05.16. Chapter Sixth
Chapter Sixth.—Typical Things In History During The Progress Of The First Dispensation.
HAVING now considered the typical bearing of the fundamental facts and symbolical institutions belonging to the first dispensation of grace, it remains that we endeavour to ascertain what there might afterwards be evolved of a typical nature during the progress of that dispensation, by means of the transactions and events that took place under it. These, it was already noted in our preliminary remarks, could only be employed to administer instruction of a subsidiary kind. In their remoter reference to Gospel times, as in their direct historical aspect, they can rank no higher than progressive developments—not laying a foundation, but proceeding on the foundation already laid, and giving to some of the points connected with it a more specific direction, or supplementing them with additional discoveries of the mind and will of God. It is impossible here, any more than in the subjects treated of in the preceding chapters, to isolate entirely the portions that have a typical bearing from others closely connected with them. And even in those which exhibit something of the typical element, it can scarcely be expected, at so early a period in the world’s history, to possess much of a precise and definite character; for in type, as in prophecy, the progress must necessarily have been from the more general to the more particular. In tracing this progress, we shall naturally connect the successive developments with single persons or circumstances; yet without meaning thereby to indicate that these are in every respect to be accounted typical.
Section First.—The Seed Of Promise Abel, Enoch. THE first distinct appearance of the typical in connection with the period subsequent to the fall, is to be found in the case of Abel; but in that quite generally. Abel was the first member of the promised seed; and through him supplementary knowledge was imparted more especially in one direction, viz., in regard to the principle of election, which was to prevail in the actual fulfilment of the original promise. That promise itself, when viewed in connection with the instituted symbols of religion, might be perceived—if very thoughtfully considered—to have implied something of an elective process; but the truth was not clearly expressed. And it was most natural that the first parents of the human family should have overlooked what but obscurely intimated a limitation in the expected good. They would readily imagine, when a scheme of grace was introduced, which gave promise of a complete destruction of the adversary, with the infliction only of a partial injury on the woman’s seed, that the whole of their offspring should attain to victory over the power of evil. This joyous anticipation affectingly discovers itself in the exclamation of Eve at the birth of her first-born son, “I have gotten a man from (or, as it should rather be, with) the Lord”—gratefully acknowledging the hand of God in giving her, as she thought, the commencement of that seed which was assured through Divine grace of a final triumph. This she reckoned a real getting—gain in the proper sense—calling her child by a name that expressed this idea (Cain); and she evidently did so by regarding it as the precious gift of God, the beginning and the pledge of the ascendency that was to be won over the malice of the tempter.[122] Never was mother destined to receive a sorer disappointment. She did not want faith in the Divine word, but her faith was still without knowledge, and she must learn by painful experience how the plan of God for man’s recovery was to be wrought out. A like ignorance, though tending now in the opposite direction, again discovers itself at the birth of Abel, whose name (breath, emptiness) seems, as Delitzsch has remarked, to have proceeded from her felt regard to the Divine curse, as that given to Cain did from a like regard to the Divine promise. It is possible that, between the births of the two brothers, what she had seen of the helpless and suffering condition of infancy in the first-born may have impressed the mind of Eve with such a sense of the evils entailed upon her offspring by the curse, as to have rendered her for the time forgetful of the better things disclosed in the promise. It is also possible, and every way probable, that the name by which this child is known to history, and which is not, as in the case of Cain, expressly connected with his birth, may have been occasioned by his unhappy fate, and expressed the feelings of vexation and disappointment which it awakened in the bosoms of his parents. However it might be, the result at least showed how little the operations of grace were to pursue the course that might seem accordant with the views and feelings of nature. In particular, it showed that, so far from the whole offspring of the woman being included, there was from the first to pervade the Divine plan a principle of election, in virtue of which a portion only, and that by no means the likeliest, according to the estimation of nature, were to inherit the blessing; while the rest should fall in with the designs of the tempter, and be reckoned to him for a seed of cursing. Abel, therefore, in his acceptance with God, in his faith respecting the Divine purposes, and his presentation of offerings that drew down the Divine favour, stands as the type of an elect seed of blessing—a seed that was ultimately to have its root and its culmination in Him who was to be peculiarly the child of promise. In Cain, on the other hand, the impersonation of nature’s pride, waywardness, and depravity, there appeared a representative of that unhappy portion of mankind who should espouse the interest of the adversary, and seek by unhallowed means to establish it in the world.
[124] It is in connection with this later development of evil in the Cainites that Lamech’s song is introduced, and with special reference to that portion of his family who were makers of instruments in brass and iron—instruments, no doubt, chiefly of a warlike kind. It is only by viewing the song in that connection that we perceive its full meaning and its proper place, as intended to indicate that the evil was approaching its final stage: “And Lamech said to his wives, Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken to my speech: for men (the word is quite indefinite in the original, and may most fitly be rendered in the plural) I slay for my wound, and young men for my hurt: for Cain is avenged seven times, and Lamech seventy times seven.” He means apparently, that, with such weapons as he now had at command, he could execute at will deeds of retaliation and revenge. So that his song may be regarded, to use the words of Drechsler, “as an ode of triumph on the invention of the sword. He stands at the top of the Cainite development, from thence looks back upon the past, and exults at the height it has reached. How far has he got ahead of Cain! what another sort of ancestor he! No longer needing to look up in feebleness to God for protection, he can provide more amply for it himself than God did for Cain’s; and he congratulates his wives on being the mothers of such sons. Thus the history of the Cainites began with a deed of murder, and here it ends with a song of murder.” This seed of the woman, however,—the seed that she produces in faith upon the promise of God, and in which the grace of God takes vital effect, is found, not only as to its existence, to be associated with a principle of election, but also as to the relative place occupied by particular members in its line. All have by faith an interest in God, and in consequence triumph over the power of the adversary. But some have a larger interest than others, and attain to a higher victory. There was an election within the election. So it appeared especially in the case of Enoch, the seventh from Adam, and again in Noah, who, as they alone of the antediluvians were endowed with the spirit of prophecy, so they alone, also, are said to have “walked with God” (Genesis 5:22; Genesis 6:9),—an expression never used of any who lived in later times, and denoting the nearest and most confidential intercourse, as if they had all but regained the old paradisiacal freedom of communion with Heaven. And as the Divine seal upon this higher elevation of the life of God in their souls, they were both honoured with singular tokens of distinction—the one having been taken, without tasting of death, to still nearer fellowship with God, to abide in His immediate presence (“He was not, for God took him”), while the other became under God the saviour and father of a new world. Of the latter we shall have occasion to speak separately, as there were connected with his case other elements of a typical nature. But in regard to Enoch, as the short and pregnant notice of his life and of his removal out of it, plainly indicates something transcendently good and great, so, we cannot doubt, the contemporaries of the patriarch knew it to be such. They knew—at least they had within their reach the means of knowing—that in consideration of his eminent piety, and of the circumstances of the time in which he lived, he was taken direct to a higher sphere, without undergoing the common lot of mortality. That there should have been but one such case during the whole antediluvian period, could not but be regarded as indicating its exceptional character, and stamping it the more emphatically as a revelation from Heaven. Nor could the voice it uttered in the ears of reflecting men sound otherwise than as a proclamation that God was assuredly with that portion of the woman’s seed who served and honoured Him—that He manifested Himself to such, as a chosen people, in another manner than He did to the world, and made them sure of a complete and final victory over all the malice of the tempter and the evils of sin. If not usually without death, yet notwithstanding it, and through it, they should certainly attain to eternal life in the presence of God. In this respect Enoch—as being the most distinguished member of the seed of blessing in its earlier division, and the most honoured heir of that life which comes through the righteousness of faith—is undoubtedly to be viewed as a type of Christ. Something he had in common with the line as a whole—he was a partaker of that electing grace and love of God, in virtue of which alone any could rise from the condemnation of sin to the inheritance of life in the Divine kingdom. But apart from others in the same line, and above them, he passed to the inheritance by a more direct and triumphant path—a conqueror in the very mode of his transition from time to eternity. These characteristics, which in Enoch’s case were broadly marked, though in themselves somewhat general and incapable of being understood to have reference to a personal Messiah, till such a Messiah had been more distinctly announced, are yet pre-eminently the characteristics of Christ, and in the full and absolute sense could be found only in Him. He is, as no other individual among men could be, the seed of the woman, considered as the seed of promise, destined by God’s purpose of grace to bruise the head of the tempter, and reverse the process of nature’s corruption. In Him, as present from the first to the “determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God,” was the ultimate root of such a seed to be found which should otherwise have had no existence in the world. He therefore, beyond all others, was the chosen of God, “His elect in whom His soul delights.” And though to the eye of a carnal and superficial world, which judges only by the appearance, He wanted what seemed necessary to justify His claim to such a position, yet He in reality gave the clearest proof of it, by a faith that never faltered in the hardest trials, a righteousness free from every stain of impurity, and a life that could only underlie for a moment the cloud of death, but even then could see no corruption, and presently rose, as to its proper home, in the regions of eternal light and glory. With our eyes resting on this exalted object in the ends of time, we have no difficulty in perceiving, that what appeared of supernatural in such men as Abel and Enoch, only foreshadowed the higher and greater good that was to come. The foreshadowing, however, was not such that from the appearance of Abel and Enoch a personal Messiah could have been descried, or as if, from the incidents in their respective lives, precisely similar ones might have been inferred as likely to happen in the eventful career of the man Christ Jesus. We could not descend thus to individual and personal marks of coincidence between the lives of those early patriarchs and the life of Messiah, without, in the first instance, anticipating the order of Providence, which had not yet directed the eye of faith and hope to a personal manifestation of Godhead, and then entangling ourselves in endless difficulties of practical adjustment—as in the case of Enoch’s translation, who went to heaven without tasting death, while Christ could not enter into glory till He had tasted it. But let those patriarchs be contemplated as the earlier links of a chain which, from its very nature, must have some higher and nobler termination; let them be viewed as characters that already bore upon them the lineaments and possessed the beginnings of the new creation: what do they then appear but embodied prophecies of a more general kind in respect to “Him who was to come?” They heralded His future redemptive work by exhibiting in part thesigns and fruits of its prospective achievements. The beginning was prophetic of the end; for if the one had not been in prospect, the other could not have come into existence. And in their selection by God from the general mass around them, their faith in God’s word, and their possession of God’s favour and blessing, as outwardly displayed and manifested in their histories, we see struggling, as it were, into being the first elements of that new state and destiny, which were only to find their valid reason, and reach their proper elevation, in the person and kingdom of Messiah.
Section Second.—Noah And The Deluge. THE case of Noah, we have already stated, embodied some new elements of a typical kind, which gave to it the character of a distinct stage in the development of God’s work of grace in the world. It did so in connection with the deluge, which had a gracious as well as a judicial aspect, and, by a striking combination of opposites, brought prominently out the principle, that the accomplishment of salvation necessarily carries along with it a work of destruction. This was not absolutely a new principle at the period of the deluge. It had a place in the original promise, and a certain exemplification in the lives of believers from the first. By giving to the prospect of recovery the peculiar form of a bruising of the tempter’s head, the Lord plainly intimated, that somehow a work of destruction was to go along with the work of salvation, and was necessary to its accomplishment. No indication, however, was given of the way in which this twofold process was to proceed, or of the nature of the connection between the one part of it and the other. But light to a certain extent soon began to be thrown upon it by the consciousness in each man’s bosom of a struggle between the evil and the good,—a struggle which so early as the time of Cain drew forth the solemn warning, that either his better part must vindicate for itself the superiority, or it must itself fall down vanquished by the destroyer. Still farther light appeared, when the contending elements grew into two great contending parties, which by an ever-widening breach, and at length by most serious encroachments from the evil on the good, rendered a work of judgment from above necessary to the peace and safety of the believing portion of mankind. The conviction of some approaching crisis of this nature had become so deep in the time of Enoch, that it gave utterance to itself in the prophecy ascribed in the Epistle of Jude to that patriarch: “Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousand of His saints, to execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have committed against Him.” The struggle, it was thus announced, should ere long end in a manifestation of God for judgment against the apostate faction, and by implication for deliverance to the children of faith and hope. By the period of Noah’s birth, however, the necessity of a Divine interposition had become much greater, and it appeared manifest to the small remnant of believers that the era of retribution, which they now identified with the era of deliverance, must be at hand. Indication was then given of this state of feeling by the name itself of Noah, with the reason assigned for its adoption, “This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed.” The feeling is too generally expressed, to enable us to determine with accuracy how the parents of this child might expect their troubles to be relieved through his instrumentality. But in their words we hear, at least, the groaning of the oppressed—the sighing of righteous souls, vexed on account of the evils which were thickening around them, from the unrestrained wickedness of those who had corrupted the earth; and, at the same time, not despairing, but looking up in faith, and even confident that in the lifetime of that child the God of righteousness and truth would somehow avenge the cause of His elect. Whether they had obtained any correct insight or not into the way by which the object was to be accomplished, the event proved that the spirit of prophecy breathed in their anticipation. Their faith rested upon solid grounds, and in the hope which it led them to cherish they were not disappointed. Salvation did come in connection with the person of Noah, and it came in the way of an overwhelming visitation of wrath upon the adversaries. When we look simply at the outward results produced by that remarkable visitation, they appear to have been twofold—on the one side preservation, on the other destruction. But when we look a little more closely, we perceive that there was a necessary connection between the two results, and that there was properly but one object aimed at in the dispensation, though in accomplishing it there was required the operation of a double process. That object was, in the words of St Peter, “the saving of Noah and his house” (1 Peter 3:20)—saving them as the spiritual seed of God. But saving them from what? Not surely from the violence and desolation of the waters; for the watery element would then have acted as the preservative against itself, and instead of being saved by the water, according to the apostolic statement, the family of Noah would have been saved from it.[125] From what, then, were they saved? Undoubtedly from that which, before the coming of the deluge, formed the real element of danger—the corruption, enmity, and violence of ungodly men. It was this which wasted the Church of God, and brought it to the verge of destruction. All was ready to perish. The cause of righteousness had at length but one efficient representative in the person of Noah; and he much “like a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, like a besieged city,”—the object of profane mockery and scorn, taunted, reviled, plied with every weapon fitted to overcome his constancy, and, if not in himself, at least in his family, in danger of suffering shipwreck amid the swelling waves of wickedness around him. It was to save him—and with him, the cause of God—from this source of imminent danger and perdition, that the flood was sent; and it could only do so by effectually separating between him and the seed of evil-doers—engulphing them in ruin, and sustaining him uninjured in his temporary home. So that the deluge, considered as Noah’s baptism, or the means of his salvation from an outward form of spiritual danger, was not less essentially connected with a work of judgment than with an act of mercy. It was by the one that the other was accomplished; and the support of the ark on the bosom of the waters was only a collateral object of the deluge. The direct and immediate object was the extermination of that wicked race, whose heaven-daring impiety and hopeless impenitence was the real danger that menaced the cause and people of God,—“the destroying of those (to use the language that evidently refers to it in Revelation 11:18) who destroyed the earth.”
Such is the proper idea of Christian baptism, and such would be the practical result were the idea fully realized in the experience of the baptized. But this is so far from being the case, that even the idea is apt to suffer in people’s minds from the conscious imperfections of their experience. And it might help to check such a tendency—it might, at least, be of service in enabling them to keep themselves well informed as to what should be, if they looked occasionally to what actually was, in the outward pattern of these spiritual things, given in the times of Noah. Are you disinclined, we might say to them, to have the axe so unsparingly applied to the old man of corruption? Think, for your warning, how God spared not the old world, but sent its mass of impurity headlong into the gulph of perdition. Seems it a task too formidable, and likely to prove hope less in the accomplishment, to maintain your ground against the powers of evil in the world? Think again, for your encouragement, how impotent the giants of wickedness were of old to defeat the counsels of God, or prevail over those who held fast their confidence in His word; with all their numbers and their might, they sunk like lead in the waters, while the little house hold of faith rode secure in the midst of them. Or does it appear strange, at times perhaps incredible, to your mind, that you should be made the subject of a work which requires for its accomplishment the peculiar perfections of Godhead, while others are left entire strangers to it, and even find the word of God—the chosen instrument for effecting it—the occasion of wrath and condemnation to their souls? Remember “the few, the eight souls” of Noah’s family, alone preserved amid the wreck and desolation of a whole world—preserved, too, by faith in a word of God, which carried in its bosom the doom of myriads of their fellow-creatures, and so, finding that which was to others a minister of condemnation, a source of peace and safety to them. Rest assured, that as God Himself remains the same through all generations, so His work for the good of men is essentially the same also; and it ever must be His design and purpose, that Noah’s faith and salvation should be perpetually renewing themselves in the hidden life and experience of those who are preparing for the habitations of glory.
Section Third.—The New World And Its Inheritors The Men Of Faith. IN one respect the world seemed to have suffered material loss by the visitation of the deluge. Along with the agents and instruments of evil, there had also been swept away by it the emblems of grace and hope—paradise with its tree of life and its cherubim of glory. We can conceive Noah and his house hold, when they first left the ark, looking around with melancholy feelings on the position they now occupied, not only as being the sole survivors of a numerous offspring, but also as being themselves bereft of the sacred memorials which bore evidence of a happy past, and exhibited the pledge of a yet happier future. An important link of communion with heaven, it might well have seemed, was broken by the change thus brought through the deluge on the world. But the loss was soon fully compensated, and, we may even say, more than compensated, by the advantages conferred on Noah and his seed from the higher relation to which they were now raised in respect to God and the world. There are three points that here, in particular, call for attention.
1. The first is, the new condition of the earth itself, which immediately appears in the freedom allowed and practised in regard to the external worship of God. This was no longer confined to any single region, as seems to have been the case in the age subsequent to the fall. The cherubim were located in a particular spot, on the east of the garden of Eden; and as the symbols of God’s presence were there, it was only natural that the celebration of Divine worship should there also have found its common centre. Hence the two sons of Adam are said to have “brought their offerings unto the Lord”—which can scarcely be understood otherwise than as pointing to that particular locality which was hallowed by visible symbols of the Lord’s presence, and in the neighbourhood of which life and blessing still lingered. In like manner, it is said of Cain, after he had assumed the attitude of rebellion, that “he went out from the presence of the Lord,” obviously implying that there was a certain region with which the Divine presence was considered to be more peculiarly connected, and which can be thought of nowhere else than in that sanctuary on the east of Eden. But with the flood the reason for any such restriction vanished. Noah, therefore, reared his altar, and presented his sacrifice to the Lord where the ark rested. There immediately he got the blessing, and entered into covenant with God—proving that, in a sense, old things had passed away, and all had become new. The earth had risen in the Divine reckoning to a higher condition; it had passed through the baptism of water, and was now, in a manner, cleansed from defilement; so that every place had become sacred, and might be regarded as suitable for the most solemn acts of worship.[126]
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2. The second point to be noticed here, is the heirship given of this new world to Noah and his seed—given to them expressly as the children of faith.
