THE PATRIARCHS (continued 3)

But there is more than this in our patriarch at this time. Two victories distinguish him--one over the armies of the kings, and one over the offers of the king of Sodom.

The first of these Abraham gained, because he struck the blow exactly in God's time. He went out to the battle neither sooner nor later than God would have had him. He waited, as it were, till "he heard the going in the mulberry trees." Victory was therefore sure; for the battle was the Lord's, not his. His arm was braced by the Lord; and this victory of Abraham's was that of an earlier sling and stone, or of the jaw-bone of an ass, or of a Jonathan and his armour-bearer against a Philistine host; for Abraham's was but a band of trained servants against the armies of four confederated kings.

The second, still brighter than the first, was achieved in virtue of fellowship with the very springs of divine strength. The spirit of the patriarch was in victory here, as his arm had been before. He had so drunk in the communication of the King of Salem--had so fed on the bread and wine of that royal, priestly stranger--that the king of Sodom spread out his feast in vain. The soul of Abraham had been in heaven, and he could not return to the world.

That was his blessed experience in the valley of Shaveh. Happy soul indeed! Oh for something more than to trace the image of it in the book! Zaccheus, in his day, was a son of Abraham in this generation, or according to this life and power. Zaccheus so drank in the joy and strength that are to be known in the presence of Christ, that the world became a dead thing to him. He had sat at table with the true Melchizedek, and had eaten of His bread and drunk of His wine. Jesus had spread a feast for His host at Jericho as He had in other days for Abraham in the valley of Shaveh; and, strengthened and refreshed, this son of Abraham, like his father of old, was able to surrender the world. Behold, Lord, says he, the half of my goods I give to the poor, and if I have wronged any man of anything by false accusation, I restore him fourfold. He could give Abraham's answer to the king of Sodom, for he had had Abraham's refreshment from the King of Salem.

Surely, beloved, this is the way of victory in all the saints. The springs of strength and joy are found in Jesus. May you and I be able to look at Him and say, "All my fresh springs are in thee." "This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith." And what are all conquests in God's account but such?--

"'Tis within

The fervent spirit labours. There he gains

Fresh conquests o'er himself, compared with which

The laurels that a Cæsar wears are weeds."

Such, then, are the victories of faith.

But we have more still; and in the next scene, in chapter xv. we see faith's boldness.

And let me ask, for our common comfort, what more precious with God Himself than this? The intelligence of faith is bright, and its victories glorious; but in the accounting of the God of all grace, its boldness surpasses all.

After Abraham's victory over the world, or over the offers of the king of Sodom, the Lord comes to him with some great pledges and promises. After these things the word of the Lord came unto Abram in a vision, saying, Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward. xv. 1. After the heat of the preceding day, it was meet, in the ways of grace, that Abraham should be owned again, and encouraged again. But faith is bold, very bold, apparently aiming higher than the purposes and undertakings of grace. And this is a wonderful moment to contemplate. Abraham seems to throw back the words of the Lord. "I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward," says the Lord. "What wilt thou give me?" Abraham replies--"What wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus?"

This was bold; but, blessed to say it, not too bold for the ear of the Lord who finds His richest joy in the language of faith like this.

Good it is to have a portion; but Abraham sought an object, an object for the heart; something far more important to us. Adam found it so. Eden was not to him what Eve was. The garden with all its tributes did not do for him what the helpmeet did. Eve opened his mouth; she alone did that, because she alone had filled his heart. Christ finds it so. The Church is more to Him than all the glory of the kingdom--as the pearl and the treasure were more to the men who found them, than all their possessions, for they sold all to get them. The strayed sheep, the lost piece of silver, the prodigal son, are more to heaven--to the Father, to the Shepherd, to the Spirit, and to angels--as occasions of joy, than all else; just because the heart has got its object--love has found its answer. This is the mind of Christ. Affection puts the heart on a journey; and it cannot rest, in the midst of all beside, without its object; and it says even to the Lord and His pledges, "What wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless?"

But bold faith this was indeed, appearing thus to throw back the words of God. But it was precious to Him. Yea, it was precious to Him on the highest kind of title; for faith, acting thus and craving after this manner, spoke the way and the taste of the divine mind itself. For God Himself looks for children, as Abraham did. It is not the spirit of bondage that is to fill His house, but that of adoption; it is not servants but children He will have round Him. He has "predestinated us unto the adoption of children, by Jesus Christ, to Himself." He has found in His children an object for Himself; and Abraham was, therefore, but telling out the common secret of his own heart, and of the bosom of God. And at once his desire is answered; and the sight of the starry heavens is made to pledge to the patriarch something better than all portions and all conditions; for the Lord says to him, "So shall thy seed be."

How truly may we say, never does faith aim more justly than when it aims high, and draws with a bold hand. Never is the mark it sets before it more God's own purpose. "Ask thee a sign of the Lord thy God," says the prophet to the king, "ask it either in the depth, or in the height above;" range through the divine resources, and use them. What king Ahaz would not do, wearying the Lord by his reserve, and unbelief, and slowness of heart, Abraham does and continues to do. His soul continues in the same power of faith to the end of this action. He holds on in the same track. "I'll give thee this land to inherit it," says the Lord to him shortly afterwards. "Whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?" is his reply to the Lord. This is of the same fine character; and being so--bespeaking the boldness of faith--it is still infinitely acceptable with the Lord. Abraham seeks something beyond a promise. Not that he doubted the promise. He was sure of it. It could never fail. Heaven and earth would pass away, ere it could pass away. But "oath and blood" to seal it were desired by Abraham. He loved covenant title, and his faith sought it; but sought no more than grace and purpose and sovereign good-pleasure had already designed to give him.

And there lies the richest, fullest consolation. Faith is never too bold to please the Lord. In the days of His flesh, He often rebuked the reserves and suspicions of little faith, but never the strength and decision of a faith that aimed as at everything, and would not go without a blessing. So, the very style in which, in this fine chapter (xv.), He answers the faith of His servant, tells us of the delight with which He had entertained His servant's boldness. The very style of the answer speaks this in our ears; as afterwards in the case of the palsied man in Luke v.; for there the words, "Man, thy sins be forgiven thee," tell how the heart of the same Lord, the God of Abraham, had been refreshed by the faith which broke up the roof of the house without apology, in order to reach Him. And it is the same here. When a fine, bold, unquestioning faith sought for a child, the Lord God took Abraham forth that very night, and, showing him the starry heavens, said to him, "So shall thy seed be." When like faith would have the land secured by something more than a word of promise, the same Lord pledges the covenant by the passage of a burning lamp between the pieces of the sacrifice.

This style, as I said, is full of meaning. It eloquently (may I say?) bespeaks the divine mind. The Lord does not content Himself by merely promising a child, as by word of mouth, or by merely giving some other assurances to Abraham that the land shall be the inheritance of his seed; but, in each case, He enters on certain actions, and conducts them with such august and striking solemnities, as lets us know instinctively, the delight with which He had listened to these demands of faith.

Would that we knew our God as He is to be known, for His praise and our comfort! Love delights to be used. Love is wearied with ceremoniousness. It is, in its way, a trespasser on love's very nature, and on its essential mode of acting. Family affection, for instance, puts ceremony aside all the day long. Intimacy is there, and not form. Form would be too cumbrous for it, as Saul's armour was for David. It has not proved it, and cannot therefore wear it. Love is doing the business of the house in one and another, and the common confidence of all allows it to be done in love's way. So will the Lord have it with Himself. The intimacy of faith is according to His grace, and ceremony is but a weariness to Him.

Grace, as we sing at times, is "a sea without a shore," and we are encouraged to launch forth with full-spread sails. The pot of oil would have been without a bottom, had the woman's faith still drawn from it; and the king of Israel's victories would have been in quick succession, till not a Syrian had been left to tell the tale, had his faith trod the field of battle as one who knew it only as a field of conquest. 2 Kings iv. and xiii. But we are straitened. The boldness of faith is too fine an element for the niggard heart of man that cannot trust the Lord: though, blessed to tell it, it is that which answers, as well as uses, the boundless grace of God.

