The Mission and Failure of the Hebrew People
“Whose is the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of Grod, and the promises.” — Bom. ix. 4.
Our attention and the attention of the civilised world has been called, with infinite pity, to the sad plight of the Russian Jews. It is almost incredible that at this time in the world’s history, and in the light of Christian civilisation, such enormous wrongs should be possible.
Their civilisation antedates that of the modern world. Moses preceded Lycurgus by at least eight hundred years. Before Troy had fallen, or Homer sang, or Ulysses went on his wanderings, God had called Abram, the first Hebrew, out of the rich culture and science of the Euphrates valley, which recent explorations have revealed, to become the ancestor of an elect race.
It is the custom of many to regard that word with suspicion, but it is a great word, and contains a great conception. Too often it has suggested ideas of privation and exclusion, as though some great blessing had been communicated to a few, which the great masses of men were neither allowed nor intended to share. There could not be a grosser misunderstanding of the Word, and it would be impossible more absolutely to misread God’s intention, than to suppose that, at His arbitrary pleasure, He had deigned to bless a few select souls, whilst the whole human race was left to rot in destitution and misery.
Election is not exclusive but inclusive; for the benefit, not of the few, but of the many; not for selfish ease, but for strenuous service. There are elect stars, elect tribes of animals, elect flowers and fruit, elect races, and elect souls. “One star differeth from another star in glory.” But these special endowments are intended to qualify them for ampler and wider service to the whole universe, that the sum-total of good and happiness may be increased. Israel was elect, not for themselves, nor for the sake of their future, but for the service which they were to be called upon to render to the whole race of man.
Let ns view their special advantages in the light of such an election. Theirs was the adoption. Israel was God’s first-born. “Thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Israel is My son, My first-born; and I have said unto thee, Let My son go, that he may serve Me.” But why this selection of Israel for so high an honour, except that out of the chosen race He should be born, Who was of the seed of David, according to the flesh, but was declared to be the 8on of God with power, by the resurrection from among the dead, even Jesus Christ our Lord; that through Him we might all receive the adoption of sons, and that the whole race might be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the sons of God.
Theirs was the glory. The Shekinah burnt in the acacia-bush of the wilderness before the awestruck eyes of Moses, flamed at night from the pillar of cloud, like the watch-fires of the sentry-hosts of angels; and successively filled the desert tabernacle and the noble Temple. “It came even to pass, when the trumpeters and singers were as one, to make one sound to be heard in praising and thanking the Lord, and when they lifted up their voice with the cymbals and trumpets and instruments of music, and praised the Lord, saying, ‘ For He is good, for His mercy endureth for ever, that then the House was filled with a cloud, even the House of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister by reason of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the House of God.,y
But why this Shekinah glory, except that they might shed light on those who sat in darkness and the shadow of death? The Holy City was bidden to arise and shine, that nations might come to her light, and kings to the brightness of her rising.
Theirs were the covenants. The covenant of Sinai was made with them, that they should be named priests of the Lord, and that men should call them ministers of our God; and when they continued not in that covenant, God made with them another, which we know best in the words of our Lord as “the new covenant.”
But clearly this new covenant was not exclusively for them, but through them for us all. They that are of the faith of Abraham are blessed with him. All the promises made to the Seed are ours in Christ. In our minds, and on our hearts God will write His law; to us He will be a God, and we may be His people; He will be merciful to our iniquities, and our sins and iniquities He will remember no more.
Theirs was the giving of the law. And the object was that its blessings might be universally distributed. It has been justly said that their sacred poets and minstrels have furnished the bridal hymns, the battle songs, the pilgrim marches, the penitential prayers, and the public praises of every nation in Christendom since Christendom was born. Their prophets and seers have beheld visions of the Glorious Goal to which the whole creation is slowly moving, which have stimulated and sustained the hopes of our race in its pilgrim march. Their sacred books have passed into the heart and speech of mankind; and their sufferings are a warning of the fate which must overtake all who refuse their high vocation, betray their sacred trust, and treat their election as a matter of private advantage.
Abraham was blessed that he might be a blessing, and this was intended to be the characteristic of his progeny. Not for their comfort or pride, but for the sake of the light they were to kindle and the life they were to inspire, were they raised to be the spiritual aristocracy of the race. As the ganglions of the brain which generate the nerve-force of the body, not for their own behoof, but for the right ordering of the entire organism, so were the Hebrew people intended to be the nerve centres of the world. But when they refused, when they shut themselves up in haughty exclusiveness, branding the Samaritan as a pariah and the Gentile as a dog, and when even the Pharisees viewed the unlettered populace of their own race as accursed, the time was ripe for the watchers in the Temple to hear the rustling of wings and the utterance of mysterious voices, saying, “Let us depart.” The purpose for which the Hebrew race had been chosen had been frustrated, and there was no alternative than to cast them on the dust-heap of the world.
