THE BURNING BUSH.
Exodus 2:23 -Exodus 3
"In process of time the king of Egypt died,"
probably the great Raamses, no other of whose dynasty had a reign
which extended over the indicated period of time. If so, he had
while living every reason to expect an immortal fame, as the
greatest among Egyptian kings, a hero, a conqueror on three
continents, a builder of magnificent works. But he has only won an
immortal notoriety. "Every stone in his buildings was cemented in
human blood." The cause he persecuted has made deathless the
banished refugee, and has gibbeted the great monarch as a tyrant,
whose misplanned severities wrought the ruin of his successor and
his army. Such are the reversals of popular judgment: and such the
vanity of fame. For all the contemporary fame was his.
"The children of Israel sighed by reason of the
bondage, and they cried." Another monarch had come at last, a change
after sixty-seven years, and yet no change for them! It filled up
the measure of their patience, and also of the iniquity of Egypt. We
are not told that their cry was addressed to the Lord; what we read
is that it reached Him, Who still overhears and pities many a sob,
many a lament, which ought to have been addressed to Him, and is
not. Indeed, if His compassion were not to reach men until they had
remembered and prayed to Him, who among us would ever have learned
to pray to Him at all? Moreover He remembered His covenant with
their forefathers, for the fulfilment of which the time had now
arrived. "And God saw the children of Israel, and God took knowledge
of them."
These were not the cries of religious individuals,
but of oppressed masses. It is therefore a solemn question to ask
How many such appeals ascend from Christian England? Behold, the
hire of labourers ... held back by fraud crieth out. The half-paid
slaves of our haste to be rich, and the victims of our drinking
institutions, and of hideous vices which entangle and destroy the
innocent and unconscious, what cries to heaven are theirs! As surely
as those which St. James records, these have entered into the ears
of the Lord of Sabaoth. Of these sufferers every one is His own by
purchase, most of them by a covenant and sacrament more solemn than
bound Him to His ancient Israel. Surely He hears their groaning. And
all whose hearts are touched with compassion, yet who hesitate
whether to bestir themselves or to remain inert while evil is
masterful and cruel, should remember the anger of God when Moses
said, "Send, I pray Thee, by whom Thou wilt send." The Lord is not
indifferent. Much less than other sufferers should those who know
God be terrified by their afflictions. Cyprian encouraged the Church
of his time to endure even unto martyrdom, by the words recorded of
ancient Israel, that the more they afflicted them, so much the more
they became greater and waxed stronger. And he was right. For all
these things happened to them for ensamples, and were written for
our admonition.
It is further to be observed that the people were
quite unconscious, until Moses announced it afterwards, that they
were heard by God. Yet their deliverer had now been prepared by a
long process for his work. We are not to despair because relief does
not immediately appear: though He tarry, we are to wait for Him.
While this anguish was being endured in Egypt, Moses
was maturing for his destiny. Self-reliance, pride of place, hot and
impulsive aggressiveness, were dying in his bosom. To the education
of the courtier and scholar was now added that of the shepherd in
the wilds, amid the most solemn and awful scenes of nature, in
solitude, humiliation, disappointment, and, as we learn from the
Epistle to the Hebrews, in enduring faith. Wordsworth has a
remarkable description of the effect of a similar discipline upon
the good Lord Clifford. He tells--
"How he, long forced in humble paths to go,
Was softened into feeling, soothed and tamed.
"Love had he found in huts where poor men lie,
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.
"In him the savage virtues of the race,
Revenge, and all ferocious thoughts, were dead;
Nor did he change, but kept in lofty place
The wisdom which adversity had bred."
There was also the education of advancing age, which
teaches many lessons, and among them two which are essential to
leadership,--the folly of a hasty blow, and of impulsive reliance
upon the support of mobs. Moses the man-slayer became exceeding
meek; and he ceased to rely upon the perception of his people that
God by him would deliver them. His distrust, indeed, became as
excessive as his temerity had been, but it was an error upon the
safer side. "Behold, they will not believe me," he says, "nor
hearken unto my voice."
