What Does Isaiah 8:18 Mean?

(18) **Behold, I and the children whom the Lord hath given me . . .**—In the mystic significance of his own name (Isaiah—*Salvation of Jehovah*) and of the names of his sons: *Remnant shall return. *and *Speed-plunder, Haste-spoil, *possibly also in that of Immanuel, the prophet finds a sufficient revelation of the future. Each was a *nomen et omen *for those who had ears to hear. Could the disciples of Isaiah complain that they had no light thrown upon the future, when, so to say, they had those embodied prophecies? The children disappear from the scene, and we know nothing of their after-history, but all their life long, even with or without a special prophetic work, they must have been, by virtue of their names, witnesses to a later generation, of what Isaiah had predicted. In Isaiah’s own life, as including symbolic acts as well as prophetic words (Isaiah 20:2), we have a further development of the thought that he was “a sign and a wonder.” (Comp. Ezekiel 12:11.) The citation of the words, “I and the children whom thou hast given me,” in Hebrews 2:13, is noticeable here chiefly as showing how little the writer of that Epistle cared in this and other quotations for the original meaning of the words as determined by the context. It was enough for him that the Christ, like the prophet, did not stand alone, but claimed a fellowship with the children whom the Father had given him (John 17:6; John 17:12), as being alike servants and children of God, called to do His will.