What is the Gospel 6

We gaze round on that craggy precipice, extending its bald brow to the lightnings and the storms, on whose top the young eaglets sleep in the warm sunshine, and under whose broad shadow the shepherd reposes in safety with his peaceful flocks. It is earth's grandest token of that "Rock of Ages," on which frail man finds his salvation, and in whose cool shade this world's weary ones are blessed.

We contemplate that great root of yon mountain oak, which has penetrated the fissure of the rock, and opened its way down to drink up the moisture from the heart of the hill. It is God's emblem of that "Root of David" which hath prevailed to open the seals, and forced a way to the fountain and waters of life. We listen to the roar of the great lion in the thicket, before whom all the beasts of the field crouch or fly in terror.

It is the symbol of that "Lion of the Tribe of Judah," who has sent consternation and dismay among all the hosts of hell, and raised the fallen sinner from his "dead level" to his feet again We look upon the flowers as they spread open their beauties to the sky, and pour from their thousand censers their incense offerings to their God; and that lily there, the most fragrant of all, and that rose yonder, the most deeply colored of all, are meant to tell of "the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the valleys," which God has planted in this bleak world to gladden the eye and revive the heart of drooping man, and to be a soothing balm to his many, many wounds.

We sit down in the arbor, and admire the vine which covers it with robes of green, and has hung it with fragrant clusters; and that too is one of nature's ten thousand images of Jesus and his grace; for he is "the true Vine," and his Father is the husbandman. The visible world scarcely contains one object of glory, beauty, or good, which God has not in some way appropriated as emblematic of his Son Jesus Christ, and of his mercy to sinners through him. He has even made prophecy of history, and written his purposes of grace and good in the very acts and lives of men and nations. And here, in this third book of Moses, in the ceremonial system which it records, there is still another plan adopted to set forth the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

We have here a system of life-pictures and practical allegorical types, in which the Gospel receives a sort of living pictorial incarnation. It treats of the slaying of goats and calves, of meats and drinks, and divers washings, all ordained of God, that in these things men might have a tangible exhibition of the offering of Him who was "delivered for our offences, and raised again for our justification." It presents a solemn ritual of blood and butchery, "imposed until the time of reformation," but meant to be "a figure," complete and lively, of those better things which have since been revealed in Jesus Christ.

It is only another of those "divers manners" in which God has chosen to deliver to us an idea of the necessity, nature, application and effects of "the common salvation" of which the prophets prophesied, and the apostles wrote. And viewed in this light, so far from being repulsive and profitless, this book of Leviticus at once gathers around it a most attractive interest, and becomes invested with a radiance, which must needs enlist, edify and inspire every attentive Christian heart. It is a torch given of God, and lit with sacred fires, to illuminate redemption's framework, and light us into those profounds of grace, of which the prophets searched and inquired, when they testified beforehand of the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow.

—Gospel in Leviticus, The