ment prophecies about the eternity and never dying of Christ. — That " lifted up " meant being put to death on the cross, they seem to have understood. That our Lord, or the Son of man, as He called Himself, claimed to be the Christ, they quite under- stood. What they stumbled at was the idea of the eternal Christ being put to death. They had got hold of the idea of a glorious, eternal Messiah. They had not got hold of the idea of a suffer- ing, dying Messiah.
Of course they were right in holding that " Christ abideth for- ever." It is the universal doctrine of the Old Testament. (Com- pare Isai. ix. 7; Psalm ex. 4; Ezek. xxxvii. 25; Daniel vii. 14; Micah iv. 7.) Our Lord had never for a moment denied this. He was the promised Saviour, who, as Gabriel said to Mary, was to "reign over the house of Jacob forever." (Luke i. 33.)
On the other hand, they were entirely wrong in not under- standing that Christ had to suffer before He reigned, and to go to the cross before He wore the crown. They were wrong in not seeing that His sacrifice as our Substitute and our Passover was the very corner-stone of revealed religion, and that the very 11 law" of which they made so much, pointed to His sacrifice as clearly as to His eternal glory. They forgot that Isaiah says that Messiah is to be "brought as a lamb to the slaughter," and that Daniel speaks of His being " cut off." (Isai. liii. 7 ; Dan. ix. 26.)
The words "we" and "thou," in this verse, in the Greek are emphatic. "We Jews have always been taught to believe the eternity of Messiah. Thou, on the other hand, sayest that Mes- siah must be put to death, and lifted up on the cross. How is this? How are we to understand it? "
" The law," in this verse, must evidently be taken for the whole of the Old Testament Scriptures.
It is worthy of remark that the Jews charge our Lord with saying "the Son of Man must be lifted up." Yet our Lord in the last verse but one had not mentioned the Sou of man, but had only said, "I, if I be lifted up." — It is also singular that our Lord nowhere uses the expression " lifted up " except in His conversation with Nicodemus, in John iii. 14. We must there- fore either suppose that the Jews referred to the saying of Christ when He spoke to Nicodemus, (which is very unlikely ;)- or else that the expression, "The Son of man must be lifted up," was so frequently on our Lord's lips, that the Jews caught it up and pressed it on Him here;— or else that our Lord so fre- quently spoke of Himself as the Son of man, that when He said, "If I be lifted up," the Jews thought it equivalent to say- ing, " If the Son of man be lifted up."
The question "Who is this Son of man? "can hardly imply that the Jews did not know that Christ was speaking of Him- self. Does it not rather mean, " Who, and what kind of a per- son dost Thou claim to be, calling Thyself the Son of man, and yet talking of being lifted up on the cross? Dost Thou really 16