II. Positive Preparation,—in the history of Israel.
A single people was separated from all others, from the time of Abraham, and was educated in three great truths: (1) the majesty of God, in his [pg 667] unity, omnipotence, and holiness; (2) the sinfulness of man, and his moral helplessness; (3) the certainty of a coming salvation. This education from the time of Moses was conducted by the use of three principal agencies:
A. Law.—The Mosaic legislation, (a) by its theophanies and miracles, cultivated faith in a personal and almighty God and Judge; (b) by its commands and threatenings, wakened the sense of sin; (c) by its priestly and sacrificial system, inspired hope of some way of pardon and access to God.
The education of the Jews was first of all an education by Law. In the history of the world, as in the history of the individual, law must precede gospel, John the Baptist must go before Christ, knowledge of sin must prepare a welcome entrance for knowledge of a Savior. While the heathen were studying God's works, the chosen people were studying God. Men teach by words as well as by works,—so does God. And words reveal heart to heart, as works never can. “The Jews were made to know, on behalf of all mankind, the guilt and shame of sin. Yet just when the disease was at its height, the physicians were beneath contempt.” Wrightnour: “As if to teach all subsequent ages that no outward cleansing would furnish a remedy, the great deluge, which washed away the whole sinful antediluvian world with the exception of one comparatively pure family, had not cleansed the world from sin.”
With this gradual growth in the sense of sin there was also a widening and deepening faith. Kuyper, Work of the Holy Spirit, 67—“Abel, Abraham, Moses = the individual, the family, the nation. By faith Abel obtained witness; by faith Abraham received the son of the promise; and by faith Moses led Israel through the Red Sea.”Kurtz, Religionslehre, speaks of the relation between law and gospel as “Ein fliessender Gegensatz”—“a flowing antithesis”—like that between flower and fruit. A. B. Davidson, Expositor, 6:163—“The course of revelation is like a river, which cannot be cut up into sections.” E. G. Robinson: “The two fundamental ideas of Judaism were: 1. theological—the unity of God; 2. philosophical—the distinctness of God from the material world. Judaism went to seed. Jesus, with the sledge-hammer of truth, broke up the dead forms, and the Jews thought he was destroying the Law.”On methods pursued with humanity by God, see Simon, Reconciliation, 232-251.
B. Prophecy.—This was of two kinds: (a) verbal,—beginning with the protevangelium in the garden, and extending to within four hundred years of the coming of Christ; (b) typical,—in persons, as Adam, Melchisedek, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, Jonah; and in acts, as Isaac's sacrifice, and Moses' lifting up the serpent in the wilderness.
The relation of law to gospel was like that of a sketch to the finished picture, or of David's plan for the temple to Solomon's execution of it. When all other nations were sunk in pessimism and despair, the light of hope burned brightly among the Hebrews. The nation was forward-bound. Faith was its very life. The O. T. saints saw all the troubles of the present “sub specie eternitatis,” and believed that “Light is sown for the righteous, And gladness for the upright in heart” (Ps. 97:11). The hope of Job was the hope of the chosen people: “I know that my Redeemer liveth, And at last he will stand up upon the earth” (Job 19:25). Hutton, Essays, 2:237—“Hebrew supernaturalism has transmuted forever the pure naturalism of Greek poetry. And now no modern poet can ever become really great who does not feel and reproduce in his writings the difference between the natural and the supernatural.”
Christ was the reality, to which the types and ceremonies of Judaism pointed; and these latter disappeared when Christ had come, just as the petals of the blossom drop away when the fruit appears. Many promises to the O. T. saints which seemed to them promises of temporal blessing, were fulfilled in a better, because a more spiritual, way than they expected. Thus God cultivated in them a boundless trust—a trust which was essentially the same thing with the faith of the new dispensation, because it was the absolute reliance of a consciously helpless sinner upon God's method of salvation, and so was implicitly, though not explicitly, a faith in Christ.
The protevangelium (Gen. 3:15) said “it [this promised seed] shall bruise thy head.” The [pg 668] “it” was rendered in some Latin manuscripts “ipsa.” Hence Roman Catholic divines attributed the victory to the Virgin. Notice that Satan was cursed, but not Adam and Eve; for they were candidates for restoration. The promise of the Messiah narrowed itself down as the race grew older, from Abraham to Judah, David, Bethlehem, and the Virgin. Prophecy spoke of “the sceptre” and of “the seventy weeks.” Haggai and Malachi foretold that the Lord should suddenly come to the second temple. Christ was to be true man and true God; prophet, priest, and king; humbled and exalted. When prophecy had become complete, a brief interval elapsed, and then he, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write, actually came.
All these preparations for Christ's coming, however, through the perversity of man became most formidable obstacles to the progress of the gospel. The Roman Empire put Christ to death. Philosophy rejected Christ as foolishness. Jewish ritualism, the mere shadow, usurped the place of worship and faith, the substance of religion. God's last method of preparation in the case of Israel was that of