by God like the rain which blesses and the sunshine. They certainly could not beget the change of mind and faith in the heart which the word does. But they might awaken and nourish the latent germ of the spiritual life, and so they were vouchsafed to faith however weak, while the unbelief that requires a sign was referred to Moses and the prophets (Luke xvi. 31), or to the signs of the times, or the sign of the prophet Jonas, that is, to the God-sent preacher of repentance and judgment (Mark viii. 12). Those miracles of Jesus were works of love for His contemporaries, intended to make His earnest prophetic words more impressive (Matt. xi. 20-24); a condescension to the weakness of men who commonly felt more deeply their sensuous than their spiritual need, but to whom the sense of spiritual need and desire for help might arise in the sensible experience of help and love. Still more in their universally compassionate character, removing, through the power of God, the manifold evil and misery of the world, they were the dawning rays of that day when the kingdom of God will dry up all tears, and glorify even the natural life, and therefore they were a testimony in fact to the truth of the kingdom as come near to those who still took offence at the testimony of the word (Matt. xi. 5, xii. 28).

§ 7. THE PERSONAL MEDIATOR OF SALVATION

It lay in the nature of the case, however, that these miraculous signs should not only attach men in trust and gratitude to the person of Jesus, but that the effect of the word should prove to depend upon a personal relation to Him. For. as we have repeatedly urged, every guarantee for the truth of the gospel lay in Him, in His personal certainty of God and communion with God, and therefore He Himself as the real mediator of salvation, stood behind the word as a means of grace from the very first, though for a long time undeclared. We get the impression that Jesus, wholly devoted to His divine mission, and seeking only the glory of His heavenly Father, for a long time allowed this saving significance of His personality to prevail without any desire of His and without reasoning about it, and that the full consciousness of the degree in which participation in the kingdom of God depends

upon surrender to Him, first came to Him through experience, through the opposition of the world. If we are not mistaken, this development of His consciousness of being Saviour comes into prominence, above all, in the much-discussed passage, Matt. xi. 25-30. Jesus has gained the new experience that the glad message committed to Him is hidden from the wise and prudent of His people, while it is revealed to the uneducated, the babes. In taking thankfully from His Father's hands this experience, which, according to human ways of thought, is so depressing, it dawns on Him what a mystery of salvation the Father has prepared for the world in Him the Son, and how all knowledge of the Father is bound up in Him, and in His free revealing of it. "All things are delivered unto Me of My Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever He will reveal Him." Why was the new revelation of God hidden from the wise and prudent, the scribes and teachers in Israel, and why was it revealed to His babes of disciples, these Galilean fishermen and peasants? Because the former took offence at Him, the meek and lowly Son of Man, and could not place confidence in Him; while, to the latter, love for Him became daily the leading means of knowledge. From this hour, therefore, commences a new tone in the teaching of Jesus, who, in a way till then unusual, places Himself in the central point of His doctrine of salvation: "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke. upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly of heart and ye shall find rest to your souls." That is a tone which is usually called the Johannine, because it certainly is much more strongly emphasised in the Fourth Gospel from the very beginning, but it also makes itself heard in the Synoptists from this point. "He who receiveth you, receiveth Me; and he who receiveth Me, receiveth Him that sent Me" (Matt. x. 40). "Whosoever confesseth Me before men, him will I also confess before My heavenly Father" (Matt. x. 32; Luke xii. 8). "He that is not for Me is against Me; and he that gathereth not with Me scattereth abroad" (Matt. xii. 30). "Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matt. xviii. 20). In

these and like words already emerges, as Jesus' own idea, the thought which afterwards ruled the whole apostolic teaching, that the attitude of man to the person of Jesus absolutely decides his relation to God. The decisive significance of His personality, in the setting up of the kingdom of God, forces itself on the Messiah from another side in that same middle period of His public life. His Pharisaic opponents attempted to destroy the impression of His healing the possessed, by tracing it back to a covenant with Beelzebub, the prince of demons. By so doing, they woke in Him the majestic consciousness of being rather the personal conqueror of Satan, the destroyer in principle of the kingdom of darkness. "How can one enter into a strong man's house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man himself?" (Mark iii. 27; Matt. xii. 29; Luke xi. 21). His power, therefore, of spoiling the prince of darkness of his prey-the possessed-rests upon His having first overcome him in personal combat,without doubt an allusion to the conflict of temptation in the wilderness, in which He had preferred the self-denying path of absolute obedience to God to all the allurements of the world-spirit, and so first obtained for Himself the power of breaking the world-dominion of evil. The consciousness of being the Conqueror and Dethroner of Satan comes into prominence also on other occasions. "I saw Satan fall as lightning from heaven." "I have given you power to tread on scorpions and serpents, and all the powers of the enemy: and nothing shall injure you," He declares to His disciples (Luke x. 18, 19) when they had returned with rich results from their mission. The destruction of the kingdom of Satan is the necessary other side of the setting up of the kingdom of God. And it is possible to others only through Him who in a personal life-struggle defeats every onset of the old evil enemy, and has indeed in principle overcome him from the first.

