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Today we provide chapter 3 as we are serializing a small book, written in 1938 by the British-Israel minister, Rev. Rupert Thomas. We have not edited the material except for style—such as adding a comma here and there for clarity, or breaking up large paragraphs for legibility purposes on our modern, 2 inch-wide screens.
All boldface and underlined portions indicate my emphasis. All comments in [brackets] are mine. QUOTE:
Instruments and tools are necessary to the best of workmen, and the Great Architect of the Universe, the Great Craftsman, requires tools with which to work and material upon which to work.
The great Potter must needs have clay. The great Father must needs have a family and a race. The King must needs have a kingdom. The Head, even Christ, must have a body, the Church.
To this end He called Abram. To this end He supervened, and, while not altering the laws of nature, improved them by a supernatural interposition which caused the birth of Isaac, the beginning of a new race.
In like manner, He perpetuated the family springing from this man, and through permitted adversity brought into being racial characteristics which otherwise might not have existed. Grown numerically to such proportions as to create alarm to their Egyptian masters, they were ripe to be organized into a nation and kingdom, with constitution, statutes and judgments peculiar to it.
Family, race and nation all in turn were developed by God and each in its own time and crisis was brought forth by a manifestation of the God of the supernatural through the realm of the spirit, applying spiritual law in the natural realm to fulfil His will.
First, the very material matter of propagation. The natural power of propagation having ceased in Abraham and Sarah, God applied laws of another realm, and Isaac was born.
Second, the people, developed to great numerical proportions, captive, bondslaves, disorganized, leaderless, were provided a leader miraculously called by God, who was given an impulse by a greater and more intimate revelation of God.
The testimony of the God-appointed leader was confirmed by signs and wonders performed in the natural world by the application of spiritual laws. Then, having departed from Egypt with the great company of the people of Israel, and having despised human instructions, Moses listened to the Divine Guide.
In consequence, he appeared, to all intents and purposes, to have blundered on the very threshold of his career. He stood with the great host of Israel between the Egyptian Army and the Red Sea.
If national leadership of today would be willing to make a few more such blunders because of a like obedience to the Voice of God, then the nation would have the same kind of deliverance as that granted to our forefathers.
And here be it noted that the performance of miracles is not limited to ecclesiastics but can be demonstrated through national leaders and statesmen such as Moses.
The apparent blunder was but the necessary reduction of the people to their own extremity, that Jehovah [more correctly, Yahweh] might provide the way of escape by an application of spiritual law in the natural realm. Thus was created the East wind which made the passage through the Red Sea, and became at once the way of escape for the Israelites and the doom of their enemies.
Subsequently, a mighty host was in the midst of a wilderness, which, having hastily evacuated its last abode, was not provisioned for more than a day or two by the wayside, and, therefore, must needs have a commissariat to provide for and control the needs of so great a multitude.
Yet, cut off apparently from all sources of supply, surrounded by potential enemies, their state caused the faithless among them to say that they must perish with hunger in the wilderness. It was easy for them to desire the leeks and the onions of Egypt, forgetting the hardships which accompanied such meagre fare.
But the God Who had delivered could deliver again, and ever will, when, in obedience to His will, problems are faced that only He can solve. So our forefathers in the wilderness were fed with food convenient for them. Neither did their clothing and shoe-leather wax old, but were maintained for their comfort.
Further, in a trackless wilderness and an unknown land with no human guide, a supernaturally wrought pillar of cloud and pillar of fire guided the people.
Again, was it necessary to cross a river, impassable through flood? Then God, at the crucial moment, causes an earthquake by the application of spiritual law in the natural realm, which dammed the Jordan. So they passed over.
By the same application of the laws of the supernatural and spiritual, the walls of Jericho were shaken, and the time fixed for their fall was made to coincide with the march of the people of God’s choice. Expressive indeed are the words:
“the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong East wind.” Exodus 14: 21.
The Lord, the Executor of the laws of all spheres; the wind the element in one of the spheres.
Yet, in co-operation, the Lord and His creation created the hurricane which delivered His people and destroyed their enemies.
“The waters saw Thee, O God, the waters saw Thee; They were afraid: the depths also were troubled. The clouds poured out water: the skies sent out a sound: thine arrows also went abroad.
The voice of Thy thunder was in the heaven: the lightnings lightened the world: the earth trembled and shook.
Thy way is in the sea, and Thy path in the great waters, and Thy footsteps are not known. Thou leddest Thy people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.” Psalm 77: 16-20.
Would God draw near to His people? He manifested His presence with the display of the Shekinah Glory. Was there rebellion? The Lord, applying the laws of the supernatural to the natural sphere, opened the earth and swallowed therein the chief offenders. Was there a question of leadership? Then the rod of Aaron was made miraculously to bud to show God’s choice.
In days of strange declension, men of the stamp of Gideon, Barak and Samson, are each in their time and place miraculously endowed; and the Spirit of God operated in the natural world through these men.
Fire, rain, sea, earth, sun and moon, are all recorded as having been affected at some specific time, suitable to God’s purpose, by the application of spiritual law in the natural realm.
And, finally, let it never be forgotten that the statutes and judgments of Jehovah for His nation came directly and miraculously from heaven, and the application of such to the affairs of the nation is, in the broadest sense, the application of spiritual law in the natural realm. END QUOTE
(To be continued.)
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