King, associated afterward with man and his heavenly destinies. They, too—before man appeared on earth—had their own eventful history. They were created free—free to love their Divine Benefactor and to consecrate to Him in dutiful and devoted service the life and exalted powers He had given them—or free to refuse such service to the Highest.
Many chose to serve their own pride, and were forever separated from God and from the glorious abode of everlasting bliss, where He reveals His inmost being and shares His inmost life with His faithful ones. Many more yielded rapturous submission and lowly service to their most loving and magnificent Lord and Father, and they were forthwith exalted to the unchangeable possession of Himself and His Kingdom.
So, in these first verses and pages of Genesis—the Book of Origins—we are treading on abysses of revealed truth—of truth which explains to us both the world beneath and around us, and that unmeasured world which extends on all sides above and beyond our little globe, both the world we can see with the bodily eye and touch with this hand of flesh, and the unseen realities of that world far otherwise glorious, in which the Lord of Hosts Himself is the central Sun of spiritual beings innumerable, whose brightness and glory is shadowed forth dimly in the starry hosts of the firmament above our heads.
Man was made “a little less than the Angels” in natural excellence; but he was at the same time raised by the divine adoption to the supernatural rank and destiny of the Angels. He, too, was created free to choose between good and evil: between a loving submission and devoted service to his Maker, and obedience to his own weak will. Raised so high, surrounded with such lavish wealth of gifts and graces, “crowned with glory and honor, and set over the works” of God’s hands here below, he too freely disobeyed and sinned, and was separated from the Most Holy God.
Not separated hopelessly and forever; for the merciful Son, whose work man was, took on Himself to expiate, in His own good time, the awful guilt of man’s ingratitude and disobedience.
The promise that He would do so was deposited in the sorrowing hearts of our first parents, when they were justly banished from their beautiful abode in the earthly paradise. This is the Promise and the Hope kept alive in the long line of patriarchs extending from Abel and Seth to Abraham.
Genesis, from the end of the third chapter to its close, is but the history of this immortal Hope, and the other books of the Pentateuch do but describe the national institutions, political and religious, by and through which this Hope was to be preserved undimmed among the universal darkness of Heathendom, till the Star of Bethlehem warned Israel that the Light of the World was come.
THE BOOK OF EXODUS.—The title is a Greek word, meaning “a going out” or “departure,” because its chief purpose is to describe the miraculous means by which God enabled Moses to lead the people of God out of Egypt in order that He might, in the wilderness of Mount Sinai, renew more solemnly His covenant with them, and give them such national laws and institutions as would distinguish them from all other peoples.
