The Triumph of Goodness.
I. Moses is not to be regarded here exactly as a historic personage; certainly it is not the song which he composed that is meant, nor the song that was composed by the Lamb; but here is the theme: Moses and the Lamb. And what was Moses in this heavenly tableau, to the thoughts of those addressed but the beginning of a great Divine dispensation of mercy and of education? He, far back in the wilderness and in the beginnings and sources of history, organised truth, and beauty, and right, and set a-going those great services by which the soul was to be enriched and ennobled. In other words, he was the beginner. The song, beginning with Moses and ending with the Lamb, connected the very first dawn of Divine truth, in the earliest periods, with its first flow and all its mutations clear down to the time of Jesus Christ, who in Jerusalem was, and who now in the new Jerusalem is, typified as the Lamb. The figure to us is almost dead, but to the Jew, who had been accustomed to associate with the sacrificial lamb whatever was sweet, whatever was beautiful, whatever was pure and unworldly in perfection, the figure meant immensely more than it means to us.
II. The song was of triumph. It was the shout, the jubilatic outcry, of the universe, that stood around about the ends of things, looking back to the beginning and seeing the way of God down through the whole dispensation of time in the world, now fulfilled and brought to a triumphant close in the other life. All that there was in the different heroes, all that there was in the different dispensations, all the judgments, all the sufferings, all the reformations, all the growths, all the developments, all the victories, whatever had gone to make up the moral elements in human history, in the household, and in matters touching priestly offices and prophetic qualities in those who witnessed in the wilderness, in prisons, and in the mountains, the apostolic administrations, and all the after-periods, and doubtless all that which has come down from the Apostles' day to ours; all these things constitute the theme of that great, heavenly, outbreaking song. And what is the result of it? It is simply the chanting of the old bard by which the deeds of his chief are narrated, as we narrate the achievements, enterprises, battles, and victories of an hero. "Great and marvellous are Thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are Thy ways, thou King of saints. Who shall not fear Thee, O Lord, and glorify Thy name? for Thou only art holy: for all nations shall come and worship before Thee; for Thy judgments are made manifest." Here, then, is the Divine catastrophe evil gone under; imperfections swelled out to perfectness; ungrowth and crudeness brought up to ripeness and to beauty; goodness triumphant through the universal realm. All nations shall come to Thee, not one being left out.
III. This was the vision, not of time, but of the upper sphere; and it was this: the absolute triumph of the Divine part in man. They who have gone before, and for generations yet those that shall follow us, must see the flesh stronger than the spirit in the great mass of mankind. Time, looked at from any high standpoint, is a most sad and dreary experience, unless we have some outlet, unless we have some compensation somewhere. The might and power of past ages has been physical, passionate, sensuous, devilish; and although here and there there have been sprinklings of goodness, although here and there there have been a thousand sweet voices heard, yet in the main the chant of time has been hoarse, harsh, cacophonous. In the main the movement of the human race has been the movement of vast bodies with vast sufferings, and vast wastefulness, and vast uselessness. But they who stand disengaged from the ignorance and darkness of time, they who are lifted up, and are at a point of vision where they can see the past, the present, and the future I behold them, not bearing witness to us, but in their own unconsciousness breaking out into ecstacies of gladness because God is justified. He who brought into existence this globe, with all its miserable populations, in the last estate shall stand and be glorified in the thought and feeling of those who behold the end as well as the beginning. "Thou only art holy." "All nations shall come and worship before Thee." Why? "For Thy judgments are made manifest." There is charity; there is explanation; there is reconciliation; there is harmonisation; and in the end it shall appear, when we see from the beginning to the end of this tremendous, and as yet uninterrupted, riddle of life and time, with an unclouded eye and with a vision just, and true, and perfect then it shall appear that God is lovely and beautiful.
H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. viii., p. 165.