86 REV. A. H. T. CLARKE, M.A., ON THE FULFILMENT OF PROPHECY. 



Messiah to come (Hos. xi, 1, with Matt, ii, 15). " To Him bore 

 all their Prophets witness." " The testimony to Jesus is the 

 spirit of Prophecy." The Desire of Nations was specially and 

 exclusively revealed to them in any distinctness. It was "of 

 them Christ came, Who is God," " It is evident that our Lord 

 sprang out of Judah." The temporal promises to Abraham, to 

 Solomon, to Hezekiah, even to Cyrus, were only to be revealed 

 through them. They alone were God's elect vessels and chosen 

 channels, the sole organs of His revealed will (Isa. xlix, 6, cp. 

 Acts xiii, 47, and Rom. ii, 17, 18). They alone supplied the "men 

 of revelation " (Dillmann). Hence, also, all Prophecy becomes 

 essentially Messianic (Augustine). Christ is its goal (-reXo?, 

 Rom. x, 4) both in His first coming and His second (Eph. i, 10). 



3. Hence Prophecy, expanding with the growing experience 

 of the Jewish nation, never exhausts itself in a single fulfilment 

 (IBias iirtXvcrews ov yiverai, II Pet. i, 20). Prophecy, like 

 history, repeats itself in cycles of analogous experiences, e.g. t 

 Ahitophel's treachery to the Messianic King David (Pss. lxix 

 and cix) repeats itself in principle in the treachery of Judas 

 to Christ (Acts i, 16-20); later, in the treachery of the 

 Jewish Church to the Christian Church (Acts v, 17; vi, 9; 

 xv, 1; Gal. ii, 11; iv, 17); last of all, in the treachery of 

 the apostate Christian Church to the Truth itself (i John ii, 

 18, 19). This is the ANTICHRIST foreshadowed in all St. 

 John's writings. " The day of the Lord," always at hand in the 

 rise and fall of nations, will culminate in one final great 

 " DAY " of Judgment, 



4. But are there to be no final fulfilments before the end ? 

 Is there no open vision of the whole without this complicated 

 cross-reference to all time ? Are there no definite stepping- 

 stones in time to ease us in this march of God across history ? 

 Yes, there are, it is true, certain historical fulfilments of doom 

 upon ancient nations like Tyre, Babylon, Egypt, Eclom, Nineveh, 

 fulfilled to the very letter. But that letter is to be reinterpreted 

 by analogy so as to apply to all nations who shall take up the 

 same standpoint and represent the same principles. These 

 nations were picked out by the bold hand of prophecy that 

 they might be a warning to future nations whose principles 

 they represented. 



5. The application of this to modern Europe, e.g. : — 



(a) Business fraud. See Hos. xii, 7-8 ; Amos viii, 4-10. 



(b) Treachery. See Amos v, 3, 4, and 10-13 (repeated by our 

 Lord over Jerusalem in His day and by St. John over the 

 Church of the future). 



