Which great challenge just means, Come and be tested by facts. Here is history needing an explanation, and running no one knows whither. Prove your divinity by interpreting or guiding it. Cease your ambiguities, and give us something we can set our minds to work upon. Or do something, effect something in history, be it good or be it evil,--only let it be patent to our senses. For the test of godhead is not ingenuity or mysteriousness, but plain deeds, which the senses can perceive, and plain words, which the reason and conscience can judge. The insistance upon the senses and mental faculties of man is remarkable: _Make us hear them, that we may know, stare, see all together, set our mind to them._
But as we have learned from Herodotus, there was nobody in the world to answer such a challenge. Therefore Jehovah Himself answers it. He gives His explanation of history, and claims its events for His doing.
_I have stirred up from the north, and he hath come; from the rising of the sun one who calleth upon My Name: and he shall trample satraps like mortar, and as the potter treadeth out clay._
_Who hath announced on-ahead_[65] _that we may know, and beforehand that we may say, "Right!" Yea, there is none that announced, yea, there is none that published, yea, there is none that heareth your words._ But _a prediction_--or _predicter_, literally a _thing_ or _man on-ahead_ (r'ishôn corresponding to the me-r'osh of ver. 26)--_a prediction to Zion, "Behold, behold them," and to Jerusalem a herald of good news--I am giving_. The language here comes forth in jerks, and is very difficult to render. _But I look and there is no man even among these, and no counsellor, that I might ask them and they return word. Lo, all of them vanity! and nothingness their works; wind and waste their molten images._
Let us look a little more closely at the power of PREDICTION, on which Jehovah maintains His unique and sovereign Deity against the idols.
Jehovah challenges the idols to face present events, and to give a clear, unambiguous forecast of their issue. It is a debatable question, whether He does not also ask them to produce previous predictions of events happening at the time at which He speaks. This latter demand is one that He makes in subsequent chapters; it is part of His prophet's argument in chs. xlv.-xlvi., that Jehovah intimated the advent of Cyrus by His servants in Israel long before the present time. Whether He makes this same demand for previous predictions in ch. xli. depends on how we render a clause of ver. 22, _declare ye the former things_. Some scholars take _former things_ in the sense, in which it is used later on in this prophecy, of _previous predictions_. This is very doubtful. I have explained in a note, why I think them wrong; but even if they are right, and Jehovah be really asking the idols to produce former predictions of Cyrus' career, the demand is so cursory, it proves so small an item in His plea, and we shall afterwards find so many clearer statements of it, that we do better to ignore it now and confine ourselves to emphasizing the other challenge, about which there is no doubt,--the challenge to take present events and predict their issue.[66] Crœsus had asked the oracles for a forecast of the future. This is exactly what Jehovah demands in ver. 22, _declare unto us what things are going to happen_; in ver. 23, _declare the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods_; in ver. 26 (spoken from the standpoint of the subsequent fulfilment of the prediction), _who declared it on-ahead that we may know, and beforehand that we may now say, "Right!" Yea, there is none that declared, yea, there is none that published, yea, there is none that heareth your words_. But _a prediction unto Zion, "Behold, behold them," and to Jerusalem a herald of good news--I give. I give_ is emphatically placed at the end,--"I Jehovah alone, through my prophets in Israel, give such a prediction and publisher of good news."