should no longer be at variance; but that all the twelve tribes, every spiritual worshipper of God, whether Jew or Gentile, should become one, the prophet was commanded to take two sticks-one for Judah and his companions, and another for Ephraim and his companions, and they were joined together as one stick. Ezek. Xxxviii. 16.

CHAP XVIII. Upon the charge to the Levites, which occupies a great part of this chapter, the reader may turn to the remarks on Lev. xxii. and xxvii. (p. 217 and 223) and upon verse 19, to those in p. 184, &c.

At verse 21, we have the law respecting tithes. "The Levites were appointed to receive all the tithes, and the tenth of the tithes were set apart for Aaron and his sons, and hence were said to be offered to the Lord, and to be holy. Again, the shew bread, or bread of faces, which was appointed to stand on tables before the Lord continually, and was wholly to be eaten by the priests in the holy place, is ordered to be made of tenths. Lev. xxiv. 9, &c. The manna, too, which was also holy bread, was gathered by tenths, a tenth for every man, and a tenth of it was laid up before the ark, there to remain so long as the ark endured. Exod. xvi. 16, 33, 36. “An omer is the tenth of an ephah." In short, all the bread of God, all that was hallowed under the law, and set a part for holy purposes, was measured by tenths.

"

"A tenth, then, in general signified something sacred, dedicated to God; something of the nature of food, and which might be called the bread of God. All this was but a shadow of a good thing to come, and Christ may most properly be said to be the substance of it. The word can be applied to none but to him in its full significance. He was separated from the common mass of mankind from the very womb, and Holiness to the Lord was the motto most descriptive of his character. He was separated for holy purposes, as all the tithes were. He, too, is the bread of faces which stands before Jehovah in heaven always; the bread appointed for the spiritual priesthood under the gospel; and he that eateth Him shall live by Him. He himself, also, tells us, that he is the bread of life, the bread of God, which came down from heaven; the true manna, the food of all the "holy nation" of believers, of which if a man eat, he shall live for ever Thus every tithe of old, in its prophetic or future sense, meant Jesus Christ."

It is worthy of remark, that gnashar in Hebrew, the word which in that language signifies a tenth, originally denotes riches. This points out to us an interesting instruction. The tenth or tithe of our goods, was the portion devoted to religious uses, or charit able purposes, so early as the time of Abraham. This is the portion which God required in his law given to Israel--a portion not to be used by us, but given to the Lord. Yet this alone is called our riches. The tenth is the only rich number. This may seem strange, if not absurd, to the friends of this world: yet a little at

tention will convince us of the propriety of this idea. What we use, perishes in the using; what we lay by us, or hoard up, we leave to others, and so it is another man's, and not ours; what we give away from a principle of religion, and according to its rules, we lend to the Lord, and have the strongest assurance of receiving it again. "He that hath pity on the poor, lendeth unto the Lord; and that which he hath given will he pay him again." Prov. xix. 17. This is God's bill for our money, goods, or services. Our Lord also assures us, that if we give but a cup of cold water to a disciple, in the name of a disciple, it shall have a reward. With what propriety, then, does Paul call giving our goods for religious purposes, a "laying by us in store!" 1 Cor. xvi. 2. again, "laying up for ourselves a good foundation (a good stock) against the time to come." 1 Tim. vi. 18, 19. This, then, is our proper riches, which we shall assuredly enjoy. We have God's bill for the whole, and he will repay it with full interest. The tenth, or what we give to the Lord, then, is still the rich number. This alone we lay up for ourselves, and not for another. Hence, alluding to this sense of the word, Paul calls the charitable rich in good works. What we lay out on human securities, and do not enjoy, is laid out for another; nor is it certain, as the human security may fail: but what we give out on the divine bond, we lay it out for ourselves; and our enjoyment of it is infallibly certain." Pirie's Works, vol. iii. p. 54, &c.

And

CHAP. XIX. Contains the law respecting the water of separation made of the ashes of a red heifer, and its use in purification. See the observations on Levit. xi. xii &c.

