GENESIS IN THE
LIGHT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
Sec.
8 - Abraham.
(Chapter 11. 10-21)
(1.) HIS PATH. The life of Abraham is the
well-known pattern-life of faith, as far as the Old Testament could furnish
this. It connects, as already noticed, in the closest way, with the story of
Noah which precedes it, and alone makes it possible. For the essential
characteristic of the life of faith is strangership, but this founded upon
citizenship elsewhere. Faith dwells in the unseen, substantiating to itself
things hoped for. This is exemplified in Abram, called to Canaan, his
possession in hope alone. He dwells there, but in tabernacles, the bringing
together of two things typically - the heavenly calling and its earthly
consequence. Canaan is here Noah’s new world beyond the flood, and, as we
all know, heaven; but the earthly aspect of this is, as all through Genesis,
the prominent one. We must wait for Joshua before we get a distinct type of how
faith lays hold, even now, of the inheritance in heaven. Here, tent and altar
are as yet the only possession.
The introduction to this history is the
record of Abraham’s descent from Shem. It is a record of failure, of which
the whole story is not told here, for we know that his line whose God Jehovah
was, were worshipping other gods when the Lord called Abraham from the other
side of Euphrates (Josh. xxiv. 2). The genealogy itself may tell us something,
however - in Peleg, how men were possessing themselves more than ever of the
earth, and at the same time the days of their tenure of it shortening rapidly -
by half, in this very Peleg’s time (comp. ch. x. 25.). Reu lives two
hundred and thirty-nine years; Serug, two hundred and thirty, Nahor, but one
hundred and forty-eight; Terah, again, two hundred and five; but Haran dies
before his father Terah. God yet numbers the fleeting years of those who have
forgotten Him.
Now we find a movement in Terah’s family, the full
explanation of which we must look for outside of Genesis. Here, it seems to
originate with Terah, for we read that "Terar took Abram his son, and Lot the
son of Haran, his son’s son, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son
Abram’s wife; and they went forth from Ur of the Chaldees, to to go into
the land of Canaan: and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there". Terah fulfills
his name (delay), and ends his days at Haran, so called from his dead son.
Natural things hold him fast, though death be written on them, and memory but
perpetuates his loss. "Haran" means "parched," yet there he abides (and Abram
with him) till he dies. Then we find that whom he had led he had been holding
back; and Abram rises up in the power of a divine call which had come to him,
and to him alone in the first place, and by which he was separated from
country, kindred, and father’s house alike, to be blessed and a blessing
in the land pointed out of God for his abode. And now there is no further
delay: "they went forth to go into the land of Canaan, and into the land of
Canaan they came."
Which of us does not know something of these
compromises, which seem to promise so much more than God and to exact so much
less, but in which obedience to God goes overboard at the start, and which end
but in Haran, and not Canaan? Who would not have thought it gain to carry our
kindred with us instead of a needless and painful separation from them? Why
separate, when their faces can be set in the same way as ours and why not tarry
for them and be gentle to their weakness, if they do linger on the road? How
hard to distinguish from self-will or moroseness and unconcern for others, the
simplicity of obedience and a true walk with God! But the lesson of this is too
important to end here, and Lot’s walk with Abraham is yet to give us full
length instruction upon a point which is vital to the life of faith.
But now Abram is in the land. We hear of the first halt at Sichem (Shechem), at
the oak of Moreh. The first of these words means "shoulder" the second,
"instructor" and it is in bowing one’s shoulder to bear that we find
instruction. He that will do God’s will shall know of the doctrine: he
that will learn of Christ must take His yoke. This is the "virtue" in which
still is "knowledge" (2 Pet. i). The oak of Moreh grows at Shechem
still.
And it is surely "in the land" we find it: power for full
obedience in those heavenly places, where we are "blessed with all spiritual
blessings," and where "to the principalities and powers are made known by the
Church the manifold wisdom of God." It is as Canaan-dwellers the secrets of
God’s heart are opened to us; and Christ, in whom we are, becomes the key
of knowledge as of power. In Him, "in whom dwelleth all the fullness of the
Godhead bodily,"we are "filled up."
Jehovah now appears to Abram, and
confirms the land to his seed as their inheritance; and here for the second
time in Genesis we read of an "altar," the first that Abram builds. He worships
in the fullness of blessing, and then first also his "tent" comes into view "he
removed from thence into a mountain on the east of Bethel, and pitched his
tent, having Bethel on the west, and Hai on the east." "Hai" means "a heap of
ruin," and is the city which in Joshua resists the power of Israel, after
Jericho falls to the ground. It is as if the very walls of Jericho had risen up
against those who had lost the victorious presence of God their strength.
