of the particular passages, which are cited in the New Testament as pointing to a suffering Messiah. Among these there are several, such as Is. liii., Zech. ix., xi., xii., and xiii., which, judging from internal evidence, refer directly and exclusively to Christ.

As a question of fact, the resurrection is positively predicted in all the passages, which speak of the glory of Christ subsequently to his sufferings, such for example as Is. liii. and others. In Acts xxvi. 23 Paul points expressly to the resurrection as necessarily following from the prediction of Isaiah (xlii. 6, 7), that he was to be a light to Israel and the Gentiles.

At all events, the impression made by the declarations of the Lord and his apostles ought to be of such a nature, as to deter any one from denying at the outset the existence of any predictions of the suffering Christ in the Old Testament, to produce a readiness and willingness to admit their existence wherever they present themselves to an unprejudiced mind, and to lead to a complete renunciation of the thought, that they are a priori impossible, or even at all improbable.

The rationalistic view, however, is not only at variance with the authority of the Lord and his apostles, but may be quite as strongly resisted on internal grounds.

In the first place, it is impossible to overlook the fact, that the Old Testament throughout is based upon the supposition of a suffering and atoning Christ.

man.

And here the first thing which presents itself is the teaching of the Old Testament, with reference to the innate depravity of If "every imagination and disposition of the heart of men is only evil continually" (Gen. vi. 5; compare viii. 21),—if the prevalence of sin upon the earth is such as we find described in Ps. xiv. and lviii. 3-5, where it is expressly intimated that the corruption of man is of so fearful a character, because it rests upon original sin, "the wicked are estranged from the womb, they go astray as soon as they be born, speaking lies. They have poison like the poison of a serpent, like a deaf adder he stops his ear. She hearkeneth not to the voice of the charmer, charming never so wisely;"-then it is impossible to imagine anything else than that, if the Messiah came as the perfectly righteous man, as the pure manifestation of the divine upon

earth, he would inevitably experience a powerful opposition from human wickedness, and pass through the midst of conflict and suffering. It is a fact of permanent importance in this respect that, at the very threshold of the sacred history, we are met by the opposition between Cain and Abel, which issues in the death of the latter. From Cain and Abel we ascend the more directly to the fall, on account of the evident connexion in which the two are placed in the book of Genesis. The doctrine of the fall would not be treated in so serious a manner, as an unprejudiced examination of Gen. ii. and iii. shows it to be, if the career of the Messiah had been regarded as without exception a joyful Moreover, the sufferings which the men of God had to endure in the earliest times, from human wickedness, led to a very different conclusion. And if Moses describes the result of his own personal experience, in such terms as these, "ye have been rebellious against the Lord from the day that I knew you (Deut. ix. 24), and again in Deut. xxxi. 21 sqq., "I know their mind, which they have even this day. Behold, while I am yet alive with you, ye rebel against the Lord, and how much more after my death?" what must be the opposition endured by the Messiah at the hands of sinners!

one.

It is also a point of peculiar importance that the wickedness of man does not stand alone, but that, according to the representation contained in the very first chapters of the sacred Scriptures, it rests upon a Satanic background. Is it conceivable that he who bears the name of Satan, the adversary, from his opposition to the righteous, should leave the righteous one, in the strict sense of the word, unopposed? The book of Job constitutes an indirect prophecy of the suffering Christ. "The history of Job," as I have already stated in my discourse on the book of Job, p. 36,"contains a typical representation of the Messiah in his sufferings, and the glory that follows. The ardent desire of Satan to destroy the "much opposed one," against whom he raises up enemies on every side, should be particularly noticed. For if the faulty and meagre righteousness of Job excited such hatred on the part of Satan, how must he burn with malignity against the truly righteous one."

VOL. IV.

This is the meaning of the name Job.

Y

The righteous sufferer is a standing figure in the Old Testament. In a long series of Psalms, in particular, righteousness and the deepest suffering, arising out of the hostility of the ungodly world, are described as inseparably connected (e.g., Ps. vi., xvi., xxii., xxxv., xxxviii., cii., cix.). The righteous man is represented in the Old Testament as the distressed one, . A Messiah, regarded as not wantós (Acts xxvi. 23), would be violently separated from those, with whom he is most intimately connected. If the righteous man has to utter such lamentations as these, "my soul is among lions, and I lie even among them that are set on fire, even the sons of men whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword," a Messiah, to whom the whole nation should surrender itself with readiness and good will, is an inconceivable idea.