It is an important truth that in very few lives the
decisive moment comes just when it is expected. Men allow themselves
to be self-indulgent, extravagant and even wicked, often upon the
calculation that their present attitude matters little, and they
will do very differently when the crisis arrives, the turning-point
in their career to nerve them. And they waken up with a start to
find their career already decided, their character moulded. As a
snare shall the day of the Lord come upon all flesh; and as a snare
come all His great visitations meanwhile. When Herod was drinking
among bad companions, admiring a shameless dancer, and boasting
loudly of his generosity, he was sobered and saddened to discover
that he had laughed away the life of his only honest adviser. Moses,
like David, was "following the ewes great with young," when summoned
by God to rule His people Israel. Neither did the call arrive when
he was plunged in moody reverie and abstraction, sighing over his
lost fortunes and his defeated aspirations, rebelling against his
lowly duties. The humblest labour is a preparation for the brightest
revelations, whereas discontent, however lofty, is a preparation for
nothing. Thus, too, the birth of Jesus was first announced to
shepherds keeping watch over their flock. Yet hundreds of third-rate
young persons in every city in this land today neglect their work,
and unfit themselves for any insight, or any leadership whatever, by
chafing against the obscurity of their vocation.
Who does not perceive that the career of Moses
hitherto was divinely directed? The fact that we feel this,
although, until now, God has not once been mentioned in his personal
story, is surely a fine lesson for those who have only one notion of
what edifies--the dragging of the most sacred names and phrases into
even the most unsuitable connections. In truth, such a phraseology
is much less attractive than a certain tone, a recognition of the
unseen, which may at times be more consistent with reverential
silence than with obtrusive utterance. It is enough to be ready and
fearless when the fitting time comes, which is sure to arrive, for
the religious heart as for this narrative--the time for the natural
utterance of the great word, God.
We read that the angel of the Lord appeared to
him--a remarkable phrase, which was already used in connection with
the sacrifice of Isaac (Gen 22:11). How much it implies will better
be discussed in the twenty-third chapter, where a fuller statement
is made. For the present it is enough to note, that this is one
pre-eminent angel, indicated by the definite article; that he is
clearly the medium of a true divine appearance, because neither the
voice nor form of any lesser being is supposed to be employed, the
appearance being that of fire, and the words being said to be the
direct utterance of the Lord, not of any one who says, Thus saith
the Lord. We shall see hereafter that the story of the Exodus is
unique in this respect, that in training a people tainted with
Egyptian superstitions, no 'similitude' is seen, as when there
wrestled a man with Jacob, or when Ezekiel saw a human form upon the
sapphire pavement.
Man is the true image of God, and His perfect
revelation was in flesh. But now that expression of Himself was
perilous, and perhaps unsuitable besides; for He was to be known as
the Avenger, and presently as the Giver of Law, with its inflexible
conditions and its menaces. Therefore He appeared as fire, which is
intense and terrible, even when "the flame of the grace of God does
not consume, but illuminates."
There is a notion that religion is languid,
repressive, and unmanly. But such is not the scriptural idea. In His
presence is the fulness of joy. Christ has come that we might have
life, and might have it more abundantly. They who are shut out from
His blessedness are said to be asleep and dead. And so Origen quotes
this passage among others, with the comment that "As God is a fire,
and His angels a flame of fire, and all the saints fervent in
spirit, so they who have fallen away from God are said to have
cooled, or to have become cold" (De Princip., ii. 8). A
revelation by fire involves intensity.
There is indeed another explanation of the burning
bush, which makes the flame express only the afflictions that did
not consume the people. But this would be a strange adjunct to a
divine appearance for their deliverance, speaking rather of the
continuance of suffering than of its termination, for which the
extinction of such fire would be a more appropriate symbol.
Yet there is an element of truth even in this view,
since fire is connected with affliction. In His holiness God is
light (with which, in the Hebrew, the very word for holiness seems
to be connected); in His judgments He is fire. "The Light of Israel
shall be for a fire, and his Holy One for a flame, and it shall burn
and devour his thorns and his briers in one day" (Isa 10:17). But
God reveals Himself in this thorn bush as a fire which does not
consume; and such a revelation tells at once Who has brought the
people into affliction, and also that they are not abandoned to it.
To Moses at first there was visible only an
extraordinary phenomenon; He turned to see a great sight. It is
therefore out of the question to find here the truth, so easy to
discover elsewhere, that God rewards the religious inquirer--that
they who seek after Him shall find Him. Rather we learn the folly of
deeming that the intellect and its inquiries are at war with
religion and its mysteries, that revelation is at strife with mental
insight, that he who most stupidly refuses to "see the great sights"
of nature is best entitled to interpret the voice of God. When the
man of science gives ear to voices not of earth, and the man of God
has eyes and interest for the divine wonders which surround us, many
a discord will be harmonised. With the revival of classical learning
came the Reformation.
