, when they sat down to the feast, lo! on the table only ashes, ashes! (J. T. Davidson, D. D.)
A deceived heart hath turned him aside
The self-deception of most who affect to be infidels
1. Consider seriously, what was the real origin of your unbelief. A fathers house forsaken, and a fathers instructions soon to be forgotten, you entered on the world. Passions rose within you. Companions encouraged them; religion checked them. Your belief became irksome to your indulgence; and your faith descended to doubts. It was natural and necessary that it should do so, if you meant to continue in your sins.
2. You have had times, no doubt, when you thought your course somewhat wrong; and, partly sated with such enjoyments, had some idea of turning from them. What, then, was the obstacle? Was it the difficulty which you had in accounting for the truth of revelation? Was it not the voice of pleasure whispering, Will you then renounce the joys which were once so dear to you? Here was the fatal obstacle. Not in the difficulties of revelation, but in the timidity and weakness of the heart.
3. If this be not true, go one step farther. Many have met with calamity; a death unexpected among your friends, some great and sudden change of fortune, which showed you the uncertainty of human happiness. In these cases, what was your resource? Did you go to the tables, whither before you had gone for pleasure? Was it in the society of those who make a mock at sin that you expected the gleam of comfort in the hour of sorrow? Your heart will own that, when you were in heaviness, you could think upon God. But religions truth all the time remained the same. If, therefore, you doubted on it under the former situation, why not under the latter? Your heart deceived you. You did not disbelieve. You wished to do so; and passion blinded you. Affliction removed the veil from your heart.
4. But, living as we do in an age of boasted light, this reasoning will probably be considered as carried too far; and it will be urged by many a young man, that, although the passions may have had some influence in biassing his opinions, yet his doubts of the Gospel have arisen, in some measure, from his judgment. Let us, then, meet him on this ground. We expect, therefore, from you some striking argument that is to set aside at once the authority of ages and destroy the best hopes and resources of the human heart. And what do we find? A few common-place phrases and objections--doubts, not created by yourselves, but only received from others, and kept up by you, to preserve a kind of watchword of a party against believers.
5. But if you have not searched very deeply into these things yourself, they with whom you are in the habit of associating are adequate to give you sufficient religious instruction, and you have taken, you say, your creed chiefly from them. Let us, then, repair a moment to them. You profess yourselves general believers in a God, and possessed of some amiable virtues. How often in the assemblies of your friends and instructors is the name of God mentioned without irreverence? How seldom have you heard rigid virtue made the subject of discussion except to be ridiculed? Have you often heard beauty and innocence mentioned without some sentiment of an abandoned passion? (G. Mathew, M. A.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Alexander MacLaren1905 · Public DomainOn v20
Isaiah
FEEDING ON ASHES
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Isa 44:20.
The prophet has been pouring fierce scorn on idolaters. They make, he says, the gods they worship. They take a tree and saw it up: one log serves for a fire to cook their food, and with compass and pencil and plane they carve the figure of a man, and then they bow down to it and say, ‘Deliver me, for thou art my god!’ He sums up the whole in this sentence of my text, in which the tone changes from bitter irony to astonished pity. Now, if this were the time and the place, one would like to expand and illustrate the deep thoughts in these words in reference to idolatry; thoughts which go dead in the teeth of a great deal that is now supposed to be scientifically established, but which may be none the more true for all that. He asserts that idolatry is empty, a feeding on ashes. He declares, in opposition to modern ideas, that the low, gross forms of polytheism and idol-worship are a departure from a previous higher stage, whereas to-day we are told by a hundred voices that all religion begins at the bottom, and slowly struggles up to the top. Isaiah says the very opposite. The pure form is the primitive; the secondary form is the gross, which is a corruption. They tell us too, nowadays, that all religion pursues a process of evolution, and gradually clears itself of its more imperfect and carnal elements. Isaiah says, ‘he cannot deliver his soul’; and no religion ever worked itself up, unless under the impulse of a revelation from without. That is Isaiah’s philosophy of idolatry, and I expect it will be accepted as the true one some day.
But my text has a wider bearing. It not only describes, in pathetic language, the condition of the idolater, but it is true about all lives, which are really idolatrous in so far as they make anything else than God their aim and their joy. Every word of this text applies to such lives-that is to say, to the lives of a good many people listening to me now. And I would fain try to lay the truths here on some hearts. Let me just take them as they lie in the words before me.
I. A life that substantially ignores God is empty of all true satisfaction.
‘He feedeth on ashes’! Very little imagination will realise the force of that picture. The gritty cinders will irritate the lips and tongue, will dry up the moisture of the mouth, will interfere with the breathing, and there will be no nourishment in a sackful of them.
Dear brethren, the underlying truth is this-God is the only food of a man’s soul. You pick up the skeleton of a bird upon a moor; and if you know anything about osteology-the science of bones-you will see, in the very make of its breast-bone and its wing-bones, the declaration that its destiny was to soar into the blue. You pick up the skeleton of a fish lying on the beach, and you will see in its very form and characteristics that its destiny is to expatiate in the depths of the sea. And, written on you, as distinctly as flight on the bird, or swimming on the fish, is this, that you are meant, by your very make, to soar up into the heights of the glory of God, and to plunge deep into the abysses of His infinite love and wisdom. Man is made for God. ‘Whose image and superscription hath it?’ said Christ. The coin belongs to the king whose head and titles are displayed upon it; and on your heart, friend, though a usurper has tried to recoin the piece, and put his own foul image on the top of the original one, is stamped deep that you belong to the King of kings, to God Himself.
For what does our heart want? A perfect, changeless, all-powerful love. And what does our mind want? Reliable, guiding, inexhaustible, and yet accessible truth. And what does our will want? Commandments which have an authoritative ring in their very utterance, and which will serve for infallible guides for our lives. And what do our weak, sinful natures want? Something that shall free our consciences, and shall deliver us from the burden of our transgressions, and shall calm our fears, and shall quicken and warrant our lofty hopes. And what do men whose destiny is to live for ever want but something that shall go with them through all changes of condition, and, like a light in the midst of the darkest tunnel, shall burn in the passage between this and the other world, and shall never be taken away from them? We want a Person to be everything to us. No accumulation of things will satisfy a man. And we want all our treasures to be in one Person, and we need that that Person shall live as long as we live, and as long as we need shall be sufficient to supply us. And all this is only the spelling in many letters of the one name-God. That is what we want, that, and nothing less.
Then the next step that I suggest to you is, that where a man will take God for the food of his spirit, and turn love and mind and will and conscience and practical life to Him, seeing Him in everything, and seeing all things in Him; saturating, as it were, the universe with the thought of God, and recreating his own spirit with communion of friendship to Him; to that man lower goods do first disclose their real sweetness, their most poignant delight, and their most solid satisfaction. To say of a world where God has set us, that it is all ‘vanity and vexation of spirit,’ goes in flat contradiction to what He said when, creation finished, He looked upon His world, and proclaimed to the waiting seraphim around that ‘it was very good.’ There is a view of the world which calls itself pious, but is really an insult to God; and the irreligious pessimism that is fashionable nowadays, as if human life were a great mistake, and everything were mean and poor and insufficient, is contrary to the facts and to the consciousness of every man. But if you make things first which were meant to be second, then you make what was meant to be food ‘ashes.’ They are all good in their place. Wealth is good; wisdom is good; success is good; love is good. And all these things may be enjoyed without God, and will each of them yield their proportional satisfaction to the part of our nature to which they belong. But if you put them first you degrade them; a change passes over them at once. A long row of cyphers means nothing; put a significant digit in front of it, and it means millions. Take away the digit, and it goes back to nothing again. The world, and all its fading sweets, if you put God in the forefront of it, and begin the series with Him, is sweet, though it may be fleeting, and is meant to be felt by us as such. But if you take away Him, it is a row of cyphers signifying nothing, and able to contribute nothing to the real, deepest necessities of the human soul. And so the old question comes-’Why do ye spend your money for that which is not bread?’ It is bread, if only you will remember first that God is the food of your souls. But if you try to nourish yourselves on it alone, then, as I said, a sackful of such ashes will not stay your appetite. Oh! brethren, God has not so blundered in making the world that He has surrounded us with things that are all lies, but He has so made it that whosoever flies in the face of the gracious commandment which is also an invitation, ‘Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness,’ has not only no security that the ‘other things’ shall ‘be added unto him,’ but has the certainty that though they were added to him, in degree beyond his dreams and highest hopes, they would avail nothing to satisfy the hunger of his heart. As George Herbert puts it-
‘Shadows well mounted, dreams in a career,
Embroidered lies, nothing between two dishes,
These are the pleasures here.’
