"The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world."
Our Lord asserts nothing more frequently than that he came to this
world, not as other men come, but as a voluntary exile from a higher
and purer life. He said in public, speaking to the Jews, "I came
down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him that
sent me." When the Jews tauntingly said to him, "Thou art not yet
fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?" he answered, "Before
Abraham was, I AM." In fact, while he walked as a brother among men,
there were constant and mysterious flashes from the life of a higher
sphere. Jesus moved about in our life as a sympathetic foreigner
who ever and anon in moments of high excitement breaks out into
his native language. So Christ at times rose into the language of
heaven, and spoke for a moment, unconsciously as it were, in the
style of a higher world.
He did not say, "Before Abraham was, I _was_," but "I AM," using
the same form which in the Old Testament is used by Jehovah when
he declares his name to Moses, "I AM that I am." So, too, when
conversing with Nicodemus, our Lord asserts that he is the only
person competent to bear testimony to heavenly things, because he
came from heaven.
He says, "No man hath ascended into heaven but he that came down
from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven." This last is
one of those changes into the language of a higher world which so
often awed and perplexed those who talked with Jesus. It would seem
that he had the power by moments to breathe aside the veil which
separates from the higher state, and to be in heaven. Such a moment
was this, when he was declaring to an honest-minded, thoughtful
inquirer the higher truths of the spiritual life, and asserting
his right to know about heavenly things, because he came down from
heaven--yea, because for the moment he was in heaven.
But in the last hours of his life, when he felt the scenes of his
humiliations and sufferings approaching, he declared this truth, so
often shadowed and intimated, with explicit plainness. He said, "I
came forth from the Father, and am come into the world. Again, I
leave the world, and go to the Father." This was stating the truth
as plainly as human words can do it, and the disciples at last
understood him fully. "Lo! now speakest thou plainly, and speakest
no proverb." And in that affecting prayer that followed our Lord
breathes the language of an exile longing to return to the home of
his love: "And now, O Father! glorify me with thine own self--with
the glory that I had with thee before the world was."
It is then most plain on the face of the New Testament that our
Lord had a history before he came to this world. He was a living
power. He was, as he says, in glory with the Father before the world
was. Are there any traces of this mysterious Word, this divine Son,
this Revealer of God in the Old Testament? It has been the approved
sentiment of sound theologians that in the Old Testament every
visible appearance of an Angel or divine Man to whom the name of
Jehovah is given is a pre-appearance of the Redeemer, Jesus. It is a
most interesting study to pursue this idea through the Old Testament
history, as is fully done by President Edwards in his "History of
Redemption" and by Dr. Watts in his "True Glory of Christ." In
Milton's "Paradise Lost" he represents the Son of God as being "the
Lord God who walked in the Garden of Eden" after the trespass of our
first parents, and dwells on the tenderness of the idea that it was
in the cool of the day,--
"when from wrath more cool
Came the mild Judge and Intercessor both."
This sentiment of the church has arisen from the plain declaration
in the first chapter of John, where it is plainly asserted that "no
man hath seen God at any time, but the only begotten Son, which is
in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." The Old Testament
records to which our Lord constantly appealed were full of instances
in which a being called Jehovah, and spoken of as God,--the Almighty
God,--had appeared to men, and the inference is plain that all these
were pre-appearances of Christ.
It is an interesting study for the sacred season of Advent to trace
those pre-appearances of our Lord and Saviour in the advancing
history of our race. A series of readings of this sort would be
a fit preparation for the triumphs of Christmas, when he, the
long-desired, was at last given visible to man.
We shall follow a few of these early appearances of the Saviour,
in the hope that some pious hearts may be led to see those traces
of his sacred footsteps, which brighten the rugged ways of the Old
Testament history.
