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SERMON S.

SERMON I.

THE PROPHETIC DESCRIPTION OF THE

CHARACTER OF JESUS CHRIST.

JEREMIAH Xxiii. 5, 6.

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper; and shall execute judg ment and justice in the earth.-In his days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely and this is his name whereby he shall be called, THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.

AMONG the various circumstances which distinguished the Jewish nation from every other people on the face of the earth, one of the most striking is, that they lived under a state of Prophecy. All nations, which have arrived at any moderate degree of civilization, have their past his

tory. They have their annals, more or less exact, in which they can trace back the exploits of their ancestors, the origin of their community, their progress or decay in arts and arms, and the intercourse which they have at various times maintained with the nations around them. But the Jews differed from all others in this, that they not only possessed such a record-and that, too, written by an unerring pen-but they had also before them, by the same hand, a record of what was to come. They had every important event in their future history minutely detailed for their perusal under types and shadows indeed, as was necessary, to leave national freedom of action-but still as distinctly and accurately as any part of their past transactions. This circumstance gave an exciting interest to their books, which neither they nor any other books can possess in our eyes. For though they still speak to us of truths as momentous as they did to the Jews, yet they treat no longer of personal interests or national power. They address us not as

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subjects of this or that earthly kingdom, but as members of the universal kingdom of Jesus Christ. They speak of the progress and final triumph of that kingdom, on earth and in heaven; but the rise and fall of individual states and nations they pass by, as beneath their notice.

We, therefore, from pursuing our past history, are left to conjecture the future. But it was not so with the Jew. He knew that his future history was already written by the finger of God; and he therefore perused it with the same avidity as we should study such a history of our coming years, if such a one were vouchsafed to us. It turned, indeed, its dark side to his view; but it was constantly growing brighter and brighter, as each successive year brought with it the fulfilment of prophecy after prophecy, the infliction of some predicted evil, or the boon of some prophetic blessing. With what earnestness, when in the midst of calamity, would the Jew turn to this history of his future fortunes, to trace in the gloom of slavery or captivity, some glimpses of brighter days! While, in his

hours of prosperity, we may conceive that, when his conscience accused him that they were undeserved, he would turn this record of God's coming judgments with a trembling hand! Still, prosperity and adversity alike would tend to increase the interest with which he would study these sacred pages, and rivet their contents indelibly on his mind; and we know1, in fact, that no Jew was so ignorant as not to be intimately acquainted with every thing that the Holy Spirit had recorded. Our Saviour condemns them for abusing, but never for neglecting, the word of God. Abuse it indeed they did, and that grievously, and to their own destruction; and the principal reason of this was, their pushing the truth which I have mentioned -that it contained their national and temporal history-beyond due bounds. They knew that the prophecies referred to them they learned to consider that they referred to them only. They knew that they were the chosen race—they

1 Vide Josephus cont. Apion.

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