‘He feedeth on ashes,’ because he does not take God for the food of his soul.
II. So, secondly, notice that a life which thus ignores God is tragically unaware of its own emptiness.
‘A deceived heart hath turned him aside.’ That explains how the man comes to fancy that ashes are food. His whole nature is perverted, his vision distorted, his power of judgment marred. He is given over to hallucinations and illusions and dreams.
That explains, too, why men persist in this feeding on ashes after all experience. There is no fact stranger or more tragical in our histories than that we do not learn by a thousand failures that the world will not avail to make us restful and blessed. You will see a dog chasing a sparrow,-it has chased hundreds before and never caught one. Yet, when the bird rises from the ground, away it goes after it once more, with eager yelp and rush, to renew the old experience. Ah! that is like what a great many of you are doing, and you have not the same excuse that the dog has. You have been trying all your lives-and some of you have grey hairs on your heads-to slake your thirst by dipping leaky buckets into empty wells, and you are at it yet. As some one says, ‘experience throws a light on the wave behind us,’ but it does very little to fling a light on the sea before us. Experience confirms my text, for I venture to put it to the experience of every man-how many moments of complete satisfaction and rest can you summon up in your memory as having been yours in the past? ‘He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver, nor he that loveth abundance with increase.’ Appetite always grows faster than supply. And so, though we have tried them in vain so often, we turn again to the old discredited sources, and fancy we shall do better this time. Is it not strange? Is there any explanation of it, other than that of my text? ‘A deceived heart hath turned him aside.’
And that deceived heart, stronger than experience, is also stronger than conscience. Do you not know that you ought to be Christians? Do you not know that it is both wrong and foolish of you to ignore God? Do you not know that you will have to answer for it? Have you not had moments of illumination when there has risen up before you the whole vanity of your past lives, and when you have felt ‘I have played the fool, and erred exceedingly’? And yet, what has come of it all with some of you? Why, what comes of it with the drunkard in the Book of Proverbs, who, as soon as he has got over the bruises and the sickness of his last debauch, says, ‘I will seek it yet again.’ ‘A deceived heart hath turned him aside.’
And how is it that this hallucination that you have fed full and been satisfied, when all the while your hunger has not been appeased, can continue to act on us? For the very plain reason that every one of us has in himself a higher and a lower self, a set of desires for the grosser, more earthly, and, using the word in its proper sense, worldly sort-that is to say, directed towards material things, and a higher set which look right up to God if they were allowed fair play. And of these two sets-which really are one at bottom, if a man would only see it-the lower gets the upper hand, and suppresses the higher and the nobler. And so in many a man and woman the longing for God is crushed out by the grosser delights of sense.
One sometimes hears of cowardly, unmanly sailors, who in shipwreck push the women and children aside, and struggle to the boats. And there are in all of us groups of sturdy mendicants, so to speak, who elbow their way to the front, and will have their wants satisfied. What becomes of the gentler group that stand behind, unnoticed and silent? It is an awful thing when men and women do, as so many of us do, pervert the tastes that are meant to lead them to God, in order to stifle the consciousness that they need a God at all. There are tribes of low savages who are known as ‘clay-eaters.’ That is what a great many of us are; we feed upon the serpent’s meat, the dust of the earth, and let all the higher heavenly food, which addresses itself first to loftier desires, but also satisfies these lower ones, stand unnoticed, unsought for, unpartaken of. Dear friends, do not be befooled by that treacherous heart of yours, but let the deepest voices in your soul be heard. Understand, I beseech you, that their cry is for no created person or thing, and that only God Himself can satisfy them.
III. And now, lastly, notice that a life thus ignoring God needs a power from without to set it free.
‘He cannot deliver his soul.’ Can you? Do you think you can break the habits of a lifetime? Do you think that, left to yourself, you would ever have any inclination to break them? Certainly, left to yourselves, you will never have the power. These long indulged appetites of ours grow with indulgence; and that which first was light as a cobweb, and soft as a silken bracelet, becomes heavier and solider until it is an iron fetter upon the limb, which no man can break. There is nothing more awful in life than the influence of habit, so unthinkingly acquired, so inexorably certain, so limiting our possibilities and enclosing us in its grip.
Dear brethren, there is something more wanted than yourselves to break this chain. You have tried, I have no doubt, in the course of your lives, more and more resolutely, to cure yourselves of some more or less unworthy habits. They may be but mere slight tricks of attitude or intonation, or movement. Has your success been such as to encourage you to think that you can revolutionise your lives, and dethrone the despots that have ruled over you in the past? I leave the question to yourselves. To me it seems that the world of men is certain to go on ignoring God, and seeking its delight only in the world of creatures, unless there comes in an outside power into the heart of the world and revolutionises all things.
It is that power that I have to preach, the Christ who is the ‘Bread of God that came down from Heaven,’ who can lift up any soul from the most obstinate and long-continued grovelling amongst the transitory things of this limited world, and the superficial delights of sense and a gratified bodily life; who can bring the forgiveness which is essential, the deliverance from the power of evil which is not less essential, and who can fill our hearts with Himself the food of the world. He comes to each of us; He comes to you, with the old unanswerable question upon His lips, ‘Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which satisfieth not?’ It is unanswerable, for you can give no reason sufficient for such madness. All that you could say, and you durst not say it to Him, is, ‘a deceived heart hath turned me aside.’ He comes with the old gracious word upon His lips, ‘Take! eat! this is My body which is broken for you.’ He offers us Himself. He can stay all the hungers of all mankind. He can feed your heart with love, your mind with truth which is Himself, your will with His sweet commands.
As of old He made the thousands sit down upon the grass, and they did all eat and were filled, so He stands before the world to-day and says, ‘I am the Bread of Life; He that cometh to Me shall never hunger.’ And if you will only come to Him-that is to say, will trust yourselves altogether to the merits of His sacrifice, and the might of His indwelling Spirit-He will take away all the taste for the leeks and onions and garlic, and will give you the appetite for heavenly food. He will spread for you a table in the wilderness, and what would else be ashes will become sweet, wholesome, and nourishing. Nor will He cease there, for in His own good time He will call us to the banqueting house above, where He will make us to sit down to meat, and come forth Himself and serve us. Here, hunger often brings pain, and eating is followed by repletion. But there, appetite and satisfaction will produce each other perpetually, and the blessed ones who then hunger will not hunger so as to feel faintness or emptiness, nor be so filled as to cease to desire larger portions of the Bread of God. I beseech you, cry, ‘Lord, ever more give us this bread!’
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0On vv18–20for their eyes are blind and cannot see
for their eyes are blind and cannot see
Yahweh speaks of those who cannot understand the foolishness of worshiping idols as if they were blind. (See: Metaphor)
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for their eyes are blind
Here "their eyes" represents the whole person. AT: "for they are blind" (See: Synecdoche)
their hearts cannot perceive
Here the people are represented by their "hearts." AT: "they cannot understand" (See: Synecdoche)
Tyndale Open Study Notes2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0On v1844:18-19 Their minds are shut: Idol worshipers cannot see…
44:18-19 Their minds are shut: Idol worshipers cannot see the irony in using one part of a log to warm themselves and another part of the same log to be their god.
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain On vv18–20 The Prophet giveth here an answer to all them…
The Prophet giveth here an answer to all them that wonder how it is possible that any should be so blind to commit such abomination, saying, that God hath blinded their eyes, and hardened their hearts.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv18–20 Isa 44:18 They have not known nor understood: for…
Isa 44:18 They have not known nor understood: for he hath shut their eyes, that they cannot see; [and] their hearts, that they cannot understand.
Ver. 18. They have not known nor understood.] How should they, say, when infatuated and given up to an injudicious mind, or reprobate sense, as those? {Rom 1:28}
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For he hath shut their eyes.] Heb., Daubed up their eyes from seeing, their hearts from understanding.
