Vain Comfort, and Ariel Besieged

…“Take counsel; exalt a vain comfort” (Isaiah 28:29).

Having promised them amnesty for their drunken outrages, and having said very plainly that He will not be too harsh with them, He bids them lay hold of good counsel. But He rebukes them because they thought a vain comfort to be something great and lofty, and so were carried beyond what is reasonable. And what was this comfort which they held to be great, though it brought no profit? Surely that one. For they said: “We have made a covenant with Hades and agreements with death; if a rushing storm passes through, it will not come upon us; we have made a lie our hope, and by the lie we shall be sheltered” (Isaiah 28:15).

But those who pondered these things and held an empty hope, supposing that they would die before the calamities came, heard plainly: “If a rushing storm comes upon you, you will be trampled down by it. Whenever it passes by, it will take you” (Isaiah 28:18-19).

“Woe, city of Ariel, which David besieged! Gather produce year upon year, for you will eat with Moab. For I will afflict Ariel, and her strength and her wealth will be Mine. And I will encircle you like David, and set a palisade around you, and set towers around you; and your words will be brought low to the earth, and your words will sink into the earth. And your voice will be like those who speak from the earth, and your voice will grow faint toward the ground” (Isaiah 29:1-4).

He takes up something that happened in history in the time of the reign of blessed David, and he does this as if to bring to light what the synagogue of the Jews dared to do against Christ. For the things that befell the people of old as in shadows are types of the true things.

Now the present Jerusalem was once called Jebus. Blessed David besieged it, and for what cause we shall learn from the holy Scriptures themselves. For it runs thus in the Second Book of Samuel: “And David and all his men went to Jerusalem, to the Jebusite who inhabited the land; and it was said to David, David shall not come in here; for the blind and the lame rose up, saying, He shall not come in here. And David took the stronghold of Zion; this is the city of David. And David said on that day: Let everyone who strikes a Jebusite attack with the dagger the blind and the lame, who fight against the life of David” (2 Samuel 5:6-8).

So the blind and the lame from Jerusalem, or Jebus, opposed blessed David, and for doing this they perished miserably; for he took the city. And at the time of His coming, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, lame and blind, opposed Christ, the Savior of all; for they did not know how to walk uprightly. Nor did they receive the divine light into their mind, those who…