At Elim there is an oasis in the desert, representing the divinely appointed provision of ministry by earthly instruments. There are twelve well-springs (not “wells,” b'ehr, but ngahyin, that is, Christ being the hidden well, there are channels or ducts from Him—as apostles, prophets, teachers, and so forth). Twelve; the earthly number, four, multiplied by the heavenly number, three, for it is spiritual ministration dispensed on earth; twelve tribes, twelve gates to the New Jerusalem, twelve apostles through whom the Holy Ghost, the living water, is given; but the palm-trees represent a more general ministry. “The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree," a beautiful simile, expressing not only the elegance and grace that caused the name of the palm (Tamar) to be given to the Jewish maidens; not only that hardy vitality which can live where almost everything else dies; not only that its fruits are sweet and nourishing, its ever-green bough a world-wide symbol of victory and praise, its bark yielding medicine for the sick, or made into mats for the devout, its mass of perennial foliage making “the scorching sun-light dim, That drinks its greenness from the ground,” or indicating to the weary traveler afar off across the desert, where the hidden springs are to be found—that in fact there are three hundred and sixty different uses made of it, alive and dead, by the Arabs—expressing not only all this, but above all, that participation in the sufferings and glories of the Messiah which caused its branches to be strewn prostrate before Him as He approached Jerusalem to die, and its boughs to be waved in joyous triumph at His ultimate exaltation in the feast of tabernacles.
This is a divine definition of a righteous man or woman. It is a pity that our conceptions are often so different—of something hard, rigid and ungenial. We have all met with these beautiful and bountiful natures, whose fruit is never more sweet to our taste than when we have just passed by the bitter waters of Marah. We rest ender the shadow of their gracious benediction, and for the moment cease to swell the chorus of those who are always crying that Christians are the worst people in the world.
Two such natures, lately transplanted, have shown how difficult it is to destroy the usefulness of a palm tree—one was she who was deaf, dumb, blind and otherwise infirm, yet who surrounded herself with an atmosphere of fragrant spiritual life, and earned by her own labors enough to give help to others who were in need; a second was he who went to and fro at Molokai, laboring with his remaining faculties, as one by one they were palsied, and his limbs rotted off, with leprosy. A Latin proverb: conveys the general belief that a palm tree grows best when it is burdened by weights—like the similar belief that a walnut tree thrives most on being beaten. Perhaps it is true, and that that is why the All-wise Husbandman lays burdens, and heavy ones sometimes, on the righteous—such as the weight of these three million people on the heart of Moses, and certainly he grew stronger by it. Mohammed says, “The Christians say, ‘We are the children of God and His beloved.' Answer, ‘Why therefore doth He punish you for your sins?’” Well, in the first place, God does not punish us at all; the Father chastens us (two as different matters as for a judge to be dealing with a criminal in the dock and for the same man in his private and domestic capacity to be dealing with his own child at home for disobedience). And, secondly, the Christian is chastened because he is “His beloved,” just as the tree might be either weighted, beaten or pruned, because the Husbandman cares for it. The number of palm trees is larger and more elaborate than the number of wells. It is five (man's number) doubled.——ten, human responsibility, i. e., to God and man—the law has two tables: this is multiplied by seven, the heavenly and earthly numbers combined (three and four)=—seventy. Twelve represents a mission amongst the community: seventy represents the community itself. Moses appoints twelve pioneers and seventy elders, as Christ twelve apostles and seventy messengers. Twelve is an official number—twelve gates to the New Jerusalem, &c.: seventy is non-official.
They journey again and the whole congregation murmurs. Moses was beginning to feel the weight of them now. Usually we are apt to think that the qualities which a leader most needs are the strong, vigorous, dominant ones. But, when Pitt was asked his opinion, he replied that the quality which a prime minister most needed is patience. Pliny said the same things about a judge; and, though Moses had more patience than anyone living, it was exhausted at last at Meribah. “Would to God,” say these emancipated slaves, “that we had died by the hand of the Lord [how pious we can make our blasphemies sound by a few interjections of sacred names] in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh-pots [I doubt whether they sat much] and when we did eat bread to the full, &c., &c., we remember the fish the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic!” Ah, “those good old times” that never really existed: what a glamor is over them—once we are well out of them. What an enchantment distance lends to the view, whether prospective or retrospective. How impressed we should be with a sense of the former highly respectable connections of these people, but that we happen to know that all they had to do with the leeks, the onions and the garlic was to grow them for their taskmasters; and that all they had to do with the flesh-pots was to clean them.