On verse 9, Pirie remarks, (vol. iii. p. 71.) that "the ceremony of burning the red heifer was intended to prefigure the death of the Saviour, is sufficiently confirmed by the authority of the apostle, writing to the Hebrews, chap. xiii. 11, 12; and that its attendant circumstances were no less figurative than the sacrifice itself, seems equally clear from the same authority. As the heifer was burnt without the camp, so, the apostle assures us, it behoved Jesus to suffer without the gate of the holy city. The emblematical intention of many such circumstances have been pointed out by our writers on mystery. The following, however, seem to have escaped their attention. In the verse under consideration, God appoints a man that is clean, to remove the ashes of the burnt heifer, and to lay them up in a clean place without the camp. The mystical design of these circumstances is very exactly marked by John the Evangelist, chap. xix. 38-42. Joseph of Arimathea was the elean man, i. e. clear from the guilt of shedding innocent blood; (and just and good, by the faith in which he lived, Luke xxiii. 50) nor had Nicodemus consented to the death of Jesus. These took the ashes of the great sacrifice, the body of Jesus, and laid it in a new tomb, wherein no man, had been yet laid; as the Jews reckoned every thing defiled that had been so much as touched by the

bones of a dead man, this tomb would be called clean in their dialect, as no corpse had been hitherto laid in it. And that the antitype might fully correspond to the type, the garden in which this new tomb was, lay without the city, upon Calvary, the scene of our Saviour's crucifixion. Here were these ashes laid up, which still remain as the only "purification for sin," when sprinkled on the conscience in " the washing of regeneration, and the renewing of the Holy Ghost." See also the notes on Exodus xii.

CHAP. XX. Here we find the whole congregation encamped at Kadesh in the wilderness of Zin, witnessing the death of Miriam, and burying her there. Here also we have an account of the murmuring of the people for want of water, upon which the Lord commanded Moses to take THE ROD, (even the rod from before the Lord,) and speak to the rock before their eyes, and it should give water. Moses and Aaron then gathered the congregation together, but instead of speaking to the rock, with the rod of power before the people, they said "Hear now, ye rebels, must we fetch water out of the rock?" Moses at the same time smiting the rock twice. It would seem these two eminent characters not only forgot, that to speak to the rock, with the authority of God, was sufficient, but in this case they assumed to themselves the honour of an act by which the Lord should have been sanctified before Israel. The sign of speaking to the rock was perhaps intended for a rebuke to the people, who were not so obedient to the Lord's command as the very rocks were. Though the water was not withheld, yet the relief to Israel was followed by a severe rebuke to Moses and Aaron, with a sentence against their entering Canaan.

Moses then, verse 14, sent a request to their relations, the Edomites, to suffer Israel to pass through the borders of their land; but the answer they received, affords an instance of the effect of the divine decree, I will put enmity, &c.

Israel leave Kadesh, verse 22, and come to mount Hor, where Moses, at the command of God, took Aaron, with his son Eleazar, up to the mount, and divested him of his robes, which were put upon his son; and Aaron died upon the mount. What could be the meaning of thus publicly stripping Aaron of his priestly robes, and of this his public death? We are told it was in the sight of all Israel, and was, no doubt, of importance to all. If, in his first calling to be prophet and spokesman of Moses, he exhibited the design of that priesthood, how much more in his death! His giving place to a successor, strikingly displayed the nature of that covenant which waxed old, and ultimately vanished away. See p. 80.

CHAP. XXI. The Israelites not being permitted to go through Edom, were obliged to make a retrograde movement towards the Red Sea, and were much discouraged because of the way. When just upon the prospect of entering Canaan, they were turned back to be farther tried, and the result was another proof of the wicked.

ness of the heart of man; followed by a fresh display of the gos pel, in the midst of the miserable multitude. Loathing the bread which was sent them from heaven, they give vent to their unbelief in the most bitter complaints against God and against Moses.-The Lord then sent fiery serpents among them, by which many of them died. Upon this they confessed they had sinned, and re quested Moses to pray for them. Moses, at the command of God erected a pole in the midst of the camp, with a fiery serpent of brass fixed to it; assuring the people at the same time, that whoever was bitten, he had only to look to the serpent on the pole, and he should certainly live Now, as the divine sovereignty ne. ver acts but in concert with wisdom, there must have been some wise reason for preferring this method of cure to any other. By any means, or without any means at all, God could have expelled the poison from the veins of the stung Israelite, or rendered it to tally innoxious-When the people asked a cure, it was proper to put them in mind of the original cause of the disease and as by a serpent on a tree man was first bitten, or deceived into the paths of destruction and death, no symbol could be better suited to that purpose than the erection of a tree, with the statue of a serpent affixed to it. Nor was the brass of which this figure was made less wisely chosen as a symbol of the bright, the brilliant appearance of the serpent, assumed-by Satan in paradise; and also of the durability of the mischief his sting has produced among the sons of

men."

