Leaves From the
Book
THE "Times of the Gentiles"
T HE "times of the Gentiles" is the Lord's own expression
for the whole period of their divinely appointed supremacy over Israel (Luke
xxi. 24). It is the period, therefore, of Israel's rejection nationally, and
begins with Nebuchadnezzar's destruction of the temple and city when Judah was
carried away captive into Babylon, and ends with their deliverance from the
assembled nations by the coming of the Lord from heaven (Zech. xiv. 3, 4, 9).
It is the time of the four Gentile empires seen in the visions of Daniel and
the Gentile king, with a noteworthy exception which we find in the hook of
Revelation, that there is a time in which the last empire ''is not "(xvii. 8),
before its final appearance and complete overthrow. In this gap we stand, for
none of the great world - empires exist, and all the political effort of the
present is to prevent any possibility of the revival of such a thing.
Napoleon's history is a warning of how easily God can break through these human
counsels, and bring about what He has ordained.
For the history of the
times of the Gentiles we are dependent largely upon prophecy. even though much
of this be now historical fact. But the history of the Old Testament almost
ceases with the subversion of the kingdom of Judah, and no mere human hand can
supply the deficiency. It is God's view of things we are seeking, and "the Lord
seeth not as man seeth." 'l'hus man's history would be likely by itself to lead
us only astray from the divine view, which alone has any real significance. We
should hold fast, then, to prophetic scripture as to our sure guide through the
mazes of human history.
But prophecy, while it throws light upon the
darkness of the present. hastens ever onward to the accomplishment of God's
counsels in the time before us. and indeed mainly in revealing this declares
the present to us. The end is the time of manifestation, for the tree is known
by its fruit. We misjudge constantly by anticipating this, mistaking the true
harvest_time which it is the glory of Him who knows the end from the beginning
to make certainly known.
This will prepare us for a character of prophecy
to miss which will leave us in continual perplexity. All prophecy connects with
the end, and by this means with every other prophecy. None is its own
interpreter, as that passage in the second of Peter, so commonly perverted,
really means. And why? ''For prophecy came not in old time by the will of man.
but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. It is all one
plan, one counsel. To separate one part from the rest would be to make a rent
in a seamless robe. Every seeming by path connects at any rate with some road
that ends not, save in the city of the Great King. And as we approach this, the
highway widens, the view lengthens, road after road comes in and pours its
contribution into the ever swelling stream that hastens onward whither all ends
- at the feet of the King Eternal.
It is to prophecy that we mainly turn,
then, and for our present purpose especially to Daniel and its complement, the
book of Revelation. And the fact that the history is at the present time
prophetic has a significance which we must now consider. With Israel in the Old
Testament man's history morally ends. The law has given its judgment as to him.
"There is none righteous,- no, not one" is the verdict it renders. If true of
the favoured nation, true then of all, for "as in water face answereth to face,
so the heart of man to man."
There is indeed another trial to be made here,
but for which we must pass on to the pages of the New Testament. Will he not,
now convicted and exposed, be ready for grace when it is offered him? Will not
the prisoners of hope turn to the stronghold,- to the Mighty One on whom God
has laid help? The answer to this is but the cross; and in this the full and
final judgment of the world is found. In the meanwhile, the law has already,
and to leave him thus shut up to grace, given its verdict. Man's history closes
with Israel's ruin. The record closes. God may predict the future of him with
whom He has now parted company; but He has parted company.
It was the
throne of the Lord upon which Solomon had sat (i Chron. XX1X. 23), and the ark
of the "God of all the earth" had long before passed through the dried-up
Jordan to the place of His rest. But now the glory of God had passed from the
mercy-seat, and Ezekiel had seen its lingering sorrowful departure from the
city (Ezek. Xi. 23); and now God's title is, in the books which speak of this
time, the "God of heaven" (2 Chron. XXXV1. 23; Ezra, Nehemiah, and Daniel). The
God of heaven gives Nebuchadnezzar the kingdoms of the earth, and the Gentile
kingdom widens out soon into an empire such as never had been seen in Israel.
