The Things Concerning Himself

Luke 24:25–27, 44–47 (with Isaiah)

Before this final session, look back over the whole book of Isaiah, and reread Luke 24:25–27 and 24:44–47, where the risen Lord Jesus, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, interprets in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself. As you look back, trace the figure of Christ through the book: Immanuel (7:14); the Child born, the Son given (9:6); the Branch and the peaceable kingdom (11); comfort and the voice in the wilderness (40); the Servant Songs and the suffering Servant (42–53); the great invitation (55); the Anointed Herald (61); the Warrior-Redeemer (59, 63); and the new heavens and new earth (65–66).

Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things written about himself in all the scriptures.

Luke 24:27

On the Emmaus Road

On the first Easter afternoon, two disciples walked the seven miles from Jerusalem out to a village called Emmaus, their faces downcast, their hopes lying in ruins. The One they had trusted to redeem Israel had been crucified, and it was now the third day since it happened; and though there were strange rumors abroad of an empty tomb, they did not know what to make of them. As they walked and talked over it all, a stranger drew near and went along with them, and it was the risen Lord Jesus Himself, though their eyes were kept from recognizing Him. He asked why they were so sad; they poured out their disappointment to Him; and then He answered them in a way that ought to shape how we read the whole of the Old Testament. “You foolish people,” He said, “how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Wasn’t it necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and enter into his glory?”

Notice that their trouble was not a lack of Scripture. These two were devout men; they knew their Bibles; they had very likely heard Isaiah read aloud in the synagogue all their lives. Their trouble was that they had read it all and not seen Him, or rather, had not seen that the suffering and the glory belonged together, that the Messiah must be wounded before ever He reigned. The Lord Jesus does not hand them new Scriptures that afternoon; He gives them back the old ones, opened. He shows them that the very thing which had seemed to shatter all their hopes, a crucified Messiah, was the very thing the prophets had foretold all along. The cross was not the failure of the plan; it was the plan, written down centuries beforehand in the books they were already carrying in their hands. They had been slow of heart, not short of text.

And then comes the verse that has given this whole series its name. Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things written about himself in all the scriptures (Luke 24:27), which older translations render “the things concerning himself,” the phrase that names this series. The risen Lord Jesus walked those two disciples back through their own Scriptures (Moses, the prophets, all of it) and showed them how, from beginning to end, the Scriptures had been speaking of Him all along. Later that evening their eyes were opened and they recognized Him, and He vanished out of their sight; and they said to each other, “Didn’t our hearts burn within us while he was speaking with us on the road, while he was explaining the scriptures to us?” Later still, to the gathered disciples, He would say it once again: that “everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.”

There is something in that detail of the burning hearts worth holding onto, for it names the goal of all such reading. The two on the road did not merely come away with new information about the Scriptures; their hearts burned within them. To see Christ in the Old Testament is not finally an intellectual exercise, a matter of matching up prophecies with fulfillments like a puzzle solved. It is meant to set the heart alight: to make us love, and trust, and adore the One we find there. If we have traced the Christ through Isaiah only to be able to say cleverly where He may be located, we have missed the whole point of it. The aim, from first to last, has been that our hearts should burn within us, as theirs did, at the sight of the Savior the prophet saw; that we should not merely know about Him, but know Him, and be warmed through.

We are not told exactly which passages He opened on the road to Emmaus. But we may be quite sure that He opened Isaiah, for of all the books of the prophets, none shows forth “the things written about himself” more fully, or more clearly, than this one. This whole volume has been, in its own way, an attempt to do what the Lord Jesus did on that road: to walk back through the prophet and to find, at every turn, the Christ of whom it had been speaking all along. And now, at the end of our journey, we draw back to take in the whole of it at once, and to gather into one the threads we have followed session by session. Let us walk the book through once more, quickly, and see together the Christ who has been there from the first page to the last.

The King Promised

The book began to show Him to us early. When the house of David trembled before its enemies and would not trust the LORD, the prophet gave a sign that reached far beyond that anxious hour: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel (Isaiah 7:14, ESV). We quote the ESV here: the NET has “young woman,” but Matthew, writing by the Spirit, reads “the virgin” (Matthew 1:23), and the church reads it with him. Immanuel: “God with us.” Matthew, telling of the virgin birth of the Lord Jesus, reaches straight back to this verse and tells us it was fulfilled when the Son of God was born of Mary: God, with us, in the flesh. The first great portrait of the Christ in Isaiah is just this: not merely a man sent from God, but God Himself come to be with us.