The fatal lack of Judaism. Judaism which was represented by men like Gamaliel, at whose feet Paul had been educated, represented a very distinct advance of religious thought on the conclusions of Natural Religion.
They believed in the unity and spirituality of God. That God was One and that He was a Spirit, had been burnt into their hearts during long and bitter sufferings. They believed that God was the Creator, and therefore greater than His works; Infinite, and therefore greater than any Temple made by hands.
He was the All-Giver, and therefore needed nothing from men, because He gave to all life, and breath, and all things. There was no danger of Pantheism for the Hebrew, because He felt that God was Transcendent as well as Immanent. Neither was there peril of a visionary transcendentalism or mysticism, because the Jew felt that he lived and moved and had his being in the Divine environment. They believed in the Divine Forgiveness, though they were not sure of its basis in righteousness. The sacrifices of innumerable victims were still offered in the Temple, but those sacrifices were felt to be insufficient. They could never, as one of the profoundest Jewish thinkers confessed, “with the same sacrifices, which they offered year by year, make perfect those who drew nigh.” They were not perfected in peace, or joy, or confidence, else they would have ceased to be offered, because the worshippers, having been once cleansed, would h&ve had no more conscience of sins. In those sacrifices, therefore, there was only a yearly remembrance of sins. In the judgment of their theologians and teachers, it was impossible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins. They believed also, from the days of the Maccabees, with growing clearness of vision, in the future state of the resurrection.
But amid much that was excellent and beautiful, of Judaism, as of Gentilism, it was true that the fatal lack was of “Power unto Salvation.” There was not a sufficient dynamic. It is true that the Holy Spirit had been given to a few of the noblest, rarest spirits of their race, to a Samuel, a David, an Elijah, an Ezekiel, but for the most part the masses of the people were unconscious of His Divine energies.
In Alpine regions the traveller will behold wonderful spectacles at early dawn. It will seem to him that some high angel, having lit his torch at the
Eternal Altar, is stepping from summit to summit, which had been awaiting his advent wrapped in solemn majesty. Suddenly one after another begins to burn. The snowy summits are steeped in fire. They arise and shine, because the glory of the Lord has smitten them; but as yet the lower slopes are swathed in mist. The valleys resemble vast cauldrons in which the clouds are seething, and so it will be for some few hours, until the sun can strike with vertical rays into their most hidden recesses. Then every stick and stone casts a shadow. Every valley becomes exalted to share the glory which in the earlier hours of the day pertained only to the highest peaks. Thus it was with the Hebrew race. Their prophets and kings knew by happy experience the Dynamic of the Holy One, but their sons and daughters, the servants and handmaids knew the Ethic only, and they were therefore taught to expect another age when the Spirit should be poured out upon all flesh, when sons and daughters should prophesy, when young men should see visions and old men dream dreams, and when upon servants and handmaidens that same Spirit should be poured forth.
The casting-off of the chosen people. For want of sufficient dynamic, that power unto salvation, that mighty quickening Spirit, the Hebrew people as a whole lost sight of the higher ideals of their race. At the time when the Epistle to the Romans was written, they had bowed their necks to foreign masters, had substituted a lifeless ritualism for vital religion, and had become debased enough to denounce and reject Him whose holy character and merciful ministry marked Him as the white flower of their race.
It is not enough to know, man must have power to be and do, or he drifts as a doomed vessel to the teeth of the jagged rocks. The awful havoc caused in
Judaism by this fatal lack of spiritual power is recited- by one of the greatest of the sons of Israel, in immortal words, and we will take them as expressing the lament of the purest and noblest spirits of his race in that eventful age which culminated in the overthrow of Temple and City:
“The commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death. For sin, taking occasion by the commandment deceived me, and by it slew me. For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin. For that which I do, I allow not; for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. To will is present with me, but how to perform that which is good, I find not. For the good that I would I do not; but the evil that I would not that I do. I delight in the law of God after the inward man, but I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.. 0 wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”
This is one of the deepest pieces oi spiritual experience in the literature of the world. It expresses the ultimate verdict of the soul on Judaism. Great and good as its conceptions of the Divine Being and of Duty were, it lacked the driving-power, the divine energy, and that concord with the Divine nerve- centres of the Universe, which was to be supplied in the fulness of time. The inability of Judaism to meet the ultimate and imperative need of the human soul was a mute and eloquent appeal to God to hasten the introduction of a new Age, when the ancient prayer should be realised: “Let Thy hand be upon the Man of Thy right hand, and upon the Son of Man whom Thou madest strong for Thyself, so shall we not go back from Thee. Quicken Thou us, and we will call upon Thy Name,”
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It was Paul’s lot to live when the chosen people were being cast aside, but, as Rom. ix. — xi. proves, he saw clearly that they would be taken again in hand. He saw the Church called to fulfil their functions and do their work. Above all he saw the perfect flower of the Hebrew race in the peerless beauty of the Lord of Light and Glory,