Appearances Before the Advent
Most of the time which Abraham spent in the Land of Promise, he sojourned at Mamre. With its any uplands — its hill-sides sprinkled with olives, vines, and cherry-trees — its turf dappled with daisies and the star-of-Bethlehem — it was a charming retreat; and what made it still more delightful was a thicket of evergreen trees, under which he had formed his encampment. Here, in the heat of the day, Abraham would often sit at the entrance of his patriarchal pavilion; and as the bees murmured in the dark foliage overhead, and soft winds passed into the tent, it was pleasant to look through half-shut lids and espy the herdmen and their flocks huddled together in the shadow of the distant copse; and amidst the sunshine, with its sleepy oppression, it was pleasant to close these lids and muse on the wonderful past till slumber succeeded, and life’s morning in Ur, the appearance of the God of glory, and the more wonderful future, floated and flickered through the noon-day vision.
On one such occasion the patriarch received a remarkable visit. He observed three men approaching, and, with the impulse of the olden hospitality, he hasted forth to meet them. As soon as he was near enough, in one of them he perceived something so pre-eminent and prince-like, — we could almost fancy something which so brought to mind the days of Ur and “the God of glory,” — that with a lowly prostration he exclaimed, “My Lord, if now I have found favour in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant;” and then, extending his welcome to all the three, he added, “Let a little water, I pray you, be fetched, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree; and I will fetch a morsel of bread, and comfort ye your hearts.” They accepted the invitation. They sat down in the leafy shade; and when Sarah’s cakes, and the calf from the herd, with milk and butter, were placed on the board, they partook of the friendly cheer; and when they had ended their repast, and when the principal guest had rewarded the kindness of his host by announcing that the time at length was come, and that the son of promise should now be born, Sarah’s incredulous laughter was rebuked by the significant challenge, “Is anything too hard for Jehovah?”
But if any doubt as to the heavenly character of the speaker remained, that doubt was speedily dispelled. When the meal was emled and the day was
‘4^* Of TH* growing cool, the travellers resumed their journey. They set their faces eastward, and Abraham accompanied them. They soon reached an eminence from which they beheld a glorious prospect. Embosomed amongst the mountains stretched a little paradise. Fringed with palms, luxuriant with tropic verdure, and reflecting the purple cliffs from the tranquil bends of its glistening river, it almost looked as if a fragment of old Eden had drifted down the stream and stranded among these silent hills; and as the spectator gazed on the mighty orchard, and heard the hum ascending from the smokeless villages, he might be pardoned if he envied the inhabitants of such a happy valley. But Abraham’s companions looked grave, and as the two subordinates went down the steep, Abraham and the other were left alone. That other now stood forth in Deity confessed. He told Abraham that this lovely scene was about to become the theatre of a fearful visitation. ‘The place is fair, but the people are vile. Their sin is very grievous. As here we stand, there comes up the lowing of the herds, the carol of the evening bird; but that which reaches the ear of God is the cry of abominable iniquities — the looe jest, the ribald song, the voice of lust and violence. And although the landscape is beautiful, on account of its horrible inhabitants Heaven cannot look at it. It is time to pour over it the flaming annihilation, and blot it out of being.’
And Abraham’s face grew pale. The doomed region contained those whom he dearly loved; and, falling at the feet of the celestial speaker, he exclaimed, “Oh, let not the Lord be angry,” and with an affable and yielding arbiter he urged his suit till he hoped that he had won a reprieve for the guilty cities. Then “the Lord went his way as soon as he had left communing with Abraham.”
No one can doubt that the patriarch’s Visitor was a Divine Person; and any one who considers the entire facts of the case and the fitness of things, can have as little doubt that this Divine Person was He who afterwards said of Himself, “Before Abraham was, I am,” and who enunciated the great truth, “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” He it was who said, “Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I do?” and it was He who, when the two angels passed on and entered Sodom, remained alone with the patriarch, and confided to him the secret of the coming overthrow. It was He who, so exorable and so ready to pardon, gave in six times over to His servant’s intercession, and said, “For the sake of ten righteous, I will not destroy it;” and who, when a fearful necessity inverted the vials of vengeance, “remembered Abraham,” and rescued the kindred of His friend.
