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they gave: "All that the Lord hath spoken we will do." Thus was the foundation of the first covenant laid, in knowledge and consent, to be presently ratified by sacrifice.

Moses took back the answer to the Lord. Next we have a step characterised by all the reasonableness and majesty that always appertain to divine procedure. God would manifest Himself in a sensible manner in the presence of the whole congregation that there might be no room for doubt hereafter as to the reality of His part in their transactions. They had seen the miracles performed in Egypt, but it had been as yet a matter of faith with them that they were the works of God. Moses had told them so, and in all the circumstances, their belief was reasonable; but God would now put the matter beyond all doubt by speaking to Moses in their hearing, so that faith in the work of Moses might not be a matter of reasonable tradition, but might be established for ever upon the actual evidence of their senses: Lo, I came unto thee in a thick cloud that the people may hear when I speak with thee and BELIEVE THEE FOR EVER (Ex. xix. 9). Not only so, but what He should say should also be addressed to the congregation themselves, and should be a declaration of the first principles of the covenant He should make with them as a nation--a compendium of the whole law He should deliver to them -as we discover from the speech divinely delivered from the summit of Sinai in the hearing of "600,000 men, besides women and children."

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CHAPTER III.-AT SINAI.

T was fitting that there should be due preparation for the stupendous event of an audible address from the mouth of Almighty God (personated by an angel-Acts ii. 38; Heb. ii. 2) to a mustered nation at the foot of Mount Sinai. There had been a measure of preparation in all that filled up the interval since the selection of Abraham and the appointment of circumcision as the token of the covenant and the condition of their choice. Their deep affliction in Egypt, following the pure prosperity of Joseph's time (like the seven years of famine after a similar period of great plenty), prepared them to give themselves up willingly into the hands of the deliverer when he appeared. And the observance of the Passover in anticipation of the last and most crushing plague on the eve of their departure from "the iron furnace of their affliction, even Egypt (Deut. iv. 20), enabled them to feel they were under the protection of the God of their fathers. (Circumcision and the Passover, preceding the law, were afterwards incorporated in the law, and will most naturally engage our attention when we meet them there). But now they were actually to meet with God" (Ex. xix. 17). So they were commanded to "be ready against the third day; for on the third day the Lord will (not only speak but) come down in the sight of all the people upon Mount Sinai." They were to "wash their clothes," and abstain from the common defilements of domestic life, and to keep at a respectful distance from the mount at whose base they were encamped. The terrible penalty of death was attached to non-compliance.

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The people were entirely compliant; and on the morning of the third day, there were awful tokens of the promised interview between God and a nation. The top of the mountain was concealed in dense cloud, intermittently illuminated by the play of lightning. From the cloud ascended thick volumes of smoke as from a furnace. Roars of thunders pealed forth at intervals, the earth trembled under their feet. In the midst of all these terror-inspiring manifestations, the steady strident sound of a loud trumpet note was heard from the summit, "sounding long and waxing louder and louder." On a sudden the tumult ceased, and in the silence, "the Lord spake unto all the assembly out of the midst of the fire and the cloud and the thick darkness WITH A GREAT VOICE (Deut. v. 22).

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The whole assembly

heard the pealing words which filled the air to the following effect:

"I am the Lord thy God which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of any thing that is in the heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them, for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments.

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain. Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou

labour and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant nor thy cattle, nor the stranger that is within thy gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day. Wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it.

Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

Thou shalt not kill.

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Thou shalt not steal.

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house: thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbour's."

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Moses, in rehearsing these impressive circumstances forty years afterwards, says the Lord spoke these words "with a great voice, and he added no more (Deut. v. 22). This cannot mean that he added no commandments after the ten commandments, for he immediately proceeds to narrate that the ten commandments having been delivered, the Lord ordered Israel to their tents, and said to Moses, "But as for thee, stand thou here by me, and I will speak unto thee all the commandments, and the statutes, and the judgments which thou shalt teach

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them" (Deut. v. 30-31). It means, then, that the voice that proclaimed the ten commandments stopped abruptly at the prohibition of covetNothing was added to the oral delivery from the mountno tapering off-no peroration-no gradual and ornamental finish, as there had been no exordium or appropriate introduction-no rounded periods--none of the mere arts of rhetoric: nothing beyond solemn substance and meaning. There must have been something very impressive in this sudden cessation of "the great voice," as there was in its sudden commencement in the pause after the terrific overture. The whole method of their communication seems to mark off the ten "words" or commandments with a special emphasis, as possessing a peculiar and leading importance: for not only were they rehearsed in the hearing of the whole assembly, but immediately afterwards, as Moses records, "the Lord wrote them in two tables of stone, and delivered them unto him" for special preservation.