But it often happens that the curiosity of the
intellect is in danger of becoming irreverent, and obtrusive into
mysteries not of the brain, and thus the voice of God must speak in
solemn warning: "Moses, Moses, ... Draw not nigh hither: put off thy
shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy
ground."
After as prolonged a silence as from the time of
Malachi to the Baptist, it is God Who reveals Himself once more--not
Moses who by searching finds Him out. And this is the established
rule. Tidings of the Incarnation came from heaven, or man would not
have discovered the Divine Babe. Jesus asked His two first disciples
"What seek ye?" and told Simon "Thou shalt be called Cephas," and
pronounced the listening Nathaniel "an Israelite indeed," and bade
Zaccheus "make haste and come down," in each case before He was
addressed by them.
The first words of Jehovah teach something more than
ceremonial reverence. If the dust of common earth on the shoe of
Moses may not mingle with that sacred soil, how dare we carry into
the presence of our God mean passions and selfish cravings? Observe,
too, that while Jacob, when he awoke from his vision, said, "How
dreadful is this place!" (Gen 28:17), God Himself taught Moses to
think rather of the holiness than the dread of His abode.
Nevertheless Moses also was afraid to look upon God, and hid the
face which was thereafter to be veiled, for a nobler reason, when it
was itself illumined with the divine glory. Humility before God is
thus the path to the highest honour, and reverence, to the closest
intercourse.
Meantime the Divine Person has announced Himself: "I
am the God of thy father" (father is apparently singular with a
collective force), "the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the
God of Jacob." It is a blessing which every Christian parent should
bequeath to his child, to be strengthened and invigorated by
thinking of God as his father's God.
It was with this memorable announcement that Jesus
refuted the Sadducees and established His doctrine of the
resurrection. So, then, the bygone ages are not forgotten: Moses may
be sure that a kindly relation exists between God and himself,
because the kindly relation still exists in all its vital force
which once bound Him to those who long since appeared to die. It was
impossible, therefore, our Lord inferred, that they had really died
at all. The argument is a forerunner of that by which St. Paul
concludes, from the resurrection of Christ, that none who are "in
Christ" have perished. Nay, since our Lord was not disputing about
immortality only, but the resurrection of the body, His argument
implied that a vital relationship with God involved the
imperishability of the whole man, since all was His, and in truth
the very seal of the covenant was imprinted upon the flesh. How much
stronger is the assurance for us, who know that our very bodies are
His temple! Now, if any suspicion should arise that the argument,
which is really subtle, is over-refined and untrustworthy, let it be
observed that no sooner was this announcement made, than God added
the proclamation of His own immutability, so that it cannot be said
He was, but from age to age His title is I AM. The inference from
the divine permanence to the living and permanent vitality of all
His relationships is not a verbal quibble, it is drawn from the very
central truth of this great scripture.
And now for the first time God calls Israel My
people, adopting a phrase already twice employed by earthly rulers
(Gen 23:11, Gen 41:40), and thus making Himself their king and the
champion of their cause. Often afterwards it was used in pathetic
appeal:--"Thou hast showed Thy people hard things,"--"Thou sellest
Thy people for nought,"--"Behold, look, we beseech Thee; we are all
Thy people" (Psa 60:3, Psa 44:12; Isa 64:9). And often it expressed
the returning favour of their king: "Hear, O My people, and I will
speak"; "Comfort ye, comfort ye My people" (Psa 50:7; Isa 40:1).
It is used of the nation at large, all of whom were
brought into the covenant, although with many of them God was not
well pleased. And since it does not belong only to saints, but
speaks of a grace which might be received in vain, it is a strong
appeal to all Christian people, all who are within the New Covenant.
Them also the Lord claims and pities, and would gladly emancipate:
their sorrows also He knows. "I have surely seen the affliction of
My people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of
their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows; and I am come down to
deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up
out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing
with milk and honey." Thus the ways of God exceed the desires of
men. Their subsequent complaints are evidence that Egypt had become
their country: gladly would they have shaken off the iron yoke, but
a successful rebellion is a revolution, not an Exodus. Their
destined home was very different: with the widest variety of
climate, scenery, and soil, a land which demanded much more regular
husbandry, but rewarded labour with exuberant fertility. Secluded
from heathenism by deserts on the south and east, by a sublime range
of mountains on the north, and by a sea with few havens on the west,
yet planted in the very bosom of all the ancient civilisation which
at the last it was to leaven, it was a land where a faithful people
could have dwelt alone and not been reckoned among the nations, yet
where the scourge for disobedience was never far away.
