(2) ABRAHAM’S INNER LIFE, (ch. 15:-21:)-It is evident that in the fifteenth chapter we have a new beginning, and that we pass from the more external view of his path and circumstances to that of his inner life and experiences. Abram is now for the first time put before us as a man righteous by faith, a thing fundamental to all spiritual relationships and all right experiences. It was not, surely, now for the first time that he believed the Lord when God said to him under the starry sky of Syria, "So shall thy seed be." Yet here it pleased God first openly to give the attestation of his righteousness:words which lay for a gleam of comfort to how many sin-tossed souls, before God could come openly out with the proclamation of it as 'His principle, that a " man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law."

There are two things specially before us in this chapter; and they come before us in the shape of a divine answer to two questions from the heart of Abram. The two questions, moreover, are drawn out of him by two assurances on God's part, each of which is of unspeakable moment to ourselves.

The two assurances are, (i) "Fear not, Abram; I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward;" (2) " I am the Lord that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it." As we would read this for ourselves now,-" God is our portion," and " Heaven is the place in which we are to enjoy our portion."

To the first assurance Abram replies, "Lord God what wilt Thou give me, seeing I go childless?" to the second, "Lord God, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?" Strange words, it may seem, in the face of God's absolute assurance; which do speak to us of a man's heart which not merely God's, word, but God's act must meet; questions which thus He takes up in His grace, seriously to answer, and that we through all time may have the blessedness of their being answered.

The answer to both, no Christian heart can doubt, is Christ; for Christ is God's answer to every question. Here it may be figuratively and enigmatically given, as was characteristic of a time in which God could not yet speak out fully. None the less should it be plain to us now what is intended, and unspeakably precious to find Christ unfolding to us, as it were, out of every rose-bud in this garden of the Lord.

"After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision:'Fear not, Abram:I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward.' "

Had Abram been fearing? The things that had just transpired, and to which the Lord evidently refers, were his victory over the combined power of the kings, which we have already looked at; and secondly, his refusal to be enriched at the hands of the king of Sodom. Brave deeds and brave words! wrought with God and spoken before God who could doubt ? Yet it is nothing uncommon, just when we have wrought something, for a sudden revolution of feeling to surprise us,- for the ecstatic and high-strung emotion upon whose summit we were just now carried, to subside and leave us, like a stranded boat, consciously, if we may so say, above water-mark. The necessity, of action just now shut out all other thought. That over it no longer sustains. We drop out of heroism, to find-what? Blessed be His name!-God Himself beneath us! We who were shielding others find more than ever the need of God our shield:we who were energetically refusing Sodom's offers need to be reminded, " I am thy exceeding great reward." Thank God, when the boat strands there!

God our defense! what shaft of the enemy can pierce through to us? God our recompensing portion! what is all the world can give ? In this place of eternal shelter, oh to know more the still unsearchable riches!

"Of Christ," adds the apostle. Did not Abram feel the lack of our revelation there,-unintelligent as he may be as to what was wanted,' and utterly unable, of course, to forestall God's as yet but partially hinted purpose ? Grasping, as it were, at infinity, and unable to lay hold of it, he drops from heaven to earth, and cries, with something like impatience, as the immensity of the blessing makes itself felt in his very inability to hold it, " Lord God, what wilt Thou give me, seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus? …. Behold, to me Thou hast given no seed; and, lo, one born in my house is mine heir."

How flat all God's assurances seem to have fallen with the pattern man of faith! And yet we may find, very manifestly, in all., this pattern. It is all very well to say that Abram's faith was not up to the mark here. In truth it was not; but that is no explanation. Do you know what it is, apart from Christ as now revealed to us, to grasp after this immensity of God your portion? If you do, you will know how the wings of faith flutter vainly in the void, and cannot rise to it. Thank God, if you cannot rise, God can come down; and so he does here to Abram. Serenely He comes down to the low level of Abram's faith, and goes on to give him what it can grasp:" And, behold, the word of the Lord came unto him, saying, 'This shall not be thine heir; but he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall be thine heir.' And He brought him forth abroad, and said,' Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them:so shall thy seed be.' And he believed in the Lord; and He counted it to him for righteousness." .

