The Messiah in Moses and the Prophets

by Eleazar Lord

For this audacious treason and unbelief, about three thousand men were slain: soon after which, Jehovah made a covenant with the people, promising to drive out the Canaanites before them, and renewedly enjoining them to break their images and destroy their altars and groves. Chap. xxxiv.

The tabernacle having been erected and offerings made according to the ritual, “There came a fire out from before Jehovah, and consumed upon the altar the burnt offering, ... which when all the people saw, they shouted and fell on their faces.” Leviticus ix. On this occasion two of the priests, Nadab and Abihu, sons of Aaron, in the spirit of the Egyptian idolatry, burnt incense with strange fire, i. e., such as idolaters used: “And there went out fire from Jehovah and devoured them, and they died before Jehovah.” Levit. x.

The constant recurrence of reproof, instruction and prediction, in the historical and Prophetic writings of the Old Testament, proceeds from the nature of that dispensation, the conduct of the people under it, and the manner of its final consummation.

The dispensation was one of outward and visible manifestation, discipline, trial, prefiguration and hope; disobedience under it was acted out visibly in idolatry and all practical abominations. Reproofs were uttered according to actual circumstances, having respect to present actual wickedness.

A leading feature of that dispensation was that of the personal, local, visible appearances and interpositions of the Mediator. The tendencies and results of the dispensation were thwarted and delayed by the idolatry and wickedness of the people. The predictions, founded in the nature and design of that visible economy, looked forward to the circumstances, agencies and results which were to fulfil, complete and vindicate the nature and original design of the economy.

Hence the humiliation and vicarious sufferings of the Mediator, and the glory of his ultimate manifestations, judgments and triumph, are the prominent topics of prophetic announcement; and the latter chiefly, as more in keeping with the analogy of the past, and as being ultimate and perfect. By the things thus predicted, the thwarted and delayed purposes and tendencies of the dispensation were to be adequately provided for, and rendered effective by the foreseen intervention of the agency and power of the Mediator in his incarnate state. The prophets accordingly pass from the circumstances which gave rise to their predictions to the circumstances and events of their fulfilment by the Mediator in his future visible manifestations.

It was, for example, provided in the Mosaic economy that the loyalty and obedience of the Israelites should have a trial under the government of the Mediator as King; as Priest and King on his throne in the tabernacle. Being thus perfectly protected and provided for, they had every facility and every inducement to be loyal and obedient. But they rebelled and rejected him as King.

At length they desired and solicited a human chieftain as king, after the manner of the surrounding nations. This was granted, and a trial made under vicegerents in the persons of David and Solomon, sitting on the throne of Jehovah, as rulers in his place, and as types of his kingly office, when he shall at the latter day visibly resume it.

The rejection of the Mediator as King, and the consequent interruption and final discontinuance of the theocratic administration, gave occasion to the mission of the prophets; the earliest of whom, Hosea, prophesied in the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, about 800 years before Christ, and the latest, Malachi, about 440 B. C. Hosea flourished about 180 years after the death of Solomon. The apostasy of all the tribes to idol worship was then nearly total. The restoration from the Babylonish exile having resulted in no reformation, both Jews and Samaritans, at the close of Malachi’s mission, were, like the heathen nations, left to themselves.

The prophets and true worshippers all regarded the separation of the ten tribes as an apostasy from the theocratic government, the seat of which was in the temple, and the representative vicegerent on the throne was to be in the line of David.