The believing mind is the happy mind; and it is the obedient mind also, the God-glorifying mind. It is the thankful and the worshipping mind; the mind too that keeps the saint the most in readiness for service, and in separation from pollutions. We may be watchful, and it is right; we may be self-judging, and it is right; we may be careful to observe the rule of righteousness in all that we do, and it is right: but withal, to hold the heart up in the light of the favour of God, by the exercise of a simple, child-like, believing mind, this is what glorifies Him, this is what answers His grace, this is what above all proves itself grateful to Him with whom we have to do. "We have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand." It is not attainment, it is not watchfulness, it is not services or duties, which entitle us to take that journey, that gives the soul entrance into that wealthy place of the divine favour--by faith we have access into this grace wherein we stand.

But we go onward still in this history, and find it rich in other instructions and illustrations of the life of faith.

Sarah now comes forth for the first time in independent action. Chapters xvi. xvii.

The famine had already, as we saw, tempted Abraham to seek the land of Egypt, and he got the resources of that land, with shame and sorrow, and a wearisome journey back again to Canaan. Sarah now tempts him to seek the bondmaid of Egypt.

We know what this Egyptian bondmaid is, from the divine teaching of the epistle to the Galatians. She is the covenant from mount Sinai, the law, the religion of ordinances; and Sarah, in her suggestions to Abraham, that he should take this Egyptian, represents nature, which always finds its relief and its resources in flesh and blood, finds its religion there also, as well as everything else.

The Spirit had not as yet dealt with Sarah's soul. At least, we have had no manifestation of this. She was an elect one surely; but our election goes long before we become the subject of divine workmanship; and, as yet, spiritual life, the life of faith, the operation of the truth on Sarah through the Holy Ghost, had not been witnessed. She had not as yet been spoken of by the Lord. She had not been the companion of her husband in the exercise of his spirit before God, nor his fellow-disciple in God's school. She was not called out with Abraham to number the stars, or to watch the sacrifice. She was still, I may say, in the place of nature; and accordingly she invites her husband to give her seed by her Egyptian handmaid.

That is her place in this action; and Abraham becomes the saint betrayed by nature, led in nature's path, surprised by a temptation from that quarter now, as he had been before by the pressure of famine.

But all this is unbelief and departure from God. It is the way of man, the way of nature; not of faith or of the Spirit. We naturally resort to the law, the bondwoman, the religion of ordinances, when the soul feels its need; as we naturally go down to Egypt, or seek the world, when our circumstances are needy. It is unbelief and departure from God, as is seen even in Abraham; but to leave God and the restorings of His grace, when the soul has need, is a more grievous offence and wrong against Him, than to seek help as from Egypt, when our circumstances have need. My poverty may tempt me to use shifts and contrivances, which is bad enough; but if my conscience want healing, if breaches within need repairing, that I may walk again in the enjoyed light of His countenance, and I go to mere religion, or to ordinances, or to anything but the provisions of His own sanctuary, this is still worse.

The Hagars and the Pharaohs, the bondmaids and the wealth of Egypt, are poor resorts for the Abrahams of God. But so it has been, and so it is, through the working of nature. But Abraham (we will now see for our comfort) is under God's eye, though led by Sarah's suggestions. God has His place in him as well as nature; and He will assert it for his restoring. He rises on his soul in a fresh revelation of Himself, demanding of His saint the fresh obedience of faith. "I am the almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect." For Abraham's soul had lost this truth, the almightiness or the all-sufficiency of God. He had gone in to Hagar; he had taken up confidence in the flesh; he had left the ground he had stood upon in chap. xv.; but the Lord will not and cannot allow this; and therefore rises, in a renewed revelation of Himself, on the spirit of His saint; and it is a rising "with healing in its wings;" for Abraham falls on his face, convicted and abashed, and the soul is led again in paths of righteousness.

Surely there are to this hour such moments in the history of "them that believe," as well as of their "father Abraham." Abraham had not fallen on his face, when the Lord appeared to him and spoke to him in chap. xv. There he stood, conscious that he was in the light with the Lord. But darkness had now come over his soul, and he is not ready for the Lord. He is on his face, silent and amazed. He is not standing, urging the suits of faith, as there; but on his face, silent and confounded. The change in his experience is great; but there is no change in the Lord; for it is the same love, whether He rebuke or comfort. If we walk in the light, we have fellowship with Him; if we confess our sins, we have forgiveness with Him; if we be able to stand before Him, He will feed and strengthen us; if we must needs fall convicted in His presence, He will raise us up again.

This is a fine, earnest path of the spirit of a saint. There is a deep reality here. Departure from God proves itself to be bitterness; but God proves Himself to the soul to be restoration and peace; and under His gracious hand faith is afresh emboldened, and Abraham plies his suit, as one that was again in the vigour of chap. xv., and seeks of God that Ishmael might live before Him.

How one longs to have one's own soul formed by these blessed revelations of grace, and the inwrought work of faith which answers them. The scene changes; but God and the soul are together still. There is reality--reality in the sadness and in the joy, in the light of the divine countenance and in the hiding of our own face as in the dust.

All this may be said of the life of faith, as seen in chapters xvi. xvii. But on entering upon the next scene of action, in chapters xviii. xix., I would observe, that in the life of Abraham we get something beside these exercises and illustrations of faith. We get exhibitions of certain divine mysteries also.

All the facts in this history are simple truths. They happened just as recorded. But there is this twofold design in them: either to give samples of the life of faith in a saint, or to give illustrations of some great ways and purposes of God.

And such illustrations of the divine counsels and mysteries is the common way of divine wisdom throughout Scripture. What was the tabernacle or the temple but a place for the constant rehearsal of mysteries, such as atonement and intercession, and the varied order of God in the worship and services of His house, or in the ministry of grace? For such were the sacrifices and the services there, the feasts, and the holy days, and the jubilees. What, in like manner, were the exodus, and the journey through the wilderness, and the entrance into Canaan, the wars there, and then the throne of the peaceful one? Were not all these, whether institutes of the sanctuary, or facts in the history, exhibitions of the hidden, eternal counsels of the divine bosom?

Now chapters xviii. xix. of this history suggest this recollection. These chapters are to be read together, and afford us a large and vivid exhibition of certain great truths, which concern us at this moment, in as full a sense as ever the facts themselves, which convey them to us as in a parable, concerned Abraham and his generation.

Sodom, in that day, was the world. It had been warned, but had refused instruction. It had proved incurably departed from God, and beyond correction. Sodom had been visited and chastened in the day of the victory of the confederated kings--as we saw in chapter xiv.; but it was Sodom still, and was, at this time, in advanced iniquity, in a state of ripened apostasy, her last state worse than her first.

Sodom was the world in this day. The Lord Jesus, in His teaching, gives it morally that place, just as another generation had been the world in Noah's day. See Matt. xxiv.; Luke xvii. They are like figures, presenting to our thoughts "this present evil world," which is ripening itself for the judgment of God.

At such a crisis, however, in this day of the judgment of Sodom, or the overthrow of the cities of the plain, as in every other like day, there are two incidental matters to be deeply pondered by our souls; there is deliverance out of the judgment, and there is separation before it come. There is Lot, and there is Abraham. Lot is delivered, when the hour of the crisis comes; Abraham is separated before it comes.

All this is much to be weighed in our thoughts. Judgment, deliverance, separation--these are the elements of the action here, and these are full of meaning, and of application to our own history as the Church of God, and to the world around us.

Before this action opens, Abraham had been in a heavenly place. He was a stranger on the earth, having his tent only, and wandering from place to place without so much as to set his foot on; and now, when the judgment comes, he is apart from it altogether, like Enoch, the heavenly Enoch, in another and earlier day of judgment. Each of these, in the day of visitation, was outside, beyond, or above the scene of the ruin; not merely delivered out of it when it came, but separated from it before it came.

Abraham had already stood with the Lord Himself on an eminence which overlooked Sodom, as he and the Lord had walked together from the plain of Mamre; and now, when the judgment spends itself on that apostate, polluted city, Abraham is again, in that high place, beholding the desolation afar off. He was (in the spirit of the place where he stood) in company with Him who was executing the judgment. But Lot is only rescued. Lot is a delivered man, Abraham is a separated one. As Abraham is the Enoch, Lot is the Noah of this later day, and is drawn forth from the devoted city.

