“The words which Thou gavest me.”—JOHN xvii. 8.
NO one ever honoured the Scriptures of the Old Testament as did Jesus Christ. His body was broken, in order that the Scriptures might be fulfilled. Yet it is an error to think, as some do, that Christ had no other means of knowing the mind and will of the Father, save the written word. He was in all things made like unto His brethren, sin only excepted, and He was made like unto His brethren in being made subject unto the written word. But although He became what His brethren were, that does not mean that He did not continue to be what they were not. And in regard to the means which He had of knowing the mind and will of the Father, the Apostle John, especially, is emphatic in intimating to his readers that Christ knew Himself as One who spake upon this earth things that He had heard before the eternal ages. Thus he quotes (John iii. 31, 32) John the Baptist as saying of Jesus Christ: “He that cometh from heaven is above all. And what He hath seen and heard that He testifieth.” And he quotes (John xv. 15) Christ Himself as saying: “All that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.” Christ may, on this account, be said to be contrasted with Moses. Moses was marvellously equipped for his work as mediator of the typical covenant which God made with Israel when He had brought them up out of the land of Egypt. He was repeatedly forty days and forty nights with God in the mount. That meant marvellous fitness for his peculiar work. But Christ’s fitness is of a still higher order. The Mediator of the New Covenant was in ineffable fellowship with the Father before the eternal ages. Of Him are to be understood the words of Proverbs viii., “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning or ever the earth was. . . . Before the hills was I brought forth. . . . When he prepared the heavens I was there. . . . I was by him as one brought up with him; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him; rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth, and my delights were with the sons of men.” What things Christ uttered in the days of His flesh were, it is true, thoughts which passed through the mind of a man, words which were spoken by the lips of a man. Yet He was conscious in giving expression to these thoughts that He, there and then, uttered what He had seen and heard in that ineffable fellowship which was His with the Father from all eternity. When then Christ in John xvii. 8, speaks of “the words which the Father gave Him,” words which Christ gave His disciples, and which they received, we are to understand Him to refer, in the first instance, to the consciousness which He had of the divine and mysterious source of the teaching wherein He taught His people.
But, secondly, we are not to overlook the fact that one of the standards which God set up in His Church whereby a true prophet was distinguished from a false prophet was this: The true prophet spake in harmony with such oracles as God had, in earlier times, delivered to His people. Christ was always willing to have His claims tried by this test. In fact, the Old Testament promises do so tally with Christ’s claims as that the promises and claims can be understood only through their correspondence the one with the other. They are like the lock and the key whose fitness the one to the other, especially when the mechanism is unusually complex, is the sufficient proof that the maker of the one had the other also in mind. Similarly the divine answerableness of Jesus Christ to the promises of the Old Testament Scriptures is the means of our identifying Jesus of Nazareth with the Messiah promised of old. Through the unction which is of the Holy Ghost, the claims are read in the light of those mysterious promises, and vice versa.
The second Psalm, so rich in its expressions of Christ’s essential glory as the Eternal Son, and of the glory of His mediatorial kingdom, becomes in this way to the believing soul words which the Father gave to Christ, and which Christ by His Spirit gave to His people. The same is true, to mention only one other example, of the one hundred and tenth Psalm, with its revelation of Christ’s eternal priesthood.
Has Christ in this way become precious to us in His Word? Has His Word become precious to us as the galleries in which our King is held? If we can truly answer in the affirmative, it cannot but be that Jesus of Nazareth has appeared to us as the incomparable prophet, as One who, when He trod this earth, continued revealing those divine, mysterious, and life-giving truths which had been His own possession in the beginning, yea, from the eternal ages.
Science and Religion.
It was a usual saying of Pascal, that the sciences produced no consolation in the times of affliction; but the knowledge of Christianity was a comfort both in adversity, and in defect of all other knowledge.