“ Mons oblita Dei, vitiorumque oblita caeno. ”
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain On vv18–20 They have not known or understood: this showeth that…
They have not known or understood: this showeth that they want common discretion, and have not the understanding of a man in them. He, to wit, God; who is easily understood, and is oft expressed by this pronoun he; and to whom this very act is frequently ascribed in other places of Scripture. And therefore men need not to be shy in ascribing it to God here. Which yet is to be soberly understood; not as if God did make men wicked, but only permits them so to be, and orders and overrules their wickedness to his own glorious ends. And such passages as these are added in such cases to give an account of the prodigious madness of sinners herein; because, as they wilfully shut their own eyes, and harden their own hearts, so God judicially blinds and hardens them, and sends strong delusions upon them, and gives them up to believe lies, and then it is no wonder if they fall into such dotages.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv18–20 They have not known nor understood,.... Who the true…
They have not known nor understood,.... Who the true God is, nor the worship that is due to him alone; they do not know nor understand divine and spiritual things; nay, they have not the knowledge and understanding of men; they want common sense that can do and say such things as before mentioned, both idol makers and idol worshippers:
for he hath shut their eyes that they cannot see, and their heart that they cannot understand; either the devil, as some think, the god of this world, that blinds their eyes from seeing the folly of such gross idolatry, which he, deceiving them, leads them into; or rather God himself, who, because they like not to retain him in their knowledge, gives them up to a reprobate and injudicious mind, to believe a lie, and worship a false god; this he permits, orders, and overrules to some good ends and purposes: this is to be understood of the eyes of the understanding, which, as the word (i) signifies, are "daubed" and plastered over, that there is no opening of them, and seeing with them; which is the judicial blindness and hardness of heart, which God sometimes in righteous judgment gives up men unto; see Rom 1:28.
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(i) "oblevit oculos eorum", Montanus; "obleverit", Cocceius; "quod sculptile oblinat", Piscator.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain On vv18, 20 Not known - This shews that they have not…
Not known - This shews that they have not the understanding of a man. For he - God. Not as if God did make men wicked; he only permits them so to be, and orders, and over-rules their wickedness to his own glorious ends.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv18, 20 Verse 18. He hath shut their eyes - "Their…
Verse 18. He hath shut their eyes - "Their eyes are closed up"] The Septuagint, Chaldee, and Vulgate, for טח tach, read טחו, tachu. See Clarke on Isa 6:10.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain On v18 Isa 44:18-20. They have not known, &c. — They…
Isa 44:18-20. They have not known, &c. — They want common discretion, and have not the understanding of a rational being in them. For what an absurdity is it for a man to dress his meat and make his god with the same piece of wood! Or to think that a log of timber hath any more divinity in it than it had before, because of the form man can give it, or any thing he can do to it! “When,” says Minutius Felix, “does it become a god! Behold, it is cast, fashioned, and carved! It is not yet a god. It is soldered, put together, and set up. Neither is it yet a god. Behold, it is adorned, consecrated, and prayed to! Then at length it is a god when men have chosen and dedicated it.” He hath shut their eyes — God hath. Not as if God made men wicked; he only permits them so to be, and orders and overrules their wickedness to his own glorious ends. And none considereth in his heart — By which the prophet implies, that the true cause of this, as well as of other absurd and brutish practices of sinners, is the neglect of serious and impartial consideration. He feedeth on ashes — An unprofitable and pernicious food, and no less unsatisfying and mischievous is the worship of idols. A deceived heart — A mind corrupted and deceived by deep prejudice, gross error, and especially by his own lusts; hath turned him aside — From the way of truth, from the knowledge and worship of the true God, unto this irrational and foolish idolatry; that he cannot deliver his soul — From this error, and the vengeance that will follow upon it; nor say, Is there not a lie, &c. — Is not this idol which I honour and trust to a mere fiction and delusion which will deceive me?
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain On vv18–20 They have not known nor understood - They are…
They have not known nor understood - They are stupid, ignorant, and blind. Nothing could more strikingly show their ignorance and stupidity than this idol worship.
He hath shut their eyes - God hath closed their eyes. Margin, ‘Daubed.’ The word used here, טה ṭah from טוה ṭûah denotes properly “to spread over”; to besmear; to plaster; as, e. g., a wall with mortar Lev 14:42; 1Ch 29:4; Eze 13:10; Eze 22:28. Here it means to cover over the eyes so as to prevent vision; and hence, metaphorically, to make them stupid, ignorant, dull. It is attributed to God in accordance with the common statement of the Scriptures, that he does what he permits to be done (see the notes at Isa 6:9-10). It does not mean that God had done it by any physical, or direct agency, but that it had occurred under the administration of his Providence. It is also true that the Hebrew writers sometimes employ an active verb when the signification is passive, and when the main idea is, that anything was in fact done. Here the main point is not the agent by which this was done, but the fact that their eyes were blinded - and perhaps all the force of the verb טה ṭah used here would be expressed if it was rendered in an impersonal, or in a passive form, ‘it is covered as to their eyes,’ that is, their eyes are shut, without suggesting that it was done by God. So the Septuagint renders it, Ἀπημαυρώθησαν Apēmaurōthēsan - ‘They are blind,’ or involved in darkness.
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So the Chaldee, מטמטמן meṭmeṭemân (also in the plural) - ‘Their eyes are obscured’ or blind. It cannot be proved from this text that God is, by direct agency, the author by whom it was done. It was not uncommon to shut up, or seal up the eyes for various purposes in the East, and unquestionably the prophet alludes to some such custom. ‘It is one of the solemnities at a Jewish wedding at Aleppo, according to Dr. Russell, who mentions it as the most remarkable thing in their ceremonies at that time. It is done by fastening the eyelids together with a gum, and the bridegroom is the person, he says, if he remembered right, that opens the bride’s eyes at the appointed time. It is also used as a punishment in those countries. So Sir Thomas Roe’s chaplain, in his account of his voyages to East India, tells us of a son of the Great Mogul, whom he had seen, and with whom Sir Thomas had conversed, that had before that time been cast into prison by his father, where his eyes were sealed up, by something put before them, which might not be taken off for three years; after which time the seal was taken away, that he might with freedom enjoy the light, though not his liberty.’ (Harmer’s Obs. vol. iii., pp. 507, 508. Ed. Lond. 8vo, 1808.)
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain On vv18, 20 Covered. Septuagint, "darkened." Are Catholics in the same predicament?…
Covered. Septuagint, "darkened." Are Catholics in the same predicament? (Chap. xl. 18.) (Haydock)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain On vv18–20 he, &c.--God hath given them over to judicial blindness;…
he, &c.--God hath given them over to judicial blindness; not His direct physical, but His providential agency in administering His moral government, is meant (Isa 6:9-10). "Shut," literally, "daubed," plastered up; it is an Eastern custom in some cases to seal up the eyes of offenders.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain On v18 18-20. The whole system of idol religion, in like…
18-20. The whole system of idol religion, in like manner, is simply foolish. Its votaries embrace it only to be blinded in conscience and reason. The makers and worshippers of idols are alike fools. And the sarcastic prophet cannot lament the dementing effects of the idol system in language more fitting than in the exactly literal words of Isa_44:19-20, which sufficiently explain themselves.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain On vv18–20 18–20. But such is the infatuation of idolatry, that…
18–20. But such is the infatuation of idolatry, that its blinded votaries never pause to reflect on their actions; the idolater has not sense enough to say to himself in plain words what he has done.
They have not … understood] Better, as R.V. they know not, neither do they consider. he hath shut their eyes] Rather: their eyes are besmeared, as it were plastered over, so that they cannot see (a different verb, however, from that used by Isaiah in Isa_6:10, &c.).
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain On vv18, 20 (18) He hath shut their eyes.—Better, their eyes are…
(18) He hath shut their eyes.—Better, their eyes are smeared over. The state described is the judicial blindness of Rom_1:20-25. It will be remembered that blindness thus inflicted was one of the tortures of Eastern cruelty.
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain On vv18–20 They have not known nor understood. The cause of…
They have not known nor understood. The cause of all this folly is a Minding of the understanding, divinely caused in the way of punishment, on account of their having wilfully closed their eyes to the truth. Because they "did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them up to a reprobate (or, undistinguishing) mind". (Rom_1:28; comp. Isa_29:10) He hath shut; or, One hath shut. But the reference is in either case to God. The word translated shut" means literally plastered" or "smeared."
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain On v20 He feedeth on ashes
Isa_44:20
He feedeth on ashes
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Earth used as food
One of the most extraordinary examples of depraved or perverted appetite is the use of earth for food.