A chapter on, the portrait deepens into one of the most beloved in all of Scripture. For a child has been born to us, a son has been given to us. He shoulders responsibility and is called Wonderful Adviser, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace (9:6). A child, born as children are; and yet a son given, from somewhere beyond. And the names heaped upon this child are names that no mere child could ever bear: Wonderful Adviser; Mighty God; Everlasting Father; Prince of Peace. Here, seven full centuries early, is the mystery the church would one day confess: that the child born at Bethlehem is the Mighty God; that the rule of the whole world rests upon the shoulders of One who once lay in a manger.

It is worth pausing on how much these names hold together that we would never have dared to join. A child, and the Mighty God. A son given, and the Everlasting Father. The smallest and most dependent of all creatures, a newborn, and the One who sustains all things by His powerful word. We have grown so used to the manger and the cross that we can forget how staggering the combination is: that the Maker of heaven and earth should be born as a baby, nurse at a mother’s breast, learn to walk, grow weary on the road, and at the last be crucified. The names heaped up in this one verse are the whole doctrine of the incarnation, gathered into a single line and laid in advance beside the cradle. Isaiah did not understand all that he wrote; but he wrote it down, and in the fullness of time the Child came, and the names fit Him exactly.

And the King is given roots. A shoot will grow out of Jesse’s root stock, a bud will sprout from his roots. The LORD’s Spirit will rest on him (11:1–2). When the royal line of David had been hacked down to a bare stump, a living shoot would yet spring from the old root: a King of David’s line, the Branch, upon whom the Spirit of the LORD would rest in fullness. And His reign would be the peaceable kingdom we studied early in our journey: a wolf residing with a lamb, a baby playing over the hole of a snake, no one injuring or destroying on all God’s royal mountain. That kingdom, promised so near the book’s beginning, we saw return again at its very end, in the new heavens and the new earth; for the kingdom the Branch begins now in grace is the same kingdom that comes to its fullness in the new creation.

Comfort, Comfort My People

At the fortieth chapter the whole book turns, and a new voice breaks in, tender after all the long thunder of judgment: “Comfort, comfort my people,” says your God (40:1). From there to the very end, the dominant note is comfort, and we have heard it sound again and again, all the way to the book’s close, where God promises to comfort His people as a mother consoles her child. The God of Isaiah is not only the thrice-holy One whose robe fills the temple and before whom the seraphim cover their faces; He is also the God who bends down low to comfort the weary and the grieving.

And it is worth asking on what ground such comfort could be spoken at all to a people who had earned only judgment. The answer comes in the very next breath: tell Jerusalem, God says, “that her time of warfare is over, that her punishment is completed.” The comfort of Isaiah is never the thin, sentimental sort that merely pats the sufferer on the shoulder and tells him all will somehow be well; it is comfort grounded in a debt actually settled, in iniquity genuinely dealt with. And we have seen, across the length of this book, exactly how that punishment would be completed: for the Servant of the fifty-third chapter would bear it, enduring “punishment that made us well” (53:5). The comfort announced at the fortieth chapter and the wounds borne at the fifty-third are not two unrelated themes; the one rests squarely upon the other. There is comfort to be spoken to the people because there is a Servant appointed to carry their sin away.

And the comfort comes heralded. A voice cries out, “In the wilderness clear a way for the LORD” (40:3). All four Gospels take up this single verse and lay it upon one man, John the Baptist, “the voice of one shouting in the wilderness” (Matthew 3:3), the forerunner sent on ahead of the Lord Jesus to prepare His way. Isaiah, centuries beforehand, not only foresaw the Christ but foresaw the very one who would announce Him; the voice crying out in the wilderness was written into the prophet’s scroll long before John was so much as born. When at last he came, leather-girt and shouting in the desert, he was stepping into a part that had been written for him here.