What mysteries are these! What solemn realities, in the counsels of God, are here rehearsed for our learning! Do we know what we are looking at in all this? Do we not see great purposes of God, as in a glass, in this varied and eventful action? Have we to ask, Where is this mystic ground, on which we are here standing? Surely, beloved, we ought to know it. In this action, the world, as Sodom, is typically meeting its doom; the righteous remnant, as in Lot, are delivered in that hour of wrath; and the Church, as in Abraham, already separated and borne above, looks afar off on the scene of the mighty desolation. Surely these mysteries are before us in this action at Sodom. "Known unto God are all His works from the beginning of the world." The world, the Church, and the kingdom, are here in mysteries or types; the thing that is to be judged; the thing that is to be separated to heavenly glory; the thing that is to be delivered, and thus reserved for the earth again after the purification. Enoch, Noah, and the deluged creation are again here in Abraham, and Lot, and the doomed cities of the plain.

These are mysteries of which the Book of God is full. And thus is it again and afresh witnessed to us, what we are and where we are, though travelling on, to all appearance, in the common track of everyday human life, with a generation, in the spirit of their mind, still, as ever, saying, "Where is the promise of His coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation."

Many incidental things might occur to the mind in this, as in other sections of this wonderful history; such as the visit of the Son of God to Abraham; Abraham's intercession for Sodom; the angels' reserve towards Lot; and the contrasted characters of the two saints--the saint of the tent, and the saint in Sodom. But my purpose, in this little book, does not take in such details. But I would ask, in closing this action in chapters xviii. xix. Are we, beloved, apprehensive of the moment in which we are living? Is "man's day" brightening up to its meridian before us, ascending to its noontide splendour? And what think we of that? Are we joining in the congratulations of man with his fellow, that thus it is? Or is all this brightness suspected and challenged by us, as the sure precursor of God's judgment? Do we know that the god of this world finds a house "swept and garnished" as thoroughly a scene for his evil and destructive energy as a Sodom? Do we judge, with our generation, that this cannot be? Or do we hold it in mind, that it is in such a house that he will work at the closing of Christendom's history? And are we waiting for the Son of God to take us up to that mystic eminence where of old He took His Abraham? The Lord give us grace to occupy such ground! And we shall the more easily and naturally do so, if, like Abraham, we are saints of the tent and not of the city--such saints (again like Abraham) as rejoice, "in the heat of the day," to hold communion with the Lord of glory.

After this we go, with our patriarch, into the land of the Philistines, where he sojourns during the times of chapters xx. xxi.

The old compact between Abraham and Sarah is acted on again, after so long a time--acted on now at Gerar, as before it had been in Egypt. It had been made between them ere they left their native country. It was brought out with them from the very place of their birth. It was, I may say, in them older than anything of God; and after many changes and exercises it is in them and with them the same thing still.

It was a very evil thing--both subtle and unclean. It was false and yet specious, and savoured strongly of the serpent, of him that is a liar and the father of lies. Abraham was forced to betray it, vile as it was, to the king of Gerar. "It came to pass, when God caused me to wander from my father's house, that I said unto her, This is thy kindness which thou shalt show unto me: at every place whither we shall come, say of me, He is my brother." This was worse than we might even have feared. There was not a principle in the life of faith that was not gainsaid by so vile a compact as this, brought from the very place of their nativity with them. And such is the flesh, the inbred corruption. Its way, whenever taken, is shame and deep dishonour. It degrades a saint even before men. It is that which will confound and expose an Abraham before an Abimelech. And it never changes, or improves, or ceases to be. It is the same in Egypt, and at Gerar. It lives in us still, and follows us everywhere. We get it at our birth from the loins of Adam; and we are, for the common consistency of our way as the called of God, to mortify and refuse it.

Wretched indeed it is to have to see such a thing as this. But the Spirit of God hides nothing. There it lies before us, this vile and wicked thing, in the pathway of the recording Spirit. We have, however, other happier objects.

The progress of Sarah's soul, under the light and leading of the Lord, is to be tracked in its own peculiar and instructive path. Under the influence of the flesh she had, at the outset, joined Abraham in this unclean compact, of which I have just spoken. In unbelief, she had afterwards, as we also saw, given Hagar to her husband; and then, in the haste and rebellion of the heart, she resented the effects of that unbelief, and cast out the bondwoman, whom she had adopted and settled in the family. But at the command of the Lord, Hagar had gone back to her; and now, at the time of this action, she had borne with her in the house for fourteen years. There was, however, no manifestation of the renewed mind, or the life of faith, in her. It was even during these years, that in unbelief she had laughed at the promise, behind the tent-door. But still, I may say, she had, during this time, in one sense, been at school; and she seems to have learnt a lesson, for she submitted patiently and unresistingly, to the presence of the bondwoman and her child in the house of her husband. We hear of no fresh quarrels between them. This was something. This was witness of her being in the hand of God, till at length, as we know, she was given faith to conceive seed. Heb. xi. A great journey, however, after all this, is now about to be taken by her spirit. She is to take the lead even of her husband. And happy this is--common enough, too, among the saints--but happy, very happy. And were we of a delivered heart--a heart given up to the desire of Christ's glory only--we should rejoice in these discoveries, made in the regions of the Spirit, though we ourselves would have to be humbled by them. "The last shall be first, and the first last." These are among the ways of "new-born souls," and to be discerned still by those who "mark the steps of grace." Paul could say of some, "Who also were in Christ before me;" but we may be bold to add, in that case, though he did not, "The last were first." And the generous liberty of the redeemed soul will but glory in these sovereign actings of the Spirit.

Sarah's elevation above Abraham in the things of the kingdom of God is now to appear in illustration of all this. In obedience to the command, Abraham calls the child that was born, Isaac. But Sarah interprets that name: and this is a finer exercise of soul over the gift of God. To obey a word is good; but to obey it in the joy of an exercised heart, and in the light and intelligence of a mind that has entered into the divine sense of that word, is better. Abraham called the child that was born to him, Isaac: but Sarah said "God has made me to laugh; and all they that hear it will laugh with me." The oracle of chapter xvii. 19 was made more to her than a command to be observed. It had springs of refreshing in it, and kindlings of soul. It was full of light and meaning to the opened understanding of Sarah. And this leads to strength and decision. This Deborah of earlier days will brace the loins of Barak. "Cast out this bondwoman and her son," says Sarah to Abraham; for she was happy in the liberty of grace and promise, while he was still lingering amid the claims of nature, and the desires which his own loins had gendered. "Cast out this bondwoman and her son; for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, even with Isaac." And this was Scripture, as we read in Gal. iv.; this was the voice of God. This decision of faith, in the liberty of grace, gets its sealing at once under God's own hand. "Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made you free," says the Spirit. And what met the mind of the Lord, in the days of His flesh, like the faith which was bold and free, after this manner? the faith which would use Him without ceremony, which reached Him through a crowd, which pressed in through the silent reproaches of a misjudging Pharisee, or through the injurious whispers of a self-righteous multitude! And how much of the energy of the Spirit in St. Paul is engaged in giving the sinner this precious boldness, this immediate assurance of heart in Christ, in spite of law, conscience, earth, and hell!

This boldness of faith in Sarah, this challenge of the bondwoman, this demand (in her own behalf too) that she might enjoy her Isaac all alone, is Scripture. Gal. iv. 30. She spake as "the oracles of God." But in Abraham nature now acts. He would fain retain Ishmael. This is no strange thing. Nature now acts in Abraham, and faith in Sarah; as, on an earlier occasion, which we noticed, nature had acted in Sarah and faith in Abraham. But nature in Abraham must submit. He must not let Sarah be entangled any longer as with this yoke of bondage. The house must be freed of Ishmael, for it is to be built only in Isaac. "The son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman."

But all this quickly bears its fruit. Hagar being now gone, and the house settled in Isaac according to this demand of faith, glory is therefore quickly ready to enter. For this is the divine order. Having "access into this grace wherein we stand, we rejoice in hope of the glory of God." Such is the order of the Spirit in the soul of such a saint; and such is the order now in the mystic house of our Abraham.

Abraham is sought by the Gentile. This is full of meaning. In the days of stress and famine, Abraham seeks the Gentile, whether in Egypt or in Philistia; but now, the Gentile seeks Abraham. This is a great change. Abraham's house, as we have seen, is now established in grace. Ishmael is dismissed, and Isaac is gloried in. In mystic sense, Israel has turned to the Lord, the veil is taken away, Jerusalem has said to Christ, "Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord," her warfare is therefore accomplished, and she is receiving the double. The Gentile seeks Israel. Abimelech and Phichol, the king and his chief captain, come to Abraham.