Nebuchadnezzar is thus a king of kings,- a petty image again of Him who will be
the "King of kings and Lord of lords;" somewhat also in the absolute authority
possessed by him. But there the resemblance ends. How different the character
of the one who possesses this power, and how rapid the degeneration of it!
To him whom God had raised up He appears, that he may know the hand that has
raised him up; making him debtor too for the interpretation of his dream to one
of the scanty remnant of the people he had overthrown, that he may learn the
vanity of his false gods in the presence of Him to whom they are opposed. This
dream makes him aware of the fact that He who had placed can displace, and of
the continual degradation of power in the kingdoms which succeed his own until
at last they all together come to an end, smitten by a kingdom which becomes
really world-wide and which stands forever. About this final kingdom little is
said; only that it is of no human shaping, but set up in a peculiar way by the
God of heaven Himself, that it destroys all others, and abides. It is the
vanity and corruptibility of all mere earthly power that is insisted on: a
homily against pride and independence of heart read to one who is in the
greatest need of it.
In this view of the kingdoms, the debasing of material
shows the decay of power in the successive forms. The Babylonian was the head
of gold, owing no allegiance save to God Himself. In the Persian - the silver,-
the law when made, although the king might make it, could not be altered even
by himself. The kingdom of Alexander - the "brazen-tunicked Greeks" had risen
on the ruins of a pure democracy, of which it retained many elements; while
Rome, which succeeded this, though strong as iron, was in principle entirely
such, the power of the emperors being gained by their assuming to themselves a
number of democratic offices. Finally, in the latter days of the divided
empire, the inroads of barbarian nations mixed the iron with clay. There was no
real cohesion, and the heterogeneous elements falling apart, the kingdoms of
Europe arose out of this division. But this was not the smiting of the image
with the stone.
This belongs to a still future time, as we shall see, if
the Lord will, as we proceed. The next four chapters of Daniel show, step by
step, the character which these world-powers assume, and are the preface to the
seventh chapter, in which they are viewed prophetically in their history as
before God, the history in which these features are manifested. The third
chapter shows the assumption of control over the conscience, which has
characterised man's rule wherever he has had the necessary power.
Nebuchadnezzar's image is marked as that which he has set up. To refuse to
worship in the prescribed way is rebellion, therefore, against himself. How
invariably, we may say, has the civil power assumed to be the religious also,
wherever it could. Liberty of conscience - precious as the boon is,- is in our
days the sign of the decay of absolute authority, and it will not last, but
give way finally to the worst form of spiritual despotism which the world has
ever seen. But this, as in the case before us, surely leads into opposition to
God in the persecution of His people. Others may escape by submission, but not
they; although the Son of God is with them in the furnace.
The fourth
chapter is the descent of the kingdoms from what has at least the form of a
man, as in the second chapter, to the beast-form in which they are seen in the
seventh. It is the pride of power which forgets God, which levels man with the
beast that has none. Nebuchadnezzar claims the great city over which he rules
as built by his own power and for his own glory. In the same hour he is driven
to the beasts, until he has learnt that the "Most High ruleth in the kingdom of
men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will." Then he is restored, but the lesson
remains, not, alas! to avert the doom of the Gentile empires, but as a note of
warning for him who has the secret of the Lord.
The fifth chapter shows us
the moral declension still progressing unchecked. Beishazzar openly lifts
himself up against the Lord of heaven, exalting above Him the senseless idols
of silver and gold; and fingers of door come forth and write his sentence
before his eyes. Thus the Babylonian empire runs its course, and is followed by
the Persian; but the Persian we see also, in the next chapter, brought in to
complete the terrible picture of decline, ending in complete apostasy. The king
exalts himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped, making a
decree that for thirty days no petition is to be asked of any god or man except
himself. That Darius himself is not the real author of this decree, and is
personally very different from what it would imply, does not alter the
significance of this terrible act,- the presage of that last antichristian
blasphemy for which the Gentile powers come to an end, while Israel, like
Daniel, is delivered from the paw of the lion. The seventh chapter now gives
these empires, seen in the prophetic vision, as four wild beasts. But attention
is concentrated upon the last, and that, too, as seen at the time of the end.