Typically, Hai is no doubt the ruined old creation, and thus between a judged
world and the "house of God" Abram’s tent is pitched, in view of both.
Here, too, once more he builds an altar, and calls upon Jehovah’s
name.
But Canaan is a dependent land. It is contrasted with Egypt as not
being like it watered with the foot, but drinking directly of the rain of
heaven.* And although the eyes of the Lord are there continually, that
does not exclude the trial which a life of faith implies and necessitates. Thus
Abram finds famine in the land to which God has called him, and to avoid it
goes down to Egypt. There it becomes very evident that he is out of the path of
faith, and he fails openly.
*Egypt must needs be dependent also, but
not so immediately. Its river was its boast, and the sources of supply were too
far off to be so easily recognized: a vivid type of the world in its self
sufficiency and independence of God. They are yet sending scientific
expeditions to explore the sources of their unfailing river, and by searching
yet have not found out God.
But we must note that the secret failure
had begun before, and the famine itself had followed, not preceded this. A
famine in Canaan cannot be mere sovereignty on God’s part - sovereign
though He be, and thus we find that when Abram, fully restored in soul, returns
to the land, it is "to the place of the altar, which he made there at the
first". There, between Bethel and Hai, he had been at the beginning; but there
he had not been when the famine came, but in the south - his face toward Egypt,
if not yet there. This borderland is ever a dry land, and Abram found it so.
Famine soon comes for us in our own things when we get into this borderland.
But who that has known what God’s path is but has known the trial of a
famine there? And when we find such, how Egypt tempts - how the world in some
shape solicits to give up the separate place which we have taken. Few, perhaps,
but have made some temporary visit to Egypt in the emergency. But the price of
Egypt’s succor is well known. Abram’s fall there has been but too
constantly repeated, and its repetition upon the largest scale has been one
great step in the failure of the whole dispensation. Sarai in Pharaoh’s
house is but the commencement of that which reaches its full development in the
guilty commerce of the harlot-woman with the kings of the earth. But the germ
is yet very different from the development, and Sarai is of course by no means
the apocalyptic woman. She is, as the epistle to the Galatians tells us, the
covenant contrasted with the Sinaitic, as grace with law. The grace in which we
stand God has linked with faith, and with faith alone. It belongs not to the
world in any wise. We are not of the world: "we are of God, and the whole world
lieth in wickedness." But who can maintain that testimony, when the
world’s help is wanted, and association with it sought? It is evident some
form of universalism must be preached. Sarai (grace) must not be held as
Abraham’s exclusive possession, but the world allowed to believe it can
obtain what divorced from faith is sufficiently attractive to it. Give Sarai
up, and you shall have wealth and honours - be the king’s brother-in-law;
and by simony such as this has the Church bought peace and prosperity in the
world; but the world will yet learn by judgment (as did Pharaoh) that Sarai is
not its own. This manifest, its favours cease, and Abraham is sent away.
And now the true character of Lot comes out. His story (one of the saddest
in Genesis) is most important to be noticed in a day when, God having revealed
to us the truth of our heavenly calling, it is but even too plain that there
are many Lots. The word "Lot" means "covering," and under a covering he is ever
found. With Abraham outwardly, he is not at heart what Abraham is; and with the
men of Sodom outwardly, he is not after all a Sodomite either. He is a saint,
and therefore not a Sodomite, though in Sodom. He is a saint untrue to his
saintship, and herein Abraham’s contrast, even of his companion. His is,
however, alasl a downward course. First, with Abraham, a pilgrim; then, a
dweller in Sodom; finally, he falls under deeper personal reproach, and his
life ends as it began - under a covering. There is no revival, no effort even
upward, throughout nothing but mere gravitation, dragging down into still
deeper ruin lives associated with his. His wife’s memorial is a pillar of
salt; his daughters’, a more abiding and perpetual infamy, linked with his
own shame forever. How terrible this record! How emphatic an admonition to
remember, in him, how near two roads may be at the beginning which at the end
lie far indeed apart! Reader, may none who read this trace this by-path, save
here where God has marked out for us the end from the beginning, that with Him
we may see it; not, as having trod it, the beginning from the end.
The
beginning is found here "And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of
Haran, his son’s son . . . to go into the land of Canaan; and they came
unto Haran, and dwelt there."
Nature, taking in hand to follow a divine
call, which it had never understood nor heard for itself; leading without being
led; settling down short altogether of the point for which it started, to dwell
in a scene of death to which it clings spite of dissatisfaction: - these are
the moral elements amid which many a Lot is nurtured. Terah shines out in him
when, having undertaken to walk with Abram, the plain of Jordan fixes his eyes
and heart; once again, when in the presence of judgment, the messengers of it
laid hold upon his hand, the Lord being merciful to him, and brought him forth
and set him without the city, - because "he lingered."
