THE PROMISE.

THE voice of Jehovah having been heard at the summit of the bright stair, announcing His Name as the God of faithful Abraham, we wonder what will form the tone and subject of further communication ! It cannot surely be, that language of unqualified encouragement and heart-cheer is to be addressed to one, whose past life has so abundantly evidenced that neither natural nobility of character nor spiritual grace are hereditary; on the contrary, who has proved himself all unworthy of his illustrious pedigree. Can these words of the Almighty fail to be mingled at least, with merited reproof, answering and echoing the thoughts and accusings which must have haunted the dreamer himself, when he laid his head on his pillow? Indeed, could we be greatly astonished, (after the tale of previous mendacity and treachery, plotting and counterplotting,) had the Being he had dishonoured now been heard cancelling, by one righteous sentence of outlawry, every covenant blessing hitherto promised; reversing the oracle of the younger son's

predicted greatness, and reponing the wronged and injured Esau in his right of primogeniture?

"I am the Lord, I change not, therefore (JACOB and) ye sons of Jacob are not consumed!" (Mal. iii. 6.) My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure" (Is. xlvi. 10). "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion" (Rom. ix. 15). All the unworthy past of that unpromising, and unlovable wayfarer is to be consigned to oblivion; and without a word of reproach he is to be reclaimed, strengthened, cheered, comforted. The words of the Prophet, descriptive elsewhere of the retributive dealings of Jehovah, are in his case reversed" For all this, His anger" is turned away, and His hand (of mercy and loving-kindness) is stretched out still!"

Although the lesson has run, like a golden thread, throughout the whole preceding narrative; this may be a befitting place for us to pause, and more specially to admire and magnify the Sovereignty of God's Grace.

Many other sleepers there were that night in the Holy Land, who could have asserted a better claim on the divine regard than the wanderer from a home which he had embittered and disgraced :-a home in which, as we now know well, he had left

passions smouldering, which craft and treachery had kindled, along with stifled purposes of revenge. We might have expected, therefore, the Keeper of Israel, in His universal watch, to have piled the Angelic stair over some worthier recipient alike of His temporal and spiritual blessings ;—leaving the wayward fugitive of Beersheba-(the "Underminer" as his name has been literally rendered)to be haunted in the night with visions of anguish and terror; in which, prominent would be, a duped father, an incensed brother, and, worse than all, the alienated face of the Infinite Being he had offended.

But here, as in manifold other cases, the Lord would show that the divine and the human methods are often in conflict. It is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy." The Patriarch dreamer's is the old, old story, that "where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” At that hour, this man of like passions is pronounced, by the lips of Jehovah Himself, to be the chosen recipient and inheritor of honours such as no mortal ever shared before or since. We have vividly recalled to us the story of the erring sheep in the New Testament parable. Instead of that truant of the fold being left to its own estrangement, to plunge ever deeper into the thorny thicket of its wanderings, the unwearying

shepherd follows after it " until he finds it;" and, "when he hath found it," there is no anger in his look, no displeasure in his voice. In silent love "he layeth it on his shoulders rejoicing." Such, in the later Gospel delineation, was a picture of God's present dealings with this exile on the bleak wilds of Bethel. He rehearses nothing in his ear save the wondrous favours he had for him in reversion; anew proclaiming that he was served heir to the Abrahamic covenant; recognised as the representative of the chosen seed:-above all, that he was the selected ancestor of the Messiah of Israel, the Saviour of mankind. The promise itself is so far couched in the same terms previously employed to Abraham and Isaac. But it embraces also a wider sweep. It tells of the cosmopolitan character of the wondrous race that was to spring from his loins, as stretching "westward, and eastward, and northward, and southward."

Strange destiny, for that lonely wanderer on that lonely moorland! to be father of the myriad people, who, in addition to past annals of peerless interest, are at this hour found by the banks of every river, and within the walls of every city in either hemisphere; unmingled and unassimilated with Gentile blood and Gentile customs, and with a proud and noble destiny still to be unfolded for their children's children. "The land whereon thou liest,

Not only

to thee will I give it, and to thy seed; and thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth; and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south; and in thee, and in thy seed, shall all the families of the earth be blessed " (Gen. xxviii. 13, 14). It has been well noted, God accommodates the very words in which the promise is couched to the condition of His servant. does He say, 'I will give thee the land;' but, "The land whereon thou liest." 'The land, all of which thou canst to-night claim as thine own, is the stony pillow on which thy head reclines;—this land, as far as eye can reach, is thy predestined and covenanted heritage. That stone thou art about to leave behind thee will remain a pledge of My word : -"I am the Shepherd of the stone of Israel!" In the words of Matthew Henry, "He seemed to be plucked off as a withered branch, yet he is to become a flourishing tree that shall send out his boughs unto the sea. 'Who can count the dust of JACOB?" (Num. xxiii. 10.)

On leaving the Beersheba tent, his own father had pronounced on him a similar blessing, almost indeed in identical words (Gen. xxviii. 3, 4). It is now endorsed by his father's God, and has put upon it the sign and signature of Heaven. Although, therefore, he had neither by priority of birth nor elevation of character any title to so magnificent a spiritual pos