VOLUME LXIX (69) January to December,1962. 1962-1 JOTTINGS In Isa.48:10 we find God saying of Israel, " I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction." This was true of Israel in Egypt. Moses compared Egypt to an iron furnace: "The LORD hath taken you, and brought you forth out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be unto Him a people of inheritance, as at this day" (Deut.4:20). The furnace was hot when Moses refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter. The people were in sore affliction when Moses decided to turn his back upon the glory, the wealth and the sin of Egypt and to east in his lot with the people of his race. He thought that they would understand that at his coming to them, God was by his hand giving them deliverance. But the attitude of the Israelite who was smiting his fellow changed Moses' view. His brethren were in no wise ready to leave the land of bondage and to accept Moses as their prince and deliverer. He was met with the question of the offender, " Who made thee a prince and a judge over us? thinkest thou to kill me, as thou killedst the Egyptian?" (Ex.2:14). When Pharaoh heard what Moses had done, he sought to slay him, and Moses fled from the face of Pharaoh to Midian. But Moses' fear of Pharaoh was not the foundational cause of his leaving Egypt. The Spirit, of God through Paul gives us the real reason when He says, " By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king" (Heb.11:27). God commanded Moses to leave Egypt and by faith he obeyed God. The iron furnace of Egypt was not yet heated sufficiently for Israel to flow out into the wilderness to be moulded as a nation according to the divine will. So, for the next forty years they languished in the bondage of Egypt with their state there becoming worse and worse. As Moses wandered about in the Sinaitic wilderness, seeking pasture with his father-in-law's sheep, he came upon a wondrous scene, a bush which burned and was not consumed. He watched til? sight for a time and still the bush did not burn out, so he proposed to himself that he would draw near and see the great sight. As he drew nearer a voice from the bush halted him, " Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground" (Ex.3:5). Here was a picture of his own people in a bush which burned and was not consumed. For years Egypt had been to them an iron furnace, but the fire was to be to them not a consuming fire, but a refining fire. We now consider the former part of Isa.48:10, quoted at the beginning, " Behold, I have refined thee, but not as silver: I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction." Israel had sunk low into idolatry and other forms of sin during their sojourn in Egypt, They were God's people according to election, but they were to become His people by redemption. Israel's burdens became heavy, their tasks more severe. Pharaoh demanded bricks without straw. The lashes of the taskmasters left their red scars on the backs of Pharaoh's Israelite bondmen. They groaned and cried to God for deliverance from oppression. At last those who had been divinely preserved were divinely delivered. The work was a monumental and unparalleled work in the annals of time. Such a thing God had never done before (Deut.4:32-35). Their redemption and separation from Egypt and unto God have become types of redemption and separation for God's people in any age. Their first enemy after they were finally freed from Egypt and the Egyptians was Amalek, their desert foe, against whom God would have war from generation to generation. There was to be no truce, no peace and no reconciliation with Amalek. Amalek was to be destroyed. Israel's king was to be higher than Agag, Amalek's king, and Balaam also said, "Amalek was the first of the nations; but his latter end shall come to destruction." And yet again he said, " While Israel doeth valiantly. And out of Jacob shall One have dominion, and shall destroy the remnant from the city" (Num.24:7,18,19,20). Even so it was in the struggles in the book of Esther between Mordecai and Haman, between the Israelite and the Agagite.—J.M. 1962-1 JOTTINGS It was well for Israel in Egypt that God had a man in Moses who stood in the breach, a mediator indeed. By Isaiah (Isa.59:10) we find God saying, " He saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor: therefore His own Arm brought salvation unto Him; and His righteousness, it upheld Him." Again by Ezekiel He says, " I sought for a man among them, that should make up the fence, and stand in the gap before Me for the land, that I should not destroy it: but I found none" (Ezek.22:30). Great is the value of one man who will stand alone for God, whom God uses for the good of others. Such a man was Mordecai in the book of Esther. Esther is a strange book amongst the Scriptures of the Old Testament. Mho wrote it we know not. It is the only book in which the name of God is not once plainly mentioned, yet through it all there is plainly seen the providential care and preservation of the Jewish people, throughout the Persian empire, whom Haman, the Agagite, the Jews' enemy, had determined to destroy. The emperor Ahasuerus is otherwise called Xerxes (Est.1:1, R.V.M.) a Persian emperor who reigned between Darius Hystaspes (Ezra 4:24; Ezra 6:1) and Artaxerxes Longimanus (Ezra 7). the last being the emperor during whose reign both Ezra and Nehemiah returned from Babylon to Jerusalem. Ezra in the seventh year (Ezra 7:8), and Nehemiah in the twentieth year of that king (Neh.2:1). If Ahasuerus was Xerxes, a mighty Persian king well known in secular history, and we have no reason to doubt it, we can see how even the remnant who had built the house of God at Jerusalem would have been swept into the maelstrom of that destruction which was so satanically and carefully planned by Haman, for Jerusalem was within the Persian empire. Haman was an Amalekite, an Agagite, one of the royal house of Amalek. He was favourite with Ahasuerus. He slandered the Jews throughout the empire to Ahasuerus, that they were a people diverse from all people who did not keep the king's laws and whom the king should not suffer, for they were not to his profit, and for their destruction he would pay ten thousand talents of silver into the king's treasuries. The king in his simplicity swallowed the bait and the royal decree was made that the Jews were to be destroyed. The letters were scaled with the king"s ring and sent in haste by posts to all the king's provinces that on the thirteenth day of the twelfth month (Adar) they were " to slay, and to cause to perish, all Jews, both young and old. little children and women, in one day" (Est.3:13). It was to be the extinction of the Jewish race in the Persian empire. Esther, Mordecai's uncle"s daughter, who was thus Mordecai's cousin, had stepped into the picture of the Persian royal house and had become the queen of Ahasuerus in place of the deposed and disobedient queen Vashti. In plotting against the Jews, Haman actually plotted against queen Esther"s life, for she was a Jewess, but, no doubt, he had not intended it to work out that way. But so it was, and when at her banquet at which the king and Hainan attended, she pleaded with the king for her life and that of her people. IVhen the king inquired who had presumed in his heart to do this fearful damage, Esther said it was an adversary and enemy, even this wicked Haman. The king arose in his wrath and went into the palace garden and when he returned Haman had fallen on the couch, on which was Esther, pleading for his life. Haman had prepared a gallows fifty cubits high on which to hang Mordecai, who paid him no respect, and on this gallows Ahasuerus ordered Haman the Jews' enemy to be hanged. Haman greatly mistook the king's question about '" the man whom the king delighteth to honour," for in the question he thought he saw himself, but alas for him, the man was Mordecai. He had to be a party to the honouring of Mordecai and when he returned home mourning, and told his wife and all his friends what had befallen him, his far-seeing wife Zeresh and his wise men said to him. "If Mordecai, before whom thou has begun to fall, be of the seed of the Jews, thou shalt not prevail against him, but shalt surely fall before him" (Est.6:131, How much depends upon one man!—J.M. 1962-2 EDITORIAL To minister the truths contained in the word of God is a great privilege and a solemn responsibility. To the elders of the church of God in Ephesus the apostle Paul was able to say, " I shrank not from declaring unto you the whole counsel of God" (Acts 20:27).