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But God, the Lord of heaven and earth, revealed to the heathen His eternal Godhead and His invisible essence, not only by His almighty government in the disposal of the affairs of their history, but He also, in every great event in the historical development of humanity, announced His will through that people whom He had chosen as the depositaries of His salvation. Already the patriarchs had, by their lives and by their fear of God, taught the Canaanites the name of the Lord so distinctly, that they were known amongst them as “princes of God” (Gen 23:6), and in their God they acknowledged the most high God, the Creator of heaven and earth (Gen 14:19, Gen 14:22). Thus, when Moses was sent to Pharaoh to announce to him the will of God regarding the departure of the people of Israel, and when Pharaoh refused to listen to the will of God, his land and his people were so struck by the wonders of the divine omnipotence, that not only the Egyptians learned to fear the God of Israel, but the fear and dread of Him also fell on the princes of Edom and Moab, and on all the inhabitants of Canaan (Exo 15:14.). Afterwards, when Israel came to the borders of Canaan, and the king of Moab, in conjunction with the princes of Midian, brought the famed soothsayer Balaam out of Mesopotamia that he might destroy the people of God with his curse, Balaam was constrained to predict, according to the will of God, to the king and his counsellors the victorious power of Israel over all their enemies, and the subjection of all the heathen nations (Num 22-24). In the age succeeding, God the Lord showed Himself to the nations, as often as they assailed Israel contrary to His will, as an almighty God who can destroy all His enemies; and even the Israelitish prisoners of war were the means of making known to the heathen the great name of the God of Israel, as the history of the cure of Naaman the Syrian by means of Elisha shows (2 Kings 5). This knowledge of the living, all-powerful God could not but be yet more spread abroad among the heathen by the leading away captive of the tribes of Israel and of Judah into Assyria and Chaldea.
But fully to prepare, by the exile, the people of Israel as well as the heathen world for the appearance of the Saviour of all nations and for the reception of the gospel, the Lord raised up prophets, who not only preached His law and His justice among the covenant people scattered among the heathen, and made more widely known the counsel of His grace, but also bore witness by word and deed, in the presence of the heathen rulers of the world, of the omnipotence