tiles, it is strange that Paul nowhere alludes to it ; and what did the Gentile care about Melchisedec or the relation of Christ’s priesthood to his ?
It is indeed true that, in the practical warnings of the epistle, nothing is directly said about apostasy to Judaism ; but the admonitions are enforced by distinctively Jewish references, as, for example, the warning against failure to enter into God’s rest, which is pointed by the example of the Israelites in failing to enter Canaan. Would a writer have said to a Gentile convert that, in case of his committing wilful sin, there was no expiation for him? But he might properly say to a Jewish Christian, who was tempted to return to Judaism: “If you abandon Christ, and return to Judaism, you have no more sacrifice for sins. Your whole system of Levitical sacrifices is abolished. It is Christ or nothing.”
It is very strongly urged that the warning against depart- ing from the living God Gii. 12) might very properly be given to Gentiles as against a relapse into heathenism, while it would be utterly inappropriate to a Jewish Christian, because the living God is common to both Jews and Christ- ians; and a relapse into Judaism could not, therefore, be a departure from the living God. But the objection overlooks the intent of the whole epistle, which is to show that the living God of the Jewish economy has revealed himself in the Christian economy, thereby superseding the former. It is the God of the Christian dispensation who is commended to the readers; the living God under a new and grander manifestation of life. God who spake by the prophets, now speaks by his Son, the effulgence of his glory and the very image of his substance. To go back to the old economy of types and shadows, the economy of partial access to God, would be literally to depart from the living God. It would oe, practically, to deny him as a living God, by denying all development and expansion in his revelation of his own life, and confining that revelation to the narrow limits of the Mosaic system; in other words, to identify the living God with the dead system. To depart from Christ, the Life, and