(4) As " The Branch of Jehovah" who in that day shall be " for beauty and for glory, ... for excellency and comeliness to them that should be of the escaped in Israel"
(Isa. iv. 2). The promised King the Servant the Man the Branch, or Son of God.
And this fourfold prophetic picture of Messiah on the pages of the Old Testament, as I have elsewhere shown many years ago,[1] answers to the fourfold portraiture which the Holy Spirit has given us in the four different Gospels of the Christ of history. One probable reason why the Divine artist has seen fit to sketch the person and character of Messiah for us in four Gospels instead of one, has been well expressed by the late Professor Godet, who says: " Just as a gifted painter, who wished to immortalize for a family the complete likeness of the father who had been its glory, would avoid any attempt at combining in a single portrait the insignia of all the various offices he had filled; at re presenting him in the same picture as general and as magistrate; as man of science and as father of a family; but would prefer to paint four distinct portraits, each of which should represent him in one of these characters. So has the Holy Spirit, in order to preserve for mankind the perfect likeness of Him who was its chosen Representative, God in man, used means to impress upon the minds of the writers, whom He has made His organs, four different images."
And these " four different images " in the historic narrative correspond in a striking manner, as already stated, with the fourfold outline of Messiah's character as delineated on the page of prophecy. Although the same blessed features of our Redeemer are easily recognisable in all the Gospels, there is a special aspect of His character brought out in each, (i) In Matthew, which is primarily " the Jewish Gospel," and was very probably in the first instance written in Hebrew or Aramaic (though afterwards rewritten by the same evangelist in Greek), we have the promised
- ↑ In Rays of Messiah's Glory, 2nd edition, published in 1886, now out of print.