This is a great dispensational change. Israel is the head now, and not the tail. The skirt of the Jew is now laid hold on by the nations; for the Jew has, by faith, laid hold on the Lord, and the nations say, God is with you. Chap. xxi. 22; Zech. viii. 23.

This is full of meaning; and Abraham on all this (led of the Spirit) is full of thoughts of glory or of the kingdom. And rightly so. Because, when the Jew is sought by the Gentile, instead of being trodden down or degraded by the Gentile, the kingdom is at hand. Accordingly, on the king of Gerar seeking him and suing him, our patriarch raises a new altar; not the altar of a heavenly stranger, as in chapter xii., but an altar to "the everlasting God;" not an altar in a wilderness-world, but an altar beside a grove and a well; the one being a witness that the solitary place had been made glad, and that the wilderness was rejoicing; the other, that the peoples of the earth were confederate with the seed of Abraham.¹¹

All this bright intelligence of faith in Abraham is very beautiful. We have already seen other actings of it in him. He knew a time of peace and a time of war, and acted accordingly in the day of the battle of the five kings with four. So, again, he knew his heavenly place, and took it, when the fire of the Lord was judging the cities of the plain. So, again, as this chapter xxi. very remarkably shows us, he also knew when to suffer wrong and when to resent, when to be passive and when to assert his rights. For now, in the time of this chapter, when the Gentile seeks him, he reproves Abimelech for a well of water which Abimelech's servants had violently taken away. But he had not complained of this injury until now; for Abimelech said to him, "I wot not who has done this thing; neither didst thou tell me, neither yet heard I of it, but to-day." And this is exceedingly beautiful. It is perfect in its generation. Abraham had till now suffered, and taken it patiently, because till now he had been a heavenly stranger on the earth; and such patient suffering in such an one is acceptable with God. But now, times are changed. The heavenly stranger has become the head of the nations, sought by the Gentile; and rights and wrongs must now be settled, and the cry of the oppressed must be heard.

All this has great moral beauty in it. I know not how sufficiently to admire this workmanship of the Spirit in the mind of Abraham. He was an Israelite who knew the seasons of the year--when to be at the Passover, and when at the Feast of Tabernacles. He knew, in spirit, when to continue with Jesus in His temptations, and then again, when the day arrived, how to surround Him with hosannahs as He entered the city of the Son of David. All such various and blending lights shone in the spiritual intelligence of his soul. God, by the Spirit, communicated a beautiful mind to Abraham. In other days, he would not have so much of this earth as to set his foot on--he would surrender the choice of the land to Lot--he would leave the Canaanite where he found him--he would refuse to be enriched by the king of Sodom even in so little as a thread or a shoe-latchet--he would wander up and down in his tent here, a stranger from heaven--but now, in a day signified and marked by the hand of God, he can be another man, and know his millennial place, as father of the Israel of God, and their representative as head of the nations. He can keep the Feast of Tabernacles in its season. His rebuke of Abimelech--his entertaining him--his enriching him--his giving him covenant pledges--and all this in such easy, conscious dignity--and then his new altar or his calling on God in a new character, and his planting a grove, all bespeak another man, and that a transfiguration, if I may so speak, had taken place in him, according to God.

All this I judge to have a great character in it. But I will not any longer stay here; for there is still more in this fine life of faith which our father Abraham, through grace, tracked to the very end, holding still the beginning of his confidence.

And here let me say, this life of faith is, in other words, life spent in the power of resurrection. It is the life of a dead and risen man. It is a lesson, if one may speak for others, hard indeed to be learnt to any good effect, but still it is the lesson, the practical lesson of our lives, that we are a dead and risen people. At the outset Abraham, in spirit, took that character. He left behind him all that nature or the world had provided him with. He left what his birth introduced him to, for that which faith introduced him to. And as he began, so he continued and ended, with failings by the way indeed, and that too again and again, but still to the end he was a man of faith, a dead and risen man.

As such an one he had received Isaac, some twenty years ago, not considering his own body now dead, neither yet the deadness of Sarah's womb; and as such an one he now offers him on the altar at the word of the Lord. The promise was God's--that was enough for him. For faith is never overcome. It has divine, infinite resources. The believer fails again and again; but faith is never overcome, or comes short of its expectation. xxii.

This is the way of faith, when Isaac was demanded.¹² And the same overcoming faith we trace in the very next scene, the burial of Sarah. This was the same faith, the faith of a dead and risen man, the faith which had already received Isaac, and offered Isaac, now buries Sarah. Abraham believed in resurrection, and in God as the God of resurrection, the God who quickens the dead, and calls those things that be not as though they were. The cave of Machpelah tells us this. "Earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, in sure and certain hope," was the language of Abraham's heart there. His purchase of that place, with all his care to make it his own, to have it as his possession, while beyond it he cared not for a single acre of the whole land, tells us of his faith in resurrection. His treaty for it with the children of Heth is like his words to his servants at the foot of mount Moriah, "Abide ye here with the ass, while I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you." Each of these things bespoke beforehand what he knew about his Isaac and his Sarah. He committed each of them into the hands of Him who, as he knew, quickens the dead. The corn of wheat dying, as he knew, was to live again. The handful of sacred dust, as he knew, was to be gathered again. Death itself was eyed in like victory of faith, as had already been eyed the fire, and the wood, and the beloved victim on the altar. xxiii.

These were the victories of faith again. Faith in our patriarch, after this manner, talked calmly with all circumstances, and won the day over them all in their turn. Beautiful victories of "precious faith"! And they are gained still. Faith still disposes of one circumstance after another as it rises. It meets our own personal condition as "dead in trespasses and sins;" it meets the difficulties and temptations of the way; it meets the last great enemy. Let me not make a wonder of meeting things on the journey, or at the end of it, if I have already met what withstood me at the outset. Faith will go to mount Moriah, or to the cave of Machpelah, if it have already gone out in the starry night with the Lord at Hebron. If it have met death in my own person, it may meet it in my Isaac or my Sarah. One speaks, the Lord knows, of His grace, and not of one's own experience. But still, beloved, let each of us say, Am I not at peace with God? Do I not know that He is for me? Do I not know that my estate of sin, guilt, and condemnation has been met in His grace? Do I not know that I am washed, accepted, adopted? Have I not gone out with Abraham, as in the night of chap. xv., and found relief for my own state by nature, and shall I then tarry on my way, though the trial of mount Moriah await me, or the death and burial at Machpelah? If faith have already met sin, it is to know itself conqueror over even death. Let our souls be accustomed to the thought that the brightest victory of faith was achieved at the beginning--that if at peace with God in spite of sin, we may reckon on strength and comfort from Him in spite of the trials of the way, and on power and triumph in Him in spite of the end of it. Faith which has done its first work has done its greatest work. "If, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life." God is glorified in these reckonings of faith. "He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?"

It is the power of life over death, life in victory, that faith uses. It was such power of victorious life that Abraham possessed himself of by faith. The sepulchre is empty, and the grave-clothes are lying there, as the spoils of war. The deadness of his own body, the altar of his Isaac, and the grave of his Sarah, were visited and inspected by a risen man, in the light of the faith of Him who is the Quickener of the dead, and calleth those things that be not as though they were.

These are the great things of faith in the souls of the elect. But further still, in this fruitful, shifting history. Abraham, at the end, is seen to hold his first ground, as well as to work his earlier victories. He maintains, through grace, erect and firm, that very attitude which he had at once and at the first assumed, when by faith he hearkened to the call of God.

That call of God had done these two things with Abraham, I might say for Abraham; it had separated him from Mesopotamia, and yet left him a stranger in Canaan. From country, kindred, and father's house he had been withdrawn; but still, in the midst of that land and people to which he had come, he was to be but a pilgrim, dwelling as on the surface of it, in a tent, whatever part of it he might pass through or visit.

This position was very holy. His separation was twofold--separation from pollution, such as he might meet in Canaan; separation from natural alliances, such as he had been born into in Mesopotamia. He was under the call of the God of glory; and such a call made no terms with either the flesh or the world. In somewhat of Levite holiness, he did not know his mother's children; in somewhat of church holiness, he knew no man after the flesh. Nay; beyond even all this, in somewhat of the virtue of his divine Lord, he did not know himself. He was the heir of the land where he was a pilgrim. The promise of God was his, as surely as the call. He knew himself to be destined of divine, unimpeachable purpose, to dignities of a very high order. But to the end he was willing to pass unknown, entirely unknown. He talked of himself to the children of the land only as a stranger and a sojourner. He would pay for the smallest plot of ground which he wanted. He would be nothing and nobody in the midst of them. He never talked of the dignities which he knew, all the time, really attached to him. David, in like spirit, in other days, had the oil of Samuel on him, the consecration of God to the throne of the tribes of Israel; and yet he would be hid, and thank a rich neighbour, in his need, for a piece of bread. These men of God knew not themselves. This was the way of our Abraham; and this was the virtue of Him who, in this same departed, evil world, made Himself of no reputation, though God of heaven and earth.

