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THE GREAT PROPHET

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 8, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 41.

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THE GREAT PROPHET.

By Alexander McLaren

The loftiness and the limitations of “the goodly fellowship of the prophets” alike point onward to Jesus Christ. In Him, and in Him alone, the idea of the prophet is fully realized. The imperfect embodiments of it in the past are prophecies as well as prophets. The fact that God has “spoken unto the fathers by the prophets,” leads us to expect that He will speak “to us in a Son,” and that not by fragments of His mighty voice, but in one full, eternal, all-embracing and all-sufficient Word.
Every divine idea, which has been imperfectly manifested in fragmentary and sinful men and in the material creation, is completely incarnated in Him. He is the King to whom the sins and the saintlinesses of Israel’s kings alike pointed. He is the Priest, whom Aaron and his sons foreshadowed, who perfectly exercises the sympathy which they could only feel partially, because they were compassed with infirmity and self-regard, and who offers the true sacrifice of efficacy higher than the blood of bulls and goats. He is the Prophet, who makes all other means of knowing the divine will unnecessary, hearing whom, we hear the very voice of God speaking in His gentle words of love, in His authoritative words of command, in His illuminating words of wisdom, and speaking no less loudly and heart-touchingly in the eloquence of deeds no less than divine; who is not ashamed to call us brethren, and is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh; who is like, but greater than, the great Law-giver of Israel, being the Son and Lord of the “house,” in which Moses was but a servant.
“To Him give all the prophets witness,” and the greatest of them was honored when, with Moses, Elijah stood on the Mount of Transfiguration, subordinate and attesting, and then faded away when the voice proclaimed, “This is My beloved Son, hear Him,” and they “saw no one save Jesus only.”—Alexander McLaren, D.D., in S. S. Times.