The Lord’s Messianic Mission and the Scope of the Gospels

But to resume; for all this is, in a sense, a digression, albeit a necessary one. The Lord’s Messianic mission had a twofold character. He came “to confirm the promises made unto the fathers”’ — the covenant people; “and the apostle adds that the Gentiles who had neither covenant nor promises might glorify God for His mercy.”* But first, He was “a minister of the circumcision for the truth of God.” Under Professor Harnack’s “Ptolemaic system” of exegesis this was “the husk” — the outcome of Jewish prejudice and provincial ignorance.t But we have learned to read the Bible differently. The Jew claimed a monopoly of divine favour, but the divine concession granted him was wholly different. “In commerce there are two well-known systems on which merchants deal with the public. The one is to sell directly to everyone who wishes to become a customer; the other is to deal only through an agent. When the owner of some famous French vineyard, for instance, appoints an English agent, and refuses to supply his wine except through that agent, his object is to make it easier for the English public to obtain supplies, and to insure them against adulteration and fraud. And God’s purpose for Israel was that that favoured na-

* Romans xv. 8, 9.

+ The historian’s task of distinguishing between what is traditional and what is peculiar, between the kernel and the husk, in Jesus’ message is a difficult one” (Harnack, p. 55).

tion should be His agents upon earth. Jerusalem was to be ‘the place of His name.’”* Hence the words, “He came to His own.” And in the first two Gospels — Matthews especially — we have the record of that phase of His ministry. The truth of grace — the great characteristic truth of Chentienityonw be sought there in vain. The very word “grace” cannot be found in them. In the third Gospel, written for a Gentile, that truth is foreshadowed; but it is not till we. read the fourth that ‘the full revelation of it bursts upon us. The distinctive doctrings~et-6 anity are not to be found in the ieagrins of the “Synoptics,” as they are called, “Ths EST two Gospels, indeed, belong as much to the Old Testament as to the New. They are the winding up of the Old and the beginning of the New. The synoptical Gospels are divinely described as the records of what Christ “began to do and to teach”; of what “began to be spoken by the Lord.” And His voice like that of Moses and the prophets, then “spake on earth.” But to us He “speaketh from heaven.” The full revelation of Christianity has come to us from the throne of God —

*The Bible and Modern Oriticism, p. 159.

from our ascended and glorified Lord speaking through His inspired apostles and prophets of the New Testament.

If men would but bring their intelligence to bear on the subject, they would see that the truth of this is clear on the open page of Scripture. The Old Testament spoke, indeed, of “mercy” for Gentiles — crumbs from the children’s table — but this fell very far short of the glorious revelation of grace; grace reigning through righteousness unto eternal life, and divine love to a lost world. During the reign of covenant and promise grace could have no scope. It was not till covenants and promises had been broken and forfeited by the murder

of the Son of God that-grace in its fulness could be réveale ven the gospel of the

Ministry was “a poseel which in its main particulars had yet to be fulfilled, and which could not be fully opened till it had been fulfilled.”* “I am not sent but to the lost sheep of the House of Israel” is not, as Dr. Harnack would tell us, “the husk” of prejudice; it expresses the dispensational limits of the Lord’s special

* Cannon Bernard’s Bampton Lectures, 1864; which see, by all means, on the question here at issue,

Messianic mission. “I have a baptism to be baptised with” (He exclaimed), “and how am I straitened till it is accomplished?” Grace was there, for “grace came by Jesus Christ;” but it was restrained — restrained until the cross of

Calvary broke down every barrier by canceling

every covenant and promise that bound Him