1.02.01.03 The Prophets
III. THE PROPHETS. No portion of the Old Testament has been more frequently misunderstood and misapplied than that which contains the writings of the prophets. Many passages are obscure and even misleading as they appear in the Authorized Version, and therefore it is of imperative importance to make use of the Revised Version; in which, happily, a number of the rough places are made smooth. But it is not merely a question of rightly translating and construing the sentences. The interpretation of the prophecies has been sadly astray.
1. The Evidences of Prophecy.— Too often the only object of the Christian advocate has been to gather out of the various books of the Old Testament a collection of isolated texts, irrespective of context, date, or contemporary history, and to fit these together into a mosaic picture, the original design of which was previously sketched out with a conscious reference to the narratives and doctrines of the New Testament. Such a method is radically defective. It is inevitable that the idea of the object in view will color the mind of the inquirer so as to make it impossible for him to carry on a fairly impartial investigation. We are therefore prepared to find that those commentators who have pursued this method most unreservedly have started with the boldest assumptions, and ended by landing themselves in the most glaring absurdities. But even when these extremes are avoided there can be no doubt that the passion for discovering coincidences solely as coincidences must blind our eyes to the inherent worth of the truths concerned, just as too great attention to the rhyme of a poem hinders us from appreciating its thoughts. This method must also lead to a disproportionate treatment of the several prophecies, often quite reversing their relative order of importance. Minute predictions, exact in detail like Dutch paintings, no matter how insignificant their substance if only their forms are clearly defined, will necessarily be preferred to the greater truths. But now a more accurate process of exegesis is showing that some of the most famous instances of correspondence between prediction and fulfilment are superficial and accidental, while others are seen to be so doubtful that they must lose all force in the controversy for which they were formerly prized as choice weapons. In one case the coincidence is discovered to consist in a merely verbal correspondence, based on a translation which must have been made with more regard for New Testament history than Old Testament grammars in another the language points so plainly to contemporary events that this reference can only be ignored so long as we keep our eyes closed to the facts of ancient history.’’ Nevertheless, “the dissolution of the mechanical relation between the ideas of prophecy and the facts and doctrines of Christianity is really doing good service to the cause of Christian truth, by directing more attention to these ideas themselves and their deeper vital union with the later revelation. If we are led to attach less value to the agreement between superficial details, we are called to bow before the transcendent majesty of the essential truths.”
2. History and Prophecy.—You can never come to a true understanding of these ancient prophecies unless we apply the historical method to the study of them. Our first requisite is to know who wrote them, when they were written, and what were the circumstances under which they were put forth. The prophets, let us always remember, were the preachers of their day, and the true preacher must speak to the times. Assuredly the Hebrew prophets did so. In dealing with political questions they took the place of the modern leaderwriter in the newspaper, although they raised their topics high above the region of party politics, viewing them in the light of God’s will and judging them according to the standard of divine righteousness. It was by no means their chief aim to lift the veil from the countenance of the dim future. They did predict, it is true, both judgment and redemption; but their predictions for the most part related to the immediate future, and the larger proportion of their teaching was concerned with the present troubles, needs, sins, duties, and hopes of the people to whom they preached. The prophet was primarily God’s messenger, the apostle of Old Testament times. His peculiar office was to speak for God, to give God’s message to the people; and that message more often concerned the present than the future. The kernel of it was a revelation of eternal truth. Thus Amos leaves his herds and his vines in the south country, and comes up to the court of the famous King Jeroboam II. at Bethel, to denounce the corruption that abounds in that scene of dissolute luxury, and to point to the plague of locusts and other disasters as chastisements from the hand of God. A century later Isaiah, a great statesman as well as a preacher of righteousness, like one of the capable abbots and archbishops of the middle ages, guides the counsels of Hezekiah at a grave national crisis, when Jerusalem is threatened by foreign enemies showing his political insight in perceiving