But there is
another beginning, after this; for now -
"Abram took Sarai his wife, and
Lot his brother’s son, . . . and they went forth to go into the land of
Canaan, and into the land of Canaan they came."
Not nature now, but the man
of faith leads, and they no longer linger on the road; but Lot merely follows
Abram, as before he had followed Terah. Abram walks with God; Lot only with
Abram. How easy even for a believer to walk where another’s bolder faith
leads and makes the way practicable, without exercise of conscience or reality
of faith as to the way itself! How many such there are, practically but the
camp-followers of the Lord’s host, adherents of a cause for which they
have no thought of being martyrs, nearly balanced between what they know as
truth and a world which has never been seen by them in the light of it. For
such, as with Lot, a time of sifting comes, and like dead leaves they drop off
from the stem that holds them.
Egypt had acted thus for Lot. The
attraction it had for him comes out very plainly there where the coveted plain
of Jordan seems in his eyes " like the land of Egypt." But beside this, it is
easy to understand how Abram’s failure there had loosened the moral hold
he had hitherto retained upon his nephew. Yet still true to the weakness of his
character, Lot does not propose separation, but Abram does, after it was plain
they could no longer happily walk together. Their possessions, increased
largely in Egypt, separate them, but Abram manifests his own restoration of
soul by the magnanimity of his offer. Lot, though the younger, and dependent,
shall choose for himself his portion; and he, not imitating the unselfishness
by which he profits, lifts up his eyes and beholds the fertility of the plain
of Jordan, and he chooses there.
The names unmistakably reveal what is
before us here. Jordan ("descending") is the river of death, flowing in rapid
course ever down to the sea of judgment, from which there is no outlet - no
escape.* There, in a plain soon to be visited with fire and brimstone from the
Lord, he settles down, at first still in a tent though among the cities there,
but soon to exchange it for a more fixed abode in Sodom, toward which from the
first he gravitates.
* The Dead Sea, it is well known, lies in a deep
hollow, twelve hundred and ninety-two feet below the level of the
Mediterranean, and there is no river flowing out of it.
Lot-like, even
this he covers with a vail of piety. The plain of Jordan is "like the garden of
the Lord" - like paradise: why should he not enjoy God’s gifts in it? He
forgets the fall, and that paradise is barred from man, argues religiously
enough, while under it all the real secret is found in this: It is "like the
land of Egypt." How much of man’s reasoning comes from his heart and not
his head - a heart too far away from God! It is significantly added, "As thou
comest unto Zoar," and thus indeed Lot came to it.
But Abram dwells in
the land of Canaan, and God bids him walk through it as his own. Thereupon he
removes and dwells in Mamre ("fatness") which is in Hebron ("companionship,
communion"). The names speak for themselves again sufficiently. May we only
know, and live in, the portion of Abram here.
In the next chapter
things are greatly changed. Abram himself is in connection with Sodom, as well
as with another power, which we may easily identify as essentially Babylonish.
The names are difficult to read, and two at least of the confederated countries
are just as doubtful.*
*For the attempt to make Ellasar Hellas, or
Greece, though favoured by the Septuagint, can scarcely be maintained. It is
more probably Larsa. Nor is Tidal, king of nations, a very satisfactory
representative of the Roman power.
But in the first enumeration
Amraphel, king of Shinar, stands first, the undoubted representative of the
kingdom of Nimrod, although Chedorlaomer appears the most active and
interested. They all seem but divisions of this Babylonish empire however,
though changed no doubt into a confederacy of more or less equal
powers.
These four kings - and our attention is specially called to the
number here (ver. 9.) - are at war with the five petty kings of the plain of
Jordan. Typically these last represent the world in its undisguised** and
sensual wickedness; the Babylonish kings, the religious world-power, always
seeking to hold captive (and in general successfully) the more open form of
evil. Indeed the Sodom of heathenism never yielded but to a spiritual Babylon
which had already obtained supremacy over the Christianity of Scripture and the
apostles; and in no way was this last ever really established, nor could it be.
But the world craves some religion; and nothing could suit it better than one
which with external evidences to accredit it, such as undeniably historical
Christianity had, linked its blessings with a system of ordinances by which
they could be dispensed to its votaries. This exactly was the character of
Nicene Christianity, and hence its conquest of the Roman empire. The leaven was
already in the meal: the adulteration of the gospel had already advanced far;
but leaven (evil as in Scripture its character undoubtedly is) has certainly
the power of rapid diffusion, and rapidly the popularized gospel
spread.
