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To these passages one other must be added, Ps. 40:6 ff. (Heb. 10:5 ff.), in order to complete the portraiture of the Christ. By perfect obedience the Son of man fulfils for men the will of God.

Several reflections at once offer themselves to the student who considers these quotations as a whole. (1) It is assumed that a divine counsel was wrought out in the course of the life of Israel. We are allowed to see in ‘the people of God’ signs of the purpose of God for humanity. The whole history is prophetic. It is not enough to recognise that the O. T. contains prophecies: the O. T. is one vast prophecy.

(2) The application of prophetic words in each case has regard to the ideal indicated by them, and is not limited by the historical fact with which they are connected. But the history is not set aside. The history forces the reader to look beyond.

(3) The passages are not merely isolated phrases. They represent ruling ideas. They answer to broad conceptions of the methods of the divine discipline for the nation, the King, the prophet, man.

(4) The words had a perfect meaning when they were first used. This meaning is at once the germ and the vehicle of the later and fuller meaning. As we determine the relations, intellectual, social, spiritual, between the time of the prophecy and our own time, we have the key to its present interpretation. In Christ we have the ideal fulfilment.

So it is that when we look at the succession of passages, just as they stand, we can see how they connect the Gospel with the central teaching of the O. T. The theocratic Sovereign addressed as ‘Son’ failed to subdue the nations and rear an eternal Temple, but none the less he gave definite form to a faith which still in one sense wants its satisfaction. The Marriage Song of the Jewish monarch laid open thoughts which could only be realised in the relation of the Divine King to His Church. The confidence with which the exile looked for the deliverance of Zion by the personal intervention of Jehovah, who had entered into covenant with man, led believers to see the Saviour in the Creator. The promise of the Session of Him who is King and Priest and Conqueror at the right hand of God, is still sufficient to bring strength to all who are charged to gather the fruits of the victory of the Son.

In this way the Majesty of the Christ, the Son of God, can be read in the O. T.; and no less the Christian can perceive there the sufferings of ‘Jesus,’ the Son of man, who won His promised dominion for man through death. The path of sorrow which He hallowed had been marked in old time by David, who proclaimed to his ‘brethren’ the ‘Name’ of his Deliverer, when he saw in the retrospect of the vicissitudes of his own life that which transcended them; and by Isaiah, who at the crisis of trial identified his ‘children’—types of a spiritual remnant—with himself in absolute trust on God.

On the one side we see how the majestic description of the Mediator of the New Covenant given in the opening verses of the Epistle, is justified by a series of passages in which He is pointed to in the records of the Old Covenant as Son and Lord and Creator and Sharer of the throne of God; and on the other side even we can discern, as we look back, how it was ‘becoming’ that He should fulfil the destiny of fallen men by taking to Himself, like King and Prophet, the sorrows of those whom He relieved. The greatest words of God come, as we speak, naturally and intelligibly through the occasions of life. In the history of Israel, of the Christ, and of the Church,


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