Next after the promise of this good land, the
commission of Moses is announced. He is to act, because God is
already active: "I am come down to deliver them ... come now,
therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, that thou
mayest bring forth My people." And let this truth encourage all who
are truly sent of God, to the end of time, that He does not send us
to deliver man, until He is Himself prepared to do so, that when our
fears ask, like Moses, Who am I, that I should go? He does not
answer, Thou art capable, but Certainly I will go with thee. So,
wherever the ministry of the word is sent, there is a true purpose
of grace. There is also the presence of One who claims the right to
bestow upon us the same encouragement which was given to Moses by
Jehovah, saying, "Lo, I am with you alway." In so saying, Jesus made
Himself equal with God.
And as this ancient revelation of God was to give
rest to a weary and heavy-laden people, so Christ bound together the
assertion of a more perfect revelation, made in Him, with the
promise of a grander emancipation. No man knoweth the Father save by
revelation of the Son is the doctrine which introduces the great
offer "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I
will give you rest" (Mat 11:27-28). The claims of Christ in the New
Testament will never be fully recognised until a careful study is
made of His treatment of the functions which in the Old Testament
are regarded as Divine. A curious expression follows: "This shall be
a token unto thee that I have sent thee: When thou hast brought
forth the people out of Egypt, ye shall serve God upon this
mountain." It seems but vague encouragement, to offer Moses,
hesitating at the moment, a token which could take effect only when
his task was wrought. And yet we know how much easier it is to
believe what is thrown into distinct shape and particularised. Our
trust in good intentions is helped when their expression is detailed
and circumstantial, as a candidate for office will reckon all
general assurances of support much cheaper than a pledge to canvass
certain electors within a certain time. Such is the constitution of
human nature; and its Maker has often deigned to sustain its
weakness by going thus into particulars. He does the same for us,
condescending to embody the most profound of all mysteries in
sacramental emblems, clothing his promises of our future blessedness
in much detail, and in concrete figures which at least symbolise, if
they do not literally describe, the glories of the Jerusalem which
is above.
A NEW NAME.
Exo 3:14. Exo 6:2-3.
"God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and He said,
Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me
unto you."
We cannot certainly tell why Moses asked for a new
name by which to announce to his brethren the appearance of God. He
may have felt that the memory of their fathers, and of the dealings
of God with them, had faded so far out of mind that merely to
indicate their ancestral God would not sufficiently distinguish Him
from the idols of Egypt, whose worship had infected them.
If so, he was fully answered by a name which made
this God the one reality, in a world where all is a phantasm except
what derives stability from Him.
He may have desired to know, for himself, whether
there was any truth in the dreamy and fascinating pantheism which
inspired so much of the Egyptian superstition.
In that case, the answer met his question by
declaring that God existed, not as the sum of things or soul of the
universe, but in Himself, the only independent Being.
Or he may simply have desired some name to express
more of the mystery of deity, remembering how a change of name had
accompanied new discoveries of human character and achievement, as
of Abraham and Israel; and expecting a new name likewise when God
would make to His people new revelations of Himself.
So natural an expectation was fulfilled not only
then, but afterwards. When Moses prayed "Show me, I pray Thee, Thy
glory," the answer was "I will make all My goodness pass before
thee, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord." The proclamation
was again Jehovah, but not this alone. It was "The Lord, the Lord, a
God full of compassion and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in
mercy and truth" (Exo 33:18-19, Exo 34:6, R.V.) Thus the life of
Moses, like the agelong progress of the Church, advanced towards an
ever-deepening knowledge that God is not only the Independent but
the Good. All sets toward the final knowledge that His highest name
is Love.
Meanwhile, in the development of events, the exact
period was come for epithets, which were shared with gods many and
lords many, to be supplemented by the formal announcement and
authoritative adoption of His proper name Jehovah. The infant nation
was to learn to think of Him, not only as endowed with attributes of
terror and power, by which enemies would be crushed, but as
possessing a certain well-defined personality, upon which the trust
of man could repose. Soon their experience would enable them to
receive the formal announcement that He was merciful and gracious.
