Isaiah 25:8 He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from off all faces… "He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces" — a passage of which the poet Burns said that he "could never read it without weeping." I. THE PROMISE OF SWALLOWING UP DEATH IN VICTORY. This promise, as well as that which follows it, may have a primary allusion to the resuscitation of the Jewish people after their captivity, but this is only an allusion, as in Hosea 13:14. What the ultimate meaning is we learn from. the glowing words of St. Paul: "So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption," etc. It was a glorious promise when first given, but its full meaning was not known, nor will it be completely understood till it shall be actually fulfilled. Yet the revelations of the Gospel enable us to form an enlarged idea of what that fulfilment will be. 1. The death of our Lord Jesus Christ, as an expiation for sin and a homage to the claims of law, has removed, to His people, that which chiefly makes death terrible. That with man, the lord of the inferior creatures, the body should die just as they do, is sufficiently humbling. Yet, serious as this is, it is not the most solemn feature of the case. "After death the judgment," and, to a godless soul, how terrible that audit! But to a believer sin is forgiven. "The strength of sin in the law." But the law is satisfied, yea, magnified by the Redeemer's expiatory work. Peace may now, therefore, take the place of that apprehension which before was the only alternative to senseless unconcern. 2. As the Saviour's death not only obtains deliverance for believers from guilt and condemnation, but is the channel by which grace "reigns through righteousness unto eternal life," death becomes to them the gateway of life and the passage to Heaven. Here God educates them by the discipline of life, and often of the chamber of sickness, for His kingdom and the receiving of the promise. Then He calls them home to the possession of it, and it is death which brings the summons. 3. Still the earthly house lies in ruins. Death seems as yet to triumph there. But even those ruins are to be built again. II. THE WIPING AWAY THE TEARS OF SORROW. The two things are intimately related, and the second springs out of the first. Death is one of the prolific causes of sorrow. Whilst unreconciled to God, the thought of mortality, if a man thinks seriously of the great problems of his being at all, casts a dark shadow over his anticipations of the future. And even among Christians the separations which death occasions are a frequent cause of sadness. (E. T. Prust.) Parallel Verses KJV: He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from off all faces; and the rebuke of his people shall he take away from off all the earth: for the LORD hath spoken it. |
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