This propensity is not an occasional freak, but a common custom, and is found among so large a number and variety of tribes that it may be regarded as co-extensive with the human race. From time immemorial the Chinese have been in the habit of using various kinds of edible earth as substitutes for bread in times of scarcity; and their imperial annals have always religiously noticed the discovery of such bread-stones, or stone-meal, as they are called. On the western coast of Africa a yellowish kind of earth, called caouac, is so highly relished, and so constantly consumed by the negroes, that it has become to them a necessary of life. In the island of Java, and in various parts of the hill-country of India, a reddish earth is baked into cakes and sold in the village markets for food; while on the banks of the Orinoco, in South America, Humboldt mentions that the native Indians find a species of unctuous clay, which they knead into balls, and store up in heaps in their huts as a provision for the winter or rainy season. They are not compelled by famine to have recourse to this clay; for even when fish, game, and fruit are plentiful they still eat it after their food as a luxury. This practice of eating earth is not confined solely to the inhabitants of the Tropics. In the north of Norway and in Swedish Lapland a kind of white powdery earth, called mountain-meal, found under beds of decayed moss, is consumed in immense quantities every year. It is mixed by the people with their bread in times of scarcity; and even in Germany it has been frequently used as a means of allaying hunger. All these examples of the use of earth as food are so contrary to our experience that they might seem incredible were it not that they are thoroughly authenticated. Such an unnatural custom must, in the long run, prove injurious to the constitution of those who indulge in it, although it is wonderful how long it can be carried on by some individuals apparently with impunity. (H. Macmillan, LL. D.)
Feeding on ashes:
In the spiritual world there are many who feed upon ashes. The prophet is speaking of the idolater.
I. WHO IS THE IDOLATER--who is the he that is said to feed on ashes? The prophet had a definite audience before him. He was prophesying to the children of Israel. Notwithstanding the purity and sublimity of their own monotheistic creed, and the awful threatenings and sanctions with which it was guarded, we can trace throughout their entire history, as a marked feature of their character, a propensity to blend a theoretical belief in the true God with an accommodating reverence to the idols of the heathen Pantheon. Except when under the immediate spell of some special revelation of Jehovah, they craved for some visible shape or outward sign of the divinity--a craving which was satisfied for a time by the erection of the tabernacle and temple, and the establishment of the worship connected with them, but which soon overleaped barriers thus imposed upon it, and sought for novel sensations in the tabernacle of Moloch and in the star of the god Remphan--figures which they made to worship them. The very priests and Levites, who were most concerned in keeping the worship of Jehovah pure, were the leaders of the various national apostasies. Isaiah deeply deplored this national fickleness and spiritual inconstancy. In the passage under consideration he seeks to overwhelm it with contempt. Were Isaiah addressing us in these days his ideas would be the same, though the form in which he would present them would be different. Material idolatry, in its literal import, has passed away among civilised nations. But the essence of the temptation remains the same. Human society is changed, but human nature is unchanged. The impulse which led to idolatry is therefore as strong at the present day as it was in the time of Isaiah; and images are set up and worshipped now as fantastic as any pagan fetich or joss. The New Testament form of the Second Commandment, Be not conformed to this world, requires to be frequently and urgently enforced. If I were to sum up all spiritual idolatry in these days in one form, I should call it worldliness, for everything else is but a phase of this. And this worldly conformity leads speedily, in most instances, to a low moral standard, and to a weak and corrupt form of religion, and produces the same humiliating results which flowed from the idolatry of ancient times.
II. WHAT IS IDOLATRY? It is a perverted spiritual appetite. In certain diseased states of the brain there is an unnatural craving for the most extraordinary and unwholesome substances. Men and women under such morbid influences have been known to eat cinders and sand with apparent relish, and even to prefer them to the richest dainties. In such cases it is not the appetite that is at fault. The controlling power of the brain, which chooses the proper food, is impaired, and this healthy appetite is set to work upon substances which are altogether unsuitable. In like manner idolatry arises from a natural craving of the soul, which was made for God, for His worship and enjoyment. It finds that it must go out of itself for the blessedness it needs. This spiritual appetite is a God-given instinct of our nature. It is the soul seeking its highest good. It is healthy and natural. But when, under the guidance and power of a deceived heart, it seeks its gratification in earthly things to the exclusion altogether of God, it affords a most melancholy example of a perverted spiritual appetite.
III. WHAT ARE THE EFFECTS OF IDOLATRY? How does idolatry affect the man guilty of it? There is a very striking and beautiful relation between the food of man and his digestive organs. He is omnivorous. He is the ruler of the world, and therefore the varied life of the world must throb in his veins. But all the varied food which she presents to him must be organic food. Phosphorus literally flames in the brain, that thoughts may breathe and words may burn; lime gives solidity to the bones; the alkaline salts promote the oxidation and removal of the effete materials of the body. Common minerals--iron, sulphur, soda, potash, and others--circulate in the blood, or are garnered in the various tissues. But all these inorganic materials are furnished, not from the earth directly, but in the food; the various vegetable and animal products containing them in varying quantities. Such being the law of mans nutrition, it will be seen at once that if he feeds directly upon ashes, he is feeding upon substances that are altogether incongruous, and unfitted to nourish him. His organs cannot digest or assimilate ashes. And is not the analogy between spiritual and natural things here very clear? If mans spiritual appetite can feed only on God, then if man seeks his portion only in the things of the world, what can you expect but spiritual indigestion and misery? It is true, indeed, that just as the body requires inorganic elements--salt, lime, and iron--as well as organic, for its proper nourishment, so man requires the things of the world as well as the things of faith for his spiritual welfare. But then we are to seek these temporal things, not directly from the world, but through the channel of communion with God. There are natures that, by a long course of feeding upon ashes, have become accustomed to this unnatural diet. Like the clay-eaters of South America, their digestive organs become assimilated to their food, and they are put to little inconvenience by it. We meet with persons who are satisfied with their portion in this world, who mind earthly things, and are contented with the nourishment for their souls which they find in them. But are such persons the truly great and noble ones of our race? How can an infinite hunger be appeased by a finite good? The soul wants organised food; food that has spiritual life in it; food that is redolent of the sunshine and permeated with the light of heaven; food that has drunk in all the impalpable virtues and forces of the things unseen and eternal; food that can gather up in itself these vitalising influences, and transfer them to us to glow within our veins and animate our nerves; and, instead of that, we get ashes out of which all the glow and the virtue have departed. Our sin will become our punishment; our idols our scourges. I have remarked that there are some who are satisfied with their worldly portion--who, though feeding upon clay, are not put to inconvenience by it. Such individuals, in the midst of their contentment, are in reality, if they only knew it, more to be pitied than those whose truer instincts are tortured by the unsuitable food by which they endeavour to appease their spiritual cravings. (H. Macmillan, LL. D.)
Feeding on ashes
I. THE VAIN OBJECTS TO WHICH MAN DIRECTS HIS ENERGIES. He feedeth on ashes.
II. THE REASON OF THIS PERVERTED CHOICE. A deceived heart hath turned him aside. Sin, in its very nature, has a tendency to harden the heart. When it first begins to make advances, there is resistance offered to it. Conscience speaks, expostulates, reproaches; but sin gets the mastery. Conscience becomes by degrees blunted; the heart at length gets callous, that it cannot feel; the eye is altogether darkened, that it cannot see; the ear heavy, that it cannot hear the instruction of wisdom. Thus the heart is in due time thoroughly deceived. It rejoices in evil, instead of in good; it has an exclusive appetite for the bitter instead of the sweet. But there is a diseased state of the heart where the fatal results do not appear so manifest to the eye of man. When the world is keenly loved and followed, when self is worshipped, when God is not supreme in the affection, the root must be looked for in the heart. The heart is deceived. How dangerous is this state of heart! How much does it need of watchfulness in the case of every one of us, so that we may not be ensnared by it.
III. THE DANGER OF THIS STATE, AND THE DIFFICULTY OF ITS REMEDY. He cannot deliver himself. When the heart has been once beguiled by the deceitfulness of sin, and its affections have been riveted and firmly fixed upon earthly things, it is not in man to deliver himself. God, indeed, has provided means whereby those who have banished themselves from Him may be brought home to His fold. In Him there resides power to cut asunder the chain, however firmly it may bind us down to the earth.
IV. SOME PRACTICAL QUESTIONS FOR OUR EXAMINATION. Is there not a lie in my right hand? (H. J. Hastings, M. A.)
I. WHAT THE SOUL PROPERLY REQUIRES. We cannot find food for the body in ourselves; we have to look for it in the animal or vegetable world. Our spiritual part--our intellect, conscience, affections--is every whit as dependent on extraneous supplies as our bodies are.
The deceived heart:
I propose to show--
II. HOW PERILOUSLY FAR SOME ARE FROM GIVING TO THEIR SOULS WHAT THEY REQUIRE. You see this magnificent provision; it is spread before your eyes. But the question is, are you feeding on it? Feeding implies taking it to yourself, appropriating it, masticating it with pleasure, receiving it into your digestion. It then becomes a part of you, and goes into your bones, your blood, your flesh, your marrow. We admit that you come to the feast, that you admire it, and that you intend to eat; but we cannot admit that you are feeding on it thus far. We cannot say you have the Word of God dwelling in you richly in all wisdom. (J. Bolton, B. A.)
