THE DIVINE ACCOUNT OF CREATION.
We had occasion, some time ago, to consult a good and useful work on The Hebrews, by Arthur Pridham, and were astonished, in reading a lengthy note at foot of page 305, to find the following sentence; marked, too, by all the emphasis of italics:" ' In six days God created] etc. Such is the express testimony of the Holy Ghost." Now this is a singularly inaccurate expression, and is neither the "express "nor even indirect" testimony of the Holy Ghost." The words of Moses are plain enough:"For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is" (Ex. 20:11). The evident reference is to the six literal days' work described from the third verse to the end of the first chapter of Genesis. It is no-where stated in Scripture that the earth was created in six or any number of days. People have confounded creating and making; they are carefully distinguished in Scripture:thus "created to make" (Gen. 2:3, marg.). Again, "These are the generations" (an expression occurring ten times in the book) "of the heavens and of the earth when they were created"- referring to the first verse of Genesis-to that primal creation of which no particulars are given, the fact alone being stated-" In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens" (Gen. 2:4); this part of the verse refers to the six days' work detailed from ver. 3 to ver. 31 of the first chapter of the Bible. Carefully observe that when it is creating, the order is "the heavens and the earth;" but when it is making, he says, "the earth and the heavens." The word "created" occurs five times in course of the narrative-once in reference to the universe (5:. I), once to the sea-monsters (5:21), and thrice to man (5:27).

God "called" occurs five times:-"day," "night," "heaven," "earth," "seas," were severally named by the Creator. Thus human language was ordained. The next who distinguished things by names was Adam (vv 5, 8, 10; chap. 2:19). In naming these things, the ground-work was laid in which the beauty, order, and life of creation were to be displayed.

"God said" -a simple yet withal majestic expression-is repeated ten times in course of the chapter. There is no elaborate preparation for so mighty a work, no means employed or assistance given. Power went with the word. "He spake, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast." The third and sixth days were the most important:in the former, the earth is raised up and out of its watery tomb, and then covered with luxuriant vegetation,-thus we have life out of death and judgment, surely the great lessons of the third day; while the latter or sixth day shows two creations of life,-first, of land animals, and lastly, of man. It is the importance of the creative-acts of those days which accounts for the sublime expression "God said" being used twice for the third day and four times for the sixth day.

In that creation-psalm 104:we meet with a beautiful expression- "The Lord shall rejoice in His works" (5:31). Hence, in our chapters the Creator's delight in His work is repeatedly signified in the six repetitions of the word "good.; God saw that it was "good;'' and when all was made, it was pronounced ''very good." It is interesting, however, to observe that the word is omitted on the second day, while it occurs on the third day twice:the reason being that the third day was needed to complete the work of the second; hence, till completion was reached, the Creator's note of approval in His work could not be uttered.

It is interesting to observe that all aquatic creatures and winged fowl (5:22), man (5:28), and the seventh, or Sabbath, day (chap. 2:3) are "blessed" by God. Why are land animals an exception to the bestowal of their Creator's blessing?

Before passing on to a brief consideration of the work of making, forming, and beautifying this earth as a home for man-preparing it as a sphere for the display of the moral principles of good and evil-a platform on which God, man, and Satan were to be the chief actors,-it may be well to inquire if there is scriptural authority for contrasting' two distinct material creations, generally spoken of as "the old creation" and "the new creation." These expressions are not to be found in the Scriptures ; it would be as well to discard them, therefore, in our theological writing. The use of them has done harm. It seems to us that the effort to prove a re-creation of material heavens and earth involves the idea of the annihilation of the present physical system-a thought utterly foreign to Scripture.

But does not Isa. 65:17, 18-"I create new heavens and a new earth … I create Jerusalem a rejoicing and her people a joy"-teach a fresh creation of physical worlds? Certainly not. The grandest of the Hebrew prophets is treating of the moral change which the presence of the Messiah will accomplish. The whole moral system, in the celestial and terrestrial spheres of glory, will be changed. Jerusalem, its center, will become the joy of the Lord, and He will fill it with rejoicing. It is the millennium, in which, we know, the PRESENT heavens and earth will exist to display the glory of the Nazarene, that is before the mind and the prophetic gaze of the seer. It is equally certain, however, that the "new heavens and new earth," without the troubled sea-the sepulcher of countless millions-referred to by Peter and John, are to be understood as physically new-the new homes through eternity of the heavenly and earthly families of God (2 Pet. 3:13; Rev. 21:i). But then these arc made, not created:"Behold, I make all things new" (Rev. 21:5) What Scripture does teach is that the heavens, earth, and elements which are will be destroyed (not annihilated,) by fire, then new ones made adapted to the eternal condition of things. So far, then, there is contrast; not, however, between what was and what is-that is old and new creations; but the contrast is between the present material universe and the future one. The eternal new heavens and earth are never termed "new creation;" in fact, the word "creation" is not used of them at all. God will "make," not create, the new heavens and earth of eternity.

Now Scripture does not say, so far as we know, that we Christians are brought into a "new creation" either by life or by the Spirit. The term occurs but twice in the New Testament (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15, see Gk.). If in Christ, you are "new creation;" not, mark you, brought into it. The new and spiritual race "in Christ" are it-1:e., "new creation." The term is applied to persons, not to things, which greatly simplifies the subject we are considering.

We will not enter the new heavens and new earth for more than a thousand years. Our anxious desire is to "hold fast the form of sound words;" shunning, too, those peculiar phrases and expressions which have grown up amongst us, and which will not always stand the rigid application of God's Word. Then Christ is said to be "the beginning of the new creation of God," and comments are freely made upon this supposed beautiful scripture, but they lack the merit of scriptural correctness. The Word reads, "The beginning of the creation of God" (Rev. 3:14)-that is, the present material system. The expression, "Creation of God" is probably more comprehensive than even that recorded as the creative-work of God in the first chapter of the Bible; and of this vast created system Christ is pre-eminent in time, rank, title, and glory. What comfort, what strength, is thus ministered to our souls in these Laodicean times and ways! God "made the earth, and created man upon it" (Isa. 45:12). The earth was not "created" as a home for man; it was "made" out of the chaotic state and condition of ruin into which it fell subsequent to its creation, and the six days' work prepared it as man's dwelling; so the race in Christ are "new creation," and for which God will "make," not create, an eternal home. W. S. (Scotland.) (To be continued, D. V.)

EDITOR’S NOTE-for the contents of this, and all papers to which initials are appended, the writer is understood to be alone responsible. A some what different account of new creation is given in this volume (pp. 103-108), I would here add that it is not at all denied that in Isa. lxv, lxvi, the scene which is dwelt upon is millennial, as is clear. The prophet just gives the "promise" of the new heavens and new earth which Peter appeals to and Revelation describes the fulfillment of -surely not as millennial,-and then goes on to what was more within the Old-Testament range of vision.

Let it be considered also that Scripture speaks of no creation of matter simply, but of heaven and earth; and that after the dissolution Peter speaks of, the word "create" would seem appropriate. It is a change, at least, the nature of which we know little of. Neither the beast nor man were altogether produced from nothing when "created."

The "rule" of new creation (Gal. 6:16) seems difficult to apprehend also in the way our brother uses it. If it mean the rule of belonging to another scene, it is evident. We have to walk as outside the world. If the scene be the same, (no new creation at least of it,) no separation seems enforced.

If our readers will weigh all in the presence of God, there will be only good from the comparison of views. And our beloved brother's desire in this paper will be attained. Scripture must judge us all.

We now come to look at the efficacy of atonement-that is to say, its connection with redemption. For redemption is not, in Scripture, what it is for many, a thing accomplished for the whole world. No passage which hints at this even can be produced from the Word. Redemption was, for Israel, the breaking of Pharaoh's yoke. The redemption of our body is accomplished in resurrection (Rom. 8:23). "We have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace" (Eph. 1:7). Such statements sufficiently show us that redemption is an accomplished deliverance, that it involves, not a salvable state, but a salvation, which "the world as a whole never knows. And redemption is "through His blood" shed in atonement:it is that in which the proper efficacy of atonement is declared. "Not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, . . . . but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot" ( Pet. 1:18, 19).

A difficulty which has divided Christians comes in here. If redemption is by atonement, and atonement-the "propitiation "of 1 John 2:2,-is for the whole world, how is it that in fact all are not redeemed ? The answer to which is given by some that atonement is only conditionally efficacious, and this is plainly the only possible one if such texts as that just cited are accepted in their natural sense. The alternative is only to explain, as all strict Calvinists do, the "world," as simply the elect among Jews and Gentiles. But this is not what "the whole world "means. What would the very persons who urge this think, if when the same apostle in the same epistle says, "We know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness," a similar limitation were maintained? "We" and "the whole world" are no more contrasted in the one case than "ours" and "of the whole world" are in the other. Or again when Paul declares that "whatsoever the law saith it saith to them that are under the law, that every mouth might be stopped, and the whole world become guilty before God," if it were contended that this meant any thing less than all men, who would admit it?

Take 1 Tim. 2:1-6 as another statement. Prayer is enjoined for all men, for God our Saviour "will have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth; for there is one God, and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time." Here, the "all men" must be consistently interpreted throughout.

So the gospel which Paul preached to the Corinthians was that "Christ died for our sins" (1 Cor. 15:3), as the doctrine of his second epistle is that "He died for all" (5:14). Only on this ground, indeed, could the gospel be sent out, as it confessedly is, to "every creature," or could it be spoken of as "the grace of God which bringeth salvation to all" (Tit. 2:2).

Only a provision actually made for all could fulfill the fair meaning of such texts as these; and we may not bring into them any doctrine of election, to limit them. They are the testimony of the desire of God's heart for all. They are the assurance that if men die unsaved, the responsibility of their ruin is with themselves alone. They are the encouragement to implicit confidence in a love that welcomes, and has title to welcome, all who come by Christ to God.
But while these texts seem very clear, and the sufficiency and applicability of the atonement are in words allowed by some who contest even the meaning of them, there are others which to many occasion difficulty in regard to a "propitiation for the sins of the whole world." These are the texts which speak of substitution in the strict sense.

Substitution is not found as a term in Scripture, but the fact of it is abundantly found. Every victim whose blood was shed in atonement for the sin of him who offered it was a real substitute for the offerer. It has been objected that the word for "substitution" does not occur in connection with the Levitical sacrifices or the Lord's work; but that the "Son of Man came to give His life a ransom for [άvτι-instead of] many" is said in both Matthew and Mark, while in 1 Tim. 2:6 we have the word άvτιλυτρov -a ransom-price. But, as I have said, the doctrine is there where the term is not. If the Lord were "made a curse for us," how could this be but as representing us? If He "bare our sins in His own body on the tree," what else was this but substitution ? And there is much of similar language elsewhere, as we shall see. In fact, the difficulty of which I have spoken arises from the way in which it is every-where pressed that our Lord's work for us was of true substitutionary character.

For while in a certain sense, the Lord might be said to be a ransom in place of all, it is evident that where faith is not and while it is not the ransom is as if it were not. And there are expressions thus as to the sacrifice which to faith and only faith could apply. Take one from Isaiah 3:"The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all." Here, faith speaks, and the words are surely not true of any other than believers. But then comes the difficulty:was there, then, when Christ died, some special work needed and undergone for the sins of believers?

The same question might be asked, perhaps even more pointedly, with regard to 1 Pet. 2:24:"Who Himself bare our sins in His own body on the tree." For this "bearing" surely speaks of the removal of them from before God's sight. Would it be possible, then, to say of the world that He bare their sins in His body on the tree ? Surely not, or they would most certainly be saved. He could not have borne their sins and they yet have to bear them. A strict and proper substitution assuredly necessitates the removal of responsibility from the one for whom the substitute assumes it. It results, therefore, that a substitute for the world the Lord was not.

And the language of Scripture is everywhere in accord with this. It does speak of propitiation for the sins of the whole world:it does not speak of their sins being "laid on" or "borne" by Christ. These two things have been confounded on the one hand, and made into a doctrine of limited atonement, or of substitution for all. On the other, where the distinction has been noticed, it has been taken to imply that on the cross there was a work for all and a special work for the elect beside-a double atonement, as it were; that it was a propitiation for all, a substitution for the elect. In other words, the Arminian atonement and the Calvinistic atonement are both considered true, and to be found together in the work of Christ. But this leads to much confusion and misreading of Scripture, much manifest opposition to it.

It has led some to speak of salvation as a thing wrought out eighteen hundred years ago,-not simply the blessed work which saves, but actual salvation. Faith serves as a telescope to see what existed before we saw it, and what it had nothing to do therefore with producing. The sins of believers were thus dealt with and removed before they were committed, and people find peace by faith, but are not justified by it. All this is in complete opposition to the Word; yet it is a just consequence of the doctrine of a substitution for the elect, and their sins borne when the Lord Jesus died.

Yet He did bear their sins upon the tree, and Jehovah laid on Him the iniquity of us all. "Ours"? Whose, then? and how does this differ from the doctrine just repudiated? The answer is very simple. These words are the language of faith,-of believers; and of believers as such only is it true. He bare the sins of believers on the tree, and this is equivalent to what we have been saying-that the efficacy of atonement is conditional. It is conditioned upon faith, and His bearing the sins of believers is a complete negative of universalism in all its phases. Only their sins arc borne, although the atonement is for the sins of the whole world; and the duty and responsibility of faith are therefore to be pressed on every creature. The sins of believers were really borne eighteen hundred years ago; but only when men become believers are their sins borne, therefore. The very man who to-day believes, and whose sins were borne eighteen hundred years ago, not only could not say yesterday that his sins were borne, but they were really not borne yesterday, although the work was done eighteen hundred years ago. But it was done for believers, and only today is he a believer. The work of atonement only now has its proper efficacy for him:he is justified by faith.

All this is perfectly simple. It is transparently so, indeed. What has clouded and disfigured it ? On the one hand, the importing into it the doctrine of election, which is never done in Scripture; on the other, the thought that our iniquity being laid upon the Lord meant the putting away of so much sin for so much suffering,-so many actual sins of just so many persons being provided for, and no other. But this would make propitiation for the world impossible, and destroy, as we have seen, if consistently followed out, justification by faith. The simple meaning of the texts appealed to involves no such difficulty.

The Lord Jesus, then, was the Substitute for believers, and thus made propitiation for the sins of the world, its efficacy being conditioned upon faith. He stood as the Representative of a class, not a fixed number of individuals,-of a people to whom men arc invited and besought to join themselves, the value of the atonement being more than sufficient and available for all who come. The responsibility of coming really rests, where Scrip-always places it, upon men themselves.

Now, if it be asked, What is the issue of this invitation ? Do any become of the number of His people really except in virtue of a divine work wrought sovereignly in their souls? it is true, none do so. "To as many as received Him, to them gave He right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name; which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God" (John 1:12,13). Such is the decisive statement of Scripture. Men are born again to be children of God; and the new birth is not of man's will:the moment we speak of it, we speak of that which assures us that man's will is wholly adverse. For to be born again is never a thing put upon man as what he is responsible for:it is, in its very nature, outside of this. And "Ye must be born again "is the distinct affirmation that on the ground of responsibility all is over. "How often would I . . . ! and ye would not," is the Lord's lament over Israel; and it is true of man in nature every where. Terrible it is to realize it, but it is true.

Man is bidden to repent and believe the gospel. There is no lack of abundant evidence. It is the condemnation, that "light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil." They refuse the evidence that convicts them, and refuse the grace that would save them. "As in water face answers to face, so the heart of man to man." That he needs to be born again shows that God must work sovereignly, or the whole world perish. So it is quickening from the dead and new creation. These terms all witness to the utter ruin of man, as they do to the omnipotent grace of God in conversion.

These terms speak all of a new life conferred, and with this life the condition required in order to efficacious atonement is accomplished; there is "justification of life" (Rom. 5:18)-justification attaching to the life possessed. The last Adam is made a quickening Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45), after have gone down to death and come up out of it; and the life He gives brings those who receive it into a new creation, of which He is the Representative-Head. To these He is Kinsman-Redeemer, according to the type (Lev. 25:48). The new relationship is their security and entrance into full blessing, to which His work is now their absolute title.

It is here that election does come in; not to limit the provision, nor to restrict in any wise the grace that bids and welcomes all, but to secure the blessing of those who otherwise would refuse and forfeit it as the rest do. The grace to all is not narrowed by the "grace upon grace" to many. The universal offer means and is based on a universal provision, and a provision of exactly the same character for all alike, in which God testifies that He hath "no pleasure in the death of him that dieth," but "will have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth." It may be asked, as it has been asked, Of what avail is a provision for all which saves not one additional to the elect number? The answer which Scripture would give is, "What if some did not believe? shall their unbelief make the faith [or faithfulness] of God without effect? God forbid." The salvation of men is from God; the damnation of men is from themselves. This all the pleadings, warnings, offers of God affirm. And grace refused is still grace, and to be proclaimed to His praise.

The last Adam is thus the Representative-Head of His people, as in His atoning work He was their Substitute before God. "Upon the seed of Abraham"-that is, believers,-" He layeth hold." This affirms the work to be for all, conditionally upon faith:and for believers unconditionally. "The righteousness of God is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all; and upon "-or "over," rather, as a shield or sheltering roof,-"all them that believe."

3. (Chap. 8:2-12:) Brought to God in the Power of Resurrection.
The third section divides, like the second, into three parts:(1) chap. viii, the soul in the light,- the presence of God, revealed in grace; (2) chap. ix, x, the light in the soul,-Christ as Object and Shepherd of His people; (3) chap. xi, xii, life in the power of resurrection. The internal connection of these things we shall see better as we examine the chapters in detail.

(1) Chap. 8:The soul in the presence of God revealed in grace. To be now in the presence of God, whatever the exposure from the light of that presence, means grace. The law never revealed God, as it never brought to Him :an unrent vail was the characteristic of that dispensation. This shows the spiritual blindness of the scribes and Pharisees, zealots for the law, who would condemn by it the light for shining. In His presence they find to their own confusion that it does shine, while the convicted sinner whom they bring there finds the only safe place possible for such an one, a refuge in the grace of the One so revealed.* *Whether indeed she found it as salvation for her soul docs not seem indicated in the narrative, and is not needed for the lesson intended to be conveyed, (Grace was there for her, at least, in all its fullness, if there were faith to receive it.* It is upon this the Lord announces Himself as the "light of the world "-the revelation of God in it. Whoever followed Him should not walk in darkness, but" have the light in the only possible way for the dead to have it,-that is, as "the light of life" the light attaching to eternal life.

All turns upon the divine glory of His person therefore, which men ignorant of God, judging after the flesh merely, refused, though the Father had openly borne witness with Himself. To those who believe on Him, He adds, that continuing in His word, they should be His disciples indeed, and should know the truth and be set free by it. To the caviling, (plainly of the unbelieving Jews,) He answers in a way which seems to confuse, but in fact designedly identifies, the servant of sin and of law. "Whosoever committeth sin is the servant [bond-servant] of sin; and the servant"-the one serving in bondage, the place the law alone could give,-"abideth not in the house forever; but the Son abideth ever." The reference is plainly to Hagar and her child, types of the law and its children, as the apostle shows us:"(The covenant] from Mount Sinai, bearing unto bondage, which is Hagar. . . . But what saith the Scripture? ' Cast out the bondwoman and her son." It is plain the Lord and the apostle are speaking similarly of the footing upon which according to the law men stood with God. It is as plain that the former identifies the bond-servant to sin with the bond-servant to law; and that he who is made free by the Son is freed from sin and law together. And so, says the apostle again, "Sin shall not have dominion over you, because ye are not under law, but under grace." It is as brought to God, accepted, and standing in grace, His love in Christ made known to the heart, the tyranny of sin is broken.* *The connection of this with the story of the woman taken in adultery in the beginning of the chapter shows how foolish is the criticism which would deprive us of this latter. A gap would be left by its absence, very apparent to one who follows, as we have been doing here, the truth contained in it. And what uninspired hand could or would have written or interpolated here this wondrous passage?*

The Lord goes on to convict the Jews of their opposition to God in Him, and to bring out more and more His full glory to whose day their father Abraham had looked on rejoicing. They were no true children of Abraham; much less, as they falsely claimed, of God; but rather of Satan, the liar and man-slayer from the beginning. He that kept His saying, on the other hand, should never see death. Here already we have anticipated the doctrine of the eleventh chapter.

(2) Chap. ix, 10:Christ become the Object, Lord, and Leader of the soul. The next two chapters are self-evidently one, the story of the man born blind being but the usual narrative-introduction to the truths which follow.

The man is born blind, as spiritually we all arc. In healing him, the Lord once more proclaims Himself the light of the world. The clay made with the spittle is no doubt the figure of His own person in that lowly form which blinded indeed the eyes of carnal men, but which when revealed in the power of the Holy Ghost, the sent One, ("Siloam" means "Sent,") is the entrance of true light into the soul. Here, again, its being the Sabbath testifies to the grace of God apart from law. The Pharisees are once more roused. They question the man, seeking ground for the refusal of what is plainly the work of God. In the face of the miracle, owning too they know not whence He is, they condemn the Lord, and cast out of the synagogue the one who confesses Him to be of God. But so cast out, the man is found of Him, who is in fact leading His sheep out of the Jewish fold, and who reveals Himself to him as the Son of God.