It has already its ten horns, corresponding to the ten toes of Nebuchadnezzar's
image, and then there arises another little horn, on account of whose
blasphemous words, the beast is destroyed, and his body given to the burning
flame. But the kingdom now becomes His in whom meet the characters at once of
the Son of Man and of the Ancient of days; and "His do-minion is an everlasting
dominion, that shall not pass away, and His kingdom that which shall not be
destroyed."
Thus when Israel's course is ended for the present in utter
ruin, God takes up the Gentiles, (not as yet to reveal Himself in Christ to
them - that is another and totally different thing, as will, I trust, in its
due place appear,)- but to give them their trial also. This will seem strange
and contradictory at first sight, for has it not been just said that with
Israel in the Old Testament man's history morally ends? That is surely true
also. In all this history of the Gentiles, there is no fresh stirring of that
question. No law, no moral code, is given to them. No revelations at all are
made, save only Nebuchadnezzar's vision; although Cyrus speaks of a charge
which God had given to him to build Him a house in Jerusalem. This he might
readily have found in Isaiah's prophecy (chap. xliv. 28), and probably was
shown it there. At any rate, the founders of the first two empires were made
perfectly aware from whom it was they had received their greatness. Here all
personal communication ends. God does not bring them nigh, as He had brought
Israel. He has significantly left the earth, putting it afresh, in the most
decisive way since Noah's time, into man's hand, but with scarcely a word as to
its government. There was His written Word, indeed, if they had heart for it;
for ignorant He took care, as we see in Cyrus, that they should not be. And
there He leaves it.
What, then, can be the new test when God takes up the
Gentiles? He has not left us without plain intimation as to this, and it must
be our endeavour now to trace it out.
Two reasons the Word of God gives for
the delay of Christ's coming. For why should God delay in what was nearest to
His heart? The need of the discovery of man's need fully is the reason
assigned. "When we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the
ungodly." So there was a "due time;" and to what this has reference is plain
from the apostle's statement. It refers to the trial of man morally in Israel
under God's righteous law. This had been proved to have no help for man. Where
it had found him, there it had left him - ungodly, and without strength. He was
shut up to Christ, then; there was no hope but in Christ,
In i Corinthians,
the apostle gives us another side of this delay. The Jew had had the law,-
true; but what about the Gentile? Had God altogether left him out? The book of
Daniel, if nothing else, would prove the contrary. Even God's silence,
moreover, must have its significance. There must be a meaning even in "the
times of ignorance" which "God winked at." And so the apostle declares. "For
after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased
God by the foolishness of the preaching"- not the manner, but the matter -"to
save them that believe. For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after
wisdom." But "hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?" Yes, wisdom
as well as righteousness, for Gentile and for Jew alike, are found in Christ:
"who is made unto us wisdom from God, righteousness as well as sanctification
and redemption:" "that no flesh should glory in His presence," but that "he
that glorieth should glory in the Lord." Here, then, is the secret of the
matter. The question of man's wisdom was for him an excessively grave one.
Where had he got it? Alas! a "tree to be desired to make one wise" was the bait
which Satan held up before the woman, and by which our first parents were
seduced and fell. "Ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil," Says the
tempter. "The man is become as one of Us," says the Lord God, "to know good and
evil." What, then, is the value of the wisdom he has attained? Taught of
necessity, into which he has now got, he has "sought out many inventions." The
apron of fig-leaves was only the first of a long line which is not ended with
the steam engine and the telegraph; and all, if it be considered, are but
inventions to cover his nakedness, or like John Bunyan's "wholesome
instructions," of which cart-load after cart-load the slough of Despond
swallowed up, and was nowise bettered after all.
