“Abraham! I have found the Messiah! He whom the Gentiles call the Christ; The man-God, Jesus, is the Messiah!”
His eyes dwelt fixedly upon her face. She wondered that there was neither anger nor indignation in them.
“May I tell you why I think, why I know He is the Messiah, Abraham?” she asked.
“Do, Zillah!”
He spoke very gently, and she wondered more and more. She made no remark, however, on his toleration, but began to pour out her soul in the words of the Old Testament scriptures, connecting them with their fulfillment in the New Testament.
Cohen, watching her, thought of Deborah, for all her beautiful form seemed suddenly ennobled under the power of the theme that fired her.
“Now I know, dear Abraham,” she presently cried, “How it is that Jehovah is allowing our Rabbis—you told me, you know, the other day, of the one at Safed—to be led to dates that prove that Messiah is coming soon? Now I know why God has allowed our nation to be stirred up,—the Zionist movement, the colonization of Jerusalem and its neighbourhood, and all else of this like—yes, it is because the Christ is coming.
“Only, dear brother, it is not as the Messiah of the Jews that He comes soon—He came thus more than 1,900 years ago—this time, when He comes, He will come for His church, His redeemed ones—Jew and Gentile alike who are washed in His blood that was shed on Calvary for all the human race. For He was surely God’s Lamb, and was slain at the Great, the last real Passover, dear Abraham, if only we all—our race—could see this. What the blood of that first Passover lamb, in Egypt, was in type, to our people in their bondage and Blood-deliverance, so Jesus was in reality.”
Moses, of old, wist not how his face shone. And this lovely Jewish maiden, as she talked of her Lord, wist not how all her lovely face was transformed as she talked—glorified would not be too strong a description of the change her theme had wrought in her countenance.
“And now, dear Abraham,” she went on, “that same Jesus has not only blotted out all my sin, for His name’s sake, but he bids me look for Him to come again. When next He comes—it may be before even this day closes—”