dwellers in Bethel. The mouths of the children were full of cursing and bitterness. The tenderest of hearts once bid them welcome-" Suffer little children to come unto me." How bitter the sorrow to behold such hardened in sin, the living epistles of their parents' iniquity. "God is not mocked." "As a man soweth, so shall he reap." In Leviticus xxvi. 21, it is written, "And if ye walk contrary unto me, and will not hearken unto me, I will bring seven times more plagues upon you according to your sins. I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children." The witness for God's grace was also the witness of righteousness; "and Elisha turned back and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tore forty and two children of them. And he went from thence to Mount Carmel, and from thence he returned unto Samaria." "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness." (2 Tim. iii. 16.)

THE WRECK.

"God is a living and a present God. If His people on earth (where alone they can) have forgotten God, even the Father in heaven, and ceased to walk in the light of a risen and ascended Lord-so owning the gracious presence of the Spirit-they may, as men, have wrecked themselves and their circumstances in time; but God is God still, and in Him is their hope.

"And here (I take it) a question arises, How are we to get on in this state of things? We cannot walk as though there had been no wreck: the vessel, if not in atoms, or gone even into the separate pieces of which it was formed, is not what it was, or what God made it at first; neither would it become us, as those connected with the sin of marring it, to deny this. Moreover, God is not now walking in that path. His testimony is not now in the unshattered church of Pentecost; but it is in grace and mercy, shown in a people preserved, spite, and in the midst, of the wreck. To make the wreck, or the perception of it, the centralising point, were madness and sin. If the mercy of God in preserving in Christ Jesus, and entire separation from the sin (moral and spiritual) around, are our solace -The obedience of faith' will solve all our difficulties."

B.

No. XVIII.

RUDIMENTS OF THE WORLD.

"Verily, verily, I say unto thee, We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen; and ye receive not our witness. If I have told you earthly things and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things? And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man which is in heaven."

THE Lord Jesus, in his conversation with Nicodemus, assumes his own singular place, as the authoritative teacher, and at the same time as the great doctrine of God. These are inseparable, and we may almost say reciprocal truths. The knowledge of Him as the great doctrine of God, necessarily leads to the acknowledgment of His authority as a teacher; and if he really be owned as a teacher come from God, then, as a necessary consequence, He will be owned as the grand comprehensive doctrine of God. It is thus that the Apostle speaks, "But ye have not so learned Christ; if so be ye have heard him, and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus, etc." The Lord, as the teacher, teaches Himself, and he that hath an ear hears Him, and by faith receives Him into the heart. He is the truth. Reality is only to be found in Him. 66 Surely men of low degree are vanity, and men of high degree are a lie; to be laid in the balance, they are altogether vanity." "Verily, every man in his best estate is altogether vanity.'

" a

In death we learn the reality of man. "In Adam all But so emphatically is Jesus "the truth," that

die."

a Ps. xxxix. 5. The note of Bythner on this passage is interesting—“тa σvμπavтa μaraιorηs. Šept: quoad omnia vanitas, ita ut vanitas et miseria, quæ per alias creaturas frustatim spargitur, in uno homine aggregata videatur: sicque homo evadit compendium omnium vanitatum, quæ in creaturis extant. Cum inanimis, subjacet mutationi, corruptioni; cum animatis, alterationi, morti; cum sensilibus, lætitiæ, morori; cum angelis (qui non servarunt suam originem, sed reliquerunt suum domicilium) inconstantiæ,etc. Sicque in barathrum peccatorum ruit." Blessed contrast-" Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever!"