**Undisguised Indeed, if Gesenius is right as to Bera being
equivalent to Sen-Ra, son of evil," and Birsha to Ben-resha. "son of
wickedness."
These, then, are the powers represented here. The
portion of Abram lies outside the whole field of conflict. Lot, on the other
hand, is already in Sodom, and of course is carried captive in the captivity of
Sodom. It is the spiritual history of those who, having known the truth, fall
under the power of the world-church which Babylon represents. It is their link
with the world by which they are sucked in. And such is the secret of all
departure from the truth. The Lord is too faithful to allow mere honest
ignorance to be deceived; and although men may credit Him with it, the record
still stands: "Whosoever willeth to do His will shall know of the doctrine,
whether it be of God."
The secret of Abram’s power is revealed in
one pregnant word, which as here used of him flashes light upon the scene
before us: "There came one that had escaped, and told Abram the Hebrew." That
word, patronymic as it may be, is yet significant: it means "the passenger." So
Peter exhorts us, "as strangers and pilgrims, to abstain from fleshly lusts" -
the destruction of Sodom, while to the pilgrim, Babylon, claiming her kingdom
now in the yet unpurged earth, can only be the persecutor, "red with the blood
of the saints and of the martyrs of Jesus." Here may seem a difference between
Abram and the spiritual sons whom he represents; but typically he none the less
may represent those who, after their Lord’s example, conquer by suffering.
There never were more real conquerors than were the martyrs.
So Abram
brings back his brother Lot and all the other captives; whose deliverance
indeed was, as we see, merely incidental. For as between Sodom and Shinar how
could Abram interfere, or what deliverance would it be for a mere child of
Sodom to be delivered from the power of Babylon? Even as to Lot it is once more
solemnly made manifest that not circumstances have made him what he is, and
that change of circumstances do not change him. Freed by God’s hand
working by another, he is not really free; and soon we shall find him needing
once more to be delivered from what, having escaped man’s judgment, falls
under God’s.
But if Lot’s eyes are still on Sodom, those of
his pilgrim-brother find another object. For as he returned from the slaughter
of the kings, "Melchisedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine; and he
was the priest of the Most High God." The type is explained to us by the
apostle in the epistle to the Hebrews; and we all know in Christ the Priest
after the order of Melchisedek. The apostle’s words are remarkable for the
way in which they bring out and insist upon the perfection of Scripture, in
what it omits as well as what it inserts. "Without father, without mother,
without beginning of days or end of life," are words which have been thought to
show that the mysterious person before us was no other than Christ Himself; but
this the apostle’s very next words disprove; for "made like unto the Son
of God" could not be said of the Son of God Himself. It is simply of the
omissions of the narrative that the apostle is speaking; these omissions being
necessary to the perfection of the type. He is our High-Priest, not finding His
place among the ephemeral generations of an earthly priesthood, but subsisting
in the power of an endless life; Priest and King in one. Whilst, however, the
Lord is thus even now a Priest after the order of Melchisedek, it is not after
Melchisedek’s pattern that He is now acting. Here, His type is rather
Aaron. It is at a future time - a time, as we say, millennial - that He will
fulfill the type before us, as many of its features clearly show. Thus
Melchisedek is priest of the Most High God, - a title always used of God in the
coming day of manifested supremacy. This Melchisedek’s own words show:
"Blessed be Abram of the Most High God, Possessor of heaven and earth" The
interpretation of his name and the name of his city confirms this: "First of
all, ‘King of Righteousness’; and after that, ‘ King of
Salem,’ which is, ‘King of Peace.’" This is the order in which
the prophet gives the same things, when speaking of millennial times: "Then
judgment shall dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness remain in the
fruitful field; and the work of righteousness shall be peace, and the effect of
righteousness, quietness and assurance forever."
His place in this
chapter is in perfect and beautiful keeping with all this. For we find the
timeliness of Melchisedek’s appearance to the victor over the kings, when
the king of Sodom says to Abram, "Give me the persons, and take the goods to
thyself." It is to the "Most High God, Possessor of heaven and earth"- the One
of whom Melchisedek has spoken to him - that Abram declares he has lifted up
the hand, not to take from a thread even to a shoe-latchet. Christ seen thus by
the pilgrim man of faith, claiming on God’s part all that is his own, is
the true antidote to the world’s offers. If Christ could not accept the
kingdoms of the world at the hands of Satan, but from His Father only, no more
can His followers accept enrichment at the hands of a world which has rejected
Christ for Satan. And that bread and wine which we receive from our true
Melchisedek, the memorial of those sufferings by which alone we are enriched,
for him who has tasted it, implies the refusal of a portion here.
