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BIBLICAL ILLUSTRATOR EX 20CHAPTER XX.Vers. 1, 2. God spake all these words. — The Ten Words of God: — I. ThoseTen Commandments were to the Jews the very utterance of the Eternal,and they hold in their grand imagination that the souls of all Jews even yetunborn were summoned to Sinai in their numbers numberless to hear thatcode ; so that, in the East, to this day, if a Jew would indignantly deny theimputation of a wrong, he exclaims, "My soul too has been on Sinai." Andnot to Jews only but to all mankind there is this proof that the Ten Wordswere indeed the oracles of God, that, if they be written upon the heart, theyare an " It is written " sufiicient for our moral guidance — they are a great norilicet strong enough to quell the fiercest passions. For the laws of the naturaluniverse may mislead us. One tells us that they are just and beneficent ; anotherthat they are deadly and remorseless : but of these moral Laws we know thatthey are the will of God. o man has seen His face at any time. He seems faraway in His infinite heaven; clouds and darkness are round about Him. Yes;but righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His seat. And this was thevery idea which the Jews wished to symbolize in the building of their Tabernacle.They hung it with purple curtains ; they overlaid it with solid gold ; they filledits oute.- court with sacrifices, its inner chambers with incense ; — but when theHigh Pi test passed from the Holy into the Holy of Holies — when on the great Dayof Atonement he stood with the censer in his hands, and the ardent Urim on hisbreast, before what did he stand ? ot before Visible Epiphany ; not beforeBculptuved image. There was total darkness in the shrine ; no sunlight streamed,no lamp shed its silver radiance ; through the awful silence no whisper thrilled ;bai, through the dim gleam of the glowing thurible and the smoke of the wreathingincense, he saw only a golden Ark over which bent the golden figures of adoringCherubim — and within that Ark, as its only treasure, lay two rough hewn tables of venerable stone, on which were carved the Ten Commandments of the fiery Law.Those stony Tables, that Ark, that Mercy-seat, those adoring Cherubim seen dimly332 THE BIBLICAL ILLUSTRATOR. [chap. XX.through the darkness, were to him a visible symbol of all creation, up to its mostcelestial hierarchies, contemplating, with awful reverence, and on the basis of 
 
man's spiritual existence, the moral Law of God. II. And is that Law abrogatedOW, OK SHOR OF ITS SIGIFICACE ? aj, it remains for the Gentile noless thanfor the Jew — for the nineteenth century after Christ no less than for the fifteenthbefore Him — the immutable expression of God's will. God, as the Italian proverbsays, does not pay on Saturdays. He is very patient, and men may long denyHis existence or blaspheme His name, but more than in the mighty strong windwhich rent the mountains, and more than in fire, and more than in earthquake, isGod in that still small voice which is sounding yet. Oh, it is not in Exodus alone,or in Deuteronomy alone, but in all nature that we hear His voice. In scene afterscene of history, in discovery after discovery of science, in experience after expe-rience of life, have we heard these words rolling in thunder across the centuries theeternal distinction of right and wrong. Confidently I appeal to you, and ask, Haveyou not, at some time in your lives, heard the voice of God utter to you distinctlythese Commandments of the moral Law ? Is there one here who has ever dis-obeyed that voice and prospered ? If there be one here who feels, at this moment,in the depths of his soul, a peace which the world can neither give nor take away,is it not solely because by the aid of God's Holy Spirit he has striven to obey it ?Yes, its infinite importance is that it is as old not as Sinai, but as humanity, andrepresents the will of God to all His children in the great family of man ; so thatif in this life we be passing from mystery to mystery, it is our surest proof that weare passing also from God to God. What matters it that we know not eitherwhence we came or what we are, if " He hath shown thee, oh, man ! what is good,and what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and towalk humbly with thy God ? " HI. And thus it is, lastly, that if we be faithfulTHE Law may lead us to the Gospel. For his must indeed be a shallow soulwho thinks it an easy thing to keep the Commandments. When we observe thatthe summary of the first Table' is that life is worship, and of the second that lite isservice ; wben we notice that the first Table forbids sin against God, first inthought, then in word, then in deed ; while the second, proceeding in a reverseorder, forbids gins against our neighbour first in deed, then in word, and then inthought ; so that, unlike every other code that the world has ever known, theCommandments begin and end with the utter prohibition of evil thoughts, whichof us is not conscious that we have utterly broken God's Law in this, that out of the heart proceed evil thoughts ? And when we go from Moses to Jesus, from Sinaito Galilee, will Christ abolish the Law ? will He teach us that we may keep bothour sin and our Saviour, and that there is no distinction between a state of sin anda state of grace? There are no dim presences, no thundering clouds, no scorchingwilderness, no rolling darkness around the trembling hill, but the sweet humanvoice of one seated in the dawn on the lilied grass that slopes down to the silverlake — but does that voice abrogate the Law ? ay, more stringently than to themof old time come the ten commandments now. JIurder is extended to a furious
 
thought ; adultery to a lascivious look ; and at first it might seem as if our lasthope were extinguished, as if now our alienation from God be permanent, sinceadmitted into a holier sanctuary we are but guilty of a deadlier sin. And whenthis has been indeed brought home to us, and we see the unfathomable gulf whichyawns before a God of infinite holiness and a heart of desperate corruption, thenindeed — and above all in the meeting of calamity with crime — then cometh themidnight. But after that midnight to the faithful soul there shall be light. Withthe per.-^onal conviction that the Law worketh wrath, come also the personil expe-rience that Christ hath delivered us from its curse. In Him comes ihe soleantidote to guilt, the sole solution to the enigma of despair. True, He c'eepenedthe obligation of the Law, but for our sake He also fulfilled it. And thus bylove, and hope, and gratitude, and help. He gives us a new impulse, a new inspi-ration, and this is Christianity; and this Christianity has redeemed, has ennobled,has regenerated the world. The " thou must " of Sinai becomes the " I ought,""I will," "I can." "I can do all things through Him that strengthent+h me."And then for us the Law has done its work. It has revealed to us the will of God,it has revealed to us the apostacy of man, it has driven us to know and to embr'aiethe deliverance of Christ. {Archdeacon Farrar.) The Ten Commandments : — TheTen Commandments bold a conspicuous position in that prolonged revelation of Himself — His character. His will, and His revelations to mankind — which Godmadeto the Jews. They can, therefore, never become obsolete. I. The Ten Command-CHAP, XX.] EXODUS. 833ments rest on the principle that God claims authority over the moral life of man.II. There can be no doubt that God intended that these commandments should beKEPT. They are not merely to bring us to a sense of our guilt, as some seem toimagine. III. These commandments deal chiefly with actions, not with merethought or emotion. IV. Before God gave these commandments to the Jewishpeople, He wrought a magnificent series of miracles to effect their emancipationfrom miserable slavery and to punish their oppressors. He first made them free,and then gave them the law. (R. W. Dale, D.D.) Comprtliensive summary of theTen Commandments : — 1. Its uniqueness : Compare this law with other so-calledlegislations — e.g., Lycurgus, Draco, Solon, the Twelve Tables. Tbere is found nocounterpart ; there is a gulf betwixt them and it. 2. Its origin : What is it thatmakes this separation but its divinity? Said a lawyer of eminence, who was ledto renounce his infidelity by the study of the Decalogue: "I have been looking intothe nature of that law : I have been trying to see whether I can add anything to it,or take anything from it, so as to make it better. Sir, I cannot ; it is perfect."
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