02.00.3. INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION THE Children of Israel were captives in the land of Egypt.
Pharaoh oppressed them. He set over them–taskmasters who cruelly entreated them. Their cry came into the ears of the God of Sabaoth. He sent Moses and Aaron to demand of Pharaoh that he let the people go.
He refused. By the hand of Moses the Lord then poured forth bitter plagues upon Egypt.
Each plague served only to harden Pharaoh’s heart and tighten his grip upon the captives. The Lord announced through Moses that He would send one more plague.
He would slay the first born in the land. This doom involved the first born in Israel. To deliver them from this doom the Lord provided a substitute for them. In obedience to His command Moses bade the people take a lamb on the tenth day of the month according to their families, a firstling (a first born) of the flock, without spot or blemish, keep it till the fourteenth day, kill it between the two evenings of that day, put the blood in a bason, dip a bunch of hyssop in the blood and strike it against the sides of the door and above, thus marking the house with a crimson stain.
They were then to go into the house, shut the door, fix the slain lamb on a spit in the form of a cross, roast it before an open fire, eat it with bitter herbs, and eat it in haste, shoes on the feet, loins girded and staff in hand. At midnight the Lord would go forth and slay the first born.
It would be the Lord’s Passover. The first born in the house under the shelter of the blood of the lamb would be spared–saved. The people did as they were commanded. At midnight the Lord, in fulfillment of His promise, went forth to slay.
Wherever He saw blood on a door He passed over that house. The next morning there was a first–born dead in every house. In the homes of the Egyptians it was a first–born son or daughter, and from that home came the sound of weeping, the voice of lamentation, hearts that ached and would not be comforted. In the houses of the Israelites there was, indeed, a first–born dead, but it was the first–born substitute–the slain lamb provided of God. By this sore judgment the Lord broke the chains of Israel’s bondage, showed Himself a Redeemer and Saviour of His chosen people.
He led them out of the land of bondage and the house of affliction, He divided the waters of the Red Sea that they might pass over dry–shod. In a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night He led them through a “.waste howling” wilderness to Mount Sinai. At Sinai He tested them.
He rehearsed all He had done in their behalf. He had brought them thus far on eagles’ wings. Would they, henceforth, cast themselves in obedient and dependent faith upon Him; or, would they by relying upon their own strength, their own wisdom, walk in their own righteousness and earn their way into the Promised Land?
There was only one true course to follow.
They should have confessed their helplessness and cast themselves wholly upon the omnipotence and the grace of God.
They did nothing of the kind. With consummate spiritual blindness and offensive self–sufficiency they agreed to earn and merit their way into the Promised Land. With united voice they said:
“All the Lord hath spoken (that is, all He required of them) we will—do.” By that response they repudiated the grace of God, set aside the Abrahamic, unconditional covenant and placed themselves on the ground of law.
It was a fatal act.
Immediately, the Lord changed His attitude to them. He caused a line to be drawn between Himself and them.
He threatened with instant death all who should cross that line.
Herein you may behold the essential difference between law and grace.
Grace bids us draw nigh to God.
Law shuts us out from God.
Grace bids us to consider God.
Law bids us consider ourselves.
Grace bids us to behold what God can and is willing to do for us.
Law bids us know we can do nothing for ourselves.
Under grace we are taken up with God.
Under law we are taken up with self.
Under grace we discover what God is–full of mercy and saving love.
Under law we find out what we are–sinful, unrighteous, lost.
Grace is expressed in four letters––done.
Law is contained in a word of two letters––do.
Under grace all is done, the work has been done for us, it is completely and perfectly finished. There is nothing for us to do but to rest in the finished work.
Under law we are always doing and never done.
We never accomplish, we never meet the demand made of us, we never can begin to give even the slightest hint of satisfaction, we have no place of rest, there is not a moment in which we are secure.
Grace bids us hope.
Law tells us to fear.
Grace brings salvation.
Law puts under condemnation and demands the penalty without mercy. The people desired law and despised grace. God gave them their request. From the top of Sinai now covered with a thick cloud, flashing with lightnings, echoing with thunder, filled with smoke as from the opening of furnace doors, with the voice of a trumpet waxing louder and louder till the whole mount seemed to quiver and rock, the Lord God proclaimed the law the people had invoked, giving it to them in the form of Ten Commandments.
There was no longer any joy or peace among the people, no sense of nearness to God, there was nothing but consciousness of the clanging, clashing, clamoring law and the revelation of God as that God who will “by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, even unto the third and fourth generation;” a revelation of that God who has said (and said it with the accent of an inexorable and unchanging decree) “the soul that sinneth it shall die.” To this people, the God who had been their Redeemer from death and their Deliverer from the land of bondage, was now to them as a God afar off, unapproachable, terrible. Every breast was filled with dread, every heart throbbed with fear. The Lord called Moses up into the mount to receive a transcript of the law He had so thundrously proclaimed.
While he was gone and before they had as yet received a copy of it, the people broke the very first commandment: that they should have the Lord as their only God.
