With Abraham there is also introduced the first step in a new method adopted by God in the training of men. The dispersion of men and the divergence of their languages are now seen to have been the necessary preliminary to this new step in the education of the world-the fencing round of one people till they should learn to know God and understand and exemplify His government. It is true that God reveals Himself to all men and governs all; but by selecting one race with special adaptations, and by giving to it a special training, God might more securely and more rapidly reveal Himself to all. Each nation has certain characteristics, a national character which grows by seclusion from the influences which are forming other races. There is a certain mental and moral individuality stamped upon every separate people. Nothing is more certainly retained; nothing more certainly handed down from generation to generation. It would therefore be a good practical means of conserving and deepening the knowledge of God, if it were made the national interest of a people to preserve it, and if it were closely identified with the national characteristics. This was the method adopted by God. He meant to combine allegiance to Himself with national advantages, and spiritual with national character, and separation in belief with a distinctly outlined and defensible territory.
In seeking the ultimate answer to our question, How were the Israelites prepared to be the chosen people? we are confronted by a miracle that baffles our power to analyse: it is the supreme fact that the Spirit of the Almighty touched the spirit of certain men in ancient Israel so that they became seers and prophets. This is their own testimony, and their deeds and words amply confirm it. The experiences of men to-day also demonstrate its possibility. Indeed it is not surprising, but most natural, that the one supreme Personality in the universe should reveal Himself to and through human minds, and that the most enlightened men of the most spiritually enlightened race should be the recipients of the fullest and most perfect revelation. It is the truth that they thus perceived, and then proclaimed by word and deed and pen, that completed the preparation of the chosen people, for it was none other than the possession of a unique spiritual message that constituted the essence of their choice. Furthermore, as the greatest of the later prophets declares (Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13.), that Divine choice did not mean that they were to be the recipients of exceptional favours, but rather that they were called to service. By the patient enduring of suffering and by voluntary self-sacrifice they were to perfect the revelation of God's character and will in the life of humanity.1 [Note: C. F. Kent, Origin and Permanent Value of the Old Testament, 59.]
The Hebrews were to have impressed upon them the ineffaceable stamp of separateness. “Lo, the people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations.” Abraham is “the ideal representative of the life of faith and of separation from the idolatries of an evil world.” God's call to him detached him from his heathen environment. Separation from the world is the crux, the cross of true religion. “It is only with renunciation that life, properly speaking, can be said to begin.” But what is essential in this is the detachment of the heart. “Abraham's renunciation,” as Augustine observes, “was not the bodily removal, but the, inward separation of the soul, from his worldly possessions.” His change of locality would have effected little, had there not been at the same time a change in the condition of his heart. When God commanded His people to separate themselves, this was but a means to an end. Detachment from the creature is useless unless it leads to attachment to the Creator. God asks not only world-surrender, but self-surrender. The abiding ideal is not abstraction from the world, but protection from its evil; to be in the world without being of it; not to retire from the world, but, as Cowley says, “rather to retire from the world as it is man's, into the world as it is God's.”1 [Note: J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, i. 19.]
