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Isaiah 49:19

Albert Barnes
Notes on the Whole Bible

For thy waste and thy desolate places - Thy land over which ruin has been spread, and ever which the exile nation mourns.

And the land of thy destruction - That is, thy land laid in ruins. The construction is not uncommon where a noun is used to express the sense of an adjective. Thus in Psalm 2:6, the Hebrew phrase (margin) is correctly rendered ‹my holy hill.‘ Here the sense is, that their entire country had been so laid waste as to be a land of desolation.

Shall even now be too narrow - Shall be too limited to contain all who shall become converted to the true God. The contracted territory of Palestine shall be incapable of sustaining all who will acknowledge the true God, and who shall be regarded as his friends.

And they that swallowed thee up - The enemies that laid waste thy land, and that “absorbed,” as it were, thy inhabitants, and removed them to a distant land. They shall be all gone, and the land shall smile again in prosperity and in loveliness.

Matthew Henry
Concise Bible Commentary
Zion is addressed as an afflicted widow, bereaved of her children. Numbers flock to her, and she is assured that they come to be a comfort to her. There are times when the church is desolate and few in number; yet its desolations shall not last for ever, and God will repair them. God can raise up friends for returning Israelites, even among Gentiles. They shall bring their children, and make them thy children. Let all deal tenderly and carefully with young converts and beginners in religion. Princes shall protect the church. It shall appear that God is the sovereign Lord of all. And those who in the exercise of faith, hope, and patience, wait on God for the fulfilment of his promises, shall never be confounded.
Ellen G. White
Our High Calling, 334.2

What kind of blindness is this? It is a blindness that will not allow our eyes to contemplate evil. It will not allow our eyes to rest upon iniquity. It will not grasp the things of sight and lose eternity out of its reckoning.... We want to see aright, we want to see as God sees; for Satan is constantly trying to convert the things our eyes rest upon in order that we may see through his medium.... OHC 334.2

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