to see how long that love in which it rejoiced had looked forward to be fully known, are: "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me? All they that see me laugh me to scorn they shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying, He trusted on the Lord that He would deliver him: let Him deliver him, seeing He delighted in him" (Ps. xxii.) "They weighed for my price thirty pieces of silver. And the Lord said unto me, Cast it unto the potter. And I took the thirty pieces of silver, and cast them to the potter in the house of the Lord" (Zech. xi. 12, 13). "And one shall say, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends. Awake, O sword, against my Shepherd, and against the man that is my fellow, saith the Lord of hosts: smite the Shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered" (Zech. xiii. 6, 7). "Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah ? this that is glorious in His apparel, travelling in the greatness of His strength? I that speak in righteousness, mighty to save. Wherefore art Thou red in Thine apparel, and Thy garments like him that treadeth the winefat? I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me. And I looked, and there was none to help; and I wondered that there was none to uphold: therefore mine own arm brought salvation unto me" (Isa. lxiii. 1-5). "Then I said, I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nought, and in vain. And He said, It is a light thing that Thou shouldest be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel; I will also give Thee for a light to the Gentiles, that Thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth" (Isa. xlix. 4, 6). These are examples of descriptions lying here and there in the Old Testament fitting the redeeming life lived by Jesus, which are not given in their places as prophecies of the Christ, nor are claimed as prophecies in the argument of the evangelists and apostles, but are peculiar features of the life of saving love that was to be lived upon earth; and in them faith, taught by the Gospels, recognises Him who is the theme of the evangelists, and sees Him, as it were, standing by the side of the prophets, and, while He helped them by the New writers. to look forward to the fulness of times, letting fall in His inspiration of their speech expressions which would have to wait full recognition until the mystery of godliness was manifest in the flesh,-but would then betray His own forelooking love. recognised 23. Did not the first disciples love to recall such expressions Testament to their minds, and rejoice in any new one that occurred, as some peculiar event of their Lord's life, or some remarkable phase of conduct, brought up suddenly its description in old revelation? A confessed example is in John ii. 17. Seeing their Master's strange access of holy indignation, and His as strange authority in expelling the traders from His Father's house, they remembered that it was written, "The zeal of Thine house hath eaten me up" (Ps. lxix. 9). So did the evangelists themselves "remember," and see far back the footprints of the Saviour coming through the long ages to the history they were to write. Matthew (ii. 15) sees Jesus in Hosea's words of Israel (xi. 1), "I called my son out of Egypt;" and in Jeremiah's picture of the captivity (Matt. ii. 18, Jer. xxxi. 15), “Rachel weeping for her children." John beholds incidents of His crucifixion painted long before in the Psalms (xix. 24, xxii. 18), "They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture;" (xix. 36, xxxiv. 20), "He keepeth all his bones: not one of them is broken." Paul, feeling the greatness of Jesus, and the direful ignorance which crucified the Lord of glory, recognises the grandeur of the Christian times foreshown in Isaiah's unconscious words of Jehovah's grace to penitents of his own time (1 Cor. ii. 9, Isa. lxiv. 4): "Since the beginning of the world men have not heard, nor perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen, O God, besides Thee, what He hath prepared for him that waiteth for Him." Other recognitions of Jesus in Ps. viii. 5 and xl. 7 appear in Heb. ii. 9 and x. 7. Did our Lord design to bid faith open the eyes of its mind, and see Him the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, when (John i. 51) He sent Nathaniel's thoughts of Him back to Jehovah's communion with Jacob at Bethel (Gen. xxviii. 12), and afterwards (Matt. xxiv. 30) quoted without remark, in speaking of His day of judgment on Jerusalem and the world, Daniel's vision of the Son of man? (Dan. vii. 13.) isms of history, 24. Akin in the kind of anticipation of the Messiah's times Anachronare the strange geographical combinations familiar in the inspirations of the Psalms and the prophets, but totally beyond any thought which history could have suggested to the writers. The kings of Tarshish and the isles bringing presents, the kings of Sheba and Seba offering gifts (Ps. lxxii. 10), describes a meeting of Eastern and Western civilisations not both in existence in the Psalmist's times. Princes coming out of Egypt, Ethiopia stretching out her hands to God (Ps. lxviii. 