II.

THE TYPICAL PERSONS OF THE PENTATEUCH: THEIR MESSAGE TO THE CHURCH IN ALL AGES.

II.-CHRIST, THE TRUE JOSEPH.

"The good of all the land of Egypt is yours."-GENESIS xlv. 20.

THE questions to which I invite your attention are, (1) What is the true principle of interpretation to be applied to a particular class of so-called "types;" and (2) What is the relation in which Christ's people have a right to consider themselves as standing to that outer world, which in some schools of theology is described as "their spiritual enemy"; and in all schools is allowed to be the sphere of their trial.

(1) In what sense do we use the words, when caught by, and gazing on, some old saintly or heroic character, whose deeds are chronicled in the history of the people of God, we say instinctively, "Here is a plain type of the Lord Jesus Christ?" He Who first by His bodily presence and counsel, and afterwards, and still, by the Spirit Whom He sent, "comforted His Church;" He, the Preacher of an evangelical righteousness, is the true

Noah. He, Who from the post of glory on His throne in heaven, is "not ashamed to call us brethren;" Who feeds us with His hidden sustenance through years of drought and famine; Who makes our homes glad for us in the days of our pilgrimage, is the true Joseph. He Who is the Mediator of the New Covenant is the true Moses the Apostle and High Priest of our profession, the true Aaron: the Captain of our salvation, the true Joshua: in Whom are hid, and not hid only, but to Whom are imparted, all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, the true Solomon: out of whose loins, as it were, springs renewed, restored, regenerated humanity, the Second Adam. What do we mean by this manner of speaking? What sort of relation between type and antitype do our words imply?

For, mark you, it is quite a different thing from saying that the Paschal Lamb, or the Scape Goat, or the High Priest's "going once a year into the Holiest of all to make Atonement for the sins of the people," were types of Christ, or of corresponding acts of Christ. That a ceremony, an institution, or even a prescribed and formal human act, in which freewill is not concerned, and which therefore could be moulded and fashioned after any rule, or (in the hands of Omniscience) for any purpose-that things like these should be typical and prefigurative, and should shadow out the outlines of a coming and better dispensation, is possible enough and intelligible enough. But the fact is placed under altogether different conditions-is removed, indeed, into another department of thought, and as it seems to me, has to be interpreted by a different

principle, when we take such a wonderfully complex organism as a living, thinking, free-acting man, and set him up and say, "Mark that man, and read his history well; for he is a sign of things that shall be hereafter."

"Whatsoever things are true," says the Gospel's most renowned preacher, "whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, if there be any praise-think on these things." Think of them as exhibited one by one-by each man according to the measure of his gift-in the saints of old. Think of them as the diadem of grace that crowned the head of Him to whom the Father "gave not the Spirit by measure; Who was inade flesh and dwelt among us" that we might behold what is indeed "the glory of the only-begotten of the Father;" Who made for Himself one glorious crown of all these precious jewels, and set it upon His head that all men might behold its beauty, and Who now weareth it on His throne in the heavenly place for evermore.

66

Was compassion ever shown by man to man? No pity, we are told was like His pity. Were words of wisdom ever uttered by human tongue? He spake, we are told, with a power and constrainingness such as never fell to the lot of orator or philosopher before. Did men ever go forth with brave calm hearts of heroism on missions of peril and to battle-fields? None ever went with so cheerful, so calm a heart as He, to that tremendous blood-weltering agony, where Sin, and Death, and Satan combined and intensified their

Have there been

power to distract and rend His soul. saints who have drawn draughts from the cup of suffering? He drained it to the very dregs, when every ingredient had been poured into it that could enhance its bitterness, without one quivering nerve, one angry, or self-justifying, or reproachful word.

So He was the perfect man; the "recapitulation of humanity, the incarnation-the prototype, rather than the antitype-of all that men had ever seen, or dreamed of, or pictured to themselves in fancy of the heroic, the pure, the altogether lovely and spotless, the godlike in man. "He was full of grace and truth;' and men have but received in divers and unequal measures, "of His fulness."

८८

If the patriarchs were "types" of Christ-as no doubt they were-it was in this sense only, that the Spirit of God, which dwelt in Him in its fulness bodily, struck out from their natures too, from time to time, sparks of fire and gleams of light, which men's consciences and spiritual intuitions recognised and canonised as Divine; and which kept alive faintly but not altogether vainly, the true conception of goodness, and beauty, and saintliness, in a world upon which a murky darkness was fast settling down-conceptions that should revive, and once more become impersonate when the epoch of the new creation, "the time of refreshment," "the manifestation " of the archetypal Son of Man, should dawn.

No one type is adequate to set forth the image of "the King in His beauty." He exhausts, and more than exhausts, the significance of them all. He realises

and gathers into one, all that men had ever admired, loved, honoured, well-nigh worshipped, in what they rightly saw were the perfectible capacities of man. In Him dwelt “all the fulness" not only of Godhead, but of manhood, bodily. These old saints were not dumb, incomprehensible signs, but living, manifest interpreters of the purposes of God. They taught men incompletely, but approximately, to discern the lineaments of that form of perfected humanity which the Son of God should wear when, in the dispensation of the fulness of time, He should leave His Father's glory to visit and redeem a perishing world.

(2) "The good of all the land of Egypt is yours." So spake Joseph to his kindred; so speaks Christ to us who are members of His body. We are in Egypt, or at least on the edge of it, in Goshen the "land of approaching "—and though our trade and calling be an abomination to its people, yet because we claim kinship with the True Joseph, they shall not, dare not, harm us. We can dwell safely there, ay! increase and multiply. There is a wonderful parallel in those twin histories: of the little family of Israel, three score and ten, multiplying in scarce 200 years, and in spite of scorn and tyranny, oppression and bloody edict, into a nation of 600,000 that were grown men alone; and the history of the little stone, as King Nebuchadnezzar saw it, smiting the bright and terrible image, and becoming a great mountain that filled the whole earth. Both speak of powers at work in the world greater than are ofttimes dreamt of in our philosophy.

We dwell in Egypt, and all its good things are ours.