NO. I.
The Messianic prophecies obviously possess a far
higher spiritual importance than any other portions of the Old
Testament. It is, in fact, these prophecies pervading it which give life
and meaning to the ancient dispensation. They may be said to constitute
its very soul, while everything else belongs merely to the body prepared
for that soul; and yet it will be generally admitted that they have not
been studied with the diligence and success which might have been
expected. They have, to a very considerable extent, participated in the
neglect into which all the rest of prophecy has fallen; that is to say,
they have been allowed to be dealt with almost exclusively by men
destitute of everything like breadth of view or sound principles of
interpretation. There are thus no inquiries into the subject of
prophecy—even of Messianic prophecy—at all comparable with certain
inquiries into the important, indeed, but still not so important subject
of Mosaic legislation. We think a great deal even of new light may be
thrown upon it by any diligent student fortunate enough to start with
liberal, independent, and philosophical views as to the method of
studying Scripture. The sum of what has hitherto been done is just
this:—Single prophecies have been illustrated and applied; and it has
been shewn that, from the Fall until the time of Malachi, there was a
progressive advance in revelation regarding Christ—that it continually
became fuller and clearer until its accomplishment. There has, however,
hardly been an attempt to trace any of the laws regulating that progress
and certainly there has been no attempt whatever to find the causes or
trace the consequences, either on the character of revelation itself, or
on actual human history of such laws.
It is our intention to deal at present with one of
these laws. It is of so obtrusive a character that it has often been
noticed as a fact, and one well-known German commentator on the Psalms (Rosenmuller)
has even made it the ground of a division of them; but it has,
notwithstanding, been as yet very imperfectly apprehended, either in
itself or in its bearings. We wish to shew how-wide and far-reaching
these bearings are, and what light they throw on more than one
interesting event.
Turn to the second Psalm, and you will observe it
sets before us a Person all-glorious—a King to whom all kings must bow
the knee, and serve with fear and trembling—the great High Priest of
universal humanity. Turn to the twenty-second Psalm, on the other hand,
and you will observe a man in extremity of agony and sorrow —"a worm,
and no man"—painfully imploring God not to withdraw Himself from Him.
And, if you will make the examination, you will find that each of these
psalms is representative of a distinct class of prophetical psalms; and
not only so, but representative of distinct series of prophecies, that
run parallel to each other through the whole of the Old Testament
without coalescing —without uniting. The second Psalm is a link in the
chain of those Messianic prophecies which exhibit Christ and His Church
as glorious and triumphant—gradually overcoming, in spite of the most
determined opposition, the powers of the world—expelling all evil, and
working an entire spiritual revolution; so that all nations are at
length transformed into a great "kingdom of God," whose Head is Christ.
The twenty-second Psalm is, in like manner, a link in that series of
prophecies which relate to the sufferings of Messiah, from the
outpourings of Divine wrath and the malice of His enemies.
These two streams rise at one and the same
fountain-head, the first promise—the promise made to man immediately
after his fall, in the form of a curse on the serpent who had deceived
him— " I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy
seed and her seed: it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his
heel." Here we have the mingled joy and sorrow, good and evil, retreat
and victory; the bruised heel of the Saviour, and the bruised head of
the serpent. But from the time of this promise they are separated. A
stream of sweet and a stream of bitter water issue from the same spring,
and they flow onwards, each widening and swelling as they proceed, but
never meeting nor mingling till they reach the ocean. Almost every
prophet adds something to one or other of these classes of prophecies;
but no prophet ever attempts to set before us the image of Messiah's
character as a whole—no prophet endeavours to give us a completed
portrait of Messiah—no prophet shades his pictures. Never is our Lord
described in the same passage in His state of glory and exaltation, and
in His contrasted state of humiliation and endurance; never do we find
the features of these two aspects of Messiah's character blended
together, the one tempered by and proportioned to the other, in the way
that He actually realised them. In the second, the forty-fifth, the
seventy-second, and one hundred-and-tenth psalms, for instance, there is
portrayed the regal office of Christ, His eternal sonship, universal
dominion, the glory of His reign, the majesty of His person—all without
any introduction of those dark and painful aspects of His life which
make up the whole of the twenty-second Psalm, and of the fifty-third
chapter of Isaiah.
