Upon those great thoughts, that God's are all strong things and all weak things, and that the real and the certain in life is His will, the prophecy breaks into a vision of multitudes in motion. There is a great stirring and hastening, crowds gather up through the verses, the land is lifted and thronged. _Lift up thine eyes round about, and behold: all of them gather together, they come unto thee. As I live, saith Jehovah, thou shalt surely clothe thyself with them all as with an ornament, and gird thyself with them, like a bride. For as for thy waste places and thy desolate ones and thy devastated land--yea, thou wilt now be too strait for the inhabitants, and far off shall be they that devoured thee. Again shall they speak in thine ears,--the children of thy bereavement_ (that is, those children who have been born away from Zion during her solitude), _Too strait for me is the place, make me room that I may dwell. And thou shalt say in thine heart, Who hath borne me these_,--not begotten, as our English version renders, because the question with Zion was not who was the father of the children, but who, in her own barrenness, could possibly be the mother,--_Who hath borne me these, seeing I was_ first _bereft of my children, and_ since then have been _barren, an exile and a castaway! And these, who hath brought them up! Lo, I was left by myself. These,--whence are they!_ Our English version, which has blundered in the preceding verses, requires no correction in the following; and the first great Doubt in the Way being now answered, for _they that wait on the Lord shall not be ashamed_, we pass to the second, in ver. 24.
2. _Can the prey be taken from the mighty, or the captives of the tyrant_[242] _be delivered?_ Even though God be full of love and thought for Zion, will these tyrants give up her children? _Yea, thus saith Jehovah, Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken, and the prey of the tyrant be delivered; and with him that quarreleth with thee will I quarrel, and thy children will I save. And I will make thine oppressors to eat their own flesh, and as with new wine with their blood shall they be drunken, that all flesh may know that I am Jehovah thy Saviour, and thy Redeemer the Mighty One of Jacob._