John Kitto Morning Bible Devotions: April 2

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John Kitto Morning Bible Devotions: April 2


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Moses and the Judges

The Chosen People

A new scene now opens to us. Between the books of Genesis and Exodus there is a considerable chasm, corresponding to the interval between the time of Joseph and that of Moses. At the remoter edge of this chasm, the Israelites, few in number, are seen peaceably seated among the good things of Egypt, in the land of Goshen; flourishing under the protection of a government grateful for the eminent services of Joseph. At the nearer edge we find the nation increased to a mighty host, but groaning under the oppressions of a government that “knew not Joseph.”

But the purposes of God are ripening. And now that we enter upon a period in which the great doctrines of eternal truth—lost to the world, or smothered beneath the burden of man’s inventions—are to be seen embodied in the institutions and muniments of one of the smallest of the nations, let us for a moment glance at a few of the questions which exercise the thoughts of those who look closely at this condition of the world’s affairs.

We have already had more than one occasion, in the course of these Daily Illustrations, to intimate that the object of the revelation made to Moses was to put the Jewish people in possession of a pure religion, and to place them in a condition to maintain it amid the corruptions of the earth, and eventually to become the instruments of communicating it under more complete developments, to the rest of the world. It may be asked, and it has been asked: Why should so desirable a revelation, of the truths of which the whole idolatrous world stood so much in need, be limited to a single nation, and that a nation so politically unimportant? To this it may, in the first place, be answered, that to have a pure worship of God ascend but from one corner of the earth, seems, even to human reason, to be an object in all respects well worthy of the Divine wisdom, and in itself suitable to be accomplished. But when such questions are asked, we are always too much in the habit of thinking only of man’s apparent advantage, as if there were nothing else to be taken into account. We are always measuring not only earth but heaven by the standard of our own very scant knowledge, and of our own very limited ideas; forgetting, or remembering but faintly, and expressing very delicately, as if only to round a period or to fill a sentence, the great and solemn fact, that there is One higher than the highest, whose honor is not to be the second or the third—but the first matter for consideration. If we look to this, we may see that the question of man’s greater or less benefit is not always to be the first, and still less the sole, object in every consideration of divine things: and although we, for ourselves, hold that man’s most essential well-being has been marvellously made consistent with the highest glory to God’s great name, it yet behooves us to consider whether that is not worthy of being an independent object—an adequate and sufficient object in itself; and whether as such it might not most worthily be consulted by His worship not being allowed to be wholly banished from the earth.

But it is further asked, Why this revelation should have been communicated to the Jews alone, and other nations not allowed to partake of its benefits? Now to this we have no right to expect an answer, further than as an answer is furnished by observation on the whole course of Divine providence. We might quite as well ask, why one nation enjoys a better climate than another; why among men there are native differences of talent and disposition; why one man is made to live under a government which oppresses his mind, and another under social influences which give all its faculties free scope and excitement; why one man’s religious interests are made from the first to flourish under the fostering influence of parental care, while another is exposed from infancy to every kind of moral contamination. The question respecting the abstract justice of such inequalities, may or may not be a question hard to answer; but such as it is, it relates to the whole acknowledged course of the Divine administration of the world’s affairs, and cannot, therefore, with any propriety, be made a ground of distrust as to the divine origin or essential fitness of the Mosaical dispensation. It applies quite as much to Christianity as it does to Judaism; and not more to either than it does to the endless variety of human fortunes and conditions.

This being the ordinary course of the Divine government, which carries its final adjustments by the scale of justice and truth into a world yet future, where all apparent inequalities are to be settled and explained, it would have been a deviation from that course had not one part of the world, and one people, been in this instance and for this purpose preferred before another; and had the preference fallen on some other nation than the Jews, the same question would still have remained to be asked. The selection of that nation in particular may or may not have been arbitrary. The later Scriptures, to discourage the conceit of the Jews in the peculiar honor put upon them, seem to urge that it was at least so far arbitrary, that it was for no peculiar and distinctive merit of their own that they were chosen; yet the same Scriptures admit the privilege of their descent from the covenant fathers as a ground of distinction, which therefore merely carries this question further back to seek the grounds on which Abraham became the root of that covenant. Still, even if there were nothing, as there may have been although undiscoverable by us, in the capacities, character, conditions, and relations of this particular people, to account for the honor put upon them, we certainly are not historically acquainted with any other people better entitled to it on any conceivable ground of claim; and it ought to satisfy the mind to know that even if the Hebrews had no special fitness for this high destination, we know not of any nation that had more, or which could exhibit any preferable claims. Either way, there is nothing to excite surprise in our inability to see distinctly what it was that determined the Divine preference of this nation; nor does this raise any presumption against the fact that this preference was actually exercised.

It may also be observed, that in point of fact, the selection of one nation was not in this instance an exclusion of the rest of mankind. Other men, to whom the knowledge of this religion might come, were at liberty to adopt it if so inclined, and special provision was made for their admission to all the privileges of the chosen race; and we find, both in the early and later history of this nation, that proselytes from divers nations did in fact receive the religion, and came to stand in relation to it on the same footing as the descendants of Israel.

But still farther: the Mosaical institution, while it sternly refused on its own part to mingle with the various systems which corrupted the world, and strove to keep altogether aloof from them, was so far from excluding, in any conceivable sense, the mass of mankind from its benefits, that it was expressly designed to be ultimately for the benefit of all mankind, by being an introduction for Christianity—by preparing the way for a system which, in their existing state of culture, the nations could not have been made to embrace, without stronger compulsion than in his dealings with the nations, God has ever yet seen fit to exercise. Men were then universally bigoted to idolatry; and to reclaim them eventually to better views, the fittest way for God to adopt—seeing that he always works by means—was to reclaim first a portion of mankind, by subjecting them to a minute and detailed discipline, only capable of being administered to a small community. Such was the system organized under the agency of Moses—a system well adapted to train one community to the profession of religious truth, which, when they were established in it, they would be fit instruments of communicating in an extended and spiritualized form to the world.

Far be it from its to think that God is bound to give us an account of any of his matters, or to make the path he takes plain to our understandings. Many things there are that he has not seen fit to disclose clearly to us—and many there are that we have not the capacity of understanding—because they belong to a different and a higher realm of thought and spirit than that of which we are, for the present, citizens. With respect to both, we may be content to feel, that what we know not now, we shall know hereafter. It is nevertheless pleasant to be enabled to understand the reasons of His high dealings with the sons of men; and in this branch of spiritual knowledge there is little that He has seen fit to withhold from us that may not be discovered in the careful consideration and comparison of his word, and of his past doings in the government of the world. In general, the reason we do not see, is more often because we are blind, than because it is dark.