that the awful power of Assyria — now just looming on the horizon — is far more dangerous than the neighboring confederation of Israel and Syria, and shaping the sublime policy of isolation with trust in the protection of Jehovah, by which alone the city could be saved. Another century, and we have Jeremiah perceiving the approaching ruin, to which the infatuated king and his infatuated people are blind, while false, flattering prophets throw dust in their eyes, and then, though execrated as a traitor for counseling the wise course of submission to the inevitable, announcing a new and better covenant that is to take the place of the old outworn covenant, which the Jews have dishonored by their faithlessness and which can no longer serve as the charter of their safety. Then, in the Exile, Ezekiel beholds his visions of providence and a reformed temple service, visions that help to bring about the reform at the return from Babylon. Toward the end of the Captivity we come upon a wonderful collection of inspired utterances, which has been preserved with the prophecies of Isaiah— from the fortieth chapter onward— and which, steeped in the atmosphere of the Exile as it is, is designed to comfort the captives with promises of approaching deliverance. After the Return we see Haggai cheering the toilers at the rebuilding of the temple, and a hundred years later Malachi blaming the Jews for their negligence of the restored temple service, as well as for other signs of declension that have crept in by his time, and warning of new judgments yet to fall on the unfaithful people. In all these cases— and they are but specimens— we see that the prophecy had immediate bearings on the people to whom it was addressed, as the living message of the preacher to his age. Therefore it can only be understood when read in this connection. In this way we must study the prophets, if we are not to be wholly mistaken as to what they are aiming at. But then, how can the prophecies be used for the benefit of ourselves and our own times? Certainly not by giving to them a new and artificial meaning. That is the vicious process by which the Bible is made to teach anything, and therefore as a just revenge made to teach nothing, because it is converted into a mere mirror of the reader’s prejudices. And yet we need not be content with reading the prophecies of the Old Testament simply as studies in ancient history. In that case the results would be meager indeed, though they might be sober and sound. The ancient utterances are of value to us chiefly because they contain truths for our own times —truths from which we ourselves can extract the very juice and marrow of divine revelation. There is no inconsistency in this position. Transitory events may illustrate eternal truths. It is the glory of Hebrew prophecy that it rises above the petty details of external circumstances and carries its themes up into the realm of the divine. It was just by pursuing this lofty course that the prophets endeavored to elevate both the political and the private life of Israel. But what they did in these respects for their own day they did for our day also and for all time. Because they reached those eternal truths which are above the shifting tides of time, we read them to-day for the sake of the great lessons they contain, and find in them, fresh and living, the very principles that are most needed to set right our life. But then, this modern application of the ancient teachings of the Hebrew prophets is not an excuse for ignoring their historical setting, because they can only be understood aright as they are seen in that setting.
Like the string that holds down the kite, and yet without which it would fall to the ground, the connection with limited historical events, which in our impatience we may be tempted to think a hindrance, is essential to the soaring of the prophecies into the higher regions.
“We must first know the historical meaning in order rightly to perceive the divine truth contained in it.
3. Messianic Prophecy.— Naturally, Christians have always regarded the prophecies that foreshadow the coming of the Messiah as the most precious heritage they have received from the Old Testament. This was the case in the preaching of the apostles and in the writing of the New Testament. It is illustrated emphatically in St. Peter’s sermons reported in the Acts of the Apostles, and in the Gospels of Matthew and John, where we have repeated citations from the prophets, with claims of the fulfilments of their predictions in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But now, does it not seem that the new historical reading of the prophecies must be robbing them of their peculiar value as witnesses to Christ? In attempting to answer this question, it would be well to divide the prophecies that are regarded as Messianic into two classes: first, those that were intended from the beginning to predict the coming of the Messiah, or at least the coming of the deliverance and blessedness that the Jews were led to associate with the Messianic age; and, second, those which, though written with no such reference, nevertheless contain truths of a Messianic character.
