PERHAPS there is no chapter in all the Old Testament where we have a more simple picture of the gospel, as meeting man’s need in the way of relieving him from judgment, than in Exodus 12.
There God is plainly set forth both as a Judge and as a Deliverer―a Judge to those who would not bow to Him not avail themselves of the remedy He provided for their escape, a Saviour for those who did.
Two nations, representing two different classes of people, are there―those who were not sheltered from judgment and those who, though still in the place of judgment, were sheltered.
Pharaoh had refused―willfully and stubbornly refused every overture of God’s abounding mercy toward himself and his people. By this means he became morally hardened. He hardened himself by his procrastinating, prevaricating course. God, no doubt, allowed it that He might make His power known to the proud monarch.
Pride of heart brought down the judgment of God upon Pharaoh and on the Egyptians. The pride of heart that in open defiance resists God will ultimately bring down the righteous judgment of God upon this habitable world. Though God is long-suffering and full of mercy, though judgment is His strange work, He will yet assert His sovereign power in the judgment of man’s pride.
The beast and the anti-Christ, who one day will be the world’s leaders and rulers, receiving their direct energy from Satan, will act in the same defiant spirit, leading the world to openly blaspheme God’s name―will yet, with all their confederates, be hurled into the lake of fire and brimstone.
Awful thought! Man of the world, consider!
How often, even now, there are those who resist God’s Spirit and give themselves over to infidel teaching; who seem unreservedly to put themselves into the hands of the devil, by whom their eyes are blinded, their consciences hardened. Take the following instance―
“We will have some prayer,” said a wife to her dying infidel husband as he lay in the sweat of a great agony.
“Not a breath of that, Mary,” he said. “The slightest breath of prayer would roll back on me like breakers upon the rocks on a drowning man. I have come to the hour of test. I believed in a liar, and be has left me in the lurch. Bring me my infidel book that I swore by, and pitch it into the fire and let it burn.” Then with a groan of despair and agony, tossing his hands wildly in the air, he exclaimed, “Blackness of darkness! Oh, my God! too late”
Alas for the pride and hardness of man’s heart and the utter weakness and vanity of his mind! Befooled and bewitched by infidelity, it leaves him in darkness and despair in the hour of supreme testing, the hour of death.
God would make Pharaoh and all Egypt feel that He is Sovereign, and that, though so highly exalted amongst men, Pharaoh cannot do as he likes. Therefore He allows a wave of death to pass over the whole land, besides which nothing is so deeply affecting, and before which nothing makes man feel so powerless.
How often, even now, God speaks to people by death A Christian woman told me that it was through the death of her only child that God broke down the pride of her heart and saved her soul.
A big, burly man told me the other day that he had been very wicked―betting on horses, etc. ―but that God allowed death to come into his family and take away his four-year-old boy. That broke him down. He turned to God in confession and self-judgment, and is now truly converted. He can now thank God for the death of that child.
On the other hand, some are like Pharaoh: though they pass through all kinds of sorrow, they do not seem to hear the voice of God to them in it. Indeed, sometimes sorrow and death seem to have a hardening effect. “God speaketh once, yea, twice, yet man perceiveth, it not.”
Reader, death may have come into your family. We would solemnly and affectionately advise you to cease your defiance and to give earnest heed to it! Hear God’s voice to you, lest you grow hardened, and Death suddenly lay his pitiless hand upon you and find you unprepared P. W.
Comfort for a Seeker. ― “COME unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” OUR REST COMES NOT FROM OUR BEING WHAT HE WANTS, BUT HIS BEING WHAT WE WANT. J. N. D.