The Life Of Jesus Christ In Its Historical Connexion

AS the entrance of Christ into the course of humanity was brought about by the co-working of supernatural with natural elements, so both these agencies conspired in preparing the way for that great event, the centre of all things, and the aim of all preceding history. So we interpret the relations of the Jews and heathens to the appearance of Christ. The natural developement of the heathen was destined, under the Divine guidance, to prepare them for receiving the new light which emanated from Jesus; and the history of the Jewish people was all preparatory to the appearance and ministry of Christ, who was to come forth out of their midst. This preparation was accomplished by means of a chain of separate, but organically connected revelations, all tending toward the full revelation in Him, whose whole life was itself to be the highest manifestation of God to man.

There was peculiar fitness in Christ's being born among the Jewish people. His life revealed the kingdom of God, which was to be set up over all men, and it properly commenced in a nation whose political life, always developed in a theocratic form, was a continual type of that kingdom. He was the culminating point of this developement; in Him the kingdom of God, no longer limited to this single people, was to show its true design, and, unfettered by physical or national restraints, to assert its authority over the whole human race. The particular typifies the universal; the earthly, the celestial; so David, the monarch who had raised the political theocracy of the Jews to the pinnacle of glory, typified that greater monarch in whom the kingdom of God was to display its glory. Not without reason, therefore, was it that Christ, the summit of the theocracy, sprang from the fallen line of royal David. [38]