Exodus 12:2

A NEW START

‘This month shall be … the first month of the year to you.’

Exodus 12:2

Egypt behind—Sinai before—Canaan beyond—this is the exact account of the position of Israel when God said to him, ‘This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you.’ Redemption was the starting point of the new: from it all that follows shall take a new character, a new life.

The text is chosen, all will understand, not with a view to historical retrospects, but to the circumstances of this day, and of this congregation—kept alive by Him who created, to take part in the public worship of the first Sunday of a new year. ‘This shall be to you the beginning of months: the first month of the year to you.’

I. The idea of a new start is naturally attractive to all of us.—We are fatigued, we are wearied, we are dissatisfied, and justly so, with the time past of our lives. O for a gift of amnesty and of oblivion! O for some one to say to us, ‘The past is gone and done with—nothing shall come back from it to scare, to encumber, or to accuse,—God and man have agreed together to bury it in the earth, to drown it in the depths of the sea!’ Let us have a ‘beginning of months’ once again; let this be indeed ‘the first month’ of a second first year!

There are senses, indeed, in which this is impossible. The continuity of life cannot be broken. Neither lapse of time, nor division of time; neither transition from childhood to youth, nor from youth to uttermost age; neither change of place, nor change of position, nor change of circumstance, nor change of companionship; neither joy nor sorrow; neither prosperity nor disappointment; neither pain nor love (the two most powerful factors in man’s life) can snap in twain the unity of this being, or make me, save for a few rare and fallacious moments, so much as dream that I am not the thing I was. When any accidental evidence comes to me out of the past—the sight of an old letter, to me or from me—the greeting of a former schoolfellow, unseen for twenty or thirty years—I start as I recognise my present self in the mirror of that past—the same ‘mixture of a man’—the same good points, whether of mind or heart, which I hoped were new—the same bad points, whether of feeling or character, which I flattered myself were the creatures of circumstance, recent, accidental, evanescent. I seem to understand—and it is no pleasant discovery—in such confrontings of the old self and the new, how it is that Scripture is able to fix that character which to us appears ever dissolving—how it may be possible for God in the great day, without witnesses, without a jury, to judge a man as one thing all along, all through, and not many—even to write his epitaph, as He has done for so many in the pages of His Book—‘He did that which was good,’ or, ‘He did that which was evil,’ ‘in the sight of the Lord’—his name, and his mother’s name, and his birth, and his burial!

There is a continuity, a unity, an identity, which annihilation only—nay, not annihilation—could destroy. And there are those who overlook this—deal too lightly, too flippantly, with this re-beginning which is our text—are startled, almost angry, if they find the Israel of Sinai bewraying by his murmurings his identity with the Israel of Egypt’s flesh-pots, or the Israel of Canaan itself dwelling contentedly amidst ‘abominable idolatries’ which he was commissioned and charged and set there to exterminate. Against this false teaching we must earnestly warn such as will hearken. It will come to us, most often, in the garb of evangelical doctrine, true and scriptural and salutary in its principle—wrong only, yet most wrong, in its inferences and its corollaries.

II. ‘The beginning of months’ is made so by an Exodus.—The Passover, the sprinkling of sacrificial blood, the faith thus evidenced, the part thus taken, the choice thus made, the lot thus cast in with God and His people as against Egypt and its ‘pleasures of sin for a season’—this was the starting-point. Brethren, it is so still. Redemption, the Redemption of the world—undertaken as at this season, completed on Calvary, by our Lord Jesus Christ—this is the groundwork of the new life. It is no re-commencement of the life to write a new year in our books or on our letters. This is indeed a change marked in sand, written in water—a mere name, a mere fancy, if we treat it as anything but just a signal or symbol of God’s call and of our duty. We waken in the new as we slept in the old. This is nothing. If there be in any of us a real desire for change—for a life different in kind from the former—for a life higher, nobler, purer, more real, more consistent, more spiritual—plant your foot firmly upon redemption. See the Paschal Lamb bearing the sins of the world. Behold Him, Divine and Human, undertaking to deliver man, coming into the world to save sinners, making atonement for us, opening the kingdom of heaven to all believers. View the enterprise in this large, bold, broad way. Believe that it was successful. Believe that your sins were there. See God, your Father, in His Son Jesus Christ: and doubt not that He who spared not Him will spare nothing else that is good.

Dean Vaughan.

Illustration

(1) ‘There is nothing so great, nothing so supreme for thought now, as the coming, in our wrong-doing world, of that kingdom of Christ which holy men from the beginning of time have looked forward to. And, as we enter on another year, when new and gigantic developments of the working of evil sound alarm, prayer is what the Spirit is pressing on us.’

(2)‘Charge not thyself with the weight of the year,

Child of the Master, faithful and dear.

Choose not the cross for the coming week,

For that is more than He bids thee seek.

Bend not the arms for to-morrow’s load:

Thou may’st leave that to thy gracious God,

“Daily” only He saith to thee.

“Take up thy cross and follow Me.” ’

(3) ‘God is the ruler of time. We do not invent years and months and weeks. These are really, when searched into, the creations and appointments of the Divine Power. New days are new opportunities. New days enable us to forget the evil of all yesterdays. Consider the dawning year in this light, and the opening day. The true birthday of a man is the day on which his soul was born into a purer and nobler life. A birthday may be determined by a vow. The birthday of the body is the poorest of all anniversaries. When the great idea entered the mind, inspiring and ennobling it, and filling it with Divine enthusiasm, the man was truly born. We are entitled to date our existence from our regeneration, otherwise our memory might become an intolerable torment. Regeneration destroys the recollections of remorse. Man is breaking a Divine ordinance when he goes beyond the day of his re-creation, and insists upon making alive again all the iniquities that corrupted and degraded his earliest life. Beautiful is the word beginning. It is one of the first words in the Bible. God Himself alone could have invented that word. It is a dewy term; it is tender with the brightness of morning; it is beautiful with the bloom of Heaven; a very holy and most helpful word. Blessed is the man who knows he has begun his life again, and who can confidently date his best existence from a point in time which separates him from every evil and accusing memory.’

(4) ‘It is a good thing for us to keep up such anniversaries as affect us as a people, or as households, or as believers in Jesus Christ. “He clung,” says the biographer of Baron Bunsen, “with affection to signs and seasons, and days and years, though not to the extent that would have degenerated into superstition; a date once marked by an event for good seemed to him a point round which all that was good and desirable might cluster for ever.” ’