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growth of religious ideas. The kingship of Jehovah was, as it were, visibly realized under the monarch; the reigning king of David's line was reverenced as Jehovah's representative, reigning by His grace and in His name; and to the prophets of the eighth century the kingdom of Jehovah became practically identical with the kingdom of David. Isaiah, observes Wellhausen, is unconscious of any difference between human and divine law: law in itself, jurist's law in the proper juristic sense of the word, is divine, and has behind it the authority of the Holy One of Israel . . . Jehovah is a true and perfect king, hence justice is His principal attribute and His chief demand '.' On the whole, it is probable that the kingship of Jehovah was a conception belonging indeed to the Mosaic age, but under the monarchy consciously acknowledged and taken as the foundation of ideal hopes for the future. The conquests of David and his successors over the tribes bordering on Palestine appeared to the prophetic eye to signalize a gradual extension of the victorious sway of Jehovah. Kingship appears to have invariably suggested to a Hebrew mind the notion of conquest over foes, and extension by victorious conflict of a rightful dominion. Thus the prophetic picture of the Messiah represents him as an ideal ruler, filled with the spirit of Jehovah, and adorned with all the virtues of a just and powerful prince.

As time went on, however, the ideas of the prophets were at once expanded and spiritualized. They were inspired to proclaim two truths respecting the kingdom of God which the mass of the nation had peculiar difficulty in apprehending: viz. its universality-the kingdom was to embrace mankind; and its spirituality-it was to be a kingdom of holiness. Each of these ideas was suggested by the events, or by the needs of the present. The thought of universal dominion resulted in part from the disasters

1 Wellhausen, Prolegomena, c. xi. pp. 413-415.
2 See Kuenen, Hiblert Lectures, pp. 126 foll.

which overtook Israel on the broad stage of secular history. The outcome of contact or collision with the great world-powers of Egypt, Asshur, and Babylon, was the conception of a world-wide empire of Jehovah, embracing the very nations which threatened or oppressed the defenceless kingdom of God. The temptation of the average Israelite was to mistake a portion of the divine kingdom for the whole; but prophecy rose to the sublime thought of a worldwide kingdom of God, into which all the nations of the earth should flow and bring their glory, in which a Prince, enthroned as Jehovah's representative and vicegerent, should reign in peace and righteousness over a universe redeemed from all elements of moral or physical evil. Certainly the constitution of the visible theocracy, as we find it fully developed in Judaism after the exile, seems at first sight to mark a retrogression from the ideals of Messianic prophecy; but here also wisdom is justified of her children; and we can see now that the legal stage of Israel's development was the means of keeping alive and deepening those great spiritual ideas which alone could give to the religion of the Old Testament a true universality.

Again, the prophets proclaimed the spiritual character and purpose of Jehovah's kingdom. It was to be a kingdom of righteousness. The obstinate and cherished belief of ordinary Israelites was that the divine favour had been pledged to them unconditionally, and that Jehovah would under any circumstances intervene on His people's behalf; it was thought to be self-evident that any difficult or dangerous crisis would certainly end in Israel's favour. On the other hand, it was the work of the prophets to combat this delusion. In season and out of season they were the preachers of God's moral requirement. They insisted that the holy God could be Israel's God only in so far as the laws of social righteousness were recognized and fulfilled. They refused, as Wellhausen finely expresses it, 'to

allow the conception of Jehovah to be involved in the ruin of the kingdom. They saved faith by destroying illusion'.' Their function, in a word, was to vindicate the spirituality of God's kingdom; to proclaim the indefeasible conditions of the divine covenant. Moreover, they perceived that a spiritual kingdom must necessarily outgrow nationalistic limitations: its dominant tendency and its irresistible impulse must be to embrace universal humanity.