But first they were required to trust His promise amid all
discouragements; and to this end, stability was the attribute first
to be insisted upon.
It is true that the derivation of the word Jehovah
is still a problem for critical acumen. It has been sought in more
than one language, and various shades of meaning have been assigned
to it, some untenable in the abstract, others hardly, or not at all,
to be reconciled with the Scriptural narrative.
Nay, the corruption of the very sound is so
notorious, that it is only worth mention as illustrating a phase of
superstition.
We smile at the Jews, removing the correct vowels
lest so holy a word should be irreverently spoken, placing the
sanctity in the cadence, hoping that light and flippant allusions
may offend God less, so long as they spare at least the vowels of
His name, and thus preserve some vestige undesecrated, while
profaning at once the conception of His majesty and the consonants
of the mystic word.
A more abject superstition could scarcely have made
void the spirit, while grovelling before the letter of the
commandment.
But this very superstition is alive in other forms
today. Whenever one recoils from the sin of coarse blasphemy, yet
allows himself the enjoyment of a polished literature which profanes
holy conceptions,--whenever men feel bound to behave with external
propriety in the house of God, yet bring thither wandering thoughts,
vile appetites, sensuous imaginations, and all the chamber of
imagery which is within the unregenerate heart,--there is the same
despicable superstition which strove to escape at least the extreme
of blasphemy by prudently veiling the Holy Name before profaning it.
But our present concern is with the practical
message conveyed to Israel when Moses declared that Jehovah, I AM,
the God of their fathers, had appeared unto him. And if we find in
it a message suited for the time, and which is the basis, not the
superstructure, both of later messages and also of the national
character, then we shall not fail to observe the bearing of such
facts upon an urgent controversy of this time.
Some significance must have been in that Name, not
too abstract for a servile and degenerate race to apprehend. Nor was
it soon to pass away and be replaced; it was His memorial throughout
all generations; and therefore it has a message for us today, to
admonish and humble, to invigorate and uphold.
That God would be the same to them as to their
fathers was much. But that it was of the essence of His character to
be evermore the same, immutable in heart and mind and reality of
being, however their conduct might modify His bearing towards them,
this indeed would be a steadying and reclaiming consciousness.
Accordingly Moses receives the answer for himself,
"I AM THAT I AM"; and he is bidden to tell his people "I am
hath sent me unto you," and yet again "JEHOVAH the God of your
fathers hath sent me unto you." The spirit and tenor of these three
names may be said to be virtually comprehended in the first; and
they all speak of the essential and self-existent Being, unchanging
and unchangeable.
I AM expresses an intense reality of being. No image
in the dark recesses of Egyptian or Syrian temples, grotesque and
motionless, can win the adoration of him who has had communion with
such a veritable existence, or has heard His authentic message. No
dreamful pantheism, on its knees to the beneficent principle
expressed in one deity, to the destructive in another, or to the
reproductive in a third, but all of them dependent upon nature, as
the rainbow upon the cataract which it spans, can ever again satisfy
the soul which is athirst for the living God, the Lord, Who is not
personified, but IS.
This profound sense of a living Person within reach,
to be offended, to pardon, and to bless, was the one force which
kept the Hebrew nation itself alive, with a vitality unprecedented
since the world began. They could crave His pardon, whatever natural
retributions they had brought down upon themselves, whatever
tendencies of nature they had provoked, because He was not a dead
law without ears or a heart, but their merciful and gracious God.
Not the most exquisite subtleties of innuendo and
irony could make good for a day the monstrous paradox that the
Hebrew religion, the worship of I AM, was really nothing but the
adoration of that stream of tendencies which makes for
righteousness.
Israel did not challenge Pharaoh through having
suddenly discovered that goodness ultimately prevails over evil, nor
is it any cold calculation of the sort which ever inspires a nation
or a man with heroic fortitude. But they were nerved by the
announcement that they had been remembered by a God Who is neither
an ideal nor a fancy, but the Reality of realities, beside Whom
Pharaoh and his host were but as phantoms.
I AM THAT I AM is the style not only of permanence,
but of permanence self-contained, and being a distinctive title, it
denies such self-contained permanence to others.