(2)
ABRAHAM’S INNER LIFE (ch. xv. - xxi.) It is evident that in the
fifteenth chapter we have a new beginning, and that we pass from the more
external view of his path and circumstances to that of his inner life and
experiences. Abram is now for the first time put before us as a man righteous
by faith, a thing fundamental to all spiritual relationships and all right
experiences. It was not, surely, now for the first time that he believed the
Lord when God said to him under the starry sky of Syria, "So shall thy seed
be". Yet here it pleased God first openly to give the attestation of his
righteousness: words which lay for a gleam of comfort to how many sin-tossed
souls, before God could come openly out with the proclamation of it as His
principle, that a "man is justified by faith without the deeds of the
law."
There are two things specially before us in this chapter; and they
come before us in the shape of a divine answer to two questions from the heart
of Abram. The two questions, moreover, are drawn out of him by two assurances
on God’s part, each of which is of unspeakable moment to ourselves. The
two assurances are,
(i) "Fear not, Abram; I am thy shield, and thy
exceeding great reward,"
(2) "I am the Lord that brought thee out of Ur of
the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it." As we would read this for
ourselves now - "God is our portion" and "Heaven is the place in which we are
to enjoy our portion."
To the first assurance Abram replies, "Lord God
what wilt Thou give me, seeing I go childless?" to the second, "Lord God,
whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?" Strange words, it may seem, in
the face of God’s absolute assurance; yet questions which do speak to us
of a need in man’s heart which not merely God’s word, but God’s
act must meet; questions which thus He takes up in His grace, seriously to
answer, and that we through all time may have the blessedness of their being
answered.
The answer to both, no Christian heart can doubt, is Christ;
for Christ is God’s answer to every question. Here it may be figuratively
and enigmatically given, as was characteristic of a time in which God could not
yet speak out fully. None the less should it be plain to us now what is
intended, and unspeakably precious to find Christ unfolding to us, as it were,
out of every rose-bud in this garden of the Lord.
"After these things
the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision: ‘Fear not, Abram: I am thy
shield, and thy exceeding great reward.’" Had Abram been fearing? The
things that had just transpired, and to which the Lord evidently refers, were
his victory over the combined power of the kings, which we have already looked
at; and secondly, his refusal to be enriched at the hands of the king of Sodom.
Brave deeds and brave words! wrought with God and spoken before God, who could
doubt? Yet it is nothing uncommon, just when we have wrought something, for a
sudden revolution of feeling to surprise us, for the ecstatic and high-strung
emotion upon whose summit we were just now carried, to subside and leave us
like a stranded boat, consciously, if we may say, above watermark. The
necessity of action, now shut out all other thought. That over, it no longer
sustains. We drop out of heroism, to find - what? Blessed be His name, God
Himself beneath us!
We who were shielding others find more than ever
the need of God our shield: we who were energetically refusing Sodom’s
offers need to be reminded, "I am thy exceeding great reward." Thank God, when
the boat strands there!
God our defence, what shaft of the enemy can pierce
through to us? God our recompensing portion! what is all the world can give? In
this place of eternal shelter, "oh to know more the still unsearchable riches
of Christ," adds the apostle. Did not Abram feel the lack of our revelation
there - unintelligent as he may be as to what was wanted, and utterly unable,
of course, to forestall God’s as yet but partially hinted purpose?
Grasping, as it were, at infinity, and unable to lay hold of it, he drops from
heaven to earth, and cries, with something like impatience, as the immensity of
the blessing makes itself felt in his very inability to hold it, "Lord God,
what wilt Thou give me, seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house is
this Eliezer of Damascus Behold, to me Thou hast given no seed: and, lo, one
born in my house is mine heir."
How flat all God’s assurances seem
to have fallen with the pattern man of faith! And yet we may find, very
manifestly, in all this our pattern. It is all very well to say that
Abram’s faith was not up to the mark here. In truth it was not; but that
is no explanation. Do you know what it is, apart from Christ as now revealed to
us, to grasp after this immensity of God your portion? If you do, you will know
how the wings of faith flutter vainly in the void, and cannot rise to it. Thank
God, if you cannot rise, God can come down; and so He does here to Abram.
Serenely He comes down to the low level of Abram’s faith, and goes on to
give him what it can grasp: "And, behold, the word of the Lord came unto him,
saying, ‘This shall not be thine heir; but he that shall come forth out of
thine own bowels shall be thine heir.’ And He brought him forth abroad,
and said, ‘Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to
number them: so shall thy seed be.’ And he believed in the Lord; and He
counted it to him for righteousness."