And the chapter that opens with comfort gives us one of the tenderest pictures of the Christ in the whole book. Like a shepherd he tends his flock; he gathers up the lambs with his arm; he carries them close to his heart (40:11). The mighty God, before whom the nations are like a drop in a bucket and dust on the scales, is the very same God who gathers the lambs in His arms and carries them against His heart. Strength and tenderness meet together in Him: the One who measured out the waters in the hollow of His hand is the One who carries the weak and the young, so that they shall not tire on the road. This is the Shepherd the Lord Jesus would later stand up and claim to be: the good Shepherd who lays down His life for the sheep.

The Servant Wounded for Us

And now we come to the height of the whole book, indeed to one of the very heights of the whole Old Testament: the place where the things concerning Himself are shown most clearly, and most movingly, of all. Scattered across the second half of the book are four songs about a mysterious figure called the Servant of the LORD, and together they build, step by step, toward a single, staggering portrait. We spent the very heart of this volume among them (see the session on Isaiah 52:13–53:6), and they reward every hour that is given to them.

It is no accident that we lingered longest here, for these Songs are the Christological heart not only of Isaiah but, in a sense, of the whole Old Testament. Readers have long puzzled over who exactly the Servant is. At times He seems to be Israel itself, the nation called to be God’s servant; at times a faithful remnant within the nation; at times a single individual who stands over against the nation and suffers on its behalf. The puzzle is resolved only in One: in the true Israel, the faithful Remnant of one, who did what the whole nation could not, and bore what the whole nation deserved. The Servant is the Lord Jesus, who gathered up Israel’s entire vocation into Himself and fulfilled it alone. Every earlier guess at the Servant’s identity finds its answer at last in Him; the Songs were a portrait waiting for a face, and the face, when it came, was His.

The first Song showed us the Servant anointed with the Spirit, gentle enough that He would not break even a crushed reed, sent to be a light to the nations. The second showed Him summoned from birth, hidden in the hollow of God’s own hand like a sharpened arrow in His quiver, and made a light to the nations, so that God’s deliverance would reach the remote regions of the earth. The third showed Him steadfastly resolved, offering His back to those who attacked Him, obedient all the way to the end. And the fourth, the greatest of them all, showed us at last the reason why.

He was wounded because of our rebellious deeds, crushed because of our sins … but the LORD caused the sin of all of us to attack him (53:5–6). Here, seven hundred years before the cross, is the gospel itself: the Servant who bears the sin of others; who is led as a silent lamb to the slaughter; who is wounded not for any sin of His own (He had none) but for ours, the LORD causing the sin of us all to fall upon Him. And out the far side of His death, the Song will not leave Him in the grave: he will see descendants and enjoy long life … “My servant will acquit many, for he carried their sins” (53:10–11). The death, and then the resurrection; and then the great word that crowns the whole: that the righteous Servant will acquit many, which is justification itself.

No wonder, then, that when an Ethiopian official, riding home from Jerusalem, was found reading this very chapter and asking aloud of whom it spoke, Philip, beginning with this scripture, proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus (Acts 8:35). There was nothing forced in it, nothing strained; the chapter was already a portrait of Christ, waiting only to be named. Penal substitution, the great exchange, justification through the bearing of another’s sin: the whole heart of the gospel is here, in Isaiah, set down in the past tense as though it had already happened, by a prophet who saw it coming from far off. If we needed but a single reason to call Isaiah the gospel before the Gospels, this one chapter would be more than enough.

The Anointed and the Warrior

The portraits continue on toward the book’s close. We heard the Anointed One describe His own mission in His own words, and we heard the Lord Jesus, in the synagogue at Nazareth, read these very words aloud and claim them: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor (Luke 4:18, reading Isaiah 61:1). The Anointed, the Messiah, the Christ, sent to the poor, the brokenhearted, the captive; sent to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and to give a turban in place of ashes. Of all the portraits in the book, this is the one the Lord Jesus pointed straight to and said, in so many words: This is Me.

We heard, too, the great open invitation, Hey, all who are thirsty, come to the water! (55:1; see Come to the Waters), the gospel offered freely, without money and without cost, because the whole price had already been paid in full by the Servant. And we met the Redeemer who comes when no one can save: the One whose own right arm accomplished deliverance because there was no one to help; the Warrior striding up from Edom with His garments stained, able to deliver, who trod the winepress all by Himself. The same Christ is at once the gentle Herald of good news to the poor and the mighty Warrior who judges all evil; for the day of His vengeance is, in the very same breath, His year of redemption.

