thers knew God by the name of
God Almighty, but by His name Jehovah was He not known, or made known,
unto them. Now, it is quite clear that they were not utterly ignorant of
this title, for no such theory as that it was hitherto mentioned by
anticipation only, can explain the first syllable in the name of the
mother of Moses himself, nor the assertion that in the time of Seth men
began to call upon the name of Jehovah (Gen. iv. 26), nor the name of
the hill of Abraham's sacrifice, Jehovah-jireh (Gen. xxii. 14). Yet the
statement cannot be made available for the purposes of any reasonable
and moderate scepticism, since the sceptical theory demands a belief in
successive redactions of the work in which an error so gross could not
have escaped detection.

And the true explanation is that this Name was now, for the first time,
to be realised as a sustaining power. The patriarchs had known the name;
how its fitness should be realised: God should be known by it. They had
drawn support and comfort from that simpler view of the Divine
protection which said, "I am the Almighty God: walk before Me and be
thou perfect" (Gen. xvii. 1). But thenceforth all the experience of the
past was to reinforce the energies of the present, and men were to
remember that their promises came from One who cannot change. Others,
like Abraham, had been stronger in faith than Moses. But faith is not
the same as insight, and Moses was the greatest of the prophets (Deut.
xxxiv. 10). To him, therefore, it was given to confirm the courage of
his nation by this exalting thought of God. And the Lord proceeds to
state what His promises to the patriarchs were, and joins together (as
we should do) the assurance of His compassionate heart and of His
inviolable pledges: "I have heard the groaning of the children of
Israel, ... and I have remembered My covenant."

It has been the same, in turn, with every new revelation of the Divine.
The new was implicit in the old, but when enforced, unfolded, reapplied,
men found it charged with unsuspected meaning and power, and as full of
vitality and development as a handful of dry seeds when thrown into
congenial soil. So it was pre-eminently with the doctrine of the
Messiah. It will be the same hereafter with the doctrine of the kingdom
of peace and the reign of the saints on earth. Some day men will smile
at our crude theories and ignorant controversies about the Millennium.
We, meantime, possess the saving knowledge of