Blessed virtues of soul under the power of the call of God, through the Holy Ghost! Mesopotamia is left, Canaan is estranged, and self is forgotten and hid! The call of God purposes to do at this day with us what in that day it did with Abraham. It would fain conform us to itself. Its authority is supreme. It is not that country or kindred are, of necessity, defiling. Nature accredits them; and the law of God, in its season, owns and enforces them. But the call of God is supreme, and demands separation of a very high, and fine, and peculiar order. And this was what addressed Abraham when he dwelt in Mesopotamia, the place of his birth, of his kindred, and of his natural associations, and this was what still echoed in his heart all the time of his sojourn in Canaan.

It was not that he was called to assert the harm of such things. Not at all. But they were such things as the call of God left behind; and the harm, or the moral wrong, or the pollution of a thing was no longer his rule, but inconsistency with the call of God. He may allow the right and the claim of a thousand things; but it is the voice of the God of glory, to which in faith he had hearkened already, that must lead him and command him. "No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God."

He was very true to his call. According to it, at the beginning, he had gone forth, not knowing, as before him, whither he went, and leaving, as behind him, all that even nature itself must accredit, and all but the sovereign pleasure of God sanction. He continued in the power of it, sojourning in tents, unknown and unendowed, a stranger in the world, refusing to take one backward step. And at the end, we find the same power of his call as fresh in his soul as ever--as earnest and as simple in chap. xxiv. as it had been in chap. xii. He charges Eliezer to act upon it to the full, as he himself at the outset had done--that is, he was to keep Isaac in the place of separation at all cost. Let come what may, Isaac was neither to be taken back to Mesopotamia, nor to be allied with Canaan. He was, let circumstances make it difficult as they may, to be maintained in his true place under the call of God.

This has a great character in it. There is another mystery in this exquisite chapter (xxiv.), as we commonly know; but I do not notice it here. I rather design to trace the earnest, simple path, which faith trod from first to last, in our father Abraham. The voice of the God of glory was still heard by him. He was still the separated man. He declared plainly that he sought a heavenly country. He might have had opportunity to return. This very journey of Eliezer proved that he had not forgotten the road. But he did not, he would not.

This strangership of our patriarch in the earth has indeed a very fine character. He left Mesopotamia, he sojourned in Canaan, he hid or forgot himself! Abraham left Abraham behind, as well as country, kindred, and father's house. He made himself of no reputation. He spoke of himself as "a stranger and a sojourner," and as that only, in the audience of the children of Heth, though he was, all the while, the one "who had the promises." All this was real, true-hearted strangership in the world. And it was conscious citizenship in heaven that made him, after this manner, a willing stranger here. Because of possessions in prospect, he could do without them in hand. The land of promise was to him but a strange country, because it was but a land of promise and not of possession. He saw Christ's day, and was glad; but he saw it in the distance. Heb. xi. 9-14.

And Abraham was all this to the very end--as these closing chapters show us. The character which he took up at the beginning, under the call of God, that character he maintained to the end. He fails in the power of faith along the road, again and again, but he is the same heavenly stranger to the end of his journey.¹³

And strangership of this order is ours, I am deeply assured. Ours is to be strangership in the earth, because of conscious and well-known citizenship in heaven; separation from the world, because of oneness with an already risen Christ. Nothing can alter this while we are on the earth. We ought so to look in the face of a rejected Christ as to maintain this strangership in power. And so we do, as far as Christ is of more value to us than all our circumstances. It is for want of this that we take up with the world as we do. We have not learnt the lesson that Moses learnt--that the reproach of Christ was greater riches than the treasures of Egypt.

Hard but blessed. Abraham knew something of it in power. He was the stranger to the end. He might have returned to Mesopotamia. He had not forgotten the road, as we observed before; and the constant respect and friendliness of all his neighbours proved that there was no enemy to hinder the journey. But the call of God had fixed his heart, and he looked only where it led him.¹⁴

Would that the soul held these things in increased power! Little indeed does the heart know of this, if one may speak for others. But they are real--the prized fruit of divine energy in the elect of God.

After all this we find another and distinct matter in the history of Abraham. I mean his marriage with Keturah, and his family by her.

This family by Keturah is, we may surely judge, a distinct mystery. That is, Abraham is here presenting a new feature of the divine wisdom, or illustrating another secret in the ways of the divine dispensations. In these children of the second wife we get (typically) the millennial nations, the nations which shall people the earth in the days of the kingdom, branches of the great family of God in that day, and children of Abraham. They may lie far off, as in the ends of the earth; but they shall have their allotments, and be owned as of the one extended millennial family. "Rejoice, ye Gentiles, with His people," shall be said to them. The ends of the earth shall be Christ's inheritance then, as surely as the Church shall be glorified in Him and with Him in the heavens, and the throne of David, and the inheritance of Israel be His, as set up and revived in the land of their fathers. Abraham's children will be all the world over.

For in that day of glory, the King of Israel shall be the God of the whole earth. Christ is the Father of the everlasting age. If Israel be honoured by Him, all the nations shall be blest in Him. He is "the light to lighten the Gentiles," as He is "the glory of His people Israel." Keturah's children, parcelled off in other lands, bespeak this mystery. They will be second to Israel, it is true; but, nevertheless, they will be elect and beloved. As it is here written: And Abraham gave all that he had unto Isaac. But unto the sons of the concubines which Abraham had, Abraham gave gifts, and sent them away from Isaac his son, while he yet lived, eastward, unto the east country. xxv.¹⁵

This is, I believe, the mystic meaning of this new family of Abraham; and this strange and wondrous article is that which closes his history. But it is another witness of the large and varied testimony which God has borne to His own counsels and secrets in that history. And this is very remarkable. At times the Father is seen in Abraham--as, in his desire for children--his making a feast at the weaning of Isaac--his offering up of his son--his sending for a wife for his son; at other times the Christ is seen in him, as the one in whom all the families of the earth are to be blest--as the kinsman-redeemer of Israel--as the holder of the headship of the nations--father of the millennial or everlasting age--and then, at other times, the Church, or heavenly people, are traced or reflected in this wondrous story; and, at other times, we are on earth, or with Israel.

We have the Blessed One, unto whom all His works are known from the beginning of the world, in the details and changeful stories of this life of Abraham, thus showing forth parts of His ways. In the allegories of Sarah and her seed, of Hagar and her seed, of Keturah and her seed, we have the mystery of Jerusalem, "the mother of us all," Israel in bondage as she now is with her children, and the gathering of the nations all the world over, as branches of the one extended millennial family. Mystery after mystery is thus acted in the life of Abraham; and many and various parts of "the manifold wisdom of God" are taught us.

I am quite aware, that living or personal types may have been as unconscious of what they were, under God's hand, as material types. Hagar, no doubt, was as passive as the gold that overlaid the table of shew-bread, or as the water which filled the brazen laver. But the lesson to us is not affected by this. I have Christ's royal glory in the state of Solomon, and I have the deeply precious provisions of His grace in the golden plate on Aaron's forehead; and I no more think of enquiring about Solomon himself in that matter than I do about the gold. The sleeping Adam teaches me about the death of the Christ of God; the waking rapture of Adam, on receiving Eve, teaches me about the satisfaction and joy of the same Christ of God, when He shall see of the travail of His soul; but whether Adam knew what he was doing for me, I do not ask myself. I can learn about the first covenant from an unconscious Hagar, as I can learn about the cleansing of the blood of Christ from an unconscious altar. So, as to our Abraham, in taking his place in the midst of all these varied and wondrous mysteries, I enquire not curiously the measure of his mind in these things. The wisdom of God can say--the Christ who stood in the eternal counsels can say, "Behold, I and the children whom the Lord hath given me are for signs and for wonders;" but how far Abraham could speak so, in whatever measure he was himself in the secret he was made to utter, or whether he spoke mysteries as in an unknown tongue, we have not to enquire. "God is His own interpreter."