We must hold these two together, the gentleness and the severity, and never split the one Christ into two. There is a persistent temptation to keep only the Herald who helps the brokenhearted, and to set quietly aside the Warrior who treads the winepress; to imagine a gentle Christ somehow at odds with a severe God standing behind Him. Isaiah will not permit it; the gentle Herald of the sixty-first chapter and the stained Warrior of the sixty-third are one and the very same figure, and the hand that binds up the broken is the hand that will one day break the unrepentant. He is, as the Revelation would have it, both the Lamb who was slain and the Lion of the tribe of Judah; and the very same love that makes Him tender toward the wounded is what makes Him fierce against the evil that wounds them. To know Him truly is to know Him whole: gentle and mighty, Lamb and Lion, Savior and Judge.

And we followed the book all the way to its end, where the whole of it comes at last to rest: the new heavens and the new earth, where the former troubles are not merely ended but forgotten, and the sound of weeping is heard no more; where God Himself rejoices over His people and wipes away every tear with His own hand. The kingdom the Branch was born to bring arrives there in its fullness; the comfort first promised back at the fortieth chapter reaches its consummation; and the redeemed, gathered in from every nation under heaven, worship before God forever. From Immanuel to the new creation, the book has been showing us, all along, one single figure: the Christ in whom the whole of it holds together.

The Fifth Gospel

It is little wonder that Isaiah has so often been called the fifth gospel, the gospel given before the Gospels. Jerome, introducing his translation of Isaiah, said that he should be called an evangelist rather than a prophet. Few books of the Old Testament are quoted more often in the New; only the Psalms can rival it. It gave the church the virgin birth, the forerunner’s cry, the gentle Servant, the atoning death, the resurrection, the good news carried to the nations, and the new creation at the end: all of it, centuries in advance of the events. The Lord Jesus read it of Himself at Nazareth; the Ethiopian heard Jesus preached from it and was baptized on the desert road; Paul and the apostles reach for it again and again. It is as though one of the prophets had been granted a long, clear look down the whole corridor of the centuries, and had written down, beforehand, the gospel that he saw coming.

And here it is worth being very plain about what we have been doing all through this volume, and what we have not. We have not been taking up an old book about other matters entirely and cleverly reading Christ back into it, where He was never meant to be found. We have been doing instead what the Lord Jesus and His apostles did before us: finding Christ where He genuinely is. Our warrant for reading Isaiah in this way is not our own ingenuity or our pious imagination; it is the risen Lord Himself, who on the Emmaus road interpreted the things concerning Himself, and who told His own disciples plainly that the prophets had written “about me.” Peter would later say that the prophets themselves, as they wrote, “probed into what person or time the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating when he testified beforehand about the sufferings appointed for Christ and his subsequent glory” (1 Peter 1:11). The Christ was in the book long before ever we came to it. We have done no more than follow the trail the Lord Jesus Himself marked out for us.

This is the difference between sober, Christ-centered reading and the uncontrolled allegory the church has always rightly feared. Allegory finds whatever it likes wherever it likes, turning every stray detail into a hidden symbol by the reader’s own cleverness; and it has done a great deal of mischief over the centuries. What we have tried to do all along is something far more disciplined, and far more sure: to read each text first for what it says in its own place and time, and then to follow the connections that the New Testament itself draws, in order to see the Christ that the apostles and the Lord Jesus saw. We have not asked, “What clever meaning can I squeeze out of this?” but rather, “Whom did the Spirit who inspired this passage intend it to point toward?” And again and again the answer, given by the New Testament’s own hand, has been the same: the Lord Jesus. That is not allegory. That is simply reading the book the way its Author meant it to be read.

And we have found in Isaiah not Christ only, but the whole shape of the gospel: law and gospel woven together from the first chapter to the last. The book does not flinch from the wreckage of sin, the burning holiness of God, the hard reality of judgment; it ends, soberly, with the two destinies set in plain view. But neither does it ever leave us stranded there. Through the whole of it runs the comfort of the One who was wounded because of our rebellious deeds, the open invitation to come and buy without money, the promise of a new creation where we shall weep no more. Isaiah holds the two together exactly as the gospel always must: the law that breaks us, and the Christ who binds up the broken. It diagnoses our disease without flattery or mercy, and then it gives us, without stint and without cost, the cure.

