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" Yes " or " No " in some one critical moment, and many a man may be in training all his life for the work of life's last hour. We sometimes try to reap in sowing time, but He never sends forth fruit until the season is fitted for the fruit, and the fruit for the season.^
Look not thou down but up 1
To uses of a cup, The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal,
The new wine's foaming flow,
The Master's lips a-glow ! Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with earth's wheel ?
But I need, now as then.
Thee, God, who mouldest men; And since, not even while the whirl was worst,
Did I, — to the wheel of life
With shapes and colours rife. Bound dizzily, — mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst:
So, take and use Thy work:
Amend what flaws may lurk. What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim !
My times be in Thy hand !
Perfect the cup as planned ! Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same ! •
II.
The Approach op God.
1. When in this or in any other scene of holy story we meet with One who wears the supreme name, yet holds a subordinate office; who is God, yet sent by God; God, yet seen; God, yet heard — who is this " Traveller unknown " ? Not the Divine Father, " for he dwelleth in secret." Besides, in the economy of grace the Father is evermore the sender, the Son the sent. It must, therefore, be the Son. This thought is our only outlet from a maze of contradictions. Through all time, at first by His visits to our world as a celestial stranger ; at last by His life as a man, Christ has been " the angel of the Lord."
* C. Stanford. ' Browning, Babbi Ben Ezra.
266 THE BURNING BUSH
^ It would be absurd to seek the New Testament doctrine of the Logos full-blown in the Pentateuch. But it is mere prejudice, unphilosophical and presumptuous, to shut one's eyes against any evidence which may be forthcoming that the earliest books of Scripture are tending towards the last conclusions of theology ; that the slender overture to the Divine oratorio indicates already the same theme which thunders from all the chorus at the close.^
^ Too often the term " angel " has for us a cloudy and inde- terminate meaning ; but we should resolve to make it clear. We are apt to use it as a term of race, and to distinguish the natives of heaven as angels, just as we distinguish the natives of earth as men. But it is in reality a term of office, simply meaning an envoy, a messenger, one who is sent. Doubtless any heavenly being who is sent on an errand of love to this globe is for the time an angel ; but One there is above all others who deserves the name of angel. Sent not only out from the unknown heavens, but out from the very essence and depth of the unknown God; sent to reveal God's heart; sent to translate the Divine nature into the conditions of human nature, and to make the Divine Being not only conceivable by that which is finite, but approachable by that which is fallen ; sent to discover and accom- plish the Father's purposes of grace, and to fetch home to Him each lost and wandering child — Jesus is the Prince of Mission- aries, "the Envoy extraordinary, the Evangelist supreme," the angel whom all other angels worship, and round whose throne thunders at this moment the mingled music of a numberless company, ceasing not day or night to ascribe to Him all the glory of redemption.*
2. " Behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed." Here we approach a study in symbols. The vision of a bush burning with fire which did not consume it was full of symbolic meaning to Moses. What he saw outwardly with the natural eye, he was able to discern inwardly with the spiritual eye, because he was ready to see and hear what God would teach him.
Earth's crammed with heaven.
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.
^ A bush on fire with no human hand to set it alight, no fuel to keep it burning — it was just a picture to Moses of what God
» O. A. Chadwick. » 0. Stanford.
EXODUS III. 2 267
could do with him, and a picture to the people of God for all time, of the grace of Him who is willing to dwell in human beings as lowly, as insignificant, as the little thorn bush on the Mount of Horeb.^
^ It needed no great flame to reduce a bush quickly into a heap of white ashes. If, as in that arid region might well have been the case, the bush was scorched and withered — its leaves dead and limp, its branches dry and sapless — the flame would make all the speedier work with it. But the thorn was not consumed ; no branch or twig or leaf was even scorched or singed ; the flame played round it as innocuously as the sunset glory burns in a belt of wood. The Alpine traveller is familiar with one of the most beautiful sights of that beautiful region. At sunrise the serried pines projected against the sky on some mountain-ridge appear robed in dazzling brightness. The stems and branches lose their opacity, and shine with a transparent glory; while the leaves are burnished till they seem like angel's wings or fragments of the sun itself. As harmlessly as the sunrise glows in the Alpine pines, so harmlessly did the mysterious flame envelop the bush in the desert, because the Angel of the Covenant dwelt in it. His presence restrained the devouring fire, as afterwards it held in leash the stormy winds and waves of Gennesaret. The law of nature was subject to the stronger law of the Divine will. He made His minister here a flame of fire, and the fire fulfilled His word.'