of the Jews. As He is the strength of all the present, so was He the fulfilment of all the past. God, who loved His human children unto the end, loved them from the beginning. The Incarnation was no sudden thought; no second-best plan. It was the consummation of that love of God of which He had not left Himself without witness from the foundation of the world. We have an Old Testament as well as a New Testament. We are one in hope, one in promise with all the forefathers of our race. When men fell, the promise was given ; when the Deluge came, it was renewed ; it was confirmed to Abraham and to his sons; it gleamed through the thunder-smoke of Sinai; it brightened the De profundis of the Jewish people in the Psalms ; it is the divinest tone in the grandest utterances of all the prophets. The object of the Evangelists in teaching that Jesus is the Christ is to convince us that this Son of man was the promised seed of the woman who should bruise the serpent's head ; that He was the true rainbow of the Covenant; that in Him were all the nations of the world to be blessed ; that He was the Prophet greater than Moses of whom Moses spoke ; that He was the true Star of Jacob, the Sceptre of Israel ; the King of David's line ; the branch of the stem of Jesse ; the oppressed and afflicted but not for Himself ; the King upon His throne ; the Priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.
^ From the beginning of His ministry the Nazarene was familiar with the idea of His Messiahship as involving service and suffering, and gave no indistinct signs of the force with which it possessed Him. He is a true Hebrew in hope and faith. He reads the Law, sings the Psalms, and is fired by the Messiah hope. On His acceptance of the office of Scripture-reader in the synagogue of His native village He appropriated the Messianic words of Isaiah as descriptive of Himself. To the Samaritan woman He made known His character, and affirmed that He was the Messiah expected by the people ; and such was the beauty of His life and the power of His words, that after He had been but two days in Sychar many said to the woman, " Now we believe, not because of thy speaking: for we have heard for ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world." ^
(3) Son of God. — We must advance one step further. Jesus is the Son of God. He who could claim to be in so supreme and
1 Joliu Cliiforcl, The Christian Certainties, 174.
4o6 CHIEF PURPOSE OF THE GOSPEL
distinguishing a sense the Son of Man without deserving the charge of insanity or overweening self-conceit, and to be the Messiah, the anointed prophet-king of the Most High, without refutation from the cleverest and bitterest of His foes, need not hesitate to urge His right to be regarded as the Son of God. This is the fundamental fact in His consciousness. Directly and in- tuitively He knows His own Sonship, and speaks and acts by the final and supreme authority of that unique relation. We must, therefore, complete the synthesis of facts grouped in the words " Jesus " and " Christ " in another and higher designation : and what can that be but the Son of God the Father ! The circum- stances of the case demand and fully justify the triple name for the Galilean Teacher, our Lord Jesus Christ.
^ When Jesus named Himself the Son of God before the religious Jews, the only interpretation they could put upon His words was, that He was setting Himself up as a rival God, " making himself equal with God." It is interesting and instructive to observe how Jesus passes by the word equal, in order that He may expound and dwell upon His perfect filial unity with His Father. He entirely disavows the equality in the sense in which the Jews meant it ; and so St. Paul says of Him, that He did not think equality with God a thing to be grasped at. It was impossible to imagine a more complete subordination than that of the Son of God to the Father. Mark once more those wonderful sayings of Jesus : " Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do." What language could more explicitly repudiate any independent equality of the Son with the Father ? But then our Lord adds the assertion, " What things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise." Such a relation as this might not unnaturally be expressed by the term equality. But if we follow our blessed Lord's own teaching, we shall make sonship — sonship in its most perfect idea, eternal sonship — the key to what He was and is at the side of the Father. Jesus did not shrink from saying that it was the Father's purpose that "all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father."^
They come to Thee, the halt, the maimed, the blind,
The devil-torn, the sick, the sore; Thy heart their well of life they find,