Notes on the Pentateuch: Genesis to Deuteronomy
Overview
For more than one hundred years, pastors, teachers, and students of the Bible have benefited from Mackintosh’s deeply devotional commentary on the first five books of the Bible. His reflections are borne out of prolonged reflection and pastoral sensitivity—not abstruse theological concepts or an abstract engagement of the text. Mackintosh coaxingly invites readers to place themselves within the stories of the Pentateuch and confront the issues faced by the characters—to walk the garden with Adam and Eve, to connive with Jacob, to travel with Joseph, and to wander with the Israelites from the bondage of Egypt to the freedom of the Promised Land. The Pentateuch expresses the most basic human sentiments, and exposes the tension between promises and fulfillment, good and evil, belief and deception. Mackintosh’s Notes on the Pentateuch shows how these books lay the groundwork for God’s redemptive history.
Top Highlights
“If God be not known, He cannot be obeyed; for obedience is ever founded upon knowledge. When the soul is blessed with the knowledge of God, it finds this knowledge to be life (John 17:3), and life is power; and when I get power, I can act. It is obvious that one cannot act without life; and therefore it is most unintelligent to set people upon doing certain things in order to get that by which alone they can do anything.” (Page 169)
“The conception of Christ’s humanity by the Holy Ghost, in the womb of the virgin, unfolds one of the most profound mysteries which can possibly engage the attention of the renewed mind. It is most fully set forth in Luke’s Gospel; and this is entirely characteristic, inasmuch as, throughout that Gospel, it would seem to be the special object of the Holy Ghost to unfold, in His own divinely touching manner, ‘the Man Christ Jesus.’ In Matthew, we have ‘the Son of Abraham—the Son of David’; in Mark, we have the divine Servant—the heavenly Workman; in John, we have ‘the Son of God’—the Eternal Word—the Life—the Light, by whom all things were made; but the great theme of the Holy Ghost in Luke is ‘the Son of Man.’” (Page 294)
“There was a material difference; but it is because He was not a sin-bearer all His life. What is the difference? In Gethsemane, He was anticipating the cross; at Calvary, He was actually enduring it. In Gethsemane, ‘there appeared an angel unto Him from heaven, strengthening Him’; at Calvary, He was forsaken of all. There was no angelic ministry there. In Gethsemane, He addresses God as ‘Father,’ thus enjoying the full communion of that ineffable relationship; but at Calvary, He cries, ‘My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?’ Here the Sin-bearer looks up and beholds the throne of Eternal Justice enveloped in dark clouds, and the countenance of Inflexible Holiness averted from Him, because He was being ‘made sin for us.’” (Pages 303–304)
Man’s complete ruin in sin, and God’s perfect remedy in Christ, are fully, clearly, and often strikingly presented [in Mackintosh’s writings].
—Andrew Miller, a leader of the Plymouth Brethren movement
- Title: Notes on the Pentateuch: Genesis to Deuteronomy
- Author: C. H. Mackintosh
- Series: C. H. Mackintosh Collection
- Publisher: Loizeaux Brothers Publications
- Publication Date: 1973
- Pages: 928