Franz Delitzsch

“ By the union of the spirit with the All, Μώτ, i.e., slime, was formed, from which every seed of creation and the universe was developed; and the heavens were made in the form of an egg, from which the sun and moon, the stars and constellations, sprang. By the heating of the earth and sea there arose winds, clouds and rain, lightning and thunder, the roaring of which wakened up sensitive beings, so that living creatures of both sexes moved in the waters and upon the earth. ”

“ In Num 24:8 and Num 24:9, Balaam proclaims still further: “God leads him out of Egypt; his strength is as that of a buffalo: he will devour nations his enemies, and crush their bones, and dash them in pieces with his arrows. He has encamped, he lies down like a lion, and like a lioness: who can drive him up? Blessed be they who bless thee, and cursed they who curse thee!” The fulness of power that dwelt in the people of Israel was apparent in the force and prowess with which their God brought them out of Egypt. ”

“ In the song of praise which Moses and the children of Israel sang at the Red Sea, in celebration of the wonderful works of Jehovah, the congregation of Israel commemorated the fact of its deliverance and its exaltation into the nation of God. By their glorious deliverance from the slave-house of Egypt, Jehovah had practically exalted the seed of Abraham into His own nation; and in the destruction of Pharaoh and his host, He had glorified Himself as God of the gods and King of the heathen, whom no power on earth could defy with impunity. ”

“ Is this representation of the work of creation, which follows in the simplest way from the word of God, at variance with correct ideas of the omnipotence and wisdom of God? Could not the Almighty create the innumerable host of heaven at the same time as the earthly globe? Or would Omnipotence require more time for the creation of the moon, the planets, and the sun, or of Orion, Sirius, the Pleiades, and other heavenly bodies whose magnitude has not yet been ascertained, than for the creation of the earth itself? ”

“ Just as the sun, when it rises and diffuses its rich glory and soft light over all the world, merely lifts up its face upon all the world;...so when God gives His word, He causes His face to shine clearly and joyously upon all minds, and makes them joyful and light, and as it were new hearts and new men. ”

“ The blood taken from the altar shadowed forth the soul as united with God through the medium of the atonement, and filled with powers of grace. The holy anointing oil was a symbol of the Spirit of God. Consequently, through this sprinkling the priests were endowed, both soul and spirit, with the higher powers of the divine life. ”

“ By an act of divine omnipotence man arose from the dust; and in the same moment in which the dust, by virtue of creative omnipotence, shaped itself into a human form, it was pervaded by the divine breath of life, and created a living being, so that we cannot say the body was earlier than the soul. The dust of the earth is merely the earthly substratum, which was formed by the breath of life from God into an animated, living, self-existent being. ”

“ For the laws of nature are ordained by God, and have their ultimate ground and purpose in the divine plan of the universe which links together both nature and grace. “Springing as it does from the effect of the sun upon the dark mass of clouds, it typifies the readiness of the heavenly to pervade the earthly; spread out as it is between heaven and earth, it proclaims peace between God and man; and whilst spanning the whole horizon, it teaches the all-embracing universality of the covenant of grace” ( Delitzsch) . ”

“ Natural research, again, will never explain the origin of the universe, or even of the earth; for the creation lies beyond the limits of the territory within its reach. By all modest naturalists, therefore, it is assumed that the origin of matter, or of the original material of the world, was due to an act of divine creation. But there is no firm ground for the conclusion which they draw, on the basis of this assumption, with regard to the formation or development of the world from its first chaotic condition into a fit abode for man. ”

“ In the blood sprinkled upon the altar, the natural life of the people was given up to God, as a life that had passed through death, to be pervaded by His grace; and then through the sprinkling upon the people it was restored to them again, as a life renewed by the grace of God. In this way the blood not only became a bond of union between Jehovah and His people, but as the blood of the covenant, it became a vital power, holy and divine, uniting Israel and its God ”

“ 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 herb of the field is in contrast with the trees of the garden, and sorrow with the easy dressing of the garden. We are not to understand, however, that because man failed to guard the good creation of God from the invasion of the evil one, a host of demoniacal powers forced their way into the material world to lay it waste and offer resistance to man; but because man himself had fallen into the power of the evil one, therefore God cursed the earth, not merely withdrawing the divine powers of life which pervaded Eden, but changing its relation to man. ”

“ Thus did the works of God go hand in hand with His revelation in the words of promise, of law, and of prophecy, in the economy of the Old Covenant, not merely as preparing the way for the introduction of the salvation announced in the law and in prophecy, but as essential factors of the plan of God for the redemption of man, as acts which regulated and determined the whole course of the world, and contained in the germ the consummation of all things;— the law, as a “schoolmaster to bring to Christ,” by training Israel to welcome the Saviour ”

“ The blessing of Abraham was once more to unite the divided families, and change the curse, pronounced upon the ground on account of sin, into a blessing for the whole human race. This concluding word comprehends all nations and times, and condenses, as Baumgarten has said, the whole fulness of the divine counsel for the salvation of men into the call of Abram. All further promises, therefore, not only to the patriarchs, but also to Israel, were merely expansions and closer definitions of the salvation held out to the whole human race in the first promise. ”