A perverted appetite:
Two lessons were learnt by Israel in captivity--the all-sufficiency of God, and the absurdity of idols. It is on the latter of these that we are now to dwell. Why do men act with such inconceivable folly? The prophet knows nothing of the modern theory that men do not worship the stone or wood, but accept the effigy as a help to fixedness of thought and prayer; he would affirm that with the mass of men this is a fiction, and that the worship of the devotee stops short with what he can see and touch. The cause of idolatry lies deeper. He feedeth on ashes; a deceived heart hath turned him aside, &c.
I. THERE IS A HUNGER FOR THE DIVINE IN MAN.
1. It is universal.
2. It is significant. We can tell something of the composition of the human body by the materials which it needs for its sustenance. Similarly the true dignity of man betrays itself in the hunger which perpetually preys upon him. If man is only matter, if thought is only the movement of the grey matter of the brain, if there is no spirit and no beyond, how is it that the material world cannot supply the supreme good?
3. It is inevitable. The functions which food performs in our system are threefold. It is needed to replace the perpetual waste which is always wearing down the natural tissues; to maintain the temperature at some 98°; and to provide materials for growth. And each of these has a spiritual analogy. We need God, for the same three reasons as the body needs food.
(1) To replace the perpetual waste of our spiritual forces.
(2) For warmth and heat.
(3) For growth.
II. THIS APPETITE MAY BE PERVERTED. He feedeth on ashes. Men tamper with their natural appetite. But there is a close similarity in their treatment with that wonderful yearning after the unseen and eternal which is part of the very constitution of our being--a hunger after the ideal Food, the ideal Beauty, the ideal Truth, which may be resisted and ignored, but still claims satisfaction; and if it does not get it in God, it will seek it in the ashes of idolatry. Men worship idols yet. The man of the world worships money, rank, high office. The child of fashion worships in the temple of human opinion, and feeds on the ashes of human applause an appetite which was meant to satisfy itself on the Well done! of the Almighty. The student who questions or denies the Being of God, worships in the temple of learning; and feeds with the ashes of human opinion an appetite which was intended to be nourished by eternal truth. And in every case these substitutes for God, with which men try to satisfy themselves, are as incapable of satisfying the heart, as ashes of supporting the physical life.
III. THE TRUE BREAD.
1. It is the gift of God. My Father giveth the true Bread from heaven. God who made thee hunger for bread, made bread to grow for its appeasement. Other vegetables have their peculiar habitat. But the cornplant will make its home in every land, and grow on every soil. He has also provided beauty for our taste, truth for our thought, love for our heart; and has gathered all these and much more into His one Gift, Jesus Christ.
2. Nature yields her provision to man through death. So it is through death that Jesus has become the Food of men. We must assimilate our food. We must receive Jesus into our hearts by an act of spiritual apprehension. (F. B.Meyer, B. A.)
Feeding on ashes:
I shall speak of three classes of young men who are feeding on ashes.
I. Those who are giving themselves up to SENSUAL PLEASURE. There is no one on earth who has so much right to the pleasures of the world as the believer. I do not believe in asceticism. I do not believe in pious melancholy. But this innocent hilarity, which leaves no ill results behind, is good and healthful, and a very different thing from the emmaddening gaieties of the world.
II. I have a word to say to you who are setting up another idol for your worship. It is neither Venus nor Bacchus, but it is Plutus; it is WORLDLY SUBSTANCE; it is money. There is no sin in desiring to be rich, if your money comes to you honourably, and goes from you usefully. But what is all that, if that is all? Can you feed the immortal soul within you with bank cheques and good investments? Will all the gold in the Bank of England appease the hunger of your deathless spirit? No! But many seem to think it will. Such men are the most hopeless cases to deal with. I should be more sanguine of bringing to the feet of Jesus a poor bloated debauchee, than of doing any good to one of these hardened, wizened, shrivelled-up money-scrapers, who for twenty, thirty, or forty years have no other thought but this--to lay up gain.
III. There is a third class of men who are daily feeding on ashes, because a deceived heart has turned them aside. They have got hold of a lot of INFIDEL LITERATURE, and they are stuffing their souls with as weak and poisonous rubbish as it is possible to meet with. With the prophet, I invite you to something more palatable and nourishing; I bid you to a feast of milk and honey; hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness. (J. T. Davidson, D. D.)
Feeding on ashes:
Many to-day feed on the kind of ashes Isaiah has in mind.
1. False conceptions of God.
2. False conceptions of Christ.
3. False conceptions of religion.
4. False conceptions of the Church.
5. False conceptions of morality, life, and happiness.
Application:--
1. Upon the true or false conception of God and His relations to men conduct depends. The Christians conception of God is revealed in the incarnation, life, and atonement of His Son. He only is a true Christian who obeys Christs words, imitates His life, and becomes conformed to His image. He must be our ideal.
2. Again, we ask how comes it that men thus feed on ashes? A deceived heart hath turned him aside. (J. B. Nies, Ph. D.)
Feeding on ashes:
To-day we are told by a hundred voices that all religion begins at the bottom, and slowly struggles up to the top. Isaiah says the very opposite. The pure form is the primitive; the secondary form is the gross, which is a corruption. They tell us, too, that all religion pursues a process of evolution, and gradually clears itself of its more imperfect and carnal elements. Isaiah says He cannot deliver his soul, and no religion ever worked itself up, unless under the impulse of a revelation from without. That is Isaiahs philosophy of idolatry, and I expect it will be accepted as the true one some day.
I. A LIFE THAT SUBSTANTIALLY IGNORES GOD IS EMPTY OF ALL TRUE SATISFACTION. He feedeth on ashes. Very little imagination will realise the force of that picture. The gritty cinders will irritate the lips and tongue, will dry up the moisture of the mouth, will interfere with the breathing; and there will be no nourishment in a sackful of them. The underlying truth is this--God only is the food of a mans soul. You pick up the skeleton of a bird upon a moor; and if you know anything about osteology, you will see in the very make of its breast-bone and its wing-bones the declaration that its destiny is to soar into the blue. And written on you, as distinctly as flight on the bird, or swimming on the fish, is this, that you are meant, by your very make, to soar up into the heights of the glory of God, and to plunge deep into the abysses of His infinite love and wisdom. What does your heart want? A perfect, changeless, all-powerful love. And what does your mind want? Reliable, guiding, inexhaustible yet accessible truth. And what does your will want? Commandments which have an authoritative ring in their very utterance, and which will serve for infallible guides for your lives. And what do our weak, sinful natures want? Something that shall free our consciences, and deliver us from the burden of our transgressions, and calm our fears, and quicken and warrant our lofty hopes. And what do men whoso nature is to live for ever want but something that shall go with them through all changes of condition? We want a person to be everything to us. No accumulation of things will satisfy a man. God has not so blundered in making the world that He has surrounded us with things that are all lies, but He has so made it that whosoever flies in the face of the gracious commandment which is also an invitation, Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, has not only no security that the other things shall be added unto him, but has the certainty that though they were added to him, in degree beyond his dreams and highest hopes, they would avail nothing to satisfy the hunger of his heart.
II. A LIFE WHICH THUS IGNORES GOD IS TRAGICALLY UNAWARE OF ITS OWN EMPTINESS. A deceived heart hath turned him aside. That explains how the man comes to fancy that ashes are food. His whole nature is perverted, his vision distorted, his power of judgment marred. That explains, too, why men persist in this feeding on ashes after all experience. You will see a dog chasing a sparrow. It has chased hundreds before and never caught one. Yet, when the creature rises from the ground, away it goes after it once more, with eager yelp and rush, to meet the old experience. That is like what a great many of you are doing, and you have not the same excuse that the dog has. And that deceived heart, stronger than experience, is also stronger than conscience. How is it that this hallucination that you have fed full and been satisfied, when all the while your hunger has not been appeased, can continue to act on us? For the very plain reason that every one of us has in himself a higher and a lower self, a set of desires of the grosser, more earthly, and, using the word in its proper sense, worldly sort--that is to say, directed towards material things, and a higher set which look right up to God if they are allowed fair play. And of these two sets--which really are one at bottom, if a man would only see it--the lower gets the upper hand, and suppresses the higher and the nobler.And so in many a man and woman the longing for God is crushed out by the gross delights of sense.
