Let us flee from the wrath to come! Behold, the sun is risen high on the day of vengeance! Let us not be found among the enemies of Messiah, lest we fall a sacrifice to his righteous indignation on the field of Armageddon! Let us escape for our lives, for the fire-storm of his anger will burn to the lowest hell! Let us pray for grace to lay hold on the salvation of his redeemed! It is a free, full, perfect, glorious, and eternal salvation. Return, ye ransomed exiles from happiness, return to your forfeited inheritance! Now is the year of jubilee. Come to Jesus, that your debts may be cancelled, your sins forgiven, and your persons justified! Come, for the Conqueror of your foes is on the throne! Come, for the trumpets of mercy are sounding! Come, for all things are now ready!
“_For they drank of that spiritual rock that followed them_, _and that rock was Christ_.”—1 Cor. x. 4.
IN this chapter the apostle solemnly cautions his brethren against apostasy, and consequent shipwreck of their spiritual privileges. His admonitions are educed from important events in the history of the journey of the Israelites from Egypt to the land of Canaan. He speaks of the march of the twelve tribes out of the scene of their bondage, under the uplifted banner of God; of their baptism unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea, when Jehovah gloriously displayed his power in preserving their lives between the watery ramparts which shut them in like the solid walls of the sepulchre, while the cloud rested upon them through the deep night, like the marble covering of the tomb; of their safe emerging on the other side of the flood, a type of the resurrection, leaving Pharaoh and his host to sleep in the waters till the morning of the last day, when they shall rise without their chariots and their horses; of their miraculous supply in the wilderness, with bread from heaven, and water from the smitten rock, which he calls spiritual meat and spiritual drink, because of their typical reference to the sacrificial death of Christ, which is the spiritual life of the world; and of their subsequent ingratitude and forgetfulness of God, notwithstanding these great deliverances and mercies, their murmurings, idolatries, fornications, and tempting of Christ, for which they were destroyed by the plague, slain by fiery serpents, smitten by the angel of the Lord, and fell to the number of three and twenty thousand in one day. “Now all these things,” he adds, “happened unto them for ensamples, and are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come; wherefore, let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall.” Thus he opens the graves of ancient sinners, and brings before his brethren the carcasses of those “who fell in the wilderness;” brings them into our solemn assemblies, and hangs them up over the pulpit, the baptistery, and the communion-table, terrible warnings against departing from the living God; even as the censers of Korah, Dathan and Abiram were beaten up, and made a covering for the altar, for a perpetual sign and memorial to Israel, to keep them from the sin of those men, that they might not share their fate.