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your ruin.

your transgressions, so iniquity shall not be Cast away from you all your transgressions, whereby ye have transgressed; and make you a new heart and a new spirit for why will ye die? For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord God: wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye."

SERMON VIII.

THE PLAGUES OF EGYPT.

EXODUS VII. 5.

And the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I stretch forth mine hand upon Egypt, and bring out the children of Israel from among them.

THE Lord is the creator and governor of all the earth, and all his creatures, but those especially which are peculiarly gifted with reason and speech, should shew forth his praise. But he is too generally neglected and set aside, as if he were nothing in his own world, and mankind, who are under peculiar obligations to honour and serve him, rise up in the most daring and direct rebellion against him, and not only cast off his authority through negligence, but oppose his

will, and break his commandments through unbelief and hardness of heart. Yet he will be glorified in the earth. For that purpose he of old selected one nation, whom he honoured with his presence and favour, to whom he revealed himself, and appointed his statutes and ordinances, that they might be a peculiar people to shew forth his praise. For that purpose he has now a Christian church on earth, to whom he has given the still clearer revelation of his gospel, and in which he has a people to serve him, as he has declared that he always will have so long as the world shall endure. For the same purpose, namely, to glorify himself in the earth, he has often visited various nations or individuals with severe and tremendous judgments. The punishment of Cain, the destruction of the old world by the deluge, the confusion of tongues at Babel, the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah by fire and brimstone rained from the Lord out of heaven, the turning of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, have already appeared before us in the records of this sacred history. Few are more striking, or

more circumstantially related than those with which the kingdom of Egypt was visited, before its haughty and hardened king could be made to submit himself to the command of God. Indeed it was a great occasion. The Exodus is that event to which God more frequently calls the attention of the Israelites than any other. It was the great deliverance which was continually set before them as his special mercy to them, until it was superseded by that still greater deliverance effected for the whole race of mankind by the Son of God himself. It was the mercy by which even the giving of his law was prefaced; but it yielded in power, and interest of motive to all holy obedience, to that crowning mercy by which Jesus obtained an eternal redemption for us.

The several steps, by which that deliverance of the Israelites from the bondage in Egypt was effected, we are now to review. They form a series of miracles, which bear the two-fold character of tremendous judgments upon the Egyptian nation, and of distinguishing mercies to Moses and his

people. They were effected by the mighty power of God, who has all creatures, animate and inanimate, at his command, and by the outward sign of the stretching out of that wonder-working rod, which God had consecrated for the purpose, when he first spake unto Moses out of the midst of the burning bush.

The first miracle wrought in the presence of Pharaoh was calculated to shew him the mighty power of God, and to strike him with alarm, but in itself it was harmless. Moses and Aaron went unto Pharaoh, and, as the Lord had previously directed him to do, Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent. Here was a visible display of almighty power. Two single, unassisted men, without friends or allies, of a despised and oppressed nation, stand in the presence of a powerful king and his nobles, all enemies to them, and at this time peculiarly enraged against them. There could be no collusion, no predisposition to be deceived, and Moses and Aaron well knew that insufferable contempt, and more

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