§ 8. THE SAVING SIGNIFICANCE OF HIS DEATH

These very considerations, which are obscurely indicated in the synoptic tradition, lead to a still more definite unfolding of Jesus' ideas of salvation, to the idea of the founding of

salvation by means of His death. The personal Mediator of salvation must crown His work by giving up His life for it. That is an idea with which Jesus did not begin, an idea which must have been hidden from Him so long as the possibility of calling His people to repentance, by the word of the glad tidings, was not actually disproved. It is an idea which He reaches, too, through the experience from which, as in Matt. xi. 25, He learns His Father's will. That conflict and victory at the gate of entrance to His Messiahship had probably been decisive for Himself, but not yet quite decisive for His work. Whatever powers and triumphs for the kingdom of God His official life at its height might secure, the powers of darkness gathered themselves together all the stronger against it, and made it clear that the last, hardest, and decisive combat was yet to come. An ever darker hatred was being developed in the leading circles of the people against Him who brought salvation. World - ruling selfishness with demoniac power appeared against the divine love with its joyful message, resolved in self-preservation to lay murderous hands on the messenger of God. The great mass of Israel, however, held by sensuous Messianic expectations, and not at all comprehending His spiritual ideas of salvation, wavered back and forwards irresolutely between Him and His deadly enemies. And even the few faithful ones whom He had gained, how weak and dependent, and how bound up in those worldly and selfish expectations they still were. Amid these impressions and experiences, in the death which lay threateningly before Him, in His situation as a man, Jesus prophetically laid hold of, and ever more clearly perceived, a decree of His heavenly Father a decree that He should accomplish by dying what He had only been permitted to prepare for by living; and thus towards the end of His life we have declarations about the saving significance of His death. He could not indeed develop in formal teaching to His disciples an idea of God after the understanding of which He had yet himself to strive, and which again became doubtful on the threshold of its realisation in Gethsemane. He could only utter it in hints and presentiments like a prophet, and therefore it need not surprise us that it lies before us only in a few short and obscure sayings. It was written of the servant of Jehovah

(Isa. liii.): "When he hath made his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hands." Correspondingly, we meet, in the words of Jesus (Luke xii. 49, 50), with the idea that He had to expect the full results of that which He desired on earth only beyond His earthly life, after a baptism of blood that is at hand: "I am come to send fire on the earth (that is, a power of purifying separation; cf. ver. 51 f.); and what will I if it be already kindled? But I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened until it be accomplished!" That, however, expresses only the fact of the necessity for dying, not the reason for it. This reason is given in Mark x. 45; Matt. xx. 28: "The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many ”—δοῦναι τὴν ψυχὴν AÚTоû XÚTρOV ȧνTì TOλλov. This solitary saying has, of course, αὐτοῦ λύτρον ἀντὶ πολλῶν. tormented many who seek to force upon it all their preconceived doctrinal opinions about the death of Jesus. Simplicity of interpretation, the analogy of Scripture, and especially the agreement with Jesus' mode of thought elsewhere, must decide. The idea of ransom presupposes those who are not free, who are captive or enslaved, and who are to be set free by means of it. It may be asked, who or what is to be thought of as the power which holds them captive or in bondage? On the basis of Old Testament passages such as Ps. xlix. 9, Job xxxiii. 24, redemption from death has been thought of, and this has been brought into connection with Matt. xvi. 27, in which Jesus represents the impossibility for a man who has wasted his soul on the vain and transitory, of buying it back even at the price of the whole world.2 But these passages have nothing to do, either with each other, or with the one in question. Those Old Testament passages speak (poetically) of a ransom to be given to God, in order that a man may not die-in the usual sense of the word die. But whenever the New Testament considers the life or blood of Christ as a

1 Baptism as an image of dying-as sinking into a watery grave-is a symbol bound up with the original form of immersion, which we have also in Mark x. 38, 39; Rom. vi. 3-5.

2 So Ritschl (Rechtf. u. Versöhnung, ii. 84), and after him Weiss (N. T. Theol. p. 74).