Charles Ellicott Commentary Isaiah 42

Behold my servant ... —Here the words point not, as before, to the visible, or even the ideal Israel, but to One who is the centre of both, with attributes which are reproduced in His people in the measure of their fulfilment of the ideal.

“Elect” is another of the words with which Isaiah has fashioned the theology of Christendom. It meets us there four times (Isaiah 45:4; Isaiah 65:9, 22), and is echoed and interpreted in the voice from heaven of Matthew 3:17. That voice fixed on the human consciousness of the Son of Man that He was “the servant of the Lord,” and throughout His life we trace an ever-expanding and conscious reproduction of the chief features of Isaiah’s picture. Disciples like St. Matthew learned to recognize that likeness even in what might seem to us subordinate details (Matthew 12:17–21).

I have put my spirit ... —An echo from Isaiah 11:2, heard once more in Isaiah 61:1. The promise we note as fulfilled in closest connection with the utterance of the previous words in Matthew 3:16; Luke 3:22; John 1:32–33.

He shall bring forth judgment to ... —The ministry of “the servant,” as extending to the Gentiles, is prominent in 2 Isaiah (Isaiah 49:6–7; Isaiah 52:15). It expands the thought of Isaiah 2:1-4. There the Temple is the centre from which the knowledge and the “judgment” (used here in the sense of law, or ordinance) flow; here it is from the personal teaching of “the servant.”

He shall not cry ... —Isaiah’s ideal of a teacher, but partly realized in himself, is that of one exempt from the violence of strong feelings, calm in the sereneness of authority, strong in his far-reaching and pitying sympathy. False prophets might rave as in orgiastic frenzy. We are reminded of Solon affecting the inspiration of a soothsayer in order to attract attention to his converts.

Even true prophets might be stirred to vehement and incisive speech, but it should not be so with him. No point of resemblance between the archetype and the portrait seems to have impressed people so deeply as this (Matthew 7:29; Matthew 12:17–21). The “street” describes the open space of an Eastern city, in which, as in the Greek agora, men harangued the people, while “the gate of the city” was reserved for the more formal administration of justice (Ruth 4:1; Proverbs 31:23).

A bruised reed shall he not break ... — Physical, moral, and spiritual weakness are all brought under the same likeness. In another context, we have encountered this image in Isaiah 36:6. The simple negative “he shall not break” implies, as in the rhetoric of all times, the opposite extreme: the tender care that props and supports.

The humanity of the servant of the Lord was to embody what had already been declared concerning the Divine will (Psalms 51:17). The dimly burning flax, the wick of a lamp nearly out, He will foster, cherish, and feed the spiritual life, almost extinguished, with oil until it burns brightly again. In Matthew 25:1-13, we have to deal with lamps that are going out, and these not even He could light again unless the bearers of the lamps “bought oil” for themselves.

Judgment unto truth — that is, according to the perfect standard of truth, with something of the sense of St. John’s “true” in the sense of representing the ideal (John 1:9; John 15:1).

He shall not fail nor be discouraged ... —Both verbs in the Hebrew point back to those of the previous verse, He shall not burn dimly nor be crushed, as if to teach that in helping others to strength and light, the servants of the Lord, after the pattern of the Servant, gain light and strength for themselves.

The isles shall wait for his law. —The relation of “the servant” to the far-off Gentile world is still dominant in the prophet’s mind. The Septuagint Version, given in Matthew 12:21, In His name shall the Gentiles hope, is a paraphrase rather than a translation. The words describe the earnest expectation, the unconscious longing of the heathen for One who shall be a true teacher (Romans 8:22).

He that created. —The accumulation of Divine attributes, as enhancing the solemnity of a revelation, has an earlier parallel in Amos 5:8; a later one in Zechariah 12:1.