DEVARIM

Words [of Moses]

2 And thou shalt remember all the way [kol haderech] which Yahweh thy Elohim led thee these 40 years [arba'im shanah] in the wilderness [midbar], to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart [lev], whether thou wouldest keep [be shomer] his commandments [over His mitzvot], or no.

A man who truly knows God yields Him a constant loving reverence; and how can this mix with the mind that prevails in the world, the most predominant feature of which is the absence of reverence?

Nothing teaches wisdom in this matter more powerfully or more directly than the Law of Moses, and the history of its communication to Israel. For this very purpose they were written, that those who came after might receive the instruction which they naturally imparted to those who received them in the first instance. We deprive ourselves of great good if we neglect their study. What is the foremost lesson of it all, but this that God Himself announces-

"I will be sanctified in them that approach unto Me."

"I will be exalted"-exalted on every day and always.

He took hold of a nation for Himself. See what He did with them? First of all, having delivered them with His own naked hand, manifest in direct works of power, in the destruction of Egypt, and their own miraculous rescue from mortal peril, He

"humbled them and proved them."

He led them in a great and terrible wilderness and taught them. What did He teach them? Science? No. Of what good to show them how He has made things? Political economy? No. The art of legislation, which being interpreted means self-government by count of human wills, whether wise or foolish? No, no, man is not capable of self-government. See what a miserable pass it has brought him to after 6,000 years fair experiment.

He requires the government of God. He requires God to tell him what to do, and to compel him to do it by power governmentally applied. What God taught Israel was the art of worshipping God and serving man. This was the essence of the Law of Moses. It was taught in many rites and ceremonies, but this was the thing taught. God was in all things and in every way to be exalted as an object of reverence and fear, and love on the basis of fear. Holiness was the perpetual exhibition.

"I, the Lord thy God am holy."

"Thou shalt fear before Me."

It is the lesson of circumcision: of presentation to the Lord; of the purifications presented in the various recurring uncleanliness of life; of the sacrifices and offerings in the various relations of experience; of the incessant ablutions connected with approaches to the sanctuary.

The pith of all these things is brought to bear on us in Christ - the Holy One of God. The righteousness of the Law was fulfilled in him, and Paul declares it is fulfilled in us if we walk not according to the flesh but according to the spirit. Holiness or consecration to God, is the first principle of righteousness; just as God is the first principle or idea of the Spirit.

Here is where the world is utterly destitute of godliness, and becoming more so under the leadership of elegant gabblers infected with Darwinism and the "higher criticism." God is less and less in all their thoughts. With the children of God it is otherwise; they grow in the knowledge and love of God.

Bro Roberts - THAT GOD SHALL BE SANCTIFIED

3 And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers [Avoteicha] know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread [lechem] only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of Yahweh doth man live.

A spiritual result was aimed at in this ascetic rigour. Israel was made to know experimentally that men have not been brought into existence merely to indulge their appetites; that these appetites are but means; that they are only in their place when they are ministrant to the ultimate end of being: that this ultimate end is to serve the Lord with gladness in the worship of His greatness, and in the exercise of mercy and truth to fellow-man.

In this employment of created life, God, the Creator, receives pleasure, and man, benefit. The taste for such an employment of life is liable to be blunted, and finally destroyed, in the possession of abundance. Israel, luxuriating in plenty, would never have learnt the lesson which prepared their second generation for entering the land of promise as an accepted worshipping nation.

In poor, but sufficient living, they came to perceive that not bread alone, but the words and worshipping of Yahweh were a staple in truly civilised life.

The Visible Hand of God Ch 15.

15 Who led thee through that great and terrible wilderness [midbar], wherein were fiery serpents [nachash], and scorpions [akrav], and drought [parched earth], where there was no water; who brought thee forth water [ mayim] out of the rock of flint;.

Wilderness of Sinai cp Psa 68:17

This, then, I believe is the place or country to which the personal Son of Man, "the Man Christ Jesus," will come first at his approaching advent. The region is admirably adapted for the manifestation of omnipotence, in the judicial manifestation of the mystical Son of Man, or Rainbowed Angel.

The Peninsula of Sinai is the southern region which is reserved in solitude for a future display of great signs and wonders far transcending anything witnessed by Israel in the olden time.

This peninsula is formed by two arms running into the land from the north end of the Red Sea, and is bounded by the one styled "the tongue of the Egyptian sea" (Isa. xi. 15) on the southwest, at the end of which is Suez; and by the other, or Elanitic Gulf, called also the Gulf of Akaba, on the east. These waters form two divergent sides of a triangle, within the area of which are mounts Sinai and Paran, and a "waste howling wilderness," containing nothing to be desired.

Moses styles it,

"a great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and scorpions, and drought, where there was no water" (Deut. viii. 15).

It is a dry, hot, sandy, mountainous region, that no government seeks to annex, and which no emigrants undertake to people. The few that are found within it are the descendants of Hagar -- wild men, whose hand is against every man, and every man's hand against them (Gen. xvi. 11).

From Suez to Akaba, at the northern extremity of the Gulf of Akaba, a road was constructed by the Romans, measuring 125 miles in a straight line. The peninsula included within these limits is filled up with mountains, and narrow valleys, and desolate plains. Of these mountains, the chain or elevated circle of Sinai is the chief.

To the northward of the central region of Sinai, and divided from it by a broad valley, called El Sheikh, is a mountain range extending eastward, called Zebeir. North of this are sandy plains and valleys, the most barren and destitute of water of the whole country. This section borders still further north on another mountain chain, termed El Tyh, which stretches nearly across the peninsula from gulf to gulf. Still north of this range is the desert of El Tyh, through which ran the old Roman road, and, at present, the great pilgrim road from Egypt, by Suez to Akaba, on the way to Mecca.

North and northwest, and, indeed, inclusive of the desert El Tyh, is the wilderness of Paran, a tract so called after mount Paran, a chain of mountains bordering the desert of Paran on the east. The wilderness lies between the southern border of Palestine and the Mediterranean on the north; Egypt on the west; Idumea, or Edom on the east; and the El Tyh range of the peninsula on the south. "The Holy One," says Habakkuk, writing in Jerusalem, "will come in from mount Paran."

Eureka 10.6.

16 Who fed thee in the wilderness [midbar] with manna, which thy fathers [Avoteicha] knew not, that He might humble thee, and that He might prove thee, to do thee good at thy latter end [acharit];

Manna in the wilderness

The two main facts in the type were that the manna came from heaven, and that the children of Israel were so situated that if they had not received it, they must have perished.

Almost of their own force, they speak of eternal life through Christ. This meaning becomes absolutely certain in the presence of Christ's promise "to him that overcometh" of permission to "eat of the hidden manna" (Rev. 2:17), and of his declaration during a conversation on the Mosaic manna that he is the living bread that came down from heaven, whereof if a man eat, he shall not die (John 6:51).

This interpretation involves the doctrine that man is mortal, and will die apart from Christ; and also the truth that Christ is not of human origin, as the Josephite school alleges, but of Divine origin by the Holy Spirit in the way narrated in Luke 1:35.

Law of Moses Ch 13