Exodus 19:1-2 - Homiletics

Localities shaped to suit God's moral purposes.

It is scarcely possible to read the descriptions of the Sinaitic localities by modern travellers, who pointedly note their exact adaptation to the scenes transacted among them, without the feeling stealing upon us, that God, in the countless ages during which he was shaping and ordering the earth to be a fitting habitation for man was also arranging it in such sort as would best conduce to the exhibition upon it of those supernatural occurrences, which in his counsels were to constitute turning-points in the moral history of man. Take for instance Jerusalem: are we to suppose that the valleys were furrowed and the rocky platform upraised by the elements acting mechanically, as chance might direct, or not rather that God lovingly shaped, age after age, the mountain where he was about to set his name, and which was to be "the joy of the whole earth"? ( Psalms 48:2 .) Rome again, with its seven hills: was not this remarkable formation brought into existence to constitute the site for that capital which was to be, first and last, the pivot of the world's secular history; for five hundred years the seat of an almost universal empire; for a thousand the western ecclesiastical centre; and having in the future possibilities which the wisest forecast can only dimly indicate, but which transcend those of any other existing city. And, if in these cases Providence contrived and shaped the geographic features with a view to the future history, must it not have been the same at Sinai? Must not that vast granite cluster have been upreared in the place it holds by a series of throes which shook all the regions of the east, in order that from it the law might be given in such a way as to impress men deeply? Must not the plain Er-Rahah have been washed by floods into its present level surface to furnish a convenient place from which the multitudinous host of Israel might at once see and hear? Must not the entire Sinaitic region have been so modelled, that here should be the adytum —here and here alone in the entire district, should be the natural "inmost sanctuary"— penetrale —"holy of holies"—the centre of attraction—the fit spot for supernatural events, on which the future of mankind was to hinge for fourteen centuries? To us it seems, that God did not so much select for his supernatural communications with man the fittest of existing localities, as design the localities themselves with a view to the communications, shaping them to suit his moral purposes.