This introduces the discourse in the next chapter, in which Jesus contrasts Himself with all pretended shepherds. Entering in by the door,-in the way of lowly submission to all divine requirements, the Spirit of God gave Him access to the sheep; those that were His own in Israel heard His voice and recognized His authority. He Himself became the door, not into the fold- there was to be no fold any longer,-but of the flock:* by Him, if any one entered in, he should be saved, go in and out, and find pasture. Salvation, liberty, sustenance, would all be found with Him, who had come to give life, and that abundantly, by the giving up of His own. In this flock, Judaism being done away); the Gentiles would have part. *In the sixteenth verse, as is well known, it should be, "One flock and one Shepherd."*

The guidance of a living Leader, whose love known in salvation has attached the heart to Himself, is here substituted for the mere measurement of sin by a code. To follow Him who laid down His life for the sheep is a new holiness, in which liberty is safe. Moreover, His everlasting arms of love are ample security, which the walls of the fold could never give. The Father's love to the saints is specially dwelt on in this chapter. They are those whom the Father has given to Christ; gave Him commandment to die for them, an act which has drawn out to Him peculiarly the Father's love. And now the Father and Son are both engaged to keep the possessors of eternal life.

(3) Chap. xi, 12:The power of resurrection-life. But this eternal life as given to man is life out of death, placing him who receives it therefore beyond death, in a new place outside the world, and which gives character to his life while in the world. This is to the glory of God, by which the Son of God is glorified. Lazarus brought up from the grave is the illustration of this.

The power of death for the disciples is shown in the first part of the eleventh chapter. They cannot understand how the Lord should go back into Judea, where of late the Jews sought to stone Him; nor His quiet talking of death as sleep. Martha and Mary rise but in their thoughts to this, that His presence would have saved their brother from dying. But now he is dead, and will rise but in the resurrection at the last day-far off for present comfort. The Lord, in reply, brings out the great distinctive feature of the new day which is coming in:"I am the resurrection and the life:he that believeth on Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and he that liveth and believeth on Me shall never die."

Here, "he that believeth on Me, though he were dead," speaks evidently of Old-Testament saints; while "he that liveth and believeth on Me" speaks of the time now beginning, the characteristic of which is that the Resurrection and the Life has come. For believers in the past, the power of resurrection can be known only when they are raised from the dead by the coming Lord. For those now alive, there is, on the other hand, a present power of resurrection. Such have no death to pass through. All the reality of it has been taken from them. If they go through it, it is in the triumph of Him who has "abolished death, and brought life and incorruption to light through the gospel."

Thus the believer of the present time finds his type in Lazarus raised from the dead for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified thereby. In fact, this testimony it is that makes many to believe on Him, as it rouses, on the other hand, the opposition of the Pharisees to its height. Bethany becomes known as the place of resurrection; and there we find, in the beginning of the twelfth chapter, a supper made for Him. The place is significant of that in which He can alone see of the fruit of the travail of His soul; and here Martha serves, Lazarus sits at table with Him, Mary anoints His feet with her ointment:service, communion, worship, have each their representative there where no cloud ever casts its shadow.

But now, if the Lord is to be to others the resurrection and the life, we have to see what this involves for Him. He enters Jerusalem, is hailed as King of Israel; and then certain Greeks come up, desiring to see Him:upon this He announces the approach of the hour in which the Son of Man should be glorified. But in what? "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." No way could life come for us but out of His death; resurrection-life out of death accomplished. And with this, judgment is come for the world, the prince of this world's doom, to be cast out; Christ lifted up from the earth is yet to draw all men unto Him.

The chapter closes, as so many others, with warnings because of their unbelief. The greater the blessing, the sadder to be lost; the more the mercy, the worse the judgment for its rejection; and even as the last miracle which attests the Deliverer is the water turned into blood, so says the Lord, "He that rejecteth Me, and receiveth not My words, hath one that judgeth him:the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day."

II.

THE LIFE AS COMMUNICATED, WITH ITS ACCOMPANIMENT IN THE BELIEVER.(Chap. 2:23-17:)
The life now manifested in the person of the Word made flesh is in the second part of the gospel displayed as communicated to man, in its various aspects, and with all its wondrous accompaniments as they are found in the believer in Christ. These arc given in regular and perfect order, beginning with new birth in the third chapter, and ending in the thirteenth and four chapters following with the apprehension of the Father and the Son, communion and the fruits in which it issues. Of this part there are four sections, which successively give us, first, chap, iii, iv, the two divine gifts which are fundamental to Christianity-eternal life and the gift of the Holy Ghost; secondly, chap, 5:-vii, the position in which believers are thus placed in relation to the world; thirdly, chap, 8:-xii, the bringing to God in the power of resurrection; and lastly, chap, 13:-xvii, the practical fruits for walk and testimony.

I. (2:23-4:) Life in the Spirit,

There are, in the first section, two distinct but related parts. The first, new birth, the absolute prerequisite to the other, the gift of the Holy Ghost. The one forms the vessel, the other fills it:the one sets right the affections, the other satisfies them.

(I) 2:23-3:New Birth. The last three verses of the second chapter belong evidently in subject to the third, to which they form an important introduction. The condition of man is shown, not in the case of enemies or rejecters, but of those convinced and orthodox in belief, to whom yet as alien in spirit the Lord could not commit Himself. Convinced by miracles, the glory of Christ was yet unseen by them; there was no link of true faith, no response of heart. In Nicodemus' case, while he takes similar ground to theirs-that of the miracles, yet he comes to Christ, showing personal need. The Lord insists on the necessity and character of new birth, man being naturally only "flesh;" a birth which the Word and Spirit unite to produce. Until this is accomplished, man, Jew or Gentile, does not live; and this life is in the sovereign gift of God alone.

But Israel rejected the testimony of One who spoke with perfect knowledge, even when He testified in the line of their own prophets-of earthly things. And He had more to communicate. How would they receive what would have no authority but His to commend it to them? how would they believe when He spoke of heavenly things? Moreover, not for testimony only had He come, but, as antitype of the brazen serpent, to be lifted up, made sin for sinners, that whosoever believeth in Him might not perish, but have eternal life, God having so loved the world as to give His only begotten Son for that purpose. "After these things came Jesus and His disciples into the land of Judea, and there He tarried with them, and baptized." Baptism is burial, and thus the Lord confirms the testimony of the cross as to man's condition. It is life man needs as dead; eternal life that he receives.

The heavenly things the Lord has not yet declared ; for as far as He has yet gone, another is permitted to testify with Him. John expressly says of himself, "He that is of the earth is earthly, and speaketh of the earth," and yet he bears witness of the Son, and of eternal life being the possession of him who believes in the Son. Not, of course, that eternal life is in its own nature earthly, as surely the Son of God is not; but they can be and are received on earth, while Christ's testimony opens heaven itself.

(2) 4:1-42. The gift of the Holy Ghost-the living wafer. It is now significantly noted that "Jesus Himself baptized not," He confirms the Baptist's witness to man's condition, but not as if it were His own proper sphere of truth. We now find Him, moreover, in Samaria, a Gentile scene. Here He announces the gift of the living water, the Holy Ghost, to an open sinner; for it is the gift of grace, which surmounts, therefore, all legal restrictions also. The Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans; but He is no Jew, but Himself the gift of God to men:of Him, of whom one has but to ask to obtain living water. Moreover, he who drank of this should not merely find satisfaction for a time, as with all mere human joys, but possess the spring of it-for it is not "well," but "spring"-in himself, perpetual and eternal, "springing- up unto eternal life." Here the indwelling of the Spirit is plainly declared to be forever.

The woman's conscience being now reached by the confronting with her past life, she confesses the Lord as a "prophet," and then appeals to His decision between Jerusalem and Gerizim. He declares the worship of God apart from all question of locality, and only possible in reality as resulting from the knowledge of an object which could produce it. God must be known, and salvation was that by which He was known, who was the Father, now seeking, in His grace, true worshipers. The thought of Messiah springs up in the woman's heart. The Lord declares Himself to be Messiah.

This completes the work in the woman's soul. Christ come, and with perfect knowledge of her, revealing to her heart the Father's love, she leaves what had occupied her to tell in the city her new-found joy, her words revealing the secret-" Come, see a man that told me all things that ever I did" On the other hand, the Lord's joy is revealed in the fact that the disciples, who had left to obtain food for His need, come back to find Him no more a hungered:"I have meat to eat that ye know not of," He replies to their wonder. "My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish His work."

The "two days" in Samaria speak, I doubt not, of the present time of grace among the Gentiles. Their apprehension of Him is fittingly as "Saviour of the world"

We find, then, here the Holy Ghost as "living water," indwelling, satisfying the soul; Christ revealing the Father in connection with a known salvation, and, as the result, true, spiritual worship awakened in the heart. This testimony among Gentiles, and to the Saviour of the world. This, with the third chapter, gives the two great factors of Christianity.

(3) 4:43-54 The nobleman son, typifying Israel's conversion. The last part of the fourth chapter seems a supplement to the rest, in which God's grace is seen going out once more to Israel, after the present dispensation is ended. Here we return to Cana of Galilee, marked, too, as the place of the former miracle. We are prepared thus for a connected meaning.

The "nobleman," or "servant of the king," depicts, I doubt not, the nation sunk into the character of courtiers of the world, but now under the judgment of God, as the son smitten apparently to death at Capernaum (elsewhere doomed for the rejection of Christ,) plainly points out. This distress brings him to Christ. The Lord reproves him for the unbelief common to the nation:"Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe." But the man's need is urgent:"Sir, come down ere my child die." And the ready answer of grace is, "Go thy way; thy son liveth." The deliverance brings both himself and his house to true faith.
July 1886

"Our care should ever be, not to suffer ourselves to proceed for a single moment beyond the energy of the Spirit, as the time for the Spirit will always keep us directly occupied with Christ. If the Holy Ghost produces 'five words' of worship or thanksgiving, let us utter the five and have done. If we proceed further, we are eating the flesh of our sacrifice beyond the time; and so far from its being 'accepted,' it is really 'an abomination.'"

THE HISTORY OF THE AGE OF LAW Twenty years pass, and all the house of Israel are found lamenting after the Lord. The ark had not indeed remained long in the Philistines' hand, but had wrought its own deliverance apart from the people. It had returned, but not to Shiloh, its former abode, nor to the tabernacle, no more to receive it. Bethshemesh-a city of priests-to which it had first come, smitten for its irreverence, had had to yield it up to Kirjath-jearim, where it remained in retirement, kept by Eleazar "in the fields of the wood" (Ps. 132:6) until David brought it out (2 Sam. 6:2). All this time was marked thus as a time of disorder and disturbed relation between God and Israel.

This gap of time between Eli and David is bridged by the prophet Samuel, the real link between God and the people even during the reign of Saul. The prominence of the prophets was always a sign of disorder and decline among the people. It was an extraordinary agency, with no provision for succession or permanence at all; in this case, from the first, a note of preparation for the king (I Sam. 2:10), whom at last it anoints and makes way for.

Before the priesthood is set aside, Samuel is established as the prophet of the Lord; but through the unbelief of the people, twenty years pass, after the return of the ark, before the value of God's gift is realized. Then Israel gather for confession and prayer to God at Mizpeh, and Samuel judges them there. This brings up the Philistines; but the battle is now the Lord's, and Israel has but to pursue a smitten foe. The Philistine yoke is broken, and Samuel becomes the judge of Israel. We see the prophet here, as never before under the law, building his altars and offering to the Lord, the priesthood quite unrecognized.

But Samuel grows old, and his sons, whom he has associated with himself in the judgeship, walk not in his ways. The enemies of Israel begin again to gather strength. The unbelief of the people becomes manifest. They desire a king, explicitly to be like the nations, from whom God had separated them. Now He intended they should have a king. Moses had spoken of it, anticipating indeed their desire as expressed here (Deut. 17:14-20). Hannah had spoken of God's king to whom He would give strength. And to Eli, God had told, by His prophet, of His anointed one, before whom the faithful priest should walk (I Sam. 2:35). Self-will might here find its excuse, but nothing more. In fact, as they are forewarned by God through Samuel, the rule of a king among them, while it would bring them into a bondage hitherto unknown, would be the sign of God further removed from them-another step downward in the long descent they had been making. It does not affect this that under David and Solomon they were in fact freed from their enemies, and attained a worldly eminence such as they had not enjoyed till then. The characters of the kingdom as Samuel depicts them were none the less fully illustrated in these reigns; and the more the grandeur of the monarchy, the more even might the yoke press, the more the distance between king- and subject. But above all, God Himself, rejected as their King, dealt now with the people, not on the old familiar terms, but at a distance, through the king himself. Let David be rejected, and the show-bread, even if just sanctified, is but common bread (I Sam. 21:5).* *The passage is otherwise rendered in the Revised Version, and by other translators. The common version is, however, Justifiable, and I believe to be preferred, as see the Lord's use of this incident in connection with the Sabbath and His own rejection (Matt. 12:).*

That the king was here also the shadow of the King of God's kingdom in a coming day is true, but neither does it alter the significance of the fact literally. Faith here as elsewhere may find tokens of the coming day, and see also the justification of God's long-suffering then. None the less the links between God and His people were more and more being strained. And if this last endured longest of all, it was surely because it was the last:there was no other, and God's patience lingered.

Saul, the first king, though chosen by God, is given them as one after their own heart, as his name providentially signifies,-"the Asked." After being fully tested, he is set aside for the man after God's heart, David. And Saul, though the anointed of the Lord, is never recognized as the true link between the people and God. He is throughout dependent upon Samuel, who as he anoints him to his office announces also his rejection, and before his own death anoints his successor.

David is thus the first king fully owned,-with Solomon, the double type of Christ, the -Sufferer-Conqueror and the Prince of Peace. He brings the ark to Jerusalem, appoints the courses of the priests and the service of the Lord's house, for which he provides abundantly the material, and receives the pattern. His kingdom is greatly extended and his enemies are subdued, and Solomon builds and consecrates the house, with "neither adversary nor evil occurrent."

But "man being in honor abideth not:he is like the beasts that perish." And all this glory is like the flower of grass; it has scarcely blossomed before it begins to fade. The first love passes, and there is no indistinct threatening that the candlestick is under sentence to be removed. Solomon loves many strange women, and his heart is drawn after their idols. Adversaries are stirred up against him. He passes away, and a sudden rent tears ten out of the twelve tribes out of the hand of his son ; and in the fifth year only of his reign, Shishak sweeps down upon and spoils Jerusalem and the house of the Lord. Henceforth, in Israel, with the worship of the golden calves, it is one monotonous story of evil ever growing worse; in Judah, the descent stopped, indeed, again and again, by the intervention of divine grace acting in an Asa, a Jehoshaphat, a Hezekiah, a Josiah, but still with no recovery really. Blow after blow falls upon them; prophet after prophet warns and threatens in vain:at last, disintegration fully begins. The ten tribes are carried captive into Assyria; Judah, spared for a hundred and thirty years longer, is at last carried into Babylon.

The glory has before, this departed from the temple, which the king of Babylon plunders and destroys. The people are now (though not forever) disowned of God. The legal covenant, in fact, is over, although the dispensation of law cannot be said to have ceased. "The law and the prophets were until John." But the history of the people as such is closed, although a feeble remnant return from Babylon. But they return only to await in Messiah their Deliverer, amid the tokens of the ruin in which they have involved themselves. The glory does not return. The ark of the covenant, Jehovah's throne in the midst, is gone from their new temple. The Urim and Thummim, by which the Lord had communicated regularly with them in the past, is also gone. Prophets His mercy raises up to them for a brief time, and every one of them is a witness that the moral and spiritual condition is unchanged. This voice soon passes. The history of the favored people ends in blank and total, most significant silence. The throne of the earth is in the hands of the Gentiles. Israel's dominion is passed away; and those "times of the Gentiles" have begun in which we still are, and which continue until the kingdom of the Son of Man is introduced by His coming in the clouds of heaven.

But the significance of this change we must consider more at length.

An important period comes now to be considered; not itself forming part of these probationary ages, but having nevertheless the deepest significance in relation to these. The trial by law, it is evident, was the fullest and most detailed trial that man received; as it was the trial of the only religious system that ever was the fruit of man's mind simply. We have seen it in principle already in Cain-a mere natural man, of course; but with the believer also there are-thoughts of the natural mind which are no better. God, in the giving of law, does not yet reveal His own way of blessing, but adopts, for the sake of experiment, man's way; only supplying the needful conditions that the experiment may be fully made, and the issue such as may not at all be doubtful.

But in a case of this kind, special care would be needed also to guard against the mistake, so sure otherwise to happen, of confounding this adoption of man's way, for a certain purpose, with the acceptance of it by God as the true one, and His own thought. This in fact has happened, because unbelief in man can set aside the plainest testimonies that can be given; while the systems which set these aside necessarily, in proportion as they do so, deny the simple facts connected with the giving of the law, and which arc indeed part of a testimony which He has thus graven upon the history itself.

Thus those who affirm the law to be in any sense God's original thought have endeavored to prove, as it was needful to prove, its universality and its existence from the beginning in a fallen world. Its universality, for that which was God's way of blessing for man, could not be (according to His own design) shut up from the mass; its existence from the beginning, partly for the same reason, and partly because God's thought would surely be the one first announced by Him.

To establish its universality, they have had to distinguish between a written and an unwritten law; or, as they assume to call it from Scripture, a law written on the heart. What they mean is in fact conscience, an implicit law which every one has, while the ten commandments are only its explicit form, and as such given to Israel alone. In the same way they prove equally, as they think, its existence from the beginning.

Scripture refuses this, however, utterly. The "law written upon the heart" is only used of Israel's condition when finally converted to God. It is one of the blessings of the new covenant-"I will put My laws in their minds, and write them in their hearts; "words which prove conclusively that such a condition is not every man's natural one. While in the passage in Romans often quoted, where at first sight a similar term seems to be applied to the Gentiles, it is in reality a very different one:"Which show," says the apostle, "the work of the law written upon their hears"-not the law written, but its work written, as the original text declares without any question. The work of the law is conviction :conscience does this work in the one who has not the law, though far less completely:"By the law is the knowledge of sin;" and this knowledge conscience in measure gives to every one, and in that respect they, "having no law "(so the Revised Version correctly gives it), "are a law unto themselves." Had they a law, they would not be a law to themselves.

There is no escape from the plain statement of Scripture that the law written on the heart is conversion, and not the natural state; and that if it were, God could not promise to do it for those who already had it done in them. Positive, too, is the statement that the Gentiles have "no law." But beside all this, the introduction of law at the beginning in a fallen world is the subversion of the whole argument of the apostle (Gal. 3:17), that "the covenant, which was confirmed before of God in Christ [or rather "to Christ"], the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, could not disannul, that it should make the promise of no effect." For "though it be a man's covenant, if it be confirmed, no man disannulled or adds thereunto."

He here shows one of the meanings of this Abrahamic period preceding the dispensation of law. No less than four centuries does God require to put between the promise of grace to Abraham and his seed and the legal covenant between Himself and Israel, to prevent the one being confounded with or added to the other. And the importance of this will be seen, when we compare the real universality of the first with the restricted bearing of the second. "In thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed," God says to Abraham, speaking to him as the pattern man of faith, the "father of all them that believe." For "they which are of faith," says the apostle, "the same are the children of Abraham." And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would "justify the heathen [the nations] through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, ' In thee shall all nations be blessed.' So then," he adds, "they which be of faith are blessed with faithful [or rather, "believing"] Abraham."

Thus God had proclaimed, centuries before the law, that the Gentiles should be blessed upon the principle of faith. Even as, long after the law was given, He had declared by Habakkuk that "the just shall live by faith." "And," adds the apostle again, "the law is not of faith; but 'the man that doeth them shall live in them' "-an entirely different and conflicting principle.

Even thus far it is plain that as God's universal way of blessing, the gospel had possession of the field before the law came in at all. But God would make it more evident; and He confirms this covenant of promise (really) to Christ, when He afterward adds, "In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed." This is of course the completion (and therefore confirmation) of the former promise; and its full significance is seen in connection with that offering up of Isaac, and receiving him back (in figure) from the dead, which so plainly find their antitype in Christ's sacrificial death and resurrection. The true Isaac is that One Seed, as the apostle points out, "to whom the promise was made." If "in thee" showed that the blessing was to be by faith, "in thy seed" reveals the object of faith, the Person and work through whom alone the blessing of all nations could in fact come.

Law is excluded from this covenant of promise. It has absolutely no place there. And what proves this, according to the apostle, is just the fact of its having been made and confirmed of God four hundred and thirty years before the Sinaitic. Even a man's covenant made and confirmed cannot be reopened to insert new conditions. How simply impossible, then, to acid the law as a condition to the covenant of grace !

Theological systems would come in here to assure us, however, that the law was written upon man's heart from the beginning, and thus upset altogether the apostle's reasoning. Instead of grace having priority of law, as he affirms, according to these, it is the law that has the priority. Either he or they, then, must be in error.

In the epistle to the Romans also he speaks of a time before law. "For until the law," he says, -or rather, "until law"-"sin was in the world." Law did not introduce it therefore, he means to say" but again they would correct him:according to them, there was no time "until"-that is, before law. And some would doubtless quote the next words of the apostle in proof:"But sin is not imputed where there is no law." The mistake is in supposing "imputing" here to be the same thing as elsewhere in the epistle; it is in reality a different word :"sin is not put in account" (as the different items of a bill,) is the true thought. "Sin is not put in account where there is no law ; nevertheless death reigned"-proving that sin was "imputed," from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression." For Adam had"transgressed;" he had overstepped a positive law under which he was. "From Adam to Moses "is just the time of the most part of the Genesis history; it is the time until law, when sin was already in the world, but when it had not as yet this aggravation. The supposition-for it has been supposed-that infants are in question "from Adam to Moses," is scarcely deserving a refutation.

It is not true, then, that the law given at Sinai was only the explicit announcement of what had been implicitly in existence from the beginning; but on the contrary, law, as a principle of God's dealings in a fallen world, came in then. It is what He was forced into (to speak after the manner of men), rather than desired. Abel, in the world before the flood, declared what was His way from the beginning; and this Noah's altar proclaimed again as His, when those waters had scarcely dried from off the face of the new world.

