SERMON I. Advent. CHRIST THE DESIRE OF ALL NATIONS. IN HAGGAI ii. 7. "The desire of all nations shall come." N accordance with the teaching of this Holy Season I wish to speak of the Coming of our Lord. The Church engages our thoughts both on His first and second Advents. She invites us to welcome Him Who eighteen hundred years ago "came to visit us in great humility," and she prepares us to expect Him Who "shall come again in His glorious majesty to judge both the quick and dead." She reminds us of that season of expectancy when men were musing in their hearts concerning some great Deliverer Who should visit this sin-cursed world, and she bids us to look forward to the consummation of all things. She would not have us to forget that we likewise are in a season of expectation : we, like them of old, are "waiting for the consolation of Israel; " we "look for redemption in Jerusalem." B The character in which I am desirous to set the Messiah before you, is that of "the Desire of all nations.” It is my purpose to exhibit Him thus, with respect to both His Advents. You will remember that there are two kinds of predictions in the Holy Writings-the one anticipating a Dispensation of grace and mercy; the other giving forewarnings of awful and tremendous judgments, such as the world had never before witnessed. On the one hand, we await the rise of a kingdom which shall gather in "the heathen for an inheritance, the uttermost parts of the earth for a possession," wherein "the meek shall eat and be satisfied" and "all the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the Lord, and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before Him," "when the Lord God shall cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations": on the other hand, it is intimated that against this righteous dominion "the kings of the earth shall set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together." One while it is said, “I have set My King upon My holy hill of Zion": another while "I have spread out My hands all the day unto a rebellious people." Does Isaiah, in his ninth chapter, speak of a Prince of Peace, "of the increase of Whose government and peace there shall be no end" ?-in his fifty-third chapter he says that "He is despised and rejected of men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief," that He has "no beauty that we should desire Him, taken from prison and from judgment, and cut off out of the land of the living." The very same sentence which 1 See Ps. xxii. Is. xlix., liii., lxi.—lxii., lxv. Zech. vi., &c. proclaims "the acceptable year of the Lord," describes it as "the day of vengeance of our God." So irreconcileable did these passages seem to the Jews, that they were inclined to believe in two Messiahs,-one, of the tribe of Joseph, to suffer, another, of the tribe of Judah, to triumph. 3 We know, indeed, that such statements may be reconciled by our Lord's own words, "My kingdom is not of this world." We know that although He was the Prince of Peace, yet through human perversity the result of His mission was a sword, the kindling of the fire of evil passions, the setting of the members of an household one against another. Whatever we expect hereafter, here we look not for the fulfilment of our hopes. A similar contradiction seems to be involved in the text. Knowing, as we know, how uncongenial the whole spirit of the Gospel is to the natural heart of fallen man ; knowing, as we know, the perpetual feud between the Church and the world, the age-long contest between the Prince of Peace and the prince of this world, the weary persecutions by which the faithful have been harassed, how could the Bringer-in of such a Dispensation be truly spoken of as the "Desire of all nations"? With the consequences which must be connected with His future manifestation as the Judge of Quick and Dead, how can we justly say that He has, or that He will, satisfy those desires ? The distinction may be thus made. The prophets do not say that when He appears, the desires of all 2 Isaiah lxi. 2. The Targum on Cant. iv. 5. "Two are thy Redeemers, Messiah the Son of David, and Messiah the Son of Ephraim." nations shall be satisfied; but that He Who is the Desire of all nations shall come; He, that is, Whom they desire by anticipation. Now with respect to His first Coming, it is certain that, from the Fall downwards, the sons of men have ever looked for some mighty Deliverer. The evidence rests on the testimony of traditions, many of which are more ancient than the Sacred Writings, on that of the Holy Scriptures, and on concurrent History. The name which Eve gave to her first-born, "I have gotten the man from the Lord," (or, as some have rendered it, "I have gotten the man, even Jehovah His very Self,") and the intense desire for offspring on the part of women in ancient nations and amongst the Jews, are proofs of these anticipations. Old traditions are, indeed, too plain to be misunderstood. However mystical and grotesque in their details, we have witnesses to the primæval innocence of our race; to the Fall; to the world's expected recovery by means of incarnations or manifestations of Deity in human form; and to the raising up, through their instrumentality, of the fallen family of man to be partakers of the Divine Nature. 5 However deeply men might err as to the Object of faith, however speculative their notions as to the nature of the Eternal Godhead and their own nature, however depraved their ideas as to the means whereby to propitiate the Supreme Being, they could not avoid the 4 Genesis iv. 1. Maurice on the 5 See Faber's Hora Mosaicæ. Bishop Horsley's Dissertation on the Prophecies of the Messiah dispersed among the_Heathen. Religions of the world. Trench's Hulsean Lectures. nection, &c. De Pressense's Religions before Christ. conviction that, if they were to be saved at all, it must be by the Advent of a Son of GOD in human form, as the connecting link between the Creator sinned against, and the creature sinning. 8 And such foreshadowings of the truth, originally impressed upon the human mind, the sacred oracles confirm. I need not repeat predictions which are scattered throughout the Holy Volume. As the event draws nearer, those predictions become clearer, more definite and precise. He Who is proclaimed to our first parents as "the Seed of the woman That should bruise the serpent's head," is promised to Abraham," to Isaac and Jacob as One in Whom "all the families of the earth shall be blessed." Does Jacob speak of Him as Shiloh, the asked, the desired One, the Procurer of our happiness, our alone Peacemaker with GOD? Balaam, the last Seer of the patriarchal Dispensation, more than two hundred years later gives1 us mysterious intimations of the subversion by this same Divine Being of the ancient Magian idolatry and hero-worship, of which Balak the son of Zippor was a votary. Again, 2 Moses, the contemporary of Balaam, anticipates a Prophet "raised up from amongst his brethren" by GOD Himself, to Whom the Spiritual Israel shall "hearken." I need not multiply quotations from the Psalms and later Prophets. It will be sufficient to say that the same characteristics mark them. They are more explicit as the time approaches, till, at length, we hail 6 Genesis iii. 15. 2 Deut. xviii. 15. 7 Genesis xii. 3; xxii. 18. 1 Numbers xxiv. 17, 18. |