31), Rahab and Babylon, Philistia and Tyre, the birthplaces along with Zion of the people of God (Ps. lxxxvii.), was a geographical combination utterly above all Jewish religious sentiment; but brightly descriptive of the style of the world's tribute to Christianity, the only thing which its powers have with one practical, though unknowing, agreement served. They were anticipations that could not be human. They were forelookings of His who was to make them history; and faith is to recognise Him desiring with desire, and make the psalmists and the prophets speak strange words of, the redemption of the children of men, and is to feel more, because of the sight, how from everlasting His saving love to man has been. 25. Beyond these anticipations of history, a moral picture and of religious appears in those old writings, also recognisable only when He sentiment. appeared in whom all the religious life of Jewish ordinances and instruction was fulfilled. The joyous childlike wholehearted faith of the Psalms did not fit into the times of the kingdom of David, and never appeared in suchlike verbal description again but in the Gospels. Christian readers of the Psalms, and the prophetic utterances which record the religious thoughts granted to Israel's teachers during their needed times of severe discipline, are constrained to see His glorious greatness often breaking forth in them; as if, in the spirit of His human manifestations to Abraham, He yearned to show Himself to those whom He so loved and waited to redeem, and in consequence often gave them thoughts stretching boundlessly beyond their present circumstances-thoughts of great joy to them which, though not yet clear, would be in them living seeds of pondering anticipation and growing desires, drawing their Designed fruit of words thus sown. souls forth after Him. The minor prophets, the commissioned comforters of Israel and Judah when the captivities were at hand, had allotted to them a specially rich portion of such spiritual thoughts-thoughts unfitting, as their descriptions of Israel's restoration were, to any future that Israel ever came to, but bright reflections, to be recognised by Christian times, of the fulness of grace which was to become historical fact to them. They were glimpses of a historical salvation over centuries of which we of the latter days have the joy of looking back to see, in those old unveilings, the Saviour desiring the coming time; and lighting up His way of salvation in the growing desires of His faithful servants and in their anticipating faith. 26. What end is served by all those pregnant words, those expressions and descriptive features of earthly future concerning Christ, lying for centuries in waiting, to be understood only when He became known in the flesh, some of them perhaps not until, or nearly until, His second coming without sin unto salvation? No prophecies to indicate His approach, nor claimed when He came as verifications of His person; they were but marks of His presence with the minds of the speakers, unrecognised by them. Parents often gratify their affection for their children, and knit their own hearts more to them, by placing, unnoticed by them, tokens of their own watchful affection about their daily path, that they may find them unawares, and feed their faith in that careful love thereby. If this was the designed effect of these tokens of our Saviour's presence laid in wait to surprise believers' hearts in following ages into joyful faith in the oldness of that solicitous love which we are apt to think of as but a modern thing, it is no design unworthy of His grace. It is a great gift given to our faith, seeking amplest room wherein to joy in Him, when we have to think of the love, not of one who came in the latter days of the world to work a short awful work of salvation; but of one whose love had suffered long, as human sinfulness had been long, and loved through all the contradiction of sinful men, not for thirty, but for four thousand years; and still has so to love, and does love-always wounded in the house of His friends, always leading His loved ones like the good shepherd, always looking in vain for His people to help, treading the wine-press alone, and His own arm bringing salvation. sent in all Himself "School 27. We think of the great preparatory dispensation of Moses, Christ preIsrael's whole religious history-the Law-as having been a "The schoolmaster to bring the chosen people to Christ; a long train- Law" ing under close commandments as to cleanness and unclean- the ness to habituate them to thoughts of holy obedience to a pure master." God, and under the burdensome laws of sacrifice bringing them to thoughts of the necessity of atonement; and a long providential government of goodness and severity keeping them or bringing them back to the thoughts which were to work in their souls habitual feelings of a pure and holy God loving them so as to redeem them by the sacrifice of Himself. But we are apt to think as if a marked chronological line of division separated that preparatory dispensation from Christ Himself; and that though we are clearly taught that it was "the Spirit of Christ" that was in the prophets (1 Pet. i. 11), and "the reproach of Christ " that Moses chose in Egypt (Heb. xi. 26). What a relief to our faith thoughts-what a comfort, bringing into our view of the grace of God that simplicity which belongs to all other thoughts of our God's ways when we understand any of them well—it is to look on that long training as being wrought out by the loving Saviour Himself; and to know that He Himself was the Angel of God's presence who saved His people of old, that it was He who was afflicted in all their afflictions, who in His love and His pity redeemed them, and bare them, and carried them all the days of old! What a relief from thinking of the Messiah as one who was waiting, all the long period of man's existence and his needs, apart in heaven until the time for His coming in the flesh should arrive; and of mankind as having been prepared for His appearing by some far more distant supervision than that which Jesus of Nazareth exercised over the fulness of times! It was not another supervision, but His own; He it was, not in heaven, but as now both in heaven and on earth, watching over the race whom He loves, with only a hidden presence, as parents watch with overflowing and sometimes self-betraying |