Isaiah 51:2

): " Look unto Abraham your father, the father of all the faithful, of all that follow after the righteousness of faith as he did ( Rom. iv. 11 ), and unto Sarah that bore you, and whose daughters you all are as long as you do well.

quarantine:debris (2026-07-29) — leading-punctuation+unbalanced-parens+odd-straight-quotes

Look unto Abraham your father,....

I called him alone - As I have made out of one a great nation; so, although ye are brought low and minished, yet I can restore you to happiness, and greatly multiply your number.

alone--translate, "I called him when he was but one" (Eze 33:24). The argument is: the same God who had so blessed "one" individual, as to become a mighty nation (Ge 12:1;

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I DESIRE to thank God for having had the privilege of preaching in Exeter Hall, yesterday, to a large congregation from the whole of the second verse of the 51st of Isaiah—"Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bore you: for I called him alone, and blessed him, and increased him." [See No. 1596, HEARKEN AND LOOK—OR, ENCOURAGEMENT FOR BELIEVERS preached on behalf of the Baptist Missionary Society on the morning of April 27,1881.]

I DESIRE to thank God for having had the privilege of preaching in Exeter Hall, yesterday, to a large congregation from the whole of the second verse of the 51st of Isaiah—"Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bore you: for I called him alone, and blessed him, and increased him." [See No. 1596, HEARKEN AND LOOK—OR, ENCOURAGEMENT FOR BELIEVERS preached on behalf of the Baptist Missionary Society on the morning of April 27,1881.] On that occasion I confined my remarks to Abraham and tried to make prominent the facts that God called him while he was a heathen man, one man and a lone man—and yet He blessed him and made him the founder of His people, multiplying his seed as the stars and as the sand of the seashore. I devoutly beseech the Lord to accept my testimony to His power and to increase the faith of the many of His servants to whom I spoke on that occasion. His Holy Spirit gave me the word—may He cause His saints to feed upon it! Now, I never like to do an injustice to anybody and I feel that I did not, in that sermon, speak sufficiently about Sarah, though I did not quite forget her. Let us make up for our omissions. If we had Abraham at Exeter Hall yesterday morning, we will have Sarah at the Tabernacle, tonight, and maybe we shall learn a lesson from her holy character as well as from that of her husband. And the two lessons combined may go to the perfecting of each other. May our great Teacher, the Holy Spirit, now instruct us! To begin with, let us note what a happy circumstance it is when a godly, gracious man has an equally godly and gracious wife. It is ill when there is a difference, a radical difference, between husband and wife—when one fears God and the other has no regard for Him.

‘Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you: for I called him alone, and blessed him, and increased him For the Lord shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody.’’Isaiah 51:2-3. THE second verse contains my actual text. It is the argument by which faith is led to look for the blessings promised in the third verse.

‘Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you: for I called him alone, and blessed him, and increased him For the Lord shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody.’’Isaiah 51:2-3. THE second verse contains my actual text. It is the argument by which faith is led to look for the blessings promised in the third verse. It is habitual with some persons to spy out the dark side of every question or fact: they fix their eyes upon the ‘waste places,’ and they study them till they know every ruin, and are familiar with the dragons and the owls. They sigh most dolorously that the former times were better than these, and that we have fallen upon most degenerate days. They speak of ‘shooting Niagara,’ and of all sorts of frightful things. I am afraid that a measure of this tendency to write bitter things dwells in almost all of us at this present season, for certain discouraging facts which cannot be ignored are pressing heavily upon men’s spirits. The habit of looking continually towards the wildernesses is injurious because it greatly discourages; and anything that discourages an earnest worker is a serious leakage for his strength. Perhaps a worse result than honest discouragement comes of depressing views, for they often afford an apology for indifference and inaction. The smallest peg suffices to hang an excuse upon when we are anxious to escape from the stern service of faith. ‘I pray thee have me excused,’ is a request which was supported in the parable by the flimsiest of pretences, and discouragement makes one of the same sort. The sluggard’s argument is on this wise,’’I will not attempt the work, for it is far too heavy for my poor strength.

Look unto Abraham - What was figuratively expressed in the former verse is here expressed literally. They were directed to remember that God had taken Abraham and Sarah from a distant land, and that from so humble a beginning he had increased them to a great nation. The argument is, that he was able to bless and increase the exile Jews, though comparatively feeble and few. For I called him alone - Hebrew, ‘For one I called him;’ that is, he was alone; there was but one, and he increased to a mighty nation. So Jerome, Quia unum vocavi eum. So the Septuagint, Ὅτι εἷς ἦν hoti heis ēn - ‘For he was one.’ The point of the declaration here is, that God had called one individual - Abraham - and that he had caused him to increase until a mighty nation had sprung from him, and that he had the same power to increase the little remnant that remained in Babylon until they should again become a mighty people.