_Keep silence towards Me, O Isles, and let the peoples renew their strength: let them approach; then let them speak: to the Law let us come._
_Who hath stirred up from the sunrise Righteousness, calleth it to his foot? He giveth to his face peoples, and kings He makes him to trample; giveth_ them _as dust to his sword, as driven stubble to his bow. He pursues them, and passes to peace a road that he comes not with his feet. Who has wrought_ it _and done_ it? _Summoner of generations from the source,_[63] _I Jehovah the First, and with the Last; I am He._
Crœsus would have got a clear answer here, but it is probable that he had never heard of the Hebrews or of their God.
After this follows the satiric picture of the heathen world, which has already been quoted. And then, after an interval during which Jehovah turns to His own people (vv. 8-20),--for whatever be His business or His controversy, the Lord is mindful of His own,--He directs His speech specially against the third class of the leaders of heathendom. He has laughed the foolish statesmen and imagemakers out of court (vv. 5-7); He now challenges, in ver. 21, the oracles and their priests.
We have seen what these were, which this vast heathen world--heathen but human, convinced as we are that at the back of the world's life there is a secret, a counsel and a governor, and anxious as we are to find them--had to resort to. Timid waiters upon time, whom not even the lavish wealth of a Crœsus could tempt from their ambiguity; prophets speechless in face of history; oracles of meaning as dark and shifty as their steamy caves at Delphi, of tune as variable as the whispering oak of Dodona; wily-tongued Greeks, masters of ambiguous phrase, at Miletus, Abæ, and Thebes; Egyptian mystics in the far off temple of "Lybic Hammon,"--these are what the prophet sees standing at the bar of history, where God is Challenger.
_Bring here your case, saith Jehovah; apply your strong grounds, saith the King of Jacob. Let them bring out and declare unto us what things are going to happen; the first things_[64] _announce what they are, that we may set our heart on them, and know the issue of them; or the things that are coming, let us hear them. Announce the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods. Yea, do good or do evil, that we may stare and see it together. Lo! ye are nothing, and your work is of nought; an abomination is he who chooseth you._