A century and a half passed on — a century and a half of those ample and deliberate days, when incidents were few and impressions lasted long. Abraham slept by Sarah’s side in the cave of Machpelah, but God was mindful of His covenant, and in the sunny world outside the sepulchre He was making that covenant to grow. Isaac’s son and Abraham’s grandson was returning from a foreign sojourn, and was bringing with him eleven sons of his own, and a mighty retinue. And he was nearing the Promised Land, but still on the further side of Jordan. Word had reached him that an angry brother was on the way to meet him with an overwhelming company; and, after making the best arrangements to propitiate Esau, he was now left alone in darkness and in solitude. To-morrow would decide his destiny, and whilst others slumbered in the tents, Jacob, anxious and wakeful, wandered down to the sides of Jabbok, and cried in his extremity to the God of Bethel. But instead of heaven opening, instead of some friendly sign from the excellent glory, the patriarch found himself suddenly assaulted. It might be Esau himself, or it might be some supernatural opponent; but it seemed as if a man were wrestling with him, bearing him backward, twisting, thrusting, and straining, and striving to hurl him to the ground. It was a strange, mysterious conflict, with no spectators except the stars, and in a silence only broken by the babbling of the brook; yet, silent and insuperable as he was, Jacob began to feel that his opponent was not an enemy. He was not an enemy, and yet he withstood the pilgrim’s prayer; and though Jacob “wept and made supplication,” as well as struggled in his earnest agony, he could not extort his request, till the day-spring closed the strife, and with a touch that left him lame for life, and with a blessing that made him illustrious to all eternity, the angel vanished. u And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel; for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.” Jacob gave the place a new name, and God gave a new name to the patriarch. “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel; for as a prince hast thou power with God and with man, and hast prevailed.” The supplanter had come out in a new character, and earned a new title. By this valiant constancy as man with man, he had evinced himself a hero and a king of men; by this fervid importunity as a creature with his Creator, he had come out a prince of believers, a favourite with Heaven, the conqueror of condescending Omnipotence, a pattern of perseverance in prayer.
Two centuries and a half passed on — four hundred years since the flames of Sodom were quenched in the Dead Sea, and its ashes buried in that sullen sepulchre. The descendants of Abraham and Israel were now bondsmen in Egypt; and in the grim solitudes of Sinai, one of the proscribed race, a man who had been reared in a palace, but who was now reduced to do the work of a herdsman, was watching the flock, but was revolving higher themes, when he was suddenly startled by a strange phenomenon. A blaze of light drew his eyes in the direction of a certain shrub or tree, which for a moment he might have fancied had caught fire; but although with its brilliant pyramid it outshone the noon, he quickly noticed that it was not really burning. It was transfigured, and its leaves and branches shone as through a tent of flame; but instead of curling and crackling in the heat, it continued unconsumed, and from its excellent glory a voice hailed the astonished exile: “Draw not nigh, but put off thy shoes from off thy feet; for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” Had this been all, Moses might have imagined that “the angel of the Lord” who appeared to him in the bush, and whose voice he now heard, was a mere ministering spirit, one of the many members of the heavenly host; but the speaker, “angel” as he was, went on to add, “I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Then Moses hid his face, and from between the leafy cherubim and from within the flaming canopy the voice proceeded:” I have surely seen the affliction of my people in Egypt, and I have heard their cry: and I am come down to deliver them, and to bring them unto a good land and a large, a land flowing with milk p
and honey. Come now, therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, that thou may est bring forth my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.” And when the timid Hebrew trembled at the task, when he shrank from the prospect of appearing before Pharaoh, in order to disarm his fears the speaker added, “Certainly I will be with th.e.” Accordingly, from the New Testament we gather that the Son of God, the Saviour, accompanied that exodus; that it was His voice which shook Mount Sinai; that it was He whom the murmurers tempted at Massah, when so many were destroyed of serpents; and that He was the spiritual rock of whom the believers among them drank as oft as they resorted to their Divine conductor and unfailing companion.”
