Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 317.
Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xii. No. 694; xvi.
No. 925. Swan (F. R.), The Death of Jesus Christ, 12. Sermons for Sundays, Festivals, and Fasts, 2nd series, ii. 63. Church Pulpit Year Book, vii. 9. Church/man's Pulpit (Good Friday), 16 (Pinder). Clergyman's Magazine, 3rd series, ii. 91. Contemporary Pulpit, Ist series, ix. 274 (Perowne). Homiletic Review, iii. 690 (Tyng) ; vii. 59 (Brown) ; xxx. 146 (Bayne). Preacher's Magazine, ii. 463 (Ryle) ; xvi. 334 (Cowl).
Our Sin-bearer.
All we like sheep have gone astray ; we have turned every one to his own way ; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.— liii. 6.
We do not know, and there is no gain in guessing, who the sufferer was who is thus commemorated. " Vicarious sufferincr " it has been said, " is not a dogmatic but an experimental truth . . . a great living fact of human experience, evident to men's eyes, and appreciable, in its meaning, to their consciences." Somebody — Jeremiah or another — lived a life of absolute self-devotion and, as appeared, of defeat as absolute, and then he passed away without remark. There was nothing in him to draw the eyes of his contemporaries, nothing but his sufferings, from which, as average healthy creatures, they were rather inclined to turn away. He was one from whom men hide their faces, seeking to avoid him on the street ; and he made so little impression on his age that the writer adds, " Who of his generation even considered that he had ceased to live ? " Whatever the nobility of his life may have been, that was the extent of its prosperity — a failure which had not even the compensation of publicity.
And yet when that life was over it somehow refused to be done. It is no uncommon experience for us to discover, weeks or months after an event, that we have been more observant than we imagined. When a situation, which in no way concerned us at the time, is recalled in memory, fragmentary impressions come drifting back, words which unconsciously we had marked, looks which had been noted ; and we fit them together so that we begin actually to understand the episode from which we fancied we had carried nothing away. That is how the prophet proceeds. He, also, had been one of the unobservant, but some- thing from that forgotten incident remained, insistent, provocative to the mind ; and by degrees he began to spell out the meaning
326 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
of what he had not regarded, until in the figure of that forgotten sufferer he found a key to the mystery of God's way in redeeming men. It is by self-devoting love like that, he says, that men are healed, and God's Servant when He comes will surely take that way.^
But there is only one Individual in history of whom it is a likeness. The life and death of Jesus Christ — lived and died five hundred years after the very latest date to which any one has assigned this prophecy — fit it feature by feature, tint by tint, as nothing else can. And the minute external correspond- ences between the prophet's vision and the Gospel story, important as these literal resemblances are, are mainly important as pointing onwards to the complete correspondence between the spirit and functions of the suffering servant of the prophecy and of the Jesus Christ of the Gospel history.
All we, like sheep.
1. All we have gone astray. — The speakers are primarily the penitent Jewish nation, who at last have learned how much they had at first misunderstood the servant of the Lord. But the " we " and the " all " of our text may very fairly be widened out so as to include the whole world, and every individual of the race. Iniquity is the universal burden of us all.
f In the Journal of Biblical Literature for 1910 (Part I., p. 24) Dr. W. H. Cobb points out that the Hebrew word kol translated " all " IS not an adjective but a substantive, and has the definite article prefixed to it. Accordingly, to bring out the force of the original, he translates this passage, " The whole of us wandered like sheep." It is the universe of mankind; there is no break in its uniformity. In the same way he renders Deut. vi. 5, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with the whole of thy heart," for it is not merely an intense love that God demands, it is an undivided love ; no part of the heart is to be given to the love of any other god.
(1) The fact that every man is a transgressor of the law of God is the prime fact of humanity, and the all-important truth
* W. M. Macgregor.
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needed for the apprehension of the very rudiments of the Gospel. We shall never know what we need, or be able to understand what Christianity, as gathered in Christ — who is Christianity — offers to do for us, unless our eyes are opened and our consciences made sensitive to the unwelcome but undeniable truth that we all " have sinned and come short of the glory of God." I believe that almost all of the mistaken and unworthy conceptions of Christianity which have afflicted and do afflict the world are directly traceable to this — the failure to apprehend the radical fact affecting men's condition that they are all sinful, and there- fore separated from God.^