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I. SEE HOW CONTINUOUS HAS BEEN THIS LAW.

1. The records of the world before the flood, scanty as they are, show us that it was ever present in that earliest dispensation. Through that darkness we can see man under the dispensation of an incomplete revelation; God, ever present and yet ever hidden, and restraining His manifestation of Himself even as He gives it. What an expression it is, "God looked upon the earth, and behold it was corrupt." That looking on it, His revelation; that turning aside from it, His hiding of His face, because He could not endure its corruption and its violence.

2. After the flood it is still the same; as to the world at large most evidently so. How soon does the knowledge of God die out, even in the family of Noah! Then the Lord calls Abraham, and reveals Himself to that one chosen witness What a hiding of Himself, even in His revelation, does this imply. Even more remarkable yet is the presence of this law amongst those to whom the light was given. Marvellous communications of Himself were made by God to Abraham. When the three mysterious strangers stood suddenly before him as he sat in his tent-door in the heat of the day, how near he is to the knowledge of the Divine Trinity; and when the men vanish out of his sight, and he is left alone "before the Lord," how is the Trinity gathered up again into the unity of the Godhead. So again, when the assurance of his own acceptance is vouchsafed to him as the lamp of God moves between the divided pieces of his sacrifice, a horror of great darkness falls upon the spirit of the favoured man. In the revelation of Himself God still hides Himself, even from the opened eye of Abraham. So it continues all along the line.

3. So it was throughout the whole prophetic dispensation. What growing light, — what remaining darkness meet us everywhere.

4. How plainly is the same feature to be traced in the personal ministry of Our Lord Himself! This is everywhere discernible in His conduct to the scribes and Pharisees, and even to the multitude. What else were those charges to one and another not to make known His miraculous works of healing; what else the wrapping up of His words in parables; that "seeing they might see and not perceive, and hearing they might hear and not understand"? And even with His own disciples He acted to a great degree on the same rule. How plainly do their words and acts convey to us the idea of men living under a sense of mystery which they could not fathom.

5. Is not the same law marked even upon the open revelation of the dispensation of the Spirit? God's sovereignty and man's free agency; the co-working of His almighty grace and our own personal responsibility; the infinite love and power of God, and the origin and being of evil; who can explain the co-existence of these wonders?

6. Nor is it otherwise, if from these unsolved difficulties of thought we turn to the direct appointments of the Church of Christ. Do not the blessed sacraments of the Gospel at once reveal and hide the Divine Presence?

7. Most signally, too, is this true as to God s dealings with individual souls in the Church of the redeemed.

8. We may trace it in the Church at large. Bright as is the light, where is it without the shadow following it?

II. ITS OBJECT. Here, then, is the dispensation. Why we are put under it the fewest words may safest tell Evidently it is of God's love for us, and of His pity for our weakness. It is because we cannot now bear more; and that we may be led on to more.

III. ITS CONSEQUENCES. What especially we should learn from His having placed us under such a dispensation seems to be —

1. That if we would know Him we must follow hard after Him.

2. The need of reverence in seeking.

3. The true mode of treating these mysteries is neither to deny their existence nor to fear their presence, still less to let them minister to the production of doubt or unbelief, but to look at them as men look at the clouds which fleck the heavens; which, though for the time they hide the sun, yet do not make it the less present in the firmament, but which may themselves become so full of its light as to give back its radiance with a beauty which, if its burning brightness had not been broken by them into the infinity of light and shade, it could not have possessed.

(Bp. S. Wilberforce, D. D.)

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KJV: Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Saviour.

WEB: Most certainly you are a God who hidden yourself, God of Israel, the Savior.'"