Israel's present shame proves God alone gives victory

But these hopes, he says, are firm and unshakable, and we will not abandon them because of what has happened. Yet what has happened now is the opposite of them. For we have been left behind by you, he says, having been thrust away, and you are not present with our armies. The shame that then seized the battles has come around upon us, and we have been diminished before those whom we formerly mastered, and we have been plundered by those whom we plundered. For in this it has been shown all the more by God that the strength belonged to Israel, since when they are abandoned they are defeated—just as for man, being abandoned became the occasion of death, showing that resurrection comes from God alone and in no other way (Psalm 44:11).

We have been gripped by cowardice, he says, a cowardice unable to defend us against those who devour us like sheep. This is the cowardice that Moses also threatened would seize them for their transgressions, because the sound of a driven leaf would pursue them. And we have become captives, he says, and we have been scattered among the nations—we who were formerly brought out from the nations and possessed the holy land. This is a dissolution of honor, just as for man the dissolution of his formation is the saying, “Earth you are, and to earth you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). So also Isaiah says about the people: “We have become as at the beginning, when you did not rule over us and your mercy was not called upon us” (Isaiah 63:19) (Psalm 44:12).

Freely they were sold, as Isaiah also says. And he says they were sold for their sins, just as Paul says about man: “I am fleshly, sold under sin” (Romans 7:14). The sale is the alienation and the coming to be under human masters instead of God. This is what he also threatened Jeroboam and the people with him through Shemaiah the prophet: that they would become slaves to the Egyptian king Shishak, and they would know the slavery of God and the slavery of the kings of the earth (2 Chronicles 12:8).

For such a thing is a parable—that they are remembered in the curses. Just as Jeremiah says against the false prophets: “They will take up a curse against him in the exile, O Judah, in Babylon, saying, ‘May the Lord do to you as he did to Zedekiah and as to Ahab, whom the king of Babylon roasted in fire because of the lawlessness they committed in Israel’”. Grant these things now, and most justly: they are devoured like sheep, when they led Christ like a sheep to slaughter; they are sold to the nations, just as they bought the Lord, betrayed for silver and in some way handed over to death; they are mocked, just as they made mockery and shaking of heads at the crucified Lord (Psalm 44:11-14).

This alone remains to Israel as a hope for the recall of those who are left, which the prophecy foreseeing says: that they did not turn aside to the customs of the Greeks according to the idolatry they had agreed upon, nor did they swerve from the path of piety toward the one God that had been commanded them, even though they were so humbled and exiled and placed under the authority of those who kill. This was preserved especially by those around Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael, who endured fire rather than accept worship of idols. And indeed, this is not present as something pious among the remaining Jews at the present time. For while they do not entirely abandon the practice of not going to idols or the Greek sickness of incantations, their impiety toward Christ is shown to be most harmful in this way: because, not worshiping idols as before, they are enslaved as never before.

Having mentioned the Israelite evils before this and having left behind the grace that releases from evils—a grace beginning from the nations but also taking up no small portion of those from Israel, for many from the Jews have believed—he makes a kind of prelude of the initiation concerning these things. He announces a good word about the coming of the king, who oversees the works of the righteous for his contemplation, and which are brought up by them as a kind of hearing for him, and who gives to them the divine fulfillment. For he has come as the fulfiller of what is not truly fulfilled among human beings, lawful by divine purity and by the sanctifying participation that comes from him. And he indicates that he will say many things quickly, comparing the tongue that declares these things to the pen of a very swift scribe.

Isaiah foresees his outward appearance failing compared to the sons of men, prophesying his dishonor according to the flesh (Psalm 45:2). But David interprets the divine beauty, which is also made clear in Isaiah through the words that the king will be seen with glory.