What blanks man's wisdom?
We shall find it in the Old Testament "preacher ", clothed in sackcloth though
a king. For God has given us, as I have elsewhere said, side by side, in two
Old Testament books, the two questions we are looking at. A divinely pronounced
best man, Job, is the preacher of repentance: a divinely pronounced wisest man,
Solomon, is the preacher of vanity. Yes, the vanity of wisdom, if it be only
human, more than all. For the beast has no regrets and no sad anticipations;
finds his place in a world of change, enjoying the present, and never thinking
of the future. But man, if he does not know, anticipates and dreads; cannot
bear his every-day burden and lie down in quiet. Death levels all; and what
beyond death? Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward? Yet the heart
says, "God judgeth the righteous and the wicked." Here we stop, the one thing
certain our ignorance, with eternity in the heart and no sure outlook beyond
time,- except God give it. Human wisdom fails: we must await, says one of the
wisest of the Greeks, God's revelation.
But "vain man will be wise, though
he be born a wild ass's colt." Even yet he prefers a guess to the truth,- the
first being his own, the latter God's. It is strange and significant, in that
blessed Word where all is significant, that in these two books of Job and
Ecclesiastes, the Jew takes up the Gentile question, the Gentile Job takes up
the Jew's. Thus the same truths are applied to all the world.
Notice, too,
that Solomon is not only the wisest of men, but the richest and most powerful.
Man's wisdom needs plenty of material to work with. God gives him all he can
desire. When He takes up the Gentile, He gives him just the same things. The
Gentile becomes the possessor of the world, and the controller of it But he
only forfeits his power and loses it, runs through the portion of goods that
falleth to him, and leaves his crown to his successor. The Babylonian leaves
and the Persian enters; the Persian thrusts at the Greek, and falls by a
back-thrust; the Greek power breaks into fragments, and is devoured piecemeal
by the Roman. When Christ comes, after the predicted sixty-two weeks of silent
waiting (Dan. ix. 26), the Roman is already issuing his mandate that all the
world shall be registered, although he does not know that God is making him
move all the machinery of his empire to bring a Jewish woman to Bethlehem, that
her child may be born there, and then for years will stop the census, which is
not taken up again till Cyrenius is governor of Syria. So must the world wait
after all upon Christ.
And He comes, He lives among men, He dies, He
ascends to heaven, and the Holy Ghost is sent down at Pentecost. The Church is
formed, and the world is dropped. Since that time, the world has had no
history. Even prophecy in the meantime is silent. The empires are for God
already gone, although their history yet for a space will be taken up again
after the Church is gone from earth, and when the harvest of the world is
come.
THE NEW BEGINNING.
The
voice of Old Testament prophecy does not cease without predicting the time of
the coming of the Deliverer, in whom now plainly is man's only hope. The
seventy weeks of Daniel, to which we shall have to return hereafter to consider
them more fully, foretell this as to take place sixty-nine weeks (of years -
483 years) after Nehemjah's commission to restore and to build Jerusalem. This
plainly reaches to the time of Christ's public ministry, after which the
prophecy declares He Would be "cut off." Before this, the Gentile empires have
already reached their fourth or final form; the Jewish Maccabean revival has
shown itself to be but the flash of an expiring flame; politically, the people
lie helplessly under the foot of the oppressor, while the law is over-weighted
by human observances, in the vain attempt to patch with new cloth their rags of
legal righteousness. It is at this time, when utter failure and hopeless ruin
are everywhere manifested, that we reach a new beginning,-the beginning of what
is not susceptible of failure or decay at all. A new, a second Man,- since
Adam, there had been no second,- appears upon the scene, to - be the "last
Adam" of a new creation, "the Beginning" - of what God can identify as His
thought from the first -"the creation of God."
