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spiritual rule of the written Word in Christian times, when every believer for himself should search the Scriptures for the testimony of Jesus. Under the constant light of the written Word made thus to shine in Israel, the occasional light of the prophetic messengers was to cease; Malachi, apparently the last of them, proclaiming the future rising of the Sun of Righteousness, and the sending of Elias to prepare the way for the coming of Jehovah Himself to His temple.

Jewish

to "The

Word."

20. Between the time of Malachi and the advent of Christ Latest we have no means of tracing Jewish faith except the apocry- thought as phal books. A most remarkable circumstance appears, however, in the works which represent Jewish thought in the period containing the advent. In the Targum of Onkelos, the term The Word of the Lord is used in a personal sense, and given as the equivalent of Jehovah in historical passages of the Hebrew Scriptures, such as Gen. xxviii. 20, 21; Exod. xvi. 8; Deut. i. 30, v. 5, ix. 3, xviii. 19. This personification of The Word of the Lord does not appear except once in the Apocrypha, the date of which is about the middle of the period when revelation was silent, but Wisdom is used personally in Ecclesiasticus. In Philo Judæus, The Word, when used personally, is surrounded with attributes so like those conjoined with the Christ by John and Paul; such as creative power and wisdom, being the First-Begotten of God, a High Priest, a King, a Shepherd; that a Christian origin for these ideas would be sought, were that not excluded by both the matter and the date of the writings. The commentary of Onkelos was written probably late in the first century; Philo wrote apparently about the beginning of it. The former was a Jewish theologian, of course not disposed to favour Christianity; the other shows more of the Platonic philosopher than of the Jew in the religious import of his writings. He lived in Alexandria, where Greek philosophy and Jewish religion were in close contact, and he may have wished to show how much of the Logos of Plato's philosophy could be found in Hebrew theology. It would be interesting in the extreme, as part of the great question of how far God by supernatural aid made the Hebrew Scriptures a light to "the nations," to be able to investigate the origin of this later

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Jewish understanding of The Word of the Lord. The Logos of Philo was a contemporary Greek idea. Did the outer world get its notions of that divine personality from an advancing understanding which the Hebrews had of their own. revelation, or did the subtle Greek mind have the distinction given to it of seeing more in the sacred books of the Jews than the Jews themselves saw? Certain it is, that thoughts of the early coming of a personal Redeemer, a divine Being descending to deliver the earth from its miseries, filled the atmosphere of the outer world as well as the land of Israel before the advent of Christ.

21. In reviewing the progress of the teaching and the learnman's ne- ing of the thoughts of faith as God's education of the world, we see, along the stages of the development, a great principle, congenial to most fully enlightened Christian thought, unifying the whole history of the revelation of God's holy love of man-that man's necessity was always God's opportunity. It was in a time of need that every successive lifting of the veil from the light of God's countenance took place. Prefaced, so to speak, by the summary of all His designed grace, spoken in the first terrible day of need "the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head, and it shall bruise His heel" -the revelations which succeeded came alike opportune to special needs of them, and with the expressed combination of result; success and failure-the head of the oppressive evil bruised, the means of salvation smitten always in its efficacy in the end. The revelations of God's loving help came always to His servants in times of felt need and probable impressibility. The warmest showing to Abraham of Jehovah's human-hearted friendship was made in the human form and sympathies, when the patriarch was sorely tried by long solitary striving to believe the promise of seed; and again, in a less degree, but in the same manner, the same loving help came to Jacob and to Joshua at crises of their trials of faith -while even Abraham's and Jacob's biographies show that their bright and opportune lights of faith continued to enlighten their eyes to full seeing but for a season. Israel's history of belief and forgetfulness, epitomised as a type of all

