Isaiah's preface is in the form of a Trial or Assize. Ewald calls it "The Great Arraignment." There are all the actors in a judicial process. It is a Crown case, and God is at once Plaintiff and Judge. He delivers both the Complaint in the beginning (vv. 2, 3) and the Sentence in the end. The Assessors are Heaven and Earth, whom the Lord's herald invokes to hear the Lord's plea (ver. 2). The people of Judah are the Defendants. The charge against them is one of brutish, ingrate stupidity, breaking out into rebellion. The Witness is the prophet himself, whose evidence on the guilt of his people consists in recounting the misery that has overtaken their land (vv. 4-9), along with their civic injustice and social cruelty--sins of the upper and ruling classes (vv. 10, 17, 21-23). The people's Plea-in-defence, laborious worship and multiplied sacrifice, is repelled and exposed (vv. 10-17). And the Trial is concluded--_Come now, let us bring our reasoning to a close, saith the Lord_--by God's offer of pardon to a people thoroughly convicted (ver. 18). On which follow the Conditions of the Future: happiness is sternly made dependent on repentance and righteousness (vv. 19, 20). And a supplementary oracle is given (vv. 24-31), announcing a time of affliction, through which the nation shall pass as through a furnace; rebels and sinners shall be consumed, but God will redeem Zion, and with her a remnant of the people.
That is the plan of the chapter--a Trial at Law. Though it disappears under the exceeding weight of thought the prophet builds upon it, do not let us pass hurriedly from it, as if it were only a scaffolding.
That God should argue at all is the magnificent truth on which our attention must fasten, before we inquire what the argument is about. God reasons with man--that is the first article of religion according to Isaiah. Revelation is not magical, but rational and moral. Religion is reasonable intercourse between one intelligent Being and another. God works upon man first through conscience.
Over against the prophetic view of religion sprawls and reeks in this same chapter the popular--religion as smoky sacrifice, assiduous worship, and ritual. The people to whom the chapter was addressed were not idolaters.[2] Hezekiah's reformation was over. Judah worshipped her own God, whom the prophet introduces not as for the first time, but by Judah's own familiar names for Him--Jehovah, Jehovah of Hosts, the Holy One of Israel, the Mighty One, or Hero, of Israel. In this hour of extreme danger the people are waiting on Jehovah with great pains and cost of sacrifice. They pray, they sacrifice, they solemnize to perfection. But they do not _know_, they do not _consider_; this is the burden of their offence. To use a better word, they do not _think_. They are God's grown-up children (ver. 2)--_children_, that is to say, like the son of the parable, with native instincts for their God, and _grown up_--that is to say, with reason and conscience developed. But they use neither, stupider than very beasts. _Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider._ In all their worship conscience is asleep, and they are drenched in wickedness. Isaiah puts their life in an epigram--_wickedness and worship: I cannot away_, saith the Lord, _with wickedness and worship_ (ver. 13).