SERMON XIV.

CHRIST SOUGHT AND FOUND IN THE OLD TESTAMENT SCRIPTURES.

JOHN, v. 39.

Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life ; and they are they which testify of me.

IN

N the remarkable address, of which these words form a part, our Lord is engaged in proclaiming and enforcing His dignity, personal and official; and it is in order to confirm His assertions that He makes the appeal they contain. He had been challenged, by the cold-hearted hypocrisy of the Pharisaic Jews, for the crime of working a miracle of mercy on the sabbath-day. The act, it might be supposed, not only as merciful but as miraculous, was its own justification; for He, who could perform it, must have had a commission from on high competent to the suspension, or even the abolition, of any ceremonial enactment. On this our Lord insists; but not on this at first. The structure of His address is indeed very observable. He commences with a proposition of the utmost height and universality, and He gradually descends to the lower topics and sources of proof. He begins (ver. 17) with an assertion of His co-equality with His Father. Up to this moment" (sabbathday and all days) "my Father worketh and I work;" an answer whose force and pertinency can rest only on the unexpressed assumption of a natural and inherent equality of privilege; the argument manifestly being, that, if the Father could be justified in His incessant activity, the Son must share in the same justification, as sharing in the same rights and dignities.

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So the Jews unquestionably understood it; their persecution was built on the assumption; Christ was the daily martyr of His claims to divinity. And so, I am inclined to think, the very form of St. John's comment (ver. 18) proves him to have interpreted Jesus also; for it seems to me highly probable that the words "making Himself equal with God," are meant by the Evangelist, not only as the Jewish charge, but as St. John's own comment upon the claim of sonship; the accusation of assuming equality with God being not denied, but justified; and the Evangelist in that clause intending willingly to allow that, in claiming God as "His own Father" (idiov márepa), Christ had implicitly claimed a community of nature, and thence an equality of dignity. Our Lord, however, hastens, as usual, to prevent the unity of nature from absorbing the distinctness of person, and hiding the speciality of the personal functions in this divine economy. Accordingly He descends—if it be a descent―(vv. 19, 20) to declare, that such is the unanimity of purpose, and the mysterious co-operation, of the Father and Son, that "the Son can do nothing of Himself but what He seeth the Father do;" that it is the Father's to give the initiative, but that "whatsoever the Father doeth the Son doeth likewise." In this, or after this, He passes (vv. 21-30) into His mediatorial subordination, and pronounces that the bestowal of life, and the dispensation of judgment, are committed to His administration.

And now, having published these lofty characteristics of His nature and office, He comes at once upon the question of credentials. "If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true." But He had a manifold evidence, distinct from His own. He had the evidence of His Father, speaking from heaven, and speaking in the awful language of miracles; He had the evidence of St. John the Baptist, till then the greatest born of woman; and, finally, He had the evidence of the text, the evidence of the Scriptures. The transition to this topic is effected in the preceding verse: "Ye have not His word abiding in you, for whom He hath sent, Him ye believe not. . . . . Search the Scriptures, for they testify of me." The voice of the Father

from heaven, and the voice of God in His word, He classes as two forms of the same general attestation: "Ye have neither heard His voice at any time nor seen His shape, and ye have not His word abiding in you." You have neither witnessed Him speaking immediately, nor understood Him speaking mediately. And if you prefer to regard the miracles as another conjoint department of the Father's evidence, which is perhaps the simpler way of analyzing the import of this profound passage, from ver. 31 to 40, you may (slightly altering your point of view) regard our Lord as, for the present, waiving the testimony of John, as belonging to an inferior class of evidences ("I receive not testimony from man. ... I have greater witness than that of John."-vv. 33, 36), and mainly engaged in setting forth (agreeably to His preceding statements of a commission from the Father) the threefold attestation which the Father had furnished to this great truth,-the voice from heaven, the miracles on earth, and the Scriptures echoing from all past ages. God spoke in them all, and in them all He accredited Jesus as His Messiah.