Adam, at his creation, was constituted the lord of this world, and had kingly power and authority given him to subdue it and rule over it. But on the occasion of his fall, this grant, though not formally recalled, suffered a capital abridgment; since he was sent forth from Eden as a discrowned monarch, to do the part simply of a labourer on the surface of the earth, and with the discouraging assurance that it should reluctantly yield to him of its fruitfulness. Nor, when he afterwards so distinctly identified himself with God’s promise and purpose of grace, by appearing as the head only of that portion of his seed who had faith in God, did there seem any alleviation of the evil: the curse that rested on the ground, rested on it still, even for the seed of blessing (Genesis 5:29); and not they, but the ungodly Cainites, acquired in it the ascendency of physical force and political dominion. A change, however, appears in the relative position of things, when the flood had swept with its purifying waters over the earth. Man now rises, in the person of Noah, to a higher place in the world; yet not simply as man, but as a child of God, standing in faith. His faith had saved him, amid the general wreck of the old world, to become in the new a second head of mankind, and an inheritor of earth’s domain, as now purged and rescued from the pollution of evil. “He is made heir,” as it is written in Hebrews, “of the righteousness which is by faith,”—heir, that is, of all that properly belongs to such righteousness, not merely of the righteousness itself, but also of the world, which in the Divine purpose it was destined to possess and occupy. Hence, as if there had been a new creation, and a new head brought in to exercise over it the right of sovereignty, the original blessing and grant to Adam are substantially renewed to Noah and his family: “And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. And the fear of you, and the dread of you, shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea: into your hand are they delivered.” Here, then, the righteousness of faith received direct from the grace of God the dowry that had been originally bestowed upon the righteousness of nature—not a blessing merely, but a blessing coupled with the heirship and dominion of the world.
There was nothing strange or arbitrary in such a proceeding; it was in perfect accordance with the great principles of the Divine administration. Adam was too closely connected with the sin that destroyed the world, to be reinvested, even when he had through faith become a partaker of grace, with the restored heirship of the world. Nor had the world itself passed through such an ordeal of purification, as to fit it, in the personal lifetime of Adam, or of his more immediate offspring, for being at all represented in the light of an inheritance of blessing. The renewed title to the heirship of its fulness was properly reserved to the time when, by the great act of Divine judgment at the deluge, it had passed into a new condition; and when one was found of the woman’s seed, who had attained in a peculiar degree to the righteousness of faith, and along with the world had undergone a process of salvation. It was precisely such a person that should have been chosen as the first type of the righteousness of faith, in respect to its world-wide heritage of blessing. And having been raised to this higher position, an additional sacredness was thrown around him and his seed: the fear of them was to be put into the inferior creatures; their life was to be avenged of every one that should wrongfully take it; even the life-blood of irrational animals was to be held sacred, because of its having something in common with man’s, while their flesh was now freely surrendered to their use;—the whole evidently fitted, and, we cannot doubt, also intended to convey the idea, that man had by the special gift of God’s grace been again constituted heir and lord of the world, that, in the words of the Psalmist, “the earth had been given to the children of men,” and given in a larger and fuller sense than had been done since the period of the fall.[127]
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3. The remaining point to be noticed in respect to this new order of things, is the pledge of continuance, notwithstanding all appearances or threatenings to the contrary, given in the covenant made with Noah, and confirmed by a fixed sign in the heavens. “And God spake unto Noah, and to his sons with him, saying, And I, behold, I establish My covenant with you, and with your seed after you; and with every living creature that is with you, of the fowl, of the cattle, and of every beast of the earth with you; from all that go out of the ark, to every beast of the earth. And I will establish My covenant with you: neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth. And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between Me and you, and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set My bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant” (more exactly: My bow I have set in the cloud, and it shall be for a covenant-sign) “between Me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: and I will remember My covenant, which is between Me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.”—(Genesis 9:8-15)
There can be no doubt that the natural impression produced by this passage in respect to the sign of the covenant, is, that it now for the first time appeared in the lower heavens. The Lord might, no doubt, then, or at any future time, have taken an existing phenomenon in nature, and by a special appointment made it the instrument of conveying some new and higher meaning to the subjects of His revelation. But in a matter like the present, when the specific object contemplated was to allay men’s fears of the possible recurrence of the deluge, and give them a kind of visible pledge in nature for the permanence of her existing order and constitution, one cannot perceive how a natural phenomenon, common alike to the antediluvian and the postdiluvian world, could have fitly served the purpose. In that case, so far as the external sign was concerned, matters stood precisely where they were; and it was not properly the sign, but the covenant itself, which formed the guarantee of safety for the future. We incline, therefore, to the opinion that, in the announcement here made, intimation is given of a change in the physical relations or temperature of at least that portion of the earth where the original inhabitants had their abode; by reason of which the descent of moisture in showers of rain came to take the place of distillation by dew, or other modes of operation different from the present. The supposition is favoured by the mention only of dew before in connection with the moistening of the ground (Genesis 2:6); and when rain does come to be mentioned, it is rain in such flowing torrents as seems rather to betoken the outpouring of a continuous stream, than the gentle dropping which we are wont to understand by the term, and to associate with the rainbow. The fitness of the rainbow in other respects to serve as a sign of the covenant made with Noah, is all that could be desired. There is an exact correspondence between the natural phenomenon it presents, and the moral use to which it is applied. The promise in the covenant was not that there should be no future visitations of judgment upon the earth, but that they should not proceed to the extent of again destroying the world. In the moral, as in the natural sphere, there might still be congregating vapours and descending torrents; indeed, the terms of the covenant imply that there should be such, and that by means of them God would not fail to testify His displeasure against sin, and keep in awe the workers of iniquity. But there should be no second deluge to diffuse universal ruin; mercy should always so far rejoice against judgment. Such in the field of nature is the assurance given by the rainbow, which is formed by the lustre of the sun’s rays shining on the dark cloud as it recedes; so that it may be termed, as in the somewhat poetical description of Langé, “the sun’s triumph over the floods; the glitter of his beams imprinted on the rain-cloud as a mark of subjection.” How appropriate an emblem of that grace which should always show itself ready to return after wrath! Grace still sparing and preserving, even when storms of judgment have been bursting forth upon the guilty! And as the rainbow throws its radiant arch over the expanse between heaven and earth, uniting the two together again as with a wreath of beauty, after they have been engaged in an elemental war, what a fitting image does it present to the thoughtful eye of the essential harmony that still subsists between the higher and the lower spheres! Such undoubtedly is its symbolic import, as the sign peculiarly connected with the covenant of Noah; it holds out, by means of its very form and nature, an assurance of God’s mercy, as engaged to keep perpetually in check the floods of deserved wrath, and continue to the world the manifestation of His grace and goodness. Such also is the import attached to it, when forming a part of prophetic imagery in the visions of Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1:28) and of St John (Revelation 4:3); it is the symbol of grace, as ever ready to return after judgment, and to stay the evil from proceeding so far as to accomplish a complete destruction.[128]
[128]
Yet gracious as this covenant with Noah was, and appropriate and beautiful the sign that ratified it, all bore on it still the stamp of imperfection; there was an indication and a prelude of the better things needed to make man truly and permanently blessed, not these things themselves. For what was this new world, which had its perpetuity secured, and over which Noah was set to reign, as heir of the righteousness that is by faith? To Noah himself, and each one in succession of his seed, it was still a region of corruption and death. It had been sanctified, indeed, by the judgment of God, and as thus sanctified it was not to perish again as it had done before. But this sanctification was only by water—enough to sweep away into the gulf of perdition the mass of impurity that festered on its surface, but not penetrating inwards, to the elements of evil which were bound up with its very framework. Another agency, more thoroughly pervasive in its nature, and in its effects more nobly sublimating, the agency of fire, is required to purge out the dross of its earthliness, and render it a home and an inheritance fit for those who are made like to the Son of God.—(2 Peter 3:7-13) And Noah himself, though acknowledged heir of the righteousness by faith, and receiving on his position the seal of heaven, in the salvation granted to him and his household, yet how far from being perfect in that righteousness, or by this salvation placed beyond the reach of evil! Ere long he miserably fell under the power of temptation; and unmistakeable evidence appeared that the serpent’s seed had found a place among the members of his household. High, therefore, as Noah stood compared with those who had gone before him, he was, after all, but the representative of an imperfect righteousness, and the heir of a corruptible and transitory inheritance. He was the type, but no more than the type, of Him who was to come—in whom the righteousness of God should be perfected, salvation should rise to its higher sphere, and all, both in the heirs of glory, and the inheritance they were to occupy, should by the baptism of fire be rendered incorruptible and undefiled, and unfading.
Section Fourth.—The Change In The Divine Call From The General To The Particular—Shem, Abraham. THE obvious imperfections just noticed, both in the righteousness of the new head of the human family, and in the constitution of the world over which he was placed, clearly enough indicated that the divine plan had only advanced a stage in its progress, but had by no means reached its perfection. As the world, however, in its altered condition, had become naturally superior to its former state, so—in necessary and causal connection with this—it was in a spiritual respect to stand superior to it: secured against the return of a general perdition, it was also secured against the return of universal apostasy and corruption. The cause of righteousness was not to be trodden down as it had been before, nay, was to hold on its way and ultimately rise to the ascendant in the affairs of men. Not only was this presupposed in the covenant of perpetuity established for the world, as the internal ground on which it rested, but it was also distinctly announced by the father of the new world, in the prophetic intimation he gave of the future destinies of his children. It was a melancholy occasion which drew this prophecy forth, as it was alike connected with the shameful backsliding of Noah himself, and the wanton in decency of his youngest son. When Noah recovered from his sin, and understood how this son had exposed, while the other two had covered, his nakedness, he said, “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants (i.e., a servant of the lowest grade) shall he be to his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.”—(Genesis 9:25-27)
There are various points of interest connected with this prophecy, and the occurrence that gave rise to it, which it does not fall within our province to notice. But the leading scope of it, as bearing on the prospective destinies of mankind, is manifestly of a hopeful description; and in that respect it differs materially from the first historical incident that revealed the conflict of nature and grace in the family of Adam. The triumph of Cain over righteous Abel, and his stout-hearted resistance to the voice of God, gave ominous indication of the bad pre-eminence which sin was to acquire, and the fearful results which it was to achieve in the old world. But the milder form of this outbreak of evil in the family of Noah—the immediate discouragement it meets with from the older members of the family—the strong denunciation it draws down from the venerable parent—above all, the clear and emphatic prediction it elicits of the ascendancy of the good over the evil in these seminal divisions of the human family,—one and all perfectly accorded with the more advanced state which the world had reached; they bespoke the cheering fact, that righteousness should now hold its ground in the world, and that the dominant powers and races should be in league with it, while servility and degradation should rest upon its adversaries.
This, any one may see at a glance, is the general tendency and design of what was uttered on the occasion; but there is a marked peculiarity in the form given to it, such as plainly intimates the commencement of a change in the Divine economy. There is a striking particularism in the prophetic announcement. It does not, as previously, give forth broad principles, or fore tell merely general results of evil and of good; but it explicitly announces—though still, no doubt, in wide and comprehensive terms the characteristic outlines of the future state and relative positions of Noah’s descendants. Such is the decided tendency here to the particular, that in the dark side of the picture it is not Ham, the offending son and the general head of the worse portion of the postdiluvian family, who is selected as the special object of vengeance, nor the sons of Ham generally, but specifically Canaan, who, it seems all but certain, was the youngest son.—(Genesis 10:6) Why this son, rather than the offending father, should have been singled out for denunciation, has been ascribed to various reasons; and resort has not unfrequently been had to conjecture, by supposing that this son may probably have been present with the father, or some way participated with him in the offence. Even, however, if we had been certified of this participation, it could at most have accounted for the introduction of the name of Canaan, but not for that being substituted in the room of the father’s. Nor can we allow much more weight to another supposition, that the omission of the name of Ham may have been intended for the very purpose of proving the absence of all vindictive feeling, and showing that these were the words, not of a justly indignant parent giving vent to the emotions of the passing moment, but of a divinely inspired prophet calmly anticipating the events of a remote futurity. Undoubtedly such is their character; but no extenuating consideration of this kind is needed to prove it, if we only keep in view the judicial nature of this part of the prophecy. The curse pronounced is not an ebullition of wrathful feeling, not a wish for the infliction of evil, but the announcement of a doom, or punishment for a particular offence; and one that was to take, as so often happens in Divine chastisements, the specific form of the offence committed. Noah’s affliction from the conduct of Ham was in the most peculiar manner to find its parallel in the case of Ham himself: He, the youngest son of Noah,[129] had proved a vexation and disgrace to his father, and in meet retaliation his own youngest son was to have his name in history coupled with the most humiliating and abject degradation.
It was, therefore, in the first instance at least, for the purpose of marking more distinctly the connection between the sin and its punishment, that Hävernick statesin his Introduction to the Pentateuch—that the curse, properly belonging to Ham, was to concentrate itself in the line of Canaan; and, beyond doubt, it is more especially in connection with that line that Scripture itself traces the execution of the curse. But these are somewhat remote and incidental considerations; the more natural and direct is the one already given—which Hofmann, we believe, was the first to suggest.[130] And as the word took the precise form it did, for the purpose more particularly of marking the connection between the sin and the punishment, it plainly indicated that the evil could not be confined to the line of Ham’s descendants by Canaan; the same polluted fountain could not fail to send forth its bitter streams also in other directions. The connection is entirely a moral one. Even in the case of Canaan there was no arbitrary and hapless appointment to inevitable degradation and slavery; as is clearly proved by the long forbearance and delay in the execution of the threatened doom, expressly on the ground of the iniquity of the people not having become full, and also from the examples of individual Canaanites, who rose even to distinguished favour and blessing, such as Melchizedek and Rahab in earlier, and the Syrophenician woman in later times. Noah, however, saw with prophetic insight, that in a general point of view the principle should here hold, like father like child; and that the irreverent and wanton spirit which so strikingly betrayed itself in the conduct of the progenitor, should infallibly give rise to an offspring whose dissolute and profligate manners would in due time bring upon them a doom of degradation and servitude. Such a posterity, with such a doom, beyond all question were the Canaanites, to whom we may add also the Tyrians and Sidonians, with their descendants the Carthaginians. The connection of sin and punishment might be traced to other sections besides, but it is not necessary that we pursue the subject farther.
[130] Weissagung und Erfüllung, i., p. 89. Our course of inquiry rather leads us to notice the turn the prophecy takes in regard to the other side of the representation, and to mark the signs it contains of a tendency toward the particular, in connection with the future development of the scheme of grace. This comes out first and pre-eminently in the case ofShem: “And he said, Blessed is (or be) Jehovah, the God of Shem”—a blessing not directly upon Shem, but upon Jehovah as his God! Why such a peculiarity as this?No doubt, in the first instance, to make the contrast more palpable between this case and the preceding; the connection with God, which was utterly wanting in the one, presenting itself as everything, in a manner, in the other. Then it proclaims the identity as to spiritual state between Noah and Shem, and designates this son as in the full sense the heir of blessing: “Blessed be Jehovah, the God of Shem,” My God is also the God of my son; I adore Him for Himself; and now, before I leave the world, declare Him to be the covenant God of Shem. Nor of Shem only as an individual, but as the head of a certain portion of the world’s inhabitants. It was with this portion that God was to stand in the nearest relation. Here He was to find His peculiar representatives, and His select instruments of working among men here emphatically were to be the priestly people. A spiritual distinction, therefore—the highest spiritual distinction, a state of blessed nearness to God, and special interest in His fullness—is what is predicated of the line of Shem. And in the same sense—namely, as denoting a fellowship in this spiritual distinction—should that part of the prophecy on Japheth also be understood, which points to a connection with Shem: “God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem.” It obviously, indeed, designates his stock generally as the most spreading and energetic of the three—pre-eminent, so far as concerns diffusive operations and active labour in occupying the lands and carrying forward the business of the world and thus naturally tending, as the event has proved, to push their way, even in a civil and territorial respect, into the tents of Shem. This last thought may therefore not unfairly be included in the compass of the prediction, but it can at most be regarded as the subordinate idea. The prospect, as descried from the sacred heights of prophecy, of dwelling in the tents of Shem, must have been eyed, not as an intrusive conquest on the part of Japheth, subjecting Shem in a measure to the degrading lot of Canaan, but rather as a sacred privilege—an admission of this less honoured race under the shelter of the same Divine protection, and into the partnership of the same ennobling benefits with himself. In a word, it was through the line of Shem that the gifts of grace and the blessings of salvation were more immediately to flow—the Shemites were to have them at first hand; but the descendants of Japheth were also to participate largely in the good. And by reason of their more extensive ramifications and more active energies, were to be mainly instrumental in working upon the condition of the world.
It is evident, even from this general intimation of the Divine purposes, that the more particular direction which was now to be given to the call of God, was not to be particular in the sense of exclusive, but particular only for the sake of a more efficient working and a more comprehensive result. The exaltation of Shem’s progeny into the nearest relationship to God, was not that they might keep the privilege to themselves, but that first getting it, they should admit the sons of Japheth, the inhabitants of the isles, to share with them in the boon, and spread it as wide as their scattered race should extend. The principle announced was an immediate particularism for the sake of an ultimate universalism. And this change in the manner of working was not introduced arbitrarily, but in consequence of the proved inadequacy of the other, and, as we may say, more natural course that had hitherto been pursued. Formally considered, the earlier revelations of God made no difference between one person and another, or even between one stem and another. They spoke the same language, and held out the same invitations to all. The weekly call to enter into God’s rest—the promise of victory to the woman’s seed—the exhibition of grace and hope in the symbols at the east of Eden—the instituted means of access to God in sacrificial worship—even the more specific promises and pledges of the Noachic covenant, were offered and addressed to men without distinction. Practically, however, they narrowed themselves; and when the effect is looked to, it is found that there was only a portion, an elect seed, that really had faith in the Divine testimony, and entered into possession of the offered good. Not only so, but there was a downward tendency in the process. The elect seed did not grow as time advanced, but proportionally decreased; the cause and party that flourished was the one opposed to God’s. And the same result was beginning to take place after the flood, as is evident from what occurred in the family of Noah itself, and from other notices of the early appearance of corruption. The tendency in this direction was too strong to be effectually met by such general revelations and overtures of mercy. The plan was too vague and indeterminate. A more specific line of operations was needed from the particular to the general; so that a certain amount of good, within a definite range, might in the first instance be secured; and that from this, as a fixed position, other advantages might be gained, and more extensive results achieved.