Our patriarch has now closed his actings and his exercises. We have now to close his eyes, as we read in chap. xxv. 7, 8, "And these are the days of the years of Abraham's life which he lived, an hundred threescore and fifteen years. Then Abraham gave up the ghost, and died in a good old age, an old man, and full of years; and was gathered to his people."

He had, we may say, seen the land, but he was not to go over and possess it. He was the Moses of an earlier generation; like him, a heavenly man, a man of the wilderness and not of the inheritance--a man of the tent--a child of resurrection. He was gathered to his people, ere the land was entered by the Israel of God according to promise. As in the glass of God's purpose, and by the light of faith, he sees the land; but he goes not over to possess it. He dies as on Mount Pisgah, on the wilderness-side of the Jordan, destined, with Enoch before him and with Moses after him, to shine on the top of the hill in the heavenly glory of the Son of man.

We have now closed the third section of the Book of Genesis; and, with it, the scenes and circumstances of the life of Abraham.

In the midst of these fragments, thus gathered and treasured up for us by the Holy Ghost, we have seen faith getting its victories, knowing its rights and pleading its titles, practising its generosity, enjoying its fellowships, making its surrenders, and obtaining its consolations and promises. But we have seen also its intelligence, and learnt it to be such a thing as walks in the light, or according to the judgment, of the mind of Christ.

There is something very beautiful in such a sight as this. We do not commonly witness this fine combination--the intelligence of faith, and the moral power of faith. In some saints, there is the earnest, urgent power of faith, which goes on right truthfully and honestly, but with many a mistake as to the dispensational wisdom of God. In others, there is a mind nicely taught, endowed with much priestly, spiritual skill, in following the wisdom of God in ages and dispensations, but with lack of power in all that service which a simpler and more earnest faith would be constantly pursuing. But in Abraham we see these things combined.

In our walk with God, the light of the knowledge of His mind should be seen, as well as our hearts be ever found open to His presence and joy, and our consciences alive to His claims and His will. The life of faith is a very incomplete thing, if we know not, as Abraham knew, the times as signified of God, when to fight, as it were, and when to be still; when to be silent under the wrongs of an Abimelech, and when to resent them; when to raise the altar of a sojourning stranger, and when to call on the name of the everlasting God. In other words, we ought to know what the Lord is about, according to His own eternal purpose, and what He is leading onward to its consummation, in His varied and fruitful wisdom.

Such is the nature of all obedience; for the conduct of the saint is ever to be according to the dispensed wisdom of God at the time, or in the given age.

But, let me add, the highest point of moral dignity in Abraham was this: that he was a stranger in the earth.

This, I may say, outshines all. It was this that made God not ashamed to be called his God. God can morally own the soul that advisedly refuses citizenship in this revolted, corrupted world.

This was the highest point in moral dignity in Abraham.

God loveth the stranger. Deut. x. 18. He loves the poor, unfriended stranger, with the love of pity and of grace, and provides for him. But with the separated stranger, who has turned his back on this polluted scene, God links His name and His honour, and morally owns such without shame. Heb. xi. 13-16.

How finely he started on his journey at the beginning! The Lord and His promises were all he had. He left, as we have seen, his natural home behind him, but he did not expect to find another home in the place he was going to. He knew that he was to be a stranger and sojourner with God in the earth. Mesopotamia was left, but Canaan was not taken up in the stead of it. Accordingly, from all the people there, he was a separated man all his days, or during his sojourn among them of about one hundred years. Canaan was the world to that heavenly man, and he had as little to do with it or to say to it as he might, though all the while in it. When circumstances demanded it, or as far as business involved him, he dealt with it. He would traffic with the people of the land, if need were (to be sure he would), but his sympathies were not with them. He needed a burying-place, and he purchased it of the children of Heth. He would not think of hesitating to treat with them about a necessary matter of bargain and sale; but he would rather buy than receive. He was loth to be debtor to them, or to be enriched by them--nor were they his companions. This we observe throughout. If Aner, Eshcol, and Mamre--it may be morally attracted by what they saw in him--seek confederacy with him, he will not refuse their alliance on a given occasion of the common interest, when such interest the God who had called him would sanction or commend. But still the Canaanites were not his company. His wife was his company, his household, his flocks and his herds, and his fellow-saint, Lot, his brother's son, who had come out of Mesopotamia with him--as long, at least, as such an one walked as a separated man in Canaan. But even he, when undistinguished from the people of the land, is a stranger to him as well and as fully as they.

All this has surely a voice in our ears. Angels were Abraham's company at times, and so the Lord of angels--and at all times, his altar and his tent were with him, and the mysteries or truths of God, as they were made known to him. But the people of the land, the men of the world, did not acquire his tastes or sympathies, or share his confidence. He was among them but not of them--and rather would he have had his house unbuilt, and Isaac be without a wife, than that such wife should be a daughter of Canaan.

To some of us, beloved, this breaking up of natural things is terrible. But if Jesus were loved more, all this would be the easier reckoned on. If His value for us within the veil were more pondered in our hearts and treasured up there, we should go to Him without the camp with firmer, surer step. "I have learnt," said one of the martyrs, "that there is no freedom like that of the heart that has given up all for Christ--no wisdom like that learnt at His feet--no poetry like the calm foreseeing of the glory that shall be."

Of our Abraham and his companions in this life of faith, confessing that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth, it is written, "They that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country--and truly if they had been mindful of that 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."

Beloved, we are called to be these strangers--strangers such as God can thus morally own. If the world were not Abraham's object, we ought to feel, even on higher sanctions, that it cannot be ours. The call of the God of glory made Abraham a stranger here--the cross of Christ, in addition to that, may still more make us strangers. As we sometimes sing--

"Before His cross we now are left,

As strangers in the land."

"Ye are dead," says the apostle, "and your life is hid with Christ in God." That is strangership of the highest order--the strangership of the Son of God Himself. "The world knoweth us not, because it knew Him not."

In the strength of this strangership in the world, may we have grace to "abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul"! and in the strength of our conscious citizenship in heaven may "we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself."

ISAAC.

GENESIS XXV.-XXVII.

In the former papers, entitled Enoch, Noah, and Abraham, I have followed the course of the Book of Genesis, down to the end of chapter xxiv. I now propose to take it up from thence, and follow it on through chapters xxv.-xxvii.; Isaac, after Abraham, being the principal person there.

There is, however, but little in his history, and little in his character. In some respects this is no matter; for, whether much or little, his name is in the recollection of us all who have learnt the ways of the God of grace, "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," which is His name for ever, His memorial unto all generations. Exod. iii.

Isaac was a stranger in the earth, a heavenly stranger, as his father had been, and we see him with his tent and his altar, as we saw Abraham; and we hear the Lord giving him the promises, as He had given them to Abraham.

"By faith Abraham 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."

This tent-life of the patriarchs had a great character in it. Hebrews xi. 9, 10 teaches us this. It tells us that the fathers were content to live upon the surface of this world. A tent has no foundations. It is pitched or struck at a moment's warning. And such a slight and passing connection with this earth, and life upon it, these patriarchs were satisfied to have and seek only. They did not look for a city or for foundations, till God became a Builder. Till His building was manifested they were sojourners here, just crossing the plain, or surface of the earth, without striking their roots into it.

This is the voice that is heard from the tents of these pilgrim-fathers. And as their tents bespoke this heavenly strangership, their altars bespoke their worship, their true worship; for they raised their altar to Him who had appeared to them. They did not affect to find out God by their wisdom, and then worship Him in the light and dictate of their own thoughts. They did not, thus, in the common folly, profess themselves to be wise; but they knew God and worshipped God only according to His revelation of Himself. Therefore it was not an altar "to the unknown God" at which they served; but they served or worshipped in truth. And in its generation the patriarchal altar was, in this way, as beautiful as the patriarchal tent. The latter put them into due relationship to the world around them, the former to the Lord God of heaven and earth who was above them.

Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were alike in all this. There was, therefore, no new dispensational secret, no fresh purpose of the divine counsels, revealed in Isaac, as there had been in Abraham.¹⁶ This is so. But still, though there was no new dispensational scene unfolded, there was a further unfolding of the glories that attach to the dispensation or calling which had been already made known in Abraham. And a very important one too--such as, if we had divine affections, we should deeply prize. I mean this: The heavenly calling or strangership on earth was the common thing; but characteristically, election was illustrated in Abraham, and sonship or adoption in Isaac.

