THE K I N G ’ S BUS I NESS stilled the tempests, holding the secrets of Nature. Hosts of evil fled from His word, for He understood the unseen world. In human life disease and even death fled from His touch. No other prophet ever did miracles as Jesus did. They are His works, the expression of His own nature, His own proper function. So He worked miracles with the ease and naturalness that we have in doing our own work. He moved with freedom among the secrets that are utterly beyond our ken.— All others have had to strain after a power that was not theirs. But He had perfect mastery over all, for He was GOD walk ing among men. He is God’s Prophet also in what He says. Nearly all that we know about God comes from the lips of Christ. With swift intuition of our heart’s desire He went to the heart of God’s character. He spoke of God with that intimacy and sureness of One who had come straight from Him. The incense of the Father’s house still hung about Him. “ All Thy garments smell of myrrh and cassia out of the ivory palaces.” When He came it was not only God’s Presence on earth, it was God’s PER SONALITY. And that was a new impression for the world. It is true that He is the ideal human being. But He is more than that. There are two essentials in every human char acter, which were utterly absent from the character of our Lord. One was the sense of sin and of forgiveness. Every high and holy human character is more or less based on the sense of its failures and sins, and the sense of for giveness. But there was no such thing in Him,-—never a thought of sin or for giveness. He has not in Him that which makes other characters noble. And the second essential absent from Him and found in all others was the sense of aspiration. He is not aspiring, for He moves freely among the highest ideals. He had no sense of anything beyond to attain to, for while He was a Man
648 In getting to the beginning of His prophetic career we must go hack to Creation; and there find that when the universe came into being and this great world was spread into space, the Lord Jesus Christ was God’s Spokesman, God’s Prophet. This great creation is the expression of God’s Mind as reveal ed by His Prophet, Jesus Christ. In Proverbs 8 we have the scene of Creation, wheji the Lord Jesus w'as as “ a Master-Workman,” working out God’s plans. (See Prov. 8:30, R. V.). So creation, the expression of God’s mind, is the first expression of the function of Jesus Christ as the Prophet of God. All through the Old Testament we see that strange, mystic Figure, who appeared as Man, yet with something of the arpma of another world clinging to His garments,— He who talked with Abraham on the plains of Mamre, and who appeared to Joshua as the Cap tain of the Lord’s hosts, and who spoke to Gideon. So looking back over the history of Israel, the prophet Isaiah rec ognizes Him, and calls Him the “ Angel of His Presence.” And He was none other than Jesus Christ, in His Divine garments, not having yet put bn His human garments. Thus He leads us through the Old Testament to the gates of the New. But not only thus directly, but often He used human beings, as we read in 1 Peter 1:11, that the Spirit of Christ spoke through the prophets. And all these bring us to the time when He stepped out, and became a Man among men. The Lord Jesus is God’s Prophet not only in what He does and says, but in what He IS,— God’s Prophet before cre ation. And He is Himself the final and last Revelation, when the Word laid aside His Divine glory and came and tabernacled among us. (John 1:1-3, 14). In that Man God revealed God by His miracles and His works. The miracles of the Lord Jesus are different to those of any other prophets. They are in all the realms of life. He
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