Man is as the past has moulded him, a compound of
attainments and failures, discoveries and disillusions, his eyes dim
with forgotten tears, his hair grey with surmounted anxieties, his
brow furrowed with bygone studies, his conscience troubled with old
sin. Modern unbelief is ignobly frank respecting him. He is the sum
of his parents and his wet-nurse. He is what he eats. If he drinks
beer, he thinks beer. And it is the element of truth in these
hideous paradoxes which makes them rankle, like an unkind
construction put upon a questionable action. As the foam is what
wind and tide have made of it, so are we the product of our
circumstances, the resultant of a thousand forces, far indeed from
being self-poised or self-contained, too often false to our best
self, insomuch that probably no man is actually what in the depth of
self-consciousness he feels himself to be, what moreover he should
prove to be, if only the leaden weight of constraining circumstance
were lifted off the spring which it flattens down to earth. Moses
himself was at heart a very different person from the keeper of the
sheep of Jethro. Therefore man says, Pity and make allowance for me:
this is not my true self, but only what by compression, by
starvation and stripes and bribery and error, I have become. Only
God says, I AM THAT I AM.
Yet in another sense, and quite as deep a one, man
is not the coarse tissue which past circumstances have woven: he is
the seed of the future, as truly as the fruit of the past. Strange
compound that he is of memory and hope, while half of the present
depends on what is over, the other half is projected into the
future; and like a bridge, sustained on these two banks, life throws
its quivering shadow on each moment that fleets by. It is not
attainment, but degradation to live upon the level of one's mere
attainment, no longer uplifted by any aspiration, fired by any
emulation, goaded by any but carnal fears. If we have been shaped by
circumstances, yet we are saved by hope. Do not judge me, we are all
entitled to plead, by anything that I am doing or have done: He only
can appraise a soul a right Who knows what it yearns to become, what
within itself it hates and prays to be delivered from, what is the
earnestness of its self-loathing, what the passion of its appeal to
heaven. As the bloom of next April is the true comment upon the dry
bulb of September, as you do not value the fountain by the pint of
water in its basin, but by its inexhaustible capabilities of
replenishment, so the present and its joyless facts are not the true
man; his possibilities, the fears and hopes that control his destiny
and shall unfold it, these are his real self.
I am not merely what I am: I am very truly that
which I long to be. And thus, man may plead, I am what I move
towards and strive after, my aspiration is myself. But God says, I
AM WHAT I AM. The stream hurries forward: the rock abides. And this
is the Rock of Ages.
Now, such a conception is at first sight not far
removed from that apathetic and impassive kind of deity which the
practical atheism of ancient materialists could well afford to
grant;--"ever in itself enjoying immortality together with supreme
repose, far removed and withdrawn from our concerns, since it,
exempt from every pain, exempt from all danger, strong in its own
resources and wanting nought from us, is neither gained by favour
nor moved by wrath."
Thus Lucretius conceived of the absolute Being as by
the necessity of its nature entirely outside our system.
But Moses was taught to trust in Jehovah as
intervening, pitying sorrow and wrong, coming down to assist His
creatures in distress.
How could this be possible? Clearly the movement
towards them must be wholly disinterested, and wholly from within;
unbought, since no external influence can modify His condition, no
puny sacrifice can propitiate Him Who sitteth upon the circle of the
earth and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers: a movement
prompted by no irregular emotional impulse, but an abiding law of
His nature, incapable of change, the movement of a nature, personal
indeed, yet as steady, as surely to be reckoned upon in like
circumstances, as the operations of gravitation are.
There is no such motive, working in such magnificent
regularity for good, save one. The ultimate doctrine of the New
Testament, that God is Love, is already involved in this early
assertion, that being wholly independent of us and our concerns, He
is yet not indifferent to them, so that Moses could say unto the
children of Israel "I AM hath sent me unto you."
It is this unchangeable consistency of Divine action
which gives the narrative its intense interest to us. To Moses, and
therefore to all who receive any commission from the skies, this
title said, Frail creature, sport of circumstances and of tyrants,
He who commissions thee sits above the waterfloods, and their rage
can as little modify or change His purpose, now committed to thy
charge, as the spray can quench the stars. Perplexed creature, whose
best self lives only in aspiration and desire, now thou art an
instrument in the hand of Him with Whom desire and attainment, will
and fruition, are eternally the same. None truly fails in fighting
for Jehovah, for who hath resisted His will?
To Israel, and to all the oppressed whose minds are
open to receive the tidings and their faith strong to embrace it, He
said, Your life is blighted, and your future is in the hand of
taskmasters, yet be of good cheer, for now your deliverance is
undertaken by Him Whose being and purpose are one, Who is in
perfection of enjoyment all that He is in contemplation and
in will. The rescue of Israel by an immutable and perfect God is the
earnest of the breaking of every yoke.
