The threat of punishment, joined with exhortations to repentance, to which the people willingly listened, and humbled themselves before the Lord, continues down to chap. ii. 17. With this is connected the proclamation of salvation--which extends down to chap. iii. 2 (ii. 29). The showing of mercy begins with the fact, that God sends the _Teacher of righteousness_. He directs the attention of the people to the design of their sufferings, and invites the weary and heavy laden to come to the Lord, that He may refresh them. His voice is heard by those who are of a broken heart; and there then follows rich divine blessing, with its consummation--the outpouring of the Spirit. Both--the sending of the Teacher of righteousness, and the outpouring of the Spirit--had their preliminary fulfilments; the first of which took place soon after the commencement of the devastation by the locusts, in the time of the Assyrians,--a second, after the destruction by the Babylonians had come upon the people,--a third, after the visitation by the Greek tyranny under the Maccabees. But the chief reference of the prophecy is, throughout, to Christ, and to the vouchsafement [Pg 299] of the blessing, and to the outpouring of the Spirit, originating in His mediation. The announcement of salvation for the Covenant-people is, in the third and last part, followed by the opposite of it, viz., the announcement of judgments upon the enemies of the Congregation of God. Their hatred of it, proceeding from hatred to God, is employed by Him, indeed, as a means of chastising and purifying His Church; but it does not, for that reason, cease to be an object of His punitive justice. The fundamental idea of this part of the book is expressed in 1 Pet. iv. 17 by the words: "For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God. And if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the Gospel of God? And if the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?" The description bears here also, as in the second and first parts, a comprehensive character. That which, in the course of history, is realized in a long series of single acts of divine interposition against the enemies of the Church, is here brought together in a single scene. The overthrow of Assyria, Babylon, the Persian and Grecian monarchies, is comprehended in this prophecy. But its final fulfilment must be sought for only in the Messianic time. This is sufficiently evident from the relation of this part, to the second. Having given ear to the Teacher of righteousness, and the Spirit having been poured out upon her, the Congregation has become an object of the loving providence of God. From this flows the judgment upon her enemies. If, then, the promise of the Teacher of righteousness and of the outpouring of the Spirit be, in substance, Messianic, so, the judgment too must, in substance, bear a Messianic character. The same appears from iv.