The many seeds and the One are
here; and the many to be reached by means of the One. Abram’s "One Seed"
must be familiar to us all. Through and in Isaac we read Christ: "He saith not,
And unto seeds, as of many; but as of one, ‘And to thy Seed,’ which
is Christ." To us, at least, is it an obscure utterance of how this first
assurance is made good to us, and possible to be realized? The Son of Man, here
amongst us, where faith shall need no impossible flights to lay hold of Him,
and the infinity of Godhead shall be brought down to the apprehension of a
little child. Himself "the Child born," Himself the "Son given," the kingdom of
peace is forestalled for those with whom, all the faculties of their soul
subdued and harmonized under His blessed hand, "the calf and the young lion and
the fatling" dwell together, and a little child leads them.
God our shield,
and God our reward: we know these, we appreciate them in Him who is God
manifest, because God incarnate.
The second question now comes up - "And
He said unto him, ‘I am the Lord that brought thee out of Ur of the
Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it.’ And he said, ‘Lord
God, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?’"
Here too the
question is plain, and to be answered by deeds, not words. The land for us is
the good land of our inheritance, the land upon which the eyes of the Lord are
continually - not earth, but heaven. A wonderful place to enjoy our portion,
when we know indeed what our portion is! "Where I am" is the Lord’s own
description; and thus you will find it most apt and suited, that it is not
until He stands before us upon earth that the full clear revelation of an
inheritance in heaven is made to us. He uncloses heaven who ascending up there
carries the hearts of His disciples within its gates. Did they open to admit us
without this, would not our eyes turn back reluctantly to that earth only
familiar to us? Did they not open now, would they not be an eternal
distance-putting between us and our Beloved? "That where I am, there ye may be
also" explains all. The stars shining out of heaven are thus in this chapter
the evident symbol of the multitudinous seed.
But how is man to reach a
land like this? A place with Christ, reader! Look at what you are, and answer
me: what is to raise a child of earth up to the height of God’s own
heaven?
No work of man, at least; no human invention of any kind. How
could we think of a place with Christ as the fruit of any thing but God’s
infinite grace? He who came down from the glory of God to put His hand upon us,
alone can raise us up thither. No human obedience merely, even were it perfect,
could have value of this kind, because it would be still merely what was our
duty to do. He to whom obedience was a voluntary stooping, not a debt, alone
could give it value. And He, raised up from the dead by the glory of the
Father, and gone in as man into the presence of God, brings us for whom His
work was done into the self-same place which as man He takes.
Thus God
answers Abram by putting before him Christ as the pledge of inheritance: "Take
Me a heifer of three years old, and a she-goat of three years old, and a ram of
three years old, and a turtle-dove, and a young pigeon." God delights to
accumulate the types of what Christ is, and press their various significance
upon us. These are all types which are brought out more distinctly before us in
the offerings after this. The three beasts - all tame, not wild, nor needing to
be captured for us, but the willing servants of man’s need; each three
years old - time in its progress unfolding in them a divine mystery. The first
two, females, the type of fruitfulness: the heifer, of the patient Workman; the
she-goat, of the Victim for our sins; the ram, in whom the meek surrender of
the sheep becomes more positive energy, - afterward, therefore, the ram of
consecration, and of the trespass-offering. (Lev. V. I 5; viii. 22.) The birds
speak of One from heaven, One whom love made a man of sorrow (the turtle-dove),
and One come down to a life of faith on earth (the rock-pigeon, like the coney,
making its nest in the place of security and strength).
To unfold all
this, and apply it, would require a volume. No wonder, for we have here our
occupation for eternity begun. These, the fivefold type expressed in one
perfect Man, Abram "divided in the midst, and laid each piece one against
another, but the birds divided he not; and when the fowls came down upon the
carcasses. Abram drove them away." Thus upon all these types of moral beauty,
and that they may be fit types of Him whom they represent, death passes, and
they lie exposed under the open heaven, faith in Abram guarding the sacrifice
from profanation, until, "when the sun was going down, a deep sleep passed upon
Abram, and he slept; and, lo, a horror of great darkness fell upon him."
Faith’s watchfulness is over; darkness succeeds to light; but this only
brings out the supreme value of the sacrifice itself, which not faith gives
efficacy to, but which sustains faith. God Himself, under the symbol of the
"smoking furnace and the burning lamp," passes between the pieces, pledging
Himself by covenant* to perform His promise of inheritance. Purifier and
enlightener, He pledges Himself by the sacrifice to give the discipline needed
in faith’s failure, and the needed light in the darkness it involves; and
thus the inheritance, not apart from the suited state to enjoy it with God, but
along with the conditions which His holiness (and so His love)
necessitates.