And to the proud and godless world which knows Him
not, He says, Resistance to My will can only show forth all its
power, which is not at the mercy of opinion or interest or change: I
sit upon the throne, not only supreme but independent, not only
victorious but unassailable; self-contained, self-poised and
self-sufficing, I AM THAT I AM.
Have we now escaped the inert and self-absorbed
deity of Lucretius, only to fall into the palsying grasp of the
tyrannous deity of Calvin? Does our own human will shrivel up and
become powerless under the compulsion of that immutability with
which we are strangely brought into contact?
Evidently this is not the teaching of the Book of
Exodus. For it is here, in this revelation of the Supreme, that we
first hear of a nation as being His: "I have seen the affliction of
My people which is in Egypt ... and I have come down to bring them
into a good land." They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud
and in the sea. Yet their carcases fell in the wilderness. And these
things were written for our learning. The immutability, which
suffers no shock when we enter into the covenant, remains
unshaken also if we depart from the living God. The sun shines alike
when we raise the curtain and when we drop it, when our chamber is
illumined and when it is dark. The immutability of God is not in His
operations, for sometimes He gave His people into the hand of their
enemies, and again He turned and helped them. It is in His nature,
His mind, in the principles which guide His actions. If He had not
chastened David for his sin, then, by acting as before, He would
have been other at heart than when He rejected Saul for disobedience
and chose the son of Jesse to fulfil all His word. The wind has
veered, if it continues to propel the vessel in the same direction,
although helm and sails are shifted.
Such is the Pauline doctrine of His immutability.
"If we endure we shall also reign with Him: if we shall deny Him, He
also will deny us,"--and such is the necessity of His being, for we
cannot sway Him with our changes: "if we are faithless, He abideth
faithful, for He cannot deny Himself." And therefore it is presently
added that "the firm foundation of the Lord standeth sure, having"
not only "this seal, that the Lord knoweth those that are His,"--but
also this, "Let every one that nameth the name of the Lord depart
from unrighteousness" (2Ti 2:12-13, 2Ti 2:19, R.V.).
The Lord knew that Israel was His, yet for their
unrighteousness He sware in His wrath that they should not enter
into His rest.
It follows from all this that the new name of God
was no academic subtlety, no metaphysical refinement of the schools,
unfitly revealed to slaves, but a most practical and inspiring
truth, a conviction to warm their blood, to rouse their courage, to
convert their despair into confidence and their alarms into
defiance.
They had the support of a God worthy of trust. And
thenceforth every answer in righteousness, every new disclosure of
fidelity, tenderness, love, was not an abnormal phenomenon, the
uncertain grace of a capricious despot; no, its import was permanent
as an observation of the stars by an astronomer, ever more to be
remembered in calculating the movements of the universe.
In future troubles they could appeal to Him to awake
as in the ancient days, as being He who "cut Rahab and wounded the
Dragon." "I am the Lord, I change not, therefore ye sons of Jacob
are not consumed."
And as the sublime and beautiful conception of a
loving spiritual God was built up slowly, age by age, tier upon
tier, this was the foundation which insured the the stability of
all, until the Head Stone of the Corner gave completeness to the
vast design, until men saw and could believe in the very Incarnation
of all Love, unshaken amid anguish and distress and seeming failure,
immovable, victorious, while they heard from human lips the awful
words, "Before Abraham was, I AM." Then they learned to identify all
this ancient lesson of trustworthiness with new and more pathetic
revelations of affection: and the martyr at the stake grew strong as
he remembered that the Man of Sorrows was the same yesterday and
today and for ever; and the great apostle, prostrate before the
glory of his Master, was restored by the touch of a human hand, and
by the voice of Him upon Whose bosom he had leaned, saying, Fear
not, I am the First and the Last and the Living One.
And if men are once more fain to rend from humanity
that great assurance, which for ages, amid all shocks, has made the
frail creature of the dust to grow strong and firm and fearless,
partaker of the Divine Nature, what will they give us in its stead?
Or do they think us too strong of will, too firm of purpose? Looking
around us, we see nations heaving with internal agitations, armed to
the teeth against each other, and all things like a ship at sea
reeling to and fro, and staggering like a drunken man. There is no
stability for us in constitutions or old formul