faith of unstable mankind in the 78th, 105th, 106th, and 107th Psalms, shows both aspects of the constantly-revolving history. Crushed under the heel of the mighty Rameses, Jacob's children were in bitter need of the drawing nigh to them of the God of their fathers, the almighty I AM, when Moses came to them from Horeb. Their need braced their souls to a temporary faith, which safety beyond the Red Sea saw speedily relax again in part; and a permanent necessity brought immediately an abiding means of faith. Their minds, demoralised by long slavery, unaccustomed to self-guidance or self-restraint, were put under the strong confinement of the ceremonial law of sacrifices and meats and purifications. The soldier-priesthood and divinely-appointed leadership were a needed staff through the long pilgrimage, an impressive rule of religious sentiment, and a visible religious executive, while memory failed to keep the truth and conscience to enforce faithfulness to it. After "Joshua, and the elders that outlived Joshua," that support to faith ceased to manifest efficacy. The first Israelite dark age, like all succeeding ones, had its "Jehovah's hidden ones," a "seed to serve Him;" but that wild period of the Judges made the need always more and more felt of some new visible aid to faith so unsupported, burdened instead, by the demoralised state of the priesthood; which had become no more a guide, restraint, and support to religious life, but a stumbling-block and a covering of the eyes. Faith received its needed help in the supraposition of kingly authority to control and protect the nation as the people of Jehovah; bringing prominently out the idea of obedience to the divine King as more essentially the service to be given to Him than the performance of rites, and infusing into faith's expectations of salvation the thought of kingly power to defend and uphold and rule, in addition to the thought of the priestly power to atone and make peace. The Psalms, the product chiefly of the kingly period, record how, in faith's thoughts of Jehovah, the kingly idea was developed —the thought of a "King reigning in righteousness,” a “King of glory," a "King for ever and ever," a "King commanding deliverances for Jacob," a "King of old working salvation

-a thought which, expanding beyond whatever David's or Solomon's greatness could approach, went forth into faith's only region of full satisfaction - "things unseen," "things hoped for." Similarly timed came the prophetic institution, when the necessity was sorely felt by faith of new helps to endure as seeing God who was so invisible in the affairs of the world. It came when the kingly authority and help and constraint to religion was fallen, as the priestly had done before, into irreligiousness-when idolatry possessed the royal houses of both kingdoms oftener than the true worship, and punctilious formality in observing the sacrificial ceremonies was the dead representative of religion; while nobles and priests, ordinary religious teachers and common rulers and heads of the people, were universally filled with drunkenness and luxurious selfishness, and there "was no place clean." Then was the time when, to the hidden thousands of faithful, known only to Jehovah, in the dense kingdom of Baal and Moloch, and to the wild idolatrous masses and their wildly sinful leaders, "He sent His servants the prophets, rising up early and sending them;" to chastise with scorpion words the criminal stewards of His law and His providence-to speak from Him withering scorn of the religious observances He Himself had commanded, and now had to abhor-to ignore, despise, and sweep aside priests and kings alike; but to bid believers endure in the faith of a coming glory of moral greatness and service, and expect the advent of a kingly priestly Prophet of justice and righteousness and peace. It is from the midst of these bursts of remonstrance and threatening against present sinfulness that their promises and representations of future holiness and salvation are sent forth. was to the freshness of Babylonian captivity that Jeremiah's richest consolations, contained in his 30th and 31st chapters, came. It was in the midst of the sufferings of that sore chastisement that Ezekiel's compassionate reproofs were spoken, and his revelations of Israel's union again to Jehovah-the loving union of care and help and comfort on the one side, and faithfulness and godly sorrow and new life on the other

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-the dry bones of the house of Israel living again (chapters xxxvi., xxxvii.)

the Lord.

22. Those days of the Lord, days of salvation, greatest Days of advents of new light to faith, were thus systematically timed to states of need, and of, consequently, not improbable onward looking for some heavenly help-even like the last perfecting manifestation of the "Desire of all nations," the moral opportuneness of which has forced itself upon observers of history-the coming of the Son of God in that "due time" when ungodliness was evidently proved to be without strength to help human needs. The Messiah came when, again, a sumptuous ritual and a system of costly sacrifices and minute service of ceremony had been so vainly sought unto by the despiritualised chosen people; and the outer world had so exhausted the ingenuity of philosophy and cultivation of taste in aspirations after moral ameliorations; and yet vice alone had come to have dominion in both Jewish and Greek life. His words, "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden," which reveal the state of heart to which His grace will be welcome in human life, express, what both before and since His manifestation in time of need has been the order of divine grace; tribulation, faith, and comfort, coming in succession.

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love.

23. Another principle unifies the very diverse revelations Holy charof Jehovah to Hebrew faith. The great truth revealed was, God's rethat "God so loved the world." The principle that made one revelation of all the mixed history of goodness and severity is, that His love was a holy love; a love seeking to save mankind from the ruin of sin, by forbearance, by chastisement, by kindness, by endurance,—in the end manifesting itself to be so great a love as not to withhold from giving up His onlybegotten Son for their salvation. The first denunciation and the first reproof began the never-changed manner of this instruction of man's thoughts of God. God has condemned through all time as a Saviour, and reproved as a Holy One. The bodily part of the judgment, "In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die," was unrelentingly exe

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