This view may be held, though the main essence of the prophecies made to him should have been concealed from David during his lifetime, as e.g. Peter may never until the last moments of his existence have understood the meaning of our Lord's prophecy concerning his end.1 The Prophets did certainly apprehend the more profound sense. "Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that I will perform that good thing which I have promised to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah. In those days and at that time, I will cause the branch of righteousness to grow up unto David: and he shall execute judgment and righteousness in the land. For thus saith the Lord: David shall never want a man to sit upon the throne of the house of Israel."2 Cf. what is said Isaiah xi. 1, etc. of the rod out of the stem of Jesse. It cannot be denied that the prophets knew that the prediction should meet its ultimate fulfilment in the One great descendant of David. But was that knowledge hid from David? Believing, as he did, in the Messiah, in the King of Zion as described in Psalms ii. and cx. to whom the uttermost parts of the earth should obey, who should be a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek, is it likely that the thought should never have entered his mind, that the eternal kingdom of his house had reference to that descendant? At his departure from life, if not earlier, David knew at least, that the Messiah whose victories he had celebrated in Ps. ii. and cx. should spring from his progeny. In his above quoted last prophecy, he sees a ruler over men in righteousness and in the fear of God from his house, during whose reign an unclouded sun shall shine on men and the earth yield a rich increase.1 He says that God's everlasting covenant with him had determined as much; * that all ungodly powers would be compelled to yield to the conquering might of his house. These words may be regarded as exhibiting the clear fundamental type of David's Messianic hopes. Our collection of Psalms contains two Messianic psalms of David,5 one of Solomon, to which must be added Psalm xlv.

6

A few observations on matter and form are needed for the correct understanding of the Messianic psalms. If we understand the prophecies as predictions of the life of Jesus only, it will follow, that only some particulars met a literal fulfilment. Even the modern Jews, searching for Messianic predictions in that sense, deem themselves entitled to the confident assertion, that the Old Testament contains but few of that kind. We ask, Is the kingdom of Christ to be confined to the brief period of not quite three years of His ministry on earth? It is but the beginning of that consummation in the future kingdom of glory to which we have referred, p. 35. Prophecy points to every gradation of Christ's existence and the total extension of His kingdom, down to its final completion (1 Cor. xv. 28; xiii. 12; 2 Pet. iii.; Rev. xxi.) Supposing this to be seen and granted, we have further to consider, that prophecy refers to the Messiah and His kingdom in terms which have neither been fulfilled during the period of Christ's appearance on earth, nor in the history of the Christian church, while they no less answer the expectations which we entertain of the future kingdom of God. The Messiah is certainly described as accomplishing his earthly mission in the character of a prophet and teacher endowed with the Spirit of God, of the servant of God, gentle and beneficent, despised by His nation and enduring great sufferings. But a far greater number of passages set Him forth as a valiant king, endowed with Divine power, who is to subdue the heathen and (1) Jno. xxi. 18. (2) Jer. xxxiii. 14, etc. (3) Ps. ii. 7; cx. 4. (4) Cf. ad. Ps. lxvii. 7. (5) Psalms ii. cx. (6) Psalm lxxii. (7) Isaiah xlii. 49. 53; Zech, ix. 11.

* To understand what is said of the ruler collectively of the whole house of David is equally admissible. It would even then exhibit a development of the prophecy in 2 Sam. vii., though David would then not have understood the full meaning of the promise.

