"And all these thy servants shall come down unto me, and bow down themselves unto me, saying, Get thee out, and all the people that follow thee: and after that I will go out." God will accomplish His own ends. His schemes of mercy must be carried out at all cost, and confusion of face must be the portion of all who stand in the way. "O, give thanks unto the Lord; for He is good: for His mercy endureth forever.... To Him that smote Egypt in their first-born; for His mercy endureth forever: and brought out Israel from among them; for His mercy endureth forever: with a strong hand and with a stretched-out arm; for His mercy endureth forever." (Ps. cxxxvi.) "And the Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, 'This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you.'" (Chap. xii. 1, 2.) There is here a very interesting change in the order of time. The common or civil year was rolling on in its ordinary course, when Jehovah interrupted it in reference to His people, and thus, in principle, taught them that they were to begin a new era in company with Him; their previous history was henceforth to be regarded as a blank. Redemption was to constitute the first step in _real life_. This teaches a plain truth. A man's life is really of no account until he begins to walk with God, in the knowledge of full salvation and settled peace, through the precious blood of the Lamb. Previous to this, he is, in the judgment of God, and in the language of Scripture, "dead in trespasses and sins;" "alienated from the life of God." His whole history is a complete blank, even though, in man's account, it may have been one uninterrupted scene of bustling activity. All that which engages the attention of the man of this world--the honors, the riches, the pleasures, the attractions of life, so called--all, when examined in the light of the judgment of God, when weighed in the balances of the sanctuary, must be accounted as a dismal blank, a worthless void, utterly unworthy of a place in the records of the Holy Ghost. "He that believeth not the Son shall not see life." (John iii. 36.) Men speak of "seeing life" when they launch forth into society, travel hither and thither, and see all that is to be seen; but they forget that the only true, the only real, the only divine way to "see life," is to "believe on the Son of God."