James Nisbet Commentary - Hebrews 8:5 - 8:5

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James Nisbet Commentary - Hebrews 8:5 - 8:5


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THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT

‘See … that thou make all things according to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount.’

Heb_8:5

The building of the tabernacle, which was to be the visible sign and symbol of God’s presence among His people, suggests also a method and a duty capable of the widest application.

I. Is there not for all history and for all life, even for the common tasks of our daily duty, a ‘pattern in the mount,’ a thought of God waiting for our study and reproduction, realised in everything rightly said and thought and done, and hidden, thwarted, disturbed by sin?

II. The development of character includes two main principles—the principle of purpose and the principle of progress.

(a) The principle of purpose. Everybody who looks at the world about him must be struck by the fact how much of life is without a purpose; and, indeed, such a fact calls for perpetual astonishment and ever-abiding regret. Even in London, where there is so much activity and devotion directed to some definite end, you will find in every class of society thousands of men and women who live practically without an aim. So often men drift, drift like the dead leaves upon the current of a swollen stream.

(b) The principle of progress. I do not hesitate to say that the world is indebted to Christianity as an historical phenomenon for the whole idea of progress; that very idea which modern society, and especially modern democracy, is so proud to claim for its own. It is a Christian idea in its true sense and meaning. Look at any one who tries to live, but who has no ‘pattern in the mount,’ whose days pass only as days of enjoyment or days of business, unenlightened by the splendour of the thought of God. Do we not think of such that he makes no progress, no development, from one year to another does just the same? The months come and go, and leave him morally unchanged, at any rate for the better. He seems to have lost something; he has lost something, the secret of development.

III. If we ask how we shall restore it, and escape the fatal influence, how we shall find and live by ‘the pattern in the mount,’ we know that our moral sense makes answer, the study of the life of Jesus Christ.

—
Rev. Canon S. A. Alexander.