The many seeds and the One are here; and the many to be reached by means of the One. Abram's " One Seed " must be familiar to us all. Through and in Isaac we read Christ:" He saith not, And unto seeds, as of many; but as of one, ' And to thy Seed,' which is Christ." To us, at least, is it an obscure utterance of how this first assurance is made good to us, and possible to be realized ? The Son of Man, here amongst us, where faith shall need no impossible flights to lay hold of Him, and the infinity of Godhead shall be brought down to the apprehension of a little child. Himself "the Child born," Himself the "Son given," the kingdom of peace is forestalled for those with whom, all the faculties of their soul subdued and harmonized under His blessed hand, "the calf and the young lion and the fatling" dwell together, and a little child leads them.

God our shield, and God our reward:we know these, we appreciate them in Him who is God manifest, because God incarnate.

The second question now comes up.-"And He said unto him, 'I am the Lord that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it.'And he said, ' Lord God, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?' "

Here too the question is plain, and to be answered by deeds, not words. The land for us is the good land of our inheritance, the land upon which the eyes of the Lord are continually – not earth, but heaven. A wonderful place to enjoy our portion, when we know indeed what our portion is! " Where I am " is the Lord's own description; and thus you will find it most apt and suited, that it, is not until He stands before us upon the full clear revelation of an inheritance in heaven is made to us. He uncloses heaven who ascending up there; carries the hearts of His disciples within its gates. Did they open to admit us without this, would not our eyes turn back reluctantly to that earth only familiar to us ? Did they not open now, would they not be an eternal distance-putting between us and our Beloved? "That where I am, there ye may be also" explains all. The stars shining out of heaven are thus in this chapter the evident symbol of the multitudinous seed.

But how is man to reach a land like this? A place with Christ, reader ! Look at what you are, and answer me:what is to raise a child of earth to the height of God's own heaven?

No work of man, at least; no human invention of any kind. How could we think of a place with Christ as the fruit of any thing but God's infinite grace? He who came down from the glory of I God to put His hand upon us, alone can raise us up thither. No human obedience merely, even were it perfect, could have value of this kind, because it would be still merely what was our duty to do. He to whom obedience was a voluntary stooping, not a debt, alone could give it value. And He, raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, and gone in as man into the presence of God, brings us for whom His work was done into the self-same place which as man He takes.

Thus God answers Abram by putting before him Christ as the pledge of inheritance:" Take Me a heifer of three years old, and a she-goat of three years old, and a ram of three years old, and a turtle-dove, and a young pigeon." God delights to accumulate the types of what Christ is, and press their various significance upon us. These are all types which are brought out more distinctly before us in the offerings after this. The three beasts-all tame, not. wild, nor needing to be captured for us, but the willing servants of man's need" each three years old-time in its progress unfolding in them a divine mystery. The first two, females, the type of fruitfulness:the heifer, of the patient Workman; the she-goat, of the Victim for our sins; the ram, in whom the meek surrender of the sheep becomes more positive energy, -afterward, therefore, the ram of consecration, and of the trespass-offering. (Lev. 5:15; 8:22.) The birds speak of One from heaven, One whom love, made a man of sorrow (the turtle-dove), and One come down to a life of faith on earth (the rock-pigeon, like the coney, making its nest in the place of security and strength).

To unfold all this, and apply it, would require a volume. No wonder, for we have here our occupation for eternity begun. These, the fivefold type expressed in one perfect Man, Abram " divided in the midst, and laid each piece one against another, but the birds divided he not; and when the fowls came down upon the carcasses, Abram drove them away."Thus upon all these types of moral beauty, and that they may be fit types of Him whom they represent, death passes, and they lie exposed under the open heaven, faith in Abram guarding the sacrifice from profanation, until, " when the sun was going down, a deep sleep passed upon Abram, and he slept; and, lo, a horror of great darkness fell upon him."Faith's watchfulness is over; darkness succeeds to light; but this only brings out the supreme value of the sacrifice itself, which not faith gives efficacy to, but which sustains faith. God Himself, under the symbol of the "smoking furnace and the burning lamp," passes between the pieces, pledging Himself by covenant* to perform His promise of inheritance. *See Jeremiah 24:18, where God announces the doom of those who had not performed the covenant made with Him, when they " cut the calf in twain, and passed between the parts thereof."* Purifier and enlightener, He pledges Himself by the sacrifice to give the discipline needed in faith's failure, and the needed light in the darkness it involves; and thus the inheritance, not apart from the suited state to enjoy it with God, but along with the conditions Which His holiness (and so His love) necessitates.