Man, true and perfect Man,
is here, holy and righteous, not merely innocent; perfect in obedience in the
scene of the first man's failure - not in a garden, but in a wilderness, which
sin has made the world. To man at first, the trial had been made as light as
possible: to the Second Man, everything that could make the trial full and
searching to the utmost was ordained. With miraculous power freely used in
behalf of others, He never uses it to minister to His own need, or to take
Himself out of the condition of absolute dependence upon God, which is the
necessity of the creature. "Tempted in all things like as we are, sin apart"
(Heb. iv. 15, Gr.), He not merely walks by faith, as the people of God in all
ages have done, but is "the Leader and Perfecter of faith." (chap. xii. 2, Gr.)
One who fills the whole possibility of such a life in His own person. Moreover,
as He lives not in a scene like the first paradise, where all ministers to Him,
so He does not walk as One who is served, but as One who serves. The law of His
life is that of sacrifice. - He closes it with laying down of Himself what none
could take from Him. His one principle throughout is, "Lo, I come to do Thy
will, 0 God."
Such, then, as He is, He is no product of His times- no
outgrowth of preceding generations. Light does not develop out of darkness, nor
life out of death. And in Him the Eternal Life is manifest; not that He has it
merely, struggling, as in His people, with many discord-ances; He is it,- the
Eternal Life itself.
But this brings us where to know is to worship. It is
God who is come down to us. He who visited man's abode in goodness at the
beginning, to prepare it for him, has now visited it after another fashion; and
"we beheld His glory," says the apostle, "the glory as of the Only-Begotten of
the Father, full of grace and truth."
Here, indeed, is a new beginning, and
who shall tell the blessedness of it? God, always Light, is now in the light.
Exactly when it is fully proved that man can never find his way into the
presence of God, His glory is unveiled, and in grace, not in judgment. Judaism
is plainly over. God's grace can never be manifested side by side with law. The
hopelessness of all attempt to develop anything out of man for God has been
made apparent. And the light now come into the world, although not come to
condemn the world, but for its salvation, yet only confirms the solemn fact.
God's own Son, come in grace, awakes man's heart only to enmity and rejection
of Him. It is not mere ignorance: "They have both seen and hated both Me and My
Father."
He comes with His hands filled with the blessing which He has to
communicate; With Him, "the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Let them own but to
what palpably their sins had brought them, and He was there on God's part with
remission of their sins. The power ready to banish from among them the effects
of sin already showed itself. Sickness removed, Satan's power destroyed, death
itself made to give way at His word, what more evident than that in Him God was
reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them?
Paradise was once more opening the way to the tree of life, where no flaming
sword forbad men's access. Would not the blessing under their eyes prevent
their refusing Him who thus by every tie of interest would bind them to
Himself? So one might surely reason. Alas! such is man's enmity to God that not
even blessing will win him to receive Him in whom alone it can be found. "For
my love, they are my adversarieso they have rewarded me evil for good, and
hatred for my love." Of this the cross is the fullest proof. They can taunt Him
there with that good itself -" He saved others, Himself He cannot save."
Jew and Gentile have their part in. this. It is the commencement of that grand
conspiracy which the second psalm predicts, and it ends not until the Lord asks
and obtains the world for His inheritance, the uttermost parts of the earth for
His possession. And how then must He make good His claim? "Thou shalt break
them with a rod of iron; Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's
vessel." This is of course when He comes again; and the opposition, although at
times more covert, only ceases then. "Sit Thou at My right hand, until I make
Thy foes Thy footstool." Still we know He sits there; and then He actually
comes forth (as Rev. xix. depicts it), it will be when the enmity of the world
has blazed out again most fiercely, and there is no concealment of it any
longer. The cross, then, is the expression, on the one side, of the world's
hatred: "The mind of the flesh is enmity against God." Thus it is the judgment
of the world - a judgment pronounced, but waiting execution. On the other hand,
it is the expression of God's over-abounding grace-a grace reigning through
righteousness unto eter-nal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Whatever man's
enmity, then, this grace must find utterance - must be published and have its
proclamation in the world. The sweet savour of Christ's work must come abroad.