(1) All through the history of Israel, but especially in the latter reaches of it, there runs a golden thread of hope for some glorious future, and in Jeremiah we have the prediction of the New Covenant— a prediction that is only fulfilled by Christianity. Without going into an induction of passages we cannot gather up the strength of the evidence; but it can scarcely be denied that the hope for the Messiah that was found in Palestine and Samaria in the days of our Lord sprang from Old Testament prophecy. Genuine Messianic prophecy was spoken to cheer the contemporaries of the prophets, but in hope of a good time coming. It is no exception, therefore, to the principle that the prophets were preachers to their times.
(2) On the other hand, it must be confessed that a large proportion of the prophecies that Christians have been in the habit of applying to Jesus Christ do not appear to have this reference when they are taken in their historical connection. Thus the new way of reading the Bible seems to be impoverishing it in the matter of one of its most important elements. For example, it has been customary to take as simply intended for Jesus Christ the famous prediction, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel (Isa 7:14). But as we read on we find that during the infancy of the child the ravages of war are to put a stop to agriculture, so that he will have to subsist on pastoral products and food that is gathered from the wild country— “Butter and honey shall he eat” (Isa 7:15). Before he has reached years of discretion the war will be over, and the two powers that Ahaz so much dreaded, Israel and Syria, will collapse — “The land whose two kings thou abhorrest shall be forsaken” (Isa 7:16, R. V.). Then, though we find the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah repeatedly applied to our Lord in the New Testament, and commonly regarded among Christians as a prophecy of the passion, a careful perusal of the whole composition in which it appears shows that “the servant of the Lord” of whom the sufferings in this chapter are predicated is the pious remnant of the Jews, or perhaps some persecuted prophet, such as Jeremiah. Are we, then, to conclude that the Messianic application of these very famous passages, and of others that demand a similar application to local and contemporary personages and events, is a pure delusion? It has been customary to seek an escape from this disappointing conclusion by means of the theory of double interpretation. A first application to immediate circumstances is acknowledged, and then the words are read in a secondary sense with reference to Christ. The difficulty in the way of this theory is that there is nothing in the prophecies themselves to indicate it; it was simply invented to restore the Messianic meaning that had slipped out of them. What is this but the mischievous process of bringing to Scripture an idea of our own, and then contriving a plan for inserting it into the sacred text! This may be ingenious; it is not exegesis. But now a third position may be taken up, one that retains the simple historical meaning of the prophecies as their only meaning, and yet perceives the Messianic character of them. The ideas are Messianic. If they were realized in the immediate connection, which was all that the prophets contemplated, they still admit of subsequent realization under other circumstances, and if those other circumstances should prove to be more favorable, then a more perfect realization. Now, the wonderful thing about these prophecies is that they are not fully realized where the prophets expect their fulfilment, but are perfectly realized by Christ. The inspired thoughts are too great for the events with which the prophets connect them; the goodness of God is too wide for the imagination of man, even for the inspired imagination of a prophet. One point after another is fixed for the coming of the great hope; and though it is passed without a satisfactory fulfilment, the disappointment, instead of yielding to despair, only gives birth to greater promises at the next stage. One hero after another is hailed with acclamation; now it is Hezekiah, now Cyrus, now Judas Maccabaeus; none of them realize all the hopes that are set upon them, and the prophecies are still lacking their perfect fulfilment, when Jesus comes and gathers up into Himself all that was so imperfectly accomplished in the past, thus in the truest sense fulfilling prophecy, just as He fulfilled the law, by carrying it up to perfection and developing its latent ideas in a glory never dreamed of by their authors.
This, then, would seem to be our right course in the study of “Messianic prophecy,’’ with which, as with all other prophecy, we must get to know the historical meaning of the passage, as part of a preacher’s message to his contemporaries. From that we shall discover the essential idea. Then, turning our thoughts to Jesus Christ, we shall see how this idea is perfectly realized in His life and work as it had never been realized under the circumstances contemplated by the prophet.
See J. N. Smith, “Prophets of Israel”; Riehm, ’’Messianic Prophecy”; Briggs, “Messianic Prophecy.”