III. A LIFE THUS IGNORING GOD NEEDS A POWER FROM WITHOUT TO SET IT FREE. He cannot deliver his soul. There is nothing more awful in life than the influence of habit. There is something more wanted than yourselves to break this chain. It is the Christ who is the Bread of God that came down from heaven; who can deliver any soul from the most obstinate and long continued grovelling amongst the transitory things of this limited world, and the superficial delights of sense and gratified bodily life; who can bring the forgiveness which is essential, the deliverance from the power of evil which is not less essential, and who can fill our hearts with Himself, the food of the world. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
The deceived heart:
I. THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE WHO ARE ENTIRELY DECEIVED IN THEIR RELIGION.
1. The idolater.
2. The Romanist.
3. Freethinkers.
4. False professors.
II. ALTHOUGH THERE ARE MANY PERSONS THUS DECEIVED IN RELIGION, WE ARE NOT TO SUPPOSE THAT ANY OF THEM ARE REALLY CONTENTED IN HEART WITH THEIR RELIGION.
III. IT IS A STRANGE THING THAT ALL THESE PEOPLE SEEM VERY WELL CONTENTED WITH THEIR FALSE RELIGIONS.
IV. I WANT TO SPEAK TO THOSE WHO ARE PROFESSORS OF RELIGION BUT WHO DO NOT POSSESS IT. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The deceitfulness of the heart in embracing false confidences
The heart discovers its deceitfulness--
I. BY ITS STRONG PROPENSITY TO RECEIVE ANY ERROR MORE READILY THAN TRUTH.
II. BY ITS EXTREME RELUCTANCE TO THE ONLY WAY OF SALVATION, AND BY ITS VIOLENT PROPENSITY TO EVERY LYING REFUGE. More particularly we observe--
1. That multitudes betake themselves to the general mercy of God.
2. The heart often disposes one to look into itself for something good.
3. Others found their hope on resolutions of reformation.
4. Partial and outward reformation is the confidence of many.
5. Many confide in a bare profession of religion and observation of the form of duties.
6. Others deceive themselves into a reliance on their Church privileges.
7. Some confide in their gifts, or in their usefulness by means of them.
8. Some may trust to a work of the law, as if it were in itself saving.
9. This principle of deceit is discovered by the sinners endeavours to obtain justification by moral duties.
10. Many trust to their sincerity in religion. But what is this sincerity in which you make your boast before God? Do you not confide in it as the ground of your justification? If so, it must be the sincerity of a person who is not yet justified; that is, of one still under the curse of the law.
11. Another false confidence, which many fly to, is the observance of superstitious rites.
12. Some may rest on their sufferings in the cause of Christ.
13. Others may depend on a notional faith. Some are persuaded of the truth of the Gospel. But they prove that their faith is not Divine, because it is unfruitful.
14. The deceitfulness of the heart operates in others, by making them rest upon supposed attainments in holiness. There is a question the solution of which materially affects every one of us before God. If false professors may have so eminent attainments, and so remarkable a resemblance to true holiness, how may we distinguish between such attainments as are the fruit of the Spirits saving work and those which only flow from natural affections or from a common operation?
(1) These attainments, which are saving, have always a humbling tendency.
(2) Saving attainments are consistent with a godly jealousy.
(3) The fruit of solid Christian attainments is thankfulness to God.
(4) The Christian disclaims all his attainments with respect to justification.
(5) Saving attainments leave a lasting impression on the heart.
(6) The real believer loses not his confidence in God, even under severe afflictions.
(7) The real Christian does not wish to stop short in his attainments.
(8) The believer is equal, or at least consistent, in his attainments. While he makes progress in duty, in the exercise of grace, in liveliness and spirituality of affections, he at the same time advances in the mortification of sin.
(9) All true Christians have a real love to holiness, (J. Jamieson, M. A.)
Perverted spiritual appetites:
Drunkenness is a perverted spiritual appetite, a seeking in the creature what God alone can give, the longing of the soul for higher and purer happiness than the hard round of daily life and the weary sorrowful circle of the world can give. So, too, covetousness, if analysed in the same way, will be found to be a perverted spiritual appetite, a misdirected worship. Covetousness is identified in Scripture with idolatry: Covetousness which is idolatry, says St. Paul. No covetous man, who is an idolater, hath an inheritance in the kingdom of God. The love of money, as it has been well said, is the love of God run wild, the diseased action of a spiritual appetite, the aberration of a nature that was made for God. Wealth is the mystic shadow of God, which the soul is unconsciously groping after and craving for. It presents some faint features of resemblance to Him. It seems omnipotent, able to do all things; omnipresent, showing signs of itself everywhere; beneficent, supplying our present wants, providing for our future, procuring for us an endless variety of blessings, and giving us almost all that our hearts can desire. And because it presents these superficial resemblances to God, it becomes a religion to many, a worship loud in praise and aspiration as any that ever filled a church. And so is it with every form of idolatry of which man in these enlightened days can be guilty. It is the soul, in its restless pursuit of happiness, mistaking the true object of which it is in quest. (H. Macmillan, LL. D.)
Arsenical poisoning:
The peasant women of Styria are in the habit of constantly eating a certain quantity of arsenic, in order to enhance their personal charms. It imparts a beautiful bloom to the complexion, and gives a full and rounded appearance to the face and body. For years they persevere in this dangerous practice; but if they intermit it for a single day, they experience all the symptoms of arsenical poisoning. The complexion fades, the features become worn and haggard, and the body loses its plumpness and becomes angular and emaciated. Having once begun, therefore, to use this cosmetic, they must in self-defence go on, constantly increasing the dose in order to keep up the effect. At last the constitution is undermined; the limit of safety is overpassed; and the victim of foolish vanity perishes miserably in the very prime of life. And is it not so with those who feed upon the poison of the worlds idolatries? They may seem to thrive upon this insidious and dangerous diet, but all the time it is permanently impairing their spiritual health, and rendering them unfit for spiritual communion. The more they indulge in it, the more they must surrender themselves to it; and the jaded appetite is stimulated on to greater excesses, until at last every lingering vestige of spiritual vitality is destroyed, and the soul becomes a loathsome moral wreck, poisoned by its own food. (H. Macmillan, LL. D.)
Unsuitable food:
There is such a thing as a wasting of the body from insufficient nutrition, even when the appetite is satisfied and the stomach content. A strange plant, called the nardoo, with clover-like leaves, closely allied to the fern tribe, grows in the deserts of Central Australia. A melancholy interest is connected with it, owing to the fact that its seeds formed for several months almost the sole food of the party of explorers who a few years ago crossed the continent. This nardoo satisfied their hunger; it produced a pleasant feeling of comfort and repletion. The natives were accustomed to eat it in the absence of their usual roots and fruits, not only without injury, but apparently with positive benefit to their health. And yet, day after day, Burke and Wills became weaker and more emaciated upon this diet. Their flesh wasted from their bones, their strength was reduced to an infants feebleness, and they could only crawl painfully a mile or two in a day. At last, when nearing the bourne of their hopes, the explorers perished one by one of starvation; a solitary survivor being found in the last extremity under a tree, where he had laid him down to die, by a party sent out in search of the missing expedition. When analysed, the nardoo bread was ascertained to be destitute of certain nutritious elements indispensable to the support of a European, though an Australian savage might for a while find it beneficial as an alternative. And thus it happened that these poor unfortunate Englishmen perished of starvation, even while feeding fully day by day upon food that seemed to satisfy their hunger. Now, is it not precisely so in the experience of those who are seeking and finding their portion in earthly things? They are contented with it, and yet their hunger is in reality unappeased. Their desires are crowned, and yet they are actually perishing of want. God gives them their request, but sends leanness to their souls. Is it not far more dreadful to perish by slow degrees of this spiritual atrophy, under the delusive belief that all is well, and therefore seeking no change of food, than to be tortured by the indigestion of feeding on ashes, if by this misery the poor victim can be urged to seek for food convenient for him? (H. Macmillan, LL. D.)
He feedeth on ashes:
Is not the very term most significant? What are ashes? They are the last solid products of matter that has been used up--the relics that remain after all that is useful and nutritious has been consumed. You burn a piece of wood or a handful of corn, and its grosser particles fall to the ground, while all its ethereal parts--its carbon and hydrogen--mount to the skies and disappear. It is a sad thing to gaze upon the ashes of the commonest fire; for in them there is an image of utter death and ruin--of something that has been bright and beautiful, and is now but dull, cold, barren dust. And what are earthly, created things, upon which so many are feeding the hunger of their immortal souls, but ashes?