The significance of these passages is considerably impaired, owing to a certain vagueness which attends the use of the word “angel.” That word we are apt to associate with celestial beings, higher than ourselves, but inferior to the Creator. And doubtless the whole heavenly host are angels; but there is nothing to prevent a Divine Person, or a human person either, from acting as an angel. An “angel” means a “messenger” or “missionary,” an “envoy,” “one who is sent;” and just as early evangelists were angels or messengers of the Church, so the Son of God was
Heb. xii. 26; 1 Cor. x. 9, 4. The evidence on this subject ia arranged with consummate ability and clearness in Principal Hill’s “Lectures in Divinity,” book iii.
the messenger or angel of the Father. And the only way to educe a consistent meaning from the passages now quoted, is to merge for a moment the ambiguous intermediate word, the u angel,” and fix our regards on the two extremes — the “Man” and u the Mighty God” — in one word, Messiah, the Divine Missionary, the Messenger of the Covenant, God manifest in flesh, the Angel-Jehovah.
With this clue how readily all the dispensations run into one another, and how real is the identity of all believers! Yes, the Divine Friend, with whom Enoch walked, is the same as He who on the road to Emmaus made the heart of Cleopas and his comrade burn within them; and that Alpha and Omega of all his affections who well-nigh detached from the imprisoning rock and the encumbering clay the exile of Patmos, is the same Jesus who by another name talked with our sinless progenitors in the fragrant bowers of Paradise. He who said to Moses going up to a fierce tyrant, u Certainly I will be with thee,” is the same Saviour, so sympathetic and so mighty, who said to apostles going out into a frowning world, “And lo! I am with you alway!” and He whom the eastern monarch saw walking in the midst of the burning pile with the three unscathed martyrs, is the same u Son of Man “• whom through the opened heaven Stephen saw at the right hand of God, and to whom, with latest breath, he cried, u Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Nay, that Almighty Friend who was the sole companion of the Hebrew Lawgiver’s dying hour, and who took all the charge of Moses’ funeral, is the same who said of Himself, “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” and whose own lifeless form at last was laid in Joseph’s sepulchre.
And do we err when we fancy a resemblance between these earlier visits and certain incidents which happened after the eventual Incarnation? Is there nothing in the burning bush which transports our thoughts to Tabor? and in the awful attraction which made Moses “draw near,” and the overwhelming glory which next instant bore him to the dust, was there nothing akin to that consciousness of encircling heaven which made the spectators at once bury their faces and yet cry from the midst of their amazement, “Master, it is good to be here?” At the ford of Jabbok is there nothing which sends us away to the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, and, as a twinpicture to the father wrestling for all his family, exhibits a poor, weak woman importuning for her only child, till He who said to the one, “Thy name shall be called Israel, for as a prince thou hast prevailed with God,” amazed at a faith such as He had found, “no, not in Israel,” at length yielded to a tenacity which silence, and rebuffs, and seeming reluctance could not shake off, exclaiming, “O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt?” And in that God-like form which looked down so sadly on the doomed and lovely cities of the plain, and which, for the sake of a redeeming few, would so willingly have saved, is there no resemblance to One who, two thousand years thereafter, stood upon a neighbouring height, and, looking down on another doomed but lovely city, burst into tears, and cried, “If thou hadst known in this thy day the things that belong to thy peace! — but now they are for ever hid from thine eyes.”
The attire may alter, but the wearer does not change. The missionary may talk one language in England and another in India; ])ut his mind is in either land the same. The attire, the mode of manifestation, the expressive actions, the style of language vary, as they fit into the several ages, from the primitive archaic time down to the days of the Gospel story: but throughout we can recognise ever reappearing the self-same Revealer of the Father, the self-same Prophet of the Church — that very Son of God who saved the first sinner, who saved the worst, and who seeks to save ourselves, “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.” And, on the other hand, as far as the fundamental ideas are concerned, the Church of God on earth has all along been one. It has always been on the ground of an atonement, whether anticipated or accomplished, that the sinner has found pardon and acceptance. It has always been through the Mediator — through the Manifester of the Father and the Saviour of men — that the believer has held communion with God. And in this sense, — as sinners who pled the Great Sacrifice; as believers who communed with palpable and articulate Deity, who worshipped the Angel-Jehovah, who adored God manifest in the flesh, — all alike have been Christians. Malachi was a Christian, and Zechariah, and Isaiah. The sweet singer of Israel was a Christian, and there was no truer Christian in this sense than Moses himself. The father of the faithful was a Christian, and so was Noah, and so was Enoch, and so, we would fain hope, was the father of mankind — the first Adam himself.