Excerpt from The Pattern in the Mount: And Other Sermons

This occurs in the course of a lesson that the Lord was giving Moses on architecture. The tabernacle was not yet built. This lesson had primary reference to the tabernacle and its furniture. Moses when he went down from God on Sinai knew what he, was go ing to build and how he was going to build it. The tabernacle was with him already a fact, a mental fact - as real a thing to him then I suppose, as it was afterward When it stood out upon the plain a palpable affair of rams' skins, goats' hair, and Shittim wood. The thought of a thing, the conception of it, is its first half and largest half. It is easier to pour in the molten iron than to make in the sand the mould into which it is to be poured. In the idea, the taber nacle was already finished and furnished. He had now only to go on and set up upon the ground in forms of wood, linen, and metal, the structure that in his mind was already forecast and divinely complete.

This will yield two or three lessons that will serve us practically. I want, in the first place, to say some thing generally about plan and pattern and purpose Look that thou make them after the pattern that was showed thee in the mount. It is not SO clear how God drew for Moses the design and working plans for the tabernacle The story only lets us know that he went down from God with a definite notion of what was to be done and how he was to do it. He did nothing till his plan was clear and ripe. He did not go'to work at random and let a purpose develop from experiment. he planned from his work, and worked from his plan. This lets me say something broadly about plans, and about plans of life. AS I look through Scripture I discover that the men who did the best work and the most of it, first wrought out in thought what they were afterward going to work out in act and word. Noah, Moses, Solomon, Jesus, the Baptist, Paul, are examples in point. The Creator himself wrought-out first His creative designs. In that sense the world is as Old as God. When at the end of the first week He said, All very good, He meant by it that things had now become in fact what they had first and forever been in idea. Let us make man in our image, permits us to overhear God drafting His design of the man that was to be. All good work is the execu tion of plan, somebody's plan.

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