At length the power of the oppressor is broken, and the people of God are delivered. The expiration of four hundred and thirty years from the promise to Abraham marks the hour of deliverance to his posterity.[57] The nation of Israel is brought forth from Egypt as God’s peculiar treasure, that he may give them his Sabbath, and his law, and himself. The psalmist testifies that God “brought forth his people with joy, and his chosen with gladness: and gave them the lands of the heathen: and they inherited the labor of the people: that they might observe his statutes, and keep his laws. And the Most High says, “I am the Lord which hallow you, that brought you out of the land of Egypt, _to be your God_.”[58] Not that the commandments of God, his Sabbath and himself, had no prior existence, nor that the people were ignorant of the true God and his law; for the Sabbath was appointed to a holy use before the fall of man; and the commandments of God, his statutes and his laws, were kept by Abraham; and the Israelites themselves, when some of them had violated the Sabbath, were reproved by the question, “How long refuse ye to keep my commandments and my laws?”[59] And as to the Most High, the psalmist exclaims, ”Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.”[60] But there must be a formal public espousal of the people by God, and of his law and Sabbath and himself by the people.[61] But neither the Sabbath, nor the law, nor the great Law-giver, by their connection with the Hebrews, became Jewish. The Law-giver indeed became the God of Israel,[62] and what Gentile shall refuse him adoration for that reason? but the Sabbath still remained the Sabbath of the Lord,[63] and the law continued to be the law of the Most High. In the month following their passage through the Red Sea, the Hebrews came into the wilderness of Sin. It is at this point in his narrative that Moses for the second time mentions the sanctified rest-day of the Creator. The people murmured for bread: