This is only what we might expect, and it is well to remember it nowadays. “God is His own interpreter” in Scripture as well as in providence; and if we wait on Him, He will assuredly make it plain. But as in providence “blind unbelief is sure to err, and scan His ways in vain,” so in Scripture it is sure to err, and scan His lines in vain. And the devout poet might have gone farther; for, most surely, unbelief will not only scan God’s ways and God’s Word in vain, but turn both the one and the other into an occasion of making a blasphemous attack upon God Himself—upon His nature, and upon His character, as well as upon the revelation which He has been pleased to give us. The infidel would rudely smash the lamp of inspiration, quench its heavenly light, and involve us all in that deep gloom and moral darkness which inwrap his misguided mind.
We have been led into the foregoing train of thought while meditating upon the third verse of our chapter. We are exceedingly desirous to cultivate the habit of profound and careful study of holy Scripture. It is of immense importance. To say or to think that there is so much as a single clause, or a single expression, from cover to cover of the inspired volume, unworthy of our prayerful meditation, is to imply that God the Holy Ghost has thought it worth His while to write what we do not think it worth our while to study. “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God.” (2 Tim. iii. 16.) This commands our reverence. “Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning.” (Rom. xv. 4.) This awakens our personal interest. The former of these quotations proves that Scripture comes _from God_; the latter proves that it comes _to us_. That and this, taken together, bind us to God by the divine link of holy Scripture—a link which the devil, in this our day, is doing his very utmost to snap; and that, too, by means of agents of acknowledged moral worth and intellectual power. The devil does not select an ignorant or immoral man to make his grand and special attacks upon the Bible, for he knows full well that the former could not speak, and the latter would not get a hearing; but he craftily takes up some amiable, benevolent, and popular person—some one of blameless morals—a laborious student, a profound scholar, a deep and original thinker. Thus he throws dust in the eyes of the simple, the unlearned, and the unwary.
Christian reader, we pray you to remember this. If we can deepen in your soul the sense of the unspeakable value of your Bible, if we can warn you off from the dangerous rocks and quicksands of rationalism and infidelity, if we are made the means of stablishing and strengthening you in the assurance that when you are hanging over the sacred page of Scripture you are drinking at a fountain every drop of which has flowed into it from the very bosom of God Himself,—if we can reach all or any of these results, we shall not regret the digression from our chapter, to which we now return.
“And ye shall give her unto Eleazar the priest, that he may bring her forth without the camp, and one shall slay her before his face.” We have, in the priest and the victim, a joint type of the Person of Christ. He was at once the Victim and the Priest. But He did not enter upon His priestly functions until His work as a victim was accomplished. This will explain the expression in the last clause of the third verse—“_one shall slay her before his face_.” The death of Christ was accomplished on earth, and could not, therefore, be represented as the act of priesthood. Heaven, not earth, is the sphere of His priestly service. The apostle, in the epistle to the Hebrews, expressly declares, as the sum of a most elaborate and amazing piece of argument, that “we have such a High-Priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens; a Minister of the sanctuary, and of the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man. For every high-priest is ordained to offer gifts and sacrifices: wherefore it is of necessity that this Man have somewhat also to offer. _For if He were on earth, He should not be a priest_, seeing that there are priests that offer gifts according to the law.” (Heb. viii. 1-4.) “But Christ being come a High-Priest of good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this building; neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by His own blood He entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption.” “For Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, the figures of the true, but _into heaven itself_, now to appear in the presence of God for us.” (Chap. ix. 11, 12, 24.) “But this Man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins, forever _sat down on the right hand of God_.” (Chap. x. 12.)