Filled with murmuring and unbelief at the prolonged absence of Moses they set up a god of Egypt, the golden calf, Apis. They bowed down and worshipped it, and did so with all the lewdness and shamelessness of the Egyptian rites; for, we are told, they were naked.
They had thus become idolaters as guilty as the people from whom the Lord had saved and separated them. In the midst of this orgie of lust and treason against Jehovah, Moses came down from the mount bringing the law as it had been written by the finger of God on tables of stone.
Filled with indignation, with horror and righteous anger he cast down the tables of stone and broke them.
He did this as a testimony that in breaking the first commandment they had broken and were guilty of the whole law; as it is written:
“Whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.”
He stood in the gate and called upon those who were on the Lord’s side to come to him. The sons of Levi answered the call.
He bade each man gird himself with his sword, go through the camp and slay as they should go.
Three thousand idolaters were slain.
Moses did not take up the broken law and bid the people keep it.
He knew better than that.
He knew that in God’s sight it was utterly broken.
He saw the people needed, not law, but atonement.
Therefore he said:
“I will go up unto the Lord, peradventure I shall make an atonement for your sin.”
He returned to the mount. He made intercession before the Lord that He would turn aside His justly aroused anger, and that the whole nation might not be destroyed. The Lord heard his appeal.
He gave him the law written again upon other tables of stone.
It was under these circumstances the Tabernacle was built and set up, that the Lord might dwell in the midst of the people; by His presence own them as His and save them, no longer as from the bondage of Egypt, but from the bondage, the condemnation, the judgment and disaster of their own failure. A holy God could not dwell in the midst of a sinful people except upon the ground of a blood atonement; for, it is written: “without shedding of blood is no remission,” no holding back of judgment due; neither could the sinner approach a righteous God except on the ground of a sacrifice offered by the individual which should be an acknowledgment of the need of atonement and a confession of the grace that permitted and provided it.
Moses was therefore instructed to give to the people a system of sacrificial offerings and to ordain Aaron, his brother, as high priest and his sons as associate priests with “him.
These sacrifices were to be a witness to the people that they had sinned against Jehovah and could be saved only by a sacrificial and substitutionary death offered in their behalf.
Each time an Israelite brought a victim to the priest, laid his hand upon its head, confessed his sin and slew it, he was testifying that his life was forfeited and that he lived only by virtue of the victim slain in his stead. At the same time the continual repetition of these offerings was a witness that the blood of bulls and of goats could not take away sin. This constant demonstration of their inefficiency was, nevertheless, in itself, a prophecy, a promise and a pledge that an acceptable substitute should be found whose shed blood would be the guarantee of an eternal salvation and an abiding reconciliation with God. By virtue of the death of such an one all claims of the broken law would be settled, the law itself as a temporary and condemnatory system would be set aside and the unconditional covenant with Abraham again brought in and through it the blessings promised both to Israel and the Gentile world fulfilled. In the fulness of time the Son of God and God the Son became incarnate of a virgin woman, revealed Himself as Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews and the Lamb of God ordained before the foundation of the world.
He offered Himself as King. He was rejected by the Jews (not by the Ten Tribes). He was crucified, God the Father accepted Him as the Antitypical Substitute for both Jew and Gentile, owned His death as a sacrifice for sin, raised Him from the dead, took Him to Heaven and seated Him at His own right hand as immortal man and eternally incarnate God–God eternally manifest in the flesh.
All the types, figures, symbols and prophecies were fulfilled in Him.
All claims of the law were met and satisfied. As the coming in of the law could not annul the covenant made with Abraham four hundred years before, as it was brought in that it might be a revelation to the people of their sinfulness (“for, by the law is the knowledge of sin “) and that it might be finally as a “schoolmaster” to lead them to Christ, the death of Christ therefore in satisfying the claims of the law against Israel, “took it out of the way,” and delivered them from its bondage; as it is written:
“Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, (Jews) which was contrary to us, (Jews) and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross.” (Colossians 2:14) As the law of Sinai was–never given to the Gentiles, then the law, today, has no relation to the world whether Jew or Gentile.
According to Holy Scripture the law was” A ministration of condemnation.” (The ministration of death” written and engraven in stones.”
“It has been abolished.” “Done away.”
“Done away in Christ.” (2 Corinthians 3, 9, 7, 13, 11, 14) “Our Lord Jesus Christ is the seed of Abraham; as it is written:
“Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many, but as of one, And thy seed, which is Christ.” (Galatians 3:16) As the Seed of Abraham our Lord Jesus Christ is the depository of all the promises made in the covenant with Abraham; when He rose from the dead, ascended and sat down on the throne of the Most High God He brought in again the unconditional covenant, and it is on the basis of this verified and unconditional covenant with Abraham that God is dealing in unconditional grace with the world today. The Episode of the law is over. The shadowy types have been fulfilled.
Salvation is for all who by faith will offer our Lord Jesus Christ as the sacrifice provided of God and claim Him on the cross as a personal substitute. The Law came by Moses.
Grace and Truth by Jesus Christ.
It is in the shadows, the types, the figures, the symbols of the Tabernacle, the Priesthood and the Offerings that we may behold the wonder of our Lord’s divine person, His perfect work and coming glory.