They were once bright and beautiful. Gods blessing was upon them, and they were very good. But sin has consumed all their goodness and beauty, has burned up all in them that was capable of ministering to the spiritual wants of men, and left nothing behind but dust and ashes. We can apply this truth to all the world, so far as it is made the portion of the soul. In a moral sense, the whole world, which was once capable of ministering to mans spiritual wants, is now a mere heap of cinders. Its beauty has gone with its goodness, and its sufficing power with its holiness. It has become spiritually oxidised by combination with the all-devouring element of sin. The man that loves the world now feeds on ashes; not upon earth, for there is a degree of nourishment in soil, owing to the remains of former life, and the worm and the plant feed upon it; not upon clay, for the clay which the American-Indians eat is found to consist of microscopic plants with silicious envelopes, called diatoms, containing a small portion of organic matter sufficient to sustain existence;--no, but on dry, white, dusty ashes, utterly destitute of any nutritious element whatever, upon which no creature can live, and upon which almost no plant can grow--the refuse of everything that is good. (H. Macmillan, LL. D.)
Unsuitable food:
Some time ago, I read in the papers of a little boy who for months had been gathering up prune-stones, being fond of the kernel; so, wishing to prepare for himself a great treat, he laid up quite a large store: at last came the day of anticipated enjoyment; he ate them all, and, after hours of agony, died! So I have seen men who have given up their whole life to one aim, to amass wealth; preparing a banquet of enjoyment for the evening of their days; and, when they sat down to the feast, lo! on the table only ashes, ashes! (J. T. Davidson, D. D.)
A deceived heart hath turned him aside
The self-deception of most who affect to be infidels
1. Consider seriously, what was the real origin of your unbelief. A fathers house forsaken, and a fathers instructions soon to be forgotten, you entered on the world. Passions rose within you. Companions encouraged them; religion checked them. Your belief became irksome to your indulgence; and your faith descended to doubts. It was natural and necessary that it should do so, if you meant to continue in your sins.
2. You have had times, no doubt, when you thought your course somewhat wrong; and, partly sated with such enjoyments, had some idea of turning from them. What, then, was the obstacle? Was it the difficulty which you had in accounting for the truth of revelation? Was it not the voice of pleasure whispering, Will you then renounce the joys which were once so dear to you? Here was the fatal obstacle. Not in the difficulties of revelation, but in the timidity and weakness of the heart.
3. If this be not true, go one step farther. Many have met with calamity; a death unexpected among your friends, some great and sudden change of fortune, which showed you the uncertainty of human happiness. In these cases, what was your resource? Did you go to the tables, whither before you had gone for pleasure? Was it in the society of those who make a mock at sin that you expected the gleam of comfort in the hour of sorrow? Your heart will own that, when you were in heaviness, you could think upon God. But religions truth all the time remained the same. If, therefore, you doubted on it under the former situation, why not under the latter? Your heart deceived you. You did not disbelieve. You wished to do so; and passion blinded you. Affliction removed the veil from your heart.
4. But, living as we do in an age of boasted light, this reasoning will probably be considered as carried too far; and it will be urged by many a young man, that, although the passions may have had some influence in biassing his opinions, yet his doubts of the Gospel have arisen, in some measure, from his judgment. Let us, then, meet him on this ground. We expect, therefore, from you some striking argument that is to set aside at once the authority of ages and destroy the best hopes and resources of the human heart. And what do we find? A few common-place phrases and objections--doubts, not created by yourselves, but only received from others, and kept up by you, to preserve a kind of watchword of a party against believers.
5. But if you have not searched very deeply into these things yourself, they with whom you are in the habit of associating are adequate to give you sufficient religious instruction, and you have taken, you say, your creed chiefly from them. Let us, then, repair a moment to them. You profess yourselves general believers in a God, and possessed of some amiable virtues. How often in the assemblies of your friends and instructors is the name of God mentioned without irreverence? How seldom have you heard rigid virtue made the subject of discussion except to be ridiculed? Have you often heard beauty and innocence mentioned without some sentiment of an abandoned passion? (G. Mathew, M. A.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Alexander MacLaren 1905 · Public Domain On v20
Isaiah
FEEDING ON ASHES
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Isa 44:20.
The prophet has been pouring fierce scorn on idolaters. They make, he says, the gods they worship. They take a tree and saw it up: one log serves for a fire to cook their food, and with compass and pencil and plane they carve the figure of a man, and then they bow down to it and say, ‘Deliver me, for thou art my god!’ He sums up the whole in this sentence of my text, in which the tone changes from bitter irony to astonished pity. Now, if this were the time and the place, one would like to expand and illustrate the deep thoughts in these words in reference to idolatry; thoughts which go dead in the teeth of a great deal that is now supposed to be scientifically established, but which may be none the more true for all that. He asserts that idolatry is empty, a feeding on ashes. He declares, in opposition to modern ideas, that the low, gross forms of polytheism and idol-worship are a departure from a previous higher stage, whereas to-day we are told by a hundred voices that all religion begins at the bottom, and slowly struggles up to the top. Isaiah says the very opposite. The pure form is the primitive; the secondary form is the gross, which is a corruption. They tell us too, nowadays, that all religion pursues a process of evolution, and gradually clears itself of its more imperfect and carnal elements. Isaiah says, ‘he cannot deliver his soul’; and no religion ever worked itself up, unless under the impulse of a revelation from without. That is Isaiah’s philosophy of idolatry, and I expect it will be accepted as the true one some day.
But my text has a wider bearing. It not only describes, in pathetic language, the condition of the idolater, but it is true about all lives, which are really idolatrous in so far as they make anything else than God their aim and their joy. Every word of this text applies to such lives-that is to say, to the lives of a good many people listening to me now. And I would fain try to lay the truths here on some hearts. Let me just take them as they lie in the words before me.
I. A life that substantially ignores God is empty of all true satisfaction.
‘He feedeth on ashes’! Very little imagination will realise the force of that picture. The gritty cinders will irritate the lips and tongue, will dry up the moisture of the mouth, will interfere with the breathing, and there will be no nourishment in a sackful of them.
Dear brethren, the underlying truth is this-God is the only food of a man’s soul. You pick up the skeleton of a bird upon a moor; and if you know anything about osteology-the science of bones-you will see, in the very make of its breast-bone and its wing-bones, the declaration that its destiny was to soar into the blue. You pick up the skeleton of a fish lying on the beach, and you will see in its very form and characteristics that its destiny is to expatiate in the depths of the sea. And, written on you, as distinctly as flight on the bird, or swimming on the fish, is this, that you are meant, by your very make, to soar up into the heights of the glory of God, and to plunge deep into the abysses of His infinite love and wisdom. Man is made for God. ‘Whose image and superscription hath it?’ said Christ. The coin belongs to the king whose head and titles are displayed upon it; and on your heart, friend, though a usurper has tried to recoin the piece, and put his own foul image on the top of the original one, is stamped deep that you belong to the King of kings, to God Himself.
For what does our heart want? A perfect, changeless, all-powerful love. And what does our mind want? Reliable, guiding, inexhaustible, and yet accessible truth. And what does our will want? Commandments which have an authoritative ring in their very utterance, and which will serve for infallible guides for our lives. And what do our weak, sinful natures want? Something that shall free our consciences, and shall deliver us from the burden of our transgressions, and shall calm our fears, and shall quicken and warrant our lofty hopes. And what do men whose destiny is to live for ever want but something that shall go with them through all changes of condition, and, like a light in the midst of the darkest tunnel, shall burn in the passage between this and the other world, and shall never be taken away from them? We want a Person to be everything to us. No accumulation of things will satisfy a man. And we want all our treasures to be in one Person, and we need that that Person shall live as long as we live, and as long as we need shall be sufficient to supply us. And all this is only the spelling in many letters of the one name-God. That is what we want, that, and nothing less.
