Hebrew Life and Times Part 19

2. How do you explain the success of the Romans in tyrannizing the proud Jews for so many years? Consider the part played by the Sadducees.

3. Read Matthew 3. 1-2. Why did John's message arouse such interest and enthusiasm?

CHAPTER x.x.xI

JEWISH HOPES MADE GREATER BY JESUS

This history of the common people of Israel began with certain vague hopes of a happier and n.o.bler way of living for the descendants of Abraham. As the centuries pa.s.sed these hopes were only very partially realized. But what was more important the Jews came more and more clearly to understand the meaning of their own hopes. Their great teachers helped them to know what they really wanted or ought to want if they would be happy. Moses taught them the first lessons of justice as the foundation of happiness. The great prophets helped them to see that neither happiness nor justice was possible except as they knew and wors.h.i.+ped the true G.o.d--not a G.o.d of greed and anger to be bribed with sacrifices, but the G.o.d of justice and love. A few of the prophets also began to see that such hopes as theirs could not be for Jews alone but must include all mankind.

THE FULLNESS OF THE TIMES

The Jews under their Roman masters had come to a time, as we saw in the preceding chapter, when they were wildly expecting an immediate fulfillment of these hopes. The short taste of freedom and happiness which they had enjoyed under Judas and Simon Maccabeus, followed by a tyranny more cruel and distasteful than any which their ancestors had known, made them almost mad with the desire for some kind of a Saviour. And it seemed to them that he must come soon.

=The chance for a world-Saviour.=--All over the world just at this time there were strange hopes and longings in men's hearts. The Romans had robbed many other nations besides the Jews of their independence.

These people had no real nation of their own any longer to live for--and they hated Rome. What was there to make life worth living unless some Redeemer should come from G.o.d?

Moreover, it was possible now to think of such a Saviour as a world-Saviour. In the earlier centuries men hardly knew that there was a world outside their own tribe and a few of their neighbors. There were no maps. Only a few could travel, and see for themselves how great a world there really was--and how many nations there were--made up of men like themselves. The common people of Asia scarcely knew that there was a Europe, and the enormous continent of Africa, except for Egypt, did not exist for them. As for what is now called the New World, North and South America, no one knew of its existence.

=Preparations for Christianity.=--But the Romans built good roads all over the great countries which bordered on the Mediterranean Sea, and many were the travelers who went to and fro upon them. They established one government for all this Mediterranean world. One language came to be understood everywhere--not Latin, the language of the Romans themselves, but Greek. Beyond the boundaries of the empire there were, of course, vast territories. But it was possible now for even the common people to realize that their own village or city or tribe was only a small part of one great world. And for the first time in history there was a chance for some one to take the old Jewish hope of a better and happier Jewish people and change it into a world-hope of a better and happier human race, and to gather a few men and women together and start them working for it.

THE COMING OF JESUS

In the wonderful providence of G.o.d there was born in a manger-cradle just at this moment in history the Baby who was destined to accomplish this miracle; to broaden out to their widest and n.o.blest meanings these hopes which had been handed down from one generation of Jews to another. The story of the life of Jesus will be given in detail in other courses in this series. Here, in a nutsh.e.l.l, is what Jesus did: he helped men to believe in a G.o.d who loved all men as his children, whether rich or poor, learned or ignorant, Jews or Gentiles or Samaritans, even the bad as well as the good; for if they were bad, they needed his love to help them to be good. Jesus not only taught this idea of G.o.d through his spoken words; he helped men, through his deeds, to understand it. He _lived_ that way, as the Son of such a G.o.d. He healed the sick. He fed the hungry. He ate and drank with outcasts. He was everybody's friend.

=The inevitable conflict and cross.=--Of course Jesus was not able to live that kind of life very long in our kind of world. Very soon he came into conflict with the various kinds of men who enjoyed special privileges of wealth or learning or honor and were not at all willing to share these things in a brotherly way; with the Pharisees, who were considered especially holy and did not want to be brothers to common men, the "people of the land"; with the rich who did not want to be brothers to the poor; with priests who did not want to be brothers to wounded men lying by the side of the Jericho road; with Romans who were afraid the Jews might think brotherhood meant liberty. So after three short years of preaching and healing Jesus was nailed to the cross, praying even as the nails were driven into his hands, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

=Suppose the Jews had believed in Jesus.=--How different the outcome of their history would then have been! Instead of a b.l.o.o.d.y and hopeless revolt against the Romans, they might have found a way to live at peace with them, receiving from them a more just and humane government; Isaiah, centuries before, showed his people how to get along under the rule of a.s.syrians. Or, if the Romans had goaded the people to rebel, they might have fought and died gloriously, not merely for their own freedom but in the cause of all the suffering ma.s.ses in all lands. Thus the whole course of history might have been changed. The four years' war which did break out in A.D. 66, about thirty-six years after Jesus' death, was not that kind of a war. In the course of these four years different factions among the Jews fought each other almost as fiercely as they fought the Romans. The Jews themselves were selfish in their hopes. They were not inspired and strengthened by Jesus' vision of brotherhood. In A.D. 70 the Romans captured the city of Jerusalem and burned the temple. It was never rebuilt. From that day to this the Jews have been a people without a native land.

