Spirit Teachings - William Stainton Moses

ever insisted on is manifest in your Bible even as elsewhere, viz., that God's Revelation is correlative with man's spiritual development, and that He is revealed in proportion to man's capacity.

You have but to read, with this idea prominent to your mind, the records of the lives of Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, David, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Daniel, to see that this is so. In early patriarchal times, God, the Supreme, was adored under many anthropomorphic representations. The God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob was superior, in the opinion of those who worshipped him under that title, but only superior, to the gods of their neighbors. The father of Abraham, as you know, worshipped strange gods, i.e. gods other than his son's God. Nay, this was invariably the case, each family having its own representative deity by which its members vowed and swore. The name given to the Supreme, Jehovah Elohim, shows you so much as that.

Laban, too, remember, pursued and threatened Jacob for having stolen his gods. And the same patriarch collected on one occasion the images of his household gods, and hid them under an oak tree. Here you see Jehovah was, as he was constantly called, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: not the One Only God, but a family deity.

It was only when the children of Israel grew into a nation that the idea gradually enlarged itself to that of the national God of Moses and Joshua.

Even the great lawgiver, in his elevated conception of the Supreme, was not entirely emancipated from the notion of a superior God; for he says expressly that there is none like to Jehovah among the gods. And many like sentiments are to be found in the recorded sayings. Indeed, in the commandments given as the very words of the Supreme Himself, it is said that the Israelites should have no other God before Him. Read Joshua's dying address, and you will see in it too, the notion of a Superior Deity.

It was not until the development of the nation had so far progressed as to make these anthropomorphic notions repulsive, that you find truer ideas of God becoming rife. In the prophetical and poetical books of your Bible you get far nobler conceptions of the Deity that in the earlier portions.

This is assured. God is revealed in your Bible in many forms. Some are noble and elevated, as the books of Job and Daniel. Some are groveling and mean, as the books which are called historical. In all you see an 195