THE comparison suggested by our readings in connection with the observance of this commandment of the Lord are obvious; the connection between the song of Moses of old, and “the song of Moses and of the Lamb,” of which the Lord Jesus speaks, is natural and beautiful, and by the power of the truth, we are enabled to extract from the Word that encouragement and exhortation, and instruction and warning which it is designed that it should give us.
We are looking back to a time nearly 1,500 years before Christ, and here we stand, going on for 2,000 years after Christ; and the Jews are still with us, and they are “going down into Egypt” again. And the purpose of God is becoming so visible that Armageddon is illustrated in newspaper maps, and references are continually being made to the prophets, and the great war of the last days. We walk now almost by sight. We read of “the song of Moses and of the Lamb” in the 15th chapter of Revelation, and we are at once struck with the beautiful analogy of the allusions. The previous chapter had given us the picture of the Lamb on Mount Zion, with the 144,000 redeemed with him, and it concludes with the treading of the winepress without the city. Then in the 15th chapter, the apostle says: “I saw another sign in heaven, great and marvellous, seven angels having the seven last plagues” (at once that strikes a note in harmony with the former plagues in Egypt, by which God made Himself known in Egypt, and in all the earth); “for in these seven last plagues is filled up the wrath of God.” “And I saw as it were (and as the result of this, we may remember) a sea of glass, mingled with fire (or, rather, having been mingled with fire).” Again, how natural and beautiful is the allusion to the crossing of the Red Sea, when in fiery judgments God made His wrath known among the Egyptians, who perished in the water by which Israel were saved, and through which they were “baptised into Moses in the cloud and in the sea,” as the apostle has it.
THE VICTORY
“And I saw as it were a sea of glass, having been mingled with fire: and them that had gotten the victory over the beast, and over his image, and over his mark, and over the number of his name, stand on the sea of glass, having the harps of God.”
Notice the qualification: “them that had gotten the victory” over a false and abominable system. I was in Egypt last year, and saw many sculptured memorials of that system; and if you saw them, you would understand a good many things that seem a little difficult in the word of God. This false system had been challenged by the God of Israel, through His servant Moses; a series of plagues and judgments had descended upon the land, and Israel had “gotten the victory,” and it was revealed that the Lord God of Israel was the true God, and the gods of Egypt one awful system of apostasy and abomination. In the days of Moses Israel stood on the brink of the sea in victory, and the apostolic vision is of a future standing upon “a sea of glass, having the harps of God.” And then that “sea of glass,” how beautiful is the figure; the prophets use the figure of the sea as representative of the sea of “multitudes, peoples, nations, and tongues.” “The waters,” said John, in the later exhibition, or rather the angel to John, “the waters where the whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues.” “The wicked are like a troubled sea, casting up mire and dirt.” If that be so, what is a glassy sea? Calm, translucent waters, like some of those bays you see in the southern seas; you look through their clear waters, right to the sandy bottom, and see the wonderful life there; that is representative of the state of earth’s peoples and tongues, after God has clarified them through judgments, and blessed them under the dominion of Christ and the saints. They stand on the sea of glass at last, “having the harps of God,” and sing a song of victory, like that which Moses and Miriam celebrated of old time in Egypt, and which was typical of this for which we wait.
“And they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, Great and marvellous are thy works Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways, thou king of saints. Who shall not fear thee, O Lord, and glorify thy name? for thou only art holy: for all nations shall come and worship before thee; for thy judgments are made manifest.” Then he says the temple of God was opened in heaven.
TYPES
We look back again upon the typical matter of the Exodus, and see that Moses personally, first of all, is a man of sign. Time would fail to exhaust the similitudes that exist between Moses and Christ; it is very wonderful indeed, and nothing but the spirit of God could have so ordered a likeness between men separated by 1,500 years span of time.
