the perverseness of men had changed and corrupted the primitive institutions for the base purposes of idolatry and the worship of false gods, it became necessary on account of these frequent transgressions to add a written law, with a stated form of positive services, never to be altered nor departed from; and all of them descriptive of the salvation which was to be effected by the promised seed; whence you are not to wonder, that in Him they all meet and find their interpretation. They who were bound to the observation of the law, were thereby separated of necessity from the world; and, as St. Paul very strongly expresses it, "shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed";" confined to a set of ceremonies and services, under which it was in a manner impracticable for them to evade the objects of their faith, when they should be revealed in their d Gal. iii. 23. true form. Not only the substance of what was expected, but all the particulars and circumstantials had been acted over in figure for ages together: and so the law was "a schoolmaster unto Christ";" preparing those who were under it for the reception of the gospel, and as it were forcing them upon it, if men could on that principle be reconciled to truth. When the gospel appeared, the Jew should have reasoned thus with himself. Do they say Jesus died for our redemption? So did the paschal lamb die to redeem our whole nation in Egypt. Did He ascend afterwards into heaven? So did our high-priest go yearly into the most holy place, carrying thither the blood of a sacrifice slain in the worldly sanctuary. Is there no remission of sin without shedding of blood? There certainly was none under the law. Has Jesus appointed a baptism with water? So had our law its e Gal. iii. 24. purifications for the wash-interpretation is occasioning away of uncleanness. ally dropped in so many Is the partition we have so parts of the Scripture, espediligently kept up between cially in the Psalms, that ourselves and the heathens the prophets and masters to be broken down at last, of Israel appear to have and is the true religion to understood the law in a be carried out amongst all spiritual sense. If the bulk nations? So was our taber- of the people did not undernacle brought from the stand it so, we must not solitary wilderness under impute this to any unJoshua, whom the Greeks certainty or obscurity in call Jesus, into the "pos- Moses and the prophets, session of the Gentiles." but to that carnal affection Numberless other questions which naturally chooses the might be asked, shocking form of religion without to the prejudices of a Jew, the spirit of it. Their which would bring their pride, their affectation of own answers with them out false wisdom, their avarice, of the law of Moses: and their adultery, blinded such was the use the Jew them, and made them as ought to have made of it. averse to the sense of a miracle wrought before their eyes, as to the sense of the darkest verse in the Pentateuch. The world always has been, and now is, to those that are shut up under its laws, a schoolmaster to turn men away from Christ; and a conceited worldly minded Christian, proud of the powers of reason without grace, is at this hour as blind to the From the various applications of particular passages from the law, previous to the revelation of the gospel, it appears, that the law was in itself a spiritual as well as a figurative system, for the forming of the heart, and the purifying of the mind; yet conveying its precepts in parables and signs which wanted an interpretation: and that Read spirit of the gospel as the Jew ever was to that of the law. For ignorance of the true spirit of Christianity, and the design of its doctrines, I would match the modern philosophising Socinian with the blindest Jew for the one has made the gospel as void as the other made the law. the writings of some whose books have made a great noise in the present century, and you will know no more of the Christian Church and the Christian sacraments, than the wandering Jew, who now travels about to cheat Christians with his wares, knows of the priesthood and sacrifices in the books of Moses. The law is of use to us Christians for the illustration of the New Testament, whose language and mysteries are so founded upon it, that the language of the Gospels and Epistles is unintelligible without a particular attention to the law; and in proportion as our knowledge of it in creases, our faith will grow stronger. Thus the law serves for evidence both to the Jew and Gentile; and the same schoolmaster, which should have brought them to Christ, will keep us with Him. For, did the Apostle in his preaching say nothing but what Moses had said? And did the gospel teach nothing but what the law had signified long before? Then must the gospel be that very salvation, which was known to God from the beginning, and in reserve to be made manifest to the world in the latter days. This argument, clear and irresistible as it certainly is, will one day appear to the Jews as it does to us; when the scales of blindness shall fall from their eyes: and then it may be thought the greatest wonder of all, that they who had the Old Testament in their hands for eighteen hundred years, should never have seen the use of it before. LECTURE VI. ON THE FIGURES OF THE SCRIPTURE WHICH ARE BORROWED FROM THE EVENTS OF THE SACRED HISTORY. THE Scripture is the authentic history of God's Providence ever since man had a being; and in the conduct of God's Providence toward man, there is an uniformity of design, which hath proceeded according to the same laws of eternal justice and wisdom in all ages of the world: from which consideration it follows, that what God did in times past was an earnest, a pattern, and a sign, of what He might be expected to do in times to come. The godly were delivered, the wicked punished, the proud abased, the humble exalted, under like circumstances and after like forms at different periods of time. Thus it hath been, and thus it will be therefore things past are referred to in the Scripture as figures of things to come, and so the history of the Bible becomes a chain of prophecy, and is actually applied as such by the Scripture itself; as we shall see from a variety of examples. I reckon two sorts of historical figures, the one general, the other particular; the former being references to the history of places, and of such events as related to a people at large, or even to the whole world; the latter referring us to the lives, actions, ON THE FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE &c. Thus sufferings and successes of individual persons. the saints of old were prophetical in their actions as well as in their words; of which some striking examples will occur to us as we proceed. One of the most early and memorable events of the Scripture is that of the destruction of the world by the Flood; from which Noah and his family were saved in an ark, supported by those same waters which destroyed the world of the ungodly. This history of the salvation of Noah is applied by St. Peter as a figure of that salvation which we now obtain as the family of Jesus Christ in the ark of the Church by the waters of baptism: "The long suffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was preparing, wherein few, that is eight souls, were saved by water. A like figure whereunto, even baptism doth now save us by the resurrection of Jesus Christ"." 87 By which it is to be understood, that the salvation of Christians by Jesus Christ, and the salvation of Noah's family, are two events of the like form and figure; the former a sign of the latter. And a wonderful sign it was, if we look into the particulars. Here was a judgment which extended to a whole world; a condemnation that passed upon all, except those who were of the family of Noah: as the wrath of God and a future judgment upon sin, to be executed by fire, is denounced against all mankind, except those who shall belong to the family of Jesus Christ. As an ark was prepared by Noah, so hath Christ prepared His Church, to conduct us in safety through the waves of trouble and the perils of the world, in which so many are lost. And as the waters of the flood carried Noah and his family into a new world after the old was drowned; so do the waters a 1 Pet. iii. 20, 21. |