Exodus 23:20

The Angel, the way, the prepared place. It is the Divine key to the mystery of life. Life is emphatically a way. Not by the way of the sea—a prompt and easy path—but by the way of the wilderness, of old God led His pilgrims. The vision of the Angel in the way lights up the wilderness. Consider the suggestion of the text as to—

I. The pilgrim's condition. God's children must be pilgrims, because this world is not good enough, not bright enough, not capable of being blessed enough, for the pilgrim in his home. For (1) the instructed soul sees the touch of essential imperfection and the bounds of close limitation in everything here. (2) There is a constant aching of the heart through memory and hope. (3) Life is a pilgrimage because it is far away from the Friend whom we supremely love.

II. The pilgrim's Guide. (1) God has sent His Angel before us in the person of His Son. (2) He sends His Angel with us in the person of the Holy Ghost.

III. The pilgrim's way to the pilgrim's home. (1) It is a way of purposed toil and difficulty, of wilderness, peril, and night. Suffer we must in the wilderness; the one question is, Shall it be with or without the Angel of the Lord? (2) It is a way of stern, uncompromising duty. God asks us now simply to do and to bear, and to wait to see the whole reason and reap the whole fruit on high. We must train ourselves to the habit of righteous action, and leave the results to God and eternity. (3) It is a way of death. God promises to none of us an immunity from death. The shadow hangs round life as a dreary monitor to all of us. He only who can eye it steadily and fix its form will see that it is angelic and lustrous with the glory beyond. The grave is but the last step of the way by which the Angel leads us to the place which He has prepared.

J. Baldwin Brown, The Congregationalist, vol. i., p. 261.

References: Exodus 23:26.—T. T. Lynch, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxii., p. 206. Exodus 23:28 (with Exodus 33:2).—Parker, vol. ii., p. 192.

Exodus 23:30It is important, not only to see, but to love, the gradual processes of God. There is more love in doing the little thing than in doing the great thing. A great mind is never so great as when it is throwing itself into something exceedingly minute. The special subject to which the text spiritually and allegorically refers is the conquest of sin. For such as the old inhabitants of the land of Canaan were to Israel, such the old inhabitants of our hearts are to us.

I. The sin of our natural state is the temptation of our converted state, and it is only little by little that it can be driven out.

II. The old sins are conquered little by little (1) because God has His punishments in life: He makes sin scourge sin; (2) because it is for the glory of the Holy Ghost and of His Church that these sins should be left to be gradually overcome; (3) because in our present state we could not bear to be made ail at once perfectly holy.

III. Notice the expression "I will drive them out." It is one of God's high works; it requires the power of Omnipotence to eradicate sin from the human soul.

J. Vaughan, Meditations in Exodus, p. 24.

I. It is through little things that a man destroys his soul; he fails to take note of little things, and they accumulate into great; he relaxes in little things, and thus in time loosens every bond. It is the maxim of one of our nobles, "We perish by what is lawful;" it were an equally correct aphorism, "We perish by what is little."

II. It is by little and little that men become great in piety. We become great in holiness through avoiding little faults and being exact in little duties.

III. There is great difficulty in little things. In daily dangers and duties, in the petty anxieties of common life, in the exercise of righteous principles in trifles—in these we must seek and find the opportunity of ejecting "by little and little" the foes we have sworn to expel from our hearts.

H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 2036.

References: Exodus 23:30.—J. N. Norton, The King's Ferry Boat, p. 237; G. Matheson, Moments on the Mount, p. 154. Exodus 24:3-8.—J. Hamilton, Works, vol. v., p. 229.