CARRYING OUT THE IDEAS OF JESUS

There was, however, after Jesus' death and resurrection, a splendid company of disciples whose lives had been transformed by their acceptance of Jesus as Saviour and Lord, and who were eager to go on carrying out Jesus' plans. None of them thoroughly understood these plans. Indeed, we are only beginning to understand them to-day. But very soon, within a few years after Jesus' death, the wisest of the early apostles, such men as Peter, Barnabas, and Paul, came to see that to carry out Jesus' wishes there needed to be a universal church in which Jews and Gentiles, men of all races, would be included.

Within a half century branches of this new world-church had been started in every important city in the Roman empire. At first their meetings were held in synagogues of the Jews of the Dispersion; and it is a pity that all the Jews could not have perceived that these disciples of Jesus were carrying out the hopes of their own prophets, that this Christianity was simply Judaism fulfilled. But many, of course, wanted to keep their religion and their G.o.d to themselves as Jews. So there sprang up other buildings everywhere which came to be known as Christian churches rather than Jewish synagogues.

=Our task to-day.=--In these modern times we are still trying to understand what Jesus wanted and to bring it to pa.s.s in reality. We are beginning to see that if all men are indeed sacred to our heavenly Father, then under the leaders.h.i.+p of our everliving Christ, a fight is in store for us on behalf of all the millions of our brothers who are blinded by selfishness, haggard from want, embittered by injustice, stunted in soul and mind by ignorance, or tortured by all the agonies of war. If there is to be a better world for any of us, it must be a better world for all of us. It must be "everybody's world."

STUDY TOPICS

1. Look up in the Bible dictionary, for further light on the background of Jesus' life, Galilee, Nazareth, Capernaum.

2. Read Matthew 4. 17. Explain why the message of Jesus, like that of John, awakened such a quick response among the people.

3. What did Jesus think of the rule of Rome? Read Matthew 20. 25-27, and Luke 13. 31, 32.

4. In contrast with the Zealots, what was Jesus' plan for winning freedom and happiness, instead of the oppression and misery of Roman rule? Read John 18. 33-38.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

A THOUSAND YEARS OF A NATION'S QUEST

In this course of study we have been tracing the progress of a great enterprise. A race of people set out in the days of Abraham to seek the best in life. Did they win or lose, succeed or fail? What did they achieve, during a thousand years of striving?

SUMMARY OF RESULTS

Looking back over the whole period which we have studied, there are four short epochs which stand out in bright contrast to long stretches of darkness as times when the common people had a chance to enjoy some of the good things of life, or at least had reason to hope that they might some time gain them for themselves or their children. These were the times of David, of Josiah, of Nehemiah, and of Simon the Maccabee.

These four men were all able and just leaders. They were all inspired, to a greater or less extent, by the ideals of Abraham, Moses, and the great reformer-prophets.

=The long centuries of failure.=--The lives of all four of these men together, however, do not cover much more than a century. During the rest of the time, the common people were ground down under oppressors, either of their own race or foreign conquerors. Generation after generation of fathers and mothers patiently toiled and struggled and suffered, in the hope that they might climb just a little higher toward the sunlight of health and comfort and the higher blessings of life. Most of them struggled in vain. It is true that a few of the more fortunate, in each generation, saw some little advance over earlier generations in the good things of civilization. Such men as Nicodemus and Zacchaeus, in the time of Jesus, lived in better houses, wore more comfortable clothes, and ate better food than did King David himself in an earlier, ruder age. But the common people of Jesus' day were not so well off as even in the days of Abraham. For as wandering shepherds they were free. Life might be a bitter struggle against wild beasts and drought and famine. But no haughty masters looked down on them with contempt, or robbed them of their last farthing in unjust taxation. Shall we say, then, that as a whole, the great enterprise was a failure?

THE GREAT ACHIEVEMENT--A TRUE RELIGION

No, the great quest was not a failure, even though it was so far from a complete success. Out of the long years of struggle and prayer had come a new religion, not, indeed, understood by many but partly grasped at least by some, and written down in books so that it could never be wholly lost. This was a religion of the brotherhood of man and of a universal Father-G.o.d. The four eras of their history when the common people had been happy were eras when the principles of this religion had partly prevailed. And these eras still s.h.i.+ne out for us as examples of what that kind of religion means in the life of a people. And the lives and words of the great prophets, and, greatest of all, the life of Jesus Christ, are a priceless legacy to us, who are still continuing the quest which Abraham began.

=The truth which has been revealed to us.=--All men, everywhere, who are longing and toiling for a better chance for life and happiness and for knowledge and beauty and love for themselves and for their children, may now know that they are not without a mighty helper.

There is One who revealed himself, in the history of the people of Israel and uniquely in Jesus Christ his Son, who still speaks in the name of all the hungry and thirsty and ragged and sick:

="I was an hungered, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: ... Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least, ye did it not unto me."=

STUDY TOPICS

1. Of the four short eras of righteousness, in the history of the Hebrews, in which does it seem to you that the common people made the greatest gains?

2. What were some of the improvements in civilization which rich or well-to-do people, in the later centuries of this history, enjoyed, as compared with the earlier centuries? Study Chapters I and II, VI, VII, and VIII, and XXII.

3. Compare the earliest religion of the Hebrews with the religion of the prophets and Jesus. Mention four great discoveries in regard to the character of G.o.d.

REVIEW AND TEST QUESTIONS

1. Describe the daily life of the earliest ancestors of the Hebrews.

2. What valuable characteristic of these people is reflected in the story of Joseph?