It is carefully to be noted, then, that a comprehensive object was as much contemplated in this new plan as in the other; it differed only in the mode of reaching the end in view. The earth was to be possessed and peopled by the three sons of Noah; and of the three, Shem is the one who was selected as the peculiar channel of Divine gifts and communications—but not for his own exclusive benefit; rather to the end that others might share with him in the blessing. The real nature and bearing of the plan, however, became more clearly manifest, when it began to be actually carried into execution. Its proper commencement dates from the call of Abraham, who was of the line of Shem, and in whom, as an individual, the purpose of God began practically to take effect. Why the Divine choice should have fixed specially upon him as the first individual link in this grand chain of providences, is not stated; and from the references subsequently made to it, we are plainly instructed to regard it as an example of the absolutely free grace and sovereign election of God.—(Joshua 24:2; Nehemiah 9:7) That he had nothing whereof to boast in respect to it, we are expressly told; and yet we may not doubt, that in the line of Shem’s posterity, to which he belonged, there was more knowledge of God, and less corruption in His worship, than among other branches of the same stem. Hence, perhaps, as being addressed to one who was perfectly cognizant of what had taken place in the history of his progenitors, the revelation made to him takes a form which bears evident respect to the blessing pronounced on Shem, and appears only indeed as the giving of a more specific direction to Shem’s high calling, or chalking out a definite way for its accomplishment. Jehovah was the God of Shem that in the word of Noah was declared to be his peculiar distinction. In like manner, Jehovah from the first made Himself known to Abraham as his God; nay, even took the name of “God of Abraham” as a distinctive epithet, and made the promise, “I will be a God to thee and to thy seed after thee,” a leading article in the covenant established with him. And as the peculiar blessing of Shem was to be held with no exclusive design, but that the sons of Japheth far and wide might share in it, so Abraham is called not only to be himself blessed, but also that he might be a blessing,—a blessing to such an extent, that those should be blessed who blessed him, and in him all the families of the earth should be blessed. Yet with this general similarity between the earlier and the later announcement, what a striking advance does the Divine plan now make in breadth of meaning and explicitness of purpose! How wonderfully does it combine together the little and the great, the individual and the universal! Its terminus a quo the son of a Mesopotamian shepherd; and its terminus ad quem the entire brotherhood of humanity, and the round circumference of the globe! What a Divine-like grasp and comprehensiveness! The very projection of such a scheme bespoke the infinite understanding of Godhead; and minds altogether the reverse of narrow and exclusive, minds attempered to noble aims and inspired by generous feeling, alone could carry it into execution. By this call Abraham was raised to a very singular preeminence, and constituted in a manner the root and centre of the world’s future history, as concerns the attainment of real blessing. Still, even in that respect not exclusively. The blessing was to come chiefly to Abraham, and through him; but, as already indicated also in the prophecy on Shem, others were to stand, though in a subordinate rank, on the same line; since those also were to be blessed who blessed him; that is, who held substantially the same faith, and occupied the same friendly relation to God. The cases of such persons in the patriarch’s own day, as his kinsman Lot, who was not formally admitted into Abraham’s covenant, and still more of Melchizedek, who was not even of Abraham’s line, and yet individually stood in some sense higher than Abraham himself, clearly showed, and were no doubt partly provided for the express purpose of showing, that there was nothing arbitrary in Abraham’s position, and that the ground he occupied was to a certain extent common to believers generally. The peculiar honour conceded to him was, that the great trunk of blessing was to be of him, while only some isolated twigs or scattered branches were to be found elsewhere; and even these could only be found by persons coming, in a manner, to make common cause with him. In regard to himself, however, the large dowry of good conveyed to him in the Divine promise could manifestly not be realized through himself personally. There could at the most be but a beginning made in his own experience and history; and the widening of the circle of blessing to other kindreds and regions, till it reached the most distant families of the earth, could only be effected by means of those who were to spring from him. Hence the original word of promise, which was, “In thee shall all families of the earth be blessed,” was afterwards changed into this, “In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.”—(Genesis 22:18)
Yet the original expression is not without an important meaning, and it takes the two, the earlier as well as the later form, to bring out the full design of God in the calling of Abraham. From the very nature of the case, first, as having respect to so extensive a field to be operated on, and then from the explicit mention of the patriarch’s seed in the promise, no doubt whatever could be entertained, that the good in its larger sense was to be wrought out, not by himself individually and directly, but by him in connection with the seed to be given to him. And when the high character as well as the comprehensive reach of the good was taken into account, it might well have seemed as if even that seed were somehow going to have qualities associated with it which he could not perceive in himself—as if another and higher connection with the heavenly and Divine should in due time be given to it, than any he was conscious of enjoying in his state of noblest elevation. We, at least, know from the better light we possess, that such actually was the case; that the good promised neither did nor could have come into realization but by a personal commingling of the Divine with the human; and that it has become capable of reaching to the most exalted height, and of diffusing itself through the widest bounds, simply by reason of this union in Christ. He, therefore, is the essential kernel of the promise; and the seed of Abraham, rather than Abraham himself, was to have the honour of blessing all the families of the earth. This, however, by no means makes void the in thee of the original promise; for by so expressly connecting the good with Abraham as well as with his seed, the organic connection was marked between the one and the other, and the things that belonged to him were made known as the beginning of the end. The blessing to be brought to the world through his line had even in his time a present though small realization—precisely as the kingdom of Christ had its commencement in that of David, and the one ultimately merged into the other. And so, in Abraham as the living root of all that was to follow, the whole and every part may be said to take its rise; and not only was Christ after the flesh of the seed of Abraham, but each believer in Christ is a son of Abraham, and the entire company of the redeemed shall have their place and their portion with Abraham in the kingdom of God.
Such being the case with the call of Abraham,—in its objects, so high, and its results so grand and comprehensive,—it is manifest that the immediate limitations connected with it, in regard to a fleshly offspring and a worldly inheritance, must only have been intended to serve as temporary expedients and fit stepping-stones for the ulterior purposes in view. And such statements regarding the covenant with Abraham, as that it merely secured to Abraham a posterity, and to that posterity the possession of the land of Canaan for an inheritance, on the condition of their acknowledging Jehovah as their God, is to read the terms of the covenant with a microscope—magnifying the little, and leaving the great altogether unnoticed—in the preliminary means losing sight of the prospective end.[131] Another thing also, and one more closely connected with our present subject, is equally manifest; which is, that since the entire scheme of blessing had its root in Abraham, it must also have had its representation in Him—he, in his position and character and fortunes, must have been the type of that which was to come. Such uniformly is God’s plan, in respect to those whom it constitutes heads of a class, or founders of a particular dispensation. It was so, first of all, with Adam, in whom humanity itself was imaged. It was so again in a measure with the three sons of Noah, whose respective states and procedure gave prophetic indication of the more prominent characteristics that should distinguish their offspring. Such, too, at a future period, and much more remarkably, was the case with David, in whom, as the beginning and root of the everlasting kingdom, there was presented the foreshadowing type of all that should essentially belong to the kingdom, when represented by its Divine head, and set up in its proper dimensions. Nor could it now be properly otherwise with Abraham. The very terms of the call, which singled him out from the mass of the world, and set him on high, constrain us to regard him as in the strictest sense a representative man—in himself and the things belonging to his immediate heirs, the type at once of the subjective and the objective design of the covenant, or, in other words, of the kind of persons who were to be the subjects arid channels of blessing, and of the kind of inheritance with which they were to be blessed. It is for the purpose of exhibiting this clearly and distinctly, and thereby rendering the things written of Abraham and his immediate offspring a revelation, in the strictest sense, of God’s mind and will regarding the more distant future, that this portion of patriarchal history was constructed.
[131] This is exactly the course taken in a late volume, Israel after the Flesh, by the Rev. William H. Johnstone, pp. 7, 8. He appears also to slump together the covenant with Abraham and the covenant at Sinai, as if the one were simply a renewal of the other. And this notwithstanding the distinction drawn so pointedly between them in the Epistle to the Galatians, and while the author, too, professes to have gone to work with the thorough determination to be guided only by Scripture!
Abraham himself, in the first instance, was the covenant head and the type of what was to come; but as the family of the Israelites were to be the collective bearers and representatives of the covenant, so, not Abraham alone, but the whole of their immediate progenitors, who were alike heads of the covenant people, along with Abraham, Isaac also, and Jacob, and the twelve patriarchs,—possess a typical character. It shall be our object, therefore, in the two remaining sections,—which must necessarily extend to a considerable length,—to present the more prominent features of the instruction intended to be conveyed in both of the respects now mentioned first in regard to the subjects and channels of blessing, and then in regard to the inheritance destined for their possession.
Section Fifth.—The Subjects And Channels Of Blessing—Abraham And Isaac, Jacob And The Twelve Patriarchs.
WHILE we class the whole of these together, on account of their being alike covenant heads to the children of Israel, who became in due time the covenant people, we are not to lose sight of the fact, that Abraham was more especially the person in whom the covenant had its original root and representation.
It is in his case, accordingly, that we might expect to find, and that we actually have, the most specific and varied information respecting the nature of the covenant, and the manner in which it was to reach its higher ends. We shall therefore look, in the first instance, to what is written of him, coupling Isaac, however, with him; since what is chiefly interesting and import ant about Isaac concerns him as the seed, for which Abraham was immediately called to look and wait: so that, as to the greater lines of instruction, which are all we can at present notice, the lives of the two are knit inseparably together. And the same is, to a considerable extent, the case also with Jacob and the twelve patriarchs. The whole may be said to be of one piece, viewed as a special instruction for the covenant people, and through them for the Church at large, in respect to her calling and position in the world.
I. Abraham, then, is called to be in a peculiar sense the possessor and dispenser of blessing; to be himself blessed, and through the seed that is to spring from him, to be a blessing to the whole race of mankind. A divine-like calling and destiny! for it is God alone who is properly the source and giver of blessing. Abraham, therefore, by his very appointment, is raised into a supranatural relationship to God; he is to be in direct communication with heaven, and to receive all from above; God is to work, in a special manner, for him and by him; and the people that are to spring out of him, for a blessing to other peoples, are to arise, not in the ordinary course of nature, but above and beyond it, as the benefits also they should be called to diffuse belong to a higher region than that of nature. As a necessary counterpart to this, and the in dispensable condition of its accomplishment, there must be in Abraham a principle of faith, such as might qualify him for transacting with God, in regard to the higher things of the covenant. These were not seen or present, and were also strange, supernatural, in the view of sense unlikely or even impossible; yet were not the less to be regarded as sure in the destination of heaven, and to be looked, waited, or, if need be, also striven and suffered for by men. This principle of faith must evidently be the fundamental and formative power in Abraham’s bosom—the very root of his new being, the life of his life—at once making him properly receptive of the Divine goodness, and readily obedient to the Divine will in the one respect giving scope for the display of God’s wonders in his behalf, and in the other prompting him to act in accordance with God’s righteous ends and purposes. So it actually was. Abraham was pre-eminently a man of faith; and on that account was raised to the honourable distinction of the Father of the Faithful. And faith in him proved not only a capacity to receive, but a hand also to work; and is scarcely less remarkable for what it brought to his experience from the grace and power of God, than for the sustaining, elevating, and sanctifying influence which it shed over his life and conduct. There are particularly three stages, each rising in succession above the other, in which it is important for us to mark this.
1. The first is that of the Divine call itself, which came to Abraham while still living among his kindred in the land of Mesopotamia.—(Genesis 12:1-3) Even in this original form of the Divine purpose concerning him, the supernatural element is conspicuous. To say nothing of its more general provisions, that he, a Mesopotamian shepherd, should be made surpassingly great, and should even be a source of blessing to all the families of the earth—to say nothing of these, which might appear in credible only from their indefinite vastness and comprehension, the two specific promises in the call, that a great nation should be made of him, and that another land—presently afterwards determined to be the land of Canaan—should be given him for an inheritance, both lay beyond the bounds of the natural and the probable. At the time the call was addressed to Abraham, he was already seventy-five years old, and his wife Sarah, being only ten years younger, must have been sixty-five.—(Genesis 12:4; Genesis 17:17) For such persons to be constituted parents, and parents of an offspring that should become a great nation, involved at the very outset a natural impossibility, and could only be made good by a supernatural exercise of Divine Omnipotence—a miracle. Nor was it materially different in regard to the other part of the promise; for it is expressly stated, when the precise land to be given was pointed out to him, that the Canaanite was then in the land.—(Genesis 12:6) It was even then an inhabited territory, and by no ordinary concurrence of events could be expected to become the heritage of the yet unborn posterity of Abraham. It could only be looked for as the result of God’s direct and special interposition in their behalf.
Yet, incredible as the promise seemed in both of its departments, Abraham believed the word spoken to him; he had faith to accredit the Divine testimony, and to take the part which it assigned him. Both were required—a receiving of the promise first, and then an acting with a view to it; for, on the ground of such great things being destined for him, he was commanded to leave his natural home and kindred, and go forth under the Divine guidance to the new territory to be assigned him. In this command was discovered the inseparable connection between faith and holiness; or between the call of Abraham to receive distinguishing and supernatural blessing, and his call to lead a life of sincere and devoted obedience. He was singled out from the world’s inhabitants to begin a new order of things, which were to bear throughout the impress of God’s special grace and almighty power; and he must separate himself from the old things of nature, to be in his life the representative of God’s holiness, as in his destiny he was to be the monument of God’s power and goodness.
It is this exercise of faith in Abraham which is first exhibited in the Epistle to the Hebrews, as bespeaking a mighty energy in its working; the more especially as the exchange in the case of Abraham and his immediate descendants did not prove by any means agreeable to nature. “By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; arid he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise.” It may seem, indeed, at this distance of place and time, as if there were no great difference in the condition of Abraham and his household, in the one place as compared with the other. But it was quite otherwise in reality. They had, first of all, to break asunder the ties of home and kindred, which nature always feels painful, especially in mature age, even though it may have the prospect before it of a comfortable settlement in another region. This sacrifice they had to make in the fullest sense: it was in their case a strictly final separation; they were to be absolutely done with the old and its endearments, and to cleave henceforth to the new. Nor only so, but their immediate position in the new was not like that which they had before in the old: settled possessions in the one, but none in the other; instead of them, mere lodging-room among strangers, and a life on Providence. Nature does not love a change like that, and can only regard it as quitting the certainties of sight for the seeming uncertainties of faith and hope. These, however, were still but the smaller trials which Abraham’s faith had to encounter; for, along with the change in his outward condition, there came responsibilities and duties altogether alien to nature’s feelings, and contrary to its spirit. In his old country he followed his own way, and walked after the course of the world, having no special work to do, nor any calling of a more solemn kind to fulfil. But now, by obeying the call of Heaven, he was brought into immediate connection with a spiritual and holy God, became charged in a manner with His interest in the world, and bound, in the face of surrounding enmity or scorn, faithfully to maintain His cause, and promote the glory of His name. To do this was in truth to renounce nature, and rise superior to it. And it was done, let it be remembered, out of regard to prospects which could only be realized if the power of God should forsake its wonted channels of working, and perform what the carnal mind would have deemed it infatuation to look for. Even in that first stage of the patriarch’s course, there was a noble triumph of faith, and the earnest of a life replenished with the fruits of righteousness.
It is true, the promise thus given at the commencement was not uniformly sustained; and Abraham was not long in Canaan till there seemed to be a failure on the part of God toward him, and there actually was a failure on his part toward God. The occurrence of a famine leads him to take refuge for a time in Egypt, which was even then the granary of that portion of the East; and he is tempted, through fear of his personal safety, to equivocate regarding Sarah, and call her his sister. The equivocation is certainly not to be justified, either on this or on the future occasion on which it was again resorted to; for though it contained a half truth, this was so employed as to render “the half truth a whole lie.” We are rather to refer both circumstances—his repairing to Egypt, and when there betaking to such a worldly expedient for safety—as betraying the imperfection of his faith, which had strength to enable him to enter on his new course of separation from the world and devotedness to God, but still wanted clearness of discernment and implicitness of trust sufficient to meet the unexpected difficulties that so early presented themselves in the way. Strange indeed had it been otherwise. It was necessary that the faith of Abraham, like that of believers generally, should learn by experience, and even grow by its temporary defeats. The first failure on the present occasion stood in his seeking relief from the emergency that arose by withdrawing, without the Divine sanction, to another country than that into which he had been conducted by the special providence of God. Instead of looking up for direction and support, he betook to worldly shifts and expedients, and thus became entangled in difficulties, out of which the immediate interposition of God alone could have rescued him. In this way, however, the result proved beneficial. Abraham was made to feel, in the first instance, that his backsliding had reproved him; and then the merciful interposition of Heaven, rebuking even a king for his sake, taught him the lesson, that with the God of heaven upon his side, he had no need to be afraid for the outward evils that might beset him in his course. He had but to look up in faith, and get the direction or support that he needed. The conduct of Abraham, immediately after his return to Canaan, gave ample evidence of the general stedfastness and elevated purity of his course. Though travelling about as a stranger in the land, he makes all around him feel that it is a blessed thing to be connected with him, and that it would be well for them if the land really were in his possession. The quarrel that presently arose between Lot’s herdsmen and his own, merely furnished the occasion for his disinterested generosity, in waiving his own rights, and allowing to his kinsman the priority and freedom of choice. And another quarrel of a graver kind, that of the war between the four kings in higher Asia, and of the five small dependent sovereigns in the south of Canaan, drew forth still nobler manifestations of the large and self-sacrificing spirit that filled his bosom. Regarding the unjust capture of Lot as an adequate reason for taking part in the conflict, he went courageously forth with his little band of trained servants, overthrew the conquerors, and recovered all that had been lost. Yet, at the very moment he displayed the victorious energy of his faith, by discomfiting this mighty army, how strikingly did he, at the same time, exhibit its patience in declining to use the advantage he then gained to hasten forward the purposes of God concerning his possession of the land, and its moderation of spirit, its commanding superiority to merely worldly ends and objects, in refusing to take even the smallest portion of the goods of the king of Sodom! Nay, so far from seeking to exalt self by pressing outward advantages and worldly resources, his spirit of faith, leading him to recognise the hand of God in the success that had been won, causes him to bow down in humility, and do homage to the Most High God in the person of His priest Melchizedek. He gave this Melchizedek tithes of all, and as himself the less, received blessing from Melchizedek as the greater.
