The caution here given is certainly most solemn. That we may give it all the force of which it is capable, we will notice distinctly these three things ; The supposition here made ; The injunction given notwithstanding that supposition ; and The argument founded on that injunction.
First, mark the supposition here made, namely,
206.1 THE jews' LEADING OBJECTION TO CHRIST. 349
that God may permit miraculous and prophetic powers to be exercised even in support of a false religion. We are not indeed to imagine that God himself will work miracles in order to deceive his people, and lead them astray ; nor are we to imagine that he will suffer Satan to work them in such an unlimited way as to be a counterbalance to the miracles by which God has confirmed his own reli- gion : but he will, for reasons which we shall pre- sently consider, permit some to be wrought, and some prophecies to come to pass, notwithstanding they are designed to uphold an imposture. The magicians of Pharaoh, we must confess, wrought real miracles. When they changed their rods into serpents, it was not a deception, but a reality : and when they in- flicted plagues upon Egypt after the example of Moses, it was not a deception, but a reality : but at the same time that they thus, in appearance, vied with Moses himself, and with Jehovah, in whose name he came, there was abundant evidence of their inferiority to Moses, and of their being under the control of a superior power : for the magicians could not remove one of the plagues which they themselves had produced ; nor could they continue to imitate Moses in all the exercises of his power (from whence they themselves were led to confess their own inferiority to him) ; nor could they avert from themselves the plagues which Moses inflicted on them in common with the rest of the Egyptians. They were permitted to do so much as should give Pharaoh an occasion for hardening his own heart, but not sufficient to shew that they could at all come in competition with Moses.
In every age there were also false prophets, who endeavoured to draw the people from their allegi- ance to God ; and in the multitude of prophecies that they would utter, it must be naturally supposed that some would be verified in the event. Our blessed Lord has taught us to expect, even under the Chris- tian dispensation, that some efforts of this kind will be made by " Antichrist, whose coming is after the