Where else do we find Moses using the rod? When he went before Pharaoh he cast it down, as God had told him to do, and it became a serpent. And Pharaoh called in the magicians and they cast down their rods and each became a serpent, and the serpent from Moses’ rod swallowed up all the other serpents.

And then you find Moses stretching the rod over the waters, and they turned to blood; and the magicians did the same.

Then Moses lifted up his rod and smote the dust of the ground, and it became lice; and when the magicians tried to do the same, they failed.

Cannot you see the Hand of God? How wonderful God worked out His purposes there!

Some people wonder how it was that the magicians performed the miracles. God permitted it to show His greater power, and at last He brought them absolutely to naught; and old Pharaoh, disheartened, was compelled to say-in his heart if he never said it aloud, “I am defeated! The God of Israel is Greater than all the magicians! And now I can hope for nothing from the astrologers, or the magicians, or the wise men of Egypt !”

On one occasion God said to Moses, “Lift up thy rod!” And when he did so the waters of the Red Sea parted.

Listen to what he says after he reads the changed Isaiah 11:6 verse.

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Is it not evident, therefore, that imperfection belongs to the present dispensation of God’s grace, and that under it the human family cannot attain to that state of exalted glory and perfect enjoyment which is declared in the scripture to belong to the millennial period, when the savage nature of the beasts of prey shall be destroyed, and the poisonous fangs of the serpent be rendered harmless; for the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and the child shall put his hand upon the cockatrice’s den: when the inhabitant shall not say I am sick: when there shall be no more curse, either of barrenness or toil, contention or war, ignorance or idolatry, sorrow or sighing, sickness or death ; in fine, nothing to hurt or destroy in all God’s holy mountain. Is not such a state of things utterly unattainable by the greatest efficiency that can be given to the present means of grace.

Here a question arises, and a very important one it is, and one which we desire to give a candid examination ; viz. Cannot all these results be attained without a change of the present dispensation? Cannot all mankind be enlightened and sanctified, as some are, by extensive and powerful outpourings of the Holy Spirit, and then Satan be cast out and all the physical evils we have enumerated be expelled from creation by a simple act of omnipotence from above, without the personal appearing and return of Christ to the earth? Has not God power to accomplish all these results in this way? and if so, whence the necessity of Christ’s personal return and reign on the earth to the perfection of the happiness of the human family, and to the accomplishment of all the glorious promises of Paradisaical blessedness? A question of this kind, originating in honest doubt, and prompted by pious feeling, we desire to treat with the greatest respect, and in reply to it would observe,

In the midst of all these fierce creatures, the two young girls were moving about, apparently unconcerned at their presence, while the animals appeared equally unconcerned about them. The whole scene reminded us of the fanciful pictures we had seen of that time promised in the sacred book, when “all the earth shall be at peace, and the lion shall lie down with the lamb.”

Bulletin: Education series – Issues 1-5 – Page 96 – Google Books Result – University of Texas – 1918 – ‎Education

Now let us for a moment contemplate this little Sunday-school. In a black-jack and post-oak grove near the center of the town is a. rude log cabin about eighteen by twenty-two feet, the roof covered with boards held down by weight-poles. the logs unhewn, and the cracks neither chinked or battoned, a dirt floor, and across it are Placed several logs hewn on one side for seats. At one end stands the superintendent, a mere stripling, and before him are about half a dozen gentlemen and ladies as teachers, and thirty-two children, without any of these appendages which are now considered necessary to a well-conducted Sunday-school. Forty-five years have passed since the organization of that little Sunday-school, and now on a Sunday morning of a pleasant day 60,000 children are assembled in our beloved State, under the guidance of 10,000 intelligent and, for the most – part, pious young gentlemen and ladies, with a good supply of papers and libraries written by the ablest divinics of our age, and containing interesting biographies, and the very pith and marrow of Christian theology. Surely we may exclaim, What hath God wrought? That same superintendent still .lives and still labors in the delightful task of training the young in the Sunday-school, and as he contemplates, in imagination, the five and a half millions of children now being trained in the Sunday schools of the United States, and then looks forward down the long corridors of time when these children shall be actors in the great drama of life, he sees the dawn of that happy day foretold by seers and prophets when the knowledge of God shall cover the whole earth, the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and “the wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose”.

The Christian Disciple – Volume 1 – Page 41
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