Viewed thus merely as a mark of the humble and reverent spirit of Abraham, the offspring of his faith in God, this notice of his relation to Melchizedek is interesting. But other things of a profounder nature were wrapt up in the transaction, which the pen of inspiration did not fail afterwards to elicit (Psalms 110:4; Hebrews 7:1-28), and which it is proper to glance at before we pass on to another stage of the patriarch’s history. The extraordinary circumstance of such a person as a priest of the Most High God, whom even Abraham acknowledged to be such, starting up all at once in the devoted land of Canaan, and vanishing out of sight almost as soon as he appeared, has given rise, from the earliest times, to numberless conjectures. Ham, Shem, Noah, Enoch, an angel, Christ, the Holy Spirit, have each, in the hands of different persons, been identified with this Melchizedek; but the view now almost universally acquiesced in is, that he was simply a Canaanite sovereign, who combined with his royal dignity as king of Salem[132] the office of a true priest of God. No other supposition, indeed, affords a satisfactory explanation of the narrative. The very silence observed regarding his origin, and the manner of his appointment to the priesthood, was intentional, and served to draw more particular attention to the facts of the case, as also to bring it into a closer correspondence with the ultimate realities. The more remarkable peculiarity was, that to this person, simply because he was a righteous king and priest of the Most High God, Abraham, the elect of God, the possessor of the promises, paid tithes, and received from him a blessing; and did it, too, at the very time he stood so high in honour, and kept himself so carefully aloof from another king then present—the king of Sodom. He placed himself as conspicuously below the one personage as he raised himself above the other. Why should he have done so? Because Melchizedek already in a measure possessed what Abraham still only hoped for—he reigned where Abraham’s seed were destined to reign, and exercised a priesthood which in future generations was to be committed to them. The union of the two in Melchizedek was in itself a great thing—greater than the separate offices of king and priest in the houses respectively of David and Aaron; but it was an expiring greatness: it was like the last blossom on the old rod of Noah, which thenceforth became as a dry tree. In Abraham, on the other hand, was the germ of a new and higher order of things: the promise, though still only the budding promise, of a better inheritance of blessing; and when the seed should come in whom the promise was more especially to stand, then the more general and comprehensive aspect of the Melchizedek order was to reappear, and reappear in one who could at once place it on firmer ground, and carry it to unspeakably higher results. Here, then, was a sacred enigma for the heart of faith to ponder, and for the spirit of truth gradually to unfold: Abraham, in one respect, relatively great, and in another relatively little; personally inferior to Melchizedek, and yet the root of a seed that was to do for the world incomparably more than Melchizedek had done; himself the type of a higher than Melchizedek, and yet Melchizedek a more peculiar type than he! It was a mystery that could be disclosed only in partial glimpses beforehand, but which now has become comparatively plain by the person and work of Immanuel. What but the wonder-working finger of God could have so admirably fitted the past to be such a singular image of the future!
There are points connected with this subject that will naturally fall to be noticed at a later period, when we come to treat of the Aaronic priesthood, and other points also, though of a minor kind, belonging to this earlier portion of Abraham’s history, which we cannot particularly notice. We proceed to the second stage in the development of his spiritual life.
2. This consisted in the establishment of the covenant between him and God; which falls, however, into two parts: one earlier in point of time, and in its own nature incomplete; the other, both the later and the more perfect form.
It would seem as if, after the stirring transactions connected with the victory over Chedorlaomer and his associates, and the interview with Melchizedek, the spirit of Abraham had sunk into depression and fear; for the next notice we have respecting him represents God as appearing to him in vision, and bidding him not to be afraid, since God Himself was his shield and his exceeding great reward. It is not improbable that some apprehension of a revenge on the part of Chedorlaomer might haunt his bosom, and that he might begin to dread the result of such an unequal contest as he had entered on with the powers of the world. But it is clear also, from the sequel, that another thing preyed upon his spirits, and that he was filled with concern on account of the long delay that was allowed to intervene before the appearance of the promised seed. He still went about child less; and the thought could not but press upon his mind, of what use were other things to him, even of the most honourable kind, if the great thing, on which all his hopes for the future turned, were still withheld? The Lord graciously met this natural misgiving by the assurance, that not any son by adoption merely, but one from his own loins, should be given him for an heir. And to make the matter more palpable to his mind, and take external nature, as it were, to witness for the fulfilment of the word, the Lord brought him forth, and, pointing to the stars of heaven, declared to him, “So shall thy seed be.” “And he believed in the Lord,” it is said, “and He counted it to him for righteousness.”—(Genesis 15:1-6) This historical statement regarding Abraham’s faith is remarkable, as it is the one so strenuously urged by the Apostle Paul in his argument for justification by faith alone in the righteousness of Christ.—(Romans 4:18-22) And the question has been keenly debated, whether it was the faith itself which was in God’s account taken for righteousness, or the righteousness of God in Christ, which that faith prospectively laid hold of. Our wisdom here, however, and in all similar cases, is not to press the statements of Old Testament Scripture so as to render them explicit categorical deliverances on Christian doctrine,—in which case violence must inevitably be done to them,—but rather to catch the general principle embodied in them, arid give it a fair application to the more distinct revelations of the Gospel. This is precisely what is done by St Paul. He does not say a word about the specific manifestation of the righteousness of God in Christ, when arguing from the statement respecting the righteousness of faith in Abraham. He lays stress simply upon the natural impossibilities that stood in the way of God’s promise of a numerous offspring to Abraham being fulfilled—the comparative deadness both of his own body and of Sarah’s—and on the implicit confidence Abraham had, notwithstanding, in the power and faithfulness of God, that He would perform what He had promised. “Therefore,” adds the Apostle, “it was imputed to him for righteousness.” Therefore—namely, because through faith he so completely lost sight of nature and self, and realized with undoubting confidence the sufficiency of the Divine arm, and the certainty of its working. His faith was nothing more, nothing else, than the renunciation of all virtue and strength in himself, and a hanging in childlike trust upon God for what He was able and willing to do. Not, therefore, a mere substitute for a righteousness that was wanting, an acceptance of something that could be had for something better that failed, but rather the vital principle of a righteousness in God the acting of a soul in unison with the mind of God, and finding its life, its hope, its all in Him. Transfer such a faith to the field of the New Testament—bring it into contact with the manifestation of God in the person and work of Christ for the salvation of the world, and what would inevitably be its language but that of the Apostle: “God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ,”—“not my own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is of God through faith!” To return to Abraham. When he had attained to such confiding faith in the Divine word respecting the promised seed, the Lord gave him an equally distinct assurance respecting the promised land; and in answer to Abraham’s question, “Lord God, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?” the Lord “made a covenant with him” respecting it, by means of a symbolical sacrificial action. It was a covenant by blood; for in the very act of establishing the union, it was meet there should be a reference to the guilt of man, and a provision for purging it away. The very materials of the sacrifice have here a specific meaning; the greater sacrifices, those of the heifer, the goat, and the ram, being expressly fixed to be of three years old—pointing to the three generations which Abraham’s posterity were to pass in Egypt; and these, together with the turtle-dove and the young pigeon, comprising a full representation of the animals afterwards offered in sacrifice under the law. As the materials, so also the form of the sacrifice was symbolical—the animals being divided asunder, and one piece laid over against another; for the purpose of more distinctly representing the two parties in the transaction—two, and yet one—meeting and acting together in one solemn offering. Recognising Jehovah as the chief party in what was taking place, Abraham waits for the Divine manifestation, and contents himself with mean while driving away the ill-omened birds of prey that flocked around the sacrifice. At last, when the shades of night had fallen, “a smoking furnace and a burning lamp passed between those pieces”—the glory of the Lord Himself, as so often after wards, in a pillar of cloud and fire. Passing under this emblem through the divided sacrifice, He formally accepted it, and struck the covenant with His servant.—(Jeremiah 34:18-19) At the same time, also, a profound sleep had fallen upon Abraham, and a horror of great darkness,—symbolical of the outward humiliations and sufferings through which the covenant was to reach its accomplishment; and in explanation the announcement was expressly made to him, that his posterity should be in bondage and affliction four hundred years in a foreign land, and should then, in the fourth generation, be brought up from it with great substance.[133] In justification, also, of the long delay, the specific reason was given, that “the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full,”—plainly importing that this part of the Divine procedure had a moral aim, and could only be carried into effect in accordance with the great principles of the Divine righteousness.
There is no need for going into the question, whether this ordinance of circumcision was now for the first time introduced among men; or whether it already existed as a practice to some extent, and was simply adopted by God as a fit and significant token of His covenant. It is comparatively of little moment how such a question may be decided. The same principle may have been acted on here, which undoubtedly had a place in the modelling of the Mosaic institutions, and which will be discussed and vindicated when we come to consider the influence exercised by the learning of Moses on his subsequent legislation—the principle, namely, of taking from the province of religion generally a symbolical sign or action, that was capable, when associated with the true religion, of fitly expressing its higher truths and principles. The probability is, that this principle was recognised and acted on here. Circumcision has been practised among classes of people and nations who cannot reasonably be supposed to have derived it from the family of Abraham—among the ancients, for example, by the Egyptian priesthood, and among the moderns by native tribes in America and the islands of the Pacific. Its extensive prevalence and long continuance can only be accounted for on the ground that it has a foundation in the feelings of the natural conscience, which, like the distinctions into clean and unclean, or the payment of tithes, may have led to its employment before the time of Abraham, and also fitted it afterwards for serving as the peculiar sign of God’s covenant with him. At the same time, as it was henceforth intended to be a distinctive badge of covenant relationship, it could not have been generally practised in the region where the chosen family were called to live and act. From the purpose to which it was applied, we may certainly infer that it formed at once an appropriate and an easily recognised distinction between the race of Abraham and the families and nations by whom they were more immediately surrounded.
Among the race of Abraham, however, it had the widest application given to it. While God so far identified it with His covenant, as to suspend men’s interest in the one upon their observance of the other, it was with His covenant in its wider aspect and bearing—not simply as securing either an offspring after the flesh, or the inheritance for that offspring of the land of Canaan. It was comparatively but a limited portion of Abraham’s actual offspring who were destined to grow into a separate nation, and occupy as their home the territory of Canaan. At the very outset Ishmael was excluded, though constituted the head of a great nation. And yet not only he, but all the members of Abraham’s household, were alike ordered to receive the covenant signature. Nay, even in later times, when the children of Israel had grown into a distinct people, and everything was placed under the strict administration of law, it was always left open to people of other lands and tribes to enter into the bonds of the covenant through the rite of circumcision. This rite, therefore, must have had a significance for them, as well as for the more favoured seed of Jacob. It spoke also to their hearts and consciences, and virtually declared that the covenant which it symbolized had nothing in its main design of an exclusive and contracted spirit; that its greater things lay open to all who were willing to seek them in the appointed way; and that if at first there were individual per sons, and afterwards a single people, who were more especially identified with the covenant, it was only to mark them out as the chosen representatives of its nature and objects, and to constitute them lights for the instruction and benefit of others. There never was a more evident misreading of the palpable facts of history, than appears in the disposition so often manifested to limit the rite of circumcision to one line merely of Abraham’s posterity, and to regard it as the mere outward badge of an external national distinction.
It is to be held, then, as certain in regard to the sign of the covenant as in regard to the covenant itself, that its more special and marked connection with individuals was only for the sake of more effectually helping forward its general objects. And not less firmly is it to be held, that the outwardness in the rite was for the sake of the inward and spiritual truths it symbolized. It was appointed as the distinctive badge of the covenant, because it was peculiarly fitted for symbolically expressing the spiritual character and design of the covenant. It marked the condition of every one who received it, as having to do both with higher powers and higher objects than those of corrupt nature, as the condition of one brought into blessed fellowship with God, and therefore called to walk before Him and be perfect. There would be no difficulty in perceiving this, nor any material difference of opinion upon the subject, if people would but look beneath the surface, and in the true spirit of the ancient religion, would contemplate the outward as an image of the inward. The general purport of the covenant was, that from Abraham as an individual there was to be generated a seed of blessing, in which all real blessing was to centre, and from which it was to flow to the ends of the earth. There could not, therefore, be a more appropriate sign of the covenant than such a rite as circumcision—so directly connected with the generation of offspring, and so distinctly marking the necessary purification of nature the removal of the filth of the flesh that the off spring might be such as really to constitute a seed of blessing. It is through ordinary generation that the corruption incident on the fall is propagated; and hence, under the law, which contained a regular system of symbolical teaching, there were so many occasions of defilement traced to this source, and so many means of purification appointed for them. Now, therefore, when God was establishing a covenant, the great object of which was to reverse the propagation of evil, to secure for the world a blessed and a blessed-making seed, he affixed to the covenant this symbolical rite—to show that the end was to be reached, not as the result of nature’s ordinary productiveness, but of nature purged from its uncleanness—nature raised above itself, in league with the grace of God, and bearing on it the distinctive impress of His character and working. It said to the circumcised man, that he had Jehovah for his bridegroom, to whom he had become espoused, as it were, by blood (Exodus 4:25), and that he must no longer follow the unregulated will and impulse of nature, but live in accordance with the high relation lie occupied, and the sacred calling he had received.[134]
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Most truly, therefore, does the Apostle say, that Abraham received circumcision as a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had (Romans 4:11)—a Divine token in his own case that he had attained through faith to such fellowship with God, and righteousness in Him and a token for every child that should afterwards receive it; not indeed that he actually possessed the same, but that he was called to possess it, and had a right to the privileges and hopes which might enable him to attain to the possession. Most truly also does the Apostle say in another place (Romans 2:28-29): “He is not a Jew which is one outwardly (i.e., not a Jew in the right sense, not such an one as God would recognise and own); neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh: But he is a Jew which is one inwardly: and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.” The very design of the covenant was to secure a seed with these inward and spiritual characteristics; and the sign of the covenant, the outward impression in the flesh, was worthless, a mere external concision—as the Apostle calls it, when it came to be alone, Php 3:2—excepting in so far as it was the expression of the corresponding reality. Isaac, the first child of promise, was the fitting type of such a covenant. In the very manner and time of his production he was a sign to all coming ages of what the covenant required and sought;—not begotten till Abraham himself bore the symbol of nature’s purification, nor born till it was evident the powers of nature must have been miraculously vivified for the purpose; so that in his very being and birth Isaac was emphatically a child of God. But in being so, he was the exact type of what the covenant properly aimed at, and what its expressive symbol betokened, viz., a spiritual seed, in which the Divine and human, grace and nature, should meet together in producing true subjects and channels of blessing. But its actual representation—the one complete and perfect embodiment of all it symbolized and sought—was the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom the Divine and human met from the first, not in co-operative merely, but in organic union; and consequently the result produced was a Being free from all taint of corruption, holy, harmless, undefiled, the express image of the Father, the very righteousness of God. He alone fully realized the conditions of blessing exhibited in the covenant, and was qualified to be in the largest sense the seed-corn of a harvest of blessing for the whole field of humanity.
It is true—and those who take their notions of realities from appearances alone, will doubtless reckon it a sufficient reply to what has been said—that the portion of Abraham’s seed who afterwards became distinctively the covenant people—Israel after the flesh—were by no means such subjects and channels of blessing as we have described, but were to a large extent carnal, having only that circumcision which is outward in the flesh. What then? Had they still a title to be recognised as the children of the covenant, and a right, as such, to the temporal inheritance connected with it?By no means. This were substantially to make void God’s ordinance, which could not, any more than His other ordinances, be merely outward. It arises from His essential nature, as the spiritual and holy God, that He should ever require from His people what is accordant with His own character; and that when He appoints outward signs and ordinances, it is only with a view to spiritual and moral ends. Where the outward alone exists, He cannot own its validity. Christ certainly did not. For, when arguing with the Jews of His own day, He denied on this very ground that their circumcision made them the children of Abraham: they were not of his spirit, and did not perform his works; and so, in Christ’s account, their natural connection both with Abraham and with the covenant went for nothing.—(John 8:34-44) Their circumcision was a sign without any signification. And if so then, it must equally have been so in former times. The children of Israel had no right to the benefits of the covenant merely because they had been outwardly circumcised; nor were any promises made to them simply as the natural seed of Abraham. Both elements had to meet in their condition, the natural and the spiritual; the spiritual, however, more especially, and the natural only as connected with the spiritual, and a means for securing it. Hence Moses urged them so earnestly to circumcise their hearts, as absolutely necessary to their getting the fulfilment of what was promised (Deuteronomy 10:16); and when the people as a whole had manifestly not done this, circumcision itself, the sign of the covenant, was suspended for a season, and the promises of the covenant were held in abeyance, till they should come to learn aright the real nature of their calling.—(Joshua 5:3-9) Throughout, it was the election within the election who really had the promises and the covenants; and none but those in whom, through the special working of God’s grace, nature was sanctified and raised to another position than itself could ever have attained, were entitled to the blessing. If in the land of Canaan, they existed by sufferance merely, and not by right. The bearing of all this on the ordinance of Christian baptism cannot be overlooked, but it may still be mistaken. The relation between circumcision and baptism is not properly that of type and antitype; the one is a symbolical ordinance as well as the other, and both alike have an outward form and an inward reality. It is precisely in such ordinances that the Old and the New dispensations approach nearest to each other, and, we might almost say, stand formally upon the same level. The difference does not so much lie in the ordinances themselves, as in the comparative amount of grace and truth respectively exhibited in them—necessarily less in the earlier, and more in the later. The difference in external form was in each case conditioned by the circumstances of the time. In circumcision it bore respect to the propagation of offspring, as it was through the production of a seed of blessing that the covenant, in its preparatory form, was to attain its realization. But when the seed in that respect had reached its culminating point in Christ, and the objects of the covenant were no longer dependent on natural propagation of seed, but were to be carried forward by spiritual means and influences used in connection with the faith of Christ, the external ordinance was fitly altered, so as to express simply a change of nature and state in the individual that received it. Undoubtedly the New Testament form less distinctly recognises the connection between parent and child—we should rather say, does not of itself recognise that connection at all: so much ought to be frankly conceded to those who disapprove of the practice of infant baptism, and will be conceded by all whose object is to ascertain the truth rather than contend for an opinion. On the other hand, however, if we look, not to the form, but to the substance, which ought here, as in other things, to be chiefly regarded, we perceive an essential agreement—such as is, indeed, marked by the Apostle, when, with reference to the spiritual import of baptism, he calls it “the circumcision of Christ.”—(Colossians 2:11) So far from being less indicative of a change of nature in the proper subjects of it, circumcision was even more so; in a more obvious and palpable manner it bespoke the necessity of a deliverance from the native corruption of the soul in those who should become the true possessors of blessing. Hence the Apostle makes use of the earlier rite to explain the symbolical import of the later, and describes the spiritual change indicated and required by it, as “a putting-off of the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ,” and “having the uncircumcision of the flesh quickened together with Christ.” It would have been travelling entirely in the wrong direction, to use such language for purposes of explanation in Christian times, if the ordinance of circumcision had not shadowed forth this spiritual quickening and purification even more palpably and impressively than baptism itself; and shadowed it forth, not prospectively merely for future times, but immediately and personally for the members of the Old Covenant. For, by the terms of the covenant, these were ordained to be, not types of blessing only, but also partakers of blessing. The good contemplated in the covenant was to have its present commencement in their experience, as well as in the future a deeper foundation and a more enlarged development. And the outward putting away of the filth of the flesh in circumcision could never have symbolized a corresponding inward purification for the members of the New Covenant, if it had not first done this for the members of the Old. The shadow must have a substance in the one case as well as in the other.