Moses was taken out of the water, so was Jesus. Moses was threatened in his infancy — his life was threatened by royalty—so was that of Jesus. Moses was brought out of Egypt; and of Jesus it is written, “Out of Egypt have I called my Son.” Moses was divinely fair—“a proper child,” as it is quaintly stated in our version, but the underlying idea is that he was divinely fair. There was Jesus—if not a Hercules in the flesh, we read of him that “he increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man;” and he was “of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord.” Moses gave evidence of this, when he intervened in that dispute between the Egyptian and the Hebrew; but he was premature, and being premature, he was rejected of his brethren, who said, “Who made thee a ruler and a judge over us?” So they said of Jesus; they would not have him. Stephen most tellingly produces that similitude for us in his defence before the high priest: “This Moses,” he says, “to whom our fathers would not obey, but rejected him, saying, Who made thee a judge?” showing what a parallel there was between their action towards Moses of old and their action now—that is, in Stephen’s days—towards the Lord Jesus Christ.
Moses was exiled in a far country for a long time; so the Lord Jesus Christ speaks of himself in parable as “a nobleman who is gone into a far country to receive for himself a kingdom, and to return.” Moses was commissioned by God to return to Egypt by the hand of the angel who appeared in the bush. Jesus, likewise, is commissioned to return, to manifest the name of the Eternal in Israel, and in all the earth. Moses’ brethren— Aaron, at any rate—was told to go forth to meet Moses, and he went, and “rejoiced to meet him;” so when Jesus returns, his faithful brethren will be apprised of the fact, and commanded to go forth to meet him, and those who love God’s truth and strive to obey it, will do so, with rejoicing.
And so we might go on. It is a very wonderful parallel, but the thing we want to ponder during the time at our disposal this morning is that Moses was prepared for this great honour and responsibility; so was Jesus, so must we be; and it is that above all things that we are liable to forget—liable almost to resent, because the flesh hates suffering. Therefore, let us ponder for a few minutes the preparation of Moses, of David, and of Christ, and the justification of it all in the victory.
We look at Moses; we remember his experience; but we are liable to forget that when this episode transpired Moses was a man 80 years old. We are liable to think of Miriam on the seashore as we see her painted in pictures, as a young woman of about 30—she was about 85; don’t forget it, because during all that span of years there was long preparation. We remember that when Moses was about 40 years old, “it came into his heart to visit his brethren;” then that dispute took place, as a consequence of which he was exiled for 40 years. Think of it! Who of us has been in the truth for 40 years? Those who have been, think it a good long span, and so it is. And Moses was away in the desert for 40 years; In the wisdom of God that is beautiful. Supposing Moses had been put to this task immediately, fresh from the court of Pharaoh, what complications, what revolutions there might have been; but let the whole generation die out, and let this man be forgotten, then, when he himself is thoroughly humbled, and thoroughly instructed as to the truth, and has obtained a just perspective of life, and of all things, bring him into the new situation, and the new generation, where his activities will find full and just scope, and the glory of God not be obscured by any associations of Egypt and royalty. That was the idea, and at the end of that 40 years it would almost seem that, with Moses, the hope was becoming a little dim. One hesitates to speak with the least shadow of disrespect of such a man of God as Moses; but it was a fact that he did not circumcise his youngest boy, and nearly lost his life as the result. What can we conclude, but that because of the objections of his Midianite wife he neglected the first rite of the covenant; that argues that the hope was a little dim. That is all we venture to say.
THE BUSH AND THE NAME
Then the silence of God is broken, and the burning bush unconsumed is revealed, a thing incredible to philosophers and speculators; and now, with electric incandescent lamps we are surrounded with little burning bushes, and lots of them. Modern science opens the way for faith in a way that our forefathers could not have dreamed of. But here was an angelic revelation commissioning this man to go to Egypt, to fetch Israel out from it. Was he as ready as he was 40 years before? He said, “Not so Lord, I am not able. Send by the hand of him whom thou shouldest send.” Aaron is there, my elder brother; he is an eloquent man; he has not been exiled in the desert like I have. And the objection almost made God angry; “Who hath made man’s mouth? I know that Aaron can speak well.” “Go thou; thou shalt be a god to Pharaoh, and Aaron shall be thy prophet.” And he is sent, and the Memorial Name of God is revealed to him. “When I go,” said Moses, “and say. The God of my fathers hath appeared to me, and the children of Israel say, What is his name, what shall I say unto them?” and that Name is revealed to which reference is made in the chapter we have read together: “The Lord, Yahweh, is a man of war: Yahweh is his name,” commonly called in English, “Jehovah,” because of the misunderstanding of the Hebrew pointing. But what is the meaning of the name? “He who will be,” and what will the Eternal be in Israel? Here is the declaration, “A man of war.” Will the Eternal reveal himself in a man? Yes, here are the memorials; the Lord Jesus Christ is the head of that great body of redeemed humanity, covered by the name of Yahweh. God’s wonderful purpose is misunderstood in Christendom, which has tortured this glorious revelation into the fantastic doctrine of the trinity.