In this prefatory period of which we are now speaking, the types of the law and its significance the apostle has taught us to find in Abraham's history. How suited their place there should be surely evident. Hagar is thus the "covenant from. the Mount Sinai, which genders to bondage," and every detail of her history is, I am assured, luminous in this way. That she is but handmaid to Sarah, the covenant of grace, every one owns, of course. Sarah's name is "Princess," for "grace reigns." Hagar is an Egyptian, child of fallen nature; and her name is "Fugitive," for, alas! the natural effort now is to get away from God. She is fleeing toward Egypt when the angel finds her at Lahai-roi; and when dismissed with her child in obedience to the divine command, again we find her gravitating toward Egypt. How plainly is it taught, thus, that the law is characterized by "the elements of the world," with which the apostle connects it in Galatians! As a principle, it is man's way, not God's; as specific commandment, holy, just, and good; and in His intent in giving it, surely worthy every way of Him. These things alter in no wise the fact that it is man's way-his experiment with himself-taken up by God, and worked out, in His own perfect manner, to a true result.

Thus it should be very plain why Hagar is first found by God in relation to Abram, manifestly his own shift, through little faith, to obtain the promised and desired fruit. Finding her thus, He appears to her at the well Lahai-roi, and sends her back to submit herself (mark) into her mistress's hands, and to allow the trial already begun to be fully wrought. But while He allows it, He does not leave the issue for a moment doubtful. The fruit of law is the natural fruit. Ishmael shall be born, but be only the "wild-ass man"-untamed, untamable flesh.

Abraham thus exhibits in his own history the lesson which afterward, for so many centuries, his posterity were set to learn. In his own person, he is the witness of sovereign, electing grace; called out of the darkness of heathenism, as Joshua reminds the men of his generation-"Your fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood in old time, even Terah, the father of Abraham and the father of Nahor; and they served other gods." Here, "the God of glory appeared unto" him, and called him from country, kindred, and father's house, to be the special witness of His name and way.

Before Hagar appears in the history, God gives testimony to Abram, as a man righteous through faith; and it is instructive to see how the apostle, when he brings Abram before us as the pattern man of faith, passes over all the time of his connection with her as so much loss. "Who against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations, according to that which was spoken, 'So shall thy seed be' 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,"

In the last words, the apostle seems to ignore the facts of history; for Abram's body was not yet dead when God said to him, "So shall thy seed be," and when his faith was first counted for righteousness. It was after this-probably some time after -that Ishmael was born; and he was thirteen years old at the time of which the epistle to the Romans speaks. All these fifteen years or more the apostle treats as so much lost time, to bring together the period in which he is first spoken of as having the righteousness of faith, and that when he received the covenant of circumcision as the "seal" of that righteousness. Circumcision means, as the same apostle elsewhere tells us, the "putting off of the body of the flesh;" and they are the "true circumcision" who have no confidence in the flesh." God Himself thus brings these two periods together; and circumcision is seen to be indeed, as the Lord says, "not of Moses." In its spiritual meaning, it is the fundamental opposite of law.

How fully in all this the character and purpose of this intermediate time comes out!_ Even the natural seed-Israel after the flesh-will find their blessing in the end from God according to the grace of the Abrahamic covenant, and not according to the Sinaitic, the only one according to which they have yet received the land. The Abrahamic covenant will thus be in very deed to them a "new covenant." Thus grace still as a nation holds them fast, as it ever has, for future blessing,-a blessing which, when it comes, will alone be the proper fulfillment of the "covenant of promise."

Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph give us, as types, yet further lessons. Isaac shows us the Seed through whom alone the blessing can come; Jacob, the immediate father of the twelve tribes, in both his character and history foreshadows theirs; and Joseph, rejected by his brethren, and yet at last received perforce as their Saviour and lord, shows in so plain a way their history in respect of One infinitely greater that it needs no insisting on. For our present purpose enough has been already said to prove how in this period prefatory to the law the law itself is guarded from misconception, and grace is declared God's way, and only way, of blessing for man. Even for Israel, God's covenant is the covenant of circumcision. Carnality and unbelief, stopping at the outside, may misread all this from first to last. If those misread it for whom has come the full and final revelation, "the vail is upon their hearts."

"Satan would take advantage of a condition of nervous weakness, to practice upon us, and we must resist him, 'steadfast in the faith.' It is a very real thing that he is ' the accuser of the brethren,' but he is the accuser of God Himself to the brethren, and we must take heed lest we fall into the snare. If he can make us judge of what God is to us by external circumstances, and to see Him through the medium of our own thoughts and feelings, instead of in the mirror of His precious Word, then he effectually prevails against us. ' Is the Lord among us, or not?' brings up Amalek, and the place is called Meribah, because, alas! we are 'striving with the Lord.' Let him not prevail against you, dear–. Be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus-grace whatever you are. Not only then do you find spiritual help, when you can do this, but (as you know,) bodily improvement also. This is a clear proof that a great deal you suffer from is spiritual depression. Cast it off, dear brother, and for the Lord's sake, do not do Him the dishonor of taking your thoughts of Him from any thing else than His own revelation of Himself. ' Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.' Have you not in some sort experienced this too? There is nothing so certain as His Word. When instead of that we allow ourselves to trust our own thoughts rather, we are fighting the devil's battles against ourselves. And in no way else can he succeed against us. Will you allow him ?

"Above all, be of good courage, for he hath said, ' I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.' And He is true and faithful:He cannot deny Himself.

"The Lord keep and bless you.

"Ever affectionately in Him,"

4. NOAH (Heb. 11:7).

We have had acceptance by faith, and the walk of communion; now we have in Noah the testimony of faith, and its inheritance:"By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, prepared an ark unto the saving of his house; by which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness" which is by faith."

We have, then, faith's testimony. Let us observe, then, that it is the testimony of practical conduct, not merely of words. No doubt there was the testimony of his lips also. No man so possessed with the reality of that of which he had been warned could refrain from it. But the testimony of his acts is what the Spirit of God insists on here:"he prepared an ark to the saving of his house." Thus he condemned the world, and thus alone. His ark spoke out decisively his faith in coming judgment, his own assurance of what was his beyond it.

We have before seen what faith is. The apostle puts it after righteousness in his exhortation to Timothy:"Follow righteousness, faith, love, peace." Except a thing be righteous, it cannot be faith; and thus righteousness begins and guards the whole path. But righteousness alone is not enough for us. Faith it is sets the soul before God to be guided by His word, and controlled by the unseen things into which it enters. Noah's ark spoke plainly of judgment coming for the world; but it spoke of it in revealing the way of salvation in which his own soul confided. Noah had "found grace in the eyes of the Lord," and of this grace he was a witness:but it was inseparably united to this other testimony, so that he could not bear, witness to the one without testifying to the other also.

So, surely, it is for us. The maintenance of salvation for the believer cannot be separated from the condemnation of the world. The enjoyment of our own things cannot be without the solemn realization of that which hangs over the soul unsaved. If "we know that we are of God, the whole world lieth in [the power of] the wicked one."

Already for the believer, then, the separation is begun, which foreshadows and goes on to the dread final one. An Enoch life unites with a Noah's testimony. Sanctification is separation. Heavenliness alone is holiness. "The world passeth away with the lust thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever."

Are we, then, giving the testimony that Noah gave? the testimony, too, not of our lips only, but of our lives? Do men see in us that the coming judgment of the world is a reality? Do they see people preparing for a long stay on earth, or making ready to be gone? Do they understand that ours is an inheritance beyond the flood, and which belongs to the "righteousness which is of faith" alone? How serious is false witness in a case like this! How grave an indication as to the state of our own souls! How ruinous to the souls of others! How dishonoring to the "Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God even our Father"!

The story of the well with this significant name is told in few words, but full of interest. How in a few touches of Scripture a living, breathing-picture is made to stand before you; and, examine it closely, the more its perfection appears; the more your wonder and admiration grow.

God works by wonder, as when He drew aside Moses by the burning bush; but, as in that case, the wonder is never a wonder merely:underneath, if you look further, you will find some deep significance, some pregnancy of meaning-a "sign," or significant thing. More than that, where there is need,-where creature weakness and dependency are realized,-the "sign" will develop "power." there will be the ministry of God, the interposition of Omnipotent Love to meet that need. These are the three words which stand for a miracle in Scripture:it is a "wonder," a "sign," and a "power:" and in nothing are these found as they are in Scripture itself. It is one of the mightiest of miracles; and the Lord could say, even of the Old Testament, "if they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead"

Now the well Lahai-roi is, I doubt not, the type of Scripture in this very character. It is the "fountain of water" at which the angel of the Lord finds Hagar when she is fleeing from the face of her mistress Sarai, and where, assuring her of the birth and multiplication of her seed, he bids her return to her mistress, and submit herself into her hands. These women are types of which the interpretation is given us. Hagar is the law, which genders to bondage, the servant of grace, the free-woman, as God has ordained. And as we find the well first in connection with Hagar, so the first books of Scripture are the books of the law. Yet it is at this well afterward we find, not a child of the bondwoman, but of the free. Isaac dwells at the well Lahai-roi:it is his possession, as is the Word that of him who believes through grace; and the Word, as ministered in the power of the living Spirit; for as the water is a figure of the Word, so the "living water" is the figure of the Spirit, as the apostle teaches us (Jno. 7:39). By the Word the Spirit ministers, and thus it is that, as the Lord says, "the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life."

Lahai-roi is the Word, thus, with significance and power for the soul, and in which the presence of the living, omniscient God is made apparent. It is so, though under another aspect from that of water, that Hebrews 4:presents it:"living and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of joints and marrow, of- soul and spirit, a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." And then what have we? "Neither is there any thing that is not manifest in His sight, but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do." This is clearly, in another aspect, Lahai-roi. And how blessed when the Word brings us after this manner into the presence of God, as is its office! Looking at Israel in the type, we may see how in God's meaning, for His children, this is to be no casual or occasional thing. We are to dwell by the well. As children we are to abide in the intimacy of our Father's presence, under His eye, and in the assurance of His fostering care. Our Lord's words are but another expression of this:"If a man love Me, he will keep My word, and My Father will love him, and We will come unto him, and make our abode with him"

This is His thought for us, and to be without it is the "orphanage" which He would not have His people know (Jno. 14:18, marg.) How blessed where, through the Word and by the Spirit, Father and Son realize Their presence continually to the soul! How wondrous the intimacy to which we are thus called! Alas, on the other hand, for the feebleness of our actual experience in view of such invitations and assurances! Why do we so fall short? Covet the blessing in its fullness every Christian must:what, then, is the difficulty of attainment, when it is divine grace that is drawing near us? The type before us is very instructive in this particular.

First, Isaac stands before us, not only as the representative of the child of God, but of the child in the child's place,-in the liberty of divine grace known and enjoyed. And this is the first and great prerequisite to the blessing. If grace it is that comes to be entertained, faith, it is on man's part gives it entertainment. How slow we are to enter into God's thoughts, to accredit fully His goodness, and "draw near with a true heart, in full assurance of faith"! Yet we all know that the least grace we could no more pretend to be worthy of than the greatest, and that God is no less true in one word He speaks than in another. "He who spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?"

The second point is, that Isaac is not only the child of the free-woman, but also the type of that great sacrifice which in spirit we are called to be conformed to. "Let that mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, thought it not robber)- to be equal with God, but emptied Himself, and became in the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." Such is the pattern put before us, and in this twofold manner Isaac is a type. The result to us of the child's place is absolute surrender to the Father's will; and it is the peculiar fruit of faith, in which the soul's return to God is manifested. Being" in a fallen world, sin being in us and around us, this fruit is found in surrender-in sacrifice. Yet Isaac does not die, but lives; nor is there a life which speaks more of enjoyment and rest, in the book of Genesis, than his after-life. And so is surrender to God. It is the low-seeming portal to all that is bright and blessed and holy in practical life. Nay, what holiness, what blessedness, what freedom, what life of faith at all, can be known apart from it? It is here that for our troubles we find rest, for doubt assurance, for our weakness an everlasting arm. Yet it is in sacrifice we find entrance into this; for we have, alas! ways and wills that are our own, paths of human wisdom hard to relinquish, and a hostile world around. Faith amid it all seeks God, and finds in Him its rock and hiding-place.

Surrender to God must, however, be entire surrender, or it is not this; and here the real and grave condition of so many appears. They fall short, not in performance only, where all must own shortcoming, but in spirit, in intention also. And this may be with even entire unconsciousness as to the fact. Conscience does not reproach, if even it does not very decidedly approve. A standard not far removed from that of men around has been adopted practically with perhaps a theoretical one much higher at the same time, and there is little to alarm. Is not Christ's yoke easy and His burden light? They are not legal, and thank God for grace. They know no raptures, but as little disquiet. But Lahai-roi is not reached. The Word is certainly no full spring of unfailing blessing, realizing to their souls the constant presence of a living God. They have indeed no daily need. Ordinarily, they get on as others do; under more than ordinary pressure, they are forced to God.

How different Lahai-roi, where the Isaacs dwell!-the endeared mutual intercourse with God, wherein a soul lives indeed and grows, and like a tree planted by the water-brooks, brings forth its fruit in its season; his leaf also doth not wither, and whatsoever he doeth, it prospers. May you and I dwell here, dear reader, in this sweetest portion outside heaven, and where the joy of heaven is already tasted.

4. (Chap. 13:-17:) Faith Furnished for the Path through the world, with Christ absent as rejected.

The last section of this central portion of the book consists mainly of the Lord's discourses with His disciples before the cross, in view of His speedy departure to the Father. In these, therefore, He speaks of what would furnish them for the time of His absence, the one great feature of it being the coming of that other and abiding Comforter, whose presence with us-alas, how little understood and realized!-is the character of the dispensation in which we are. Thus we are not left to orphanage (14:18, marg.), but see Christ while the world does not see Him; yea, through Him both the Father and the Son come and make their abode with us (5:23).

There are seven divisions:-(I) Chap. 13:1-17, the purification needed to have part with Christ; (2) 10:18-38, the enemy's work in the traitor, only issuing in the glorifying of the Son of Man, and of God in Him; (3) chap. xiv, the Father's house, the revelation of the Father, and our present part with Christ by the Holy Ghost sent down; (4) 15:1-16, the fruit the test of abiding in Him; (5) 15:17-16:II, the doom of a world which has rejected Him;
(6) 16:12-33, access to the Father in His name;
(7) chap. xvii, the prayer of the Intercessor for His own.

(I) Chap. 13:1-17. Purification to have part with Christ. The order of the truth in these chapters is important:first, purification; then, communion; then, fruit; then, testimony. Without purification, no communion; without communion, no fruit in the life; without fruit, no real testimony. The first thing of all, then, is purification, the washing of the feet, the application of the Word to free us from all defilement by the way. This is not cleansing by blood, as in I John 1:7, which of course must go before it; nor the bathing of the whole person (the washing of regeneration), which the Lord distinguishes from it in His words to Simon Peter (5:10). Neither of these can be, nor needs to be, repeated; while the washing of the feet must be repeated constantly, not merely to bring back if we have strayed, but to maintain the soul with Him. Moreover, it is not a provision merely for known, but for unknown, evil. He must cleanse, He must judge; otherwise the most ignorant and least exercised in divine things would have the least need of purification. Absolute surrender to Christ, inviting His inspection, is the prerequisite for all real "part with" Him-communion.

As Revelation 1:gives the Lord as occupied with our collective state, so does this chapter show Him caring for our individual state; and in this He gives us also to be imitators of His grace, and to care for one another (10:12-17).

(2) Chap. 13:18-38. The enemy's work in the traitor, which only issues in the glorifying of the Son of Man, and of God in Him. And to this grace, all things perforce serve (5:3). So if the enemy's work be now seen, and the familiar token of love bring out the enmity of the heart of the traitor (5:27), the Word of God had already anticipated this (5:18), and the final result is the glory of the meek Sufferer. The Son of Man is glorified in that humiliation in which none other could have stood with Him (5:36), and in which God Himself was glorified as no where else. This leads, for Him, to the glory of God, the glory for which He had descended; while He leaves for His disciples the "new covenant" of love to one another, illustrated and enforced by His proved love to all.

(3) Chap. 14:Part with Christ. And now He unfolds what is "part with" Him, first, in its final, and then in its present, form. In its final form, it means place in the Father's house eternally, as children, beholding the Father's face, already seen, by faith, in Christ down here. For the Father and He are One. He is "the Way," the One, and the only One, in whom the Father is accessible by men,-"the Truth,"-the fruit of the Light, God manifest in the world,-"and the Life," needed to receive the revelation.

He goes on to speak of "part with" Him, as now we have it, communion by the Spirit sent down from the Father, (after His own work accomplished, and ascension,) to take abidingly with us the place of Guardian* of His people in the time of His absence. *The word translated here "Comforter," and, in 1 John 2:1, "Advocate," is perhaps better rendered by this, though still inadequate, term. "Comforter" is too vague, "Advocate "too narrow. The eighteenth verse, in the margin, shows the Reuse-"I will not leave you orphans." As the Lord had charged Himself with them while on earth, and was going now to care for them above, so the Spirit of God would now assume the charge of them below*. As Christ had come into the world, so the Holy Ghost was now to come, not, as incarnate, simply to dwell with us as the Lord had done, but to be in us as well as with us (5:17). In His coming, the Lord would, as it were, Himself return; for the Spirit of truth would make Christ known as in the Father, His people in Him and He in them. To those showing, in a spirit of obedience, their love to Him, He would (by the Spirit) manifest Himself. Yea, with those keeping His word, the Father and Son would thus come and abide (5:23).

His words on earth also would all be brought to remembrance, and all things be taught them effectually by the Holy Spirit. And dowered with the peace made for them by His work, and with that peace of communion in which He Himself had walked, their heart need no trouble and no fear. Nay, they might rejoice that He was going to the Father.

(4) Chap. 15:1-16. Fruit the test of abiding in Him. "By their fruits ye shall know them" are the Lord's own words, and to this test of fruit He now submits all professed faith in Him. Israel had been Jehovah's vine of old, had failed utterly, spite of His care of it, brought forth but wild grapes, and been set aside. Now, Christ is the true Vine, and by abiding in Him alone is all fruit found. He had already spoken of being and abiding in Him. He now uses the figure of the vine and its branches to illustrate this. The vine is nothing if it has not fruit:for the branch to be fruitful, it must abide in the vine; thus alone the sap, the life, the source of fruitfulness, abides in the branch:"Abide in Me, and [so] I in you."

That the Lord speaks of "abiding"shows that it is of grafted branches He is speaking, and this alone explains the language used. Here, if the graft remains and develops, you know that it has struck-that vital connection has been formed. No man is naturally a branch in Christ, but of the wild stock; and while it is (as the apostle says of the olive,) "contrary to nature" to graft a wild branch on a good stock, spiritually this is what must always be. Here, then, abiding is what is necessary for fruit. The branch learns to draw from the new tree, and how beautifully this illustrates that life in Christ which is essentially a life of dependence-of faith. The branch that abides not lives upon itself, is exhausted, and withers away.

The fruitful branch, then, is the object of the Father's care; He purges (or prunes) it, that it may bring forth more fruit. Concentration of the sap into fruit is what He seeks-s most important lesson for us all. "Already are ye clean "-purged -says the Lord to His disciples, "through the word which I have spoken unto you." It is the Word that sanctifies, or separates, to God, judges what is not of Christ, keeps us in to Him from whom alone our fruit is found. "He that abideth in Me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit; for apart from Me ye can do nothing. If any one,"-He will not, by saying "ye," make a doubt of already fruitful branches,-"if any one abide not in Me, he is cast forth as the branch [is], and withered ; and they gather them, and east them into the fire, and they are burned."

On the other hand, "If ye,"-He returns to the "ye" here,-"if ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will,"-for your will be (so far as this is true,) in conformity with God's will,-"and it shall be done unto you." Thus will the Father be glorified also; thus shall we be Christ's disciples, and, keeping His commandments, abide in His love, as He kept His Father's commandments, and abode in His love. Thus, too, will the joy He knew in His blessed path be in us, and be full.

Again He returns to tell us that His commandment is love to one another, "as I have loved you;" and then commends to us that love of His, than which none could be greater, proved in laying down His life for His friends; friends, as those to whom now He has made known all that He has heard of the Father. Sovereign love, which has chosen us out of the world, has ordained in us this fruitfulness, "that whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in My name, He may give you."

(5) Chap. 15:17-16:II. The doom of a world which has rejected Him. But this love on His part to us draws out to us the hatred of the world, which, as it has rejected Him, rejects His people for His sake. As in Him God has been fully revealed, the true state of men is revealed as hatred-awful, unimaginable hatred-to the Father and the Son. In this world the Spirit of truth was now going to take up a testimony to Christ, in connection with which human lips would be permitted also to testify. In opposition to this, the fury of man would burst forth, blind enough to suppose that in killing His saints it did God service.

But the judgment of the world was fixed. He was going out of it to the Father; and the coming of the Spirit-so blessed for His saints that it was expedient for Him to go away that He might come to them,-would be in itself a positive demonstration to the world, of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment. It is not a question of a work in men's consciences, but of what in itself this coming proved. For it proved Jesus gone out of the
world-and how? Sent out-rejected:"of sin, because they believe not on Me;" God therefore, who has taken Him out of the grave men gave Him, and taken Him away to heaven, against the world which has rejected Him:"of righteousness, because I go to My Father, and ye see Me no more," finally, Satan judged, but judged as prince of this world, which he has succeeded in gathering together against Him.

(6) Chap. 16:12-33. Access to the Father in His name. Again the Lord speaks of the coming of the Spirit, and that He would guide them into all truth, declaring to them things to come, and taking of the things of Christ to show them. How wondrous the sphere of this when He can add, "All things whatsoever the Father hath are Mine; therefore said I, that He shall take of Mine, and shall show them unto you." For this He must depart to the Father, and they be plunged into sorrow by His death, a sorrow soon ended in the joy of His resurrection. And then by His work accomplished they would have access to the Father in the value of His name, -direct access, though through Him, The day of dark sayings would be over. He would teach them plainly of the Father. Tribulation in the world would indeed be their portion, but in Him peace, and the fruit of His victory over it.