Such being the case as to the essential agreement between the two ordinances, an important element for deciding in regard to the propriety of infant baptism may still be derived from the practice established in the rite of circumcision. The grand principle of connecting parent and child together for the attainment of spiritual objects, and marking the connection by an impressive signature, was there most distinctly and broadly sanctioned. And if the parental bond and its attendant obligations be not weakened, but rather elevated and strengthened, by the higher revelations of the Gospel, it would be strange indeed if the liberty at least, nay, the propriety and right, if not the actual obligation, to have their children brought by an initiatory ordinance under the bond of the covenant, did not belong to parents under the Gospel. The one ordinance no more than the other ensures the actual transmission of the grace necessary to effect the requisite change; but it exhibits that grace—on the part of God pledges it—and takes the subject of the ordinance bound to use it for the accomplishment of the proper end. Baptism does this now, as circumcision did of old; and if it was done in the one case through the medium of the parent to the child, one does not see why it may not be done now, unless positively prohibited, in the other. But since this is matter of inference rather than of positive enactment, those who do not feel warranted to make such an application of the principle of the Old Testament ordinance to the New, should unquestionably be allowed their liberty of thought and action; if only, in the vindication of that liberty, they do not seek to degrade circumcision to a mere outward and political distinction, and thereby break the continuity of the Church through successive dispensations.[135]
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3. But we must now hasten to the third stage of Abraham’s career, which presents him on a still higher moral elevation than he has yet reached, and view him as connected with the sacrifice of Isaac. Between the establishment of the covenant by the rite of circumcision, and this last stage of development, there were not wanting occasions fitted to bring out the preeminently holy character of his calling, and the dependence on his maintaining this toward God of what God should be and do toward him. This appears in the order he received from God to cast Ishmael out of his house, when the envious, mocking spirit of the youth too clearly showed that he had not the heart of a true child of the covenant, and would not submit aright to the arrangements of God concerning it. It appears also in the free and familiar fellowship to which Abraham was admitted with the three heavenly visitants, whom he entertained in his tent on the plains of Mamre, and the disclosure that was made to him of the Divine counsel respecting Sodom and Gomorrah, expressly on the ground that the Lord “knew he would command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord, to do justice and judgment.” And most of all it appears in the pleading of Abraham for the preservation of the cities of the plain,—a pleading based upon the principles of righteousness, that the Judge of all the earth would do right, and would not destroy the righteous with the wicked,—and a pleading that proved in vain only from there not being found the ten righteous persons in the place mentioned in the patriarch’s last supposition. So that the awful scene of desolation which the region of those cities afterwards presented on the very borders of the land of Canaan, stood perpetually before the Jewish people, not only as a monument of the Divine indignation against sin, but also as a witness that the father of their nation would have sought their preservation also from a like judgment only on the principles of righteousness, and would have even ceased to plead in their behalf, if righteousness should sink as low among them as he ultimately supposed it might have come in Sodom. But the topstone of Abraham’s history as the spiritual head of a seed of blessing, is only reached in the Divine command to offer up Isaac, and the obedience which the patriarch rendered to it. “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains, which I will tell thee of.” That Abraham understood this command rightly, when he supposed it to mean a literal offering of his son upon the altar, and not, as Hengstenberg and Langé have contended, a simple dedication to a religious life, needs no particular proof. Had anything but a literal surrender been meant, the mention of a burnt-offering as the character in which Isaac was to be offered to God, and of a mountain in Moriah as the particular spot where the offering was to be presented, would have been entirely out of place. But why should such a demand have been made of Abraham?And what precisely were the lessons it was intended to convey to his posterity, or its typical bearing on future times! In the form given to the required act, special emphasis is laid on the endeared nature of the object demanded: thine only son, and the son whom thou lovest. It was, therefore, a trial in the strongest sense, a trial of Abraham’s faith, whether it was capable of such implicit confidence in God, such profound regard to His will, and such self-denial in His service, as at the Divine bidding to give up the best and dearest—what in the circumstances must even have been dearer to him than his own life. Not that God really intended the surrender of Isaac to death, but only the proof of such a surrender in the heart of His servant; and such a proof could only have been found in an unconditional command to sacrifice, and an unresisting compliance with the command up to the final step in the process. This, however, was not all. In the command to perform such a sacrifice, there was a tempting as well as a trying of Abraham; since the thing required at his hands seemed to be an enacting of the most revolting rite of heathenism; and, at the same time, to war with the oracle already given concerning Isaac, “In Isaac shall thy seed be called.” According to this word, God’s purpose to bless was destined to have its accomplishment especially and peculiarly through Isaac; so that to slay such a son appeared like slaying the very word of God, and extinguishing the hope of the world. And yet, in heart and purpose at least, it must be done. It was no freak of arbitrary power to command the sacrifice; nor was it done merely with the view of raising the patriarch to a kind of romantic moral elevation. It had for its object the outward and palpable exhibition of the great truth, that God’s method of working in the covenant of grace must have its counterpart in man’s. The one must be the reflex of the other. God, in blessing Abraham, triumphs over nature; and Abraham triumphs after the same manner in proportion as he is blessed. He receives a special gift from the grace of God, and he freely surrenders it again to Him who gave it. He is pre-eminently honoured by God’s word of promise, and he is ready in turn to hazard all for its honour. And Isaac, the child of promise,—the type in his outward history of all who should be proper subjects or channels of blessing,—also must concur in the act: on the altar he must sanctify himself to God, as a sign to all who would possess the higher life in God, how it implies and carries along with it a devout surrender of the natural life to the service and glory of Him who has redeemed it.
We have no account of the workings of Abraham’s mind, when going forth to the performance of this extraordinary act of devotedness to God; and the record of the transaction is, from the very simplicity with which it narrates the facts of the case, the most touching and impressive in Old Testament history. But we are informed on inspired authority, that the principle on which he acted, and which enabled him—as, indeed, it alone could enable him—to fulfil such a service, was faith: “By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac: and he that received the promises offered up his only begotten son, of whom it was said, That in Isaac shall thy seed be called: accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he received him in a figure.”—(Hebrews 11:17-19) His noblest act of obedience was nothing more than the highest exercise and triumph of his faith. It was this which removed the mountains that stood before him, and hewed out a path for him to walk in. Grasping with firm hand that word of promise which assured him of a numerous seed by the line of Isaac, and taught by past experience to trust the faithfulness of Him who gave it even in the face of natural impossibilities, his faith enabled him to see light where all had otherwise been darkness—to hope while in the very act of destroying the great object of his hope. I know—so he must have argued with himself that the word of God, which commands this sacrifice, is faithfulness and truth; and though to stretch forth my hand against this child of promise is apparently destructive to my hopes, yet I may safely risk it, since He commands it from whom the gift and the promise were alike received. It is as easy for the Almighty arm to give me back my son from the domain of death, as it was at first to bring him forth out of the dead womb of Sarah; and what He can do, His declared purpose makes me sure that He will, and even must.—Thus nature, even in its best and strongest feelings, was overcome, and the sublimest heights of holiness were reached, simply because faith had struck its roots so deeply within, and had so closely united the soul of the patriarch to the mind and perfections of Jehovah. This high surrender of the human to the Divine, and holy self-consecration to the will and service of God, was beyond all doubt, like the other things recorded in Abraham’s life, of the nature of a revelation. It was not intended to terminate in the patriarch and his son, but in them, as the sacred roots of the covenant people, to show in outward and corporeal representation what in spirit ought to be perpetually repeating itself in their individual and collective history. It proclaimed to them through all their generations, that the covenant required of its members lives of unshrinking and devoted application to the service of God—yielding to no weak misgivings or corrupt solicitations of the flesh—staggering at no difficulties presented by the world; and also that it rendered such a course possible by the ground and scope it afforded for the exercise of faith in the sustaining grace and might of Jehovah. And undoubtedly, as the human here was the reflex of the Divine, whence it drew its source and reason, so inversely, and as regards the ulterior objects of the covenant, the Divine might justly be regarded as imaged in the human. An organic union between the two was indispensable to the effectual accomplishment of the promised good; and the seed in which the blessing of Heaven was to concentrate, and from which it was to flow throughout the families of the earth, must on the one side be as really the Son of God, as on the other he was to be the offspring of Abraham. Since, therefore, the two lines were ultimately to meet in one, and that one, by the joint operation of the Divine and human, was once for all to make good the provision of blessing promised in the covenant, it was meet, and it may reasonably be supposed, was one end of the transaction, that they should be seen from the first to coalesce in principle; that the surrender Abraham made of his son, for the world’s good, in the line after the flesh, and the surrender willingly made by that son himself at the altar of God, was designed to foreshadow in the other and higher line the wonderful gift of God in yielding up His Son, and the free-will offering and consecration of the Son Himself to bring in eternal life for the lost. Here, too, as the things done were in their nature unspeakably higher than in the other, so were they thoroughly and intensely real in their character. The representative in the Old becomes the actual in the New; and the sacrifice performed there merely in the spirit, passes here into that one full and complete atonement, which for ever perfects them that are sanctified.[136]
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II. We must leave to the reflection of our readers the application of this to Christian times and relations, which is indeed so obvious as to need no particular explanation; and we proceed to take a rapid glance at the leading features of the other branch of the subject—that which concerns Jacob and the twelve patriarchs. This forms the continuation of what took place in the lives of Abraham and Isaac, and a continuation not only embodying the same great principles, but also carrying them forward with more special adaptation to the prospective condition of the Israelites as a people. Towards the close of the patriarchal period, the covenant, even in its more specific line of operations, began to widen and expand, to rise more from the particular to the general, to embrace a family circle, and that circle the commencement of a future nation. And the dealings of God were all directed to the one great end of showing, that while this people should stand alike outwardly related to the covenant, yet their real connection with its promises, and their actual possession of its blessings, should infallibly turn upon their being followers in faith and holiness of the first fathers of their race.
Unfortunately, the later part of Isaac’s life did not altogether fulfil the promise of the earlier. Knowing little of the trials of faith, he did not reach high in its attainments. And in the more advanced stage of his history he fell into a state of general feebleness and decay, in which the moral but too closely corresponded with the bodily decline. Notwithstanding the very singular and marked exemplification that had been given in his own case of the pre-eminent respect had in the covenant to something higher than nature, lie failed so much in discernment, that he was disposed only to make account of the natural element in judging of the respective states and fortunes of his sons. To the neglect of a Divine oracle going before, and the neglect also of the plainest indications afforded by the subsequent behaviour of the sons themselves, he resolved to give the more distinctive blessing of the covenant to Esau, in preference to Jacob, and so to make him the more peculiar type and representative of the covenant. In this, however, he was thwarted by the overruling providence of God—not, indeed, without sin on the part of those who were the immediate agents in accomplishing it, but yet so as to bring out more clearly and impressively the fact, that mere natural descent and priority of birth was not here the principal, but only the secondary thing, and that higher and more important than any natural advantage was the grace of God manifesting itself in the faith and holiness of men. Jacob, therefore, though the youngest by birth, yet from the first the child of faith, of spiritual desire, of heartfelt longings after the things of God, ultimately the man of deep discernment, ripened experience, prophetic insight, wrestling and victorious energy in the Divine life—he must stand first in the purpose of Heaven, and exhibit in his personal career a living representation of the covenant, as to what it properly is and really requires. Nay, opportunity was taken from his case, as the immediate founder of the Israelitish nation, to begin the covenant history anew; and starting, as it were, from nothing in his natural position and circumstances, it was shown how God, by His supernatural grace and sufficiency, could vanquish the difficulties in the way, and more than compensate for the loss of nature’s advantages. In reference partly to this instructive portion of Jacob’s history, and to renew upon their minds the lesson it was designed to teach, the children of Israel were appointed to go to the priest in after times with their basket of first-fruits in their hand, and the confession in their mouth, A Syrian ready to perish was my father.—(Deuteronomy 26:5) It was clear, even as noon-day, that all Jacob had to distinguish him outwardly from others, the sole foundation and spring of his greatness, was the promise of God in the covenant, received by him in humble faith, and taken as the ground of prayerful and holy striving. As the head of the covenant people, he was not less really, though by a different mode of operation, the child of Divine grace and power, than his father Isaac. And as his whole life, in its better aspects, was a lesson to his posterity respecting the superiority of the spiritual to the merely natural element in things pertaining to the covenant of God; so, when his history drew toward its close, there were lessons of a more special kind, and in the same direction, pressed with singular force and emphasis upon his family.
It was a time when such were peculiarly needed. The covenant was now to assume more of a communal aspect. It was to have a national membership and representation, as the more immediate designs which God sought to accomplish by means of it could not be otherwise effected. Jacob was the last separate impersonation of its spirit and character. His family, in their collective capacity, were henceforth to take this position. But they had first to learn, that they could take it only if their natural relation to the covenant was made the means of forming them to its spiritual characteristics, and fitting them for the fulfilment of its righteous ends. They must even learn, that their individual relation to the covenant in these respects should determine their relative place in the administration of its affairs and interests. And for this end, Reuben, the first-born, is made to lose his natural pre-eminence, because, like Esau, he presumed upon his natural position, and in the lawless impetuosity of nature broke through the restraints of filial piety. Judah, on the other hand, obtains one of the prerogatives Reuben had lost—Judah, who became so distinguished for that filial piety as to hazard his own life for the sake of his father. Simeon and Levi, in like manner, are all but excluded from the blessings of the covenant on account of their unrighteous and cruel behaviour: a curse is solemnly pronounced upon their sin, and a mark of inferiority stamped upon their condition; while, again, at a later period, and for the purpose still of showing how the spiritual was to rule the natural, rather than the natural the spiritual, the curse in the case of Levi was turned into a blessing. The tribe was, indeed, according to the word of Jacob, scattered in Israel, and was thereby rendered politically weak; but the more immediate reason of the scattering was the zeal and devotedness which the members of that tribe had exhibited in the wilderness, on account of which they were dispersed as lights among Israel, bearing on them the more peculiar and sacred distinctions of the covenant—thereby acquiring a position of great moral strength. Most strikingly, however, does the truth break forth in connection with Joseph, who in the earlier history of the family was the only proper representative of the covenant. He was the one child of God in the family, though, with a single exception, the least and youngest of its members. God, therefore, after allowing the contrast between him and the rest to be sharply exhibited, ordered His providence so as to make him pre-eminently the son of blessing. The faith and piety of the youth draw upon him the protection and loving-kindness of Heaven wherever he goes, and throw a charm around everything he does. At length he rises to the highest position of honour and influence—blessed most remarkably himself, and on the largest scale made a blessing to others the noblest and most conspicuous personal embodiment of the nature of the covenant, as first rooting itself in the principles of a spiritual life, and then diffusing itself in healthful and blessed energy on all around. At the same time, and as a foil to set off more brightly the better side of the truth represented in him, while he was thus seen riding upon the high places of the earth, his unsanctified brethren appear famishing for want; the promised blessing of the covenant has almost dried up in their experience, because they possessed so little of the true character of children of the covenant. And when the needful relief comes, they have to be indebted for it to the hand of him in whom that character is most luminously displayed. Nay, in the very mode of getting it, they are conducted through a train of humiliating and soul-stirring providences, tending to force on them the conviction that they were in the hands of an angry God, and to bring them to repentance of sin and amendment of life. So that, by the time they are raised to a position of honour and comfort, and settled as covenant patriarchs in Egypt, they present the appearance of men chastened, subdued, brought to the knowledge of God, fitted each to take his place among the heads of the future covenant people; while the double portion, which Reuben lost by his iniquity, descends on him who was, under God, the instrument of accomplishing so much good for them and for others. And here, again, we cannot but notice that when the chosen family were in the process of assuming the rudimentary form of that people through whom salvation and blessing were to come to other kindreds of the earth, the beginning was rendered prophetic of the end; the operations both of the evil and the good in the infancy of the nation, were made to image the prospective manifestation that was to be given of them when the things of the Divine kingdom should rise to their destined maturity. Especially in the history of Joseph, the representative of the covenant in its earlier stage, was there given a wonderful similitude of Him in whom its powers and blessings were to be concentrated in their entire fulness, and who was therefore in all things to obtain the pre-eminence among His brethren. Like Joseph, the Son of Mary, though born among brethren after the flesh, was treated as an alien; envied and persecuted even from His infancy, and obliged to find a temporary refuge in the very land that shielded Joseph from the fury of his kindred. His supernatural and unblemished righteousness continually provoked the malice of the world, and, at the same time, received the most unequivocal tokens of the Divine favour and blessing. That very righteousness, exhibited amid the greatest trials and indignities, in the deepest debasement, and in worse than prison-house affliction, procured His elevation to the right hand of power and glory, from which He was thenceforth to dispense the means of salvation to the world. In the dispensation, too, of these blessings, it was the hardened and cruel enmity of His immediate kindred which opened the door of grace and blessing to the heathen; and the sold, hated, and crucified One becomes a Prince and Saviour to the nations of the earth, while His famishing brethren reap in bitterness of soul the fruit of their inexcusable hatred and malice. Nor is there a door of escape to be found for them until they come to acknowledge, in contrition of heart, that they are verily guilty concerning their brother. Then, however, looking unto Him whom they have pierced, and owning Him as, by God’s appointment, the one channel of life and blessing, their hatred shall be repaid with love, and they shall be admitted to share in the inexhaustible fulness that is treasured up in Christ.
