Not Forgotten.

On  the mountain He talked with Elias;
On the mountain with Moses He stood;
They came from the heavenly mansions,
From the home of the true and the good;

To utter dear words to sustain Him,
In  the terrible strife near at hand;
To proclaim, that no tomb should detain Him
From the blissful and beautiful land.

'Tis the law and the hope of existence,
The truth, which all ages declare;
That the good shall thus render assistance
To the good, who have sorrows to bear.

And to thee, and to me there are moments,
In  the days of temptation and sorrow,
When the sainted shall come with their message
Of hope and of joy for to-morrow.

 

 — from Christ in the Soul LXXXVI.

The First Period in the History of Human Redemption

Among the wonderful works of God there is none more worthy of attention, none more important in its results, both to this world and to other worlds, than that of man's redemption. Man, in the exercise of that freedom of choice which God had given him, had no sooner fallen into sin and consequent ruin, than God announced to him, though at first obscurely, the great plan of salvation. As all Adam's posterity were involved in his fall, the plan of redemption, which has a relation to the whole human race in all ages of the world, occupies a great extent of time. Beginning with the promises to Adam and the early patriarchs, which were at first obscurely, and afterwards more clearly, made, it gradually unfolds itself in successive dispensations; but at last  we  see it in distinctness and as a whole.

The plan of human redemption may be divided, for the purpose of more distinct views of it, into two great periods; — including some subordinate distinctions and periods, to which it is not necessary to give particular attention here.

How God Led the Bible Characters

The Bible is full of instances and illustrations of the subject [of divine providence]. The patriarch Moses, in particular, furnishes us a lesson in relation to it. Such were the arrangements of God's providence, that he found it necessary to quit the aspiring hopes which he had once entertained of being the immediate deliverer of his people, and to flee from the splendid court of Pharaoh into the deserts of Arabia Petræa. For forty years he tended his flocks in the vicinity of Mount Sinai, exchanging the palaces of Egypt for a rude home in the distant and solitary rocks. Undoubtedly it seemed very mysterious to Moses that he should thus be dealt with. He did not then understand that God, in thus leading him into the wilderness, and making him acquainted with the vast desert between the Nile and the Red Sea, was preparing him for the dangerous task of being a leader of his people through these very deserts and mountains.

But this was not all. His manners and intellect had been trained in the court of the Pharaohs; but God, who is a greater teacher than kings, saw it necessary that his spirit should be disciplined and trained in the wilderness. It was there that he learned, more fully than he had ever understood it before, the lesson of a present and special Providence. Taken from the bulrushes and placed in a palace, and then taken from a palace and placed for forty years in a lonely desert, he felt deeply that God selects and arranges the habitations of men; and that it is man's great business, submitting on religious principles to the arrangements of Providence, to harmonize his inward state with his outward situation.

And, besides that, he wanted all this time and all this solitariness of place, in order to break up his early and unfavorable associations, to chasten and subdue his natural pride, and to imbibe that wise and gentle quietude of spirit which is one of the surest signs of a soul that dwells with God.

It was in the prisons of Egypt that Joseph received that discipline which fitted him to be the great Egyptian ruler. It was when he was tending his father's flocks in Bethlehem, or when he was driven into mountains and caverns, that the hand and soul of David were trained and strengthened to the great task of holding a nation's scepter. Daniel was taught of God in the lion's den; and Paul was aided in learning the great lesson of entire dependence, when he could find no escape from persecution, and perhaps from death, but by being let down by a basket over the wall of Damascus.

— edited from A Treatise on Divine Union (1851) Part 6, Chapter 5.