(3) And as a God of power and of glory incommunicable, indefeasible, so also as a God of mercy and judgment was He lifted up before the eyes of the world very remarkably in the Jewish people. We see these two attributes conflicting and contending for the mastery, so to speak. We see the Father's pity struggling with the Father's righteous wrath: now one seems to rise uppermost, now the other. In the early chapters of Jeremiah, we have described the most passionate emotion of the one kind and the other alternately swelling and subsiding: the principles of the moral government of the Most High touchingly accommodated in speech, so as to take all the phases and colourings of human passion: “I said, How shall I put thee among the children, and give thee a pleasant land, a goodly heritage of the hosts of nations ?"*

"Go ye up upon her walls, and destroy; but make not a full end: take away her battlements; for they are not the Lord's." "How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? How shall I deliver thee, Israel? how shall I make thee as Admah ? how shall I set thee as Zeboim? Mine heart is turned within me, my repentings are kindled together. I will not execute the fierceness of mine anger, I will not return to destroy Ephraim: for I am God, and not man; the Holy One in the midst of thee." It is as though it were of God's purpose and design that there should be this seeming irreconcilable disagreement and variance between His mercy and judgment, that the reconcilement and perfect agreement of the two in Christ, the harmony of their conflicting claims, might be more transparently manifested. Thus, "mercy and truth + Jer. v. 10. Hosea xi. 8, 9.

* Jer. iii. 19.

are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed

each other." *

(4) But, further: Beyond all His other attributes, His unchangeableness and unchangeable truth was manifested in His dealings with Israel, throughout the long course of its training. God seemed to rest over that attribute with an especial jealousy; guarding it from all aspersion; justifying it when assailed with the utmost tenderness and carefulness, that no spot or stain should attach to it. Hence the Psalmist: "Thou hast magnified Thy word above all Thy name."+ Israel's history was to be the one grand memorial of God's faithfulness-the great reassuring, strengthening instance that was to recur to the remembrance of the Church at large, and of every trembling doubting soul, that God would never change. Every strongest form of which human language is capable is employed to make assurance doubly sure, that God's promise will stand immoveably, unalterably fast. "The mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed."‡ The stability and continuity of the ordinary natural world is appealed to as being, spite of all its acknowledged fixedness, inadequate to set forth the steadfastness of God's truth to Israel. The most remarkable passage perhaps is in Jeremiah xxxi. 35: "Thus saith the Lord, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar; The Lord of hosts is His name: If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the Lord, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation be+ Ps. cxxxv.ii. 2. Isa. liv. 10.

* Ps. lxxxv. 10.

fore me for ever." Striking, too, are the passages where God points to the clear evidence, the undeniable witness, which had been borne to His truthfulness by the severity of the judgment inflicted on Israel; and the inference to be drawn was, that He would be as true to His promises as to His threatenings. Was God's truth published so loudly to every nation under heaven, in that besom of destruction which swept them from their land, like some whelming cyclone of wrath; and would His truth stop short there-fulfil its threatened terrors, and forbear to fulfil its promised blessings?

Forbid the thought! "For thus saith the Lord; Like as I have brought all this great evil upon this people, so will I bring upon them all the good that I have promised them.* Yea, I will plant them in this land assuredly with my whole heart and with my whole soul." And we observe here the great distinction between God's jealousy and man's. Man thinks to imitate God's jealousy; but it is always far too narrow, narrowed by his selfishness. The Jew was jealous for God's honour when that honour was involved in the destruction of a guilty people, when it fell in with the path which his bigoted hate would have chalked out for him: but when God's honour was concerned in an act of grace and clemency, in relentings of heart, in granting a free pardon to an humbled and repenting nation, as Nineveh; or in publishing the Gospel to the outcast Gentile, or to the offscouring of men, as the publican; then man's jealousy for God stopped short, and God's zeal for His holy name. had free course, and ran, and was glorified; then did He make it known, "I am God, and not man." And in regard to Israel's future, the zeal or jealousy of * Jer. xxxii. 42. Jer. xxxii. 41.

Jehovah, God of hosts, was always appealed to as an insurmountable barrier to Israel's utter extermination and final rejection. No guilt of Israel, however black; no combination of circumstances, however unfavourable, could ever pass that barrier so as to blot Israel's name out from under heaven, to erase it from the tablets of God's sparing and pardoning love, from His deed and covenant of grace! In 2 Kings xix. 31, Hezekiah has this assurance given him for his special comfort and encouragement: "Out of Jerusalem shall go forth a remnant, and they that escape out of Mount Zion: the zeal of the Lord of hosts shall do this." And this attribute of God, His zeal or jealousy, is more particularly appealed to by Himself (it would be profane in us to do so) as requiring it of Him, as laying Him under a pledge or bond to restore the fallen kingdom of David, by "raising up Christ to sit on his throne." This was revealed to Ahaz by the prophet Isaiah: "Of the increase of His government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts shall perform this."*

Amongst other passages of the Old Testament, strongly tending to establish the view here taken, I shall only refer to one more besides the text. It is from Zechariah viii. 1-3: "The word of the Lord of hosts came to me, saying, Thus saith the Lord of hosts; I was jealous for Zion with great jealousy, and I was jealous for her with great fury. Thus saith the Lord; I am returned unto Zion, and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem: and Jerusalem shall be called a

* Isa. ix. 7.

city of truth; and the mountain of the Lord of hosts the holy mountain." It would be difficult, I think, to maintain that this was ever literally fulfilled of the people of the Jews between their return from Babylon and the destruction of their city: it must be referred, therefore, to the unfulfilled portion of this prophecy, to the glorious future yet in store for them.

What these passages tend to show is, that God has so engaged His own attributes in the behalf of the Jewish people, that His jealousy for His own perfections is the measure of the jealousy with which He upholds the cause of Israel, and saves it from sinking irretrievably, irrecoverably, because of the purposes of mercy He has left on record in His word, and which await their accomplishment at the time appointed of His sovereign wisdom.

They show that as regard to His own name and honour (as it is called in one place, "pity for His name”*) left no other course open, but the banishment of His people from His sight, their overthrow and dispersion: so the same regard to His truth, the very necessity of clearing and justifying it from the scoff and taunt of the blasphemer, would lead to Israel's final recall and recovery. This course of argument is as a thread running through the whole of prophecy; the remarkable character of it cannot fail to strike us. Why, it may be asked, should God thus justify His ways to men? Why so scrupulously careful that not a slur should rest upon the principles of His government? that His word should be so verified, so conclusively established, that He should so lay His proceedings open to the gaze of man, and be training the reason in man, as if it were for that very purpose that in the * Ezek. xxxvi. 21.