The God of the fathers.
"I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham," etc. In these words—
I. GOD CONNECTS HIMSELF WITH THE DEAD PATRIARCHS. They imply—
1. Continued existence; for God, who says here, not "I was," but "I am, the God of thy father," is, as Christ reminds us, "not the God of the dead, but of the living" (Matthew 22:32). The personal relation was not dissolved. The patriarchs still lived to him.
2. The resurrection of the body. This will not appear a far-fetched inference, if we consider the nature of the Bible hope of immortality. The Bible has little or nothing to say of an abstract "immortality of the soul." It nowhere regards the disembodied state as in itself desirable. The immortality it speaks of is the immortality of the "man"—of man in his whole complex personality of body, soul, and spirit. This implies a resurrection. The life forfeited by sin was a life in the body, and so must be the life restored by Redemption. The covenant-promise could not fall below the hopes of the heathen; and even Egyptian theology held by the notion of a revival of the body, as essential to perfected existence. Hence the practice of embalming, with which compare the care of the body by the patriarchs.
II. CONNECTS THIS REVELATION WITH FAST REVELATIONS, AS ONE OF A SERIES. It introduces what is to be said as the fulfilment of what had been already promised.
III. CONNECTS HIMSELF WITH THE EXISTING GENERATION. The God of the fathers is, in virtue of the promise, the God of the children.—J.O.