Now he dilates a little in passing on this dear theme, the Gospel of God. He whom it reveals as eternal Love was true to Himself in the preparation as in the event; [Sidenote: Ver. 2.] He =promised= His Gospel =beforehand through His prophets in (the) holy Scriptures.= The sunrise of Christ was no abrupt, insulated phenomenon, unintelligible because out of relation. "Since the world began" (Luke i. 70), from the dawn of human history, predictive word and manifold preparing work had gone before. To think now only of the prediction, more or less articulate, and not of the preparation through general divine dealings with man--such had the prophecy been that, as the pagan histories tell us,[4] "the whole East" heaved with expectations of a Judæan world-rule about the time when, as a fact, Jesus came. He came, alike to disappoint every merely popular hope and to satisfy at once the concrete details and the spiritual significance of the long forecast. And He sent His messengers out to the world carrying as their text and their voucher that old and multifold literature which is yet one Book; those "holy writings," (our own Old Testament, from end to end,) which were to them nothing less than the voice of the Holy Spirit. They always put the Lord, in their preaching, in contact with that prediction. In this, as in other things, His glorious Figure is unique. There is no other personage in human history, himself a moral miracle, heralded by a verifiable foreshadowing in a complex literature of previous centuries. "The hope of Israel" was, and is, a thing _sui generis_. Other preparations for the Coming were, as it were, sidelong and altogether by means of nature. In the Holy Scriptures the supernatural led directly and in its own way to the supreme supernatural Event; the Sacred Way to the Sanctuary. What was the burthen of the vast prophecy, with its converging elements? [Sidenote: Ver. 3.] It was =concerning His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.= Whatever the prophets themselves knew, or did not know, of the inmost import of their records and utterances, the import was this. The Lord and the Apostles do not commit us to believe that the old seers ever had a _full_ conscious foresight, or even that in all they "wrote of Him" they knew that it was of Him they wrote; though they _had_ insights above nature, and knew it, as when David "in the Spirit called Him Lord," and Abraham "saw His day." But they do amply commit us to believe, if we are indeed their disciples, that the whole revelation through Israel did, in a way quite of its own kind, "concern the Son of God." See this in such leading places as Luke xxiv. 25-27; John v. 39, 46; Acts iii. 21-25, x. 43, xxviii. 23.