"Such was the primary intention of the crection of this pole; but our Lord himself has assured us, that this institution had an ultimate respect to the cross of the gospel. Addressing Nicodemus, he says, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up; that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life." John iii. 14, 15. "There, must, then be some striking analogy between the brazen serpent on the Mosaic pole, and something to which we must have a peculiar respect in the cross of Christ. Nor is this something very difficult to be discovered: On the first tree, of which this pole was a memorial, we find a serpent, and this was the first object which drew our mother's attention, and by whose artifice and envenomed malignity she was seduced into guilt and misery. Hence the bruising of the head of the serpent, which had seduced them, was the subject of the first promise, or the first object of hope set before our progenitors after they had transgressed. In this view, the fixing of the statue of a serpent to the pole in the wilderness was of high propriety. Here the stung Israelite saw' the serpent, not alive and vigorous as on the tree of Eden, but dead and nailed by the head to a tree, as a sign that God meant to perform his promise, to bruise the head of the serpent," in a future period and in the mean time, as a foretaste of this, the Israelite felt the poison of the fiery serpent extracted from his veins

by looking to this symbol of the divine purpose. held the serpene of brass, he lived.”

"When he be

"Now, on the cross of Christ we see the truth of this wholę matter. We know that the serpent of Eden, or at least the spirit which actuated it, was the devil, called for this cause "the old serpent." There he appeared alive, and possessed of the " power

16

of death," to which he subjected human nature; and we are ex pressly told, that our Lord was lifted up on the cross, that " by death he might destroy him that has the power of death, even the devil," and that "for this purpose he was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil," that he might "put away sin and abolish death." Hence, on the cross he is said to have spoiled principalities and powers, and to make a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in himself, or in it." Here, then, like Israel of old, we behold the first, the great enemy of mankind, who infused the fatal poison into our veins; we behold him nailed to the tree, having his head bruised, his politics defeated, and his power to hurt us destroyed. This is the first object of attention in surveying the cross. To see the cursed tree, and inno. cence itself, yea, the Son of God, his beloved Son, suffering upon it, could afford us no rational enjoyment, were we still ignorant of the grand design of these sufferings. But when we see our old man crucified with Christ, that the body of sin may be destroyed;" when we behold "the old serpent, with the hand-writing of ordinances against us," nailed to the cross, there to expire, to be destroyed for ever, we see a source of transport, ecstatic and everlasting. We see the grand promise accomplished. Jesus, the seed of the woman, bruising the head of the serpent. Jesus was nailed to the tree, that by dying he might destroy him that had the power of death, and all his works. This affords the most rational joy; particularly when we know that this is the ordinance of God for our salvation, and hear our Lord saying, "Look to me, and be ye saved, the Son of man is lifted up, that whoso ever believes on him might not perish, but have eternal life." To believe in him as crucified, is to believe in the end or design of his death, as described above. This is the faith that saves. When the Israelite looked to the serpent on the pole, he believed that the poison of the serpent in him should be destroyed, and that this was the very design of the lifting up of the brazen serpent. Similar to this is our faith in the cross of Christ. The Jews, who crucified him, saw the cross; but they saw not the serpent nailed to it: they saw Jesus there, and believed that he was crucified; but they saw not Jesus as the seed of the woman, bruising the head of the serpent." Hence they saw and died. We see, believe, and live." Pirie's Works, vol. ii. p. 145, &c.

CHAP. XXII. Commences the very interesting history of Balaam and his prophecies It is wonderful to observe the sovereignty of the Most High, and the instruments he has chosen to declare