understanding that He was God manifest in the flesh, entering upon a short career ordained in every detail by His Father and plainly described through the prophets. His past lay open before Him, His present was equally plain, and His Father so clearly pictured in the Book that He could talk simply and in detail about what He would do after He had risen from the dead. (If He went so frequently to the Mount of Olives with His disciples, was it not because Zechariah 14:4 had declared it to be the place of His triumphant return?) His future was as present and real to Him as His actual present, for He believed what He read, and faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

His astonishment was, not that He Himself understood so clearly, but that those around Him were so much in the dark. His book was their book; they too were the children of the prophets, who had spoken so plainly of the plan of God. Here is no mighty thinker lifted above the common ruck of men by sheer power of intellect, but simply a humble believer, accepting without question what was given freely to all, and walking in the light provided by an All-Seeing Father. He should have come to a nation full of holy expectation of its Divine Messiah, eagerly looking for the running out of the time foretold in Daniel 9, and longing for the One Upon whom Jehovah would lay their sins, that He might carry them away into a salt place not inhabited. There was nothing He knew which they could not have known: the Almighty had revealed His Salvation plainly, in picture, in writing, in straightforward language so that no believer should be in any doubt about what to expect. Yet in actual fact the nation walked in gloom and anguish and in the shadow of death. 'O fools', was His cry 'and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have written. Ought not Christ to have suffered these things and to enter into His glory?' If Isaiah had understood the suffering of Messiah and the glory that should follow, should Peter and