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The Old Testament, therefore, is the final record of a revelation extending through thousands of years, finding at last its most exalted expression in the messages of the Hebrew prophets, and its clearest reflection in the thoughts and experiences of the priests, sages, and psalmists of ancient Israel.
Now David, and the old Psalmists and Prophets, did not forget this. Their cry is: "Tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is King." "Worship the Son of God, ye kings of the earth, and make your peace with Him lest He be angry."
The prophets and the psalmists of the Old Testament are all full of the peace that God gave to His people Israel. My peace I give unto you, says our Lord also. Paul also has taken up that peace that comes to us through the blood of Christ, and has made it his grand message to us and to all sinful and sin- disquieted men.
Their mistakes and their victories, are equally instructive. From many vantage-points reached by prophets and priests and psalmists, we are able to catch new and glorious visions of God's character and purpose for mankind.
And some of us there are who do not pray because, as one of the psalmists says, our soul "cleaveth unto the dust." The things of God, the things of the soul, the things of eternity what Paul calls "the things that are above" are of no concern to us; we have sold ourselves to work, to think, to live, for the things of the earth and the dust.
So in Palestine and in the Bible itself we see, first of all, the image-worship of Jacob's family, then the incipient elevation of Jehovah above all other Gods by Moses, the practical establishment of the worship of Jehovah alone by Samuel, the rise of spiritual sentiment under David and the Psalmists, the more magnificent views of Hezekiah's prophets, finally in the Babylonish captivity the new tenderness assumed by that second Isaiah and the later Psalmists.
With them God is everything, and man nothing. Man finds out nothing: God reveals it to him. Man's intellect does nothing: the Spirit of God gives him understanding to do it even, says Isaiah, understanding to plough, and to sow, and to reap his crops in due season. It is the Spirit of God, according to the prophets and psalmists, which makes the difference between a man and a beast.
Prophets and Psalmists had glimpses of the doctrine, but they lived in the twilight, and saw through a glass darkly many truths now clearly made known. While we speak freely of spiritual life, our conception of it is so vague that we are apt to overlook, or to regard lightly, the work of the Holy Spirit in redemption.
Psalmists and prophets had enriched their life with the outpouring of their moral and spiritual revelations, and fired their hopes with promises. They lived in the expectation of the Messiah who was to complete these revelations of the God who had led them and taught them ever since the days of their Egyptian bondage.
I take, as true, the great words of the old Psalm, in their simplest sense 'His mercy endureth for ever'; and I fall back upon the other words which a penitent had learned to be true by reflecting on the greatness of his own sin: 'With Him are multitudes of redemptions'; and I turn from psalmists and prophets to the Master who showed us God's heart, and knew what He spake when He laid it down as the law and the measure of human forgiveness which was moulded upon the pattern of the divine, that it should be 'seventy times seven' the multiplication of both the perfect numbers into themselves than which there can be no grander expression for absolute innumerableness and unfailing continuance.
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