God called Abraham from the world, from kindred, country, and father's house, separating him to Himself and to His promises. But Isaac was already as one chosen and called and sanctified, while in the house of his father. He was at home from his birth, and he was there with God, having been born according to promise, and through an energy that quickened the dead; and in all these things he represented sonship, as Abraham had represented election. In Isaac we see that family that is "born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God," and who stand in liberty; as the apostle says, "Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise." We are Abraham's seed, so many Isaacs, children of the freewoman, or in the adoption, if we be Christ's.

Now this mystery of sonship or adoption represented in Isaac, as the mystery of election had been made known in Abraham, is in divine order. For the election of God is unto adoption, as we read, "Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ unto Himself;" and this being so, this high, personal prerogative being represented in Isaac, in the course of his history we get the mystery of the son of the freewoman very blessedly, largely exhibited.

For we get both the birth and the weaning. And each of these events was the occasion of joy in the house of the father. The child born was called "laughter," the child weaned was celebrated by a feast.

Wondrous and gracious secrets these are. It is the father's joy to have children, it is his further joy that his children should know themselves to be children. This was the birth and the weaning of Isaac in the Book of Genesis. And all this, after so long a time, is revived in the Epistle to the Galatians. For what was represented in Isaac is realized in us through the Spirit. In that epistle we learn that we are children by faith in Christ Jesus. And there we learn also that, being children, we receive the spirit of children. We are weaned as well as born. Paul travailed in birth for them again, as he says: "My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you." The Christ of this passage is Christ the Son; and Paul longed and laboured that they might be brought into the Isaac-state, the liberty of conscious adoption. They were under temptation to feed again upon the ordinances which gendered bondage, and which the tutors and governors of an earlier dispensation had enjoined. But opposed to this, the apostle would draw them again into liberty, as he himself had proved the virtue of it in his own soul. It had pleased God, as he says, to reveal the Son in him. The life he lived in the flesh he lived by the faith of the Son, who loved him. He could, therefore, go down to Arabia, where he had no flesh and blood to confer with, no Jerusalem or city of solemnities, no apostles or ordinances, no priesthood after a carnal order, no worldly sanctuary, to countenance, to seal, or to perfect him. He did not want what any or all could give him, for he had the Son revealed in him. He was a weaned Isaac; and he would fain have the Galatians to be such likewise; and to hear the word which of old had been heard in the house of Abraham over Isaac, "Cast out the bondwoman and her son; for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman."

All this is given us, mystically, in Isaac, the child of the freewoman, whose birth caused laughter, and whose weaning was celebrated with a feast. And this mystery is, we thus see, largely and expressly revived and opened, in its full character, in the Epistle to the Galatians.

It is not of glories only that we must be thinking, when thinking of predestination. God's purposes concerning us are still richer. We are predestinated to a state of gratified affections, as well as to a place of displayed glories--to "the adoption of children," and to be "before Him in love," as well as to the inheritance of all things. Ephesians i. And the Spirit already given is as surely in us the power to cry, "Abba, Father," as He is the seal of the title of the coming redemption.

We are apt to forget this. We think of calling and of predestination, in connection with glory, rather than in connection with love, and relationship, and home, and a Father's house.

And yet it is relationship that will give even the inheritance or the glory its richest joy. The youngest child in the family has another kind of enjoyment of the palace of the king, than the highest estate and dignitary of his realm. The child is there without state, for its title is in relationship--the lords of the land may be there, but they are there as at court, by title of their dignity or office. And the child's enjoyment of the palace is not only, as I said, of another kind, it is of a higher kind--it is personal and not official--the palace is a home to it, and not merely the court of royalty.

Now it is the son, the child at home, the child in the privileges of relationship, that we get in Isaac. It is such an one that he represents--this is what Isaac, mystically, is. Isaac was kept at home, waited on by the household, nourished and endowed; and the wealth as well as the comfort of his father's house was his; as we read, "And Abraham gave all that he had unto Isaac. But unto the sons of the concubines which Abraham had, Abraham gave gifts, and sent them away from Isaac his son, while he yet lived, eastward, unto the east country."

Mystically looked at, Isaac is thus before us, a son, born of the free woman, born of promise, born of God, as it is said, "I will come and Sarah shall have a son." Isaac represents that adopted family who are made "accepted in the Beloved," who have put on Christ, who stand in His joy, and breathe His spirit.

We have, however, to consider him morally as well as mystically; that is, in his character, as well as in his person. The elements, however, are but few. There is but little history connected with him. There are but few incidents in his life, and but little disclosure of character. And this is to our comfort. At times we find among the elect of God very fine natural materials, a noble bearing of soul, or a delicate, attractive form of human virtue; and again, at other times, either poor, or even very bad, human materials. And this becomes a relief to our poor hearts. Because we find it (from a better acquaintance with ourselves than with others) easy to own the poor and wretched materials that go to make up what we ourselves are; and then it is our comfort (comfort of a certain sort) to find like samples of nature in others of God's people.

Isaac was wanting in character. He was neither of fine nor of bad natural materials. There was much in him that, as we say, was amiable, and which, after a human estimate, would have been attractive. But he was wanting in character. The style of his education may go far to account for this. He had been reared tenderly. He had never been away from the side of his mother, the child of whose old age he was--her only child; and these habits had relaxed him, and kept a naturally amiable temper in its common softness. Quietness and retirement, the temper that rather submits than resents, and this allied to the relaxing indulgence of domestic, if not animal, life, appear in him. He was blameless, we may quite assume, pious and strict in the observance of relative duties, as a child and as a husband, and would have engaged the good-will and good wishes of his neighbours; but he was wanting in that energy which would have made him a witness among them, at least, beyond the separation which attended his circumcision, his altar, and his tent. And such a life is always a poor one. To his tent and his altar he was true, to a common measure; but he pitched the one and raised the other with too feeble a hand.

Isaac was forty years old when he received Rebecca to wife. For twenty years they were childless; but under this trial they behaved themselves even better than Abraham and Sarah had done. Abraham and Sarah had no child, and Sarah gave her bondmaid to her husband. Isaac and Rebecca had no child; but they entreated the Lord, and waited for His mercy. This was a difference, and for a moment, the last are first, and the first are last; and such moral variety do we find among the people of God to this day. But the two sets of children suggest different divine mysteries, as the way of the parents of each thus afford different moral teaching.

There were the two sons of Abraham--Isaac and Ishmael; but they were by two wives: there are now the two sons of Isaac--Jacob and Esau; but they are by the same wife.

The enmity between the sons of Abraham began when Ishmael, a lad of fourteen years of age, mocked the weaned Isaac. But the struggle between the sons of Isaac was in the womb. Two nations were there, as the Lord had told Rebecca, "Two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels." And so it came to pass. The man of God was found in Jacob, the man of the world in Esau; the principle of faith was in the one, the principle of nature in the other. Two manner of people were indeed separated from her bowels, and had struggled in her womb. "The friendship of the world is enmity against God." And this was Esau. Accordingly, Esau made the earth the scene of his energies, of his enjoyments, and of his expectations. He was "a man of the field," and "a cunning hunter." He prospered in his generation. He loved the field, and he knew how to use the field. He set his heart on the present life, and knew how to turn its capabilities to the account of his enjoyments. His sons quickly became dukes, nay kings, and had their cities; as Ishmael's children had become princes, and had their castles. Their dignity and their greatness proceeded from themselves; and the world witnessed them in their magnificence.

But Jacob was "a plain man," a man of the tent. He took after his fathers. Like Abraham and Isaac, he was a stranger here, sojourning as on the surface of the earth for a season, with his eye upon the promise. His children--while Esau's were dukes, settled in their domains, in the sunshine of their dignities and wealth--had to wander from one nation to another people, to suffer the hardships and wrongs of injurious Egypt, or to traverse, as pilgrims, the trackless, wasted desert.

Esau was the "profane" one. His hope and his heart were linked with life in this world, and with that only; for he would say, "I am at the point to die, and what profit shall this birthright do to me?" Like the Gadarenes, and like Judas, Esau would sell his title to Christ. But Jacob had faith, and was ready to buy what Esau was ready to sell.