"Ye search," declares Christ,-for the word may be rendered either as a command or an assertion, and the latter seems both more natural and more pointed,-" Ye search the Scriptures because in them ye think ye have eternal life; now these very Scriptures testify of me; and, nevertheless, ye will not come to me that ye may have the life ye seek." "Of late you have learned to scrutinize the Scriptures, to compare, to balance, to infer. You have been taught to seek in them satisfactory and solid proofs of an eternal happiness beyond the grave; you think you have the treasure securely laid up in them; and it is true, but only true as they testify of me. Your unhappy inconsistency is this, that believing life to be in your Scriptures, you will not believe it to be where those Scriptures have placed it. You contend with your Sadducean opponents that the promise is indeed there; but you agree with them in rejecting Him on whom the promise is suspended. Surprisingly clear-sighted to a certain point, from that point you are blind." This seems to me to be the simplest mode of connecting the sense of the

With the remainder of the

thirty-ninth and fortieth verses. discourse (which is partly a corroboration of this topic) we have at present no concern.

In this passage, then, thus understood (and it will not make any material difference, as to the substance of the argument, whether you render the first word in the imperative or indicative), our Lord may be considered as advancing two assertions; that the Scriptures of the Old Testament testify of Him, and that they testify of Him in the special character of a source or dispenser of eternal life. I will endeavour to engage you with both these topics; not in the way of minute discussion of separate passages, which would be the work of days and volumes, but in the way perhaps more calculated for pulpit utility, by large and general comment, which may subsequently serve to animate or direct your own private studies or reflections. I am about to regard the Hebrew Scriptures simply as a collection of written records, a body of writings of various dates, bearing manifestly on the same general subjects; and, for my present purpose, it would be of no importance if we received them for the first time into our hands, and knew little or nothing beyond what the collection itself informs us. There were certain records accounted authentic and venerable among the people, and to these, simply as written documents, and to their internal evidences, our Lord in the text referred. Let us take those Scriptures in the mass, and ask if their whole aspect is not essentially predictive, and predictive of Jesus.

I. The Hebrew Scriptures, then, themselves, and the people and polity which form their singular subject, intimate a wonderful future, and point altogether to it, and are wholly inexplicable unless on the supposition of it. This at once distinguishes it from every other ancient writing of the same kind; among all national literatures this makes the Jewish unique. And, what is peculiarly observable, this characteristic is neither the growth of the people themselves, nor in any respect required by their national constitution. The people, taken in the gross, appear to have, according to the record itself, acted on temporal promises; little or nothing more was exhibited to them by their guides and instructors: the "days long in the land," the "chil

dren visited to the third or fourth generation,"-these are the stimulants to endurance and obedience. And yet, though this, and only this, be discoverable on the surface, never, surely, existed writings which in themselves seem to stretch so vastly beyond any temporary scope; and which, in their very excellency, seem so perpetually and powerfully to evince, that the fate of a single nation of mankind could never cover their whole design and significancy. This is the irresistible internal argument for the genuineness and authority of the Old Testament Scriptures; the more forcible because it turns not on detached passages,these might be called interpolations,-but on the spirit, style, and bearing of the whole. In this, however, you must not so much reason as feel; taste and imagination (the powers that are busied in the higher departments of criticism) must be called into action to appreciate the force of the argument; but thus appreciated it is irresistible. The law commands, but in a tone that speaks more than its own limited commands. The prophets promise and threaten: but their threats and promises swell beyond the measure of the occasion. The voice of both law and prophets is too loud for that little region; it is made to fill a universe. Infidels have felt this, and (as Voltaire) have ridiculed the pomp of language, with which the fortunes are predicted of a people, whose narrow strip of country, from end to end, did not reach two hundred miles; as if this very inconsistency was not itself an internal indication of a boundless prophetic purport, increasing, moreover, as it perpetually appears to do, in direct proportion to the misfortunes and degradation of the people; insomuch that the voice of prophecy is never more commanding or confident, than when the nation is all but annihilated. How short-sighted is the objection; how narrowminded the prejudice it betrays! For if a platform is to be, indeed, sought, adequate to be the stage on which a God shall act, shall the world itself suffice? Is Palestine more a speck in the map of the earth than the earth itself is in the chart of the visible universe?-or the visible universe in the vast array of worlds beyond our ken?-or all these together, compared with the conceptions and the dignity of the God who made them? The mote in the sunbeam, and the sun itself, are equal as regards