(7) Chap. 17:The prayer of the Intercessor. The Lord now presents. His own to the Father as those to whom, according to the authority bestowed on Him, He has given eternal life. His work just finished, He claims to be glorified as Man with the glory which was His with the Father before the world was. He is glorified too in these disciples, the Father's gift, whom He is leaving now in the world. For them He sanctifies Himself-sets Himself apart in a new position, that as a heavenly Object He might sanctify them whom now He was sending into the world (no more of it than He was) as He had been sent into it by the Father. Moreover, all those believing through their word He prays for in like manner, that they may be one in the practical development of the divine life possessed by them, that the world through them might believe in Him. The glory given Him He gives also to them, that the world may know when it sees them in it with Him, that the Father has both sent Christ and loved them as He loves Him.

He closes by stating His request for them, that they may be in heaven with Him to behold His glory. The righteous Father He looks to distinguish between the world that has not known Him, and Himself; uniting also with Himself those who on His testimony had believed in Him.

At this point it becomes necessary to consider the nature of union with Christ, and to distinguish it from what has been confounded with it, though very different,-identification with Him. Scripture, indeed, which speaks of being joined or united to Christ, does not use the latter term; but the equivalent is abundantly given in the New Testament in the expression with which our last chapter closed-"in Christ." This is taken by most Christians as the very term for union. We must look, therefore, the more carefully into the matter.

Identification may also, and will, be in certain respects the result of union. Husband and wife become thus "one flesh;" "he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit" (I Cor. 6:17). Here is, no doubt the origin of the confusion; but it is none the less such. We may speak of identification where there could not be union. We are identified with Christ in His death, not united to Him in it; identified in nature with Him, not united to His nature; identified with Him as our Representative before God, not united with Him as such.

These things are not in fact for us the result of union. "If any man be in Christ, [it is] new creation," says the apostle (2 Cor. 5:17). That is what "in Christ" means-a new creation. At new birth there is dropped into the soul the seed of divine, eternal life. It is not, as so many think, merely a moral change which is effected; but just as that which is born of the flesh is flesh, so that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Those so born are truly partakers of His nature, and thus not simply adopted but real children of God. Christ is their life, the new "Adam" of a new creation; but in which He is Creator as well as Head, as we have seen.* *It is important to see clearly the exact force of this term "creation," as Scripture uses it. In Genesis i in the divine work, we have the creation of heaven and earth, of the living soul the animal), and of man. All else is said to be made, and not created. The creation of heaven and earth speaks, of course, of their first origination; but in the case of the beast the soul, in that of the man the spirit, are the successive additions, which justify the term "creation" as applied to them. The beast has a soul (Gen. 1:30) but not a spirit. Man has not only a soul, but a spirit also (1 Thess. 5:23), by virtue of which alone he has the knowledge of a man (1 Cor. 2:11), and is the offspring of God (Acts 17:28; Heb. 12:9). Yet the beast and the man are said to be "created," and not the soul and spirit only. So the child of God, by this new spiritual life communicated at new birth, becomes " a new creation."*

But union is never said to be by or in new creation, but accomplished in a very different way. "He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit;" and the context shows that it is of marriage the apostle is speaking:"For two, saith He, shall be one flesh ; but he that is united to the Lord is one spirit." Such a figure is not and could not be applied to new creation. The Creator is not united to the creature, nor the parent to the child; but the head is united to the body, the husband to the wife, and the apostle in Eph. 5:25-33 applies both these as illustrative of the Church's relationship to Christ. A man's wife is his own flesh, his body:and "no man ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as Christ the Church; for we are members of His body."

To be of the last Adam's race and to be members of Christ are in Scripture perfectly distinct things, though in the minds of many there is sad confusion again as to this. Many belong and will yet belong to the new creation who never belong to the body of Christ at all. We are baptized by the Spirit into the body of Christ (I Cor. 12:13); and that baptism began only at Pentecost (Acts 1:5 ; Matt. 3:11); while the Church will be complete at the coming of Christ, before the thousand years begin of the earth's blessing. But to pursue this would lead us too far from our present subject. It is enough to say that those baptized at Pentecost into the body of Christ were already before this born again and a new creation. And if these things were thus distinct in them, they must be as much so in all others.

"In Christ" is not, then, union; it is identification by virtue of that new life which is received when we are born again, and which connects us with the last Adam our Representative Head. This identification is twofold:first, in the new, divine nature received, so that it can be said, "For both He that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one; for which cause He is not ashamed to call them brethren" (Heb. 2:11); while secondly, we arc identified with Him in the work He has accomplished for us as our Representative. The identification with Him in nature is what is needed to constitute true representation:-"Behold I and the children which God hath given Me; forasmuch, then, as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part in the same; that through death He might destroy him that had the power of death, and deliver those who all their lifetime, through fear of death, were subject to bondage; for verily He taketh not hold of angels, but of the seed of Abraham He taketh hold" (Heb. 2:13-16).

We have seen how this death of Christ for His people-because all are truly welcome to become His people-becomes a propitiation for the whole world. A true basis for representation is found in this true brotherhood between the Lord and His own, without narrowing the limits of an atonement for all.

But thus too the various views of ritualists and others based upon the Lord's supposed union with all men in His assumption of the common humanity arc completely set aside. Without contending further as to the Scripture thought of "union," it is not a common humanity which establishes relationship between the Lord and the whole race of men. It is by what is in men the new nature, not the old, that they become His "brethren." And the new life that they thus receive is, as His own words testify, a life which is the fruit of His death alone :"Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." This He says of His own death and its results. But for His death, His perfect, spotless manhood could have availed nothing for us. Our link is with Him the other side of death, a death by which the first man and the old creation are set aside forever. Identification and union are both for us with Him risen from the dead.

It is for want of understanding this that the force of the apostle's words in Romans 5:10 is so little seen:"If when we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved through His life." "Who was delivered for our offenses," he says in the fourth chapter, "and raised again for our justification." Thus it is His risen life that is salvation for us; not simply because "He ever liveth to make intercession for us," but because that life is the new beginning of every thing for us. The death and resurrection of Christ are thus the pillars of the gospel:His death the knife to cut the fatal link of connection with the old fallen head; His resurrection the power that lifts us into the new place of acceptance and the eternal joy. Dead with Christ, we are dead to sin (Rom. 6:11), to the law (chap. 7:4), and to the elements of the world, and arc no longer alive in it (Col. 2:20). We are not of the world, even as Christ is not (Jno. 17:16).

From this it results that "in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision,"-neither the Jewish nor the Gentile footing, -"but new creation." And here is the practical rule of Christianity; "and as many as walk according to this rule, peace be on them, and mercy" (Gal. 6:15, 16).

How important, then, in every way is this resurrection side of the gospel! Alike for full deliverance and for a true Christian walk it must be known. Except as dead with Christ, I have no title to reckon myself dead to sin:for this is not feeling or finding, not experience at all, but faith; and faith which not only sees that Christ has borne my sins, but that He has stood for me, in my stead, so that His death has removed me and all the evil of my evil nature forever out of the sight of God, to give me my true self now in Christ in His presence. I am delivered from legal self-occupation, the enemy of all true holiness, and enabled for occupation with Christ, the true secret of holiness and of power. "We all with open face beholding the glory of the Lord are changed into His image, from glory to glory, even as by the Lord the Spirit." The imprint of this glory it is by which we become the letter of commendation of Christ read and known of all men; a letter written, not with ink, but by the Spirit of the living God; not on tables of stone, but on fleshy tables of the heart (2 Cor. 3:18, 3).

Upon all this I must not here dwell; and it has been dwelt upon at length by many. But it shows how in every detail! of it the doctrine of atonement connects with all Christian experience and practice together. May its rich and blessed fruits be found in us as in him who said, "The life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me."

CHAPTER XXIII. The Penalty in its Inner Meaning.

But we have now to look more particularly at the penalty which the Lord endured for us-Penalty we have seen it was, and true substitution; Christ dying, not upon occasion merely of our sins, but bearing them in His own body on the tree-our iniquities laid upon Him, so that He calls them "Mine." No words could express more plainly a real substitution.

We have seen too that in the penalty upon man there were two parts, separable at least, if not in fact separated:the wrath of God upon sin, and death-not the second, but what came in at the beginning through sin; and that both parts He endured.

Death has its power in this, that it is the removal of the sin-ruined creature out of the place for which he was created. "Sin has reigned in death," as the expression is in Romans 5:21. It is man's destruction by the judgment of God, as being already self-destroyed.

But the death he dies is not the death of Sadducean materialism, but one in which the sinner abides under the judgment to which it has consigned him. It is a condition of darkness-outer darkness-for God has finally and forever withdrawn Himself, It is torment in the flame of necessary anger against sin. These are the elements of a judgment which will not be altered in character, when in the resurrection of judgment the dead stand before the great white throne to receive the discriminate awards of the day of manifestation.

Unspeakably solemn is it to consider that the holy and beloved Son of God, Himself knowing no sin, yet as "made sin for us," entered into that awful darkness, and was tried by the fire of God's wrath against it. So indeed it was. He was the Substitute under our penalty, and endured the penalty. Ours it was of course, not His; but He endured it, and endured it as the necessity of holiness, to set His people free.

But there is a point here it is important to guard, and which, guarded, will go far to preserve us from some excesses which people have gone into with regard to substitution. We must not confound the Lord's standing in our place to take for us our dreadful due, with any calculation, essentially lowering as it is to the very righteousness which it is meant to uphold, of so much suffering for so much sin. In the day of final award it is indeed said that "the dead" are "judged out of the things which are written in the books, according to their works" (Rev. 20:13), and this it is, no doubt, that has been carried back as a principle to the day of atonement. It has been argued that if our iniquities were laid upon Him,-if He bare our sins in His body, then these must all have been counted up and weighed, and He must have suffered so much for each one. In this case it is plain we have just so many sins absolutely provided for, and no others. It is a limited atonement of the most rigid kind, and of which it would be impossible to use the language of the apostle, "A propitiation, not for our sins only, but also for the sins of the whole world" (i Jno. 2:2). For if the sins of the whole world had been after this manner provided for, no one could be lost, or judged again for what in Him had received its judgment. And this is very "far from the truth of Scripture.
A propitiation for the sins of the world means nothing less than such a provision made for them that if the whole world turned to God through Christ, it would find in Him a complete Saviour. But if sins needed thus to be individually taken into account and settled, this would not be true; if they had been thus settled, they could not in any case come up in the day of judgment; and this is what some hold-that men will be judged for nothing but for the refusal of grace in Christ:but this is entirely hopeless to prove from Scripture, which declares they shall be "judged according to their works," and that "every one shall receive the things done in his body according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad" (2 Cor. 5:10). And, as the Preacher says, "God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil."

"A propitiation for the sins of the whole world" does not, then, mean such an individual settlement of sins, nor is this needed in order for salvation. Can it, then, be needed for "our sins" any more than for the sins of the whole world? or can we make propitiation in the one case have a meaning which it has not in the other? This is surely impossible to suppose in the Word of God. Its faithfulness refuses absolutely all chameleon colors.

The sufficiency of atonement for the whole world we must absolutely receive, or give up Scripture. It will not suffer us to say that this is an elect world, for the "whole world" is not elect; and here, the "ours" distinguishes believers from this world, not includes them in it. Propitiation, then, (or atonement-it is the same word,) is for all; and it is the same thing for all:not as actually availing, of course, but as fully available. It has no limit to its value within the limits of the human race.

Of how that which is available for all avails for any, and how far it avails, I propose to consider in another chapter. Here, I go no farther than this, that the Lord standing in the place of men took the very penalty under which they were,-died, and was made a curse:the value of which must be measured by the infinite value of Him who did this, and the perfection of an obedience so beyond all price.

We are not, therefore, called upon to measure what is measureless, or to conceive of so many sins, or those of so many sinners, weighed out to be atoned for by a particular amount of suffering, Such a commercial idea (as it has been rightly called) of the Lord's wondrous work is an essential degradation of it,- not a high, but a low estimate of the requirements of absolute holiness which were to be met thereby. It is not that God must have so much suffering for so much sin, but that His holiness necessitates displeasure proportioned to the evil which awakes it. So even in the final judgment. The deeds done in the body become the manifestation* of the person upon whom the judgment of God rests correspondingly, but forever rests; not because, as people have wrongly conceived, the sin itself is necessarily worthy of eternal punishment, but because the sinner' remains eternally with the character which his life manifests.*"We must all be manifested before the judgment-seat of Christ" is the true rendering of 2 Corinthians 5:10.*

The error is therefore plain of making the atonement consist in the endurance of so much agony, as if God could measure out that to the holy Sufferer; whereas, beyond all our conception as was the agony endured, the reality and efficacy of atonement lay in the solemn seal thus put upon the divine estimate of sin, when God's own beloved Son stooped Himself to endure its dreadful penalty.

That He "bare our sins in His own body on the tree," and that God "laid upon Him the iniquity of us all,"-these and such like passages which declare a real imputation of our sins to Christ remain in all their solemn yet precious meaning for us. It was for these sins of ours He suffered, and this suffering of His is that which alone removes them from us, and removes them entirely:how perfectly, we shall see more as we proceed. He was the true Sin-bearer,-our Substitute under penalty, as we have seen. He could not have been this had not our sins been laid on Him; but I turn from this, which will come up before us again, to look at another question in connection with the penalty itself.

In what we have been considering lately, it will be noted that of necessity it would seem it is rather wrath-bearing than death we have been dwelling on; and it may be asked, If all this be true, what part exactly in the penalty has death, then? If wrath could be exhausted by the Lord before dying,-if He could emerge from the darkness into the light, and in peace say once more "Father" before he died,-what need, then, even of dying? Was death for Him the wages of sin which He had taken?

And it is undeniable that there has been a tendency two ways, according as one class of texts or the other has been dwelt upon, to make all atonement consist in wrath-bearing, or-far more commonly- all consist in dying. Yet both are plainly unscriptural, as we have sufficiently seen. What we want is to realize the relation of these two parts to each other-to find the due place of each in the Lord's blessed work. We have been looking at the meaning of wrath-bearing of late; and it does raise the necessary question, Why, then, His death? Granting, as we must, the necessity of it according to Scripture, yet why this necessity?

The answer is plain only in the realization of a truth which has been overlooked, conspicuous as it is, by the mass of those who have occupied themselves with the interpretation of Scripture:the setting aside of the failed first man and the old creation, to bring in blessing under another head and on another and higher plane altogether.

As already said, the solemnity of death lies in this, that it is the removal of man as failed out of the scene of his failure-the solemn sentence upon him as unfitted for the place for which he was created. The lower creatures, indeed, have never sinned,-are incapable of it,-yet they die; and men plead, therefore, that death is natural. But they cannot persuade themselves, whose whole nature cries out against it. The scriptural account is, "The wages of sin is death;" and thus, "man, being in honor, abideth not; he is like the beasts that perish" (Ps. 49:12).

Yes, the beasts do perish. Intended for nothing but a temporary purpose, they enjoy life while it lasts, without a sorrow for the past or a fear for the future. But man is not a beast:he is the offspring of God, meant to know and enjoy communion with Him forever; and his being leveled to the beasts is the sign of a moral, a spiritual ruin, in which he has forgotten God, and leveled himself to them. He, like them, passes away and is not found; his place knows him no more forever. But not like them, for he has "thoughts" that perish with him, unfulfilled plans and purposes, affections which cling to what they cannot hold, a dread upon his soul which presages a hereafter such as the beast dreads not and desires not, because it has not:"The dust returns to the earth as it was, but the spirit returns to God that gave it."

Such is death for man; and being such, it is the wages of sin. Man in it, as the creature which God made for Adam's paradise, perishes forever,-is set entirely aside. Nor do I forget resurrection when I say so. Resurrection docs not restore him to this, Job's words are absolutely true here, without bringing in the God-dishonoring thought of annihilation in any wise:"As the cloud is consumed, and vanisheth away, so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more:he shall return no more to his house; neither shall his place know him any more." God's grace may give him another and a better thing, but it does not reverse the first judgment.

And thus it is that when the Lord takes death for man He takes it as affirming God's sentence upon man, by which the old creation is set aside forever. Let this be well observed, that whereas the wrath of God upon sin, in being undergone by Christ, is removed (the effect of atonement is removal), it is not so with a sentence by which the first man is set aside:if the Lord take this, it must be, not to bring him back, but to affirm his setting aside. The effect of wrath-bearing is to put away wrath; but the effect of the Lord's dying is that with His death the old creation is confirmed as passing away-is set aside fully, not restored.

This is the direct force of 2 Corinthians 5:14-17, not well given in our common version:"For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if One died for all, then all died [or, have died]; and for all He died, that they which live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto Him who died for them and rose again. Wherefore, henceforth know we no man after the flesh; yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we Him no more. Therefore, if any man be in Christ, [it is] new creation:old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new."

This is an important passage, and needs attentive consideration. It is a positive statement of the meaning of Christ's death as dying for all, -these "all" being expressly shown not to be limited to "those who live," who are distinguished from them as a class in the latter part of the fourteenth verse.

It is directly affirmed, then, of all, that if Christ died for them, all died. Our common version has it, "then were all dead,"-making it a spiritual state; but the Greek will not admit of this, and the sense also is quite different. The point is as to what Christ's death" proves men to have been wider as sentence, not in as state; for lie came under our sentence as sinners, but not into our state of sin. He died, then, for all; and so all have died. Before God, the world is judged and passed; as the Lord Himself said of the cross, "Now is the judgment of this world" (Jno. 12:31). It is not a judgment executed, of course:none could suppose that; but it is a judgment pronounced; and a judgment pronounced is with God as it were executed, so sure and irreversible is it. If Christ, then, died for all, all died. Sentence is not taken away by this, but affirmed.

And this meaning is clearly proved by what follows in Corinthians-"wherefore, henceforth know we no man after the flesh" This is the simple and necessary result (for faith, not for sight):if all have died, they are in the flesh no longer; we walk amid a world where men are either alive in Christ or but as it were dead men. But not only so:"yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we Him no more." Even Christ has not taken up again the life which He laid down. He has not returned (that is,) to His former state upon earth. That is over; and the Christ we know is One who is in resurrection in the glory of God. An immeasurably higher condition, you say. Surely it is; but the former one is passed away, and passed away in that which affirmed God's sentence upon it. Where, then, are we who live? In Christ; and "if any man be in Christ, it is new creation:old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new."

Thus the sense of the passage is plain and perspicuous. And the meaning of the Lord's taking of death is very clearly set forth. Atonement does not restore the old Adam condition, but affirms its judgment and setting aside. For those saved by it, the darkness of distance from God who is light is passed with the darkness upon the cross. It is thus the gospel of Luke, which gives especially the effects of the work of Christ for the conscience, connects them:"And it was about the sixth hour; and there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour; and the sun was darkened, and the vail of the temple was rent in the midst" The vail meant darkness, as that in which God dwelled for man; its rending means that "God is in the light" (i Jno. 1:7).

But with His death the apostle Matthew takes especial care to connect what in fact did not occur till after His resurrection:"And the earth did quake, and the rocks rent, and the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after His resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many." The answer to His death is resurrection; not the recommencement of the old Adam life, which is finally and forever set aside.

Thus those alive in Christ are dead with Him also, and as it is specifically stated, "dead to sin," "dead to law," "dead to the elements of the world" -to all that makes it up,-and "not in the flesh." But to that we must return hereafter:our present subject closes here.

What, then, can be the new test when God takes up the Gentiles? He has not left us without plain intimation as to this, and it must be our endeavor now to trace it out.

Two reasons the Word of God gives for the delay of Christ's coming. For why should God delay in what was nearest to His heart? The need of the discovery of man's need fully is the reason assigned. " When we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly." So there was a "due time;" and to what this has reference is plain from the apostle's statement. It refers to the trial of man morally in Israel under God's righteous law. This had been proved to have no help for man. Where it had found him, there it had left him-ungodly, and without strength. He was shut up to Christ, then:there was no hope but in Christ.

In I Corinthians, the apostle gives us another side of this delay. The Jew had the law,- true; but what about the Gentile? Had God altogether left him out? The book of Daniel, if nothing else, would prove the contrary. Even God's silence, moreover, must have its significance. There must be a meaning even in "the times of ignorance" which "God winked at." And so the apostle declares. "For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of the preaching" -not the manner, but the matter-"to save them that believe. For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom." But "hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?" Yes, wisdom as well as righteousness, for Gentile and for Jew alike, are found in Christ:"who is made unto us wisdom from God, righteousness as well as sanctification and redemption:" "that no flesh should glory in His presence," but that "he that glorieth should glory in the Lord."

Here, then, is the secret of the matter. The question of man's wisdom was for him an excessively grave one. Where had he got it? Alas! a "tree to be desired to make one wise" was the bait which Satan held up before the woman, and by which our first parents were seduced and fell. "Ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil," says the tempter. "The man is become as one of Us," says the Lord God, "to know good and evil." What, then, is the value of the wisdom he has attained? Taught of necessity, into which he has now got, he has "sought out many inventions." The apron of fig-leaves was only the first of a long line which is not ended with the steam-engine and the telegraph; and all, if it be considered, are but inventions to cover his nakedness, or like John Bunyan's wholesome instructions," of which cart-load after cartload the slough of Despond swallowed up, and was nowise bettered after all.

