"There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse
A Branch shall grow out of his roots.
The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him;
The spirit of wisdom and understanding,
The spirit of counsel and might,
The spirit of knowledge, and fear of the Lord.
With righteousness shall he judge the poor,
And reprove with equity for the meek of the earth."
Then follow vivid pictures of a golden age on earth, beneath his
sway, when all enmities and ferocities even of the inferior animals
shall cease, and universal love and joy pervade the earth.
In the fifty-third of Isaiah we have again the sable thread
of humiliation and sorrow; the Messiah is to be "despised and
rejected of men;" his nation "hide their faces from him;" he "bears
their griefs, and carries their sorrows," is "wounded for their
transgressions," is "brought as a lamb to the slaughter," is "dumb
before his accusers," is "taken from prison to judgment," is "cut
off out of the land of the living," "makes his grave with the wicked
and with the rich in his death," and thence is "raised again to an
endless kingdom."
Thus far the tide of prophecy had rolled; thus distinct and luminous
had grown the conception of a future suffering, victorious Lord and
leader, when the Jewish nation, for its sins and unfaithfulness, was
suffered to go to wreck. The temple was destroyed and the nation
swept into captivity in a foreign land.
But they carried everywhere with them the vision of their future
Messiah. In their captivity and sufferings their religious feelings
became intense, and, wherever they were, the Jews were always
powerful and influential men. Daniel, by his divine skill in
spiritual insight, became the chief of the Chaldean magi, and his
teachings with regard to the future Messiah may be traced in those
passages of the Zendavesta which predict his coming, his universal
dominion, and the resurrection of the dead. Everywhere through all
nations this scattered seed of the Jews touched the spark of desire
and aspiration--the longing for a future Redeemer.
In the prophecies of Daniel we find the predictions of the Messiah
assuming the clearness of forewritten history. The successive
empires of the world are imaged under the symbol of a human
body, with a head of gold, a breast of silver, body and thighs
of brass, legs and feet of iron. By these types were indicated
the Babylonian, Medo-Persian, Greek and Roman nations, with their
successive rule. In prophetic vision, also, a stone was without
hands cut out of the mountains, and it smote the feet of the
image, so that the whole of it passed away like the chaff of the
threshing-floor.
How striking this description of that invisible, spiritual force
which struck the world in the time of the Roman empire, and before
which all the ancient dynasties have vanished!
In the ninth chapter of Daniel, verses 25, 26, 27, we find given
the exact time of the coming of the Messiah, of his death, of the
subsequent destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, and the cessation
of the Jewish worship and sacrifices. Remembering that Daniel
was the head of the Chaldean magi, we see how it is that their
descendants were able to calculate the time of the birth of Christ
and come to worship him.[2]
[2] M. Lenormant says in _The Magic of the Chaldees_: "The more one
advances in the understanding of the cuneiform text, the more one
sees the necessity of revising the condemnation too prematurely
uttered against the Book of Daniel by the German Exegetical School.
Without doubt, the use of certain Greek words serves to show that
it has passed through the hands of some editor since the time
of Alexander. But the substance of it is much more ancient--is
imprinted with a perfectly distinct Babylonian tinge, and the
picture of life in the court of Nabuchodonosor and his successors
has an equal truthfulness which could not have been attained at a
later period."
At length the Jews were recalled from captivity and the temple
rebuilt. While it was rebuilding prophets encouraged the work with
prophecies of the Lord who should appear in it. The prophet Haggai
(ii. 3-9) thus speaks to those who depreciate the new temple by
comparing it with the old:--
"Who is left among you that saw this house in her first glory?
Yet now be strong, all ye people of the land, and work, for I am
with you, saith the Lord of Hosts. For thus saith the Lord: Yet
a little while and I will shake the heavens and earth, the sea
and the dry land, and the Desire of all nations shall come, and
I will fill this house with glory, saith the Lord. The glory of
this latter house shall be greater than of the former, for in
this house will I give peace, saith the Lord of Hosts."
The prophecies of Zechariah, which belonged to the same period and
had the same object,--to encourage the rebuilding of the second
temple,--are full of anticipation of the coming Messiah. The prophet
breaks forth into song like a bird of the morning:--
"Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion;
Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem:
Behold, thy king cometh unto thee.
He is just and hath salvation;
He is lowly, riding upon an ass--
Upon a colt, the foal of an ass."