Lecture VIII. THE PASSAGE OF THE SEA

(Continued from page 71.)

Now then let us look at the type again. Mark that God does not arm Israel's hosts and lead them out against Pharaoh. He strengthened not their arm to bring salvation to them. They have, instead, to "stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord." So with us in the antitype of this memorable struggle. God does not call us to fight against the flesh and subdue it. He neither points nor leads us in that direction at all. "What other course?" many a heart might ask. Ah, God's thoughts are not as our thoughts, nor His ways as our ways. So now:as Moses' rod is lifted up over the sea, the east wind rises, and as the night falls the waters are divided from shore to shore! How strange this pathway! How impossible for aught but divine power to effect! People of God, this is your escape from the enemy! Know you this path, beloved friends? See you what it means? Your deliverance is by the way which Christ has made-quite out of Egypt to the other side.

The awful "night" of Christ's unequaled sorrow, as the wail of the east wind of calamity, has opened for us the path of deliverance. That precious death is ours! Do you understand? We are dead by it, dead with Him, passed out of the condition of men in the flesh. It is not merely that our sins are gone:blessed be God, they are, every one of them; but that is not all-myself, my miserable self, is gone! The death of Christ has put me away as a man in the flesh, as a child of Adam. I have died with Christ. His death has ended my history before God. In Him who has passed through death, / have passed through it; my standing now is in Him alone!

This is true of every child of God. It is what is his from the first moment of faith in Christ-not a matter of progress or of attainment, though there is an attainment of it too. What is ours already, we are called to apprehend as our own; thus it is that we find the passage of the Red Sea not taking place on the passover-night, but after several stages of journey beyond this. To enjoy the blessedness of the place, we must in fact have reached it experimentally-must have come by way of Migdol through the Sea. May some of you travel it with me now for the first time, and prove for yourselves the blessed end of Pharaoh's, of sin's, tyranny forever.

Dead with Christ! In Christ beyond death! May God teach us all these two lessons. The self I was taking up to improve and cultivate, He has set aside forever by the Cross. To cultivate the flesh is of no use, for "it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be."

Some may turn upon me, and say, "But, sir, I am a child of God, I am not all flesh, I am born again, I have a new nature." And so had he a new nature, who cries, "0 wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" It was his new nature that made him groan so! "I delight in the law of God," he says, "after the inward man;" "With the mind I myself serve the law of God." Yes, but that did not hinder his having to say also, "But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members." Thank God for a new nature; but deliverance is another matter. Is there not a law in your members warring against the law of your mind? Are you not learning im-potency rather than power?-the strength of sin rather than the holiness you seek?

You have a new nature, and think you have something to cultivate. I do not deny it; but do you understand what is its cultivation? The principle of the new nature is faith. Faith, hope, and love are its characteristics. Do you not see that all these require, not self-occupation, but occupation with Christ. You take up the law to help you, and the law tells you just what you must be and do, but it gives you no power for it. Power is in the Spirit, which we receive through faith in Christ. Thus grace, not law, is the way of holiness. "Sin shall not have dominion over you, because ye are not under the law, but under grace." "Israel who followed after the law of righteousness, did not attain to the law of righteousness. And wherefore? Because they sought it not by faith, but as it were by the works of the law." These principles are essentially different. You must come away from the place between Migdol and the Sea. You must follow Israel's path through the waters before you can know deliverance from Pharaoh and from Egypt. You must learn death with Christ, and leave yourself as it were in the Sea, and take your place as in Christ; then you will find, to your unspeakable joy, you have left your enemies also in the waters.

What a moment for Israel when they looked back in the dawn of the morning from the other shore, and saw the dead bodies of their enemies upon the waters and upon the shores! What a victory, for which they had never lifted a hand! And what rapturous joy to the soul that has apprehended Christ's death as its own, when in the light of resurrection it sees how God has delivered him from the rampant evil he could not meet or control! "Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with Christ, that the body of sin might be annulled, that henceforth we should not serve sin."

Notice that it is "in the morning watch" that "the Lord looked unto the host of the Egyptians, . . , and troubled the host of the Egyptians." And this also, that "the sea returned to his strength when the morning appeared, . . . and the Lord overthrew the Egyptians in the midst of the sea." Christ is "raised from the dead by the glory of the Father." Here is the morning for us. His work accepted-Himself accepted as the representative of His redeemed people, and in Him is now our standing; in Him is our happy place, and Himself is the object of our hearts and happy service. Faith, love, hope, twine around Him their tendrils, and flourish there. Here the new nature expands and develops and bears fruit-fruit which is not for her own taste or enjoyment, but for Christ. When will Christians give up the thought of feeding upon their own fruit? When will they give up seeking satisfaction in their own attainments? When will they learn that self-consciousness and self-occupation are the antipodes of holiness, instead of essential features of it? When will they cease to loiter between Migdol and the Sea, and pass to the other side, away from Egypt and its bondage? Blessed be God, He has given us the title to turn away from self. The self we would cultivate He has set aside by the Cross; and the faith which characterizes the new nature, turns ever away from self towards Him in whom it delights. Be content to be nothing; God has made Christ all to us-sanctification as well as righteousness. We grow up to what we have before us. We learn the manners of the company we keep. "We all with open face beholding the glory of the LORD, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Lord the Spirit," as the margin of our Bibles more truly reads.

Our Lord has called us to be His own. We are not "in the flesh;" we belong not to Egypt, but to Christ.

May the wonderful type we have been looking at instruct many a soul in this. How great the confirmation and clearing of our faith it will produce, as this last verse teaches:
"And Israel saw that great work which the Lord did upon the Egyptians:and the people feared the Lord, and believed the Lord, and His servant Moses."

(To be continued.)