What blanks man's wisdom? We shall find it in the Old-Testament "preacher," clothed in sackcloth though a king. For God has given us, as I have elsewhere said, side by side, in two Old-Testament books, the two questions we are looking at. A divinely pronounced best man, Job, is the preacher of repentance:a divinely pronounced wisest man, Solomon, is the preacher of vanity. Yes, the vanity of wisdom, if it be only human, more than all. For the beast has no regrets and no sad anticipations; finds his place in a world of change, enjoying the present, and never thinking of the future. But man, if he does not know, anticipates and dreads; cannot bear his every-day burden and lie down in quiet Death levels all; and what beyond death? Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward? Yet the heart says, "God judgeth the righteous and the wicked." Here we stop, the one thing certain our ignorance, with eternity in the heart and no sure outlook beyond time,-except God give it. Human wisdom fails:we must await, says one of the wisest of the Greeks, God's revelation.

But "vain man will be wise, though he be born a wild ass's colt."Even yet he prefers a guess to the truth,-the first being his own, the latter God's.

It is strange and significant, in that blessed Word where all is significant, that in these two books of Job and Ecclesiastes, the Jew takes up the Gentile question, the Gentile Job takes up the Jew's. Thus the same truths are applied to all the world.

Notice, too, that Solomon is not only the wisest of men, but the richest and most powerful. Man's wisdom needs plenty of material to work with. God gives him all he can desire. When He takes up the Gentile, He gives him just the same things. The Gentile is to be the possessor of the world, and the controller of it.

But he only forfeits his power and loses it, runs through the portion of goods that falleth to him, and leaves his crown to his successor. The Babylonian leaves and the Persian enters; the Persian thrusts at the Greek, and falls by a back-thrust; the Greek power breaks into fragments, and is devoured piecemeal by the Roman. When Christ comes, after the predicted sixty-two weeks of silent waiting (Dan. 9:26), the Roman is already issuing his mandate that all the world shall be registered, although he does not know that God is making him move all the machinery of his empire to bring a Jewish woman to Bethlehem, that her child may be born there, and then for years will stop the census, which is not taken up again till Cyrenius is governor of Syria. So must the world wait after all upon Christ.

And He comes, He lives among men, He dies, He ascends to heaven, and the Holy Ghost is sent down at Pentecost. The Church is formed, and the world is dropped. Since that time, the world has had no history. Even prophecy in the meantime is silent. The empires are for God already gone, although their history yet for a space will be taken up again after the Church is gone from earth, and when the harvest of the world is come.

THE NEW BEGINNING.

THE voice of Old-Testament prophecy does not cease without predicting the time of the coming of the Deliverer, in whom now plainly is man's only hope. The seventy weeks of Daniel, to which we shall have to return hereafter to consider more fully, foretell this as to take place sixty-nine weeks (of years -483 years) after Nehemiah's commission to restore and to build Jerusalem. This plainly reaches to the time of Christ's public ministry, after which the prophecy declares He would be "cut off." Before this, the Gentile empires have already reached their fourth or final form ; the Jewish Maccabean revival has shown itself to be but the flash of an expiring flame; politically, the people lie helplessly under the foot of the oppressor, while the law is overweighted by human observances, in the vain attempt to patch with new cloth their rags of legal righteousness.

It is at this time, when utter failure and hopeless ruin are everywhere manifested, that we reach a new beginning,-the beginning of what is not susceptible of failure or decay at all. A new, a second Man,-since Adam, there had been no second,-appears upon the scene, to be the "last Adam" of a new creation, "the Beginning of" what God can identify as His thought from the first-"the creation of God."

Man, true and perfect Man, is here:holy and righteous, not merely innocent; perfect in obedience in the scene of the first man's failure-not in a garden, but in a wilderness, which sin has made the world. To man at first, the trial had been made as light as possible:to the Second Man, every thing that could make the trial full and searching to the utmost was ordained. With miraculous power freely used in behalf of others, He never uses it to minister to His own need, or to take Himself out of the condition of absolute dependence upon God, which is the necessity of the creature. "Tempted in all things like as we are, sin apart" (Heb. 4:15, Gr.'). He not merely walks by faith, as the people of God in all ages have done, but is "the Leader and Perfecter of faith "(chap. 12:2, Gr.). One who fills the whole possibility of such a life in His own person. Moreover, as He lives not in a scene like the first paradise, where all ministers to Him, so He does not walk as One who is served, but who serves. The law of His life is that of sacrifice. He closes it with laying down of Himself what none could take from Him. His one principle throughout is, "Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God."

Such, then, as He is, He is no product of His times-no outgrowth of preceding generations. Light does not develop out of darkness, nor life out of death. And in Him the Eternal Life is manifest; not that He has it merely, struggling, as in His people, with many discordances; He is it,- the Eternal Life itself.

But this brings us where to know is to worship. It is God who is come down to us. He who visited man's abode in goodness at the beginning, to prepare it for him, has now visited it after another fashion; and "we beheld His glory," says the apostle, "the glory as of the Only-Begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth."

Here, indeed, is a new beginning, and who shall tell the blessedness of it? God, always Light, is now in the light. Exactly when it is fully proved that man can never find his way into the presence of God, His glory is unvailed, and in grace, not in judgment. Judaism is plainly over. God's grace can never be manifested side by side with law. The hopelessness of all attempt to develop any thing out of man for God has been made apparent. And the light now come into the world, although not come to condemn the world, but for its salvation, yet only confirms the solemn fact. God's own Son, come in grace, awakes man's heart only to enmity and rejection of Him. It is not mere ignorance, "They have both seen and hated both Me and My Father."

He comes with His hands filled with the blessing which He has to communicate. With Him "the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Let them own but to what palpably their sins had brought them, and He was there on God's part with remission of their sins. The power ready to banish from among them the effects of sin already showed itself. Sickness removed, Satan's power destroyed, death itself made to give way at His word, what more evident than that in Him God was reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them? Paradise was once more opening the way to the tree of life, where no flaming sword forbad their access. Would not the blessing under their eyes prevent their refusal of Him who thus by every tie of interest would bind them to Himself? So one might surely reason. Alas! such is man's enmity to God that not even blessing will win him to receive Him in whom alone it can be found. "For my love, they are my adversaries:. . . . they have rewarded me evil for good, and hatred for my love." Of this the cross is the fullest proof. They can taunt Him there with that good itself-"He saved others, Himself He cannot save."

Jew and Gentile have their part in this. It is the commencement of that grand conspiracy which the second psalm predicts, and it ends not until the Lord asks and obtains the world for His inheritance, the uttermost parts of the earth for His pos-session. And how then must He make good His claim? "Thou shalt break them with a rod. of iron; Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel." This is of course when He comes again; and the opposition, although at times more covert, only ceases then. "Sit Thou at My right hand, until I make Thy foes Thy footstool." Still we know He sits there; and when He actually comes forth (as Rev. 19:depicts it), it will be when the enmity of the world has blazed out again most fiercely, and there is no concealment of it any longer.

The cross, then, is the expression, on the one side, of the world's hatred:"The mind of the flesh is enmity against God." Thus it is the judgment of the world-a judgment pronounced, but waiting execution. On the other hand, it is the expression of God's over-abounding grace-a grace reigning through righteousness unto eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Whatever man's enmity, then, this grace must find utterance-must be published and have its proclamation in the world. The sweet savor of Christ's work must come abroad. The fruits of it must be gathered and garnered. This pause of blessing is Christianity.

Christ, then, as come to Israel, their Messiah, is (in the language of Daniel's prophecy) "cut off, and has nothing." Israel is not gathered. Three years He comes looking for fruit upon that fig-tree, whose leaves give a deceptive promise of fruit that is not found. But man's condition is apparent, and "without shedding of blood is no remission." "The Son of Man must be lifted up." His followers in Israel must see their Jewish hopes expire in His death, and be "begotten again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead," now "to an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven."

Judaism must give place to the "precious faith" of Christianity. The risen Lord ascends to heaven, receives from the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost (Acts 2:33), Pentecost beholds His coming, and the kingdom of God begins upon earth.

Yet Israel is not at once set aside; on the contrary, "to the Jew first" the message of grace is proclaimed. Nor only individually, but nationally also. The three years of Christ's ministry have found no fruit upon the barren fig-tree; still, the words are uttered, "Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it; and if it bear fruit, well; and if not, then after that, thou shalt cut it down." So, at the cross, the Lord intercedes,
"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do;" and Peter proclaims to them the acceptance of that prayer:"And now, brethren, I wot that through ignorance ye did it, as did also your rulers. . . . . Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may he blotted out, in order that the times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord; and He shall send Jesus Christ, who before was preached unto you; whom the heavens must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began." (Acts 3:17-21.)

National repentance would even then avail to bring Christ back from heaven, and to bring in the glories of His reign on earth, as the Old-Testament prophets had pictured it. Alas! there was no repentance. Numbers indeed believed, but the nation remained what it remains to this day-rejecters of the Prince of Life. They who had said that if they had lived in their fathers' days, they would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets, proved themselves, as the Lord had predicted, the children of those who killed the prophets, by persecuting, even to death, the new prophets God had raised up. Stephen, arraigned before their tribunal, sums up their guilt, proving from their history how they had always resisted the Holy Ghost, rejecting the divinely raised up deliverers sent to them; and they consummate their sin by stoning him, and sending him, as it were, a messenger after Christ, to say, "We will not have this man to reign over us."

Thus the time of repentance ends. Persecution scatters saints from Jerusalem, and they go everywhere preaching the Word. Philip goes down to Samaria, and evangelizes it. Then the Ethiopian eunuch carries away his new-found blessing. Then Saul, the incarnation of Jewish enmity, is converted to be the apostle of the Gentiles, the first of whom is, however, received by the apostle of the circumcision-Peter himself. Antioch soon after becomes the new center of Gentile evangelization, and from thence Paul and Barnabas go forth to their mission among the heathen round.

Jerusalem yet remains, however, and converts even multiply there greatly; but the nation is unceasingly hostile. Nor only so:the zeal for the law, which disfigures Jewish Christianity, and which warps even Peter himself and Barnabas (Gal. 2:), after it has been decided that it must not be imposed as a yoke on Gentile converts (Acts 15:), persuades even the great apostle of the Gentiles to conduct which brings the fury of a Jewish mob upon him, and shuts him up in a Roman prison. From Italy he writes to warn the Christians to leave the camp of Judaism altogether. Finally, according to the Lord's prophecy, Jerusalem is destroyed, and the temple-worship of necessity wholly ceases.

Alas! that still remains which becomes a subtle infection for the new and spreading faith. This we shall see, if the Lord will, as we proceed; but first, we must look at this new faith itself, and ask ourselves, (alas! in the nineteenth century of its existence, not a needless question,) What is Christianity?

Q. 32.-"In Help and Food, p. 125, you say,-'But there were some that received Him ; what, then, of these? In them divine power had acted ; to them divine life had been given :they were born of God, and now, too, 'given title to the children's place.' When were they born of God ? In receiving Christ? or does this apply to those who, having been born again before, received Christ afterward? and can this be now?"

Ans.-Of course it is true that when the Lord came on earth there were those who, like Simeon, having been born again before, received Him joyfully as so made known to them; yet even here it was, as is most evident, only the recognition of One in whom he had believed before. The real reception had, in the case even of these, then, been before.

But in the words of the gospel referred to, the point is that Christ is received only where there is a divine work in the soul to effect it. There is no statement that those who received Him had previously been born of God, but "as many as received Him . . . were born of God." The Lord tells Nicodemus, in the third chapter, that men are "born of water and of the Spirit." And we are taught elsewhere that "the washing of water" is "by the Word" (Eph. 5:26). The apostle Peter says plainly that we are "born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the Word of God "(I Pet. 1:23). Is this without faith in it or in Him of whom it testifies? Assuredly, no; for "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you ; whoso eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood hath eternal life" Jno. 6:53, 54). "He that believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God" (I Jno. 5:I).

It is impossible, then, to be born again without faith in Christ; and those who were so before His coming still received Him as the One to come. When come, faith in these, as in Simeon, recognized Him in whom they had believed before.

September 1886

"So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading. And Nehemiah, which is the Tirshatha, and Ezra the priest the scribe, and the Levites that taught the people, said unto all the people, 'This day is holy unto the Lord your God; mourn not, nor weep! for all the people wept when they heard the words of the law. Then he said unto them, 'Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared; for this day is holy unto our Lord:neither he ye sorry; for the joy of the Lord is your strength' So the Levites stilled all the people, saying, 'Hold your peace, for the day is holy; neither be ye grieved' And all the people went their way to eat, and to drink, and to send portions, and to make great mirth, because they had understood the words that were declared unto them." (Neh, 8:8-12.)

How sweetly, yet rebukingly, docs this lesson come to us from the pages of the Old Testament It is not the "gospel," and yet how much gospel is there in it too, which it would be well if we of a brighter and happier day had fully learnt. The "gospel" is "good news;" or, good news "of God" (Rom. ii); that which comes to us from the heart of the good and blessed God, as the witness of what He delights in. It is the preaching of gladness; and what is the reception of it unto the soul but the reception of gladness? News there is from Him, of such a nature and character that the mere believing listening to it is the one and effectual remedy for all the care and sorrow which oppress us naturally, and arc our heritage indeed as children of men. Reader, have you apprehended that? And good news, let me add, which God publishes for His own joy and glory, so that we may know and understand Him in the message He has sent.

Well He knows, moreover, the people among whom He publishes this good news. It is just be-cause they are what they are His gospel becomes so sweet a declaration of what He is. And He bids it to be preached to every one of them in all the world, and makes it simple obedience, the first point of duty to Himself, to "obey the gospel" with the "obedience of faith." In other words, to believe and to rejoice!

This is the blessedness of this scene in Israel in the time of Nehemiah. Good cause had they, if any ever had, to weep "when they heard the words of the law." They might claim, if any, amid the ruins of their broken city, and listening to the thunders of that terrible law, which, through their breach of it, had brought in such desolation, that they did well to weep. Would it have been any thing but hardness of heart on their part to have refused their tears to the misery of their condition, and the sin against their God which had introduced the misery?

Yet one voice had title to be heard surely even there. If He against whom they had sinned spoke, surely they were to listen. If He, even now, could preach gladness to them, surely they were to be glad! and glad the more in Him who could make their sin and misery the suited time to display His goodness and His grace. It was not "joy" simply they were called to; it was "the joy of the Lord" If it were hardness in the first instance, then, not to feel their sin and misery, would it not be greater hardness not to feel His grace now and to rejoice in Him?

And this is what God is calling men to universally, beloved reader, by that gospel which He has sent out every where, to be preached to "every creature under heaven." He is bearing witness to Himself. Has He not title to be heard and to be believed? If He (jail to "obedience of faith" in this good news, is it humble or good to go on mourning as if He had not spoken? Is it good or wise not to be confident in the love He has in His heart toward us?

And what a precious thought is this of a holy day kept to the Lord, excluding sorrow, of necessity, as profanation of its holiness! Is it not the very echo of that thought of the apostle, "Now the very God of peace sanctify you wholly"? or, of that word which assures us that among the foremost "fruits of the Spirit" are "joy" and "peace"?

Dear fellow-believer in the Lord Jesus, will you let me say to you, in the presence of these blessed scriptures, that unhappiness is unholiness? that "the joy of the Lord" is alone your "strength," whether for walk or service?

You may ask me, Do you know who I am? Do you know my failures, my sins, my backslidings, the dishonor I have done to the name of Jesus? I reply, I am sure you will do nothing but still dishonor it, if you refuse God's way of help against such dishonor. "God is for us," beloved. Is that because we are for Him, or because of what Jesus is in His presence for us? Could we be nearer to Him by any effort of right-living of our own than we are at this moment as "accepted in the Beloved"? This acceptance, this favor, this delight of God in His own Son, rests upon us spite of all we are. To know it, believe it, enter into it, live in it, is restoration, blessing, power, for the soul.

You say, My feet are defiled; how can I walk with God? I ask, again, Know you not who it is, who, having come from God, and going back to God, stooped, in the full consciousness of that, to wash the feet of His own, that they might have "part with Him"? Was that cleansing their work, then, or His? Was He at a distance from them when He did it, or near at hand? Did the unclean-ness of their feet do aught but make Him serve them in more lowly fashion? If you would be clean now, you must sit still now and let Him serve you. "Washing of water" is "by the Word." You must sit and listen and believe. And as He puts before you all the greatness and fullness of His love, and all that love has done for security of blessing to you, you will hear Him say, "Now ye are clean through the word I have spoken to you."

That which no law, no ordinance, no striving, will effect for you, a few moments in His presence will accomplish. You will learn that "there is mercy with Him, that He may be feared;" and that "in returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength." Yea, "the very God of peace" shall "sanctify you wholly."

And, reader, you who have never yet tasted of this love of His, let me assure you "to you" also "is the word of this salvation sent." There is "gospel" for you:the superscription of my message is, "To every creature." To you, surrounded with as sad evidences of your guilt as ever had Israel, the word of God's grace is still, "Believe the gospel"- "Obey the gospel." It is the "God of peace" sanctifies. It is "the grace of God which bringeth salvation unto all men," which teaches us and alone "teaches us, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, to live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world."

Therefore, to you, as you are, is "the gospel of salvation" preached. You can be nothing, do nothing, save as it teaches you, even the "grace that bringeth salvation." Will you listen to it? Will you believe it? For as surely as Christ "died for sinners" that death of His is God's great treasury of blessing for all such. Every check upon this must be signed with that name, that one name of "SINNER," which proves your title to the wealth laid up there.

To you, then, a holy day to the Lord is proclaimed"-"an accepted time, a day of salvation." God, against whom your sins have been, who alone has title to come in with a message of joy into the midst of the ruin and misery of the fall, has come in with the "good news" of "peace" made by the blood of the cross of Jesus, and preached to every creature for the obedience of faith. To believe and obey that gospel is to listen to and rejoice in what He is declaring to us.

Reader, will you be as those of whom it is written here, "And all the people went their way, to eat, and to drink, and to send portions, and to make great mirth, because they had UNDERSTOOD the words that were declared unto them"?
June 1886

I.

"And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission. It was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified with these, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true:but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us:nor yet that He should offer Himself often, as the high-priest entereth into the holy place every year with blood of others; for then must He often have suffered since the foundation of the world:but now once in the end of the world hath He appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment; so Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many:and unto them that look for Him shall He appear the second time without sin unto salvation." (Heb. 9:22-28.)

There are three expressions used in these verses to which I would call your attention. "He hath appeared" (5:26);"Now to appear" (5:24);"He shall appear" (5:28)..

It is a question of the past, present, and future. In each, it is Christ-Christ from beginning to end. When Israel were starting on their journey out of Egypt, there was a question raised between God and them,-there was a controversy between God and them to be entered into ere they took a step of their journey, and that controversy was about their sins. This had to be settled ere God could take His place among them, to dwell there. The settlement was made by the blood of the slain lamb:the angel of death could not pass into the house sprinkled by the blood; and so the blood of Jesus Christ shelters every believer, however weak, from the wrath to come. Again; when, near the end of their journey, they had sinned and been bitten of the serpents, the brazen serpent was lifted up on a pole, that they who looked might live. This is Christ again. Thus we learn that the moment it is a question of God and man, it is Christ who, from beginning to end, can meet both the claims of the glory of the One and the desperate needs of the other.

In our scripture is taken up, not merely the salvation of a sinner, but that of a Christian. What is a sinner? I walk into a nursery, and the gardener shows me a bed of beautiful little trees. "What kind of apples are these?" I ask. "They are only natural trees," the answer is; "their fruit would be worthless. Before they can bear good fruit, each tree must be taken by itself, cut off close to the root, and a little twig from a good tree inserted." Such is the sinner. He is by birth a natural tree, unable to bear fruit for God; he must be born anew. He needs to be cut down and grafted with a new life in order to bring forth fruit unto God. You who are what Scripture calls "sinners" – "unconverted," don't dream about turning over a new leaf and doing better. I like to hear of a person doing it, however, for it testifies they are troubled about the back leaf. What do you, then, need? Christ; but Christ in what aspect? for here are three aspects:-

(1) "He hath appeared to put away sin."
(2) He is appearing to make intercession.

(3) "He shall appear without sin unto salvation."

You need Him in the first aspect-"He hath appeared to put away sin."

From early childhood, my life was clouded by the prospect of judgment to come,-death at the end of all down here, and then after that the judgment,-and I could not rest until I found this blessed answer to it.

When the Son of God came, what did He come for? If a great person comes into your village, you are led to inquire, What is his business? What was the business of the Son of God in this world? What is His object down here?-what has He come here for? "To put away sin" From before whom? Not from before you. As to myself, I care not for your judgment of me:I am as good as you. I care not as to your judgment of my sins; but in the presence of God, there they are a trouble. The Lord Jesus Christ's mission was not to condemn, but to save, and before He could save, He must put away sin from before God. He offers Himself to God for us as a sweet-smelling savor. People say, "I am not sure that I have received Christ aright." I answer, Has God offended you? or is it you that have offended God? Had Christ to offer Himself to you to be accepted of you, or to God to be accepted of God for you ? Christ offered Himself to God, and God has accepted Him, and He is satisfied, glorified in Jesus Christ about our sins. That is the gospel. Will you receive it tonight? or will you set it lightly by and continue to live in your sins? Live in them, grow gray in them, die in them, be raised in them at the last day, stand before God in them, and be judged for them? Well, you will not find fault with God's judgment then, I am sure. The rich man described in Luke 16:as lifting up His eyes in hell finds no fault with God for being cast in there. He is in hell suffering for these sins. He refused to bow down to Jesus and confess them so as to be saved, and now he is getting his portion there, and he owns it is his right portion. The Lord Jesus did not expatiate on the terrors of hell, but solemnly stated the fact of it. A thing that God has spoken has no need of forcing. They who resist it resist at their own peril.