to establish the lasting temporal prosperity of His people (Ps. ii. cx. lxxii., 2 Sam. xxiii. 3. 6, as well as Ps. xlv. which is to be regarded as Messianic, use similar terms). Here we ought to distinguish between the fundamental ideas of such prophecies and the form in which they are expressed. When reference is made to the condition of the saved, they are described as sitting down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, as entering paradise, as being received into everlasting habitations, as joining the Saviour in drinking anew of the fruit of the vine in His Father's kingdom, as being set some over few, others over many cities, etc. In the Apocalypse, the prophetic book of the New Testament, are depicted the heavenly Jerusalem as coming down upon the earth,-the heavenly marriage at which the guests are to be furnished with fine linen, clean and white,—the river of the water of life, and on its banks the tree of life, yielding its fruit every month, the leaves whereof are for the healing of the nations, the temple of God with the ark of the testaments, etc. (Chaps. xxi. xix. 7. 8; xi. 19). Of the condemned on the other hand it is said in the Gospels and the Apocalypse, that they shall be cast into hell-fire, that their worm shall not die, that they shall be excluded from the marriage feast, that they shall be cast into outer darkness, where is weeping and gnashing of teeth. It has never been doubted that christians are to grasp the fundamental ideas of such descriptions, and to regard the form of their expression as adaptations to our present power of comprehension. This is clear from the variety of forms and figures. In some passages of Revelations express explanations are given; e. g. chap. xix. 8, "The fine linen is the righteousness of saints." The same remarks apply to the predictions of the prophets concerning the kingdom of Christ. Their prophetic visions are related to their fulfilment as are the visions of Christ, the Apostles, and the Prophets of the New Testament, to the period of the completion of the kingdom of Christ. Just as we employ the most beautiful and significant conditions of the present as representations of the future, so did the prophets respecting the future kingdom of the Messiah. In the time of the Old Testament as well as among christians, the weak and sensuous can only realise the substance in the symbol, while the more intelligent distinguish between symbol and thought. Hence the Messiah is represented invested with the three chief offices of the Jewish theocracy, as King, Priest, and Prophet. It is said in one place, that the nations shall show themselves willing to be instructed in Mount Zion, or that knowledge shall be sent to them, and that universal peace shall revisit the earth; in another, that the Philistines, Edom and Moab, shall be conquered, and the river of Egypt be dried up; in a third place, "Egypt shall do sacrifice and oblation. În that day shall there be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrians shall come into Egypt, and the Egyptians into Assyria, and the Egyptians shall serve with the Assyrians. In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the land; whom the Lord of Hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance."1

2

The conversion of the heathen is sometimes spoken of in terms which almost make one think that they were all to become Jews, while the same passages contain expressions which point to the abrogation of the ceremonial law. In one place the wild beasts are represented as tame, in another, that God will destroy them: that the sun shall no more go down; and again, that God shall be their sun.4 The variety of these figures shows that we can only retain the general thoughts which they embody. Just where everything (1) Isaiah ii. xlii. 1-6; lx. 11; ix. 6. 7; xi. 14. 15; xix. 23-25. (2) Isaiah xix. 21; Ixvi. 20; Zech. xiv. 16. (3) Isaiah xix. 19; lxvi. 21; Zech. xiv. 20. 21. (4) Isaiah xi. 6; lxv. 25; Ezek. xxxiv. 25; Isaiah lx. 20.

seems to point to a narrow and Jewish horizon, some expression or other occurs which plainly indicates that all cannot be taken in a literal sense. Joel e.g. chap. iii. had spoken of the judgment of God upon the heathen, after which Jerusalem should become holy and no stranger pass through her any more;1 he then says, "It shall come to pass in that day, that the mountains shall drop down new wine, and the hills shall flow with milk, and all the rivers of Judah shall flow with waters,"-all temporal allusions,-but immediately after we have, "and a fountain shall come forth of the house of the Lord and shall water the valley of Shittim." Here we are all of a sudden on spiritual territory, for Shittim is a place on the plains of the Moabites, where the Israelites encamped when they contemplated their invasion of Canaan, so that the meaning is, "The spiritual water of life shall spread from the centre of the land to its frontiers." Similar is the passage in Ezek. xlvii. etc. "Waters issued out from under the threshold of the house, which being brought forth into the sea, the waters shall be healed, on the banks whereof trees shall grow, that shall bring forth new fruits every month, because their waters they issued out of the sanctuary." Here is another instance. After the prophecy of the new covenant, by which the law should be written on the hearts of men, we have in Jer. xxxi. 38, etc. the following passage, which seems to proclaim the mere outward enlargement of the city of Jerusalem: Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that the city shall be built to the Lord from the tower of Hananeel unto the gate of the corner. And the measuring line shall yet go forth over against it upon the hill Gareb, and shall compass about to Goath. And the whole valley of the dead bodies and of the ashes, and all the fields unto the brook of Kidron, unto the corner of the horse-gate toward the east, shall be holy unto the Lord." The sublime meaning of this prophetic utterance is the sanctification of everything unclean and unholy at Jerusalem. The hill of Gareb was the abode of lepers, and the valley of the dead bodies and of the ashes, the unclean valley of Hinnom, where the corpses of malefactors used to be burnt. The prophet's meaning. is, "Every unclean spot shall then be included into the sanctuary."*

But to return to the Messianic Psalms. The preceding remarks are equally applicable to them. They depict the Messiah as a king appointed of God; as swaying the sceptre of righteousness, under whose reign God will lavish all His blessings on the people; as causing rebels to feel the edge of His sword, but as blessing the obedient. But what of the fulfilment of these predictions? In part it has already taken place, though it will be more completely realised in Christ's blissful dominion over His church, and His judgments by which He will eventually triumph over all opposing powers (Cf. ad. Ps. ii.). Psalm xlv. is peculiar in its kind, since it allegorically represents the admission of Israel and the heathen into Messiah's kingdom by the figure of a marriage.+ (1) Joel iii. 17.

