Nor let us overlook this one other point—that the case evinces the consummate skill of God in managing the free moral activities of men without the least infringement upon their free agency and moral responsibility. We see this in the way they went into their sin—purely of their own free purpose—after their own envious and proud heart, although God had purposes to answer by means of this very sin. We see it still more, if possible, in the means he used to bring them to repentance; how he put his great hook into their jaws and brought them down to Egypt; took the pride out of them; pressed them with one calamity after another till they came to feel very weak before Almighty God; aroused their long slumbering consciences and kept their thought upon that long past, almost forgotten crime against Joseph—till at length they seem to have become thoroughly penitent. Only by legitimate means and influences, and only by such a use of these as still left their moral activities under their own responsible control—were these grand results reached.——Thus we may take lessons in the masterly skill with which God’s agencies interwork with man’s, effective to the result he proposes because God is more and mightier than man.
III. Taking a broader range of view, we may next study the purposes of God in locating the birth of the Hebrew nation in the land of Egypt.
Since God’s purposes never come to nought but are always accomplished perfectly, the ends he has in view being surely secured, it is safe to reason backward fromknown results to original purposes. It would amount practically to the same thing if we were to ask—What great results were actually secured by locating his people in Egypt when and as he did; by shaping their history as he did, and by bringing them out at length with his high hand and outstretched arm?
1. In answering these questions we may note that Egypt in that age stood at the summit of the world’s civilization, a fully organized kingdom, a great and highly cultured people. There is most ample proof that Egypt was then eminent above any other nation in learning, wisdom, science, and art; in jurisprudence, and in the administration of law; in industry and in wealth; in short, in all the main appliances and results of a high civilization. The antiquities of Ancient Egypt are the marvel of our times. Her temples, pyramids, and obelisks; her paintings and works of art, have come down to our age in most wonderful preservation, living witnesses to her ancient greatness. There was no other kingdom on the face of the earth where a man like Moses could have been educated and trained to become the law-giver of the Hebrew nation, or where such a system of civil law as God gave his people by the hand of Moses could have taken its rise and could have been understood, accepted, appreciated, and ultimately wrought into established usage and into the national life. We shall have occasion in its place to inquire how far the civil system given through Moses was borrowed from the Egyptian Code, and consequently how far the scenes of their Egyptian life prepared the way for the new national life instituted in the wilderness.
2. The plan of transferring his people from their nomadic, pastoral life in Canaan, to a settled residence in Egypt provided scope for all those developments which we have been studying in the history of Jacob, Joseph, and his brethren.
3. Yet more and greater developments of God’s mighty hand were provided for in the deliverance of his people from their bondage in Egypt; in his judgments on Pharaoh and his land; in the destruction of his hosts in the Red Sea; in the wilderness life of Israel during forty years; and at length in their location in the land of promise. All these points will come under review in their order.
IV. Some notice should be taken of ancient Egypt as affording confirmation to the historic accuracy and truthfulness of Moses in Genesis.
1. Moses assumes that Egypt had a king and a fully organized government. The evidence of this from Egyptian history and antiquities is too abundant and accessible to need citation.