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Jacob being dead, and Joseph also, during the remaining 144 years
until they went out of the land of Egypt, that nation increased to an
incredible degree, even although wasted by so great persecutions, that
at one time the male children were murdered at their birth, because the
wondering Egyptians were terrified at the too great increase of that
people. Then Moses, being stealthily kept from the murderers of the
infants, was brought to the royal house, God preparing to do great
things by him, and was nursed and adopted by the daughter of Pharaoh
(that was the name of all the kings of Egypt), and became so great a
man that he, yea, rather God, who had promised this to Abraham, by
him, drew that nation, so wonderfully multiplied, out of the yoke of
hardest and most grievous servitude it had borne there. At first,
indeed, he fled thence (we are told he fled into the land of
Midian), because, in defending an Israelite, he had slain an
Egyptian, and was afraid. Afterward, being divinely commissioned in
the power of the Spirit of God, he overcame the magi of Pharaoh who
resisted him. Then, when the Egyptians would not let God's people
go, ten memorable plagues were brought by Him upon them, the water
turned into blood, the frogs and lice, the flies, the death of the
cattle, the boils, the hail, the locusts. the darkness, the death
of the first-born. At last the Egyptians were destroyed in the Red
Sea while pursuing the Israelites, whom they had let go when at
length they were broken by so many great plagues. The divided sea made
a way for the Israelites who were departing, but, returning on
itself, it overwhelmed their pursuers with its waves. Then for forty
years the people of God went through the desert, under the leadership
of Moses, when the tabernacle of testimony was dedicated, in which
God was worshipped by sacrifices prophetic of things to come, and that
was after the law had been very terribly given in the mount, for its
divinity was most plainly attested by wonderful signs and voices. This
took place soon after the exodus from Egypt, when the people had
entered the desert, on the fiftieth day after the passover was
celebrated by the offering up of a lamb, which is so completely a type
of Christ, foretelling that through His sacrificial passion He
should go from this world to the Father (for pascha in, the Hebrew
tongue means transit), that when the new covenant was revealed, after
Christ our passover was offered up, the Holy Spirit came from heaven
on the fiftieth day; and He is called in the gospel the Finger of
God, because He recalls to our remembrance the things done before by
way of types, and because the tables of that law are said to have been
written by the finger of God.
On the death of Moses, Joshua the son of Nun ruled the people, and
led them into the land of promise, and divided it among them. By
these two wonderful leaders wars were also carried on most prosperously
and wonderfully, God calling to witness that they had got these
victories not so much on account of the merit of the Hebrew people as
on account of the sins of the nations they subdued. After these
leaders there were judges, when the people were settled in the land of
promise, so that, in the meantime, the first promise made to Abraham
began to be fulfilled about the one nation, that is, the Hebrew, and
about the land of Canaan; but not as yet the promise about all
nations, and the whole wide world, for that was to be fulfilled, not
by the observances of the old law, but by the advent of Christ in the
flesh, and by the faith of the gospel. And it was to prefigure this
that it was not Moses, who received the law for the people on Mount
Sinai, that led the people into the land of promise, but Joshua,
whose name also was changed at God's command, so that he was called
Jesus. But in the times of the judges prosperity alternated with
adversity in war, according as the sins of the people and the mercy of
God were displayed. We come next to the times of the kings. The
first who reigned was Saul; and when he was rejected and laid low in
battle, and his offspring rejected so that no kings should arise out of
it, David succeeded to the kingdom, whose son Christ is chiefly
called. He was made a kind of starting-point and beginning of the
advanced youth of God's people, who had passed a kind of age of
puberty from Abraham to this David. And it is not in vain that the
evangelist Matthew records the generations in such a way as to sum up
this first period from Abraham to David in fourteen generations. For
from the age of puberty man begins to be capable of generation;
therefore he starts the list of generations from Abraham, who also was
made the father of many nations when he got his name changed. So that
previously this family of God's people was in its childhood, from
Noah to Abraham; and for that reason the first language was then
learned, that is, the Hebrew. For man begins to speak in
childhood, the age succeeding infancy, which is so termed because then
he cannot speak. And that first age is quite drowned in oblivion,
just as the first age of the human race was blotted out by the flood;
for who is there that can remember his infancy? Wherefore in this
progress of the city of God, as the previous book contained that first
age, so this one ought to contain the. second and third ages, in
which third age, as was shown by the heifer of three years old, the
she-goat of three years old, and the ram of three years old, the yoke
of the law was imposed, and there appeared abundance of sins, and the
beginning of the earthly kingdom arose, in which there were not lacking
spiritual men, of whom the turtledove and pigeon represented the
mystery.
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