Vide for more proof Hengstenberg's Christol. vol. iii.

+ Cf. the interpretation of that Psalm. It has been repeatedly shown that both love and marriage songs are found among the Hindoos, the Arabians, and Persians, which though without any allusions to a spiritual meaning celebrate the soul's relation to God. This has been done for the purpose of supporting the view which attributes to the Song of Solomon a mystical allusion to the relation of God to Israel. We have recently received some interesting contributions in this respect by Lane, who cites (vol. ii. p. 194) the following lines extracted from a song used by Mohammedan monks at their religious solemnities: "The image of thy form visited me in my sleep. I said, Oh, vision, who has sent thee? He said, I am sent by him whom thou knowest, whose love captivated thee. The loved of my heart visited me in the obscurity of night. I rose, to honour him, till he sat down. I said, Oh, thou my desire, and all my delight, art thou come at noon of night, and wert not afraid of the watchmen? He said, I feared them, but love has taken my soul and my breath." Lane compares it to Song of Solomon iii. 2-7. He remarks, however, that six of these verses find place in a common worldly love song which occurs in an edition of the "Thousand and one Nights," Calcutta, vol. i. p. 425, showing that such songs occasionally are void of every mark from which their spiritual sense could be inferred.

In conjunction with these royal Psalms we have another kind of Messianic psalms, which we may designate as psalms of the kingdom. As some portions of the prophets celebrate the Messianic kingdom, without making mention of its head, the Messiah, so also several psalms, vide Psalms xlvii. lxvii. lxviii. lxxvi. xcvi. xcvii. xcviii. Some of them indicate that great victories of Israel over neighbouring nations, in consequence of which even the heathen had to acknowledge the majesty of the God of Israel, and probably to send gifts to Jerusalem, gave rise to the hope, that all nations would gloriously join Israel, and all the princes and nations of the earth hereafter worship the God of Abraham. Vide esp. Psalm xlvii.

The Psalms contain yet another class of predictions, viz. the typical or prefigurative, as e.g. Psalms xvi. xxii. xl. lxix. As some of their expressions are said in the New Testament to have met their fulfilment in Christ, there have been from the earliest times many commentators who thought that the Psalmist had, while composing them, a lively representation of the Messiah, and as it were composed them in His soul. This is a very strange notion, for it is nowhere hinted that the Psalmist did ever compose a psalm in the mind of another, and not in his own. Add to this that the character of these psalms in no way differs from those which David and others composed under personal affliction. Hence some of the psalms of complaint, passages from which are in the New Testament applied to Christ, have not without caprice been designated as Messianic, and others because they do not occur in the New Testament as Davidic. Why should Psalm lxix. be referred to the Messiah, and why not Ps. xxviii. xxxv. lxiv. lxxxvi. etc.? Indeed one of the psalms, the expressions of which were appropriated by the Redeemer Himself (viz. Ps. xxxi. 6), has not been included in the list of Messianic Psalms. Many minds have been led astray by the notion, that all the passages of the Old Testament which our Lord and His apostles have described as fulfilled in the New Testament history apply to it exclusively. The very opposite, however, appears from citations such as Matt. ii. 15. 18; xiii. 14; Jno. vi. 45; 1 Cor. ix. 10, etc. ‡ Jno. v. 46, our Lord appeals to the fact, that Moses prophesied concerning Him. Only the five following passages in the Pentateuch have from the earliest times been regarded as predictions of Christ, Gen. iii. 15. [iv. 1.] xii. 3.; xlix. 10; Numb. xxiv. 17; Deut. xviii. 18. Did Christ refer to these only? Certainly not. His manner of showing (John iii. 14) that the idea of His atonement was already expressed in the Old Testament, indicates that He no doubt desired us to regard the entire sacrificial institutions as well as other phenomena of the Old Testament, e.g. the history of men like David, as typical and pre-indicative of what should be completely fulfilled by Him. It is said (Matt. v. 18) that every tittle of the law must be fulfilled; would not this imply a fulfilment in the sense just indicated? We maintain that Christ and His Apostles quoted the Psalms as predictions of New Testament events in the last sense. Every pious man under the ancient economy, who suf fered for God's cause, but triumphed at last, was a type of what should be completely fulfilled in Christ: hence it is said (1 Pet. i. 11) that the Spirit of Christ in the Prophets foretold them the sufferings of Christ. The Spirit of Christ so stirred the minds of the prophets that they could anticipatively speak of Him. Some of the typical Psalms, as will appear

