صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني

it, He, by an immediate and direct interposition, rewarded virtue and punished vice.

Such a system, at that period of society, was the only effectual one for supporting true religion and morality: inasmuch as it afforded a striking contrast between the power and providence of the one Great Jehovah, and the nullity and impotence of those base idols, that had usurped His place amongst deluded

men.

This superiority of the true God could never have been decisively established, by a comparison of His power in the distribution of future and invisible rewards and punishments. Moreover, the intellectual and moral character of the Jewish nation was evidently such, that promises of future retribution would not have availed with them, in opposition to the allurements of vice and idolatry. It must be borne in mind also, that national obedience and transgression could only be recompensed, as such, by national dispensations. These, therefore, God undertook, Himself, to dispense; affording an awful sanction, altogether wanting in every other state. And by carrying on a continued system of an extraordinary Providence over the Jews, proving that the Supreme Jehovah possessed both the will and the power to punish vice and reward virtue, with the strictest justice,-He prepared their minds for the belief, that He would display the same justice in a future state.

Thus the nature of the Jewish Theocracy, and the character of the Jewish people, seem sufficiently to account for the sanction of an immediate and extraordinary Providence being employed, to support the Mosaic law, rather than the rewards and punishments of futurity.

[ocr errors]

With regard to the second objection against the denunciation, That God would visit the sins of the fathers upon the children;' the only circumstance that causes it to appear severe or unjust, is the supposition that the sanctions of a future state are understood. But when, as has been already shewn, the punishment is merely a temporal one, the objection vanishes; inasmuch as all inequalities to individuals can be easily remedied, in a future life, when the Judge of all the earth shall do right" to every one. Such a sanction seems indeed to be a necessary part of the Jewish polity, so far as regarded a providential distribution of national rewards and punishments. Now these, to produce any effect, must be of some considerable duration: as when God chastised the Jews by the captivity in Babylon for seventy years, the sins of the parents were necessarily visited on the children to the third generation. And when this denunciation is extended to personal and individual punishment for sin, as it was in the crime of Idolatry,then the visitation of chastisement upon the third and

7

fourth generation, was only analogous to the general custom in civilized states. Idolatry was high treason against Jehovah; and such a crime, in civilized countries, draws after it not only the death of the individual, but the confiscation of property, and the taint of blood, by which the offender's posterity are the sufferers. Moreover, in the general course of God's providence over the world, we recognize this principle, when whole families are often involved in mischief and troubles, arising from their progenitors' follies and crimes.

But all this is no valid impeachment of the Divine Justice, because it interferes not with that final retribution, in which every man shall be recompensed according to his deeds.

CHAPTER IV.

A FUTURE STATE KNOWN TO THE JEWS.

THOUGH, however, Moses did not sanction his Laws by the promise of future rewards and punishments; yet it may be inferred from his own writings, that he himself believed in a future state of retribution.

The statement that God created man in His own image, breathing into him the breath of life;—and the account of the "tree of life," whose efficacy was such, that if Adam partook of it he would "live for ever ;” -are intelligible hints at least, of the capacity of the human soul to enjoy an eternal existence. And in the curse, denounced against him afterwards, the dissolution of the bodily frame only in its original dust, is menaced; and nothing said as to the extinction of the "breath of life," or the destruction of "the living soul," which God had given him.

The institution of sacrifice also; the translation of

Enoch; the peculiar circumstances attending the command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac; the lives of the Patriarchs embittered,-(good men though they were, and the declared favourites of Heaven,)—with continual toils and difficulties; the life of Moses himself, that man of exemplary piety and the chosen instrument of God's will, who after all his enduring resignation was not permitted to see the accomplishment of his labours in the "rest of Canaan ;"-all these must convince every unprejudiced mind, that some belief of a future state was entertained, as well by the Patriarchs as by Moses. This is corroborated by the Apostle's reasoning: speaking of Abraham, he says, "He looked for a city which hath foundations, whose maker and builder is God." (Heb. xi. 10.) Speaking of the Patriarchs, he says, "Now they desire a better country, that is a heavenly." (Heb. xi. 15.) And again of Moses he says, he "esteemed the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt; for he had respect unto the recompence of reward." (Heb. xi. 26.) And indeed, had not this inference been plainly deducible, our Saviour would not have charged the Sadducees with error, in not knowing the Scriptures, when he reasoned on that passage connected with God's manifesting Himself to Moses, and concluded with asserting, that "God was not a God of the dead, but of the living." (Luke xx. 38.)

« السابقةمتابعة »