With every century that passed away, it became more and more impossible to think of the Messiah in any other light than as a sufferer. All the experience obtained from the whole course of the Old Testament history, from the journey through the desert, and the time of the Judges downwards, showed the impossibility of any other anticipation, than that the coming of Christ would be the signal for a severe conflict with the corrupt spirit of the nation. And in Stephen's address, the crime committed by the nation in the rejection of Christ is clearly shown to be merely the termination of a long historical process.

The office of the Messiah was to be a comprehensive one. He was to combine in his own person the three leading offices in the economy of the Old Testament, those of the prophet, priest, and king. And the contemplation of either of these offices could not fail to excite the anticipation of a suffering Messiah.

The type of the Messiah in his regal capacity is always David, whose name is even transferred to him. "But who," to borrow the words of Eichhorn, "who suffered more, in a greater variety of ways, or more undeservedly, than David? From a shepherd he rose to be a king. Through what envious and hostile crowds had he to force his way, till he had reached the throne! He had more than once to fly from the javelin of Saul. How often had he to wander through the desert, either alone or with his attendants, pursued by the man, who ought to have loved and protected him, as a member of his house and

אל תשחת,59

his destined successor ! Ishbosheth opposed him as a rival, and he never knew the enjoyment of peace, till the royal house was thoroughly exterminated. After this he was engaged in successive wars with all the neighbouring states, from Egypt to the Euphrates, and after his many victories was doomed eventually to discover his most dangerous foe in his own son, the rebellious Absalom." The intensity of David's sufferings is apparent from the motto, which we find at the head of Ps. lvii. "do not destroy." What could be more natural than that David, who recognised in himself the type of his great successor, should be disposed from the very first to regard his own experience as the type of that of his Lord (Ps. cx. 1), and that subsequent prophets should merely wait for a higher sanction to their presentiment that the great king of the future, for whom they longed, would pass like the celebrated king of past times, whose life and sufferings were depicted in his own Psalms, and who took pleasure, even when seated upon the throne, in describing himself as "the afflicted one," through suffering to joy, through humilation to glory, and through reproach to honour? It is also of importance to notice, that in a series of Psalms, in which David treats of the future history of his race, such, for example, as Ps. cxxxviii.-cxlv., he infers from his own personal experience, that they will have to pass through severe sufferings, and seeks to fortify them against the strong inward temptations, to which such a cross would be sure to expose them. How then could it possibly be imagined, that He, in whom the family was to culminate, would be spared the endurance of their sufferings?

As the Prophet, again, in the full sense of the word, the idea of suffering would still be associated with the Messiah. The lives of suffering, which the Prophets led, are vividly depicted in Heb. xi. 37, 38: "they were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword, they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented; of whom the world was not worthy; they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth." Compare with this, 2 Chr. xxiv. 17 sqq., 2d Kings xxi. 16 seq., ver. 10, sqq. Neh. ix. 26, and the words of Christ in Matt. xxiii. 29 sqq. The most complete picture of the conflicts and sufferings

of the prophets is found in the life of Elias, whom Jezebel swore to put to death (1 Kings xix. 2), who prayed that his soul might die, and said, "it is enough; now, O Lord, take my soul" (ver. 4), and who complained to the Lord, "the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life to take it away." The suffering prophet is also very strikingly depicted in the prophecies of Jeremiah. "Your sword," he says in chap. ii. 30, "hath devoured your prophets, like a destroying lion." "I was like a lamb," he says in chap. xi. 19, "or an ox that is brought to the slaughter, and I knew not that they had devised devices against me, and said, let us destroy the tree with the fruit thereof, and let us cut him off from the land of the living, that his name may be no more remembered." "Woe is me," he complains in chap. xv. 10, "my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth! O Lord, thou knowest, remember me, and visit me, and revenge me of my persecutors, take me not away in thy longsuffering; know that for thy sake I have suffered rebuke. Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable, which refuseth to be healed? Thou art become unto me as a fountain that will no more flow." And again in chap. xx. 7, sqq., "O Lord, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived: thou art stronger than I and hast prevailed: I am in derision daily, every one mocketh me.

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I heard the defaming of many, fear on every side. Accuse him, they cry, yea we will accuse him. All my familiars watched for my halting, saying peradventure he will be enticed, and we shall prevail against him, and we shall take our revenge on him." In vers. 14-18 his agony increases to such an extent that he curses the day of his birth. Truly a terrible omen for the Messiah-But, notwithstanding all these sufferings, the opportunity was very often afforded to the prophets to discover that the Lord, their helper, was mightier than the men their foes. The Lord acknowledged them, bore witness to them by the fulfilment of their prophecies, and not infrequently proved that they were his messengers, and avenged them of their adversaries, by the exercise of his miraculous power.-If, then, the prophets lived in this manner (especially in the periods which