be clean, take away the evil of your devices from my eyes: cease to do perversely [1]. Learn to do well: seek judgment. Then come and accuse me, saith the Lord. If your sins be as scarlet, they shall be made as white as snow: if they be red as crimson, they shall be as white as wool. But if you will provoke me to wrath, the sword shall devour you.”
To this prophet also the Lord revealed so many particulars[2] relating to the Saviour of the world that, reading his prophecies, one would suppose Isaias had lived at the same time as our Divine Lord, instead of living seven hundred years before. A few of these prophecies will show how clearly this greatest of all the prophets foresaw the Birth, Passion and Death of the Redeemer.
Speaking of the Mother of the Messias, as well as of the Messias Himself, he said: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and His name shall be called Emmanuel, that is, God with us.” — “And there shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a flower shall rise up out of his root. And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and of fortitude, the spirit of knowledge and of godliness. And He shall be filled with the spirit of the fear of the Lord.”
“A Child is born to us, a Son is given to us, and the government is upon His shoulder. His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, God the mighty, the Father of the world to come, the Prince of Peace.” “God Himself will come and save you; then [3] shall the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped.”
Concerning the Passion of our Lord he prophesied: “There is no beauty[4] in Him, nor comeliness. Despised, and the most abject of men, a man of[5] sorrows. He has borne our infirmities;
- ↑ Cease to do perversely. The Lord thus reminds the inhabitants of Juda that they were not only to worship Him outwardly, but to serve Him by thought, word and deed. If they were converted, He would take away their sins, however grievous or numerous they might be.
- ↑ Particulars. Isaias described much of our Lord’s Life as accurately as if he had been one of the evangelists, who wrote and described what they had themselves seen. Only a few among the many prophecies of Isaias are quoted above.
- ↑ Then. That is when the Redeemer shall have come.
- ↑ No beauty, i. e. He, the Redeemer, is quite disfigured and marred by the treatment He has received.
- ↑ A man of. i. e. a man full of suffering — only there for the purpose of suffering.
