And greatly abhorred Israel,
So that He forsook the tabernacle of Shiloh,
The tent which He placed among men;
He refused the tent of Joseph,
And chose not the tribe of Ephraim,
But chose the tribe of Judah,
The Mount Zion which He loved:
And He built His sanctuary like the heights,
Like the earth, which He hath established for ever.”[65]
We are doubtless right in criticising those Jews whose limitations led them to regard Jehovah as a kind of personal possession, the inheritance of their own nation, and not of other peoples. But even here we can only blame their negations. Jehovah was their inheritance and personal possession; but then He was also the inheritance of other nations. This Jewish heresy is by no means extinct: white men do not always believe that their God is equally the God of the negro; Englishmen are inclined to think that God is the God of England in a more especial way than He is the God of France. When we discourse concerning God in history, we [pg 056] mostly mean our own history. We can see the hand of Providence in the wreck of the Armada and the overthrow of Napoleon; but we are not so ready to recognise in the same Napoleon the Divine instrument that created a new Europe by relieving her peoples from cruel and degrading tyranny. We scarcely realise that God cares as much for the Continent as He does for our island.