The fruits of it must be gathered and garnered. This pause of blessing is
Christianity. Christ, then, as come to Israel, their Messiah, is (in the
language of Daniel's prophecy) "cut off, and has nothing." Israel is not
gathered. Three years He comes looking for fruit upon that fig-tree, whose
leaves give a deceptive promise of fruit that is not found. But man's condition
is apparent, and "without shedding of blood is no remission." "The Son of Man
must be lifted up." His followers in Israel must see their Jewish hopes expire
in His death, and be "begotten again unto a living hope by the resurrection of
Jesus Christ from the dead," now "to an inheritance incorruptible, and
undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven."
Judaism must give
place to the "precious faith" of Christianity. The risen Lord ascends to
heaven, receives from the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost (Acts ii. 31),
Pentecost beholds His coming, and the kingdom of God begins upon earth.
Yet
Israel is not at once set aside; on the contrary, "to the Jew first" the
message of grace is proclaimed. Nor only individually, but nationally also. The
three years of Christ's ministry have found no fruit upon the barren fig-tree;
still, the words are uttered, "Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall
dig about it, and dung it; and if it bear fruit, well; and if not, then after
that, thou shalt cut it down." So, at the cross, the Lord intercedes, "Father,
forgive them, for they know not what they do;" and Peter proclaims to them the
acceptance of that prayer:
"And now, brethren, I wot that through ignorance
ye did it, as did also your rulers Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that
your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshing may come from the
presence of the Lord; and He shall send Jesus Christ, who before was preached
unto you; whomn the heavens must receive until the times of restitution of all
things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the
world began." (Acts iii. 17-2 i, Gr.) National repentance would even then avail
to bring Christ back from heaven, and to bring in the glories of His reign on
earth, as the Old-Testament prophets had pictured it. Alas! there was no
repentance. Numbers indeed believed, but the nation remained what it remains to
this day - rejecters of the Prince of Life. They who had said that if they had
lived in their father's days, they would not have been partakers with them in
the blood of the prophets, proved themselves, as the Lord had predicted, the
children of those who killed the prophets, by persecuting, even to death, the
new prophets God had raised up. Stephen, arraigned before their tribunal, sums
up their guilt, proving from their history how they had always resisted the
Holy Ghost, rejecting the divinely raised up deliverers sent to them; and they
consummate their sin by stoning him, and sending him, as it were, a messenger
after Christ, to say, "We will not have this man to reign over us."
Thus
the time given for repentance ends. Persecution scatters the saints from
Jerusalem, and they go everywhere preaching the Word. Philip goes down to
Samaria, and evangelizes it. Then the Ethiopian eunuch carries away his
new-found blessing. Then Saul, the incarnation of Jewish enmity, is converted
to be the apostle to the Gentiles; the first of them, however, are received by
the apostle of the circumcision - Peter himself. Antioch soon after becomes the
new centre of Gentile evangelization, and from thence Paul and Barnabas go
forth to their mission among the heathen round. Jerusalem yet remains, however,
and converts even multiply there greatly; but the nation is unceasingly
hostile. Nor only so: the zeal for the law, which disfigures Jewish
Christianity, and which warps even Peter himself and Barnabas (Gal. ii.), after
it has been decided that it must not be imposed as a yoke on Gentile converts
(Acts xv.), persuades even the great apostle of the Gentiles to conduct which
brings the fury of a Jewish mob upon him, and shuts him up in a Roman prison.
From Italy he writes to warn the Christians to leave the camp of Judaism
altogether. Finally, according to the Lord's prophecy, Jerusalem is destroyed,
and the temple-worship of necessity wholly ceases.
Alas! that still remains
which becomes a subtle infection for the new and spreading faith. This we shall
see, if the Lord will, as we proceed; but first, we must look at this new faith
itself, and ask ourselves, (alas! in the nineteenth century of its existence,
not a needless question,) What is Christianity?
Christianity
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