Without the Pentateuch, Christ as revealed in the Gospels would have been impossible; and without Christ the Pentateuch would have been impossible.
I venture upon this proposition because I find no great-event in the Pentateuch that is not for some purpose of argument or illustration used by Christ or by His disciples and apostles in the interests of what is known as evangelical truth.
It lies within easy proof that Christ is the text of the Old Testament and that the Old Testament is the text of Christ. What use is made in the New Testament of the creation of the universe, the faith of Abraham, the rain of manna, the lifting up of the serpent and the tabernacle of witness! The sublime apology of Stephen epitomizes the Old Testament, and the Epistle to the Hebrews could not have been written but for the ritual of Exodus and Leviticus. In its purely moral tone the Old Testament is of kindred quality with the New.
Take an instance from Leviticus. Three forms of evil are recognized in one of its most ardent chapters—namely, Violence, Deceit and Perjury. This is a succession amounting to a development, and, unwittingly it may or may not be, confirming that law of evolution which is as happily illustrated in morals as in physics.
Men begin with acts of violence, then go on to silent deceit and calculation, and close with a profanation of the holiest terms. The early sinners robbed gardens and killed brothers; the later sinners “agreed together” to “lie unto God.” It is something, therefore, to find in so ancient a book as Leviticus recognition of an order which is true to philosophy and to history.
But the proof that Moses and Christ are identical in moral tone is to be found in the process which offenders were commanded to adopt. By no sacerdotal jugglery was the foul blot to be removed; by no sigh of selfishness could the inward corruption be permitted to evaporate; by no investment of cheap tears could thieves compound for felony.
First, there must be restoration; second, there must be an addition of a fifth part of the whole; third, the priest must be faced as the very representative of God and a trespass offering be laid on the altar. After atonement forgiveness would come—a white angel from Heaven—and dwell in the reclaimed and sanctified heart. All the past would be driven away as a black cloud and all the present filled with a light above the brightness of the Sun.
What is this but an outline or forecast of what Christ said when He drove the hostile and vindictive man from the altar, bidding him first be reconciled with his brother and at peace with society? Christianity is not a substitute for morality; it is morality inspired, glorified and crowned. Say that the ritual was sanitary rather than doctrinal or theological. What then? All divine things are first sanitary, but not necessarily bounded by that term.
It will be found that the practice of genuine cleanness, chemical as well as mechanical, will be followed by a philosophy, and that the morality of cleanness will be followed by a theology.
Accustom a man to look out for bullocks and rams and lambs “without blemish,” and he will find that he can not stop at that point. He has begun an education which can only culminate in the prayer: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” Yet no word of that holy thought was named in the original instructions.