The Gospel of the Pentateuch: A Set of Parish Sermons

by Charles Kingsley

He who has brought the Jews to the edge of the promised land must not have the honour and glory of taking them into it. He must have no honour and glory. That must be God’s alone. Man must be nothing, and God all in all. Moses must die in faith, not having received the promises, as many another saint of God has died.

And why? To teach him and the Jews and us that man is nothing, and God is all in all.

Moses had given way to the very temptation which would beset such a man. He had spoken unadvisedly with his lips, and said, ‘Hear now, ye rebels, or ye fools, must we bring you water out of this rock?’ We, and not God. He had claimed for himself the power and glory of working miracles. The miracles, he thought for a moment, were his, and not God’s. And it may be that this was not the only time that he had so sinned. He may naturally have thought that he had some special power and influence with God. But be that as it may, the Jews were trained to believe that the miracles were God’s, God’s immediate work, and not performed by the wisdom or sanctity or supernatural power of any saint or prophet whatsoever. Let the Jews once learn to give the honour and glory to Moses, and not to God, and the whole of their strange education went for nothing. Instead of worshipping God they would begin to worship saints. Instead of trusting in God, they would begin to trust in men; whether on earth or in heaven matters not. If Moses was to have the honour and glory, the Jews would surely grow into a superstitious, saint-worshipping, miracle-mongering people, and come to ruin and slavery thereby. They were to fear God and nought else. To trust in God and nought else.

So Moses must vanish out of their sight, sadly and mysteriously. All they know of him is, that he is punished for a sin which he committed long ago, as you and I may be. All they know of his death and burial is, that his body was not left foully to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field; for the Lord buried him. They know not how, and did not need to know. And we need not know. Enough for them and for us to know that no dishonour was done to the grand old man; that as he died far away on the lonely mountain top without a child to close his eyes, his last look fixed upon the good land and large which lay spread out below, of entering which he had been dreaming for forty—it may be for more than forty—years. Enough for us to know that the kindly earth received his body again into her bosom, and that the true Moses—the immortal spirit of the man—returned to God who created him, and inspired him, and sustained him to be perhaps the greatest man—save One who was more than man—who ever trod this earth.

So our human feelings, like those of the Jews, are satisfied. But Moses is not to be worshipped by them or by us; no splendid temple is to rise over his bones; no lamps are to burn, or priest to chant round his shrine; no miracles are to be worked by his relics; no man is to invoke his patronage and intercession in their prayers. The people whom he has brought out of Egypt are to be free—free from the slavery of the body, free from the more degrading slavery of the soul.

And so they go on over Jordan to fulfil their strange destiny, to fight their way into the promised land, to root out the Canaanite tribes, whose iniquity was full, whose sins had made them a nuisance not to be suffered on the earth of God. But do they go to establish a golden age; to become a perfect people?

Nothing less. To become, according to the book of Judges, just what Moses foretold—an ignorant, selfish, often profligate and disorderly people, doing each what is right in his own eyes, falling continually into idolatry, civil war, and slavery to the heathens round about. Nothing more shows the truth of this history than its humility, its continual confession of sin, its readiness to confess the ugly truth that the Jews are a foolish, ignorant, unmanageable, lawless, sensual race, stiffnecked and rebellious, always resisting the Holy Spirit. The immense difference between the Old Testament history and that of all other nations is, that it is a history not of their virtues, but of their sins; and a history, on the other hand, of God’s punishments and mercies. God in the Old Testament is all, and the Jews are nothing; and one may say that it differs from all other histories in this, that it is not a history of the Jews themselves at all, but a history of God’s dealings with them.

If any man chooses to explain that, by saying that the story was all invented by priests and prophets afterwards, to rebuke the people for falling into idolatry, he must have his fancy. Thought is free—for the present, at least—though it is written that for every idle word that men speak, they shall give account at the day of judgment. But one question I must ask, and I am sure that British common sense and British honesty will ask it too: If these prophets were really good men, fearing God, and wishing to make their countrymen fear him likewise, would it not have been a rather strange way of showing that they feared God to tell their countrymen a set of fables and lies? Good men are not in the habit of telling lies now, and never have been; for no lie is of the truth, or can possibly help the truth in any way; and all liars have their portion in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone. And that such men as the prophets of whom we read in the Old Testament did not know that, and therefore invented this history, or invented anything else, is a thing incredible and absurd.

Here we have the Old Testament, an infinitely good book, giving us infinitely good advice and good news, and news too concerning God—God’s laws, God’s providence, God’s dealings, such as we get nowhere else. And shall we believe that this infinitely good book is founded upon falsehood? or that the good men who wrote it could fancy it necessary to stoop to falsehood, and take the devil’s tools wherewith to do God’s work? That they may have been imperfectly informed on some points there is no doubt; for the Bible tells us that they were men of like passions with ourselves, and they may not always have been true to the Spirit of God who was teaching them, even as we are not, though he teaches us. They only knew in part and prophesied in part; and now that which is perfect is come, that which is in part is done away; the mystery of Christ was not revealed to them as it has been to us by the holy apostles and prophets of the new dispensation, of which St. Paul says, comparing it with the knowledge which the old Jews had when the gospel came, That the glory of the law had no glory, by reason of the more excellent glory of the gospel. They may, I say, have made slight errors in unimportant matters, though it is far more probable that those errors have crept into the text, as the Scriptures were copied again and again through many centuries by different scribes, of whose perfect good sense and honesty we cannot be certain. But who that really values his Bible cares for them any more than he cares for the spots on the sun which he can find through a telescope? The sun still shines, and gives light to the whole earth, and the Bible still shines, and gives light to every soul of man who will read it in reverence and faith. But that the prophets ever invented, or ever dared to tamper with truth, is a thing not to be believed of men whose writings are plainly, by their own meaning and end, inspired by the Holy Spirit of God.

One more reason—and a reason which to me is unanswerable—for believing, like our forefathers, that the Old Testament is true. The Old Testament, as well as the New, tells us of the ‘noble acts’ of the Lord—of certain gracious and merciful and just things which the Lord did to the children of Israel. But if that be not true, what follows? That God has not done the noble acts which men thought he had, and therefore that God is not as noble as men thought he was; that men have actually fancied for themselves a better God than the God who exists already.