Then the next step that I suggest to you is, that where a man will take God for the food of his spirit, and turn love and mind and will and conscience and practical life to Him, seeing Him in everything, and seeing all things in Him; saturating, as it were, the universe with the thought of God, and recreating his own spirit with communion of friendship to Him; to that man lower goods do first disclose their real sweetness, their most poignant delight, and their most solid satisfaction. To say of a world where God has set us, that it is all ‘vanity and vexation of spirit,’ goes in flat contradiction to what He said when, creation finished, He looked upon His world, and proclaimed to the waiting seraphim around that ‘it was very good.’ There is a view of the world which calls itself pious, but is really an insult to God; and the irreligious pessimism that is fashionable nowadays, as if human life were a great mistake, and everything were mean and poor and insufficient, is contrary to the facts and to the consciousness of every man. But if you make things first which were meant to be second, then you make what was meant to be food ‘ashes.’ They are all good in their place. Wealth is good; wisdom is good; success is good; love is good. And all these things may be enjoyed without God, and will each of them yield their proportional satisfaction to the part of our nature to which they belong. But if you put them first you degrade them; a change passes over them at once. A long row of cyphers means nothing; put a significant digit in front of it, and it means millions. Take away the digit, and it goes back to nothing again. The world, and all its fading sweets, if you put God in the forefront of it, and begin the series with Him, is sweet, though it may be fleeting, and is meant to be felt by us as such. But if you take away Him, it is a row of cyphers signifying nothing, and able to contribute nothing to the real, deepest necessities of the human soul. And so the old question comes-’Why do ye spend your money for that which is not bread?’ It is bread, if only you will remember first that God is the food of your souls. But if you try to nourish yourselves on it alone, then, as I said, a sackful of such ashes will not stay your appetite. Oh! brethren, God has not so blundered in making the world that He has surrounded us with things that are all lies, but He has so made it that whosoever flies in the face of the gracious commandment which is also an invitation, ‘Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness,’ has not only no security that the ‘other things’ shall ‘be added unto him,’ but has the certainty that though they were added to him, in degree beyond his dreams and highest hopes, they would avail nothing to satisfy the hunger of his heart. As George Herbert puts it-
‘Shadows well mounted, dreams in a career,
Embroidered lies, nothing between two dishes,
These are the pleasures here.’
‘He feedeth on ashes,’ because he does not take God for the food of his soul.
II. So, secondly, notice that a life which thus ignores God is tragically unaware of its own emptiness.
‘A deceived heart hath turned him aside.’ That explains how the man comes to fancy that ashes are food. His whole nature is perverted, his vision distorted, his power of judgment marred. He is given over to hallucinations and illusions and dreams.
That explains, too, why men persist in this feeding on ashes after all experience. There is no fact stranger or more tragical in our histories than that we do not learn by a thousand failures that the world will not avail to make us restful and blessed. You will see a dog chasing a sparrow,-it has chased hundreds before and never caught one. Yet, when the bird rises from the ground, away it goes after it once more, with eager yelp and rush, to renew the old experience. Ah! that is like what a great many of you are doing, and you have not the same excuse that the dog has. You have been trying all your lives-and some of you have grey hairs on your heads-to slake your thirst by dipping leaky buckets into empty wells, and you are at it yet. As some one says, ‘experience throws a light on the wave behind us,’ but it does very little to fling a light on the sea before us. Experience confirms my text, for I venture to put it to the experience of every man-how many moments of complete satisfaction and rest can you summon up in your memory as having been yours in the past? ‘He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver, nor he that loveth abundance with increase.’ Appetite always grows faster than supply. And so, though we have tried them in vain so often, we turn again to the old discredited sources, and fancy we shall do better this time. Is it not strange? Is there any explanation of it, other than that of my text? ‘A deceived heart hath turned him aside.’
And that deceived heart, stronger than experience, is also stronger than conscience. Do you not know that you ought to be Christians? Do you not know that it is both wrong and foolish of you to ignore God? Do you not know that you will have to answer for it? Have you not had moments of illumination when there has risen up before you the whole vanity of your past lives, and when you have felt ‘I have played the fool, and erred exceedingly’? And yet, what has come of it all with some of you? Why, what comes of it with the drunkard in the Book of Proverbs, who, as soon as he has got over the bruises and the sickness of his last debauch, says, ‘I will seek it yet again.’ ‘A deceived heart hath turned him aside.’
And how is it that this hallucination that you have fed full and been satisfied, when all the while your hunger has not been appeased, can continue to act on us? For the very plain reason that every one of us has in himself a higher and a lower self, a set of desires for the grosser, more earthly, and, using the word in its proper sense, worldly sort-that is to say, directed towards material things, and a higher set which look right up to God if they were allowed fair play. And of these two sets-which really are one at bottom, if a man would only see it-the lower gets the upper hand, and suppresses the higher and the nobler. And so in many a man and woman the longing for God is crushed out by the grosser delights of sense.
One sometimes hears of cowardly, unmanly sailors, who in shipwreck push the women and children aside, and struggle to the boats. And there are in all of us groups of sturdy mendicants, so to speak, who elbow their way to the front, and will have their wants satisfied. What becomes of the gentler group that stand behind, unnoticed and silent? It is an awful thing when men and women do, as so many of us do, pervert the tastes that are meant to lead them to God, in order to stifle the consciousness that they need a God at all. There are tribes of low savages who are known as ‘clay-eaters.’ That is what a great many of us are; we feed upon the serpent’s meat, the dust of the earth, and let all the higher heavenly food, which addresses itself first to loftier desires, but also satisfies these lower ones, stand unnoticed, unsought for, unpartaken of. Dear friends, do not be befooled by that treacherous heart of yours, but let the deepest voices in your soul be heard. Understand, I beseech you, that their cry is for no created person or thing, and that only God Himself can satisfy them.
III. And now, lastly, notice that a life thus ignoring God needs a power from without to set it free.
‘He cannot deliver his soul.’ Can you? Do you think you can break the habits of a lifetime? Do you think that, left to yourself, you would ever have any inclination to break them? Certainly, left to yourselves, you will never have the power. These long indulged appetites of ours grow with indulgence; and that which first was light as a cobweb, and soft as a silken bracelet, becomes heavier and solider until it is an iron fetter upon the limb, which no man can break. There is nothing more awful in life than the influence of habit, so unthinkingly acquired, so inexorably certain, so limiting our possibilities and enclosing us in its grip.
Dear brethren, there is something more wanted than yourselves to break this chain. You have tried, I have no doubt, in the course of your lives, more and more resolutely, to cure yourselves of some more or less unworthy habits. They may be but mere slight tricks of attitude or intonation, or movement. Has your success been such as to encourage you to think that you can revolutionise your lives, and dethrone the despots that have ruled over you in the past? I leave the question to yourselves. To me it seems that the world of men is certain to go on ignoring God, and seeking its delight only in the world of creatures, unless there comes in an outside power into the heart of the world and revolutionises all things.
It is that power that I have to preach, the Christ who is the ‘Bread of God that came down from Heaven,’ who can lift up any soul from the most obstinate and long-continued grovelling amongst the transitory things of this limited world, and the superficial delights of sense and a gratified bodily life; who can bring the forgiveness which is essential, the deliverance from the power of evil which is not less essential, and who can fill our hearts with Himself the food of the world. He comes to each of us; He comes to you, with the old unanswerable question upon His lips, ‘Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which satisfieth not?’ It is unanswerable, for you can give no reason sufficient for such madness. All that you could say, and you durst not say it to Him, is, ‘a deceived heart hath turned me aside.’ He comes with the old gracious word upon His lips, ‘Take! eat! this is My body which is broken for you.’ He offers us Himself. He can stay all the hungers of all mankind. He can feed your heart with love, your mind with truth which is Himself, your will with His sweet commands.
As of old He made the thousands sit down upon the grass, and they did all eat and were filled, so He stands before the world to-day and says, ‘I am the Bread of Life; He that cometh to Me shall never hunger.’ And if you will only come to Him-that is to say, will trust yourselves altogether to the merits of His sacrifice, and the might of His indwelling Spirit-He will take away all the taste for the leeks and onions and garlic, and will give you the appetite for heavenly food. He will spread for you a table in the wilderness, and what would else be ashes will become sweet, wholesome, and nourishing. Nor will He cease there, for in His own good time He will call us to the banqueting house above, where He will make us to sit down to meat, and come forth Himself and serve us. Here, hunger often brings pain, and eating is followed by repletion. But there, appetite and satisfaction will produce each other perpetually, and the blessed ones who then hunger will not hunger so as to feel faintness or emptiness, nor be so filled as to cease to desire larger portions of the Bread of God. I beseech you, cry, ‘Lord, ever more give us this bread!’
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv18–20 for their eyes are blind and cannot see
for their eyes are blind and cannot see
Yahweh speaks of those who cannot understand the foolishness of worshiping idols as if they were blind. (See: Metaphor)
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for their eyes are blind
Here "their eyes" represents the whole person. AT: "for they are blind" (See: Synecdoche)
their hearts cannot perceive
Here the people are represented by their "hearts." AT: "they cannot understand" (See: Synecdoche)
translationWords
know
heart
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On v18 44:18-19 Their minds are shut: Idol worshipers cannot see…
44:18-19 Their minds are shut: Idol worshipers cannot see the irony in using one part of a log to warm themselves and another part of the same log to be their god.
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.