Two manner of people were, after this manner, separated from Rebecca's bowels, as all this tells us. They are no sooner brought forth than this is seen; and their earliest habits, their first activities, are characteristic. It was not merely the bondwoman and the free, or the children of the two covenants, as Ishmael and Isaac had been; in Esau and Jacob we get a fuller expression of the same natures; the one, that reprobate thing, had from Adam, profane or worldly, which takes a portion in the earth and not in God; the other, that divine thing, had from Christ, which is believing, hopeful, looking to God's provisions, and waiting for the kingdom.

All this survives to the present day, and flourishes abundantly in different samples in the midst of us, or around us. I might say the Cain, the Nimrod, the Ishmael, and the Esau are still abroad on the earth, and these tales and illustrations have their lessons for our souls. They are wonderful in their simplicity; but they are too deep for the wisdom of the world, and too pure for the love of it.

These things I have gathered for the sake of the moral and the mystery which so abound in them. But my immediate business is with Isaac.

Isaac, as I have already noticed, was brought up in his mother's tent. He was, as I may say, rather the child of his mother than of his father--the common case of all of us in our earliest days. But with Isaac, this was so till his mother died; and then he must have been much beyond thirty years of age.

He knew more of Sarah's tent, than of the busier haunts and occupations of men. Her tent had been his teacher, as well as his nurse, and this education left impressions on his character which were never effaced. We have a passing or incidental, but still, a very sure, witness of the strength of maternal influence over him, in chap. xxiv. 67. "And Isaac brought her [Rebecca] into his mother's tent, and Isaac was comforted after his mother's death."

This strongly intimates the tendencies of his early life. And thus was character formed in him. He was the easy, gentle, unresisting Isaac, pious, as we speak, and, as I have said of him, blameless and amicable.

But with all this, and while this I doubt not is surely so, I ask, Was it merely nature or character that bore him unresistingly along the road to Mount Moriah? See chap. xxii. Was it merely filial piety which then disposed him to be bound as a lamb for the slaughter, without opening his mouth? Can we assume this? Was this the force of character merely? I say not so. This was too much for human gentleness and submission, even such as might have been found in an Isaac, or in a Jephthah's daughter. I must rather say, the hand of the Lord was over him on that occasion, just as, long afterwards, it was over the owner of the ass that was needed to bear the King on to the city, and then over the multitude that accompanied and hailed Him on the road; or, as it was over the man bearing the pitcher of water, who prepared the guest-chamber for the last passover. On these occasions, the hand of the Lord was strong to force the material to comply, and take the impression of the moment. As also in the earlier days of Samuel, when the kine carried the ark of God right on the way homeward, though nature resisted it, their young being left behind them. For the divine power was upon the kine then. And Isaac, in like manner, was under divine power, under the hand of God, on this occasion; willingly, I fully grant, but made willing as in a day of power; for he was to be the type or foreshadowing of a greater than he. The seal was in a strong hand, and the impression must be taken, clear, deep, and legible. "Lo, I come to do thy will, O God," is the writing on the seal. "As a lamb before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth."

That was a great moment in the life of Isaac, an occasion of great meaning. So in his acceptance of Rebecca. See chap. xxiv. In his taking a wife, not of all whom he chose, but of his father's providing, we may trace the same strong hand over him. There might easily have been more of human submissiveness and filial piety in this, than in the case of the sacrifice on Mount Moriah, we may surely allow; but still this was a sealing time as well as the other. This marriage was a type or mystery, as well as that sacrifice. The wife brought home to the son and heir of the father, by the servant who was in the full confidence and secret of the father, this was a mystery; and the material must comply again, and take the impression from the hand that was using it. The potter was making vessels for the use of the household, and the clay must yield. The prophet's children, ages afterwards, had names given them, as the Lord pleased, and the prophet had to say of them, Behold, I and the children whom the Lord hath given me are for signs and for wonders. Isa. viii. And so, Isaac and Rebecca, in the day and circumstances of their marriage, were a type, "for a sign and a wonder." This was their chief dignity; they tell the mysteries of God. They are parables as well as mysteries. They were events set in time or in the progress of the earth's history, as the sun and moon and stars are set in the heavens, for signs. Each of them has a writing on it under the hand of God. "I will engrave the graving thereof, saith the Lord of hosts;" for on these events He has impressed the image of some of His everlasting counsels.

But though this gentle and submissive nature that was in our Isaac was not equal to such sacrifices and surrenders as these, yet gentle, submissive nature is the quality which gives him his character. At times it acts amiably and attractively; at times it sadly betrays him. But at all times, under all circumstances, amid the few incidents that are recorded of him, it is the easy, gentle, yielding Isaac that we see. And the presence of one and the same virtue on every occasion is, I need not say, but poor in point of character. It is combination that bespeaks character and divine workmanship. "The kingdom of God is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost." It is firm as well as gracious and joyous. And this is moral glory; as many coloured rays give us the one unsullied result in the light we enjoy and admire. But this does not shine in Isaac. In none, surely, in its full beauty, save in Him in whom all glories, in their different generations, meet and shine.

Jeremiah, I might here take liberty to say, appears to me to have been a man of one passion, as Isaac was a man of one virtue. I mean, of course, characteristically as to each of them, Isaac and Jeremiah. A godly passion indeed it was, grief over the moral wastes of Zion, which characterized Jeremiah. But being thus his one affection, the passion or sentiment, which, after this manner, possessed his soul, it makes him generally very engaging and attractive to the heart; but at times it allies his spirit with that which defiles him. He is angry with the people who were stirring the sorrows of his heart. And he murmurs against God Himself. I speak, of course, of Jeremiah's character, as we get it exhibited in his ministry. I know, surely, in that ministry, looked at in itself, he was the prophet of God and delivered the inspirations of the Holy Ghost. But as a man I speak of him; as a man, he was a man of one passion; as I have said of Isaac that he was a man of one virtue. But it is those in whom there is assemblage of virtues, that tell us more assuredly of divine workmanship, of trees planted by the rivers of waters, that bring forth fruit in season. Psalm i. For it is this seasonableness that is the real beauty. Everything is beautiful in its season, and only then. Gentleness loses its beauty, when zeal and indignation are called for. The first Psalm is too high a description for a man of one virtue; it implies character, and decision, and individuality; it shows a soul drawing its virtue from God. "He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth its fruit in its season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper." This is of divine husbandry; but such we do not see in our Isaac. In his measure, and certainly in contrast with Isaac, this combination or assemblage of virtues, of which I have already spoken, appears in Abraham; and this difference in the two may be seen in their acting under similar circumstances. Abraham in chap. xxi. and Isaac in this chapter xxvi.¹⁷

Isaac had been very badly treated by the Philistines. One well after another of his own digging was violently taken away from him, as the wells which his father had dug had been filled up. He had yielded to this wrong with a gentle, gracious spirit, in a spirit that well became one of God's strangers and pilgrims here, who look for citizenship in another world. He went from place to place, as the Philistines again and again strove with him and urged him. This was according to the mind which marks him, as we said, in every incident of his life. Suffering, he threatens not--doing well and suffering for it, he takes it patiently; and this we know is acceptable with God. 1 Peter ii. 20. And so God here attests this; for He owns His servant in this thing, and comes to him by night as He had comforted Abraham. But when, in season, the Philistines are brought to a better mind, and Abimelech the king, with his friend Ahuzzath, and Phichol his chief captain, seek Isaac and alliance with him, I ask, Does not his character, in its way, betray him?

Of course it was right in Isaac to receive them, and plight them his friendship, and to exchange the good offices and pledges and securities of neighbourliness which they sought. For we ought to forgive, if it be seventy times seven a day. But with that there is to be faithfulness in its season--faithfulness as well as forgiveness. "If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him." But Isaac was not quite up to this sturdier virtue. He complains to Abimelech, but it is in such soft and easy terms, that it seems to carry no authority to the conscience with it. Not so his entering into covenant with him. He strikes hands readily, and, I may say, heartily. He makes a feast for the king of Gerar, and sends him away as his ally, without his being brought to any acknowledgment of the wrong which his people had done to the man whose friendship he was now seeking and getting. Nor is there on the lips of Isaac any gainsaying of Abimelech's assertion, that he had done nothing but good to Isaac all the time he had been in his country. As far as this intercourse went, and as far as we can discover the mind of the king of Gerar, he was not convicted by Isaac, but returned home with his friends at peace with himself as well as with Isaac. Isaac had not made good to Abimelech's conscience the complaint he had made to his ear--there was want of character and force in it--it partook of Isaac's own nature.