The 72nd Psalm, by the splendour of its predictions concerning the grandeur of some future king of Judah, earns the title of Messianic, because it was never fulfilled by any historical king.  But it is equally certain, that it has had no appreciable fulfilment in Jesus.

But what of the 11th of Isaiah?  Its portraiture is not so much that of a king, as of a prophet endowed with superhuman power.  “He shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall slay the wicked.”  A Paradisiacal state is to follow.—­This general description may be verified by Jesus hereafter; but we have no manifestation, which enables us to call the fulfilment a fact.  Indeed, the latter part of the prophecy is out of place for a time so late as the reign of Augustus; which forcibly denotes that Isaiah was predicting only that which was his immediate political aspiration:  for in this great day of Messiah, Jehovah is to gather back his dispersed people from Assyria, Egypt, and other parts; he is to reconcile Judah and Ephraim, (who had been perfectly reconciled centuries before Jesus was born,) and as a result of this Messianic glory, the people of Israel “shall fly upon the shoulders of the Philistines towards the west; they shall spoil them of the east together:  they shall lay their hand on Edom and Moab, and the children of Ammon shall obey them.”  But Philistines, Moab and Ammon, were distinctions entirely lost before the Christian era.—­Finally, the Red Sea is to be once more passed miraculously by the Israelites, returning (as would seem) to their fathers’ soil.  Take all these particulars together, and the prophecy is neither fulfilled in the past nor possible to be fulfilled in the future.

The prophecy which we know as Zechariah ix.-xi. is believed to be really from a prophet of uncertain name, contemporaneous with Isaiah.  It was written while Ephraim was still a people, i.e. before the capture of Samaria by Shalmanezer; and xi. 1-3 appears to howl over the recent devastations of Tiglathpilezer.  The prophecy is throughout full of the politics of that day.  No part of it has the most remote or imaginable[4] similarity to the historical life of Jesus, except that he once rode into Jerusalem on an ass; a deed which cannot have been peculiar to him, and which Jesus moreover appears to have planned with the express[5] purpose of assimilating himself to the lowly king here described.  Yet such an isolated act is surely a carnal and beggarly fulfilment.  To ride on an ass is no mark of humility in those who must ordinarily go on foot.  The prophet clearly means that the righteous king is not to ride on a warhorse and trust in cavalry, as Solomon and the Egyptians, (see Ps. xx. 7.  Is. xxxi. 1-3, xxx. 16,) but is to imitate the lowliness of David and the old judges, who rode on young asses; and is to be a lover of peace.