How complete and beautiful is this, then, as the answer to Abram's second question ! If, with his eyes upon himself, he asks, " How shall I know that I shall inherit it?" he is answered by the revelation of the infinite value of all that puts a holy God and a righteous One, in both characters, upon his side:under propping faith in all its frailty, and securing holiness as fully as it secures the inheritance itself. These types and shadows belong assuredly to us, to whom Christ has become the revelation of all, the substance of all these shadows. Ours is indeed a wider and a wondrous inheritance. But so ours is a sacrifice of infinite value, and which alone gave their value to these symbols themselves. How precious to see God's eye resting in delight upon that which for Him had such significance, ages before its import could be revealed! How responsible we whom grace has favored with so great a revelation!

Thus all is secured to Abram by indefeasible promise on the ground of sacrifice. It is of promise as contrasted with law, as the apostle says. Abram believes the promise, but does not yet know this contrast. He believes God, but not yet simply; alas! as with all of us at the beginning, he believes in himself also. He is a believer, but not yet a circumcised believer. Do you perchance even yet know the difference, beloved reader? It is this that Abram's history is to make plain to us.

"Now Sarai, Abram's wife, bare him no children." Sarai is, as we have seen, the principle of grace, and this is one of the strangest, saddest things in a believer's experience, the apparent barrenness of that which should be the principle of fertility in his life and walk. " Sin shall not have dominion over you, because ye are not under the law, but under grace." And yet it is the justified man, and who thus far at least knows what divine grace is, who says, " When I would do good, evil is present with me;" and " The good that I would I do not; but the evil that I would not, that I do." It is impossible to read the lesson of the seventh of Romans aright until we have seen this. The struggle that it speaks of is not a struggle after peace or justification; nay, cannot over. The whole until this is break-down, not of a sinner, but be known aright secret of it is the of a saint. That efforts after righteousness before God should be vain and fruitless is simple enough; but that efforts after holiness should be fruitless is a very different thing, and a much harder thing to realize. It is Sarai's barrenness that troubles us. Alas! how in this distress Sarai herself, as it were, incites us to leave her; persuading us, she may be builded up by Hagar!

Of Hagar also we have the inspired interpretation. She is the covenant " from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage:" the only form of religion that man's natural thought leads him to, and that to which, if grace is left, we necessarily drop down. Hagar is thus an Egyptian, a child of nature, or as the epistle to the Galatians interprets, " the elements of the world." The principle of law, however much for the purposes of divine wisdom adopted by God, was never His thought. He uses it that man being thoroughly tested by it may convince himself by experiment of the folly of his own thoughts. It is thus Sarai's handmaid, though exalted often even by the roan of faith to a different place. The tendency of law, as it were, to depart from this place of service is shown in her very name-Hagar, that is, " fugitive;" and thus the angel of the Lord finds her by the well, going down to Egypt. When she is finally dis-missed from Abram's house, she is again found I with her son, gravitating down to Egypt; and I upon the wilderness upon its borders Ishmael dwells afterward. How little Christians suspect this tendency of that by which they seek holiness and fruit! Yet even that which, as given by God, is necessarily " holy and just and good," speaks nothing of heaven or of Christ, or, therefore, of pilgrim-life on earth. But thus all of power is left out also; for Abram's pilgrim-life springs from his Canaan-place ;and " in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing nor uncircumcision," – the whole condition of man as man, – "but a new creation."

Abram takes Hagar, however, to be fruitful by her, just as believers in the present day take up the law simply as a principle of fruitfulness, not at all for justification :it is their very thought that is being tested here. And the effect at first seems all that could be desired once. It is only when God speaks that it is seen that Ishmael is, after all, not the promised seed. The immediate result is, Sarai is despised :" And when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was despised in her eyes."So it ever is. Once admit the principle of law, and what is law if it be not sovereign?' Faith may cling to and own barren Sarai still, but the principle introduced is none the less its essential opposite. "Sarai dealt hardly with her," and " she fled from her face."

