5. Such, then, is the New Testament reflection of the Prophecy of the Servant of the Lord, both as People and Person. Like all physical reflections, this moral one may be said, on the whole, to stand reverse to its original. In Isa. xl.-lxvi. the Servant is People first, Person second. But in the New Testament--except for a faint and scarcely articulate application to Israel in the beginning of the gospels--the Servant is Person first and People afterwards. The Divine Ideal which our prophet saw narrowing down from the Nation to an Individual, was owned and realised by Christ. But in Him it was not exhausted. With added warmth and light, with a new power of expansion, it passed through Him to fire the hearts and enlist the wills of an infinitely greater people than the Israel for whom it was originally designed. With this witness, then, of history to the prophecies of the Servant, our way in expounding and applying them is clear. Jesus Christ is their perfect fulfilment and illustration. But we who are His Church are to find in them our ideal and duty,--our duty to God and to the world. In this, as in so many other matters, the unfulfilled prophecy of Israel is the conscience of Christianity.
[160] _Cf._ _The Jewish Interpreters on Isa. liii._, Driver and Neubauer, Oxford, 1877. Abravanel, who himself takes ch. liii. in a national sense, admits, after giving the Christian interpretation, that "in fact Jonathan ben Uziel, 'the Targumist,' applied it to the Messiah, who was still to come, and this is likewise the opinion of the wise in many of their Midrashim." And R. Moscheh al Shech, of the sixteenth century, says: "See, our masters have with one voice held as established and handed down, that here it is King Messiah who is spoken of." (Both these passages quoted by Bredenkamp in his commentary, p. 307.)
[161] Isa. lix. 5.
[162] _Id._ vi. 13; ix. 18; x. 17, 34; xlvii. 14.
[163] _Id._ xxi. 10; xxviii. 27; xl. 24; xli. 15 ff.
[164] _Id._ i. 31; xlvii. 14.
[165] Isa. lviii. 7.
[166] Undoubtedly taken from Isa. liii.
[167] _Cf._ with the Greek version of Isa. l. 4-7, Luke xviii. 31, 32; Matt. xxvi. 67.
[168] In Isa. xl.-lxvi. the Septuagint translates the Hebrew for Servant by one or other of two words--παις and δουλος. Παις is used in xli. 8; xlii. 1; xliv. 1 ff.; xliv. 21; xlv. 4; xlix. 6; l. 10; lii. 13. But δουλος is used in xlviii. 20; xlix. 3 and 5. In the Acts it is παις that is used of Christ: "An apostle is never called παις (but only δουλος) Θεου" (Meyer). But David is called παις (Acts iv. 25).
[169] Acts iii. 13, 26; iv. 27-30.
[170] Acts iii. 14; vii. 52.
[171] Acts viii. 30 ff.
[172] 1 Peter i. 19; ii. 22, 23; iii. 18.
[173] Rom. xv. 20 f.; 2 Cor. v. 21.
[174] Acts xiii. 47, after Isa. xlix. 6.
[175] Isa. l. 8, and Rom. viii. 33, 34.
[176] 2 Tim. ii. 24. We may note, also, how Paul in Eph. vi. takes the armour with which God is clothed in Isa. lix. 17, breastplate and helmet, and equips the individual Christian with them; and how, in the same passage, he takes for the Christian from Isa. xl. the Messiah's girdle of truth and the _sword of the Spirit,--he shall smite the land with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked_.