The life of Jesus, regarded from a mere human point of view,
presents an astonishing problem. An obscure man in an obscure
province has revolutionized the world. Every letter and public
document of the most cultured nations dates from his birth, as a
new era. How was this man educated? We find he had no access to
the Greek and Roman literature. Jesus was emphatically a man of
one book. That book was the Hebrew Scriptures, which we call the
Old Testament. The Old Testament was his Bible, and this single
consideration must invest it with undying interest for us.
We read the Bible which our parents read. We see, perhaps,
pencil-marks here and there, which show what they loved and what
helped and comforted them in the days of their life-struggle, and
the Bible is dearer to us on that account. Then, going backward
along the bright pathway of the sainted and blessed who lived in
former ages, the Bible becomes diviner to us for their sake. The
Bible of the Martyrs, the Bible of the Waldenses, the Bible of
Luther and Calvin, of our Pilgrim Fathers, has a double value.
I have in my possession a very ancient black-letter edition of the
Bible printed in 1522, more than three hundred years ago. In this
edition many of the Psalms have been read and re-read, till the
paper is almost worn away. Some human heart, some suffering soul,
has taken deep comfort here. If to have been the favorite, intimate
friend of the greatest number of hearts be an ambition worthy of a
poet, David has gained a loftier place than any poet who ever wrote.
He has lived next to the heart of men, and women, and children, of
all ages, in all climes, in all times and seasons, all over the
earth. They have rejoiced and wept, prayed and struggled, lived and
died, with David's words in their mouths. His heart has become the
universal Christian heart, and will ever be, till earth's sorrows,
and earth itself, are a vanished dream.
It is too much the fashion of this day to speak slightingly of the
Old Testament. Apart from its grandeur, its purity, its tenderness
and majesty, the Old Testament has this peculiar interest to the
Christian,--it was the Bible of the Lord Jesus Christ.
As a man, Jesus had a human life to live, a human experience to
undergo. For thirty silent years he was known among men only as
a carpenter in Nazareth, and the Scriptures of the Old Testament
were his daily companions. When he emerges into public life, we
find him thoroughly versed in the Scriptures. Allusions to them are
constant, through all his discourses; he continually refers to them
as writings that reflect his own image. "Search the Scriptures," he
says, "for they are they that testify of me."
The Psalms of David were to Jesus all and more than they can be to
any other son of man.
In certain of them he saw himself and his future life, his trials,
conflicts, sufferings, resurrection, and final triumph foreshadowed.
He quoted them to confound his enemies. When they sought to puzzle
him with perplexing questions he met them with others equally
difficult, drawn from the Scriptures. He asks them:--
"What think ye of the Messiah? whose son is he? They say unto
him, the Son of David. He saith unto them, How then doth David
in spirit call him Lord, saying, The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit
thou on my right hand till I make thine enemies thy footstool?
If David then call him Lord, how is he his son?"
So, when they ask the question, "Which is the greatest commandment
of all?" he answers by placing together two passages in the Old
Testament, the one commanding supreme love to God and the other
impartial love to man's neighbor. The greatest commandment of all
nowhere stands in the Old Testament exactly as Jesus quotes it,
the first part being found in Deuteronomy vi. 5, and the second in
Leviticus xix. 18. This is a specimen of the exhaustive manner in
which he studied and used the Scriptures.
Our Saviour quotes often also from the prophets. In his first public
appearance in his native village he goes into the synagogue and
reads from Isaiah. When they question and disbelieve, he answers
them by pointed allusions to the stories of Naaman the Syrian and
the widow of Sarepta. When the Sadducees raise the question of a
future life, he replies by quoting from the Pentateuch that God
calls himself the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and God is not
the God of the dead, but the God of the living, for all are alive
to him. He cites the history of Jonah as a symbol of his own death
and resurrection; and at the last moment of his trial before the
High Priest, when adjured to say whether he be the Christ or not, he
replies in words that recall the sublime predictions in the Book of
Daniel of the coming of Messiah to judgment. The prophet says:--
"I saw in my vision, and, behold, One like the Son of man came
with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days;
and there was given unto him dominion and glory and a kingdom,
that all people and nations and languages should serve him. His
dominion is an everlasting dominion, that shall not pass away or
be destroyed."
When the High Priest of the Jews said to Jesus, "I adjure thee by
the living God that thou tell us whether thou be Messiah or not," he
answered, "I am; and hereafter ye shall see the Son of man sitting
on the right hand of power and coming in the clouds of heaven."
So much was the character of our Lord's teaching colored and
impregnated by the writings of the Old Testament that it is
impossible fully to comprehend Jesus without an intimate knowledge
of them. To study the life of Christ without the Hebrew Scriptures
is to study a flower without studying the plant from which it
sprung, the root and leaves which nourished it. He continually spoke
of himself as a Being destined to fulfill what had gone before.
"Think not," he said, "that I am come to destroy the Law and the
Prophets. I am not come to destroy but to fulfill." He frequently
spoke of himself as of the order and race of Jewish prophets; like
them he performed symbolic acts which were visible prophecies, as
when he knew his nation had finally rejected him he signified their
doom by the awful sign of the blasted fig-tree. Through all the last
days of Jesus, as his death approaches, we find continual references
to the Old Testament prophecies, and quotations from them.
And after his resurrection, when he appears to his disciples, he
"opens to them the Scriptures;" that talk on the way to Emmaus was
an explanation of the prophecies, by our Lord himself. Would that it
had been recorded! Would not our hearts too have "burned within us!"
Now, a book that was in life and in death so dear to our Lord,
a book which he interpreted as from first to last a preparation
for and prophecy of himself, cannot but be full of interest to us
Christians. When we read the Old Testament Scriptures we go along
a track that we know Jesus and his mother must often have trod
together. The great resemblance in style between the Song of Mary
and the Psalms of David is one of the few indications given in Holy
Writ of the veiled and holy mystery of his mother's life. She was
a poetess, a prophetess, one whose mind was capable of the highest
ecstasy of inspiration. Let us read the Psalms again, with the
thought in our mind that they were the comforters, the counselors of
Jesus and Mary. What was so much to them cannot be indifferent to us.
Nor did the disciples and Apostles in the glow of the unfolding
dispensation cease to reverence and value those writings so closely
studied by their Lord. They did not speak of them as a worn-out
thing, that had "had its day," but they alluded to them with the
affectionate veneration due to divine oracles. "The prophecy came
not of old times by the will of man, but holy men of old spake as
they were moved by the Holy Ghost." St. Paul congratulates Timothy
that "from a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures, which are
able to make thee wise unto salvation," and adds: "all Scripture is
given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for
reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the
man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works."
Even while the New Testament was being formed, its writers gave this
complete testimony to the Old, as being able to make men "wise unto
salvation," and to complete a man's spiritual education. This book,
then, so dear to Christ and his Apostles, is something that should
be dear to all Christians. Its study will enrich the soul. It is
wonderful, mysterious, unique--there is no sacred book like it in
the world; and in reading it we come nearer to Him who was foretold
by it, and who when he came upon the earth found in it nourishment
for his soul, instruction and spiritual refreshment by the wayside,
comfort even in the extreme agonies of a dreadful death. However
dear to us may be the story of his life in the Gospels and his
teachings through his Apostles and their Epistles, let us in
following his steps forget not "the Scriptures" which he bade us
search, but diligently read and love the Bible of our Lord.