What a succession, then, of lessons for the children of the covenant in regard to what constituted their greatest danger—lessons stretching through four generations—ever varying in their precise form, yet always bearing most directly and impressively upon the same point—writing out on the very foundations of their history, and emblazoning on the banner of their covenant, the important truth, that the spiritual element was ever to be held the thing of first and most essential moment, and that the natural was only to be regarded as the channel through which the other was chiefly to come, and the safeguard by which it was to be fenced and kept! From the first the call of God made itself known as no merely outward distinction; and the covenant that grew out of it, instead of being but a formal bond of interconnection between its members and God, was framed especially to meet the spiritual evil in the world, and required as an indispensable condition, a sanctified heart in all who were to experience its blessings, and to work out its beneficent results. How, indeed, could it be otherwise? How could the spiritual Jehovah, who has, from the first creation of man upon the earth, been ever manifesting Himself as the Holy One, and directing His administration so as to promote the ends of righteousness, enter into a covenant of life and blessing on any other principle? It is impossible—as impossible as it is for the unchangeable God to act contrary to His nature—that the covenant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,—the covenant of grace and blessing, which embraces in its bosom Christ Himself, and the benefits of His eternal redemption,—could ever have contemplated as its real members any but spiritual and righteous persons. And the whole tenor and current of the Divine dealings in establishing the covenant seem to have been alike designed and calculated to shut up every thoughtful mind to the conclusion, that none but such could either fulfil its higher purposes, or have an interest in its more essential provisions.
What thus appears to be taught in the historical revelations of God connected with the establishment of the covenant, is also perpetually re-echoed in the later communications by His prophets. Their great aim, in the monitory part of their writings, is to bring home to men’s minds the conviction, that the covenant had pre-eminently in view moral ends, and that in so far as the people degenerated from these, they failed in respect to the main design of their calling. Let us point, in proof of this, merely to the last of the prophets, that we may see how the closing witness of the Old Covenant coincides with the testimony delivered at the beginning. In the second chapter of his writings, the prophet Malachi, addressing himself to the corruptions of the time, as appearing first in the priesthood, and then among the people generally, charges both parties expressly with a breach of covenant, and a subversion of the ends for which it was established. In regard to the priests, he points to their ancestral holiness in the personified tribe of Levi, and says, “My covenant was with him of life and peace; and I gave them to him for the fear wherewith he feared Me, and was afraid before My name. The law of truth was in his mouth, and iniquity was not found in his lips: he walked with Me in peace and equity, and did turn many away from iniquity. . . . But ye are departed out of the way; ye have caused many to stumble at the law; ye have corrupted the covenant of Levi, saith the Lord of Hosts. Therefore have I also made you contemptible and base before all the people, according as ye have not kept My ways, but have been partial in the law.” In a word, the covenant, in this particular branch of it, had been made expressly on moral grounds and for moral ends; and in practically losing sight of these, the priests of that time had made void the covenant, even though externally complying with its appointments, and were consequently visited with chastisement instead of blessing. Then, in regard to the people, a reproof is first of all administered on account of the unfaithfulness, which had become comparatively common, in putting away their Israelitish wives, and taking outlandish women in their stead—“the daughters of a strange god.” This the prophet calls “profaning the covenant of their fathers.” And then pointing in this case, as in the former, to the original design and purport of their covenant calling, he asks, in a question which has been entirely misunderstood, from not being viewed in relation to the precise object of the prophet, “And did not He make one? Yet had He the residue of the Spirit. And wherefore one? That he might seek a godly seed. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth.” The one, which God made, is not Adam, nor Abraham, to either of whom the commentators refer it, though the case of neither of them properly suits the point more immediately in question. The oneness referred to is that distinctive species of it on which the whole section proceeds as its basis—Israel’s oneness as a family. God had chosen them—them alone of all the nations of the earth—to be His peculiar treasure. If He had pleased, He might have chosen more; the residue of the Spirit was still with Him, by no means exhausted by that single effort. He could have either left them like others, or chosen others besides them. But He did not; He made one, one alone, to be peculiarly His own, setting it apart from the rest. And wherefore that one? Simply that He might have a godly seed; that they might be an holy people, and transmit the true fear of God from generation to generation. How base, then, how utterly subversive of God’s purposes concerning them, to act as if no such separation had taken place,—to put away their proper wives, and by heathenish alliances bring into the bosom of their families the very defilement and corruption against which God had especially called them to contend! Such was this prophet’s understanding of the covenant made with the fathers of the Israelitish people; and no other view of it, we venture to say, would ever have prevailed, if its nature had been sought primarily in those fundamental records which describe the procedure of God in bringing it originally into existence.
Section Sixth.—The Inheritance Destined For The Heirs Of Blessing. THE covenant made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, was connected not only with a seed of blessing, but also with an inheritance of blessing destined for their possession. And in order to get a correct view both of the immediate and of the ultimate bearing of this part of the covenant promise, it is not less necessary than in the other case, to consider the specific object proposed in its relation to the entire scheme of God, and especially to bear in mind, that it forms part of a series of arrangements in which the particular or the individual was selected with a view to the general, the universal. In respect to the good to be inherited, as well as in respect to the persons who might be called to inherit it, the end proposed on the part of God was from the first of the most comprehensive nature; and if for a time there was an immediate narrowing of the field of promise, it could be only for the sake of an ultimate expansion. To see more distinctly the truth of this, it may be proper to take a brief retrospect of the past. From the outset, the earth, in its entire extent and compass, was given for the domain and the heritage of man. He was placed in paradise as his proper home. There he had the throne of his kingdom, but not that he might be pent up within that narrow region; rather that he might from that, as the seat of his empire and the centre of his operations, go forth upon the world around, and bring it under his sway. His calling was to multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; so that it might become to its utmost bounds an extended and peopled paradise. But when the fall entered, though the calling was not withdrawn, nor the possession finally lost, yet man’s relative position was changed. He had now, not to work from paradise as a rightful king and lord, but from the blighted outfield of nature’s barrenness to work as a servant, in the hope of ultimatelyreaching a new and better paradise than he had lost. The first promise of grace, and the original symbols of worship, viewed in connection with the facts of history, out of which they grew, presented him with the prospect of an ultimate recovery from the evils of sin and death, and put him in the position of an expectant through faith in God, and toil and suffering in the flesh, of good things yet to come. The precise hope he cherished respecting these good things, or the inheritance he actually looked for, would at first naturally take shape in his imagination from what he had lost. He would fancy, that though he must bear the deserved doom for his transgression, and return again to dust, yet the time would come, when, according to the revealed mercy and loving-kindness of God, the triumph of the adversary would be reversed, the dust of death would be again quickened into life, and the paradise of delight be occupied anew, with better hopes of continuance, and with enlarged dimensions suited to its destined possessors. He could scarcely have expected more with the scanty materials which faith and hope yet had to build upon; and with the grace revealed to him, he could scarcely, if really standing in faith and hope, have expected less.
We deem it incredible, that with the grant of the earth so distinctly made to man for his possession, and death so expressly appointed as the penalty of his yielding to the tempter, he should, as a subject of restoring grace, have looked for any other domain as the result of the Divine work in his behalf, than the earth itself, or for any other mode of entering on the recovered possession of it, than through a resurrection from the dead. For how should he have dreamt of a victory over evil in any other region than that where the evil had prevailed?Or how could the hope of restitution have formed itself in his bosom, excepting as a prospective reinstatement in the benefits he had forfeited?A paradise such as he had originally occupied, but prepared now for the occupation of redeemed multitudes,—made to embrace, it may be, the entire territory of the globe,—wrested for ever from the serpent’s brood, and rendered through all its borders beautiful and good: that, and nothing else, we conceive, must have been what the first race of patriarchal believers hoped and waited for, as the objective portion of good reserved for them. But in process of time the deluge came, changing to a considerable extent the outward appearance of the earth, and in certain respects also the government under which it was placed, and so preparing the way for a corresponding change in the hopes that were to be cherished of a coming inheritance. The old world then perished, leaving no remnant of its original paradise, any more than of the giant enormities which had caused it to groan, as in pain to be delivered. But the new world, cleansed and purified by the judgment of God, was now, without limit or restriction, given to Noah, as the saved head of mankind, that he might keep it for God, replenish and subdue it,—might work it, if such a thing were possible, into the condition of a second paradise. It soon became too manifest, how ever, that this was not possible; and that the righteousness of faith, of which Noah was heir, was still not that which could prevail to banish sin and death, corruption and misery, from the world. Another and better foundation yet remained to be laid for such a blessed prospect to be realized. But the promise of this very earth was nevertheless given for man’s inheritance, and with a promise securing it against any fresh destruction. The needed righteousness was somehow to be wrought upon it, and the region itself reclaimed so as to become a habitation of blessing. This was now the heritage of good set before mankind; to have this realized was the object which they were called of God to hope and strive for. And it was with this object before them,—an object, however, to which the events immediately subsequent to the deluge did not seem to be bringing them nearer, but rather to be carrying them more remote,—that the call to Abraham entered. This call, as we have already seen, was of the largest and most comprehensive nature as to the personal and subjective good it contemplated. It aimed at the bestowal of blessing—blessing, of course, in the Divine sense, including the fullest triumph over sin and death (for where these are, there can be but the beginnings or smaller drops of blessing); and the bestowal of them on Abraham and his lineal offspring, first and most copiously, but only as the more effectual way of extending them to all the families of mankind. The grand object of the covenant made with him was to render the world truly blessed in its inhabitants, himselfforming the immediate starting-point of the design, which was thereafter to grow and germinate, till the whole circle of humanity were embraced in its beneficent provisions. But in connection with this higher and grander object, there was singled out a portion of the earth for the occupation of his immediate descendants in a particular line—the more special line of blessing; and the conclusion is obvious, even before we go into an examination of particulars, that unless this select portion of the world were placed in utter disagreement with the higher ends of the covenant, it must have been but a stepping-stone to their accomplishment a kind of first-fruits of the proper good—the occupation of a part of the promised inheritance by a portion of the heirs of blessing to image and prepare for the inheritance of the whole by the entire company of the blessed. The particular must here also have been for the sake of the general, the universal, the ultimate.
Proceeding, however, to a closer view of the subject, we notice, first, the region actually selected for a possession of an inheritance to the covenant people. The land of Canaan occupied a place in the ancient world that entirely corresponded with the calling of such a people. It was of all lands the best adapted for a people who were at once to dwell in comparative isolation, and yet were to be in a position for acting with effect upon the other nations of the world. Hence it was said by Ezekiel, Ezekiel 5:5, to have been “set in the midst of the countries and the nations”—the umbilicus terrarum. In its immediate vicinity lay both the most densely-peopled countries and the greater and more influential states of antiquity—on the south, Egypt, and on the north and east, Assyria and Babylon, the Medes and the Persians. Still closer were the maritime states of Tyre and Sidon, whose vessels frequented every harbour then known to navigation, and whose colonies were planted in each of the three continents of the old world. And the great routes of inland commerce between the civilised nations of Asia and Africa lay either through a portion of the territory itself, or within a short distance of its borders. Yet, bounded as it was on the west by the Mediterranean, on the south by the desert, on the east by the valley of the Jordan with its two seas of Tiberias and Sodom, and on the north by the towering heights of Lebanon, the people who inhabited it might justly be said to dwell alone, while they had on every side points of contact with the most influential and distant nations. Then the land itself, in its rich soil and plentiful resources, its varieties of hill and dale, of river and mountain, its connection with the sea on one side and with the desert on another, rendered it a kind of epitome of the natural world, and fitted it peculiarly for being the home of those who were to be a pattern people to the nations of the earth. Altogether, it were impossible to conceive a region more wisely selected, and in itself more thoroughly adapted, for the purposes on account of which the family of Abraham were to be set apart. If they were faithful to their covenant engagements, they might there have exhibited, as on an elevated platform, before the world the bright exemplar of a people possessing the characteristics and enjoying the advantages of a seed of blessing. And the finest opportunities were, at the same time, placed within their reach of proving in the highest sense benefactors to mankind, and extending far and wide the interest of truth and righteousness. Possessing the elements of the world’s blessing, they were placed where these elements might tell most readily and powerfully on the world’s inhabitants; and the present possession of such a region was at once an earnest of the whole inheritance, and, as the world then stood, an effectual step towards its realization. Abraham, as the heir of Canaan, was thus also “the heir of the world,” considered as a heritage of blessing.—(Romans 4:13)
But, next, let us mark the precise words of the promise to Abraham concerning this inheritance. As it first occurs, it runs, “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee; and I will make of thee a great nation,” etc. (Genesis 12:1). Then, when he reached Canaan, the promise was renewed to him in these terms: “Unto thy seed will I give this land” (Genesis 12:7). More fully and definitely, after Lot separated from Abraham, was it again given: “Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art, northward, and southward, and east ward, and westward: for all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever” (Genesis 13:14-15). Again, in Genesis 15:7, “I am the Lord that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it;” and toward the close of the same chapter, it is said, “In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river.” In Genesis 17:1-27, the promise was formally ratified as a covenant, and sealed by the ordinance of circumcision; and there the words used respecting the inheritance are, “I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.” We read only of one occasion in the life of Isaac, when he received the promise of the inheritance; and the words then used were, “Unto thee, and unto thy seed, will I give all these countries; and I will perform the oath which I sware unto Abraham thy father” (Genesis 26:3). Such also were the words addressed to Jacob at Bethel, “I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed;” and in precisely the same terms was the promise again made to Jacob many years afterwards, as recorded in Genesis 35:12.
It cannot but appear striking, that to each one of these patriarchs successively, the promise of the land of Canaan should have been given, first to themselves, and then to their posterity; while, during their own lifetimes, they never were permitted to get beyond the condition of strangers and pilgrims, having no right to any possession within its borders, and obliged to purchase at the marketable value a small field for a burying ground. How shall we account for the promise, then, so uniformly running, “to thee,” and to “thy seed?” Some, as Ainsworth and Bush, tell us that and here is the same as even, to thee, even to thy seed; as if a man were all one with his off spring, or the name of the latter were but another name for himself! Gill gives a somewhat more plausible turn to it, thus: “God gave Abram the title to it now, and to them the possession of it for future times; gave him it to sojourn in now where he pleased, and for his posterity to dwell in hereafter.” But the gift was the land for an inheritance, not for a place of sojourn; and a title, which left him personally without a foot’s-breadth of possession, could not be regarded in that light as any real boon to him. Warburton, as usual, confronts the difficulty more boldly: “In the literal sense, it is a promise of the land of Canaan to Abraham and to his posterity; and in this sense it was literally fulfilled, though Abraham was never personally in possession of it: since Abraham and his posterity, put collectively, signify the RACE OF ABRAHAM; and that race possessed the land of Canaan. And surely God may be allowed to explain His own promise: now, though He tells Abraham, He would give him the land, yet, at the same time, He assures him that it would be many hundred years before his posterity should be put in possession of it (Genesis 15:13, etc.). And as concerning himself, that he should go to his fathers in peace, and be buried in a good old age. Thus we see, that both what God explained to be His meaning, and what Abraham understood Him to mean, was, that his posterity, after a certain time, should be led into possession of the land.”[137] [137]
We do not see how these questions can receive any satisfactory explanation, so long as no account is made of the personal standing of the patriarchs in regard to the promise. And there are others equally left without explanation. For no sufficient reason can be assigned on that hypothesis, for the extreme anxiety of Jacob and Joseph to have their bones carried to the sepulchre of their fathers, in the land of Canaan—betokening, as it evidently seemed to do, a conviction, that to them also be longed a personal interest in the land. Neither does it appear how the fact of Abraham and his immediate offspring, “confessing that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth,”—which they did no otherwise, that we are aware of, than by living as strangers and pilgrims in Canaan,—should have proved that they were looking for and desiring a better country, that is, an heavenly one. And then, strange to think, if nothing more were meant by the promise than the view now under consideration would imply, when the posterity who were to occupy the land did obtain possession of it, we find the men of faith taking up exactly the same confession as to their being strangers and pilgrims in it, which was witnessed by their, forefathers, who never had it in possession. Even after they became possessors, it seems they were still, like their wandering ancestors, expect ants and heirs of something better; and faith had to be exercised, lest they should lose the proper fulfilment of the promise (Psalms 39:12; Psalms 95:1-11; Psalms 119:19; 1 Chronicles 29:15). Surely if the earthly Canaan had been the whole inheritance they were war ranted to look for, after they were settled in it, the condition of pilgrims and strangers no longer was theirs—they had reached their proper destiny—they were dwelling in their appointed home—the promise had received its intended fulfilment.
These manifold difficulties and apparent inconsistencies will vanish—(and we see no other way in which they can be satisfactorily removed)—by supposing, what is certainly in accordance with the tenor of revelation, that the promise of Canaan as an inheritance to the people of God was part of a connected and growing scheme of preparatory arrangements, which were to have their proper outgoing and final termination in the establishment of Christ’s everlasting kingdom. Viewed thus, the grant of Canaan must be regarded as a kind of second Eden, a sacred region once more possessed in this fallen world—God’s own land—out of which life and blessing were to come for all lands the present type of a world restored and blessed. And if so, then we may naturally expect the following consequences to have arisen:—First, that whatever transactions may have taken place concerning the actual Canaan, these would be all ordered so as to subserve the higher design, in connection with which the appointment was made; and second, that as a sort of veil must have been allowed meanwhile to hang over this ultimate design (for the issue of redemption could not be made fully manifest till the redemption itself was brought in), a certain degree of dubiety would attach to some of the things spoken regarding it: these would appear strange or impossible, if viewed only in reference to the temporary inheritance; and would have the effect with men of faith, as no doubt they were intended, to compel the mind to break through the outward shell of the promise, and contemplate the rich kernel enclosed within. Thus the promise being made so distinctly and repeatedly to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, while personally they were allowed no settled footing in the inheritance bestowed, could scarcely fail to impress them, and their more pious descendants, with the conviction that higher and more important relations were included under those in which they stood to the land of Canaan during their earthly sojourn, and such as required another order of things to fulfil them. They must have been convinced, that for some great and substantial reason, not by a mere fiction of the imagination, they had been identified by God with their posterity as to their interest in the promised inheritance. And so they must have felt shut up to the belief, that when God’s purposes were completely fulfilled, His word of promise would be literally verified, and that their respective deaths should ultimately be found to raise no effectual barrier in the way of their actual share in the inheritance; as the same God who would have raised Isaac from the dead, had he been put to death, to maintain the integrity of His word, was equally able, on the same account, to raise them up.
