ting for the people
while repudiated by them, offers his life a willing sacrifice for their
sins. The chastisement of their iniquities falls on him, and he
accepts the burden, and is obedient unto death. Dying he makes his
soul a guilt offering: and, living through death exalted and powerful,
he becomes an intercessor accepted with God, the head of a new seed
whom he 'justifies' before God by the intimate knowledge of God's mind
and character which in his voluntary humiliation he has won. This
wonderful prophetic picture represents a vast advance in moral teaching
on what had gone before. It is not only that the self-sacrifice of a
perfect human will is substituted for the animal victims to which the
enlightened conscience of God's people already refused to allow any
real efficacy; but also that the idea of propitiation is put in a
context where it is made plain that it can only be the prelude to a
state of actual righteousness in those who are to be justified by it.
It occurs as part of the answer to the question, not--How is Israel to
escape punishment? but, How is Israel to {145} become the really
righteous nation, living in the likeness of God?

In the later books of the Maccabees we have this idea of the expiatory
sacrifice and intercession of the ideal Israelite still retained, but
degraded, probably under Greek influences. 'And I, as my brethren,'
says the Maccabean martyr, 'give up both body and soul for the laws of
our fathers, calling upon God that he may speedily become gracious to
the nation ... and that in me and my brethren may be stayed the wrath
of the Almighty, which hath been justly brought upon our whole
race[15].' 'Be propitious to my race,' prays Eleazar, in another
Alexandrian version of the story, 'being satisfied with our punishment
on their behalf. Make my blood a propitiation for them, and receive my
life as a substitute for theirs[16].' These passages are on a lower
moral level than Isaiah's, because in them the prominent idea of
propitiation is that it is a means of procuring from God exemption from
further punishment, not a step to the restoration to holiness. The
idea both of what God desires and of what man desires is lower. And
indeed all conceptions of propitiation may be distinguished into true
{146} or false, according as righteousness or exemption from punishment
is the end which is specially in view.

Thus when we pass on into the New Testament we find in Caiaphas'
saying