I
CHRIST IN THE OLD TESTAMENT
"The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world."
Our Lord asserts nothing more frequently than that he came to this world, not as other men come, but as a voluntary exile from a higher and purer life. He said in public, speaking to the Jews, "I came down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him that sent me." When the Jews tauntingly said to him, "Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?" he answered, "Before Abraham was, I AM." In fact, while he walked as a brother among men, there were constant and mysterious flashes from the life of a higher sphere. Jesus moved about in our life as a sympathetic foreigner who ever and anon in moments of high excitement breaks out into his native language. So Christ at times rose into the language of heaven, and spoke for a moment, unconsciously as it were, in the style of a higher world.
He did not say, "Before Abraham was, I was," but "I AM," using the same form which in the Old Testament is used by Jehovah when he declares his name to Moses, "I AM that I am." So, too, when conversing with Nicodemus, our Lord asserts that he is the only person competent to bear testimony to heavenly things, because he came from heaven.
He says, "No man hath ascended into heaven but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven." This last is one of those changes into the language of a higher world which so often awed and perplexed those who talked with Jesus. It would seem that he had the power by moments to breathe aside the veil which separates from the higher state, and to be in heaven. Such a moment was this, when he was declaring to an honest-minded, thoughtful inquirer the higher truths of the spiritual life, and asserting his right to know about heavenly things, because he came down from heaven—yea, because for the moment he was in heaven.
But in the last hours of his life, when he felt the scenes of his humiliations and sufferings approaching, he declared this truth, so often shadowed and intimated, with explicit plainness. He said, "I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world. Again, I leave the world, and go to the Father." This was stating the truth as plainly as human words can do it, and the disciples at last understood him fully. "Lo! now speakest thou plainly, and speakest no proverb." And in that affecting prayer that followed our Lord breathes the language of an exile longing to return to the home of his love: "And now, O Father! glorify me with thine own self—with the glory that I had with thee before the world was."
It is then most plain on the face of the New Testament that our Lord had a history before he came to this world. He was a living power. He was, as he says, in glory with the Father before the world was. Are there any traces of this mysterious Word, this divine Son, this Revealer of God in the Old Testament? It has been the approved sentiment of sound theologians that in the Old Testament every visible appearance of an Angel or divine Man to whom the name of Jehovah is given is a pre-appearance of the Redeemer, Jesus. It is a most interesting study to pursue this idea through the Old Testament history, as is fully done by President Edwards in his "History of Redemption" and by Dr. Watts in his "True Glory of Christ." In Milton's "Paradise Lost" he represents the Son of God as being "the Lord God who walked in the Garden of Eden" after the trespass of our first parents, and dwells on the tenderness of the idea that it was in the cool of the day,—
"when from wrath more cool
Came the mild Judge and Intercessor both."