and of the Earth. The oppressors' yoke is broken by them. And death's captives are liberated through a triumph over death. The God who lives forever, who kills, can also make alive, (verse 39.) Not even death can remove any of His creatures out of His hand. This indeed is the vital, the essential fact in His redeeming work. Death is the worst and apparently the most invincible of all our enemies. All other agencies of divine wrath, war, famine, wasting sickness, are but handmaids to this supreme foe. No redemption can avail for man No deliverance

which does not redeem from death. from captivity amounts to anything which does not reach the captives in the realms of death. Hence it is the deepest truth of redemption that our Redeemer is the God of resurrection. This truth is but dimly traced through the Old Testament, as compared with its bold outlines in the New. But it is there. And here, in this grand key-passage to all subsequent psalm and prophecy and history, we find it.

Proof that the Jews had some understanding of the great truth of redemption as dependent upon resurrection, and of this truth as taught in this passage, (verse 39) is found in the paraphrase of it given in the Jerusalem Targum: "See now that I in my Word am He, and there is no other God beside me. I kill the living in this world and make alive the dead in the world that cometh; I am He who smiteth and I am He who healeth, and there is none who can deliver from my hand." So also in the Jewish liturgies, (Horne's Introduction Vol. 2. p. 107,) we find the prayer:

"Thou, O Lord, of thy abundant mercy makest the dead to live.

Thou raiseth up those who fall; thou healest the

Who is to be

sick, thou loosest them who are bound, and makest good thy word of truth to those who sleep in the dust. compared to thee, O thou Lord of might!

And who is like unto thee, O our King, who killest and makest alive, and makest salvation to spring as the grass in the field! Thou art faithful to make the dead to rise again to life. Blessed art thou, O Lord, who raisest the dead again to life!"

CHAPTER III.

JUDGMENT IN PSALM AND PROPHECY.

Most important principles of God's dealings, of the relations of Israel and of mankind to His government, and of the destiny of man and of the created system to which he belongs, have now been brought to view. The Song of Moses has declared to us God's righteousness and the far-reaching judgments required for its vindication. The human race at large must pass under the power of death. The chosen people must suffer all kinds of temporal disaster and go down into the common grave. The nations who oppress them must be given over to destruction. The unseen powers of evil, who seduce men to worship them as "gods," but who are only "devils," the instigators of this reign of discord and misery, must be tracked to their fastnesses in this system of creation and punished. The earth must be baptized with fire. The prince of all these enemies must be cast out. And death, the last enemy, must be destroyed.

If these judgments, however, were to issue in the final and total extinction of Israel and of mankind, God would be defeated and the enemy would triumph. Hence the Song casts a horoscope to see " what their end shall be." Man's extremity proves to be God's opportunity. “I was brought low and he helped me." Not even death can defeat the least of God's gracious purposes toward His people or annul His design in the creation of man and the world. The secret of relief and of victory is all contained in the fact that He is the Living One, the Lord

of both death and life. After the fullest vindication of His righteousness, after punishment has done its worst, and death and hell seem to be complete masters of the field, then the way is only the more clear for the God of grace and resurrection to work.

In His wonder-working counsels Redemption through death and resurrection is provided, and all God's enemies are overthrown. Even Death itself is vanquished and destroyed. And so all mankind, who have been shut up in this bondage to sin and death, share in the benefits of this deliverance and are summoned to rejoice because of it.

It remains for us now to see how these principles give tone to all subsequent Psalm and Prophecy.

That Israel, the nations who oppressed them, and all the Gentiles must suffer for their sins such wrath from God as should fully vindicate His righteousness is the plainest fact of Scripture. No Bible reader will require us to prove this by quotations. It is found on every page. The prophets all denounce Israel and foretell his coming desolation. But their prophetic glance takes in also the nations with which Israel had been in any way associated. It includes, indeed, within its horizon, all mankind. After the burden of Israel is declared we have, as in Isaiah,the burden of Babylon, of Moab,of Damascus, of Egypt, of Ethiopia, of Arabia, of Tyre, and finally of the whole earth, (ch. xxiv.) which is made empty and desolate, because it is "defiled under its inhabitants, and the transgression thereof is heavy upon it." These judgments would reach them through all the channels by which the curses of God find out evil doers, and which

Moses had vividly set forth in his farewell address (Deut. xxviii). Sickness, mildew and drought, famine, war, desolation of home and fields, slaughter, cruel exactions and tortures by triumphant enemies, captivity in distant lands, these were the scourges to be inflicted upon them beneath the rod of God's anger.

But these woes are only the handmaids of a worse evil. They are the avenues of death. And hence the final culminating evil they must suffer under would be a long captivity in the realms of death. Their individual, their national hopes would be buried here. "Thou has visited and destroyed them and made all their memory to perish." (Is. xxvi. 14.)

Here it is to be observed that death, bondage in Sheol, is viewed in the Old Testament as a final vindication of Jehovah's righteousness, the supreme expression of His anger against sin. This was the original sentence. “In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." ""The wages of sin is death.”

The idea attached to this term death in the Old Testament was the one which properly belongs to it. It was " cessation of being." Some passages seem to view this end of being as absolute. For instance, Job says (xiv. 10-12) " Man dieth and wasteth away; yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up: so man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep." In Jeremiah (li. 39.) death is viewed as a “perpetual sleep. And yet the hope of a future reawakening is often expressed. Even Job, in connection with the