66

the only blessed knowledge of God is obtained by knowing Him. He is the reality of God to us, especially to us as sinners. "God manifested in the flesh." "Immanuel, God with us." And the only one who ever stood in personal acceptance with God as man is the same Jesus This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." The Church is set by God as "the pillar and ground of the truth." It knows the mysteries on which it is founded from the Incarnation to the Cross; from the Cross to the Ascension at the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens. By this knowledge, the Church is enabled to judge things in the light in which they are regarded by God. When the Light came into the world, it cast its rays upon "every man," and shewed what he was in the sight of God; and when "the truth" came, it superseded those things which were merely its shadows. Gracious and interesting indeed were the ordinances of Israel. They were rightly cherished by them; the fathers might, in the fear of God, recount their origin to their children; the spirit of Nationalism was found in these ordinances, and it was in them a godly spirit. But when the reality came, even Jesus, "the truth," then, to maintain these ordinances against Him, the substance of them, was not only a proof of their blind infatuation, but was also the deepest insult to God. How touching is the word of Christ by the Spirit. "Israel would none of me." "He came to His own, and His own received Him not." But He goes on in the world as the Light of the world, casting His own light on one object and another as He meets with them. "As long as I am in the world I am the Light of the world." How interesting it is to trace Him displacing one highly prized ordinance after another, by presenting Himself; and in one instance, at least, superseding a venerated tradition. John the Baptist gracefully retires, in order to render Jesus the prominent object, bearing witness to Him as the Lamb of God, the Son of God, and the Baptiser with the Holy Ghost. He owns Him to be the Bridegroom whose voice cheered him, and he took indeed an

b Exodus xii. 26. 27.

honoured but retired place, as the friend of the Bridegroom. When Jesus enters on His own ministry, after allowing His own glory to show itself in Cana of Galilee, and casting out from His Father's house the buyers and sellers, he sets aside the ancient ordinance of the Brazen Serpent by taking its place Himself. In the close of their wilderness history, the Brazen Serpent stands forth as the gracious intervention of God on behalf of a disobedient and gainsaying people, and under the shelter of which, they had entered Canaan. But Jesus connecting the Brazen Serpent with His own proper person, presents it in a wider range than to Israel, even to all the world, that "Whosoever believed in Him might not perish, but have everlasting life."

As He goes on, He comes to Jacob's well, a place hallowed by the most interesting traditions; but how do they all vanish before Him who is "the Fountain of life," and by the knowledge of Himself communicating a well of living water to others." The water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life."

"I

Israel's God had not forgotten his ancient name. am the Lord that healeth thee;" although Israel had by their disobedience forfeited such a relationship. The Pool of Bethesda from time to time proved to "the disobedient and gainsaying people" that Jehovah remembered that name; whilst the waiting and ofttimes disappointed "impotent folk" too plainly proved to them their broken relationship with the Lord in this character. But the time was now come for their God again to present Himself, as "I am the Lord that healeth thee." He appears at the Pool of Bethesda, and says not as of old, "If thou wilt diligently hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, and wilt do that which is right in His sight, and wilt give ear to His commandments, and keep all His statutes, I will put none of the diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians, for I am the Lord that healeth thee;" but in the consciousness of His own healing and life-giving power, "Wilt thou be made whole?" Thus He sets aside the Pool of Bethesda, by presenting Himself in His own abounding

grace as the Healer, not only of bodily malady, but of that as a palpable demonstration that there was in Him and in Him alone, healing virtue against the deeper ills of death and judgment; and as the reality of the Pool of Bethesda he complains, "Ye will not come to me that ye might have life."

At the feast of the Passover, and in the wilderness, in the sixth chapter of John, Jehovah Jesus has to do with the same unbelieving people as He had to bear with long before His manifestation in the flesh, forty years in the wilderness. They boasted of the manna on which their fathers fed, but forgot that their fathers had loathed it, as they did now in His person, "the true bread which had come down from heaven." In His flesh and blood there was to be recognised the true Passover, and that which answered to the flesh and water given in answer to the murmurings of their fathers in the wilderness. But when in Himself he took up all these interesting ordinances, and presented Himself as their reality, "This is the bread which came down from heaven; not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead; he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever"- it only served to call out from the Jews the same "murmuring" and "striving" as in their fathers of old. "Massah" and "Meribah" were acted over again.

The Feast of Tabernacles, the joy of the land enhanced by the remembrance of the wilderness, is also taken up by Jesus, and displaced by Him. It is the knowledge of Him by Israel which in due time will enable them to have real joy and gladness in their own land, when penitent, converted, and restored, they will see Him and believe." And it is the knowledge of Him now by faith, which can alone bring the joy of heaven to cheer the tedium of the wilderness. "In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink. He that believeth on me, as the Scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. (But this spake He of the Spirit, which they that believe on Him should receive; for the Holy Ghost was not yet, because that Jesus was not yet glorified)."