the return of the people and the rebuilding of the temple; interpreting and applying the law, reproving
abuses in church and state, predicting the terrible judgments and the redeeming grace of God,
warning and punishing, comforting and encouraging, with an ever plainer reference to the coming
Messiah, who should redeem Israel and the world from sin and misery, and establish a kingdom
of peace and righteousness on earth.
The victorious reign of David and the peaceful reign of Solomon furnish, for Isaiah and his
successors, the historical and typical ground for a prophetic picture of a far more glorious future,
which, unless thus attached to living memories and present circumstances, could not have been
understood. The subsequent catastrophe and the sufferings of the captivity served to develop the
idea of a Messiah atoning for the sins of the people and entering through suffering into glory.
The prophetic was an extraordinary office, serving partly to complete, partly to correct the
regular, hereditary priesthood, to prevent it from stiffening into monotonous formality, and keep
it in living flow. The prophets were, so to speak, the Protestants of the ancient covenant, the ministers
of the spirit and of immediate communion with God, in distinction from the ministers of the letter
and of traditional and ceremonial mediation.
The flourishing period of our canonical prophecy began with the eighth century before
Christ, some seven centuries after Moses, when Israel was suffering under Assyrian oppression.
In this period before the captivity, Isaiah ("the salvation of God"), who appeared in the last years
of king Uzziah, about ten years before the founding of Rome, is the leading figure; and around him
Micah, Joel, and Obadiah in the kingdom of Judah, and Hosea, Amos, and Jonah in the kingdom
of Israel, are grouped. Isaiah reached the highest elevation of prophecy, and unfolds feature by
feature a picture of the Messiah—springing from the house of David, preaching the glad tidings to
the poor, healing the broken-hearted, opening the eyes to the blind, setting at liberty the captives,
offering himself as a lamb to the slaughter, bearing the sins of the people, dying the just for the
unjust, triumphing over death and ruling as king of peace over all nations—a picture which came
to its complete fulfilment in one person, and one only, Jesus of Nazareth. He makes the nearest
approach to the cross, and his book is the Gospel of the Old Testament. In the period of the
Babylonian exile, Jeremiah (i.e. "the Lord casts down") stands chief. He is the prophet of sorrow,
and yet of the new covenant of the Spirit. In his denunciations of priests and false prophets, his
lamentations over Jerusalem, his holy grief, his bitter persecution he resembles the mission and life
of Christ. He remained in the land of his fathers, and sang his lamentation on the ruins of Jerusalem;
while Ezekiel warned the exiles on the river Chebar against false prophets and carnal hopes, urged
them to repentance, and depicted the new Jerusalem and the revival of the dry bones of the people
by the breath of God; and Daniel at the court of Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon saw in the spirit the
succession of the four empires and the final triumph of the eternal kingdom of the Son of Man. The
prophets of the restoration are Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. With Malachi who lived to the time
of Nehemiah, the Old Testament prophecy ceased, and Israel was left to himself four hundred years,
to digest during this period of expectation the rich substance of that revelation, and to prepare the
birth-place for the approaching redemption.- Immediately before the advent of the Messiah the whole Old Testament, the law and the
prophets, Moses and Isaiah together, reappeared for a short season embodied in John the Baptist,
and then in unrivalled humility disappeared as the red dawn in the splendor of the rising sun of the
new covenant. This remarkable man, earnestly preaching repentance in the wilderness and laying
the axe at the root of the tree, and at the same time comforting with prophecy, and pointing to the
A.D. 1-100.