231
May 1929
T h e
K i n g ' s
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writers speak of H im ! Why, she wrote as if His action in this case showed Him to be like “a boy” dealing with a smaller boy to show supremacy. It ends with a justice bleeding for Moses. Worst of it is—I cannot get the thing out of my head! It comes between when I try to turn to God in the old way. ( There is silence for a moment.) B ill . A clever enemy’s thrust! But the unfortunate impression will not last. You will recover from it. H arold . What “enemy” is that? B ill . God’s great Misrepresenter. Look your Bible through and you will find him. The one who is disguised as an angel of light,—the one who said “I will be as God,” —the one who turned Eve aside in the Garden by assert ing positively, “Ye shall not surely die.” H arold . Oh, yes! The Serpent! Satan is the enemy. Of course I might have known that! The difficulty is not- explained away, however. B ill . N o . We are coming to that now. But I want you to hold one point in your mind—namely th is:—It is very difficult for people uninstructed in the Bible, living in this day and age of grace, to orient themselves back into the age of Law. H arold . Y ou mean to put themselves in Moses’ place? B il l . Yes. God had the letter of the Law to teach in that day and the Law was the schoolmaster that was to bring us to Jesus Christ. Moses was nearer to Him than anyone. There was less excuse for his stumbling. Any deviation on the part of a leader is awfully conspicuous. Look at the way our Campus leaders are watched. For Moses to be angry with the people, as he was, and diso bedient to God, as he was— H arold . H ow disobedient? B il l . Read it! Here it is in Numbers, chapter 20, verse 8: God said, “Take the rod, . . . and speak ye unto the rock before their eyes,” and so on. But Moses did not speak to the rock. He spoke to the people,—“Hear now, ye rebels!” He knew he was disobedient, for he had been trained in the minutiae of the Law by the Lord God Him self. He knew its full meaning. Added to that, he smote the rock twice. Do you know what Scofield says? “The rock once smitten needs not to be smitten (crucified) again. Moses’ act exalted himself and implied in type that the one sacrifice was ineffectual, thus denying the eternal efficacy of the blood.” H arold . Of course Moses was angry, we admit that. But he surely had provocation! B ill . Moses had just come from receiving his in structions in the Presence of the Glory of the Lord. He had been on his face before Him. And after that ineffable experience do you mean to tell me that it was a light thing for him to go out and say, “Must WE fetch you water out o f this rock?” Moses was not doing it, and I think claim ing God’s power for one’s self is a pretty serious depar ture. H arold . I ’m sorry for Moses, just the same. B il l . S o am I ! So are all of us poor sinners. I ’m with you there. But that is not the point. You fail to see that in this day our relationship to God has been entirely changed by the cross. We who are Christians are covered. If we commit any such sin as Moses, or any sin at all, His blood is our covering. He may discipline us, however, by laying us aside—and that was really what happened to Moses, as a matter of fact. I ’ve often thought God was most merciful to him. Look back over what the Lord had showed to Moses —to what intimacy He admitted him. The burning bush on
:: H e a r t to H e a r t ::
Mourning Over Moses B y F lorence N ye W h itwell
E XPLANAT ION : This conversation takes place in a college bedroom in Southern California. Two friends are talking —H arold , called “the huge,” who indulges in football; and B ill , surnamed “the brilliant,” who is en- route to a Phi Beta Key, according to the law of liabilities. The boys are in deep conversation that renders them obliv ious to everything else. H arold , on the divan, continually wrinkles up what he calls his “low brow.” B ill is tense and alert, leaning his elbows on his flat-top desk. H arold . It all makes life harder to live! B ill . I can’t see it. H arold . Of course not! But we have not had your father’s preaching to grow up under, nor his library to go to. I cannot see my way through—y e t! B ill . It is simply that many people with brains have not taken time to understand God. H arold . That’s strange—when it’s so important. B ill . Some of them do not wish to understand. H arold . Why not ? B ill . They instinctively know they have a responsibil ity toward Him and they shirk it—they want to shirk it. H arold . D o you mean the responsibility of obeying Him? B il l . Ye-es, with all that obedience to Him implies. H arold . What does obedience to Him imply? B ill . Obedience to God leads us first of all to Christ’s cross, and then by way of the Saviour into sonship to God. That’s the first step. H arold . Next step, please! B il l . D o as our Father tells us. H arold . H ow are we to know that? B ill . The Bible is our Guide Book, of course, and as we go on it’s just wonderful the way we come to recog nize His will by certain indications, and close in with it. H arold . I don’t see how anyone can render such blind obedience. B ill . A child in the dark does not question—it simply clings to the Father’s hand. H arold . There are questions that bother me just the same! B il l . What are they? Wo#, we trust, the well-worn “mistakes of Moses”—-long since proved to be Moses’ most reliable statements. H arold . N o , not those—it has something to do with Moses, though! B ill . Bring on the bugbears—let’s see them. H arold . I was looking over a collection of New Verse the other day and came on a poem by one of the best of the new writers—one who had seemed to me to be really spiritually minded. The theme of it was that a wrong had been done to “old Moses,” as she called him, by not allow ing him to enter Canaan. I have always been taught to reverence God, but honestly, Bill, the way these modern
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