Look back to Adam. God says to him, I make you lord of all this creation:all is under you. I only am above you, and as a reminder of it, I have put one tree in the garden which I forbid you. Eat not of it, or thou shall surely die. Only God for his Master! How grand, how noble a place! He disobeyed that Master and got another by it. And now see the effect of it:Sickness, death, murder, misery, anguish, cries of distress on every hand, Satan the master of man instead of God,-all this by one act of disobedience. How awfully solemn is every word of God! Let the lessons of the past have their due weight over our souls, beloved friends, for not one jot or tittle of what has come from His mouth can be violated with impunity. He will not repeat it:He will execute it, and He will now in grace leave its simple statements to impress the heart and command our faith.

This Word of God, which hath never been broken nor ever can be, what is it to us now? Jesus "hath appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself." Has it entered your soul? I believe it, and therefore I know my sins are gone from the presence of God. What a thing is this grace of God! It brings salvation now to us where we are. In a place where I was laboring lately, I was asked how long it took one to repent-how long to go through repentance so as to be saved. I replied, "Would you take my word for it?" "Yes," was the answer. "I believe you know." "Then I will not give you my opinion, but the testimony of One who cannot lie. Let us turn to Scripture." We turned to the dying thief. Matt, 27:44 says, "The thieves also which were crucified with Him cast the same in His teeth." Luke 23:says only one reviled Him; but the other, confessing his guilt, turned to Jesus, pleading to be remembered by Him when He came in His kingdom. Of course, both statements are true; and so, in the short space of time between the crucifying of the three and the dying of Jesus, a poor criminal has repented, and received from the Lord's own lips, "To-day shalt thou be with Me in paradise."

Take another case-the jailor at Philippi. He has done his cruel work-made the apostles, whom he has beaten, secure in the stocks, and gone to his rest. They, though dishonored by stripes, had been honoring the Lord, and so, filled with His Spirit, they praise God at midnight. God answers by an earthquake, which makes His enemies tremble. The jailor awakes; he is terrified, and about to commit suicide. Then he hears the voice of love-"Do thyself no harm." It melts him, and he cries out, "What must I do to be saved?" He owns he is lost. That is repentance. Then he hears the gospel-"Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved and thy house." He believes and is saved there and then. He was a proud sinner last night:he is a humble Christian this morning. Before the day-break, he has repented, believed the gospel, been baptized, washed their stripes, set meat before them, rejoiced in God with all his house. He had believed the blessed fact that Christ":hath appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself."

This is the same news to you now. Will you rest on this work, owning yourself a sinner?

Now another thing for us, beloved brethren. Do we no longer need Christ because the question of our sins can never, never, NEVER, be raised again? Is sin committed by a man against whom "there is now no condemnation" less obnoxious to God than when committed by one who is still under the curse? Can God pass over the sins of His people as if they were nothing? Verily, no! Sin is ten thousand times worse in our hands than in a stranger's. When God had, by the blood of the Iamb, redeemed Israel out of Egypt, He made them His dwelling-place-the people among whom He took His abode, to walk in them. How could He have continued with them all the way when they sinned so often and so grievously against Him? Would it not have been giving up His own character-His righteousness and holiness? It would. Therefore He made provision for this as He had made to deliver them out of Egypt:He ordained a priest who, as a type of Christ, could always, in his perfect person and by virtue of his perfect offering, present the people always perfect before God, being the one in whom the redeemed people were thus represented. That is Christ's present service before God for us. He now appears in the presence of God for us-His redeemed people. Thus "He is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them." Thus it is our constantly denied feet are constantly cleansed by Him, and the consciousness of that both humbles and strengthens. Oh, child of God, cheer up! You may be discovering the evil of your own heart and the crookedness of your ways. The more the better. It will make you appreciate the full provision God has made for us in Christ. The work of repentance goes deeper and deeper as we go on, and it is well. "To whom much is forgiven, the same loveth much." Never lose courage. Jesus is there before God for you, and because of that, He can always look upon you with the love of a Father. How cheering to know that whatever happens, Jesus is there !

As lost sinners, we needed Jesus as a Saviour; now, as saved sinners on their way to the glory above, we need Him as a Priest. Such is our weakness, our sinfulness, our inability to stand for one hour before such a holy God as our God, that we could no more get on with Him without Christ as our Priest than we could have been brought to Him without Christ as our Saviour. But as the secret of salvation is in the sinner's believing that Christ "hath appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself," so the secret of a holy life is to believe that He now appears "in the presence of God for us." Brethren, do we believe it? do we feel the need of it? Is it the comfort of our souls to have our feet in His hands for the constant washing they need? Our souls at perfect peace with God through Christ's past service at the cross, are we not in danger to forget or think little of our incessant need of His present service? If we do, pride of heart comes in, and a fall follows. But even then, it is His grace allowing the fruit of our departure to appear, that, like Peter, we may go out and weep, and learn in a new way our need of His service.

"Once offered," mark; not twice. Men die once, and then the judgment. Having lived and died in sin, their doom is sealed; they cannot return to try it over. So Christ having lived and died for sin, the blessed result is sealed forever in them that believe on Him:"Unto them that look for Him shall He appear the second time WITHOUT SIN unto salvation." The question of sin was settled forever when He appeared to put it away, and now we who believe can calmly, happily, longingly, lift our eyes to heaven, and, in answer to His parting words, " Surely, I come quickly," respond, " Even so, come, Lord Jesus." (Rev. 22:20.) O ye lost men who are in this audience, what a Saviour is Jesus for you! What a salvation! what a supper spread before you! What grace!

One thing more, "As it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment:so Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for Him shall He appear the second time without sin unto salvation "(10:27,28).

"In the beginning God created." This is a fact it is wasting time to prove. So here is an incontrovertible fact,-"As it is appointed unto men once to die." He takes that fact-which none can deny-and makes its certainty to illustrate this one fact that "Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many "-for rebels. What love toward men who deserve judgment! Believe, and live; or turn away from it, and add to your many sins the greatest of all-the most terrible of all, that of refusing pardon from Him who alone can pardon, and who, to deliver us from the wrath to come, had to pass through it Himself on account of our sins.

O ye saved men who are in this audience, what a Saviour we have found in Jesus! He served us by dying for our sins. He serves us now by washing our feet. He is going to serve us again, when He returns from heaven," whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ:who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself." (Phil. 3:20, 21.)

And does His service close there? No; we could not do without Him even in eternity. Hear His own words:"Blessed are those servants whom the lord when he cometh shall find watching; verily I say unto you, that he shall gird himself, and make them to sit down to meat, and will come forth and serve them." (Luke 12:37.)

" Glory, glory everlasting,
Be to Him who bore the cross,-
Who redeemed our souls by tasting
Death, the death deserved by us !"

P.J.L.

I." The promise of life which is in Christ Jesus" (2 Tim. 1. 1.9; Tit. 1. 2,3.)

When was this promise given? and to whom was it given? The common thought, I suppose, has been that it was given in eternity, and to Christ; and to this I have been content in past time to adhere. It would be necessitated if the rendering of our common version were exact, "before the world began," but this is far from being so. The late revision, with an attempt to be absolutely literal, fails more signally. Its rendering is, "before eternal times"-a self-contradiction, according to our usual thoughts. The word used here is indeed the regular one for "eternal," and So far, the translation is justifiable; but there is an alternative which the sense, the context, and the doctrine of Scripture elsewhere alike require-"before the age-times," the same word being used in Scripture for "eternity" and for an "age," a period marked by some uniform dispensation of God. These ages are referred to in many parts of the Word, and are in no sense eternal, as see in the Revised Version I Cor. x, II Heb. 9:26, etc. Before these age-times, then, the promise of life was given.

But, it may be asked, did not these ages begin in fact with the beginning of the world ? and does not this bring us back to the same thought as at first? It docs, if the time of innocency be reckoned as such an "age;" and as such probably all have reckoned it. In proposing another thought, I must therefore show cause for it; but this will be better done after we have looked at the promise of which the apostle speaks. The "promise of life which" -that is, which life-" is in Christ Jesus' is, I believe, no other than the first promise to fallen man of the Seed of the woman.

A "promise" seems certainly a strange thing to speak of from the Father to the Son. And when the apostle adds, "which God, that cannot lie, promised before the age-times," is it not plain that he is speaking of some word openly given to one who, alas! might doubt Him? Does he not appeal here to some such known and recognized word by which God had pledged Himself from the beginning?

When in Timothy he speaks of this, he says, "According to His own purpose and grace given us in Christ Jesus before the age-times," is it not also clear that he is speaking of a purpose, not merely entertained by Him, but openly avowed? What else means "given us"? And "in Christ Jesus "-does not this declare, not simply the way in which the promise had been fulfilled, but the way in which it was given? It was the promise of a personal Deliverer, the woman's Seed, who should vanquish the serpent, destroying him who had the power of death, and giving life to those who had lost it. And of this the next verse speaks:-"But is now made manifest"–a promise in some measure obscure now lighted up with its full luster,- "But is now made manifest by the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ, who has abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel." Is it not the old penalty to which we are carried back, and the scene in Eden?

Christ has brought life to light:the promise, although really of this, was not fully clear as to it. This explains the possibility of doubt even as to the apostle's reference. The truth in its whole magnificence is now displayed. But always the life in Christ Jesus was God's meaning, and through all the intervening centuries there was nothing else that could fulfill the promise but the life in Him. Now it is revealed without a cloud.

The notice of these "age-times" comes out more fully thus. Their probationary character up to the cross-dwelt upon elsewhere in this volume (pp. 15-17)-explains how for so long a time the cloud rested on the revelation. Before them, the promise had been given; now they have ended, the full truth has come out. And this also seems to explain why the time of innocence-too brief indeed to be put down as an "age"-should be left out. It is the trial of fallen man of which the apostle is thinking, as it is of the blessing to fallen man the promise speaks.

One word more only. The actual mention of "life" is not in the promise. The full blessing could not yet be manifested, as we have seen. Yet it is striking that what is not plainly uttered Adam's faith takes up, and his voice utters, upon hearing it, this significant word. "Eve" means "life;" and it is before the close even of this scene in the garden that it is said (Gen. 3:20), "And Adam called his wife's name 'Eve' because she was the mother of all living." Unbelief, after listening to the sentence just pronounced, would have said, "The mother of all dying" Faith had laid hold upon the promise, however; and blessed it is to see how thereupon God clothes the fallen with the fruit of that very death which had come in through sin.

Thus, then, we have the promise of the life which is in Christ Jesus,-the same life by grace in believers of all times.

"Rejoice in the Lord always." Certainly it could not be in circumstances, for he was a prisoner. Christians are often a great deal happier in the trial than they are in thinking of it; for there the stability, the certainty, the nearness, and the power of Christ are much more learnt, and they are happier. Paul could not so well have said, "Rejoice in the Lord always," if he had not known what it was to be a prisoner. Just as in Psalm xxxiv:"I will bless Jehovah at all times; His praise shall continually be in my mouth." Why? "This poor man cried, and Jehovah heard him, and delivered him out of all his troubles."

2 Cor. 5:17,18.

In Christ Jesus! What position!
Once "in Adam," ruined, lost!
Now redeemed ! (O changed condition!)
By His blood ! Amazing cost!

In Christ Jesus ! Blest transition !
"Old things [now] are passed away."
"All things new"in Faith's wide vision.
"All things are of God "for aye.

In Christ Jesus ! Who in heaven
Stands, our Advocate and Priest!
Conscience purged, and sins forgiven,
There He bears us on His breast.

In Christ Jesus !Midst the lilies,
Where His pasture is, we feed ;
And our song of rapturous thrill is,
He supplies our every need.

In Christ Jesus !Yet the mystery
Lies beyond, still unrevealed !
For the half the wondrous history
Is untold-in Him concealed !

In Christ Jesus !Swiftly Hearing
Is the hour of blest record,
When the saints, at His appearing,
Shall be like our glorious Lord.

In Christ Jesus ! Throned in glory !
Sons of God !With Christ coheirs!
Sequel, this, to Calvary's story:-
All things with His own He shares.

November 1886

Resurrection the Sign of Complete Atonement.
For the great mass of Christians, the resurrection of Christ has dropped out of the place in reference to atonement which it finds in Scripture. The resurrection side of the gospel has dropped out. Yet God has been graciously reviving the truth of it in many hearts. Let us seek to get hold of what is wrapped up for us in the joyful tidings of Christ risen from the dead.

If Christ be not risen," says the apostle to the Corinthians, "ye are yet in your sins." The resurrection was the full, open acceptance of the work which alone could put them away. It was God manifesting Himself on the side of those for whom the work was now accomplished. Hence faith rests in "Him who raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead;" and it is added, in explanation of this, "who was delivered for our offenses, and raised again for our justification" (Rom, 4:24, 25).

"Resurrection from the dead" has always this character of acceptance of the one raised up, and must not be confounded with the simple fact of resurrection in itself. When the Lord, at the Mount of Transfiguration, "charged them that they should tell no man what things they had seen until the Son of Man were risen from the dead," the disciples "kept that saying with themselves, questioning one with another what the rising from the dead should mean " (Mark 9:9, 10). Familiar as they were with the general truth that the dead should rise, this rising from the dead-not from the state of the dead, but from among the dead themselves, a special resurrection which would leave the rest unchanged,-was to them a new and unknown thing. "I know that he shall rise in the resurrection at the last day," Martha's words as to her brother, was the expression of the faith of every orthodox Jew of that day. Alas! even yet, the general faith of Christendom goes no further. But the Lord, in arguing with the Sadducees, speaks of a special class, "those who should be accounted worthy to attain that world and the resurrection from the dead" as "the children of God, being the children of the resurrection" (Luke 20:35, 36). The resurrection from the dead approves as accepted of God all that participate in it. Thus is it pre-eminently, then, with the resurrection of Christ from the dead. It is the triumphant demonstration, in the face of His enemies, of God for Him whom they had crucified and slain. "What sign showest Thou," said the Jews once to Him, "seeing that Thou doest these things?" and the Lord answers, " 'Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up! . . . . lie spake of the temple of His body" (Jno. 2:19, 21).

All through His ministry among men indeed the signs of the Father's approval and delight were openly given. The works which He did in His Father's name bore witness to Him. The Father's voice and the descending Spirit had borne witness also. But these were personal to Himself alone. Now, having completed His work on behalf of others, His resurrection becomes the seal of the acceptance of what was done in their behalf. It is the testimony still of the approval of His own personal perfection, but as standing in a place altogether apart from what was His due personally, and where the holiness of God tested Him as the fire of the altar the sacrifice upon it. In result, all the sweet savor of the sacrifice was brought out by it.

So of the Lord, as had long ago been declared by another prophetically personating Him, "Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell [or "hades"], neither wilt Thou suffer Thy Holy One to see corruption." It was as the Holy One He could not see it. "Who in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications, with strong crying and tears, unto Him that was able to save Him out of death,"-not, as in the common version, "from death,"-"and was heard in that He feared," or as in the margin, "for His piety" (Heb. 5:7). It was this upon which all depended, what under the most perfect, most bitter trial, was found in Him. The white linen garments of the high-priest, the type of spotless righteousness wrought out, were the only ones, as we have elsewhere seen, in which he could enter the most holy place. Nothing else but such righteousness could bring Him in there, the representative of a people accepted in Him.

The declaration of this acceptance waited not, indeed, for resurrection. His testimony before He dies is that the atoning work is "finished" (Jno. 19:30). He had no sooner died than the rent vail declared it. And the threefold witness of the Spirit, water, and blood answered at once the thrust of the soldier's spear (Jno. 19:34, 35; i Jno. 5:8). Already the record is, that "God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son"(i Jno. 5:II). It is only in continuance of these testimonies that by the glory of the Father He is raised from among the dead, and then in due season "by His own blood He entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption" (Heb. 9:12).

Blessed it is to see the promptitude of this utterance of the heart of God as to that which is in His sight of such infinite value. At once the rent vail attests that the "merciful and faithful High-Priest" has made "propitiation for the sins of the people" (chap. 2:17). The typical blood must wait until the high-priest himself has entered the sanctuary; but not so the antitypical. The vail could not have been rent had not the mercy-seat been already sprinkled. The typical blood was but the blood of bulls and goats, and required human hands to carry it in; the antitypical needed none such to present it to the omniscient eye of Him to whom it was offered. The difference is one of those suited necessary contrasts between figure and reality, of which there are so many, and which constitute one of the gravest admonitions to caution in the application of the figures.

That it is the high-priest who makes "atonement in the holy place" (Lev. 16:17), and of whom the apostle speaks in the interpretation, Heb. 2:10, is indeed a difficulty with those who having learned from Scripture that "if He were on earth, He should not be a priest" (chap. 8:4) suppose therefore that at the cross He was not. The mistake is natural, but the Word of God meets the difficulty for us in the words of the Saviour as to this, "I, if I be lifted up from the earth." At the cross He was no more "on earth," and this is no strain of an expression:He had in fact done with earth,-was passing from it, His place among men gone. And here, of necessity, His priesthood began; else was there no priestly offering up at all, for assuredly it was not in resurrection that the altar-fire consumed the victim; and the ministry of the altar was exclusively the priest's work. Thus, surely, it is clear how it was our High-Priest who as such made atonement, as it is also clear by the rent vail and the resurrection itself that before resurrection the blood was sprinkled on the heavenly mercy-seat.

Resurrection followed on the third day to set the Second Man in His Last-Adam place. It is plain how 1 Corinthians 15:connects this place with the "spiritual body" of the resurrection. "There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living souls; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit." The first Adam is plainly himself a living soul with a natural body,-the word "natural" being here the adjective of the word "soul" itself, a body fitted for the soul, as we may say. The last Adam is the pattern of those of His heavenly race, as the first was of his earthy race. Only they are not yet in the image of the heavenly, (as they shall be,) though they are heavenly; and the Lord too is not merely a living spirit, but, according to His own necessary pre-eminence, a life-giving spirit. This is so beautifully pictured in the scene in the twentieth of John, where as God breathed into Adam at the first, He breathes now upon His disciples, that I do not doubt it to be the meaning there. He has taken and is representing to us His last-Adam place. But this I do not dwell on further here.

He rises, then, with a spiritual body,-does not assume it afterward, as some have thought. The wounds in His hands and side, which some have brought forward to prove the opposite, do as little prove it as Zechariah 12:10 or 13:6 would prove it of a day yet future. Return to His former condition before the cross we have seen He could not. His death means the acceptance of the solemn sentence by which man as first created had been set aside out of his place. Restore this He does not; while He can and does bring in for His people what is infinitely better.

He rises, then, the Representative of His people in their new place of unchanging blessing, in the likeness to which they are to be conformed. He is raised again for the justification of all believers, For these His death has absolutely atoned, for these acceptance is complete and unconditional; while individually every one comes into it by faith,-is justified by faith. Here is the one condition upon which Scripture uniformly insists, in regard to propitiation no less than substitution:for, be it that He is a propitiation for the sins of the whole world, this is not unconditionally; He is a "propitiation by faith in His blood," as the common version, or "a propitiation through faith by His blood," as the Revised Version better renders it. The door is indeed open to all the world, but those who enter by faith; and only thus is the propitiation really theirs.

The resurrection of Christ is therefore God coming out openly for His people, and Christ risen is the measure of their acceptance. His is theirs. He is accepted for them; they are accepted in Him. Substitution ends with the cross, for our place in which He stood ends there; but representation does not end with the cross, but the place He
takes in resurrection He brings us into. We are dead with Him is the language of Scripture; we are risen also with Him:we are "accepted"- "taken into favor," "graced" if we may use the literal word,-"in the Beloved."

His place is ours; only we must remember that when we say this, we limit it strictly to that of which we are speaking-His place in resurrection. There are glories, it need hardly be said, that are entirely His own,-not only divine glories, but as man also. We speak simply now of a place of acceptance as manifested in resurrection from the dead; not even as yet of the opened heavens:for when we go so far, we have to remember that not all accepted ones go even to heaven. There will be by and by a new earth also, in which dwelleth righteousness. But so far as we have reached, we speak of what is the common portion of saints of all ages, heavenly and earthly alike. In this sense, then, we say His death is ours, His resurrection is ours, His acceptance is ours:we are accepted and find our place in Him; we are identified with Him.

There are but three other books which require now some attention before we close our consideration of Scripture-texts. They are the first epistles of Peter and John, and the book of Revelation.

We must not expect to find here the full development or application of atonement which Paul had especially in his commission to make known. The truth of it is every-where insisted on, however, in due connection with the peculiar theme of each book.

The theme of Peter's epistle is the path through the world of those who, as partakers of the heavenly calling, are strangers and pilgrims in it. Addressed to the believers among the Jews of the dispersion, he brings out the contrast between their Jewish hopes and those to which they had been now begotten by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Already they had received the salvation of their souls, being redeemed by the precious blood of Christ, and born again of the incorruptible Word, and were a spiritual house, a holy priesthood. As children of God, they were the subjects of His holy government, under the discipline of a sorrow which He made fruitful, passing through a world through which Christ had passed, adverse to His as to Him. To do well, suffer for it, and take it patiently was their lot, having Him for their example, and the glory into which He had already entered their eternal rest.

It is not strange, therefore, that it is the "sufferings of Christ" upon which the apostle insists; that He suffered for sins, and that we must suffer, not for these, but for righteousness or for His name's sake (2:19-21); that He "suffered in the flesh,"- His only connection with sin being in suffering on account of it; we must arm ourselves therefore with the same mind (4:i).

But the sacrificial character and efficacy of His work are fully maintained, for "Christ also once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God," and "Himself bare our sins in His own body on the tree,"-the practical end of this being enforced, "that ye being dead unto sins, should live unto righteousness-by whose stripes ye were healed "(2:24), And thus we are "redeemed, not with corruptible things, as silver and gold," (alluding to Israel's atonement-money,) "but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a Lamb without blemish and without spot" (1:18, 19). Salvation, and begetting to a living hope, are therefore connected with the resurrection of Christ from the dead (3:21; 13).

