Page:Messianic Prophecies - Delitzsch - 1880.djvu/23

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Moreover it is the divine order, that under certain circumstances God should reveal his will mediately to men, for man is not only a person but also a being which belongs to a species. It is the divine order that God should allow himself to be moved to a helping love, through the intercession of a love which seeks to help the brother. It is therefore his ordinance, that a man should be the prophet and priest of others. The prophetic and the priestly office have a common human stock in the creative order of the world. For this reason therefore the prophetic and the priestly office are not exclusively Israelitic, although nowhere so distinguished and conditioned as in Israel.

Remark. Only in Israel did the prophetic office maintain a free and independent position with reference to the ceremonially legal priesthood. Everywhere else they are united as among the Brahmins of India, the Shamans of the Mongolians, the Druids of the Celts, and also among the Chaldeans; compare Lenormant, Die Magie und Wahrsagerkunst der Chaldäer, Jena 1878.

As God makes man the medium of the revelation of Himself for others, so, when there was danger that the knowledge of the divine being and will would be extinguished, he made one nation the medium of the revelation of Himself and of the call of His redeeming love for the nations of the world. This people is Israel, the people of positive revelation (Rom. III, 2; IX, 4), the kingdom of priests (Ex. XIX, 6).

Remark. The supposed contradiction between Jehovah as God of the universe and as a national God, which is urged by Hegel, Anger, and Kuenen (Yaveh and the other Gods in the Theological Review, London 1876) disappears, when we consider this that when Israel called Jehovah his God, it was not an arbitrary national representation, but a pedagogical arrangement made by God. The divine decree of salvation demanded this particularism as a preliminary stage to a universalism.

The idea of the prophet is therefore originally mediatorial. A priest is to a certain extent one who offers himself to God,