How Far Down Dare I Drink?: Promises Greater Than Dreams by Horton Davies

Author:Horton Davies [Davies, Horton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Religion
ISBN: 9781630878528
Publisher: Wipf & Stock
Published: 2014-04-29T07:00:00+00:00

103. William Richard Morris (1877–1963), motors manufacturer and founder of Nuffield College, Oxford.

104. Dame Margot Fonteyn (1919–1991) was an acclaimed English ballerina with The Royal Ballet.

105. See n. 7, p. 61 above.

Advent

Fulfillment and Finality

God who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the Fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken to us by his son . . . (Hebrews 1:1)

If the commodious charabanc is the symbol of the Victorians, the compressed Austin-Seven is the symbol of today. The Encyclopedia Britannica has been ousted in favor of The Reader’s Digest. The seven-course dinner retires in favor of the snack; the ponderous family Bible is set aside for the bedside Bible; the Old Testament is replaced by Moffat’s version of the New. This desire for compression, this concentration on the essence, this Bovril for beef, has advantages. If the family Bible was used only as a paper-weight to hold the newspapers in place, then it is better to read the more manageable Moffat in an intelligible tongue. But this desire for compression and brevity has attendant dangers: the Sermon on the Mount is not the whole of the gospel; the New Testament is only understood on the background of the Old.

I turn to my text as a reminder that the New Testament is the fulfillment of the Old. “God who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the Fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken to us by his son.” The point is that God did speak through the prophets; they were the preparation for the gospel, the patient tilling and fertilizing of the ground in which the seed of the gospel should be planted.

I have recently seen a Russian icon, an altar picture, which illustrated this important truth. The picture is entitled The King Comes to Zion. Our Lord is seen making his triumphal entry into Jerusalem; some are cutting down branches from the trees; others are spreading these branches, and their garments on his path. But these are small figures, apparently children. Behind our Savior come the twelve disciples. But another group of bearded patriarchs come to welcome him; they also bear the palm of greeting in their hands. The disciples appear young in comparison with this group of men, whose hair the snow of the ages has whitened. And their garb is centuries out of date. Who are these? They represent the prophets. The prophets enter with him into Jerusalem. They cannot enter until he comes. They have been waiting for his advent. Perhaps the mountain in the background of the picture, with its terraces or flat places, represents the place where the prophets have been standing waiting for him, scanning the distance for the first sign of his coming. This Jesus Christ is the desire of the ages.

An early English hymn has caught perfectly the significance of the prophetic preparation:

Christ, Desire of Ages,

Theme of sacred pages,

Prophesied by sages,

He my heart engages,

And my grief assuages.

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