Toward the Twelve

And so we close the book of Isaiah, but not the search. For the same Christ who fills this prophet fills the others too; the things concerning Himself are written across the whole length of the Old Testament, and there remains a company of prophets we have not yet visited. The next volume of this study will turn to the Twelve, the books we call the Minor Prophets, not because they matter little, but only because they are short. They are twelve, and they are full to the brim with Christ.

For the testimony of the prophets, however scattered it may be across the centuries and the separate books, is finally a single testimony. The Revelation puts it in a striking phrase: “the testimony about Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Revelation 19:10). That is to say, when the prophets prophesied, whatever the immediate occasion, whatever the local crisis of their own day they were addressing, the deep current running beneath all of it was a witness to Christ. They are not a scattered collection of unrelated voices, each going his own way; they are a chorus, singing, each in his own key and from his own age, the one same song. And so to turn from Isaiah to the Twelve is not to leave the subject behind and take up another; it is to hear the very same song carried on by other singers. The Christ does not appear in Isaiah and then vanish away until the Gospels; He is the thread upon which the whole of prophecy is strung.

We will find Him there at every turn. In Hosea, we will see God’s stubborn, faithful love for an unfaithful people, and hear the word that Matthew lays upon the Lord Jesus: “I called my Son out of Egypt.” In Joel, we will hear the promise of the Spirit poured out on all people, fulfilled on the day of Pentecost. In Amos, the fallen tent of David raised up again, which the apostles saw fulfilled in the gathering of the Gentiles. In Jonah, the sign the Lord Jesus claimed for His own: three days in the deep, and then deliverance. In Micah, the little town of Bethlehem, named by the prophet centuries before the Child was born there. In Zechariah, the King coming humble and riding on a donkey, the thirty pieces of silver, the Shepherd struck down by the sword, the pierced One on whom they look and mourn. And in Malachi, the messenger who prepares the way, and the sun of vindication rising at last with healing wings.

The Twelve are no lesser appendix tacked on to the end of the prophets; they are twelve more witnesses to the same Christ, each speaking from his own corner of Israel’s long history, each adding his own voice to the one great testimony. When we take them up, we will be doing once more what we have done here: walking through the prophet and finding the Lord Jesus, the things concerning Himself, written down long before ever He came. The search that began back in Genesis, and has carried us through the Psalms and now through Isaiah, does not end here. It goes on, until the whole of the Old Testament has yielded up its Christ, and we have heard Moses and all the prophets speak, with one voice, of Him.

Gathering the Threads

We have walked the book of Isaiah now from end to end, and at every turn along the way we have met the same figure. He is Immanuel, God with us; the Child born and the Son given, whose name is Mighty God; the Branch sprung from Jesse’s root stock, on whom the Spirit rests, the King of a peaceable kingdom. He is the One the voice in the wilderness was sent ahead to announce, the Shepherd who gathers the lambs and carries them close to His heart. He is the Servant wounded because of our rebellious deeds, on whom the LORD caused the sin of all of us to fall, who rose and will acquit many. He is the Anointed Herald of good news to the poor, the Redeemer whose own arm accomplished deliverance, the Warrior able to deliver. And He is the One in whom the new heavens and the new earth will dawn, where God will wipe away every tear. From the first chapter to the very last, Isaiah has been telling us the things concerning Himself.

We might almost have supposed these to be different figures altogether: a royal Child here, a suffering Servant there, a gentle Herald, a blood-stained Warrior, a Shepherd, a King. But they are not many; they are One. No single portrait could hold Him, because He is greater than any one image is able to show: the King who is also the Servant, the Lamb who is also the Lion, the One wounded for us who is also the Mighty God. That is why the prophet needed so many portraits, painted from so many angles across so many chapters: not because there were many saviors, but because the one Savior is so much more than any single picture of Him could ever contain. Lay all the portraits of Isaiah side by side, and they do not compete or contradict one another; they converge, like many drawings of one face, upon the Lord Jesus Christ.