Certainly the exact and perfect manner in which the other line of promise—that which respected a seed to Abraham—was fulfilled, gave reason to expect a fulfilment in regard to this also, in the most proper and complete sense. Abraham did not at first understand how closely God’s words were to be interpreted; and after waiting in vain for some years for the promised seed by Sarah, he began to think that God must have meant an offspring that should be his only by adoption, and seems to have thought of constituting the son of his steward his heir. Then, when admonished of his error in entertaining such a thought, and informed that the seed was to spring from his own loins, lie acceded, after another long period of fruitless waiting, to the proposal of Sarah regarding Hagar, under the impression, that though he was to be the father of the seed, yet it should not be by his proper wife; the expected good was to be obtained by a worldly expedient, and to become his only through a tortuous policy. Here again, however, he was admonished of error, commanded to cease from such unworthy devices, and walk in uprightness before God; was reminded that He who made the promise was the Almighty God, to whom, therefore, no impossibility connected with the age of Sarah could be of any moment, and assured that the long promised child was to be the son of him and his lawful spouse.[138] Now, when Abraham was thus taught to interpret one part of the promise in the most exact and literal sense, how natural was it to infer, that he must do the same also with the other part! If, when God said, “Thou shalt be the father of a seed,” it became clear that the word could receive nothing short of the strictest fulfilment; what else, what less, could be expected, when God said, “Thou shalt inherit this land,” than that the fulfilment was to be equally proper and complete? The providence of God, which furnished such an interpretation in the one case, could not but beget the conviction, that a similar principle of interpretation was to be applied to the other; and that as the promise of the inheritance was given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as well as to their seed, so it should be made good in their experience, not less than in that of their posterity.
[139] Sic habetur traditio Rab. Simai; quo loco astruit Lex resurrectionem mortuorum? Nempe ubi dicitur, “Aque etiam coustabilivi foedus meum cum ipsis, ut dem ipsis terram Canaan.” Non enim dicitur vobis sed ipsis. In the writings of the Greeks and Romans, especially those of the former, we find the distinction constantly drawn between matter and spirit, body and soul; and the one generally represented as having only elements of evil inhering in it, and the other elements of good. So far from looking for the resurrection of the body as necessary to the final well-being of men, full and complete happiness was held to be impossible so long as the soul was united to the body. Death was so far considered by them a boon, that it emancipated the ethereal principle from its prison-house; and their visions of future bliss, when such visions were entertained, presented to the eye of hope scenes of delight, in which the disembodied spirit alone was to find its satisfaction and repose. Hence it is quite natural to hear the better part of them speaking with contempt of all that concerned the body, looking upon death as a final as well as a happy release from its vile affections, and promising themselves a perennial enjoyment in the world of spirits. “In what way shall we bury you?” said Crito to Socrates, immediately before his death. “As you please,” was the reply. “I cannot, my friends, persuade Crito that I am the Socrates that is now conversing and ordering everything that has been said; but he thinks I am that man whom he will shortly see a corpse, and asks how you should bury me. But what I have all along been talking so much about that when I shall have drunk the poison, I shall no longer stay with you, but shall, forsooth, go away to certain felicities of the blest—this I seem to myself to have been saying in vain, whilst comforting at the same time you and myself.” And in another part of the same dialogue (Phaedo), after speaking of the impossibility of attaining to the true knowledge and discernment of things, so long as the soul is kept in the lumpish and impure body, he is represented as congratulating himself on the prospect now immediately before him: “If these things are true, there is much reason to hope, that he who has reached my present position shall there soon abundantly obtain that for the sake of which I have laboured so hard during this life; so that I encounter with a lively hope my appointed removal.” No doubt such representations give a highly coloured and far too favourable view of the expectations which the more speculative part of the heathen world cherished of a future state of being; for to most of them the whole was overshadowed with doubt and uncertainty too often,—indeed, the subject of absolute unbelief. But in this respect the idea it presents is perfectly correct, that so far as hope was exercised toward the future, it connected itself altogether with the condition and destiny of the soul; and so abhorrent was the thought of a resurrection of the body to their notions of future good, that Tertullian did not hesitate to affirm the heresy, which denied that Christian doctrine, to be the common result of the whole Gentile philosophy.[140] [140]
It was precisely the reverse with believers in ancient and primitive times. Their prospects of a blessed immortality were mainly associated with the resurrection of the body; and the dark period to them was the intermediate state between death and the resurrection, which even at a comparatively late stage in their history presented itself to their view as a state of gloom, silence, and forgetfulness. They contemplated man, not in the light in which an abstract speculative philosophy might regard him, but in the more natural and proper one of a compound being, to which matter as essentially belongs as spirit, and in the well-being of which there must unite the happy condition both of soul and body. Nay, the materials from which they had to form their views and prospects of a future state of being pointed most directly to the resurrection, and passed over in silence the period intervening between that and death. Thus, the primeval promise, that the seed of the woman should bruise the head of the serpent, taught them to live in expectation of a time when death should be swallowed up in victory; for death being the fruit of the serpent’s triumph, what else could his complete overthrow be than the reversal of death—the resurrection from the dead? So also the prophecy embodied in the emblems of the tree of life, still standing in the midst of the garden of Eden, with its way of approach meanwhile guarded by the flaming sword, and possessed by the cherubim of glory—implying, that when the spoiler should be himself spoiled, and the way of life should again be laid open for the children of promise, they should have access to the food of immortality, which they could only do by rising out of death and entering on the resurrection state. The same conclusion grew, as we have just seen, most naturally, and we may say inevitably, out of that portion of the promises made to the fathers of the Jewish race, which assured them of a personal inheritance in the land of Canaan; for dying, as they did, without having obtained any inheritance in it, how could the word of promise be verified to them, but by their being raised from the dead to receive what it warranted them to expect? In perfect accordance with these earlier intimations, or, as they may fitly be called, fundamental promises, we find, as we descend the stream of time, and listen to the more express utterances of prophecy regarding the hopes of the Church, that the grand point on which they are all made to centre is the resurrection from the dead; and it is so, doubtless, for the reason, that as death is from the first represented as the wages of sin, the evil pre-eminently under which humanity groans, so the abolition of death by mortality being swallowed up of life, is understood to carry in its train the restitution of all things. The Psalms, which are so full of the experiences and hopes of David, and other holy men of old, while they express only fear and discomfort in regard to the state after death, not unfrequently point to the resurrection from the dead as the great consummation of desire and expectation: “My flesh also shall rest in hope: for Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt Thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.”—Psalms 16:9-10. “Like sheep they are laid in the grave; death shall feed on them; and the upright shall have dominion over them in the morning; and their beauty shall consume in the grave from their dwelling. But God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave; for He shall receive me” (Psalms 49:14-15). The prophets, who are utterly silent regarding the state of the disembodied soul, speak still more explicitly of a resurrection from the dead, and evidently connect with it the brightest hopes of the Church. Thus Isaiah, “He will swallow up death in victory” (Isaiah 25:8); and again, “Thy dead men shall live, together with My dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust” (Isaiah 26:19). To the like effect, Hosea 13:14, “I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction.” The vision of the dry bones, in Ezekiel 37:1-28, whether understood of a literal resurrection from the state of the dead, or of a figurative resurrection, a political resuscitation from a downcast and degraded condition, strongly indicates, in either case, the characteristic nature of their future prospects. Then, finally, in Daniel we read, Daniel 12:1-13, not only that he was himself, after resting for a season among the dead, “to stand in his lot at the end of the days,” but also that at the great crisis of the Church’s history, when they should be for ever rescued from the power of the enemy, “many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth should awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”
Besides these direct and palpable proofs of a resurrection in the Jewish Scriptures, and of the peculiar place it holds there, the Rabbinical and modern Jews, it is well known, refer to many others as inferentially teaching the same doctrine. That the earlier Jews were not behind them, either in the importance they attached to the doctrine, or in their persuasion of its frequent recurrence in the Old Testament Scriptures, we may assuredly gather from the tenacity with which all but the Sadducees evidently held it in our Lord’s time, and the ready approval which He met with when inferring it from the declaration made to Moses, “I am the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.” It is nothing to the purpose, therefore, to allege, as has often been done, against any clear or well-grounded belief on the part of the ancient Jews regarding a future and immortal state of being, such passages as speak of the darkness, silence, and nothingness of the condition immediately subsequent to death, and during the sojourn of the body in the tomb; for that was precisely the period in respect to which their light failed them. Of a heathenish immortality, which ascribed to the soul a perpetual existence separate from the body, and considered its happiness, when thus separate, as the ultimate good of man, they certainly knew and believed nothing. But we are persuaded no tenet was more firmly and sacredly held among them from the earliest periods of their history, than that of the resurrection from the dead, as the commencement of a final and everlasting portion of good to the people of God. And when the Jewish doctors gave to the resurrection of the dead a place among the thirteen fundamental articles of their faith, and cut off from all inheritance in a future state of felicity those who deny it, we have no reason to regard the doctrine as attaining to a higher place in their hands, than it did with their fathers before the Christian era.[141] [141]
There was something more, however, in the Jewish faith concerning the resurrection, than its being simply held as an article in their creed, and held to be a fact that should one day be realized in the history of the Church. It stood in the closest connection with the promise made to the fathers, as some of the foregoing testimonies show, and especially with the work and advent of Messiah. They not only believed that there would be a resurrection of the dead, to a greater or less extent, when Messiah came (see Lightfoot, Hor. Heb. John 1:21, John 5:25), but that His work, especially as regards the promised inheritance, could only be carried into effect through the resurrection.
Levi[142] holds it as a settled point, that “the resurrection of the dead will be very near the time of the redemption,” meaning by the redemption the full and final enjoyment of all blessing in the land of promise, and that such is the united sense of all the prophets who have spoken of the times of Messiah. In this, indeed, he only expresses the opinion commonly entertained by Jewish writers, who constantly assert that there will be a resurrection of the whole Jewish race, to meet and rejoice with Christ, when He comes to Jerusalem, and who often thrust forward their views regarding it, when there is no proper occasion to do so. Thus, in Sohar, Genes, fol. 77, as quoted by Schoettgen, II. p. 367, R. Nehorai is reported to have said, on Abraham’s speaking to his servant, Genesis 24:2, “We are to understand the servant of God, his senior domus. And who is He? Metatron (Messiah), who, as we have said, will bring forth the souls from their sepulchres.” But a higher authority still may be appealed to. For the Apostle to the Gentiles thus expresses—and with evident approval as to the general principle the mind—of his countrymen in regard to the Messiah and the resurrection: “I now stand and am judged for the hope of the promise made of God unto our fathers: unto which promise our twelve tribes, instantly serving God day and night, hope to come: for which hope’s sake, king Agrippa, I am accused of the Jews. Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God should raise the dead?”[143] The connection in which the resurrection of the dead is here placed with the great promise of a Messiah, for which the Jews are represented as so eagerly and intently looking, evidently implies, that the two were usually coupled together in the Jewish faith, nay, that the one could reach its proper fulfilment only through the performance of the other; and that in believing on a Messiah risen from the dead, the Apostle was acting in perfect accordance with the hopes of his nation.
[142] Dissertations on the Prophecies of Old Test., vol. i., p. 56.
Nothing less than this certainly is taught in what is said of the inheritance, as expected by the patriarchs, in the Epistle to the Hebrews: “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country. And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned. But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; for He hath prepared for them a city.”[144] Without entering into any minute commentary on this passage, it cannot but be regarded as perfectly conclusive of two points: First, that Abraham, and the heirs with him of the same promise, did understand and believe, that the inheritance secured to them under the promise of Canaan (for that was the only word spoken to them of an inheritance) was one in which they had a personal interest. And then, secondly, that the inheritance, as it was to be occupied and enjoyed by them, was to be, not a temporary, but a final one,—one that might fitly be designated a “heavenly country,” a city built by Divine hands, and based on immovable foundations, in short, the ultimate and proper resting-place of redeemed and glorified natures. This was what these holy patriarchs expected and desired,—what they were warranted to expect and desire;—for their conduct in this respect is the subject of commendation, and is justified on the special ground, that otherwise God must have been ashamed to be called their God. And, finally, it was what they found contained in the promise to them, of an inheritance in the land in which they were pilgrims and strangers; for to that promise alone could they look for the special ground of the hopes they cherished of a sure and final possession.
[145] See Appendix D.
It is true, that the Church of God, the company of sound and genuine believers, is sometimes called the inheritance or purchased possession of God. In Old Testament Scripture His people are styled His “heritage,” “His treasure;” and in New Testament Scripture we find St Peter addressing them as “a peculiar people,” or literally, a people for a possession—namely, a possession of God, acquired or purchased by the precious blood of His dear Son. The question here, however, is not of what may be called God’s inheritance, but of ours; not of our redemption from the bondage of evil as a possession of God, which He seeks to enjoy free from all evil, but of that which we are ourselves to possess and occupy as our final portion. And as we could with no propriety be called our own inheritance, or our own possession, it must be something apart from, and out of ourselves, which is here to be understood,—not a state of being to be held, but a portion of blessing and glory to be enjoyed.
Now, whatever the inheritance or possession may be in itself, and whatever the region where it is to be enjoyed, when it is spoken of as needing to be redeemed, we are evidently taught to regard it as something that has been alienated from us, but is again to be made ours; not a possession altogether new, but an old possession, lost, and again to be reclaimed from the powers of evil, which now overmaster and destroy it. So was it certainly with our persons. They were sold under sin. With our loss of righteousness before God, we lost at the same time our spiritual freedom, and all that essentially belonged to the pure and blessed life, in the possession of which we were created. Instead of this, we became subject to the tyrannous dominion of the prince of darkness, holding us captive in our souls to the foul and wretched bondage of sin, and in our bodies to the mortality and corruption of death. The redemption of our persons is just their recovery from this lost and ruinous state, to the freedom of God’s children, and the blessedness of immortal life in His presence and glory. It proceeds at every step by acts of judgment upon the great adversary and oppressor, who took advantage of the evil, and ever seeks to drive it to the uttermost. And when the work shall be completed by the redemption of the body from the power of the grave, there shall then be the breaking up of the last bond of oppression that lay upon our natures, the putting down of the last enemy, that the son of wickedness may no longer vex or injure us. In this redemption-process, which is already begun upon the people of God, and shall be consummated in the glories of the resurrection, it is the same persons, the same soul and body, which have experience both of the evil and of the good. Though the change is so great and wonderful, that it is sometimes called a new creation, it is not in the sense of anything being brought into existence, which previously had no being. Such language is simply used on account of the happy and glorious transformation that is made to pass upon the natures which already exist, but exist only in a state of misery and oppression. And when the same language is applied to the inheritance, which is used of the persons of those who are to enjoy it, what can this indicate, but that the same things are true concerning it?The bringing in of that inheritance, in its finished state of fulness and glory, is in like manner called “the making of all things new;” but it is so called only in respect to the wonderful transformation which is to be wrought upon the old things, which are thereby to receive another constitution, and present another aspect, than they were wont to do before. For that the possession is to be redeemed, bespeaks it as a thing to be recovered, not to be made,—a thing already in being, though so changed from its original destination, so marred and spoiled, overlaid with so many forms of evil, and so far from serving the ends for which it is required, that it may be said to be alienated from us, in the hands of the enemy, for the prosecution of his purposes of evil.
Now, what is it, of which this can be affirmed? If it is said heaven, and by that is meant what is commonly understood, some region far removed from this lower world, in the sightless realms of ether, then we ask, was heaven in that sense ever man’s? Has it become obnoxious to any evils, from which it must be delivered? or has it fallen into the hands of an enemy and an oppressor, from whose evil sway it must again be redeemed? None of these things surely can be said of such a heaven. It would be an altogether new inheritance, a possession never held, consequently never lost, and incapable of being redeemed. And there is nothing that answers such a description, or can possibly realize the conditions of such an inheritance, but what lies within the bounds and compass of this earth itself, with which the history of man has hitherto been connected both in good and evil, and where all the possession is, that he can properly be said either to have held or to have lost.
Let us again recur to the past. Man’s original inheritance was a lordship or dominion, stretching over the whole earth, but extending no farther. It entitled him to the ministry of all creatures within its borders, and the enjoyment of all fruits and productions upon its surface—one only excepted, for the trial of his obedience.—(Genesis 1:28-31; Psalms 8:1-9) When he fell, he fell from his dominion, as well as from his purity; the inheritance departed from him; he was driven from paradise, the throne and palace of his kingdom; labour, servitude, and suffering, became his portion in the world; he was doomed to be a bondsman, a hewer of wood and drawer of water, on what was formed to be his inheritance; and all that he has since been able, by hard toil and industry, to acquire, is but a partial and temporary command over some fragments of what was at first all his own. Nor is that the whole. For with man’s loss of the inheritance, Satan was permitted to enter, and extend his usurped sway over the domain from which man has been expelled as its proper lord. And this he does by filling the world with agencies and works of evil, —spreading disorder through the elements of nature, and disaffection among the several orders of being,—above all, corrupting the minds of men, so as to lead them to cast off the authority of God, and to use the things he confers on them for their own selfish ends and purposes, for the injury and oppression of their fellow-men, for the encouragement of sin and suppression of the truth of God,—for rendering the world, in short, as far as possible, a region of darkness and not of light, a kingdom of Satan and not of God, a theatre of malice, corruption, and disorder, not of love, harmony, and blessedness.
