EXPATRIATION 1-7. Despite the awful doom of the antediluvians, the people after the flood soon became terribly wicked. While they constantly ploughed up the bones of their antediluvian predecessors, fear and trembling appalled them so they were constantly resolving to be good. Ah! the road to hell i... [ Continue Reading ]
REGENERATION AND SANCTIFICATION 8. While the physical birth emblematizes regeneration, it is equally true that physical circumcision typifies sanctification. The Jewish law was to circumcise eight days after birth, illustrating the fact that we should get sanctified about eight days after conversio... [ Continue Reading ]
JOSEPH TYPICAL OF CHRIST 9-16. The symbolism of Joseph is entirely in the royal line of Jesus. In his deep disgrace and humiliation, slavery and imprisonment, he emblematizes Christ in His first advent; while crowned with gold, mounted on a golden chariot, ruling over all the land, he typifies Chris... [ Continue Reading ]
MOSES TYPICAL OF CHRIST 17-40. While Joseph so beautifully and vividly emblematizes King Jesus, both in His humiliation and in His glory, Moses equally grandly emblematizes the mediatorial Christ, himself not only the prophet and legislator of Israel and the world, but the mediator of the old coven... [ Continue Reading ]
_“At which time Moses was born, and was beautiful unto God.”_ The E. V. does not give you the clear translation of this beautiful passage, which reveals that Moses was beautiful in the divine estimation, being doubtless the finest looking baby the world had ever seen. [Of course, Adam and Eve were p... [ Continue Reading ]
_“He having been deposited, the daughter of Pharaoh took him and adopted him unto herself for a son.”_ Contemporary Egyptian history says that this daughter of Pharaoh, the heir to the throne in the blood-royal, her father now very old, was then a widow without an heir, her husband having fallen on... [ Continue Reading ]
_“Indeed Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians: and was mighty in his words and deeds.”_ God needed in Moses the highest scholarship in the world to reveal the Bible, write the Pentateuch and legislate for all mankind. Therefore He avails Himself of the Egyptians, whose philosophers... [ Continue Reading ]
_“And when the time of the fortieth year was being fulfilled to him, it came into his heart to visit his brethren, the sons of Israel.”_ Here culminates a crisis, more copiously revealed in Hebrews 11:24-28, where it is said that he “refused to be called the son of Pharaoh, preferring to suffer aff... [ Continue Reading ]
Cultured all his life in the Egyptian idolatry, flooded with all the learning of the world, the greatest military general on the globe, born with redoubtable physical courage, and a total stranger to fear, Moses unhesitatingly dashes away to the brick kilns and mortar-yards, quarries and mines of hi... [ Continue Reading ]
Out of the burning bush Jehovah now commissions the sons of Amram to go and preach to the Pharaohs and princes of Egypt. Even the earth in that august presence is so sacred that sandals must be removed from their feet. The Arabs in that country still adhere pertinaciously to that precept, positively... [ Continue Reading ]
_“Seeing I have seen the affliction of my people, who are in Egypt, and have heard their groaning, and come down to deliver them; now come hither, I will send thee into Egypt.”_ The divine economy, God's method with man and the idiosyncrasies of salvation, is the same in all ages and dispensations.... [ Continue Reading ]
THE CHURCH 36-38. _“This is the one who is in the church in the wilderness along with the angel speaking to him in Mt. Sinai and with our fathers.”_ As ecclesia, the word constantly used by the Holy Ghost for church, from ek, “out,” and _kaleoo_, “call,” simply means “the called out,” _i. e_., all t... [ Continue Reading ]
IDOLATRY IN THE WILDERNESS 40-43. While Moses tarries forty days on the summit of Sinai, complimented as no other man with the very audience of Jehovah, revealing to him the wonderful truth which he wrote in the Bible, the apostatizing myriads of Israel, their faith faltering, turned back to the go... [ Continue Reading ]
_“And God turned away and gave them up to worshipping the host of heaven,” i. e_., the sun, moon, and stars. I do not wonder that they worshipped the unparalleled splendor of an Egyptian sky, where clouds are never seen, rain never falls, and the sun in his glory accumulates a splendor and grandeur... [ Continue Reading ]
_“You took up the statue of Moloch and the star of your god Remphan, images which you made, to worship them; and I will carry you away beyond Babylon.”_ Moloch is the Tyrian word and Remphan the Coptic for the Hebrew word Baal, all meaning the sun-god, which was so extensively and extravagantly wors... [ Continue Reading ]
CHURCH EDIFICES 44-50. Here Stephen alludes to the grand spiritual meaning of the portable tabernacle which God dictated to Moses on Sinai and the beautiful symbolic significance of Solomon's temple. As the great majority of the Christian church at the present day, preachers and people, are living i... [ Continue Reading ]
Jesus, E. V., in this verse, should read Joshua, as in R. V. The solution consists in the fact that Joshua is a Hebrew word, which means Jesus in Greek. The great general reason why Moses could not lead Israel into the promised land was because of his symbolic character as the law-giver of Israel. ... [ Continue Reading ]
STEPHEN'S CULMINATION 51. _“Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in hearts and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost; as your fathers did, so do ye._ 52. _“Which one of the prophets did not your fathers persecute? And they slew those proclaiming concerning the coming of the Righteous One, whose b... [ Continue Reading ]
STEPHEN'S MARTYRDOM 54. The officers of the Sanhedrin, clerical and laymen, are torn all to pieces by the straight, awful truth enunciated by Stephen. They get so mad that they grit their teeth. I witness to you that I have seen the same under similar circumstances, _i. e_., leading preachers so ma... [ Continue Reading ]
_“And being full of the Holy Ghost and looking up to heaven, he saw the glory of heaven, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God.”_ The normal posture of Jesus in heaven is sitting on the mediatorial throne. This is an extraordinary occasion; heaven enjoys the exquisite privilege of witnessing t... [ Continue Reading ]
_“Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”_ This is another one of the innumerable Scriptures which knocks the bottom out of soul-sleeping, proposing to brutalize you by taking away your immortal soul and humbugging you with the silly delusion that you consist only of this material body, making even heathens... [ Continue Reading ]
_“And putting down his knees he cried with a great voice, O Lord, charge not this sin to them.”_ Here we see that Stephen knelt among the stony shower and prayed for the preachers and church officers who killed him, thus illustrating the normal posture of prayer, _i. e_., on the knees. Heathens, Moh... [ Continue Reading ]