In the eighteenth chapter of Genesis we have an account of a long
interview of Abraham with a being in human form, whom he addresses
as Jehovah, the Judge of all the earth. We hear him plead with him
in words like these;--
"Behold now, I have taken on me to speak unto Jehovah, which am
but dust and ashes ... that be far from thee to do after this
manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked: and that the
righteous should be as the wicked. Shall not the Judge of all
the earth do right?"
What a divine reticence and composure it was, on the part of our
Lord, when afterwards he came to earth and the scoffing Jews said to
him, "Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?"
He did not tell them how their father Abraham had been a suppliant
at his feet ages ago, yet he must have thought of it as they thus
taunted him.
Again we read in Genesis xxviii., when Jacob left his father's house
and lay down, a lonely traveler, in the fields with a stone for his
pillow, the pitying Jesus appeared to him:--
"He dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the
top of it reached unto heaven; and behold the angels of God
ascending and descending upon it. And behold, Jehovah stood
above it, and said, I am Jehovah, God of Abraham, thy father."
As afterwards Jesus, at the well of Samaria, chose to disclose his
Messiahship to the vain, light-minded, guilty Samaritan woman, and
call her to be a messenger of his good to her townsmen, so now he
chose Jacob--of whom the worst we know is that he had yielded to
an unworthy plot for deceiving his father--he chose him to be the
father of a powerful nation. Afterward our Lord alludes to this
vision in one of his first conversations with Nathaniel, as given by
St. John:--
"Jesus said unto him, Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under
the fig-tree, believest thou? thou shalt see greater things than
these, Verily I say unto you, hereafter ye shall see heaven open
and the angels of God ascending and descending _upon the Son of
man_."
This same divine Patron and Presence watches over the friendless
Jacob until he becomes rich and powerful, the father of a numerous
tribe. He is returning with his whole caravan to his native land.
But the consequence of his former sin meets him on the way. Esau,
the brother whom he deceived and overreached, is a powerful prince,
and comes to meet him with a band of men.
Then Jacob was afraid and distressed, and applies at once to his
heavenly Helper. "I am not worthy," he says, "of all the mercy
and all the truth which thou hast shown to thy servant, for with
my staff I passed over this Jordan and now I am become two bands.
Deliver me, I pray thee, from the hand of my brother Esau, for
I fear him, lest he come and smite me and the mother with the
children." Such things were common in those days--they were possible
and too probable--and what father would not pray as Jacob prayed?
Then follows a passage of singular and thrilling character. A
mysterious stranger comes to him, dimly seen in the shadows of the
coming dawn. Is it that human Friend--that divine Jehovah? Trembling
and hoping he strives to detain him, but the stranger seeks to flee
from him. Made desperate by the agony of fear and entreaty, he
throws his arms around him and seeks to hold him. The story is told
briefly thus:--
"And Jacob was left alone. And there wrestled A MAN with him
until the breaking of day. And when he saw that he prevailed not
he touched the hollow of his thigh, and the hollow of Jacob's
thigh was out of joint as he wrestled with him. And the man
said, Let me go, for the day breaketh; and he said, I will not
let thee go except thou bless me. And he said, What is thy name?
and he said, Jacob. And he said, Thy name shall be called no
more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince thou hast power with God
and with men, and hast prevailed. And Jacob said, I beseech thee
tell me thy name. And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost
ask after my name? And he blessed him there."
How like is this mysterious stranger to the One in the New Testament
history who after the resurrection joined the two sorrowful
disciples on the way to Emmaus. There is the same mystery, the same
reserve in giving himself fully to the trembling human beings who
clung to him. So when the disciples came to their abode "he made
as though he would go farther," and they constrained him and he
went in. As he breaks the bread they know him, and immediately he
vanishes out of their sight.
In his dying hour (Gen. xlviii.) the patriarch Jacob, after an
earthly pilgrimage of a hundred and forty-seven years, recalls these
blessed visions of his God:--
"And Jacob said to Joseph, God Almighty appeared to me at Luz in
the land of Canaan and blessed me."