Now, as the redemption of man’s person consists in his being rescued from the dominion of Satan—from the power of sin in his soul, and from the reign of death in his body, which are the two forms of Satan’s dominion over man’s nature; what can the redemption of the inheritance be, but the rescuing of this earth from the manifold ills which, through the instrumentality of Satan, have come to lodge in its bosom,—purging its elements of all mischief and disorder,—changing it from being the vale of tears and the charnel-house of death, into a paradise of life and blessing,—restoring to man, himself then redeemed and fitted for the honour, the sceptre of a real dominion over all its fulness,—in a word, rendering it in character and design what it was on creation’s morn, when the sons of God shouted for joy, and God Himself looked with satisfaction on the goodness and order and beauty which pervaded this portion of His universe?To do such a work as this upon the earth, would manifestly be to redeem the possession which man by disobedience forfeited and lost, and a new title to which has been purchased by Christ for all His spiritual seed; for were that done, the enemy would be completely foiled and cast out, and man’s proper inheritance restored. But some are perhaps ready to ask, Is that, then, all the inheritance that the redeemed have to look for?Is their abode still to be upon earth, and their portion of good to be confined to what may be derived from its material joys and occupations?Is paradise restored to be simply the re-establishment and enlargement of paradise lost?We might reply to such questions by putting similar ones regarding the persons of the redeemed. Are these still, after all, to be the same persons they were during the days of their sojourn on earth?Is the soul, when expatiating amid the glorious scenes of eternity, to live in the exercise of the same powers and faculties which it employed on the things of time? And is the outward frame, in which it is to lodge, and act, and enjoy itself, to be that very tabernacle which it bore here in weakness, and which it left behind to rot and perish in the tomb?Would any one feel at a moment’s loss to answer such questions in the affirmative? Does it in any respect shock our feelings, or lower the expectations we feel warranted to cherish concerning our future state, when we think that the very soul and body which together constitute and make up the being we now are, shall also constitute and make up the being we are to be hereafter?Assuredly not; for however little we know what we are to be hereafter, we are not left in ignorance that both soul and body shall be freed from all evil; and not only so, but in the process shall be unspeakably refined and elevated. We know it is the purpose of God to magnify in us the riches of His grace by raising our natures higher than the fall has brought them low—to glorify, while He redeems them, and so to render them capable of spheres of action and enjoyment beyond not only what eye has seen or ear has heard, but even what has entered into the mind of man to conceive. And why may we not think and reason thus also, concerning the inheritance which these redeemed natures are to occupy? Why may not God do a like work of purification and refinement on this solid earth, so as to transform and adapt it into a fit residence for man in glory? Why may not, why should not, that which has become for man, as fallen, the house of bondage and the field of ruin, become also for man redeemed the habitation of peace and the region of pre-eminent delight?Surely He, who from the very stones can raise up children unto Abraham, and who will bring forth from the noisome corruption of the tomb, forms clothed with honour and majesty, can equally change the vile and disordered condition of the world, as it now is, and make it fit to be “the house of the glory of His kingdom,”—a world where the eye of redeemed manhood shall be regaled with sights of surpassing loveliness, and his ear ravished with sounds of sweetest melody, and his desires satisfied with purest delight,—ay, a world, it may be, which, as it alone of all creation’s orbs has been honoured to bear the footsteps of an incarnate God, and witness the performance of His noblest work, so shall it be chosen as the region around which He will pour the richest manifestations of His glorious presence, and possibly send from it, by the ministry of His redeemed, communications of love and kindness to the farthest bounds of His habitable universe!
No; when rightly considered, it is not a low and degrading view of the inheritance which is reserved for the heirs of salvation, to place it in the possession of this very earth which we now inhabit, after it shall have been redeemed and glorified. I feel it for myself to be rather an ennobling and comforting thought; and were I left to choose, out of all creation’s bounds, the place where my redeemed nature is to find its local habitation, enjoy its Redeemer’s presence, and reap the fruits of His costly purchase, I would prefer none to this. For if destined to so high a purpose, I know it will be made in all respects what it should be,—the paradise of delight, the very heaven of glory and blessing, which I desire and need. And then, the connection between what it now is, and what it shall have become, must impart to it an interest which can belong to no other region in the universe. If anything could enhance our exaltation to the lordship of a glorious and blessed inheritance, it would surely be the feeling of possessing it in the very place where we were once miserable bondsmen of sin and corruption. And if anything should dispose us to bear meekly our present heritage of evil, to quicken our aspirations after the period of deliverance, and to raise our affections above the vain and perishable things around us, it should be the thought that all we can now either have or experience from the world is part of a possession forfeited and accursed, but that it only waits for the transforming power of God to be changed into the inheritance of the saints in light, when heaven and earth shall be mingled into one. But if this renovated earth is to be itself the inheritance of the redeemed,—if it, in the first instance at least, is to be the heaven where they are to reap life everlasting, how, it may be asked, can heaven be spoken of as above us, and represented as the higher region of God’s presence?Such language is never, that we are aware of, used in Scripture to denote the final dwelling-place of God’s people; and if it were used there, as it often is in popular discourse, it would need, of course, to be understood with that limitation which requires to be put upon all our more definite descriptions of a future world. To regard expressions of the kind referred to, as determining our final abode to be over our heads, were to betray a childish ignorance of the fact, that what is such by day, is the reverse of what is so by night. Such language properly denotes the superior nature of the heavenly inheritance, and not its relative position. God can make any region of His universe a heaven, since heaven is there, where He manifests His presence and glory; and why might He not do so here, as well as in any other part of creation?—But is it not said, that the kingdom in which the redeemed are to live and reign for ever, was prepared for them before the foundation of the world; and how, then, can the scene of it be placed on this earth, still waiting to be redeemed for the purpose? The preparation there meant, however, cannot possibly be an actual fitting up of the place which believers are to occupy with their Lord; for wherever it is, the Apostle tells us it still needs to be redeemed: in that sense it is not yet ready; and Christ Himself said, when on the eve of leaving the world, that lie was going to prepare it, as He does by directing, on His throne of glory, the events which are to issue in its full establishment. Still, from the first it might be said to be prepared, because destined for Christ and His elect people in the mind of God, even as they were all chosen in Him before the foundation of the world; and every successive act in the history of the mediatorial kingdom is another step toward the accomplishment of the purpose.—Are we not again told, however, that the earth is to be destroyed, its elements made to melt with fervent heat, and all its works consumed?Unquestionably this is said, though not by any means necessarily implying that the earth is really to be annihilated. We know that God is perpetually causing changes to pass over the works of His hands; but that He actually annihilates any, we have no ground, either in nature or in Scripture, to suppose. If in the latter, we are told of man’s body, that it perishes, and is consumed by the moth; yet of what are we more distinctly assured, than that it is not doomed to absolute destruction, but shall live again?When we read of the old world being destroyed by the flood, we know that the material fabric of the earth continued as before. Indeed, much the same language that is applied to the earth in this respect, is also extended to the heavens themselves; for they too are represented as ready to pass away, and to be changed as a vesture, and the promise speaks of new heavens as well as a new earth. And in regard to this earth in particular, there is nothing in the language used concerning it to prevent us from believing, that the fire which, in the day of God’s judgment, is to burst forth with consuming violence, may, like the waters of the deluge, and in a far higher respect than they, act as an element of purification—dissolving, indeed, the present constitution of things, and leaving not a wreck behind of all we now see and handle, but at the same time rectifying and improving the powers of nature, refining and elevating the whole framework of the earth, and impressing on all that belongs to it a transcendent, imperishable glory; so that in condition and appearance it shall be substantially a new world, and one as far above what it now is, as heaven is above the earth.
There is nothing, then, in the other representations of Scripture, which appears, when fairly considered, to raise any valid objection against the renovated earth being the ultimate inheritance of the heirs of promise. And there is much to shut us up to the conclusion that it is so. We have enlarged on one testimony of inspiration, not because it is the only or the chief one on the subject, but because it is so explicit, that it seems decisive of the question. For an inheritance which has been already acquired or purchased, but which must be redeemed before it can really be our possession, can be understood of nothing but that original domain which sin brought, together with man, into the bondage of evil at the fall. And of what else can we understand the representation in Psalms 8:1-9, as interpreted by the pen of inspiration itself, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, Hebrews 2:5-9, and in 1 Corinthians 15:27-28? These passages in the New Testament put it beyond a doubt, that the idea of perfect and universal dominion delineated in the Psalm, is to be realized in the world to come, over which Christ, as the head of redeemed humanity, is to rule, in company with His redeemed people. The representation itself in the Psalm, is evidently borrowed from the first chapter of Genesis, and, considered as a prophecy of good things to come, or a prediction of the dignity and honour already obtained for man in Christ, and hereafter to be revealed, it may be regarded as simply presenting to our view the picture of a restored and renovated creation. “It is just that passage in Genesis which describes the original condition of the earth,” to use the words of Hengstenberg, “turned into a prayer for us,” and we may add, into an object of hope and expectation. When that prayer is fulfilled,—in other words, when the natural and moral evils entailed by the fall have been abolished, and the earth shall stand to man, when redeemed and glorified, in a similar relation to what it did at the birth of creation,—then shall the hope we now possess of an inheritance of glory be turned into enjoyment. In Isaiah 11:6-9, the final results of Messiah’s reign are in like manner delineated under the aspect of a world which has obtained riddance of all the disorders introduced by sin, and is restored to the blessed harmony and peace which characterized it when God pronounced it very good. And still more definitely, though with reference to the same aspect of things, the Apostle Peter (Acts 3:21) represents the time of Christ’s second coming as “the time of the restitution of all things,” that is, when everything should be restored to its pristine condition,—the same condition in kind, all pure and good, glorious and blessed, but higher in degree, as it is the design and tendency of redemption to ennoble whatsoever it touches.[147]
[147]
It is precisely on the same object, a redeemed and glorified earth, that the Apostle Paul, in Romans 8:1-39, fixes the mind of believers as the terminating point of their hopes of glory. An incomparable glory is to be revealed in them; and in connection with that, “the deliverance of a suffering creation from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the sons of God.” What can this deliverance be, but what is marked in the Epistle to the Ephesians, as “the redemption of the purchased possession?” Nor is it possible to connect with anything else the words of Peter in his second Epistle, where, after speaking of the dreadful conflagration which is to consume all that belongs to the earth in its present form, he adds,—as if expressly to guard against supposing that he meant the actual and entire destruction of this world as the abode of man,—“Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for new heavens, and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.”
It is only by understanding the words of Christ Himself, “The meek shall inherit the earth,” of the earth in that new condition, its state of blessedness and glory, that any full or adequate sense can be attached to them. He could not surely mean the earth as it then was, or as it is to be during any period of its existence, while sin and death reign in it. So long as it is in that condition, not only will the saints of God have many things to suffer in it, as our Lord immediately foretold, when He spake of the persecutions for righteousness sake which His people should have to endure, and on account of which He bade them look for their “reward in heaven;” but all the treasure it contains must be of the moth-eaten, perishable kind, which they are expressly forbidden to covet, and the earth itself must be that city without continuance, in contrast to which they are called to seek one to come. To speak, therefore, as many commentators do, of the tendency of piety in general, and of a mild and gracious disposition in particular, to secure for men a prosperous and happy life on earth, is to say comparatively little as regards the fulfilment of the promise, that they shall “inherit the earth.” If it could even command for them the whole that earth now can give, would Christ on that account have called them blessed?Would he not rather have warned them to beware of the deceitfulness of riches, and the abundance of honours thus likely to flow into their bosom? To be blessed in the earth as an inheritance, must import that the earth has become to them a real and proper good, such as it shall be when it has been transformed into a fit abode for redeemed natures. This view is also confirmed, and apparently rendered as clear and certain as language can make it, by the representations constantly given by Christ and the inspired writers, of His return to the earth and manifestation on it in glory, as connected with the last scenes and final issues of His kingdom. When He left the world, it was as a man going into a far country, from which He was to come again;[148] the heaven received Him at His resurrection, but only until the times of the restitution of all things;[149] the period of His residence within the veil, is coincident with that during which His people have to maintain a hidden life, and is to be followed by another, in which they and He together are to be manifested in glory.[150] And in the book of Revelation, while unquestionably the scenes are described in figurative language, yet when exact localities are mentioned as the places where the scenes are to be realized, and that in connection with a plain description of the condition of those who are to have part in them, we are compelled by all the ordinary rules of composition to regard such localities as real and proper habitations. What, then, can we make of the ascription of praise from the elders, representatives of a redeemed church, when they give glory to the Messiah, as “having made them kings and priests unto God, and they shall reign with Him upon the earth?” Or what of the closing scenes, where the Evangelist sees a new heaven and a new earth in the room of those which had passed away, and the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven to settle on the renovated earth, and the tabernacle of God fixed amongst men?[151] Granting that the delineations of the book are a succession of pictures, drawn from the relations of things in the former ages of the world, and especially under the Old Testament economy, and that the fulfilment to be looked for is not as of a literal description, but as of a symbolical representation, yet there must be certain fixed landmarks as to time and place, persons and objects, which, in their natures or their names, are so clearly defined, that by them the relation of one part to another must be arranged and interpreted. For example, in the above quotations, we cannot doubt who are kings and priests, or with whom they are to reign; and it were surely strange, if there could be any doubt of the theatre of their dominion, when it is so expressly denominated the earth. And still more strange, if, when heaven and earth are mentioned relatively to each other, and the scene of the Church’s future glory fixed upon the latter as contradistinguished from the former, earth should yet stand for heaven, and not for itself. Indeed, the most striking feature in the representations of the Apocalypse is the uniformity with which they connect the higher grade of blessing with earth, and the lower with the world of spirits. As Hengstenberg has justly remarked on Revelation 20:4-5, it invariably points to a double stage of blessedness,—the one awaiting believers immediately after their departure out of this life, the other what they are to receive when they enter the New Jerusalem, and reign with Christ in glory. But we find the same in our Lord’s teaching, as when He said to the thief on the cross, “To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise,” and yet pointed His disciples to the state of things on earth after the resurrection for their highest reward.—(Matthew 19:28) And, on the whole, we are forced to conclude with Usteri, that “the conception of a transference of the perfected kingdom of God into the heavens is, properly speaking, modern, seeing that, according to Paul and the Apocalypse (and, he might also have added, Peter and Christ Himself), the seat of the kingdom of God is the earth, inasmuch as that likewise partakes in the general renovation.”[152] [148] Matthew 25:14
Having now closed our investigation, we draw the following conclusions from it.
1. The earthly Canaan was neither designed by God, nor from the first was it understood by His people to be the ultimate and proper inheritance which they were to occupy; things having been spoken and hoped for concerning it which plainly could not be realized within the bounds of Canaan.
2. The inheritance was one which could be enjoyed only by those who had become the children of the resurrection, themselves fully redeemed in soul and body from all the effects and consequences of sin,—made more glorious and blessed, indeed, than if they had never sinned, because constituted after the image of the heavenly Adam. And as the inheritance must correspond with the inheritor, it can only be man’s original possession restored,—the earth redeemed from the curse which sin brought on it, and, like man himself, rendered exceedingly more beautiful and glorious than in its primeval state,—the fit abode of a Church made like, in all its members, to the Son of God.
3. The occupation of the earthly Canaan by the natural seed of Abraham was a type, and no more than a type, of this occupation by a redeemed Church of her destined inheritance of glory; and consequently everything concerning the entrance of the former on their temporary possession, was ordered so as to represent and foreshadow the things which belong to the Church’s establishment in her permanent possession. Hence, between the giving of the promise, which, though it did not terminate in the land of Canaan, yet included that, and through it prospectively exhibited the better inheritance, a series of important events intervened, which are capable of being fully and properly explained in no other way than by means of their typical bearing on the things hereafter to be disclosed respecting that better inheritance. If we ask, why did the heirs of promise wander about so long as pilgrims, and withdraw to a foreign region before they were allowed to possess the land, and not rather, like a modern colony, quietly spread, without strife or bloodshed, over its surface, till the whole was possessed?Or why were they suffered to fall under the dominion of a foreign power, from whose cruel oppression they needed to be redeemed, with terrible executions of judgment on the oppressor, before the possession could be theirs?Or why, before that event also, should they have been put under the discipline of law, having the covenant of Sinai, with its strict requirements and manifold obligations of service, superadded to the covenant of grace and promise?Or why, again, should their right to the inheritance itself have to be vindicated from a race of occupants who had been allowed for a time to keep possession of it, and whose multiplied abominations had so polluted it, that nothing short of their extermination could render it a fitting abode for the heirs of promise?The full and satisfactory answer to all such questions can only be given by viewing the whole in connection with the better things of a higher dispensation, as the first part of a plan which was to have its counterpart and issue in the glories of a redeemed creation, and for the final results of which the Church needed to be prepared by standing in similar relations, and passing through like experiences, in regard to an earthly inheritance. No doubt, with one and all of these there were connected reasons and results for the time then present, amply sufficient to justify every step in the process, when considered simply by itself. But it is only when we take the whole as a glass, in which to see mirrored the far greater things which from the first were in prospect, that we can get a comprehensive view of the mind of God in appointing them, and know the purposes which He chiefly contemplated. For example, the fact of Abraham and his immediate descendants being appointed to wander as pilgrims through the land of Canaan, without being allowed to occupy any part of it as their own possession, may be partly explained, though in that view it must appear somewhat capricious, by its being considered as a trial to their own faith, and an act of forbearance and mercy toward the original possessors, whose iniquities were not yet full. But if we thus find grounds of reason to explain why it may have been so ordered, when we come to look upon the things which happened to them, as designed to image other things which were afterwards to belong to the relation of God’s people to a higher and better inheritance, we see it was even necessary that those transactions should have been so ordered, and that it would have been unsuitable for the heirs of promise, either entering at once on the possession, or living as pilgrims and expectants, anywhere but within its borders. For thus alone could their experience fitly represent the case of God’s people in Gospel times, who have not only to wait long for the redemption of the purchased possession, but while they wait, must walk up and down as pilgrims in the very region which they are hereafter to use as their own, when it shall have been delivered from the powers of evil who now hold it in bondage, and purged from their abominations. Hence, if they know aright their relation to the world as it now is, and their calling as the heirs of promise, they must sit loose to the things of earth, even as the patriarchs did to the land of their sojourn,—must feel that it cannot be the place of their rest so long as it is polluted, and that they must stedfastly look for the world to come as their proper home and possession. And thus also the whole series of transactions which took place between the confirmation of the covenant of promise with Jacob, and the actual possession of the land promised, and especially of course the things which concerned that greatest of all the transactions, the revelation of the law from Sinai, is to be regarded as a delineation in the type, of the way and manner in which the heirs of God are to obtain the inheritance of the purchased possession. Meanwhile, apart from these later transactions, there are two important lessons which the Church may clearly gather from what appears in the first heirs of promise, and which she ought never to lose sight of:—First, that the inheritance, come when and how it may, is the free gift of God, bestowed by Him, as sovereign lord and proprietor, on those whom He calls to the fellowship of His grace: And, second, that the hope of the in heritance must exist as an animating principle in their hearts, influencing all their procedure. Their spirit and character must be such as become those who are the expectants as well as heirs of that better country, which is an heavenly; nor can Christ ever be truly formed in the heart, until He be formed as “the hope of glory.”