“ The prophecy itself commences with a picture from the “end of the days,” which rises up before the mental eye of the seer. “I see Him, yet not now; I behold Him, but not nigh. A star appears out of Jacob, and a sceptre rises out of Israel, and dashes Moab in pieces on both sides, and destroys all the sons of confusion.” ”

“ It is the curse of sin, that it renders the hard heart harder, and less susceptible to the gracious manifestations of divine love, long-suffering, and patience. In this twofold manner God produces hardness, not only permissive but effective; i.e., not only by giving time and space for the manifestation of human opposition, even to the utmost limits of creaturely freedom, but still more by those continued manifestations of His will which drive the hard heart to such utter obduracy that it is no longer capable of returning, and so giving over the hardened sinner to the judgment of damnation. ”

“ On the other hand, the human spirit is not a mere individualization of the divine breath which breathed upon the material of the world, or of the universal spirit of nature; nor is his body merely a production of the earth when stimulated by the creative word of God. ”

“ Moses and Aaron, they imagined, through their appeal to Pharaoh had made the king and his counsellors suspect them of being restless people, and so had put a weapon into their hands for their oppression and destruction. What perversity of the natural heart! They call upon God to judge, whilst by their very complaining they show that they have no confidence in God and His power to save. Moses turned (ויּשׁב Exo 5:22) to Jehovah with the question, “Why hast Thou done evil to this people,” - increased their oppression by my mission to Pharaoh, and yet not delivered them? ”

“ Creation is an act of the personal God, not a process of nature, the development of which can be traced to the laws of birth and decay that prevail in the created world. But the work of God, as described in the history of creation, is in perfect harmony with the correct notions of divine omnipotence, wisdom and goodness. The assertion, so frequently made, that the course of the creation takes its form from the Hebrew week, which was already in existence, and the idea of God's resting on the seventh day, from the institution of the Hebrew Sabbath, is entirely without foundation. ”

“ The tribes of Israel stood before the mental eye of the patriarch in their full development into the nation in which all the families of the earth were to be blessed. From this point of view, the salvation that was to blossom in the future for the children of Israel culminated in the peaceful kingdom of the Shiloh, in whom the dominion of the victorious lion out of Judah was to attain its fullest perfection. ”

“ Even to the present day the Dead Sea, with the sulphureous vapour which hangs about it, the great blocks of saltpetre and sulphur which lie on every hand, and the utter absence of the slightest trace of animal and vegetable life in its waters, are a striking testimony to this catastrophe, which is held up in both the Old and New Testaments as a fearfully solemn judgment of God for the warning of self-secure and presumptuous sinners. ”

“ But the altar was built for the offering of sacrifices, to mould and consecrate the setting up of the law upon the stones into a renewal of the covenant. In the burnt-offerings Israel gave itself up to the Lord with all its life and labour, and in the sacrificial meal it entered into the enjoyment of the blessings of divine grace, to taste of the blessedness of vital communion with its God. By connecting the sacrificial ceremony with the setting up of the law, Israel gave a practical testimony to the fact that its life and blessedness were founded upon its observance of the law. ”

“ Looked at from this side, the hardening was a fruit of sin, a consequence of that self-will, high-mindedness, and pride which flow from sin, and a continuous and ever increasing abuse of that freedom of the will which is innate in man, and which involves the possibility of obstinate resistance to the word and chastisement of God even until death. As the freedom of the will has its fixed limits in the unconditional dependence of the creature upon the Creator, so the sinner may resist the will of God as long as he lives. ”

“ If we examine the revelations of the first covenant, as they have been handed down to us in the sacred scriptures of the Old Testament, we can distinguish three stages of progressive development: preparation for the kingdom of God in its Old Testament form; its establishment through the mediatorial office of Moses; and its development and extension through the prophets. In all these periods God revealed Himself and His salvation to the human race by words and deeds. ”

“ The account before us does not contain the slightest marks of a vision, is no picture of creation, in which every line betrays the pencil of a painter rather than the pen of a historian, but is obviously a historical narrative, which we could no more transform into a vision than the account of paradise or of the fall. ”

“ But in these preparations we can discover no sign of any legendary and unhistorical transference of later circumstances and institutions, either Mosaic or post-Mosaic, to the patriarchal age; and they are sufficiently justified by the facts themselves, since the Mosaic economy cannot possibly have been brought into the world, like a deus ex machina, without the slightest previous preparation. The natural simplicity of the patriarchal life, which shines out in every narrative, is another thing that produces on every unprejudiced reader the impression of a genuine historical tradition. ”

“ The righteousness of the Israelites was “a product of the institutions which God had established among them, of the revelation of His holy will which He had given them in His law, of the forgiveness of sins which He had linked on to the offering of sacrifices, and of the communication of His Spirit, which was ever living and at work in His Church, and in it alone” (Hengstenberg) . Such a people Balaam could not curse; he could only wish that the end of his own life might resemble the end of these righteous men. Death is introduced here as the end and completion of life. ”