And all of it is for you. The Christ of Isaiah is not a figure to be admired at a safe distance, a fascinating thread of fulfilled prophecy to be traced out and then set back down. He is the Savior who was wounded because of your rebellious deeds; who invites you to come and drink without money; who is able to deliver you; who will gather you like a lamb and carry you home to the new creation, and rejoice over you when you are there. The whole point of finding Him in the book is to find Him for ourselves: to let the prophet do for us what the risen Lord did for the two on the Emmaus road, and set our hearts burning within us at the sight of the Christ who was there all along. Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, He has interpreted the things concerning Himself. May we, having seen Him, believe; and believing, be saved.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They look back over the whole of the book, at the Christ it shows forth, and at what it means for us. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

1. On the Emmaus road, the risen Lord Jesus interpreted to them the things written about himself in all the scriptures (Luke 24:27). Why is His own example the surest warrant for reading the Old Testament as a witness to Christ? How does it guard us both from ignoring Christ in the Old Testament and from reading Him in fancifully?

2. Isaiah gives us Immanuel (7:14), the Child born and Son given (9:6), and the Branch on whom the Spirit rests (11). What do these early portraits together tell us about who the Christ would be? How do they keep us from thinking of Him as merely a great man?

3. The fourth Servant Song (53) sets down the gospel (substitution, the great exchange, justification) seven centuries before the cross. Why was Philip able to preach the Lord Jesus simply by beginning with this scripture (Acts 8:35)? What does it mean that the gospel was written down “before the Gospels”?

4. Isaiah holds law and gospel together from first to last: the wreckage and the comfort, the judgment and the Servant, the two destinies at the end. Why must any faithful telling of the gospel hold these two together? What goes wrong when we keep only one of them?

5. Isaiah has long been called the fifth gospel, because it tells the Christ-story in advance. As you look back over the whole book, which portrait of Christ has moved you most, and why?

6. The same Christ fills the Minor Prophets: Bethlehem in Micah, the pierced One in Zechariah, the sun of vindication in Malachi. How does seeing Christ throughout Isaiah change the way you expect to read the rest of the Old Testament?

Looking Ahead: Toward Volume Four

With this, we close Volume Three, and with it our long journey through the great prophet Isaiah. We have seen the things concerning Himself written out across sixty-six chapters: from Immanuel to the new creation, from the Child in the manger to the Servant on the cross to the King upon His throne. But the road does not end here. The God who has shown us His Son in Genesis, and in the Psalms, and now in Isaiah, has yet more to show us still, in the writings of the Twelve. There the same Christ is waiting: in Hosea’s faithful love and Jonah’s three days, in Micah’s Bethlehem and Zechariah’s pierced Shepherd and Malachi’s rising sun. The fourth and final volume of this study will take up the Minor Prophets, and trace the things concerning Himself all the way to the very threshold of the Gospels, where the One so long foretold at last steps onto the page in person. Until then, may the Christ we have found together in Isaiah be your comfort and your hope; and may your heart, like the hearts on the Emmaus road, burn within you as the Scriptures are opened and He is shown forth.

Until the next volume, keep the book of Isaiah near, and reread it now and again with the eyes this study has tried to give you, looking, at every turn, for the things concerning Himself. And as often as you come to the Lord’s Table, or hear the gospel preached, remember that the Servant wounded because of your rebellious deeds, foretold here seven centuries in advance, is the same Lord Jesus who gives Himself to you now.

Closing Prayer

O God our Father, we thank You for the great prophet through whom You showed, so long before the fullness of time, the things concerning Your Son. We bless You that from Immanuel to the new creation, from the Child born to the Servant wounded because of our rebellious deeds, You were painting, across these many chapters, the very portrait of our Savior; and that what the prophet saw only from afar, we have seen fulfilled before our eyes in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Open our eyes, we pray, as You opened the eyes of the two on the Emmaus road, that we might see Him not in this book only, but in all the Scriptures; and seeing Him, believe; and believing, have life in His name. Make us, like the mourners of Zion comforted by Your Anointed, oaks of righteousness planted by Your hand; comfort us as a mother consoles her child; and bring us at the last to the new heavens and the new earth, where we shall weep no more. Keep our hearts burning within us as Your word is opened, and carry us on now into the writings of the Twelve, that we might hear yet more of Him; through Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom Moses and all the prophets spoke, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.