ay confidently infer that Jesus, as the Omniscient Lord of the
inanimate creation, knew well that fruit there was none under that
pretentious foliage. We dare not suppose that He went expecting to find
Figs; far less, that in a moment of disappointed hope, He ventured on a
capricious exercise of His power, uttered a hasty malediction, and
condemned the insensate boughs to barrenness and decay. The first
cursory reading of the narrative may suggest some such unworthy
impression. But we dismiss it at once, as strangely at variance with the
Saviour's character, and strangely unlike His wonted actings. We feel
assured that He literally, as well as figuratively, would not "break the
bruised reed, nor quench the smoking flax." He came, in all respects,
"not to destroy, but to save." Some deep inner meaning, not apparent on
the surface of the inspired story, must have led Him for the moment to
regard a tree in the light of a responsible agent, and to address it in
words of unusual severity.

What, then, is the explanation? Our Lord on this occasion revives the
old typical or picture-teaching with which the Hebrews were to that hour
so familiar. He, as the greatest of prophets, adopts the significant and
impressive method, not unfrequently employed by the Seers of Israel,
who, in uttering startling and solemn truths, did so by means of
_symbolic actions_. As Jeremiah of old dashed the potter's vessel down
the Valley of Hinnom, to indicate the judgments that were about to
befall Jerusalem; or, at another time, wore around his own neck a wooden
yoke, to intimate their approaching bondage under the King of Babylon;
or, as Isaiah "walked naked and barefoot three years for a sign and
wonder upon Egypt and Ethiopia," so did our Lord now invest a tree in
dumb nature with a prophet's warning voice, and make its stripped and
blighted boughs eloquent of a nation's doom!

On the height of their own Olivet, looking down, as it were, on
Jerusalem, that fig-tree becomes a stern messenger of woe and vengeance
to the whole house of Judah. Often before had he warned by His _words_
and _tears_; now He is to make an insignificant object in the outer
world take up His prophecy, and testify to the degenerate people at once
the cause, the suddenness, and the certainty of their destruction! Let
us join, then, the Master and His disciples, as they stand on the crest
above Bethany, and, gazing on that fruitless leaf-bearer, "hear this
parable of the f