The scene that follows in the wilderness is, I doubt not, a lesson from the dispensations. It is the instruction, not of experience, as in Romans, It is the explanation of the divine connection with the law. It is between the promise of the seed and its fulfillment that Hagar's history comes in. The law was given, not from the beginning, but four hundred and thirty years after the promise was made ; and it was added till the Seed should come to whom the promise was made. Again, it was not God who first gave Hagar to Abram, but Abram who took Hagar:that the experiment might be worked fully out, God sends her back to him; that is all. So in like manner the covenant at Sinai was not God's own proper thought, but what was in man's mind taken up of God to be worked out, under true conditions, to its necessary result. The whole scene is here significant:God's own voice now recognizing, and insisting on, that which alone Hagar filled; the " fountain of water " by which Hagar is found, the symbol of that spiritual truth which, connected with law, is not law; that characterizing, before his birth, of the " wild-ass man," Ishmael-child of law, and lawless,-just as the law from the beginning foretold its own necessary issue:" Every imagination of the thought of man's heart" being " only evil, and that continually." Therefore the vail before the holiest, and the declaration, even to Moses, " Thou canst not see My face." God in all this, we may note, appears to Hagar, and not to Abram:for thirteen years more we read of no further intercourse between God and Abram.

But "when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the Lord appeared unto Abram, and said unto him, ' I am the almighty God; walk before Me, and be thou perfect.' " This is the period to which the apostle refers in the epistle to the Romans, when his body was now dead, being about one hundred years old; and it is striking to see how completely the intermediate years from the taking of Hagar are counted but as loss. "And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about a hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sarah's womb:he staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; and being fully persuaded that what He had promised He was able also to perform :and therefore it was imputed to him for righteousness" (Rom. 4:19-22.)

Now here it should seem as if the apostle had confounded times far apart. It was at least fourteen years before that Abram had "believed in the Lord, and He counted it to him for righteousness." Before Ishmael was born his body was not dead, for Ishmael was born " after the flesh," or in the energy of nature merely, in contrast with the. power of God. It could not have been at that time, then, that he considered not his body now dead. Thus the faith that the apostle speaks of is really the faith of the later period. All the intervening time is thus covered, and the two periods brought together.

Natural power had to reach its end with him before the power of God could be displayed. It was now an almighty God before whom Abram was called to walk. Mighty he had known Him; not really till now almighty. The apprehension of power in ourselves limits (how greatly!) the apprehension of so simple a fact as that all "power belongeth unto God." By our need we learn His grace; by our poverty, His fullness; and the Christian as such has to receive the sentence of death in himself, that he may not trust in himself, but in God that raiseth the dead, and as a child of Abraham find his place with God according to the covenant of circumcision.

" For we are the circumcision, who worship God in the Spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh;" " having put off the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ." The cross is our end as men in the flesh, not that we should trust in ourselves now as Christians, but in Christ:that as we have received Christ Jesus our Lord, we should walk IN him. How little is it realized what that is! In our complaints of weakness, how little that to be really weak is strength indeed!

What comfort is there for us in the fact that thus "sprang there of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea shore innumerable"! How serious and how blessed that upon all the natural seed is the very condition upon which alone they can call him father! the token of the covenant was to be in his flesh for an everlasting covenant, the token of the perpetual terms upon which they were with God. How striking to find that under the law the very nation in the flesh must carry the "sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which Abraham had being yet uncircumcised"! and that at any time, spite of the middle wall of partition still standing, any Gentile could freely appropriate the sign of such a righteousness, and with his males circumcised sit down to the feast of redemption- the passover-feast!

Another reminder is here:"And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man-child in your generations, he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed." Every child of God is both born in the house and bought with money; not with silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot:and the "eight days old" shows to how fair an inheritance we are destined; for the eighth day speaks, of course, to us of new creation, the first week of the old having run out. It is in the power of the knowledge of this that practical circumcision can alone be retained. In the wilderness Israel lost theirs, and on reaching Canaan had to be circumcised the second time. So too the water of separation had to be sprinkled on the third day:in the power of resurrection only could death be applied for the cleansing of the soul. The sense of what is ours in Christ alone qualifies us to walk in His steps. It is only what His own words imply,-" Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide in the vine, no more can ye except ye abide in Me." "As ye have received Christ Jesus the Lord, walk ye in Him."