This is beautiful recovery. And in this way will faith, at times, exercise judgment on unbelief, and clear itself again. And now the Lord visits him, as He had not, as He could not, have done in Egypt. The God of glory, who had called Abraham into Canaan, could not go with him into Egypt: but to the man who was surrendering the best of the land to his younger brother, in the joy of restored confidence in God, He will delight to show Himself. Where, then, are we, beloved? I will ask. Where is our spirit? On which road with Abraham are we, as at this moment, travelling? Are we knowing Egypt in the bitterness of self-reproach, or a regained Canaan in the joy of God’s countenance? Is it a walk with God we are taking every day? The life of faith knows the difference between the checks of the worldly mind and the enlargements of the believing mind. Abraham knew these things. He knew, in spirit, what Egypt was--the place of gold and of silver, and of rebuke and death; he knew what it was to regain Ai without an altar on the road; and he knew what it was to rest again, with altar and tent, in the plains of Mamre. Thus the chequered life of faith begins. But there is vastly more in it than this. And in this variety of action in the life of faith, we notice its _intelligence_, the exercise of the mind of Christ, or of the spiritual sense, which discerns things that differ, which has capacity to know times and seasons according to God. This fine endowment of the saint we find in Abraham, in the next passage of his history. The battle of the kings is recorded in chap. xiv. While that was a mere contest between such, Abraham has nothing to say to it. Let the potsherds strive with the potsherds. But as soon as he hears that his kinsman Lot is involved in that struggle, he stirs himself. Everything, as we read, is beautiful in its season. There is a time to build, and a time to pull down. There was a time for Abraham to be still, and a time for Abraham to be active; a time to be silent, and a time to break silence. And he understood the time. Like the men of Issachar afterwards, he knew the time, and what Israel ought to do. God’s principles were Abraham’s rules. Lot was taken prisoner, and the kinsman’s part was now Abraham’s duty. The battle-field in the vale of Siddim shall be his now, as the tent had been his till now in the plains of Mamre. The mind of God had another lesson for him than that which he learnt while the potsherds of the earth were alone in the conflict; and a time to break silence calls him out at the head of his trained servants.