Such lessons do Isaac and Jacob and Solomon, in these ways, read for us, beloved--such are the minute and various instructions left for our souls in the fruitful and living pages of the oracles of God. They give us to see, in the house of God, vessels fit for use and kept in use even to the end--vessels laid aside, to rust out rather than to wear out--vessels whose best service it is to get themselves clean again--and vessels whose dishonour it is, at the end of their service, to contract some fresh defilement.
Wondrous and various the lessons and the ways of grace, abounding grace! Quickly indeed does the soul entertain thoughts of God according to the suggestions of nature, instead of knowing Him according to faith. Nature holds Him before the soul as a judge, or as a lawgiver, or an exactor of righteousness, as One that carries balances in His hand to try every thought and work--One that is sensitive and resentful of the slightest touch of evil. But faith holds Him before a gazing, worshipping eye and heart, as the One who always loves us, do what He may, or speak as He will. For faith worketh by love (Gal. v. 6)--it worketh towards God as Love, and therefore it is a spirit of confidence and liberty. If we find our souls under pressure of the spirit of fear or bondage or uncertainty, we may be sure that they have let go the gentle hand of faith, and allowed themselves to be led by such tutors and governors as nature provides. This ought not so to be. We are to know that we have ever to do with love! When we read, when we pray, when we converse, when we confess, when we serve, when we sing, when we look at His hand in providence, or think of His name in secret, may faith's communion with God be ours! He loves us. The relationship in which we stand, and of which our Isaac was the expression, makes this a necessary truth.
It is "to Himself" that God has brought us and adopted us--having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will. Eph. i. 5. And these words "to Himself" bespeak God's own joy in the adoption of the elect, in making them children; as was Abraham's joy at the weaning of our Isaac. Christ presents the Church to Himself (Eph. v. 27), and the Father gathers the elect as children by adoption to Himself. Each has personal interest and personal delight in the mysteries of grace. And according to this, the Holy Ghost, in the Epistle to the Galatians, to which the story of Isaac so refers, pleads the cause of the Father as well as the cause of Christ with us. He teaches us that we are redeemed by Christ from the curse of the law, and, through the Spirit given to us by the Father, from the bondage of the law. All this is full of blessing to us; and all this, the mystery of Isaac, the son of the free-woman, suggests to us.
Faith is that principle in us which gives to the Lord Jesus the place or privilege (such a place indeed as God alone can fill) of sustaining the confidence of a sinner entirely by Himself, of being the immediate, the only object of the sinner's trust. But faith, in this dispensation, involves relationship. By faith we stand in the Person as well as on the work of Christ--and Christ being the Son, we are children, as we are saved sinners. We are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. Gal. iii. 26. And Ishmael is not to share the house with Isaac. The spirit of bondage gendered by the law or by the religion of ordinances, is to be put out, and the spirit of liberty alone is to fill it. For the house is now set in a child and not in a servant, in Isaac and not in Eliezer--and relationship is God's joy as it is ours. "The Father seeketh such to worship Him." Wondrous words of abounding grace, beloved! and Sarah's joy in our Isaac pledged this in patriarchal days.
JACOB.
GENESIS XXVIII.-XXXVI.
I have already followed the course of the Book of Genesis to the close of chapter xxvii. From that chapter to chapter xxxvi., Jacob is principal; and it is that portion which I now purpose to consider.
There is a very important era in the life of Jacob afterwards--his sojourn in Egypt for seventeen years, and his death there. But this is found in that part of the book in which Joseph becomes principal, so that I shall refer to it only so far as Jacob is concerned.
The life of Jacob is one of very large and varied action, quite of another character from that of his father Isaac. The wisdom of God readily accounts for this; because there is divine intention in the construction of these histories, as there is divine truthfulness in the record of them. By them we are instructed in mysteries, as surely as we are made acquainted with circumstances. It has been my desire to notice these mysteries, as well as to gather the moral of these earliest ages of the human family, and these first fathers of the elect of God.
Election, and the call of God, in the sovereign exercise of His grace, were exhibited in Abraham.