Acts 7:38

Acts 7:38. This is he, that was in the church in the wilderness. ‘God's church,' writes Wordsworth here, ‘is not limited to Judæ. It was in the wilderness; and there Moses, your great lawgiver, was with it; and remember he died there in the wilderness, and was never permitted to enter the Promised Land, to which you would restrain the favours of God.'

With the angel which spake to him in the mount Sinai. The second special instance of Divine favour was his solitary communing with the great covenant Angel, the Almighty Being who, under the name Jehovah (the Eternal One), chose Israel as His peculiar people. The solemn words of Deuteronomy 34:10, which sum up the friendship of Moses with the Eternal, tell this best: ‘And there arose not a prophet in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.'

Who received the lively oracles to give unto us. He it was who, from the Eternal of hosts on Sinai, received that sacred law, those living words, the deathless charge which should endure as long as the world endures. So St. Paul estimates the Divine commands of the wilderness, ‘Wherefore the law also is holy, and the commandment holy' (Romans 7:12).