Chapter 35—Israel’s Invisible King
Thou camest down also upon mount Sinai, and spakest with them
from heaven, and gavest them right judgments, and true laws, good
statutes and commandments.
Nehemiah 9:13
.
All through the pages of sacred history, where the dealings of God with
His chosen people are recorded, there are burning traces of the great I AM.
Never has He given to the sons of men more open manifestations of His
power and glory than when He alone was acknowledged as Israel’s ruler,
and gave the law to His people. Here was a scepter swayed by no human
hand; and the stately goings forth of Israel’s invisible King were unspeakably
grand and awful.
In all these revelations of the divine presence, the glory of God was
manifested through Christ. Not alone at the Saviour’s advent, but through all
the ages after the Fall and the promise of redemption, “God was in Christ,
reconciling the world unto himself” (
2 Corinthians 5:19
). Christ was the
foundation and center of the sacrificial system in both the patriarchal and
the Jewish age. Since the sin of our first parents, there has been no direct
communication between God and man. The Father has given the world
into the hands of Christ, that through His mediatorial work He may redeem
man and vindicate the authority and holiness of the law of God. All the
communion between heaven and the fallen race has been through Christ. It
was the Son of God that gave to our first parents the promise of redemption.
It was He who revealed Himself to the patriarchs.... It was He who gave the
law to Israel. Amid the awful glory of Sinai, Christ declared in the hearing
of all the people the ten precepts of His Father’s law. It was He who gave to
Moses the law engraved upon the tables of stone....
Jesus was the light of His people—the light of the world—before He
came to earth in the form of humanity. The first gleam of light that pierced
the gloom in which sin had wrapped the world, came from Christ. And
from Him has come every ray of heaven’s brightness that has fallen upon the
inhabitants of the earth. In the plan of redemption Christ is the Alpha and
the Omega—the First and the Last.
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