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Updated: September 11, 2025
This is the message of Moses, of the Psalmists and the Prophets, just as much as of St. Paul on Mars' Hill at Athens. So begins and so ends the Old Testament, revealing throughout The Lord. And how does the New Testament begin? By telling us that a Babe was born at Bethlehem, and called Jesus, the Saviour. But who is this blessed Babe? He, too, is The Lord.
Therefore, if we want to find the spiritual meaning of Old Testament promises, we need not to alter them to suit any fancies of our own; like those monks of the fourth and succeeding centuries, who saw no sanctity in family or national life; no sanctity in the natural world, and, therefore, were forced to travesty the Hebrew historians, psalmists, and prophets, with all their simple, healthy objective humanity, and politics, and poetry, into metaphorical and subjective, or, as they miscalled them, spiritual meanings, to make the Old Testament mean anything at all.
For the men who wrote them had God's spirit with them; and God's spirit is the spirit in which God made and governs this world, and just as God cannot change, so God's spirit cannot change; and therefore the rules and laws according to which the world runs on cannot change; and therefore these rules about God's government of the world, which God's spirit taught the old Hebrew Psalmists, are the very same rules by which He governs it now; and therefore all the rules in these Psalms, making allowance for the difference of circumstances, have just as much to do with France, and Germany, and England now, as they had with the Jews, and the Canaanites, and the Babylonians then.
If we take account of all these and a number of similar passages, I think we shall come to this conclusion, that by that title, 'the Lord of hosts, the prophets and psalmists meant to express the universal dominion of God over the whole universe in all its battalions and sections, which they conceived of as one ranked army, obedient to the voice of the great General and Ruler of them all.
Much of our popular religious language is an inheritance from a time when they universally prevailed. The religious intuition even of psalmists and prophets opposed many of these notions. The pure religious intuition of Jesus opposed almost every one of them. Mystics in every religion have had, at times, insight into an altogether different scheme of things.
The cycle of mystic hymns which the Persian was expounding to the select circle of devotees assembled at Mrs. Gore's was full of the most sensual images, under which the inspired Persian psalmists had concealed the highest truth.
Now this is one of the puzzles of life, which tries a man's faith in God, as it tried the psalmists and prophets in old time. But that the text speaks truth I do not doubt.
They felt themselves that there was an immense difference between anything that they could write and what the old psalmists and prophets had written. They felt that they could not write Scripture.
The human members of this choir may be regarded as the last of the psalmists and prophets, and the first of Christian singers. The song of Zacharias, from which my text is taken, is steeped in Old Testament allusions, and redolent of the ancient spirit, but it transcends that.
Or, as one of the Psalmists puts the same idea, 'The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and His ears are open unto their cry. The face of the Lord is against them that do evil. The same eye that beams in lambent love on 'the righteous' burns terribly to the evil doer.
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