This is so similar to the first part of Romans that it is scarcely necessary to enter into it more here. It gives us only a part of it however, the application being plainly to the practical walk, as that in Romans is mainly to the setting free the conscience before God.

The second epistle of Peter has but one word, which we may notice as we pass on:the false teachers, who privily bring in damnable heresies among Christians, deny the " Lord that bought them." Thus the plain difference between redemption and purchase is made clear. The Lord has title to the world and all in it (comp. Matt. xiii 44) by the cross, but we may buy what we have no personal interest in. Redemption speaks of heart-interest in the object, and of release, deliverance.

The first epistle of John gives us the characters of eternal life in the believer as now manifested in the power of the Spirit which is in us as Christians. He dwells, therefore, more upon the Godward side of the work of Christ-propitiation for our sins (ii, 2; 4:10), from which, therefore, we are cleansed by the propitiating blood (1:7). It is thus that divine love is declared toward us; and this love is perfected with us, giving us boldness in the day of judgment, in the assurance that even now, in this world, we are as Christ is (4:17). This falls short of Paul's doctrine, not as to the perfection in which we stand, but only in not bringing us into the heavenly places, or that of being risen with Christ. Its application is to the entire freedom of the conscience by propitiation through a substitute, whose acceptance is therefore ours.

In the last chapter we have another beautiful testimony to the necessity and perfection of the work of Christ. He came, not by water only, but by water and blood. And the Spirit also bears witness, because the Spirit is truth. This, without any question, refers to the blood and water that followed the soldier's spear, and of which John by the Spirit bare record (Jno. 19:34, 35). What, then, is the purport of the record? That out of a dead Christ-His work accomplished-expiation and purification flow together for us. "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." Thus, as soon as He has died,-as soon as the judgment due has been borne, purification and expiation are found for men, in Him who has borne the judgment.

But, says the apostle, "this is the record, that God has given unto us eternal life, and this life is in His Son." In "eternal life" he sums up, as it were, these two things. For "life" is the opposite of judgment, and implies that it is passed. (Comp. Jno. 5:24, 29, where "condemnation" and "damnation" are the same word-"judgment.") While the full extent of man's need as to purification is declared. Life in a new source alone meets it. But God's grace abounds over all man's need. This life is eternal life, and in His Son,-a divine spring which guarantees the perfection of what flows from it.

In the book of Revelation, finally, the name the Lord bears everywhere through it shows how central as to all God's ways is the work of atonement. The book of His counsels finds none with title to open it save One who, coming forward in the character of Judah's Lion, is seen, in that which gives Him title, as the Lamb slain. He is therefore at once the object of worship by the elders as the Author of redemption:"For Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by Thy blood out of every kindred and tongue and people and nation"(5:6, 9).

The book of life is accordingly "the book of life of the Lamb slain" (13:8; 21:27); and the being written in this book is the only possible escape from the judgment of the second death 20:15).

Thus the saints overcome the accuser by the blood of the Lamb (12:II); their robes are washed and made white in His blood (7:14); and this it is that gives "right to the tree of life" and to enter in by the gates into the heavenly city (22:14, R.V.).

The throne, moreover, is the "throne of God and of the Lamb" (22:1,3); and "the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of" the new Jerusalem (21:22); and the glory of God doth lighten it, while the Lamb is the lamp thereof (5:23).

Fittingly, thus, does Scripture close its testimony to the atonement and Him who made it. We will not try to define the meaning of these glorious sayings. They shine by their own light. May our attitude be that than which a creature can know no higher:that of the elders in the presence of their Redeemer-of worshipers.

This is one of the Christian ornaments which the elect of God are exhorted to put on and wear. How much we have to make us humble, and yet how little effect it has upon us! If we reflect upon our origin, and look unto the rock whence we were hewn; if we consider the course we pursued before conversion, even the course of this world; or if we remember what we have been and done since the Lord called us by His grace, one would think we should see enough to make and keep us humble.

We have seen already that at the very commencement of its history the people failed under the law; and this is the one unvarying lesson of all these ages. Under law it was only more plainly marked, as was indeed to be expected of that which was emphatically the "ministration of condemnation." Still the extent of the failure seems after all amazing. I do not even refer to the worship of the golden calf, although it might seem nothing could more show the desperate wickedness of man's heart than this. The very mount which had flamed and quaked in witness to the divine presence bore witness also to this rapid descent into the abominations of the heathen round about, who "changed the image of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and to four-footed beasts, and creeping things." Judgment being executed, God took up the people the second time; not, as we know, under the same strictly legal system, which it had been proved they could not endure, but under a mingled system of law and mercy.

It was in this way that the tabernacle with its sacrifices and priesthood was added to the law, although God, in the display of perfect omniscience which could not be taken unawares, had instructed Moses as to it before the sin of the people (Ex. 25:-xxxi). And here faith found its provision, and a convicted conscience its pledged forgiveness. These at least, it would be thought, would be prized and welcomed in view of the constant failure which the vigilance of the law detected and condemned. How surpassingly strange, then, that these should have fallen into such utter disuse as God by the mouth of Amos declares they did (5:25-27). "Have ye offered Me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? But ye have borne the tabernacle of Moloch and Chiun, your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves." Thus even Moloch's dreadful altar was preferred to God's, and the gracious provisions of His tabernacle dropped into a forgetfulness hard to realize. The failure of the dispensation was already fixed:"Therefore will I cause you to go into captivity beyond Damascus, saith the Lord."

Incredible almost would this neglect indeed seem, did not the Word of God itself announce it. And there are testimonies in the history itself which show in a still more striking way the extent of it. Especially is the statement of the book of Joshua (5:2-7) remarkable as showing the complete breach of the covenant with Jehovah on the part of the people. Nothing was more fundamental to this than the ordinance of circumcision. The uncircumcised man-child was to be cut off from his people (Gen. 17:14); and none such could eat of the passover at all (Ex. 12:48). Either these laws must have been disregarded or the passover must have been almost entirely omitted toward the close of the wilderness journey, when no one under forty could have been circumcised at all. For the express statement is, "All the people that came out of Egypt that were mates, even all the men of war, died in the wilderness by the way, after they came out of Egypt. Now all the people that came out were circumcised; but all the people that were born in the wilderness by the way as they came out of Egypt, them they had not circumcised." How the patience of the Lord with the people is manifest! but how evident that priesthood and Levitical service must almost have come to an end! If these, as all other of the things that happened to Israel, happened unto them for types (I Cor. 10:n), what admonition would this convey to us!

Moses, even, dies in the land of Moab for his sin; and of all that came as men out of the land of Egypt, Joshua and Caleb alone remained. An entire new generation enter into the land of Canaan, and here a new order of things begins.

For let us notice, with all the patient goodness manifested toward the people, and which God had declared when He took them up at Sinai the second time, He does not simply continue the trial of them in one form throughout. On the contrary, He varies it in many ways. This, on the one hand, makes it a more perfect trial, as is plain; on the other, it repeats again and again the admonition of a watchful holiness which never lapsed into indifference, while mercy warned of the time of long-suffering, however slowly, still surely running out. As we, upon whom the ends of the ages have come, look back upon them, it is blessed to see how, in the various forms of this trial, God presents to us in changing aspects typically His one unchanging theme,-Christ as the justification of His long-suffering patience as of His fullest grace. This, faith might even in those days in measure see, though not in the detailed glories in which we see it. For the voice of prophecy, even in the law itself, spoke of a Prophet to be raised up, a High-Priest of good things to come,-yea, a priestly King greater than Abraham, in whom Levi had once paid tithes. And we can rejoice in thinking how God thus could linger over the picture of Him to whom when at last come He would give out-spoken witness:"This is My beloved Son, in whom I have found My delight."

In the land, then, as I have said, a new order of things begins. Moses had been in the wilderness the representative of the Lord, the channel of the divine communications. In the land, Joshua stands before Eleazar the priest, and the priest it is who communicates to him the word of the Lord. He who is confessedly the leader of the people, and standing in Moses' place, is nevertheless not in the same place of nearness with God. Departure has brought in distance, while intercession based on sacrifice is that on which all depends. The link between God and the people is now the priesthood.

Before they pass over Jordan, all their wilderness history is rehearsed to them, that it may be practical wisdom for their new position, and then they are to take possession of the land which God had promised to Abraham; although not yet do they possess it according to the terms of the covenant with their fathers. They are on the footing of law, and must make good their title to the land by actual victory over the inhabitants of it. "Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you, as I said unto Moses." (Josh. 1:3.) Thus the extent of the land, as the Lord describes it to them, they never actually acquire. Only in David and Solomon's time does their dominion extend to the Euphrates, the Abrahamic boundary, while they never properly possess thus far; Philistines, Phoeniceans, Hittites, confine them in fact within much narrower limits. Two and a half tribes they leave on the other side of Jordan, defeated by their own success; just as in Christian times the church has gained by its victories a possession the wrong side of death.

In the land, the Lord delivers their enemies into their hands. But failure is every-where apparent. The sin of Achan, the defeat at Ai, the snare of Gibeon, follow one another in quick succession. They do not drive out the inhabitants of the land, but make gain of their sin by holding them as tributaries, then go after their gods, as the Lord had warned them, and are soon captives in the hands of those they had conquered.

If Gilgal characterizes the book of Joshua, and there the reproach of Egypt-of, their slavery there-is rolled away, Bochim (weeping) characterizes the book of Judges, where they return to a more shameful one. The history shows now their broken unity, the inroad of foreign enemies, the uprising of domestic ones. Again and again they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and He delivers them out of their distress. A judge is raised up, and is the instrument of their deliverance; and as long as he judges, maintaining the authority and holiness of God among the people, the deliverance lasts. But their weakness (which is only their willfulness,) is fully apparent:the judge dies, and once more they wander; there is a new captivity, followed at length (because the mercy of God does not forsake them,) by a new deliverance.

These revivals become, however, more and more feeble and less decisive. At last, the priesthood itself fails utterly, and that when the judge and high-priest arc one. Eli's sons make themselves vile, and he restrains them not. The Lord swears that this iniquity shall not be purged with sacrifice and offering forever. And though He raise up for Himself a faithful priest, as He declares, and will build him a sure house, yet the order is again changed:Joshua stood before Eleazar, but now the priest is to walk before God's anointed (I Sam. 2:35, 3:14.)

In the meanwhile, ruin is complete. The Philistines come up against Israel, and smite them; they superstitiously send for the ark of God to deliver them- the ark of the covenant so often broken! They are again smitten, Hophni and Phinehas slain, the ark is taken; Eli falls backward at the news and breaks His neck, and Phinehas' wife, expiring, gives to her son a name expressive of the people's terrible condition. "And she named the child 'Ichabod,' saying, 'The glory is departed from Israel.'' The priesthood, as the link between God and Israel, had come to its final end. (To be continued.)

"If the eye, instead of resting on our sins and sorrows, could rest only on Christ, it would sweeten many a bitter cup, and enlighten a gloomy hour."

It was not the smoothest, or the shortest, or the one most frequented, but it was the best. It was the only right way. He intended to prove them, and to display His wonders, and the way afforded an opportunity for both. Thus it is with all His people. He has marked out the way in His unerring wisdom; He guides them into it, He tries them by it, He leads them along it, and glorifies Himself by doing so. God's way is always contrary to that which flesh and blood would choose. We want ease, plenty, pleasure, and honor; but the Lord intends that we shall have faith, humility, patience, fortitude, and confidence in Himself alone. His design is to empty us, and strip us, and humble us, and break us down before His throne; to endear the Saviour, sweeten the promises, and make the good land more desirable. And this He effects by sanctifying the trials, the losses, the disappointments, and the troubles we meet with in the way. Beloved, is yours a rough way, a trying path, a perplexing road? It is the right way. The Lord leads you, and He never leads wrong. He brings into the wilderness before He brings into Canaan.

"In the desert God will teach thee
What the God that thou hast found,
Patient, gracious, powerful, holy,
All His grace shall there abound."

2. (Chap. 5:-viii:1.) In, but not of, the world The second section divides into three parts, which correspond to its three chapters:(1) New life as quickening out of the world; (2) as a practical life of faith in the world; (3) the gift of the Holy Ghost as rivers of living water, flowing forth into the world.

(1) Chap. 5:Quickening out of the world. In the former section, the believer was looked at simply as an individual, born of the Word and Spirit, and the Spirit in him for his own personal satisfaction and blessing. We now find the world lying in death and under judgment, and eternal life as that which brings out from death, and delivers from the possibility of judgment. The Lord, by whose word men live, is Himself the Judge; and thus they already have His sentence unto life (10:21-24).

In the beginning of the chapter, the man at the pool of Bethesda is given as an illustration of the powerlessness of the law for salvation, and the deliverance from' it of one saved by grace. But the truth goes beyond the figure. It is not merely impotence, but death, out of which Christ brings the soul; and instead of "Sin no more, lest a worse thing come to thee," the Lord says of His own, "He shall not come into judgment."

Bethesda is a figure of the law as given the second time, not the first, written by the hand of the mediator, and accompanied by the declaration of "The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth; keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin;" yet-and here is the impossibility of finding salvation under it-"who can by no means clear the guilty" (Ex. 34:6, 7).

Thus something heavenly, as grace is, is introduced into the law, an opposing element which "troubles" it, as the angel's visit the water here. Yet thus only can salvation be spoken of in connection with it:"If the wicked man turn from his wickedness, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive" (Ezek. 18:27). But this is still law, useless if there be not strength. The impotent man, type of all of Adam's race merely, has none. Nor does the Lord help him into the pool, but heals by His word:"Arise, take up thy bed, and walk."

This rouses the opposition of the Jews, and brings out the freedom of the recipient of grace from law; for "the same day was the Sabbath." The Lord gives the divine argument, "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." How could He rest with man's need so great, as He had rested when creation, come fresh from His hand, was only good? The Son, the Word, here as elsewhere, was only giving expression to the Father's heart. Law could not satisfy that; only the activity of grace could do so.

His claim as Son of the Father brings out all the enmity of man against Him; but all the blessing of the soul depends upon it. Thus alone can He manifest God, all things being put into His hand, and power of life or judgment committed absolutely to Him. So he that hears His word, and believes on Him who sent Him, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment. Dead though he has been, the voice of the Son of God has penetrated with life-giving power; and so shall, at His bidding, the body rise to life or judgment (18-29).

The rest of the chapter dwells upon the testimony God had given to Him; for were it His own witness merely, it would lack the character of truth. John had thus borne witness, though nothing short of a divine one would befit Him. There were His works, and the Father's own testimony:the Scripture they professed faith in as life-giving testified of Him, yet they would not come to Him. One coming in his own name (Antichrist) they would receive. Self-seeking in them it was that hindered faith, and turned their trusted Moses into an accuser.

(2) Chap. 6:Eternal life as a life of faith. In the sixth chapter, we have the practical character of eternal life as a life of faith in the world, sustained by the bread of life, the antitype of the manna. Here also we have an introductory scene, in which first the Lord feeds the multitude, and is rejected as much by the would-be homage as by open denial. In fact, the passover is nigh (5:4). He is going to suffer. He withdraws Himself, therefore, from them to a mountain Himself alone. The disciples go over the sea also alone in darkness and tempest. Here we see the voyage of faith through a contrary scene, closed by Christ's coining again. "Then they willingly received Him into the ship, and immediately the ship was at the land whither they were going."

These things are the introduction to the discourse which follows, in which the Lord mainly insists upon the provision for the life of faith, the "meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of Man shall give unto you; for Him hath God the Father sealed." It is not only that the life endures, but the meat endures as long as the life does:it has God's seal upon it, the stamp of His approbation, and that which He seals thus abides forever. Christ, as Son of Man, gives us thus the food of an imperishable life';"the bread of God is He who cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world." Here is the human, as in the fifth chapter was the divine, side of this priceless gift. There, the dead heard and lived:here, the perishing sinners of Adam's race receive, and never die. Man's work, to which God calls him, is to believe on Him whom He has sent (10:27-33).

And yet it is the Father's will which alone secures believers, ("All that the Father giveth Me shall come to Me;") as it is that which alone secures the continuance of their salvation-"Of all the Father giveth Me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up at the last day." When the Jews murmur at Him, the Lord repeats yet more emphatically that men must be drawn, must hear and learn of the Father, to come unto Him. But he who cats lives forever; and the bread is His flesh, which He will give for the life of the world (10:34-51).

From this point, the Lord insists also on the necessity of His death. Not only must His flesh be eaten, but His blood be drunk, or there is no life; where these are, there is eternal life, and Christ abides in him and he in Christ. Dependence in intimate relationship characterizes that life:"As the living Father hath sent Me, and I live by the Father, so he that eateth Me, even he shall live by Me" (10:52-58).

But this brings out the latent unbelief even in professed disciples. He explains that it is not of literal flesh He speaks:what if they see the Son o Man ascend where He was before? His words are spirit and life. But many draw back and walk no more with Him; so that He turns even to the twelve and asks, "Will ye also go away?" Peter professes the faith of the rest; and the Lord answers that even of these chosen few one was a devil.
(3) Chap. 7:The gift of the Spirit-rivers of living water. The seventh chapter gives a striking picture of the world, in unbelief and enmity to God. The Jews are keeping the feast of tabernacles-the thanksgiving for wanderings passed and rest attained in the land; but they had not rest. The Lord therefore refuses to own the feast by going up to it publicly and at the beginning. His time (though in the world He made, and amid His own,) had not come:it was morally unprepared, and how much had He to accomplish for it! By and by He departs secretly, and in the midst of the feast goes up to the temple and teaches. They wonder at His knowing letters, having never learnt. He declares His doctrine to be of God, to be learnt as such by those who will do His will, and manifested by the glory that it gave to God. He convicts them, on the other hand, of unrighteous judgment, and breaking their own law; and their ignorance of Him as ignorance of Him that sent Him. He warns them then of His departure from them soon, which they interpret of His going to the Gentiles.

The last, the great day of the feast the Lord chooses for His most pregnant word. Men conscious of their need He invites to Him to quench their thirst; and he who believes on Him, not only should find satisfaction, but abundance; out of his belly-the very thing that craves,-should flow rivers of living water. Thus, if rest had not come for men at large, believers should be, in the world, the witness of infinite fullness free to men.

But for this Jesus must be glorified. Not till the work of atonement was accomplished could the Spirit of God thus be in men. Not till the Rock was smitten could the streams flow out. It is a testimony peculiar to Christianity therefore. In Judaism there were partition-walls, and not an outflow.

But this testimony finds out many a thirsty soul, who, realizing his need, realizes the divine character of that which fathoms and meets it. "Many of the people, therefore, when they heard this saying, said, 'Of a truth, this is the Prophet.' Others said, 'This is the Christ.'" But unbelief has ready its excuses, which betray, as ever, only its ignorance:so there is a division because of Him. The officers sent to take Him come back empty-handed, owning the power of His words. The Pharisees can plead as conclusive their own universal unbelief. Nicodemus utters a timid protest. And every one goes to his own house:He who has none, patient though rejected, to the mount of Olives.

salvation.(Chap. 8:22-19:27.) THROUGHOUT, Luke, as it presents the manhood of the Saviour, presents the grace that has come near in Him. We have seen that, as compared with the two former gospels, "grace," "peace," "Saviour," and "salvation" are new and characteristic words. The third part now declares the full character of the salvation now come for man.

I. (8:22-9:50.)The Fullness of Salvation.

(I) 8:22-25. From the power of circumstances. That which we have had in the two former gospels is repeated here, and in very similar connection. It is the same lesson of the Lord's control of circumstances through which we pass, Himself being with us, though faith be needed to discern His actual care. With God, whom all things serve, they serve us therefore, in His tender love toward us.

(2) 8:26-39. From the power of Satan and of sin.

(3) 8:40-56. Life out of death. These two sections follow almost in the words of the previous gospels, and the lesson I do not see to be different in the main from that in Mark. They are needed here to give us fully the features of that, salvation which is Luke's theme. The repetition of these things puts upon them a corresponding emphasis; and there are minor differences also, which surely have a meaning, if we have heart and wisdom given of God to find it.

(4) 9:1-17. Ministering and ministered to. We now see what the world is for those who are with Christ in it,-a wilderness, but where His grace and power are proved, and make those themselves the subjects of grace its instruments in blessing others. This is, in brief, what this section shows us.

(5) 9:18-36. Earth closed and heaven opened. Next, we have the Lord fully as the One rejected on earth, accepted of God, and glorified. And this for disciples also, as He declares, closes earth and opens heaven. In Luke we have, more than in the two former gospels, the heavenly things dwelt upon, and our portion in them. Thus, while Matthew and Mark say, "After six days," Luke dates the transfiguration as "about an eight days after" the Lord's promise. Luke also alone gives His decease in Jerusalem as what Moses and Elias spoke of with Him, and of their entering into the "bright cloud" of the "excellent glory," as Peter afterward calls it (2 Pet. 1:17). All this is in full accord with the grace which is the theme of this gospel; and here the full character of its salvation is displayed.

(6) 9:37-50. After this, it seems to me that we find a supplementary picture of a world in which those who are amazed and wonder at the power of God, owning it in Jesus, can yet crucify Him when delivered into their hands; and where disciples who have not power to cast out devils, because of their unbelief, would yet hinder him who has, "because he followeth not with us." The Lord Himself remains, the available source of power and grace, and who identifies Himself with a little child received in His name.

2. (9:vi-12:)The Ministry of Salvation.

In the last division, we were following almost entirely in the track of the two former gospels; in the two next we find what is almost entirely peculiar to the present one.

