In short, we shall have no difficulty about these Divine methods with a single, elect people, if we only remember that to be Divine is to be practical. _Yet God also is wise_, said Isaiah to the Jews when they preferred their own clever policies to Jehovah's guidance. And we need to be told the same, who murmur that to confine Himself to a single nation was not the ideal thing for the One God to do; or who imagine that it was left to one of our Lord's own creatures to suggest to Him the policy of His mission upon earth. We are shortsighted: and the Almighty is past finding out. But this at least it is possible for us to see, that, in choosing one nation to be His agent among men, God chose the type of instrument best fitted at the time for the work for which He designed it, and that in choosing Israel to be that nation, He chose a people of temper singularly suitable to His end.
Israel's election as a nation, therefore, was to Service. To be a nation and to be God's Servant was pretty much one and the same thing for Israel. Israel were to survive the Exile, because they were to serve the world. Let us carry this over to the study of our next chapter--The Servant of Jehovah.
[139] Wellhausen.
[140] "Revelation is never revolutionary.... As a rule, revelation accepts the fragments of truth and adopts the methods of religion already existing, uniting the former into a whole, and purifying the latter for its own purposes."... For instance, "in the East each people had its particular god. The god and the people were correlative ideas, that which gave the individuals of a nation unity and made them a people was the unity of its god; as, on the other hand, that which gave a god prestige was the strength and victorious career of his people. The self-consciousness of the nation and its religion re-acted on one another, and rose and fell simultaneously. This conception was not repudiated, but adopted by revelation; and, as occasion demanded, purified from its natural abuses."--Professor A. B. Davidson, _Expositor_, Second Series, vol. viii., pp. 257-8.
[141] Mr. Doughty, in his most interesting account of the nomads of Central Arabia, the unsophisticated Semites on their native soil, furnishes ample material for accounting for the strange mixture of passion and resignation in these prophet-peoples of the world.
[142] Ch. xlix. 2.
[143] Jer. xxx. 10, cf. xlvi. 27; also Ezek. xxxvii. 25: _And they shall dwell in the land that I have given My servant Jacob_. Cf. xxviii. 25.
[144] xliv. 1, 21; xlviii. 20, etc.
[145] Ch. li. 9, 10.
[146] Ch. xliii. 14.
[147] _Ib._ 3, 4.
[148] Robertson Smith, Burnett Lectures in Aberdeen, 1889-90.