* See Jeremiah xxxiv. 18, where God announces the doom of
those who had not performed the covenant made with Him, when they "cut the calf
in twain, and passed between the parts thereof."
How complete and
beautiful is this, then, as the answer to Abram’s second question! If,
with his eyes upon himself, he asks, "How shall I know that I shall inherit
it?" he is answered by the revelation of the infinite value of all that puts a
holy God and a righteous One, in both characters, upon his side: underpropping
faith in all its frailty, and securing holiness as fully as it secures the
inheritance itself. These types and shadows belong assuredly to us, to whom
Christ has become the revelation of all, the substance of all these shadows.
Ours is indeed a wider and a wondrous inheritance. But so ours is a sacrifice
of infinite value, and which alone gave their value to these symbols
themselves. How precious to see God’s eye resting in delight upon that
which for Him had such significance, ages before its import could be revealed!
How responsible we whom grace has favoured with so great a revelation!
Thus all is secured to Abram by indefeasible promise on the ground of
sacrifice. It is of promise as contrasted with law, as the apostle says. Abram
believes the promise, but does not yet know this contrast. He believes God, but
not yet simply; alas! as with all of us at the beginning, he believes in
himself also. He is a believer, but not yet a circumcised believer. Do you
perchance even yet know the difference, beloved reader? It is this that
Abram’s history is to make plain to us.
"Now Sarai, Abram’s
wife, bare him no children." Sarai is, as we have seen, the principle of grace,
and this is one of the strangest, saddest things in a believer’s
experience, the apparent barrenness of that which should be the principle of
fertility in his life and walk. "Sin shall not have dominion over you, because
ye are not under the law, but under grace." And yet it is the justified man,
and who thus far at least knows what divine grace is, who says, "When I would
do good, evil is present with me;" and "The good that I would I do not; but the
evil that I would not, that I do." It is impossible to read the lesson of the
7th of Romans aright until we have seen this. The struggle that it speaks of is
not a struggle after peace or justification; nay, cannot be known aright until
this is over. The whole secret of it is the break-down, not of a sinner, but of
a saint. That efforts after righteousness before God should be vain and
fruitless is simple enough; but that efforts after holiness should be fruitless
is a very different thing, and a much harder thing to realize. It is
Sarai’s barrenness that troubles us. Alas! how in this distress Sarai
herself, as it were, incites us to leave her; persuading us, she may be builded
up by Hagar!
Of Hagar also we have the inspired interpretation. She is
the covenant "from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage" the only form
of religion that man’s natural thought leads him to, and that to which, if
grace is left, we necessarily drop down. Hagar is thus an Egyptian, a child of
nature, or as the epistle to the Galatians interprets, "the elements of the
world." The principle of law, however much for the purposes of divine wisdom
adopted by God, was never His thought. He uses it that man being thoroughly
tested by it may convince himself by experiment of the folly of his own
thoughts. It is thus Sarai’s handmaid, though exalted often even by the
man of faith to a different place. The tendency of law, as it were, to depart
from this place of service is shown in her very name - Hagar, that is,
"fugitive;" and thus the angel of the Lord finds her by the well, going down to
Egypt. When she is finally dismissed from Abram’s house, she is again
found with her son, gravitating down to Egypt; and upon the wilderness upon its
borders Ishmael dwells afterward. How little Christians suspect this tendency
of that by which they seek holiness and fruit! Yet even that which, as given by
God, is necessarily "holy and just and good," speaks nothing of heaven or of
Christ, or, therefore, of pilgrim-life on earth. But thus all of power is left
out also; for Abram’s pilgrim-life springs from his Canaan-place; and "in
Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing nor uncircumcision," - the
whole condition of man as man, - " but a new creation."
Abram takes
Hagar, however, to be fruitful by her, just as believers in the present day
take up the law simply as a principle of fruitfulness, not at all for
justification: it is their very thought that is being tested here. And the
effect at first seems all that could be desired: fruit is produced at once. It
is only when God speaks that it is seen that Ishmael is, after all, not the
promised seed. The immediate result is, Sarai is despised: "And when she saw
that she had conceived, her mistress was despised in her eyes." So it ever is.
Once admit the principle of law, and what is law if it be not sovereign? Faith
may cling to and own barren Sarai still, but the principle introduced is none
the less its essential opposite. "Sarai dealt hardly with her," and "she fled
from her face."