(I) 9:51-62. The spirit of the ministry. The Lord is now on His way to be delivered up. This gives character to all that follows. The Master of all is taking the path of absolute self-renunciation as Saviour of men, and His own must follow Him in this spirit, finding their freedom from the world as brought out of its sphere of death, to preach the kingdom of God among men. He is thus to be glorified by those who walk in the freedom of their privileged place, in the spirit of obedience to Him who has delivered them.

(2) 10:1-24. Its testimony and effect. The mission of the seventy is more connected than even that of the twelve with the person of the Lord Himself, nor are they restricted to "the lost sheep of the house of Israel." The power of the enemy is prostrate before the messengers of grace, and babes have revealed to them what wise and prudent cannot attain unto. The object of the testimony is the Son, who, inscrutable in the full glory of His person by man, alone reveals the Father to men. It is thus the kingdom of God becomes a reality in the souls favored with so wonderful a revelation.

(3) 10:25-42. Divine love to the sinner, and divine-fullness for the saint. The question of a lawyer gives occasion to the story which follows, in which "Who is my neighbor?" is seen as easily resolved by one who has in himself the heart of a neighbor. The story thus becomes a parable of Him who is alone man's neighbor fully, serving him in his deepest needs. Here the officers of law-the priest and Levite-have no succor for the conscience-stricken and helpless sinner, while the true helper is one outside of law and under its judgment (a Samaritan), yet the minister of divine compassion, bringing to him, where he is, effectual help. The oil and wine-the glad news of Christ's work made known by the Holy Ghost-heal the wounds of the conscience; the power of the Spirit brings him to the inn, the place of refreshment and ministry on earth, where the same blessed Spirit, as host, has him in charge until Christ comes again. The "two pence" signify the present recompense of those by whom He ministers to the need of souls, the witness of further recompense when Christ comes.

The latter part of the parable thus connects with that which follows to the close of the chapter, where Christ's fullness is seen to be the provision for the saint-the "one thing needful:" the "good part," therefore, to be sitting at His feet to hear His word.

(4) 11:Man’s dependence upon the Spirit, and responsibility and Judgment for resistance to Him. Christ is, then, the one sufficiency for the soul, the Holy Spirit the only power for ministering Christ to it. It is this latter truth that is now insisted on, man's responsibility as to it being dwelt on here, as before the Spirit's competence and grace. The chapter divides into four parts.

(a) In the first place, (from 5:1-13) urgency and confidence in prayer are set before us, while the model prayer itself shows what is to be the spirit of the suppliant. In 5:13, all good gifts are summed up, as it were, in one-the Holy Spirit. "If ye, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit* to them that ask Him?" * We are not, I believe, to think here of that one gift of the Holy Ghost, as a Person dwelling in us, which constitutes the one indwelt a Christian:but, as the persons addressed and the whole context shows, rather of the help and ministry of the Spirit as daily proved. Our reception of the Spirit as indwelling is not dependent upon our prayers; nor having received it, do our prayers become less needed. The context of the passage is here, as mostly, its best interpretation*. As Christ's fullness is the one thing needful, so all gifts must be in fact included in this one, by which this fullness is communicated to us.

(b) From 5:14-28, man's rejection of the Holy Ghost is made the subject of the most solemn warnings. As the -Spirit glorifies Christ, so the devil will bring in Antichrist for the nation that refuses Him, and thus the unclean spirit (of idolatry) returns to its dwelling-place in Israel, out of which it had gone (5:26). And man, who loves independence, is in fact wholly dependent. For him, if it is not the Spirit of God, he is in the power of Satan to do with as he lists. Only Christ, by the Spirit of God, can effectually bind the strong man, who is not divided against himself. The kingdom of God was thus among men:blessed, above whatever natural relationship even to Christ Himself, were they who heard the word of God and kept it.

(c) The people sought a sign. They would find it in fact too late. For as Jonah (risen as from the dead) was a sign to the Ninevites, so the Son of Man would be to that evil generation (comp. Matt, 24:30). He would be manifested (in the clouds of heaven) to their condemnation. For God had not put the light-its own witness-under a bushel:what was wanting was the eye to take it in.

(d) Then, to the close of the chapter, the Lord exposes the unholiness of the Pharisees and lawyers, the leaders of the people, whose cleansing of the outside only made the inner uncleanness more defiling, "as graves which appear not;" while the lawyers loaded men with burdens they would not touch themselves, and built sepulchers for the prophets whom their fathers slew. They would be tested by new prophets, whom they would slay and persecute, to bring upon that generation the blood of all the prophets.

(5) 12:A call to sitting loose to the world, as men that are waiting for their lord. The twelfth chapter contains evidently one discourse; and its burden is that we be free in spirit from the world, as those whose hearts have found another Master. The first twelve verses exhort to confession of Him, and against fear of the world. Thence, to the thirty-first verse, against love of the world and care, the soul being sweetly encouraged to confidence in the perfect love of God. Then, to the forty-eighth, we are bidden to be ready for the coming of our Lord. And finally, in the closing verses, we have the effect of His first coming through the unbelief of men, and Israel going with their adversary-Moses, to whom they appealed–unto the judge, not to depart from prison until they paid the very last mite.

3. (13:-16:) The Gospel as Manifesting both God and Man.

(I) 13:Conditions of divine holiness in order to salvation. Sovereign as is God's grace, there is yet a necessary method in God's rescue of a sinner. It must be such as shall maintain the holiness and authority of God. This involves the conditions of which this chapter speaks. There are two, which give the two divisions:-

(a) The condition of repentance. The law declares this absolutely as to all:"Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish." The woman with the "spirit of infirmity" then shows that for weakness there is abundant help; divine goodness never can be stayed by divine ordinances; and so evident is this, that only manifest hypocrisy could dispute it.
(b) The second condition is, Christ sought and known in a day of grace. When once the master of the house rose up and shut the door, it would be too late. Moreover, outward acquaintance with Christ, and external relationship with Him, would not be enough. Those who were far off would enter from all sides into the kingdom of God, while Jews, of Abraham's seed, would be shut out. Jerusalem, so long rejecting the sheltering wing of God, would now be left of God desolate, until she should say, Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord.

(2) 14:Man's supper and God's. The opposition of man to God in nature and will is now made manifest in the two suppers of which the fourteenth . chapter speaks. Resistance to God's grace is the first thing, not for the first time, brought before us ; then, man's self-exalting spirit, which He can only abase; then, his seeking his own, in a carnal way, without faith. Hence his refusal of God's invitation :the field, the yoke of oxen, the wife, are more, in his eyes, than all of God's offers; and God must send out to the outcasts,-to the highways and hedges,-and even then "compel" men to come in, that His house may be filled. Yet, if men will keep to their (thought, God must of necessity keep His own; and they must count the cost of discipleship, not take it up lightly.

(3) 15:God's heart told out in salvation. And now we come to the three parables so familiar to every Christian heart, but which continually disclose fresh beauty and blessedness to the eye opened to behold it. For it is the heart of God that is seen,-His joy in finding and receiving the lost soul, famine-pressed to seek the bread in a Father's house. Here, Father, Son, and Spirit have one mind in the pursuit of one object.* * As the "shepherd" is, of course, Christ, and the Father is spoken of as such, without any figure, so, though much more enigmatically expressed, the "woman" gives us the ministry of the Holy Ghost, acting, doubtless, through the people who belong to Christ, that is the woman. And here I would ask my readers to observe in what section of this book this wonderful display of God in His grace is found. How significant is it that it is placed in the third section of the third part of the third gospel! I would once more very earnestly beg all students of the divine Word to test the truth of these divisions by the meaning of numbers as I have given them in the commencement of these "Key-Notes." If they are indeed not human fancy but of God, it is hard to overrate their importance in the study of the Word. Every number given furnishes a means of testing if it is really so*. The sheep simply wanders, is lost, and brought back. The piece of money must of necessity be sought and found. And in the case of the lost son, while he does indeed set out on his way back to the father's house, yet it is as forced by a necessity in which we see, not the will of man, but God's will supreme over it. Coming to work for necessary bread at a servant's wages, he comes to find at once the wealth of a father's love poured out over him,-the kiss, the ring, the robe, the banquet, unconditionally made his own.

(4) 16:1-13. Another's and our own. The Lord now (to His disciples) speaks of the responsibility in earthly things of those brought into a heavenly portion. Turned off as steward for unfaithfulness as man is with regard to the earth, he yet has in his hands his Master's goods; and as the unrighteous servant in the parable used what he had with a view to his own advantage after he should be dismissed, so grace privileges the believer to use the natural things, from the stewardship of which death dismisses, with a view to what is his eternal interest after death. And this for him is not unrighteousness, therefore:it is in faithfulness to his Master that this eternal blessing is to be found. This the next section emphasizes and enforces by a glimpse of the contrasted portions of souls beyond death.

(5) 16:14-31. Here or hereafter. In answer to covetous Pharisees, the Lord draws this picture of Lazarus and the rich man. The latter's case is what is emphasized. To choose one's good things here is to give up eternal blessedness. But here, faith in the word of God-better authenticated than if one returned from among the dead to wit-ness-is what enables one to choose for one's self a portion else unseen. We see in this section that grace does not set aside the "holiness, without which none shall see the Lord; "nor the principle of faith the works which it produces.

4. (xvii-19:27.)The Practical Fruits of Salvation:the Kingdom of God.

(I) xvii-18:8. The presentation of the kingdom of God. The practical power of the gospel is this, that it establishes the authority of God over our hearts and lives. And it is in Christ He is revealed:grace introduces this kingdom into our hearts. Otherwise, there is but one alternative-the judgment of God. This gives the thread of the present chapter, which seems to have three parts. In the first (10:i-io), the grace which is the spring of all right action characterizes, therefore, the walk of the receiver of it. "He cannot with impunity despise the weak. He must not be weary of pardoning his brother. If he have faith but as a grain of mustard-seed, the power of God is at his disposal. Nevertheless, when he has done all, he has but done his duty." Secondly (10:11-19), it is by the relief of personal need that the glory of Christ is revealed to the soul, and the one who thus finds Him is delivered from the claim of law. Thirdly (10:20-37), the kingdom of God comes thus among men, (not yet as outward display,) to be received in the person of the lowly Son of Man. But the disciples would soon desire to see one of His days, and would not see it; for He must suffer many things, and be rejected of that generation. From thence, the Lord goes on to speak-of His return and the judgment connected with it.

(2) 18:9-34. The character suited to the kingdom. We have now put before us the character suited for the kingdom. First, the publican, stricken with the consciousness of sin, is contrasted with the self-righteous Pharisee, and goes down to his house justified rather than he. Then the little child, the type of helplessness, is received, "for of such is the kingdom of God;" while the ruler finds in his riches that which excludes him from it, although salvation is among the things possible with God, where impossible with men. Peter suggests their own having left what they had, to follow Him. And the Lord, in reply, declares that whosoever had left anything for the kingdom of God's sake should receive much more even in the present time, and in the world to come eternal life. But the Master's feet would be foremost on the path in which the disciples were called to follow. He was to be delivered to the Gentiles, put-to death, and then to rise again.

(3) 18:35-43. Light through faith. We now find one who owns the Lord as King-the Son of David,-receiving sight wherewith he follows Him. "Thy faith hath saved thee," says the Lord. The subjection of faith to Christ is that which gives a single eye; and "the light of the body is the eye." "He that followeth Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life."

(4) 19:i-io. God works, and salvation. The story of Zacchaeus then distinguishes carefully between good works and salvation. It is plain that Zacchaeus’ answer to the Lord is the repelling of the charge that he was (as they said) in a special way a "sinner." Yet He, while owning him a "son of Abraham," maintains "salvation" to be a thing apart from any question of works, and for the "lost." It had come with Himself that day to Zacchaeus' house.

(5) 19:11-27. The reward of faithfulness and judgment of unbelief. This section closes now with the reward of works at the coming of Christ. The judgment of the unfaithful servant shows unfaithfulness to be simply unbelief.

The "times of the Gentiles" is the Lord's own expression for the whole period of their divinely appointed supremacy over Israel (Luke 21:24). It is the period, therefore, of Israel's rejection nationally, and begins with Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of the temple and city when Judah was carried away captive into Babylon, and ends with their deliverance from the assembled nations by the coming of the Lord from heaven (Zech. 14:3, 4, 9). It is the time of the four Gentile empires seen in the visions of Daniel and the king, with a noteworthy exception which we find in the book of Revelation, that there is a time in which the last empire "is not" (17:8), before its final appearance and complete overthrow. In this gap we stand, for none of the great world-empires exist, and all the political effort of the present is to prevent any possibility of the revival of such a thing. Napoleon's history is a warning of how easily God can break through these human counsels, and bring about what He has ordained.

For the history of the times of the Gentiles we are dependent largely upon prophecy, even although much of this be now historical fact. But the history of the Old Testament almost ceases with the subversion of the kingdom of Judah, and no mere human hand can supply the deficiency. It is God's view of things we are seeking, and "the Lord seeth not as man seeth." Thus man's history would be likely by itself to lead us only astray from the divine view, which alone has any real significance. We should hold fast, then, to prophetic scripture as to our sure guide through the mazes of human history.

But prophecy, while it throws light upon the darkness of the present, hastens ever onward to the accomplishment of God's counsels in the time before us, and indeed mainly in revealing this declares the present to us. The end is the time of manifestation, for the tree is known by its fruit. We misjudge constantly by anticipating this, mistaking the true harvest-time which it is the glory of Him who knows the end from the beginning to make certainly known.

This will prepare us for a character of prophecy to miss which will leave us in continual perplexity. All prophecy connects with the end, and by this means with every other prophecy. None is its own interpreter, as that passage in the second of Peter, so commonly perverted, really means.* *"No prophecy of Scripture is of separate"-literally, "its own"-"interpretation.*" And why? "For prophecy came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." It is all one plan, one counsel. To separate one part from the rest would be to make a rent in a seamless robe. Every seeming by-path connects at any rate with some road that ends not save in the city of the Great King. And as we approach this, the highway widens, the view lengthens, road after road comes in and pours its contribution into the swelling stream that hastens onward whither all ends- at the feet of the King Eternal.

It is to prophecy that we mainly turn, then, and for our present purpose especially to Daniel and its complement, the book of Revelation. And the fact that the history is at the present time prophetic has a significance which we must now consider.

With Israel in the Old Testament man's history morally ends. The law has given its judgment as to him. "There is none righteous,-no, not one" is the verdict it renders. If true of the favored nation, true then of all, for "as in water face answereth to face, so the heart of man to man."

There is indeed another trial to be made here, but for which we must pass on to the pages of the New Testament. Will he not, now convicted and exposed, be ready for grace when it is offered him ? Will not the prisoners of hope turn to the stronghold,-to the Mighty One on whom God has laid help? The answer to this is but the cross; and in this the full and final judgment of the world is found. In the meanwhile, the law has already, and to leave him thus shut up to grace, given its verdict. Man's history closes with Israel's ruin. The record closes. God may predict the future of him with whom He has now parted company; but He has parted company.

It was the throne of the Lord upon which Solomon had sat (I Chron. 29:23), and the ark of the "God of all the earth" had long before passed through the dried-up Jordan to the place of His rest. But now the glory of God had passed from the mercy-seat, and Ezekiel had seen, its lingering sorrowful departure from the city (Ezek. 11:23); and now God's title is in the books which speak of this time, the "God of heaven" (2 Chron. 36:23; Ezra, Nehemiah, and Daniel). The God of heaven gives Nebuchadnezzar the kingdoms of the earth, and the Gentile kingdom widens out soon into an empire such as never had been seen in Israel. Nebuchadnezzar is thus a king of kings,- a petty image again of Him who will be the "King of kings and Lord of lords;" somewhat also in the absolute authority possessed by Him. But there the resemblance ends. How different the character of the one who possesses this power, and how rapid the degeneration of it!

To him whom God had raised up He appears, that he may know the hand that had raised him up; making him debtor too for the interpretation of his dream to one of the scanty remnant of the people he had overthrown, that he may learn the vanity of his false gods in the presence of Him to whom they are opposed. This dream makes him aware of the fact that He who had placed can displace, and of the continual degradation of power in the kingdoms which succeed his own until at last they all together come to an end, smitten by a kingdom which becomes really world-wide, and which stands forever. About this final kingdom little is said; only that it is of no human shaping, but set up in a peculiar way by the God of heaven Himself, that it destroys all others, and abides. It is the vanity and corruptibility of all mere earthly power that is insisted on:a homily against pride and independence of heart read to one who is in the greatest need of it.

In this view of the kingdoms, the debasing of material shows the decay of power in the successive forms. The Babylonian was the head of gold, owing no allegiance save to God Himself. In the Persian-the silver.-the law when made, although the king might make it, could not be altered even by himself. The kingdom of Alexander-the "brazen-tunicked Greeks"-had risen on the ruins of a pure democracy, of which it retained many elements; while Rome, which succeeded this, though strong as iron, was in principle entirely such, the power of the emperors being gained by their assuming to themselves a number of democratic offices. Finally, in the latter days of the divided empire, the inroads of barbarian nations mixed the iron with clay. There was no real cohesion, and the heterogeneous elements falling apart, the kingdoms of Europe arose out of this division. Cut this was not the smiting of the image with the stone. This belongs to a still future time, as we shall see, if the Lord will, as we proceed.

The next four chapters of Daniel show, step by step, the character which these world-powers assume, and are the preface to the seventh chapter, in which they are viewed prophetically in their history as before God, the history in which these features are manifested. The third chapter shows the assumption of control over the conscience, which has characterized man's rule wherever he has had the necessary power. Nebuchadnezzar's image is marked as that which he has set up. To refuse to worship in the prescribed way is rebellion, therefore, against himself. How invariably, we may say, has the civil power assumed to be the religious also, wherever it could. Liberty of conscience,-precious as the boon is,-is in our days the sign of the decay of absolute authority, and it will not last, but give way finally to the worst form of spiritual despotism which the world has ever seen. But this, as in the case before us, surely leads into opposition to God in the persecution of His people. Others may escape by submission, but not they; although the Son of God is with them in the furnace.

The fourth chapter is the descent of the kingdoms from what has at least the form of a man, as in the second chapter, to the beast-form in which they are seen in the seventh. It is the pride of power which forgets God which levels man with the beast which has none. Nebuchadnezzar claims the great city over which he rules as built by his own power and for his own glory. In the same hour he is driven to the beasts, until he has learnt that the "Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will." Then he is restored, but the lesson remains, not, alas! to avert the doom of the Gentile empires, but as a note of warning for him who has the secret of the Lord.

The fifth chapter shows us the moral declension still progressing unchecked. Belshazzar openly lifts himself up against the Lord of heaven, exalting above Him the senseless idols of silver and gold, and fingers of doom come forth and write his sentence before his eyes.

Thus the Babylonian empire runs its course, and is followed by the Persian; but the Persian we see also, in the next chapter, brought in to complete the terrible picture of decline, ending in complete apostasy. The king exalts himself above all that is called God, or that is worshiped, making a decree that for thirty days no petition is to be asked of any god or man except himself. That Darius himself is not the real author of this decree, and is personally very different from what it would imply, does not alter the significance of this terrible act, -the presage of that last antichristian blasphemy for which the Gentile powers come to an end, while Israel, like Daniel, is delivered from the paw of the lion.

The seventh chapter now gives these empires, seen in the prophetic vision, as four wild beasts. But attention is concentrated upon the last, and that, too, as seen at the time of the end. It has already its ten horns, corresponding to the ten toes of Nebuchadnezzar's image, and then there arises another little horn, on account of whose blasphemous words, the beast is destroyed, and his body given to the burning flame. But the kingdom now becomes His in whom meet the characters at once of the Son oi Man and of the Ancient of days; and "His dominion is an everlasting dominion, that shall not pass away, and His kingdom that which shall not be destroyed."

Thus when Israel's course is ended for the present in utter ruin, God takes up the Gentiles, (not as yet to reveal Himself in Christ to them-that is another and totally different thing, as will, I trust, in its due place appear,-but) to give them their trial also. This will seem strange and contradictory at first sight, for has it not been just said that with Israel in the Old Testament man's history morally ends? That is surely true also. In all this history of the Gentiles, there is no fresh stirring of that question. No law, no moral code, is given to them. No revelations at all are made, save only Nebuchadnezzar's vision; although Cyrus speaks of a charge which God had given to him to build Him a house in Jerusalem. This he might readily have found in Isaiah's prophecy (chap. 44:28), and probably was shown it there. At any rate, the founders of the first two empires were made perfectly aware from whom it was they had received their greatness. Here all personal communication ends. God does not bring them nigh, as He had brought Israel. He has significantly left the earth, putting It afresh, in the most decisive way since Noah's time, into man's hand, but with scarcely a word as to its government. There was His written Word, indeed, if they had heart for it; for ignorant He took care, as we see in Cyrus, that they should not be. And there He leaves it. ( To be continued.)

"PETER, the Jewish apostle, tells us that Christ "once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God." Somehow, this mighty truth, in practical power, has been ignored of late years. The immediate effect of the death of Christ is to bring, in love and righteous-ness, the sinner to God. Confidence, too, is established in the heart. God is known, and becomes the "rock" of the heart, and one's everlasting portion. (Ps. 73:26.)

This truth of being brought now to God is not to be regarded as a mere abstract statement, nor to be accepted as a cold, doctrinal point of scriptural truth. It is a present, blessed, joyous fact,-one full of richest consolation to the afflicted saint, and of immense moral power in moments of human weakness. Is any thing, great or small, a difficulty to God? Can any power of evil prevail against God's elect? Can our poverty make too many or great demands upon His grace-the grace and love of Him who gave His Son to die? Like Israel of old, we are a people without resources; in the desert, too, without one spring of blessing; in the wilderness, without a path through it But Israel's God is ours. He is our resource; our springs are in Him; He is our Shepherd and Guide. God with us all along the way and in our midst is faith's grand answer to every human need and sorrow.
W.S. (Scotland.)