Page:Keil and Delitzsch,Biblical commentary the old testament the pentateuch, trad James Martin, volume 1, 1885.djvu/15

completed by the God-man through deeds and sufferings, death and resurrection, constitute the quintessence of the Christian religion; so also the divine revelations of the Old Covenant are not restricted to the truths proclaimed byMoses, and by the patriarchs before him and prophets after him, as to the real nature of God, His relation to the world, and the divine destiny of man, but consist even more of the historical events by which the personal and living God manifested Himself to men in His infinite love, in acts of judgment and righteousness, of mercy and grace, that He might lead them back to Himself as the only source of life. Hence all the acts of God in history, by which the rising tides of iniquity have been stemmed, and piety and morality promoted, including not only the judgments of God which have fallen upon the earth and its inhabitants, but the calling of individuals to be the upholders of His salvation and the miraculous guidance afforded them, are to be regarded as essential elements of the religion of the Old Testament, quite as much as the verbal revelations, by which God made known His will and saving counsel through precepts and promises to holy men, sometimes by means of higher and supernatural light within them, at other times, and still more frequently, through supernatural dreams, and visions, and theophanies in which the outward senses apprehended the sounds and words of human language. Revealed religion has not only been introduced into the world by the special interposition of God, but is essentially a history of what God has done to establish His kingdom upon the earth; in other words, to restore a real personal fellowship between God whose omnipresence fills the world, and man who was created in His image, in order that God might renew and sanctify humanity by filling it with His Spirit, and raise it to the glory of living and moving in His fulness of life.
The way was opened for the establishment of this kingdom in its Old Testament form by the call of Abraham, and his election to be the father of that nation, with which the Lord was about to make a covenant of grace as the source of blessing to all the families of the earth. The first stage in the sacred history commences with the departure of Abraham, in obedience to the call of God, from his native country and his father’s house, and reaches to the time when the posterity promised to