This is certainly a very remarkable fact, and worthy
of the most serious consideration. We cannot avoid seeing in it a
perfectly irresistible argument in favour of the Divine origin of Old
Testament revelation, and also of the truth of Christ's) claims. Take up
the twenty-second Psalm—read it; and when you find there the dying words
of our Redeemer—"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" His state
of humiliation strikingly described in the verse, '' But I am a worm,
and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people;" a clear
intimation of how He was reviled upon the cross—so clear as at once to
recall the passage in Matthew which tells us how the Pharisees and
people inhumanly mocked Him in His awful agony; of the very manner of
His crucifixion, '' For dogs have compassed me; the assembly of the
wicked have enclosed me; they pierced my hands and my feet;" and even
the division of His garments by the Roman soldiers, "They part my
garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture;" when, we say, you
find all these prophetic intimations—some of them very minute and
special—meet their fulfilment in the space of a few hours in the person
of one Man, you must feel it impossible to look upon them for a single
moment as merely accidental. But how infinitely stronger does the
argument become when you compare this twenty-second Psalm with the
second, where the character of Messiah is presented under an aspect so
different. The mere fact that one and the same prophet utters prophecies
of both sorts, is an indubitable proof in each case that he must be
speaking not of himself, but of God; that his statements can only
originate in immediate inspiratations from the Father of our
spirits. This proof, as a matter of necessity, gets fresh confirmation—a
vastly augmented strength—-from the discovery that the same great law
has been observed during ages, and so runs through the whole scheme of
Messianic prophecy, from beginning to end.
So far from man being able to originate such a
conception as the law now stated implies, and devise two series of
utterances so contrasted as those which pervade the Old Testament, we
find that the Jews were not even able to comprehend the whole conception
when actually embodied before their eyes, and that owing to the fact,
that in their sacred books it had been presented to them merely in one
of its aspects at a time. It was a task beyond their power even to join
together the interpretation of both classes of utterances. They let go
their grasp entirely of those peculiarities in the Divine ideal—those
peculiarities in the representation of Messiah's character exhibited in
the twenty-second Psalm, and in the numerous prophecies belonging to the
same class; and, laying-hold of that ideal or representation in a
one-sided manner, conceived of the Messiah only as a great prince, an
all-powerful conqueror. We are apt to wonder how they could do so. It
ceases, however, to be' impenetrably mysterious when once we understand
the full bearing of the law we are now considering. There was a real
difficulty in collecting into one image—into one consistent whole—
features apparently contradictory. It is not, indeed, felt by us; but we
ought not to judge the Jews of that age by our feelings of the present.
We find it easy to reconcile the contrasted representations of Messiah
given in Old Testament prophecy; but why? Just because these contrasts
have been already reconciled—have been already united into a perfect
harmony in actual fact, in historical fulfilment, in Jesus Christ. It
is, however, a most improbable supposition, that any unassisted human
intellect, and still more, that a number of such intellects acting
independently of one another, should create these contrasted
representations; and there is every likelihood that, even when created,
they would not be rightly understood—that is, understood in connexion
with each other.
The mistake of the Jews becomes, when this law is
once comprehended, for the first time intelligible ; and it is a
remarkable fact that Christ does not blame the Jews nearly so severely
for their erroneous notion about Him, as we should expect were there not
such a difficulty. The mildness of His bearing towards them is perfectly
mysterious on the ordinary explanation, or rather ordinary no
explanation of their mistaken views. What Christ does severely blame
both His own disciples and the whole body of the Jewish people for, is,
that when the prophetic ideal had been manifestly realised in His
person, and after, and in spite of, all that He had done and taught
fitted to undeceive them, they should still obstinately and perversely
adhere to their preconception, and refuse to receive, or even to attend
to such evidence as ought to have convinced every honest and
truth-loving man of its falsity and defects.
We infer, then—(1,) That these two contrasted series
of utterances never could be the work of man's invention; and, (2,) That
the mere circumstance of a twofold series of prophetic utterances—so
contrasted in character, and each order of which comprehended within
itself so many distinct facts, such a vast number of marks, and these
again so varied in their nature—rendered it utterly impossible that any
person should concentrate and fulfil them all in Himself, unless God had
specially designed Him so to do; in other words, unless He, and He
alone, were the very person whose character and mission had been
foretold by inspired men.