The truth has given us to understand, and has called us to be constituents of the Name. The multitude that John saw on Mount Zion had “the Father’s name written in their foreheads.” How so? By the writing of the gospel, the hope of Israel, in the understanding and affections bringing about the obedience of faith in baptism, an evidence of which we see in one being added to the Name this morning, in youth, and what better time? “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not.” The natural you see comes before, and is the basis of the spiritual, which brings us round these emblems of our Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we are met together as constituents of the Body of Christ, prospectively so in hope now, but hereafter, as concerning those whom he shall approve, everlastingly so, in victory.
“Yahweh is a man of war; Yahweh is his name.” This song of Moses approximately indicates that for which we wait, because Yahweh had become to them salvation of a sort, even then; for it was a very great salvation for a nation of slaves to be redeemed as they had been from this house of bondage, this iron furnace of affliction; and it had been accomplished by that which was highly typical of the salvation that is in Jesus Christ, for which we wait; for how had it been accomplished? By the blood of the Passover, sprinkled upon the doorposts and lintels of the houses, according to the commandment of God, and the lamb was eaten by the house of Israel, in the end of the exodus. And what is said in connection with that, in the antitype? “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, not with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” So doing, it will be ours at last to sing, by the mercy of God, “Yahweh is my strength and my song; he is become my salvation; he is my God, I will prepare him an habitation; my father’s God, I will exalt him.”
THE TEMPLE
Again, look at this promise—“I will prepare him an habitation”; a singular expression, is it not? Moses did so, in a way: there was the tabernacle in the wilderness, and afterwards a temple in Jerusalem; but “doth the Most High dwell in houses made with hands?” The last chapter of Isaiah is eloquent upon that. How beautiful is that habitation to us in this connection, bringing before us as it does, “the Father’s house,” in which we hope to find an abiding place; “Thus saith the Lord, heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool; where is the house that ye will build unto me? and where is the place of my rest? All these things hath mine hand made, and all these things have been, saith the Lord, but to this man will I look, even to him that is of a poor and contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word.”—a singular comparison between houses and men—a house and a man, a temple and a man. Ah, but the substance, is it not beautiful? Christ is the temple—Christ individual, and Christ multitudinous.
When he cleansed the literal house of God in Jerusalem, and some objected as concerning his authority, what did he say? “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will rear it up.” It was a mystery to his enemies, but was afterwards intelligible to his disciples: “he spake of the temple of his body”; when, therefore, he was raised from the dead, “his disciples remembered that he had spoken this. Therefore, here is the “habitation of God,” the ultimate habitation. There will indeed be a temple, a “house of prayer for all nations,” erected in Jerusalem, to the glory of God, but what would that be in the absence of the Christ-temple? Take away Christ and the saints from the earth, and what would be the value of that architectural glory? Nothing; therefore here is the substance of the habitation of the Eternal, of which Moses spoke so long ago, and concerning which we find ourselves gathered together in hope. It is Christ and the apostles who exhort the brethren regarding this hope, particularly. Does not Paul say to the Ephesians, that whereas they had been strangers and foreigners, now they were brought together, and “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone, in whom all the building fitly framed together, groweth into an holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.” There is the very term, that is what Moses spoke of, approximately—the tabernacle, and the temple afterwards; but here is the substance, the Lord Jesus Christ through the Spirit. He is what we hope to be. “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself.” He is in Christ by the Spirit for ever now, and when he shall appear, if faithful, “we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”—Ed.
CC Walker, The Christadelphian Magazine, 1915 page 162–165.
