All this has great moral beauty in it. I know not how sufficiently to admire this workmanship of the Spirit in the mind of Abraham. He was an Israelite who knew the seasons of the year--when to be at the Passover, and when at the Feast of Tabernacles. He knew, in spirit, when to continue with Jesus in His temptations, and then again, when the day arrived, how to surround Him with hosannahs as He entered the city of the Son of David. All such various and blending lights shone in the spiritual intelligence of his soul. God, by the Spirit, communicated a beautiful mind to Abraham. In other days, he would not have so much of this earth as to set his foot on--he would surrender the choice of the land to Lot--he would leave the Canaanite where he found him--he would refuse to be enriched by the king of Sodom even in so little as a thread or a shoe-latchet--he would wander up and down in his tent here, a stranger from heaven--but now, in a day signified and marked by the hand of God, he can be another man, and know his millennial place, as father of the Israel of God, and their representative as head of the nations. He can keep the Feast of Tabernacles in its season. His rebuke of Abimelech--his entertaining him--his enriching him--his giving him covenant pledges--and all this in such easy, conscious dignity--and then his new altar or his calling on God in a new character, and his planting a grove, all bespeak another man, and that a transfiguration, if I may so speak, had taken place in him, according to God. All this I judge to have a great character in it. But I will not any longer stay here; for there is still more in this fine life of faith which our father Abraham, through grace, tracked to the very end, holding still the beginning of his confidence. And here let me say, this life of faith is, in other words, life spent in the _power of resurrection_. It is the life of a dead and risen man. It is a lesson, if one may speak for others, hard indeed to be learnt to any good effect, but still it is the lesson, the practical lesson of our lives, that we are a dead and risen people. At the outset Abraham, in spirit, took that character. He left behind him all that nature or the world had provided him with. He left what his _birth_ introduced him to, for that which _faith_ introduced him to. And as he began, so he continued and ended, with failings by the way indeed, and that too again and again, but still to the end he was a man of faith, a dead and risen man. As such an one he had received Isaac, some twenty years ago, not considering his own body now dead, neither yet the deadness of Sarah’s womb; and as such an one he now offers him on the altar at the word of the Lord. The promise was _God’s_--that was enough for him. For _faith_ is never overcome. It has divine, infinite resources. The believer fails again and again; but faith is never overcome, or comes short of its expectation. xxii.