"God, before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac did walk, the God
which fed me all my life long unto this day, the Angel which
redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads."
But it was not merely to the chosen father of the chosen nation that
this pitying Friend and Saviour appeared. When the poor, passionate,
desperate slave-girl Hagar was wandering in the wilderness,
struggling with the pride and passion of her unsubdued nature,
he who follows the one wandering sheep appeared and spoke to her
(Gen. xvi.). He reproved her passionate impatience; he counseled
submission; he promised his protection and care to the son that
should be born of her and the race that should spring from her. Wild
and turbulent that race of men should be; and yet there was to be a
Saviour, a Care-taker, a Shepherd for them. "And she called the name
of the Lord that spake unto her, Thou God seest me; for she said,
Have I also here looked after him that seeth me?"
Afterwards, when the fiery, indomitable passions of the slave-woman
again break forth and threaten the peace of the home, and she is
sent forth into the wilderness, the Good Shepherd again appears to
her. Thus is the story told (Gen. xxi.):--
"And the water was spent in the bottle, and she cast the child
under one of the shrubs, and she went and sat down a good way
off, for she said, Let me not see the death of the child. And
God heard the voice of the lad, and the angel of the Lord called
to Hagar out of heaven, saying, What aileth thee, Hagar? fear
not. God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is. Arise,
lift up the lad, hold him in thy hand, for I will make of him
a great nation. And God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of
water."
Thus did he declare himself the Care-taker and Saviour not of the
Jews merely, but of the Gentiles. It was he who afterwards declared
that he was the living bread which came down from heaven, which he
gave for the life of the WHOLE WORLD.
Afterwards, in the history of Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, we
read of a divine Being who talked with him in a visible intimacy:--
"And it came to pass, as Moses entered into the tabernacle, the
cloudy pillar descended and stood at the door of the tabernacle,
and Jehovah talked with Moses. And all the people saw the cloudy
pillar stand at the tabernacle door, and all the people rose up
and worshiped, each man in his tent door. _And Jehovah spake
unto Moses, face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend._"
Some record of this strange conversation is given. Moses was a
man of wonderful soul, in whom was the divine yearning; he longed
to know more and more of his God, and at last beseeches to have
the full beatific vision of the divine nature in its glory; but
the answer is: "Thou canst not see my face [in its divine glory],
for there shall no man see me and live." That overpowering vision
was not for flesh and blood; it would dissolve the frail bonds of
mortality and set the soul free, and Moses must yet live, and labor,
and suffer.
What an affecting light this interview of Moses sheds on that scene
in the New Testament, where, just before his crucifixion, the
disciples see their Master in the glory of the heavenly world, and
with him Moses and Elijah, "who spake with him of his decease, which
he should accomplish at Jerusalem,"--Moses, who had been taught by
the divine Word in the wilderness how to organize all that system of
forms and sacrifices which were to foreshadow and prepare the way
for the great Sacrifice--the great Revealer of God to man. We see
these noble souls, the two grandest prophets of the Old Testament,
in communion with our Lord about that last and final sacrifice which
was to fulfill and bring to an end all others.
A little later on, in the Old Testament history, we come to a time
recorded in the Book of Judges when the chosen people, settled in
the land of Canaan, sunk in worldliness and sin, have forgotten the
Lord Jehovah, and as a punishment are left to be bitterly oppressed
and harassed by the savage tribes in their neighborhood. The nation
was in danger of extinction. The stock from which was to come
prophets and apostles, the writers of the Bible which we now read,
from which was to come our Lord Jesus Christ, was in danger of being
trampled out under the heel of barbarous heathen tribes. It was a
crisis needing a deliverer. Physical strength, brute force, was the
law of the day, and a deliverer was to be given who could overcome
force by superior force.
Again the mysterious stranger appears; we have the account in Judges
xiii.
A pious old couple who have lived childless hitherto receive an
angelic visitor who announces to them the birth of a deliverer. And
the woman came and told her husband, saying, "A man of God came unto
me, and his countenance was like the countenance of an angel of God,
very terrible; but I asked him not whence he was, neither told he
me his name." This man, she goes on to say, had promised a son to
them who should deliver Israel from the hand of the Philistines.
Manoah then prays to God to grant another interview with the
heavenly messenger.
The prayer is heard; the divine Man again appears to them and gives
directions for the care of the future child,--directions requiring
the most perfect temperance and purity on the part of both mother
and child. The rest of the story is better given in the quaint and
beautiful words of the Bible:--
"And Manoah said to the angel of Jehovah, I pray thee let us
detain thee till we shall have made ready a kid for thee. And
the angel of Jehovah said to Manoah, Though thou detain me
I will not eat of thy bread; and if thou wilt offer a burnt
offering thou must offer it unto Jehovah. For Manoah knew not
that he was an angel of Jehovah. And Manoah said, What is thy
name? that when thy sayings come to pass we may do thee honor.
And the angel of the Lord said unto him, Why askest thou my
name, seeing that it is secret? So Manoah took a kid with a meat
offering and offered it upon a rock to the Lord; and the angel
did wonderously, and Manoah and his wife looked on. For it came
to pass, when the flame went up to heaven from off the altar,
that the angel of Jehovah ascended in the flame on the altar,
and Manoah and his wife fell on their faces on the ground. And
Manoah said, We shall surely die, for we have seen God."
This tender, guiding Power, this long-suffering and pitying Saviour
of Israel, appears to us in frequent glimpses through the writings
of the prophets.
Isaiah says, "In all their affliction He was afflicted, and the
Angel of his Presence saved them; in his love and his pity he
redeemed them, and he bore and carried them all the days of old."
It is this thought that gives an inexpressible pathos to the
rejection of Christ by the Jews. St. John begins his gospel by
speaking of this divine Word, who was with God in the beginning,
and was God; that he was in the world, and the world was made by
him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own
received him not.
This gives an awful, pathetic meaning to those tears which Christ
shed over Jerusalem, and to that last yearning farewell to the
doomed city:--
"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and
stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have
gathered thy children as a hen doth gather her brood under her
wings, and ye would not."
It gives significance to that passage of Revelation where Christ is
called "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world."
Not alone in the four years when he ministered on earth was he the
suffering Redeemer; he was always, from the foundation of the world,
the devoted sacrifice: bearing on his heart the sinning, suffering,
wandering race of man, afflicted in their afflictions, bearing their
griefs and carrying their sorrows, the friend of the Jew and the
Gentile, the seeker for the outcast, the guide of the wanderer,
the defender of the helpless, the consoler of the desolate, the
self-devoted offering to and for the sins of the world.
In all these revelations of God, one idea is very precious. He
reveals himself not as a fixed Fate--a mighty, crushing, inexorable
Power--but as a Being relenting, tender, yearning towards the
race of man with infinite tenderness. He suffers himself to be
importuned; he hides himself that he may be sought, and, although he
is omnipotent, though with one touch he might weaken and paralyze
human strength, yet he suffers human arms to detain and human
importunity to conquer him, and he blesses the man that will not let
him go except he bless. On this scene Charles Wesley has written his
beautiful hymn beginning,--
"Come, O thou Traveler unknown."
The struggles, the sorrows, and aspirations of the soul for an
unknown Saviour have never been more beautifully told.