from God to tell us how to escape. The Law prepares for the Gospel,
and is incomplete without it. 'The soul that sinneth, it shall die,'
cannot be all which a God of pity and love has to say. A faint promise
of life lies in the very fact of threatening death, faint indeed, but
sufficient to awaken earnest desire for yet another word from the
Lord. We rightly use the solemn revelations of God's law when we are
driven by them to cry, 'What must I do to be saved?'

III. So we come to the last point, the double-edged message of the
prophetess. Josiah does not seem to have told his messengers where to
go; but they knew, and went straight to a very unlikely person, the
wife of an obscure man, only known as his father's son. Where was
Jeremiah of Anathoth? Perhaps not in the city at the time. There had
been prophetesses in Israel before. Miriam, Deborah, the wife of
Isaiah, are instances of 'your daughters' prophesying; and this
embassy to Huldah is in full accord with the high position which women
held in that state, of which the framework was shaped by God Himself.
In Christ Jesus 'there is neither male nor female,' and Judaism
approximated much more closely to that ideal than other lands did.

Huldah's message has two parts: one the confirmation of the
threatenings of the Law; one the assurance to Josiah of acceptance of
his repentance and gracious promise of escape from the coming storm.
These two are precisely equivalent to the double aspect of the Gospel,
which completes the Law, endorsing its sentence and pointing the way
of escape.

Note that the former part addresses Josiah as 'the man that sent you,'
but the latter names him. The embassy had probably not disclosed his
name, and Huldah at first keeps up the veil, since the personality of