Acts 7:30-34 And when forty years were expired… The Divine authority of the Jewish lawgiver was chiefly seen and heard in thunderings and lightnings, great plagues and fearful judgments — in the darkened air, the flashing firmament, the corrupted waters, the divided sea, the rending earth, lamenting families, armies overwhelmed and terror-stricken nations: so that most emphatically does the sacred historian, in summing up the character of Moses as a worker of miracles, declare that none ever equalled him "in all that mighty hand, and in all that great terror which he showed in the land of Egypt." The glory of our Saviour's miracles is of a different kind, and. better suited to the genius of His dispensation. He gave indeed abundant testimony that it was not for want of power He did not signalise His mission like Moses — when, e.g., over His Cross the sky was shrouded with a pall of funereal darkness, while fierce earthquakes tore the flinty rocks, and the temple vail was rent asunder by an unseen hand, and the buried dead arose. But the characteristic tone of the Redeemer's marvellous works was of another and a benignant kind. The Mighty Man of Wonders, by whom come grace and truth "went about doing good." Consolation and joy and bright-eyed health attended all His steps. Mercy went before His face; and at His heavenly smile diseases vanished, pain expired, fear ceased to quiver, sorrow dried her tearful countenance, the broken heart was made whole. (A. S. Patterson, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: And when forty years were expired, there appeared to him in the wilderness of mount Sina an angel of the Lord in a flame of fire in a bush. |
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