God must get a new leader for His man to lead him back into all the
original plan for himself. Of the whole earth man stood next to God
Himself. God could not find that leader lower down. So He went higher.
Jesus is God giving the race a new Leader who would withstand the lure of
temptation and realize the ambition of God's heart for His darling.

The man was made in the image of God, for self-mastery, and through
self-mastery for dominion over all of God's creation. That was the plan
for the man. That, too, is the plan for the new Man. There is only one
place to go to find God's plan for the coming One. That is in the Hebrew
half of the Bible. One can hardly believe, unless he has been through the
thing, how hard it is to get out of the Old Testament its vision of the
coming One without any coloring from the New getting into his eyes.

We have been reading the Old Testament _through_ the events of the New
for so long that it gives a severe mental wrench to try to do anything
else. Yet only so, be it sharply marked, can the plan for the coming of
Jesus be gotten, and, further, only so can Jesus be understood. One must
attempt to do just that to understand at all fairly what a reverent Hebrew
in prophetic times expected; what such earnest Hebrews as Simeon and Anna
were looking for.

I have tried to make a faithful effort to shut severely out of view the
familiar facts of the gospel story for my own sake, to try to understand
God's plan as it stood before there was a gospel story.

This old Hebrew picture is so full of details that are found in the
reality that one who has not actually gone studiously over the Old
separately will be very likely to think that the New Testament details are
being _read into_ the Old. If that be so, it is urgently requested that