The scene that follows in the wilderness is, I doubt
not, a lesson from the dispensations. It is the instruction, not of experience,
as in Romans, but, as in Galatians, of divine history. It is the explanation of
the divine connection with the law. It is between the promise of the seed and
its fulfillment that Hagar’s history comes in. The law was given, not from
the beginning, but four hundred and thirty years after the promise was made;
and it was added till the Seed should come to whom the promise was made. Again,
it was not God who first gave Hagar to Abram, but Abram who took Hagar: that
the experiment might be worked fully out, God sends her back to him; that is
all. So in like manner the covenant at Sinai was not God’s own proper
thought, but what was in man’s mind taken up of God to be worked out,
under true conditions, to its necessary result. The whole scene is here
significant: God’s own voice now recognizing, and insisting on, that
servant place which alone Hagar filled; the "fountain of water" by which Hagar
is found, the symbol of that spiritual truth which, connected with law, is not
law, that characterizing, before his birth, of the "wild ass man," Ishmael -
child of law, and lawless, - just as the law from the beginning foretold its
own necessary issue: "Every imagination of the thought of man’s heart"
being "only evil, and that continually." Therefore the vail before the holiest,
and the declaration, even to Moses, "Thou canst not see My face." God in all
this, we may note, appears to Hagar, and not to Abram: for thirteen years more
we read of no further intercourse between God and Abram.
But "when Abram
was ninety years old and nine, the Lord appeared unto Abram, and said unto him,
‘I am the almighty God; walk before Me, and be thou perfect.’" This
is the period to which the apostle refers in the epistle to the Romans, when
his body was now dead, being about one hundred years old; and it is striking to
see how completely the intermediate years from the taking of Hagar are counted
but as loss. "And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now
dead, when he was about a hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of
Sarah’s womb: he staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief: but
was strong in faith, giving glory to God; and being fully persuaded that what
He had promised He was able also to perform: and therefore it was imputed to
him for righteousness." (Rom. 1V. 19 - 22.)
Now here it should seem as
if the apostle had confounded times far apart. It was at least fourteen years
before that Abram had "believed in the Lord, and He counted it to him for
righteousness. Before Ishmael was born his body was not dead, for Ishmael was
born "after the flesh," or in the energy of nature merely, in contrast with the
power of God. It could not have been at that time, then, that he considered not
his body now dead. Thus the faith that the apostle speaks of is really the
faith of the later period. All the intervening time is thus covered, and the
two periods brought together.
Natural power had to reach its end with
him before the power of God could be displayed. It was now an almighty God
before whom Abram was called to walk. Mighty he had known Him; not really till
now almighty. The apprehension of power in ourselves limits (how greatly!) the
apprehension of so simple a fact as that all "power belongeth unto God." By our
need we learn His grace; by our poverty, His fullness; and the Christian as
such has to receive the sentence of death in himself, that he may not trust in
himself, but in God that raiseth the dead, and as a child of Abraham find his
place with God according to the covenant of circumcision.
"For we are
the circumcision, who worship God in the Spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus,
and have no confidence in the flesh;" "having put off the body of the flesh by
the circumcision of Christ." The cross is our end as men in the flesh, not that
we should trust in ourselves now as Christians, but in Christ: that as we have
received Christ Jesus our Lord, we should walk IN HIM. How Little is it
realized what that is! In our complaints of weakness, how little that to be
really weak is strength indeed!
What comfort is there for us in the fact
that thus "sprang there of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars
of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea shore
innumerable"! How serious and how blessed that upon all the natural seed is the
very condition upon which alone they can call him father! The token of the
covenant was to be in his flesh for an everlasting covenant, the token of the
perpetual terms upon which they were with God. How striking to find that under
the Law the very nation in the flesh must carry the "sign of circumcision, a
seal of the righteousness of the faith which Abraham had being yet
uncircumcised" and that at any time, spite of the middle wall of partition
still standing, any Gentile could freely appropriate the sign of such a
righteousness, and with his males circumcised sit down to the feast of
redemption - the passover-feast!
Another reminder is here: "And he that
is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man-child in your
generations, he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any
stranger, which is not of thy seed." Every child of God is both born in the
house and bought with money; not with silver and gold, but with the precious
blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot: and the "eight
days old" shows to how fair an inheritance we are destined; for the eighth day
speaks, of course, to us of new creation, the first week of the old having run
out. It is in the power of the knowledge of this that practical circumcision
can alone be retained. In the wilderness Israel lost theirs, and on reaching
Canaan had to be circumcised the second time. So too the water of separation
had to be sprinkled on the third day: in the power of resurrection only could
death be applied for the cleansing of the soul. The sense of what is ours in
Christ alone qualifies us to walk in His steps. It is only what His own words
imply, - " Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself
except it abide in the vine, no more can ye except ye abide in Me." "As ye have
received Christ Jesus the Lord, walk ye in Him.
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