The writer of this Epistle has an explanation to suggest. He says in the outset that Moses had faith—a sort of faith described by himself as “the evidence of things not seen.” Quite unlike the doctrine of the critics above referred to—nay squarely in the face of their assumptions, he holds up this Moses as a specialand illustrious example of real faith in the future life. “By faith Moses refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter”; “by faith he esteemed reproach for Christ greater riches than Egypt’s treasures—for he had respect to the recompense of the reward.” Aye, he had his eye onward upon that glorious recompense of reward which God gives his people when the joys that are transient have all faded out—when the life that is immortal dawns on the human soul. In his view the pleasures of Egypt were only for a season—too short to be matched against the joys before him—fully believed in—that endure forever.
Of this explanation, say what else men may of it, they must admit that it answers the purpose. It accounts for the choice Moses made of affliction before pleasure; of shame before the highest of Egypt’s honors. This explanation represents Moses to be a man of sense, and not a fool. Neological criticism holds him up to the world as void of all sense—as playing the part of supreme folly. Paul said—“If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable” (1 Cor. 15: 19). He would have said of Moses, If his hope and belief as to God were of this life only—if he had no belief in the future life and no knowledge of it, then he was of all men most foolish—most void of that judgment and good sense which are common to sensible men.——Therefore I claim that the life of Moses—the whole choice and purpose and labor of a life of one hundred and twenty years, witness to his full and glorious faith in the future life. The men who deny to him this faith stultify not Moses, but themselves.
(4.) It can scarcely be necessary to suggest that over and above the logical merits of the facts themselves, we have the current traditions of Jewish history and the authority of the inspired New Testament writers. He who wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews—a man of sense as his writings show and of surpassing eloquence and power—must have spoken the current voice of Hebrew tradition—to say nothing (in an argument with Neologist critics) of his unquestionable inspiration from God.
(5.) Still further, we have collateral proofs that the future life was known in the age of Moses.——Job gavea grand declaration of his faith that after the perishing of his body he should see God (Job 19: 25–27). Balaam, representing the thought of the ancient East, saw and believed in the blessedness of the righteous dead.——And to mention no more—the wise men of Egypt, even before the age of Moses, believed in the future life of man. With scarcely a doubt they built their pyramids in the faith of man’s immortality. Sepulchers with them had a special and grander significance because they thought of man, not as dropping at death into annihilation, but as having even then a future nobler life before him. It is more than supposable that the art and practice of embalming the body—thus providing for it a sort of immortality—was really an outgrowth of their belief in the immortality of the soul and of its returning again to its former bodily home.——That the Egyptians held the doctrine of a future life and of future rewards and punishments according to the deeds of this earthly life, is not questioned at all by those who are familiar with her ancient mythology. Symbolic representations are found which are affirmed to be nothing else but the personification of the grand principle of the immortality of the souland the necessity of leading a virtuous life.[47] Also a picture “representing the trial and judgment which the Egyptians supposed the soul of a man to undergobefore he was allowed to enter the regions of rest and happiness.”[48]——R. S. Poole (in Smith’s Bible Dictionary on “Egypt,” p. 675) says: “The great doctrines of the immortality of the soul, man’s responsibility, and future rewards and punishments were taught” [in Egypt]. “The Egyptian religion in its reference to man was a system of responsibility, mainly depending on future rewards and punishments.” “Every Israelite who came out of Egypt must have been fully acquainted with the universally recognized doctrines of the immortality of the soul, man’s responsibility, and future rewards and punishments.”——Dr. J. P. Thompson, in supplementing this article on “Egypt,” refers to Dr. Lepsius as having given the earliest known text of the [Egyptian] “Book of the Dead” “which contains theimportant doctrines of the immortality of the soul, the rehabilitation of the body, the judgment of both good and bad, the punishment of the wicked, the justification of the righteous and their admission to the blessed state of the gods” (p. 688). See also Bib. Sacra, Oct. 1867, p. 775, and Jany. 1869, p. 190.
Hence we must conclude that even if it were possible that the Hebrews had no knowledge of the future life before they went to Egypt, they must have learned it there. Really however, the fact that this doctrine appears in the oldest records of Egyptian antiquity proves that it came down from Noah—not to say from Adam. It was not indigenous and original with Egypt. It was there because Egypt had retained the primitive beliefs of the race.
In concluding this argument, I refer to the allusions which appear in the Psalms to the future life (e. g. Ps. 17, and 37, and 49, and 73),—which speak of it not as being then a new revelation, just sprung upon the universal darkness of all foregoing ages, but distinctly as an old doctrine, to be learned by “going into the sanctuary of God” and there hearing the old Hebrew scriptures publicly read; and also to be seen as illustrated and assumed in the records of God’s judgments in time on such sinners as those of the old world, and of Sodom, and as Egypt’s hardened king. Let it suffice here to specify Ps. 73, whose author says of himself: “I was envious at the foolish when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.It was too painful for me until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I understood their end. Surely thou didst set them in slippery places; thou castedst them down into destruction.”—“But [all unlike their doom] thou wilt guide me with thy counsel and afterward receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire besides thee. My flesh and my heart faileth; but thou art the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”——The good men who wrote thus, and the worshiping congregations who sung these rapturous strains in their temple worship were not in utter darkness as to the final doom of the wicked, or as to the glorious future life of the righteous.
In closing this volume it only remains to refer in aword to the progressive developments of God’s truth as manifest in these closing portions of the Pentateuch. Of previous points and periods in this history as developing progress I have spoken when the scenes were fresh in our reading and thought;—particularly of the age before the flood; of the scenes in the life of Jacob and Joseph; of the scenes of the Exodus and at Sinai; of the civil code and also of the religious Institutes.——The few incidents of history during the forty years of wilderness life bring us new lessons, some exceedingly instructive in regard to the intercessory prayers of Moses; many sadly painful, touching the unbelief, the murmuring, the sensuality, and the idolatrous tendencies of Israel. If it were not that apostasies from God occur in our own age, not at all less guilty considering the light sinned against, though less revolting perhaps to the current religious sentiments of the age, we might perhaps afford to pass these historic developments with little notice. Alas, that they should reveal sins of the human heart which it so much behooves us to study for our own admonition!
The book of Deuteronomy is an acquisition to the moral forces of the Pentateuch. Speaking now specially of its first eleven chapters and of its last nine; i. e. of the review which Moses gives of the scenes of Sinai and of his accumulation of predicted woes and of appeals at once tender and terrible in the last chapters, it is not easy to over-estimate their moral power. Let us hope that they thrilled the very heart of that generation and toned up their religious life with impulses not only deep and strong but abiding. That generation, then about to enter Canaan under Joshua, was unquestionably the best, morally, which appears throughout the entire history of Israel. For proof of this estimate of them it must suffice to refer to the spirit manifested in Josh. 1: 16–18 and in the entire scenes of Josh. 22, and indeed in the history throughout this book of Joshua.——Leaving Egypt while yet young or wilderness born; mostly uncontaminated with her idolatries and pollutions of moral life, looking upon the scenes of the Exodus and of Sinai with young eyes and susceptible souls; trained under Moses forty years; taking the ritual of religious worship in its freshness, with hearts, let us hope in a good measure tender to its first strongimpressions—they give us certainly the best fruits of this wonderful moral and religious training. So many fearers of God—so large a host imbued with the spirit of obedience to God’s authority—the world had never seen before. They were prepared of God for the conquest of Canaan. They are living witnesses that the discipline of those desert wanderings was not in vain—witnesses also to the moral and spiritual forces of the new revelations which God made of himself during those forty years from Egypt to Canaan.