" The Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tent of meeting, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they had come out of the land of Egypt, saying"
Numbers 1:1
By and by, in the story of Genesis, God concentrated His attention on one man. He said, 'To put My plan into operation, I need a Man'. And He laid His hand on Abraham, making farreaching and amazing promises to him: 'In thee and in thy seed shall all families of the earth be blessed', and subjecting him to the pressures and disciplines of His grace. It is the story of the clay in the hand of the potter. God takes this lump of clay and begins to shape it into a vessel of His mercy. And the whole Old Testament is concerned with the shaping of that lump of clay. As the story goes on, presently the man of God's choosing becomes a fami- ly; miraculously, and contrary to nature, he becomes a family; and that family by a strange concourse of events is brought down into Egypt, and begins to multiply there. Brought into bondage and serfdom by the Egyptians, God raises another man, Moses, to be their deliverer. Nor is it surprising that the man He raises up should suggest to our minds the One who was to come. The whole record glitters and gleams with suggestions and illustrations and adum- brations of the greater reality that was to come. It is certainly not fanciful to think that we see shadows of Christ in the Old Testament story. These are the edges of His ways, just brushing the side of the canvas, so to speak, or the stage of history, before His time.