The kingdom of God, then, began with the founding of the Mosaic state. Israel was welded into a compact community by uniform laws, customs, and ordinances. of worship. It became a nation not by growth from within but by a kind of constraint from without. It was bound together by the truth which it cherished. Thus organized, the nation was in due time launched into a tumultuous sea of heathen peoples-as the object of a 'relative, temporary, economical preference 2, in order to become the vehicle of revelation to the whole earth. Isolated Israel certainly was: lo, the people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations, but only with a view to the ultimate accomplishment of a definite purpose of grace towards the world. The Gentiles are accordingly summoned by Jehovah to rejoice with his people, while Israel, the covenant people, with its spiritual mission to the world, is hailed as the firstborn, the light of the Gentiles, the head of the heathen". Such was Israel's ideal calling, and all the prophecies that relate to the conversion of the world through Jacob or the 'Servant of Jehovah' are primarily applicable to the ideal Israel. We know how these great and precious promises became gradually narrowed to a remnant and only received final fulfilment in the representative personality of one, who was himself the true Israel, the true Prince

1 Sketch of the History of Israel and Judah, p. 89.

2 Bruce, Chief End of Revelation, p. 116.

8 Num. xxiii. 9.

Deut. xxxii. 43; Rom. xv. 10-12.

Exod. iv. 22; Isa. xlii. 6; Ps. xviii. 43.

of God. But what was fulfilled in Him had primary reference to the people of whose stock He willed to be born; through Him the Church of the Old Testament was destined to fulfil its prophetic and priestly calling; in Him all the glories and sufferings predicted by prophecy for the chosen people were to find full accomplishment; and thus in the historical fulfilment a single individual embodied and represented the race from which He sprang1.

The Messianic hope of the Old Testament will therefore occupy our attention. We shall attempt to study the elements which history contributed to it and the stages of its progress; we shall also have to notice the limitations of prophetic foresight, and the strictly historical conditions of prophetic prediction. But the point of highest interest is the steady growth of the universalist idea of salvation; of the thought that Israel's God is the God of all the earth, that in the last days the people of God is destined to be surrounded by a world of converted nations, that in Zion, the city of His choice, the Lord will destroy the face of the covering cast over all people, and the vail that is spread over all nations; that He will swallow up death in victory, and wipe away tears from off all faces 2.

V. The Old Testament is to be studied, in the last place, as witnessing to a divine purpose for the individual soul. It continually directs attention to the importance of personality in the development of the kingdom of God. It sets before us at each stage of a progressive movement the figures of men, sometimes pliable and passionate, sometimes commanding and majestic, on whose ready will, prompt obedience, or bold ventures of faith, nothing less depended than the cause of God in the world. The Old Testament is indeed from one point of view a history of vocations, either accepted by faith or neglected by indolence; either awakening the response of human will or forfeited by human sin. In self1 Riehm, Messianic Prophecy, p. 218. 2 Isa. xxv. 7, 8.

surrender and submission to the call of God the soul of man became conscious of itself and of the contrarieties which religion alone explains, the strange blending in human nature of weakness and misery with greatness and strength. Again, the Old Testament repeatedly illustrates the fact that man's obedient response to vocation is followed by a consciousness of personal inspiration which enhances the sense of individuality: the soul recognizes the illuminating or strengthening influence of a power higher than itself, educating the intellect, expanding the heart, and quickening the conscience; it becomes aware of a divine operation which does not constrain man ‘mechanically to receive the truth, but enables him to know it'; does not merely reveal to him what God would have him believe and practise, but raises him into intelligent sympathy with His mind and will 2. The sense of personal union with Deity however did not override or overpower individuality, but rather developed and stimulated it. The inspiration of prophets and saints was no mere possession of the soul by a divine influence, no ecstatic ebullition of irrepressible feeling, but a power which added dignity to its subject, awakening at once his consciousness of divinely appointed mission, and his perception of the heights to which human frailty might be exalted by divine grace. It belongs to the notion of prophecy, of true revelation,' says Wellhausen in a memorable passage, 'that Jehovah, overlooking all the media of ordinances and institutions, communicates Himself to the individual, the called one, in whom that mysterious and irreducible rapport in which the deity stands with man clothes itself with energy. Apart from the prophet, in abstracto, there is no revelation; it lives in his divinehuman ego3.

2

1 Cp. Pascal, Pensées, art. iv.

J. Caird, Philosophy of Religion, ch. iii. Cp. Meinhold, Jesus und das A. T. p. 139: 'Es findet ein mit dem Steigen der geistigen Entwickelung gleichlaufendes Anwachsen der Aufnahmefähigkeit für religiöse Dinge 3 Prolegomena, p. 398.

statt.'

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