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It is customary to speak of these ten commandments as "the moral law." This is an objectionable description on two grounds: it takes for granted a false theory of "morality," and it ignores the divine estimate and description of the ten commandments. The false assumption of human philosophy is that "the moral law is as natural and spontaneous a thing as the physical laws of the universe. It is assumed that the ten commandments are as natural as the law that you must have air to breathe and food to eat before you can live, and that their obligation arises from the constitution of things, and not from their having been enjoined by divine authority. The "moral law" is thus thought of as a part of nature, and not as the appointment of God. This view will upon study be found a fallacy, and like all fallacies, it works confusion in the applications of knowledge If the so-called moral law were an element in the nature of things, it would be found asserting itself like the law of gravitation or the law of eating and drinking. Instead of that, man left to himself is an ignorant savage, who kills and steals with as little scruple as a lion or a tiger. He has no idea of wrong in these acts. He never exhibits the conception of moral restraint till the idea has been introduced to him by some process of instruction. Even Paul (in Rom. ii. 12-15), where he is supposed to sanction the idea of an instinctive sense of right and wrong among "the Gentiles which have not the law," recognises that men are only a law unto themselves," and "do by nature the things contained in the law," when "the work of the law" has been “written in their hearts (see verse 15). It is very few Gentiles who have been the subject of this operation. His testimony of the world in general harmonises with experience to this day, that "the carnal mind is

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enmity against God, and is not subject to the law of God" (Rom. viii. 7), and that the Gentiles unilluminated "walk in the vanity of their mind, having the understanding darkened, and are without God and have no hope" (Eph. iv. 18; ii. 12). Those who had had "the work of the law written in their hearts" had had it so written by the pen ministration of the Spirit of God by the instrumen tality of the apostles, as Paul says: "Written not with ink but with the spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart (2 Cor. iii. 3). These were "the Gentiles" of whom Paul writes in Rom. ii. The rest he speaks of as "other Gentiles who walk in the vanity of their minds " (Eph. iv. 17).

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If the ten commandments were the moral law, and the moral law a law of nature," killing could never be right, whereas the killing of the Canaanites became Israel's duty (Deut. xx. 15-17), and the killing of the Amalekites, Saul's duty, for failure in which Saul was ejected from the kingship (1 Sam. xv. 3, 23). It is the wrong view of the subject that creates what are called "the moral difficulties of the Old Testament." People holding it read of the slaughter of the Canaanites and many other things with a shock which there is no ground for at all. Duty is the obedience of the commandments of God, and not the following of a supposed natural bias. Natural bias may be whim and darkness. The keeping of the commandments of God is the following of the light, whatever the commandments are. He makes alive and has a right to kill, and when he says Kill," it is wickedness to refrain. The slaughter of the wicked Canaanites was by the order of God, and became an act of righteousness. So with all the other so-called "difficulties." They are difficulties that vanish with a right understanding.

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The ten commandments are only to be rightly estimated by God's own description of them. He calls them (Ex. xix. 5) "My covenant." Moses says: "He wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (Ex. xxxiv. 28). Also in his rehearsal to Israel on the plains of Moab, at the end of the forty years, he said: "The Lord spake unto you out of the midst of the fire. And He declared unto you His covenant, EVEN TEN COMMANDMENTS, and He wrote them upon two tables of stone.” The rest of the law is treated as an appendix to these: "And he commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and judgments, that ye might do them in the land whither ye go over to possess it" (Deut. iv. 13-14). The " sanctuary" and "ordinances of divine service," prescribed in what is called the ritual and ceremonial law, in its detail, are scripturally treated as mere appurtenances and amplifications of "the first cove

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