Come now therefore, and I will send thee.- Exo_3:10.
Is there a discrepancy between these two announcements? If God has Himself come down to do the work of redemption, what need of Moses? Would not a word from God's Almighty lips be enough? Why summon a shepherd, a lonely and unbefriended man, a man who has already failed once, and from whom the passing years have stolen his manhood's prime, to work out with painful elaboration, and through a series of bewildering disappointments, the purposed emancipation? But this is not an isolated case. Throughout the entire scheme of Divine government we meet with the principle of mediation. God ever speaks to men, and works for them, through the instrumentality of men. Chosen agents are called into the inner circle to catch the Divine thought and mirror the Divine character, and then sent back to their fellows to cause them to partake. God never works from the many to the individual, but from the individual to the many. “He made known his ways unto Moses,” but only “his acts unto the children of Israel.”
When God has something great to accomplish, He begins to work through one man, and afterwards gives other helps; as with Moses and Aaron.1 [Note: Luther.]
The great revelation came to Moses, the great commission was entrusted to him in the desert, as he tended his flock; as he followed his ordinary vocation. Not in the midst of great public labours, in battle, in victory, or in a moment of utmost peril, was he first penetrated by the truth. It first seized on him in the calm and stillness of life, and then followed action in accordance with it. No condition of life is too lowly, no place too humble, when the pure, bright, transforming fire desires to manifest itself at the right moment to the true Divine instrument. The bush in the desolate waste suddenly becomes to the simple shepherd a burning shrine, out of whose brightness the angel of God speaks to him. The Quaker poet, Whittier, saw as sure a token of the Divine presence in the glow of a maple wood as in the burning bush:
And when the miracle of autumn came,
so he wrote of one who knew within himself what was meant by “the soul's communion with the Eternal Mind, the Spirit's Law, the Inward Rule and Guide”:
And all the woods with many-coloured flame
Of splendour, making summer's greenness tame,
Burned, unconsumed, a voice without a sound
Spake to him from each kindled bush around,
And made the strange, new landscape holy ground.
But to him who has no secret witness of that sublime Faith, who knows nothing of communion with the Eternal Mind, such thoughts are baseless and unreal.
Earth's crammed with heaven
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.
That we be ready to see and ready to hear, this is the all-important thing. The Divine manifestations are not lacking, but we do not take the trouble of turning aside to look at the great sight. The Divine glory beams upon us and we do not rejoice with trembling; we are filled with no sense of reverence and awe; we do not know that we are on holy ground. The Divine word proclaims our duty with unmistakable clearness, and we consider how most easily we can evade it and explain it away.1 [Note: P. M‘Adam Muir.]
1. Moses, with the new name of God to reveal, and with the assurance that He is about to rescue Israel, is bidden to go to work advisedly and wisely. He is not to appeal to the mob, nor yet to confront Pharaoh without authority from his people to speak for them, nor is he to make the great demand for emancipation abruptly and at once. The mistake of forty years ago must not be repeated now. He is to appeal to the elders of Israel; and with them, and therefore clearly representing the nation, he is respectfully to crave permission for a three days' journey to sacrifice to Jehovah in the wilderness.
It is often assumed that this demand for a furlough of three days was insincere. But it would have been so only if consent was expected, and if the intention was thereupon to abuse the respite and refuse to return. There is not the slightest hint of any duplicity of the kind. The real motives for the demand are very plain. The excursion which they proposed would have taught the people to move and act together, reviving their national spirit, and filling them with a desire for the liberty which they tasted. In the very words which they should speak-“The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, hath met with us”-there is a distinct proclamation of nationality, and of its surest and strongest bulwark, a national religion. From such an excursion, therefore, the people would have returned already well-nigh emancipated, and with recognized leaders. Certainly Pharaoh could not listen to any such proposal, unless he were prepared to reverse the whole policy of his dynasty toward Israel.
2. In the message which Moses should convey to the elders there are two significant phrases.
(1) He was to announce in the name of God, “I have surely visited you, and seen that which is done unto you in Egypt.” The silent observation of God before. He interposes is very solemn and instructive. So in the Revelation, He walks among the golden candlesticks, and knows the work, the patience, or the unfaithfulness of each. So He is not far from any one of us. When a heavy blow falls we speak of it as “a visitation of Providence,” but in reality the visitation has been long before. Neither Israel nor Egypt was conscious of the solemn Presence. Who knows what soul of man, or what nation, is thus visited to-day, for future deliverance or rebuke?
(2) Again it is said, “I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt unto a land flowing with milk and honey.” Their affliction was the Divine method of uprooting them. And so is our affliction the method by which our hearts are released from love of earth and life, that in due time He may “surely bring us in” to a better and an enduring country.
She was led for the first time to see, under the intimations of the Holy Spirit, that all things were just the reverse of what she had supposed,-that affliction is mercy in disguise, that we possess by first being deprived, that death precedes life, that destruction in the spiritual experience turns to renovation, that out of the sorrows and silence of inward crucifixion, and from no other source, must grow the jubilees of everlasting bliss. God was given back; and all things with Him.1 [Note: T. C. Upham, Life of Madame Guyon, 125.]
