We have here one glimpse of a consuming ardor, a burning enthusiasm, which lay repressed and hidden for eighteen years more, till the Father called him to speak.
That simple, natural utterance in the child's mouth – "My Father" – shows the secret of the holy peace which kept him happy in waiting. The Father was a serene presence, an intimate and inward joy. In the beautiful solitudes about Nazareth the divine benediction came down upon him: —
"I will be as the dew to Israel:
He shall grow as the lily,
And cast forth his roots as Lebanon."
These two natural symbols seem fittest to portray the elements of that holy childhood which grew to holiest manhood. They give us, as its marked characteristics, the shining purity of the lily and the grand strength and stability of the cedars of Lebanon.
VI
GENTILE PROPHECIES OF CHRIST
"Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judæa, in the days of Herod the king, behold there came wise men to Jerusalem, saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him."
Was the Messiah to be the King of the Jews alone? No; he was for the world; he was the Good Shepherd of nations, and declared that he had "other sheep, not of this fold."
It seems to be most striking that, in the poetical and beautiful account of the birth of Jesus, there is record of two distinct classes who come to pay him homage – not only the simple-minded and devout laboring people of the Jews, but also the learned sages of the Gentiles.
There are constant intimations throughout the Old Testament that God's choice of the Jews was no favoritism; that he had not forgotten other races, but was still the God and Father of mankind; and that he chose Israel not to aggrandize one people, but to make that people his gift-bearers to the whole world.
There are distinct evidences in the Old Testament that the coming Saviour was caring for others beside the Jewish race. Witness his gracious promise to the slave Hagar that he would bless her descendants. In the very family line from which Messiah was to be born a loving and lovely Moabite woman was suffered to be introduced as the near ancestress of King David, and the name of the Gentile Ruth stands in the genealogy of Jesus as a sort of intimation that he belonged not to a race but to the world. In a remarkable passage of Isaiah (xliv. 28, xlv. 1, 4, 5) Jehovah, proclaiming his supreme power, declares himself to be He
"That saith of Cyrus —
He is my shepherd,
He shall perform all my pleasure.
Even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built;
And to the Temple, Thy foundations shall be laid.
Thus saith the Lord to his anointed,
To Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden.
For Jacob my servant's sake,
For Israel mine elect,
I have called thee by my name:
I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known me.
I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God beside me:
I girded thee, though thou hast not known me."
The Babylonian captivity answered other purposes beside the punishment and restoration of the Jewish nation to the worship of the true God. It was a sort of prophetic "Epiphany," in which the Messianic aspirations of the Jews fell outside of their own nation, like sparks of fire on those longings which were common to the human race. Even the Jewish prophet spoke of the Messiah as "The Desire of all Nations."
And this desire and the hope of its fulfillment were burning fervently in the souls of all the best of the Gentile nations; for not among the Jews alone, but among all the main races and peoples of antiquity, have there been prophecies and traditions more or less clear of a Being who should redeem the race of man from the power of evil and bring in an era of peace and love.
The yearning, suffering heart of humanity formed to itself such a conception out of its own sense of need. Poor helpless man felt himself an abandoned child, without a Father, in a scene of warring and contending forces. The mighty, mysterious, terrible God of nature was a being that he could not understand, felt unable to question. Job in his hour of anguish expressed the universal longing: —
"Oh that I knew where I might find him! I would come even to his seat, I would order my cause before him, I would fill my mouth with arguments. Would he plead against me with his great power? Nay, but he would put strength in me."
And again: —
"He is not a man as I am that I should answer him, and that we should come together in judgment. Neither is there any daysman that might lay his hand on both of us."
It was for this Mediator, both divine and human, who should interpret the silence of God to man, who should be his Word to his creatures, that all humanity was sighing. Therefore it was that the first vague promise was a seed of hope, not only in the Jewish race, but in all other nations of the earth.
One of the earliest and most beautiful prophecies of the coming Messiah is from the heathen astrologer, Balaam: —
"Balaam the son of Beor saith,
The man whose eyes are open, saith,
He which heard the word of God
And knew the knowledge of the Most High,
Which saw the vision of the Almighty,
Falling into a trance and having his eyes open:
I shall see Him, but not now.
I shall behold Him, but not nigh.
There shall come a Star out of Jacob,
A sceptre shall rise out of Israel.
Out of Jacob shall come He that shall have dominion!"
Of late there has been discovered in Nineveh a large work on the system of magic of the Chaldee soothsayers, written on tiles of baked clay, in the "arrow-head" characters. Here we have a minute account, of the Chaldeans – the astrologers and the sorcerers spoken of in Daniel – with specimens of their liturgic forms and invocations. M. Lenormant, who has issued a minute account of this work with translations of many parts of it, gives an interesting account of the religious ideas of the Chaldees in the very earliest period of antiquity, as old or older than that of the soothsayer Balaam.
He says the supreme divinity, whom they called EA, was regarded as too remote and too vast to be approached by human prayer, and that he was to be known only through the medium of another divinity, his first-begotten Son, to whom is given a name signifying the Benefactor of Man. The prayers and ascriptions to this divinity remind us of the Old Testament addresses to the Messiah. The Hebrew poet says: —
"Of old hast thou laid the foundations of the earth,
And the heavens are the work of thy hands."
The ancient invocation upon the tiles of Nineveh addressed to the Mediator runs thus: —
"Great Lord of earth! King of all lands,
First-begotten Son of Ea,
Director of heaven and earth,
Most merciful among the gods,
Thou who restorest the dead to life."
… .
We see here the reflection of a Being such as the contemporaries of Abraham in the land of the Chaldees must have looked forward to – an image of that diffused and general faith which pervaded the world in the days when the patriarch was called to be the Father of a peculiar people.
In the Zendavesta – begun about the age of Daniel – also are traces of the same Being, with prophecies of his future appearance on earth