Eerfect ideal realized in Christ, viz. the saint or oly one, that is, the individual righteous man. It IS particularly the personal chaiacter and ex- perience of this figure, his faith in God, his struggles with adversity and death, his hopes of immortality, that come prominently to the light. It is lie who says in Ps 16, ' I have set the Lord ever before me : because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. For thou wilt not give over my soul to Sheol ; nor sufl'er thine Holy One to see the pit.' It is he also who speaks in Ps 40, ' Sacrifice and ofiering thou wouldst not. Then said I, Lo, I am come to do thy wOl, O my God ; yea, thy law is within my heart. I have preached righteousness in the great congregation.' In Ps 22^ a speaker says, ' I vv-ill declare thy name unto my brethren : in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee. For he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, nor hid his face from htm.' The ideas in this passage ditler from those in Is 53. The afilic- tions of the sufierer are not borne for others. But he suft'ers innocently and wrongly ; and the inter- position of J" to deliver him is so signal, and gives such a revelation of what J" is, that they that behold it turn unto Him — all the ends of the earth shall remember, and turn unto the Lord (v.''). Such lofty expectations were scarcely likely to be connected with any individual personage, however outstanding ; more probably the sufierer in the psalm is the true people of J" personified, as in Deutero-Isaiah.
In a sense, great part of the OT is Messianic. For it is just the peculiarity of OT that it struck out lofty moral and redemptive ideals, on occasions the most diverse, and in connexion with personages and in circumstances very various. These ideals were ultimately combined together to express the being of Him who was the ideal on all sides. But this RIessianic of OT was, so to speak, unconscious. The writers had not the future king in their mind. They were speaking of other persons, or they were uttering presentiments, or what seemed to them religious necessities, or projecting forward brilliant spiritual hopes and anticipations. There was a spirit in them broader than the hope of a future person — a spirit as broad as the kingdom of God in
* By the time of Deutero-Isaiah the idea of the • word* of God had become eenemhzed ; it is the true knowledge of the true God, and this is the U/rah of the Servant to the aationi.
all its needs, in all its endowments, and in all the possible height of its attainment. The history ol the people's mind from the Restoration onward is mainly the history of a rellection on these ideals. They tried these ideals by the conditions of tiie present, and found that they and the present world were incompatible, and they projected them into the future, and thus the ideals became prophetic. Further, they had received the liojie ol a great deliverer, and he became a centre around wliom tlie ideals, whether of glory or holiness or even of sufiering, could be gatiiered, and they attached tliem to him. The woman of Samaria, for ex- ample, regards the Messiah as one that ' will declare unto us all things.'
Kinds of Messianic Passaoes. — The question put in regard to any passage by hiiitorical exegesis is, What did tlie Heb. writer mean? What personage had he in his mind in tlie poiisage ? There may thus be several classes of Messianic prophecies. (1) Directly Messianic prophecies. In these the prophet or writer had the expected future Messiah actually present to his own mind. Examples are Is 7. 9. 11, Mic 4. 6, Jer 23»-6 309, Ezk 17-.-iM 3423ff. 37l»28, Zee 38 612 9S"f-, Ps 2. 72. 110, and other passages. Is 7 is denied by many to be Messianic (see Immanuel), while Is 9. 11, though generally aduiitted to be Messianic, are held by some to be later than Isaiali (see Isaiau). In Is 9. 11 it is not taught that the Messiah is God, but that J" is fully present in him. The general eschatological idea was that the presence of J" in person among men would be their salvation ; the prophet gives a particular turn to this general idea, repre- senting that J" shall be present in the Davidic king. The two are not identified, but J" is fully manifested in the Messiah. The passage goes very far ; and though the Christian doctrine of incarnation contains a positive conception in it which OT saints did not reach, tlieology is obliged to limit that positive by negations which seem rather to neutralize it ; and though the phrase * became ' man is used, it is atlinned at the same time that the two natures remained distinct, and that the Divine suffered no change and no confusion or composition with the human. (2) Indirectly Messianic passages. These are passages in which the writer had some OT otticer or personage in his mind, but spoke of him according to the idea of his office or function or character ; and this ideal is transferred to Christ in the NT, as being actually realized only in Hiui, or at least in llim first. Examples are what is said of ' man' in PsS, of Israel as Ser\'ant of the Lord in Is 40 ff., Ps 22, of the 'prophet' in Dt 18, of the saint or holy one in Ps 16. 40, and much else. Such passages are sometimes called tj'pically Messianic, the idea being that OT personages, such as king, prophet, and the like, were types, that is, designed prophetic suggestions, of the Messiah in some of bis essential redemptive functions or ex- periences. The exegesis of Calvin gave vogue to this method of interpretation, and applied it to passages to which it is scarcely applicable, e.g. Ps 2. 72. According to this interpretation Ps 2 is supposed spoken of some actual king of Israel ; but as its language transcends what was verified in any ordinary king, it had a more proper fulfilment in Christ. Ps2, however, could hardly have been spoken of an actual king ; the universalism of its ideas, e.g. 'the kings of the earth' who oppose J" and Ilia Anointed, the extent of the King's inheritance as the Son of J", viz. 'the nations' and 'the ends of the earth,' and the final kindling of J"'s anger, all mark it out as an eschatological and directly Messianic passage. The same is true of Ps 72. Very confused language is used by interpreters in regard to these BO'Called tj'pical proi>hecies(see Expositor. Nov. 1S78). NT does not recognize any class of iiidirect Messianic prophecies, for God being the speaker in the OT the person in whom the language waa fulfilled must be the person of svliom it was spoken. So far as the Heb. writer is concerned, he had in his mind eitlter the expected future Messiah, or he had some OT person. In the latter case, If his language transcends what could be realized in the 0*1 personage, he spoke ideally, that is, according to the religioufl idea of the personage or bis function or bis experience.