nd one of their great
kings, Antiochus Epiphanes, tried to stamp out the religion of
Jehovah altogether. The Book of Daniel is a record of that
persecution about 166 B.C. The Maccabeean brothers delivered Israel,
and rescued the religion of Jehovah; and a kingdom of a sort was
established with them; but the grandsons of the liberators became
tyrants. What did God mean? Out of all the promises to Israel, to
the House of David, this is what comes. Herod follows--a foreign
king and an Edomite; and the Romans are over all, suzerains and
rulers.

In despair of the present men began to forecast the future. A time
will surely come, they said, when God will give an anointed one, the
Messiah; he will set all Israel free, will make Israel rule the
world instead of the Romans; he will gather together the scattered
of Israel from the four winds, reunite and assemble God's people in
triumph in Palestine. And then, when the prophet paused, a plain man
spoke: "I don't care if he does. My father all his life looked
forward to that. What does it matter now, if God redeems his people,
or if he does not? My father is dead." The answer was, why should
your father not come with the redeemed Israel? But what evidence is
there for that? Does God care for people beyond the grave? Is there
personal immortality?--that became the anxious question.[18]

But is this kingdom of the Messiah to be an earthly or a heavenly
kingdom? Will it be in Jerusalem or in heaven? Are you quite sure
that there is any distinction in the other world between good and
bad, between Jew and Gentile? Some people thought the kingdom would
be in Jerusalem; others said it would be in heaven, and added that
the Jews will look down and see the Gentiles in hell--something
worth seeing at last. But, after all, it was still guesswork--
"perhaps" was the last word.

When the question is asked, "Was Jesus the Messiah?" the obvious
reply is, "Which Messiah?" For there seems to have been no standard
idea of the Messiah. The Messiah was, on the whole, as vague a term
as, in modern politics, Socialism or Tariff Reform. Neither of them
has come; perhaps they never will come, and nobody knows what they
will be till they do come. Jesus is not what they expected. A Jewish
girl, at an American Student Conference a year or two ago, said
about Jesus: "I do not think he is the Messiah, but I do love him."
Of course he was not in her Jewish sense. The term was a vague one.

The main poin