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land of Israel; and there, as was his exemplary custom, Abraham established a place of worship by planting a grove, the temples of those early times, and calling on the name of the Lord, the everlasting God. And how were his devotions answered? he received a command which, involving as it did a change in the place and manner of his worship, might have seemed to him at the moment to indicate that his God was dissatisfied with both; He enjoined him to take a distant journey to the land of Moriah, and there to perform a sacrifice, such as barely to think of, must have rent his heart with grief and horror. He was to take his son, his only son, Isaac, whom he loved, and offer him up for a burnt offering on one of the mountains to be pointed out by God. That very child of promise, of whom it had been said to him, "In Isaac shall thy seed be called,”* was demanded of him in his early boyhood, as a victim for God's altar, and he himself was to do the deed. Yet, even while he prepared himself for the work with unshrinking obedience, he was not destitute of hope; his strong faith in the promises of his Maker assured him that what he had once said would surely come to pass, though how he knew not; accounting, however," as says the apostle to the Hebrews, "that God was able to raise up, if need were, his Isaac from the dead."† And next to a resurrection from the dead, indeed, was the character of his deliverance: when, after the journey of three mournful days, they reached the place of sacrifice; when the father's heart had been wrung by the innocent inquiries of his child for the lamb that was to be offered up; when every preparation was completed, and the patient victim, stretched upon the altar, was on the very point of receiving the death-stroke from Abraham's hand; when faith, tried

* Gen. xxi. 12.

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↑ Heb. xi. 19.

to the utmost, had yielded all to God; in one happy moment all that it had yielded was restored with an approval and a blessing. "Lay not thine hand upon the lad," said a voice from heaven; "neither do thou any thing unto him, for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me. A ram, caught in the neighbouring thicket by his horns, afforded Abraham a lawful offering; and this made, "the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven a second time, and said, By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, because thou hast done this thing, that in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is by the sea-shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because thou hast

obeyed my voice."+ "Not seeds, as of many," says St. Paul to the Galatians; "but thy seed, which is Christ." From him, the Saviour of the world, the promised blessing is transmitted to all the kindreds of the earth, to all of every nation under heaven who believe and love him, and are his. " They are all one in Christ Jesus."§ "The patriarch Abraham rejoiced to see my day," said Jesus to the Jews," and he saw it and was glad." He saw, doubtless, at that time, the typical nature of the sacrifice which he had prepared upon Moriah, how on that mountain God would hereafter provide a Lamb, who should indeed be slain, and not in a figure only, but in reality, be received again from the dead; a Lamb whose precious bloodshedding should wash away the sins of every child of Adam, and bring back the lost and banished creation once more into the presence of their God.

* Gen. xxii. 12.
§ Gal. iii. 28.

+ Verses 15-18.

Gal. iii. 16.

John viii. 56.

CHAP. X.

ESAU AND JACOB,

WHEN Abraham had returned from Moriah to

Con

Beersheba, with his son Isaac restored to him, as it were, from the dead, he removed from the latter place to Kirjath-arba, or Hebron, where Sarah his wife died, being an hundred and twenty-seven years old. Of the land so often promised him by God, he did not hold in present possession so much as to set his foot on,* nor did he crave to have any for the purposes of actual enjoyment or dominion; his desire was fixed upon a better country-that is, an heavenly; he "looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God." † fessing himself "a stranger and a sojourner" among them, for one thing only did he express a wish to the people of the land: a possession of a burying-place, in which he might deposit the mortal remains of her, who had shared so long and so faithfully the joys and sorrows of his pilgrimage, and in which, when the time came, his own body might be laid beside her. Having, therefore, purchased of Ephron the Hittite, the field and cave of Machpelah, and having there paid the last rites of burial to his departed consort, the widowed father turned his thoughts in the next place to the welfare of his son, for whom, being now of a marriageable age, he shunned the idea of taking a wife of the daughters of the Canaanites, preferring a connexion with those of his own family, who had remained beyond the river Euphrates. "The Lord," it is said, "had blessed

*Acts vii. 5. + Heb. xi. 10, 13, 16.

Gen. xxiii. 4.

Abraham in all things," and amongst others, in bestowing upon him a wise and religious servant—a Iman whom he could trust in a matter of so much delicacy and importance, as the choice of a wife for his beloved son. The honourable commission with which this man was entrusted, did not puff him up with any vain notions of his own great sagacity, and peculiar fitness for such a task. Before he approached the city of Nahor, he prayed earnestly to God, intreating him to signify to him, by a simple token, his decision as to the matter: and God, who heareth the prayers of the humble, vouchsafed to grant him the token he requested, and thereby pointed out Rebekah, the daughter of Bethuel, Abraham's nephew, as the destined wife of Isaac. The token was an act of hospitality and kindly feeling; she gave the weary man water to drink out of her pitcher, and drew it also for his camels, till they had done drinking. Encouraged by this, the servant proceeded with her to her father's home, and having made known the purport of his mission, and the answer which God had granted to his prayer, he concluded by demanding her in marriage for his young master Isaac. Her father, and Laban her brother, seeing that the thing proceeded from the Lord, gave their consent at once, which was soon followed by that of the maiden, who accompanied the servant on his homeward journey, was met in the plain by Isaac, and, becoming his wife, occupied the till then vacant tent of his deceased mother Sarah. For although Abraham had married again a woman whose name was Keturah, from whom the Midianites descended, yet Rebekah, as the wife of the heir, seems to have had the preeminence in his household, till he died a good old age, an hundred

* Gen. xxiv. 1.

threescore and fifteen years, and was buried by his sons, Isaac and Ishmael, in the cave which he had bought for Sarah. Renowned among the nations of the East as an illustrious prophet, revered as the great patriarch of the Jews, celebrated in our christian Scriptures as the father of the faithful,-there is not perhaps any merely human character in the world more eminent than Abraham: and yet, my brethren, let us reflect that even this famous man had nothing "whereof to glory before God:"* his full persuasion that his own merits were nothing; that his Maker was to him, and would be, all in all under every difficulty and trial, is the feature of his character which it behoves us to imitate: "he believed God, and it was imputed unto him for righteousness, and he was called the friend of God:" and this is not recorded in the Scriptures "for his sake alone, but for ours also, to whom it shall be imputed, if we believe on Him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification." +

The blessing of a numerous posterity, which the family of Rebekah had uttered over her, when she took her departure from among them, seemed at first unlikely to take effect: for twenty years after her union with Isaac she bare him no child, nor was it till her husband betook himself to the sure resource of fervent prayer, and intreated the Lord for her, that her barrenness was ended, and she bare him two children at a birth. Before they were born, she had inquired of the Lord concerning them, and had learnt that they would form hereafter the heads of two separate nations, and that the elder of them should serve the younger. It may be that this communication, joined to the natural dispositions of the two children, which

*Rom. iv. 2.

James ii. 23.

1 Rom. iv. 23-25.

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