Among the moderns, Seiler, (Prophecy and its fulfilment, 1794, p. 188), Muentinghe, Hensler, Dereser, Pareau, Kaiser, Hengstenberg, (Christol. vol. i. but differently in his Comm. on the Psalms).

+ Augustine, A. H. Francke, Brenz, Calov, H. Michalis, etc., however, regard also this Psalm as Messianic.

Cf. my work, "The Old Testament in the New Testament." 2nd Ed. 1839.

in the Commentary, are really of such a character that without assuming the Psalmists to have soared beyond their usual religious consciousness, they defy every attempt at explanation. E.g. Ps. xxii. in which after the hardest struggles and most lacerating complaints, the Psalmist is filled with so irresistible a sense of confident victory, that he ventures to describe the conversion of the whole world as the consequence of his struggles and victories. In Ps. xvi. he expresses himself in such confident and clear terms respecting his future hope, which can only be expected in a disciple of the New Testament. A large portion of commentators have from the earliest times held, that the fulfilment of a psalm in Christ does by no means imply its exclusive application to Christ, but is based upon the typical character of the Old Testament. Bishop Theodoret observes in the fifth century ad. Ps. lix., that it strictly refers to the affliction of the exiled Jews, but typically to the Redeemer and the affliction which His rejection would bring upon the nation: the venerable Bede, the oracle of the eighth century, refers it as properly applicable to the times of the Maccabees. Theodoret explains Psalm xl. which (Heb. x. 5-9) is applied to Christ, primarily of David, secondarily of Christ. Ambrose, Augustine, and Athanasius have, on the other hand, explained these two psalms as if they spoke in the name of Christ and His church only. This double manner of interpretation occurs also among the commentators of the later Roman Catholic Church. One of their most eminent men, the learned Benedictine Calmet, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, maintains* (ad. Ps. xl. and lxix.), that David appears as the type of Christ, and that several passages in Ps. xxii. and most in Ps. xvi. treat of David.

The typical interpretation of the Psalms in which the singer speaks in the first person, became general in the Reformed Church. Even Calvin, Bucerus, Beza, Musculus, Rivet, adopt it clearly and confidently. According to Luther's view, however, David speaks in those passages in the person of Christ, so that we have really the words of Christ: this view has generally been adopted by Lutheran divines, e.g. Bugenhagen, Brenz, Calov, A. H. Francke, Geier, etc. Melanchthon already deviates from it and says (ad. Ps. xxii. xli.), that David recounts his own sufferings and deliverances, though with the consciousness of their being types of the sufferings and deliverances of the Messiah. Other psalms which Luther applied to Christ and His kingdom, meet with a different explanation at the hands of Melanchthon. Luther explained Ps. xx. of David, and Ps. xxi. though connected with it, of the Messiah. The majority of Lutheran interpreters followed him in this respect; not so Melanchthon, who says that Ps. xxi. as well as Ps. xx. treat of one and the same King. The desire of collecting if possible many predictions of Christ, has so far biased some interpreters of the Psalms, that they dispute the validity of the titles. In spite of the title of Psalm iii. which states that it was composed when David fled from Absalom his son, Augustine explains it of Christ and His enemies: so also Cocceius, A. H. Francke, etc. Now, does it not imply distrust in the mighty and sure evidences of christian truth, if in defiance of undeniable facts, we obstinately insist upon some less important piece of evidence? Besides, we should bear in mind, that we are not to consider the Psalter, though containing several prophetic songs, as a prophetical book, but that as far as it concerns the predictions respecting Christ and His kingdom, we are chiefly referred to the writings of the prophets.

* Commentarius literalis in Omnes libros Vet. et Novi Test. vol. iv.