Wisdom and The Word. 6. At the very beginning of God's work of love, the creation of a race He was also to redeem from misery to a new eternal life, the identification begins also. A comparison of the history and attributes of Wisdom in the 8th chapter of the Book of Proverbs with the language of the New Testament, and especially of the 1st chapter of John's Gospel, respecting Him who was called the "Wisdom of God," shows us, by manifestations of identity which would be enough and to spare of evidence in any historical question of identity, the future Saviour of the world, the impersonation of God's love to man, looking forward from the bosom of the Father to that manifestation of love; waiting to accomplish the work which He finished in the fulness of times. "The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way, before His works of old" (Prov. viii. 22). "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God" (John i. 1). "When He prepared the heavens, I was there: when He set a compass upon the face of the depth: when He established the clouds above: when He gave to the sea His commandment: when He appointed the foundations of the earth: then was I by Him, as one brought up with Him: and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him; rejoicing in the habitable part of His earth; and my delights were with the sons of men. Now therefore hearken unto me" (Prov. viii. 27, &c.) "Whom He hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds; who being the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His person" (Heb. i. 2, 3). "All things were made by Him; and without Him was not any thing made that was made. In Him was life; and the life was the light of men" (John i. 3). "The only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father" (John i. 18). "This is my beloved Son; hear ye Him" (Matt. xvii. 5). The remarkable phase of Jewish theology at the beginning of the Christian era noticed above (Chap. III. p. 49)— viz., the identifying of the Word of the Lord with Jehovah in the Old Testament-is a fact which it is relevant to refer to here, as indicating how the first Christians, the personal scholars of John, would understand his language as carrying back the personal history of Jesus to the beginning of human time. 7. In the history of human salvation, inaugurated as de ances. scribed in Prov. viii., we should expect to recognise Him who Human was the power of God and the wisdom of God, in the records appearof His very present helps to the objects of His love. Do we find anticipations of Jesus of Nazareth in Divine Love's early communion with man, when it came, as Jesus of Nazareth afterwards came, to bless, or promise, or save? We do. We see foretastes given, earnests recorded, even of that characteristic assurance of saving love which the manifestation of Jesus was to mankind-the assumption of the fellow-feeling condition, God the Saviour coming to man in the very form and lineaments of his own kind. On three occasions, which we must look at as forepointing epochs in the history of God's selecting love of that race which was to bring the knowledge of His grace to all the peoples of the earth-1st, when He came to tell Abraham of the immediate fulfilment of that promise of seed, the consummation of which was to be the accomplished salvation of men; 2d, when He came to Jacob, the immediate father of the chosen family, to give him the name of divine honour, Israel, God's name for His own people; and 3d, when the fulness of times was come for the holy nation entering upon the conquest of the promised land, and He appeared before Jericho to Joshua, saying, "As the Captain of the Lord's host am I come "-He came as He came in the great fulness of times, in the form of man. And with the same human sympathies He came; the hearer of prayer to Abraham's marvellous intercession; humbling Himself to the weak estate of "His servant Jacob's" human nature so as even to suffer the patriarch to wrestle as a man with Him and prevail; taking, to uphold Joshua's faith, the burden of Israel's conflicts upon Himself, as now, the "Captain of our salvation," He takes ours. titles. 8. The identity of "The Word," the declarer of God to Identifying men (John i. 18) in the fulness of times, with the old "messenger of Jehovah," "the angel of His presence," the declarer of His love to representative men in the preparatory times, should be no surprise to us, but a thing we should miss if it were not taught, since we read of both bearing the name and surrounded with the attributes of God, and working alike as the whole purpose of their manifestation among men, one peculiar work, that of man's Saviour. The identity is taught however. He whom Abraham received at the door of his tent in the plains of Mamre is called Jehovah throughout the narrative; and the "man" who wrestled with Jacob, Hosea tells us (xii. 3-5), was "the Angel," "God," "the Lord God of hosts," "Jehovah." He was "the Angel" whose blessing Jacob invoked upon the sons of Joseph, who had "redeemed the patriarch himself from all evil" (Gen. xlviii. 16). When the time came for Israel's deliverance from Egypt, the first words that Moses heard (Exod. iii.) from "the Angel" (ver. 2), "Jehovah" (ver. 4), out of the midst of the fire, was a declaration of the identity of Israel's Saviour with the Saviour and friend of Abraham and Jacob: "I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." And the next words spoken by the God of Abraham to the prophet, the incommunicable name I AM, carry on the declared identity to the divine presence known to man in Judæa and Galilee, and to Him who shall sit on the throne in "the new heavens and the new earth." That name by which the peculiar people were in all their wanderings and settlements to think of their deliverer and trust in Him, the name of eternal inherent existence, “I AM," was never repeated to human ears again after that first declaration of it until Jesus of Nazareth repeated it as His own attribute on earth-" Before Abraham was, I am" (John viii. 58); and Jesus, exalted to the glory which His own are to behold and rejoice in for ever, declared Himself, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty" (Rev. i. 8). How more clearly could declaratory evidence tell us that it is one being who is to be the beginning and the end, the first and the last object, of our faith's realising thoughts when thinking historically of God's saving love? How more distinctly could we have set before us "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever," as the central fact of revelation, the fact ever present, the tree of righteousness planted in the earth, whose sheltering branches and healing leaves all other facts of God's love are? It is enough of critical proof to identify the Jesus of the Gospels with the object of the patriarchs' faith, the "I AM" of Horeb and the "Jehovah" of Israel. And the Jehovah of Israel had no changed manifestation from His revelation to Moses until the fulness of times. Isaiah (lxiii. 9) epitomises the history of Israel as being all a fulfilment of Jehovah's promise to Moses (Exod. xxxiii. 14)" My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest;" and in identifying Israel's Saviour from Egypt with their Saviour from all succeeding troubles, he impressively sets before us the same manner of salvation, all-comprehensive and all-sympathising, which belongs to Jesus of Nazareth alone: "In all their affliction He was afflicted, and the angel of His presence saved them: in His love and in His pity He redeemed them; and He bare them, and carried them all the days of old." tification. 9. The moral identification of the Jehovah of the patriarchs Moral idenand Israel with mankind's Jesus, which Isaiah illustrates in the passage now quoted-the recognisable likeness, the sameness of expression and ways, in those old drawings-nigh of God to man, with the words and ways of Him who spake as never man spake is what faith will most rejoice to find in the early testimonies, and most will get edification from. An attentive perusal of the narratives of man's early communion with the object of his faith-" the Angel of the Lord," " the Angel of His presence," the Saviour of Israel's temporal salvations, the King of Israel's so redeemed national life, who is identified by the incommunicable name with "Jesus," the Saviour of His people's sins, the "Messenger of the covenant," the "Angel" of the Apocalypse-will show as distinct identity in moral characteristics, presenting that unique union seen in Jesus of divine grace and human sympathies. The accounts given of those early communions of God with man look like as if He, whose marvellous love was to be manifested in the fulness of times in taking the very condition of man upon Himself, had from the beginning, in desirous anticipation, frequently realised His coming nearness of approach to them; foretasting it in spirit, watching over and yearning after His own with that "desirous desire" which afterwards longed for His best earthly communion with Early facts understood only by light. or them (Luke xxii. 15); and as if He had again and again broken |