IT Believing in Jesus, we can travel on, through one wild parish after another, upon English soil, and see, as I have done, the labourer who tills the land worse housed than the horse he drives, worse clothed than the sheep he shears, worse nourished than the hog he feeds — and yet not despair; for the Prince of sufferers is the labourer's Saviour; He has tasted hunger, and thirst, and weariness, poverty, oppression, and neglect ; the very tramp who wanders houseless on the moorside is His brother ; in his sufferings the Saviour of the world has shared, when the foxes had holes, and the birds of the air had nests, while the Son of God had not where to lay His head.
Think not thou canst sigh a sigh, And thy Maker is not by : Think not thou canst weep a tear, And thy Maker is not near.
' George Eliot, Adam Bede.
ISAIAH 495
Oh, He gives to iis His joy, That our grief He may destroy : Till our grief is fled and gone He doth sit by us and moan.^
Outside holy Scripture there has not been a more intimate apprehension of the fellow-suffering of God than these words of Blake- He doth sit by us and moan.
He might have built a palace at a word,
Who sometime had not where to lay His head.
Time was, and He who nourished crowds with bread,
Would not one meal unto Himself afibrd;
Twelve legions girded with angelic sword
Were at His beck — the scorned, the buffeted.
He healed another's scratch, His own side bled.
Side, feet, and hands with cruel piercings gored !
Oh ! wonderful the wonders left undone !
And scarce less wonderful than those He wrought !
Oh ! self-restraint, passing all human thought
To have all power and He as having none !
Oh ! self-denying love, which felt alone
For needs of others — never for its own.^
II.
HIS PERSONAL PRESENCE.
" And the angel of his presence saved them." This must be understood, not as an angel of the Presence, who went out from the Presence to save the people, but, as it is in other Scriptures, God's own Presence, God Himself ; and so interpreted, the phrase falls into line with the rest of the verse, which is one of the most vivid expressions that the Bible contains of the personality of God.^
The Semites had a horror of painting the Deity in any form. But when God had to be imagined or described, they chose the form of a man and attributed to Him human features. Chiefly they thought of His face. To see His face, to come into the
' W. Blake, On Another's Sorrow.
8 R. C. Trench.
* G. A. Smith, The Book of Isaiah, ii. p. 450.
496 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
liglit of His countenance, was the way their hearts expressed longing for the living God. (Ex. xxxiii, 14; Ps. xxxi, 16, xxxiv. 16, Ixxx. 7). But among the heathen Semites, God's face was separated from God Himself, and worshipped as a separate god. In heathen Semitic religions there are a number of deities who are the faces of others. But the Hebrew writers, with every temptation to do the same, maintained their monotheism, and went no further than to speak of the angel of God's face. And in all the beautiful narratives of Genesis, Exodus, and Judges, about the glorious Presence that led Israel against their enemies, the angel of God's face is the equivalent of God Himself. Jacob said, the " God which hath fed me, and the angel which hath redeemed me, bless the lads." In Judges this angel's word is God's Word.
1. The angel of His Presence. — This singularly beautiful expression carries with it associations which must be dear to every heart. " The angel of his presence " — how the mind loves to linger on the music of those words, and how near they seem to bring us to high and holy things, things unspeakably precious and helpful to our souls ! No one can stand in much doubt as to what they mean, strange and unaccustomed though the phrase may be. The " angel of the Lord " is an expression often used in the Old Testament to denote a special manifestation of God Himself ; it does not denote a messenger coming from God ; it frequently signifies a coming of God into human affairs. The still stronger phrase, " the angel of his presence " certainly denotes any form under which God chooses to make His immediate presence felt by His children. The form chosen may, or may not, be that of an angelic being or a human instrument, but it is always a means whereby God Himself comes right into human experience to help and heal and save.
Scarcely has God made a new covenant than Jehovah, in the guise of a man, is found in Abraham's tent, and the Judge of all the earth was there. From that day we grow familiar, as we read, with a form which seems, as it were, to haunt the world, and a form like unto the Son of Man — a form which comes and goes in fitful glimpses, speaks in Jehovah's name, expects the worship due to the Most High, and yet calls Him- self the angel of the presence of God. Especially during the