The great pyramid passages and chambers

him the restriction that he should not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The penalty of disobedience to the Divine will was to be death. Accordingly, when Adam disobeyed God, the curse of death was passed upon him. Through the law of heredity, which declares: ‘The fathers have eaten a sour grape [of sin], and the children’s teeth are set on edge,” all Adam's posterity have been ‘born in sin and shapen in iniquity,” and therefore share in that death-sentence. It was a dying life that the dying Adam gave to the race, for ‘by one man sin entered into the world, and death by [as a result of] sin; and so death passed upon all men"—Rom. 5: 12.

33. God, however, did not leave Adam without a ray of hope. While pronouncing the curse upon the serpent, he intimated that the ‘‘seed of the woman” would “ bruise the serpent’s head,’’—that some day and somehow a Saviour, a seed of the woman, would arise and destroy the tempter and reverse the death sentence upon mankind. But many centuries rolled by, and no progress was made in the salvation of the human race. Abel, Enoch and Noah were commended for their faith, but of the vast majority it is recorded “ every imagination of the thoughts of their heart was only evil continually. So corrupt became the people, that the Lord was forced by his love and wisdom no less than by his justice to destroy them all—men, women and children—in the Deluge, and repeople the earth afresh through Noah, who was ‘perfect in his generation” and a ‘‘preacher of righteousness.” So ended the First Dispensation, a period of 1656 years.

34 During the Patriarchal Age which followed, the period of 659 years during which God bestowed special blessings upon Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the same condition of affairs prevailed. In spite of the terrible punishment which the Lord had inflicted upon their forefathers, the people once more relapsed into gross wickedness, so much so, that there were not even ten righteous men in Sodom. Lot, the one righteous man in it, was rescued before it and the other cities of the plain were destroyed by God. In this stage of the Second Dispensation, two thousand years after the promise that the seed of the woman should bruise the Serpent's head, God made his oath-bound covenant with Abraham, that it would be in Ais seed that all the families of the earth would be blessed—Gen. 12: 1-3; 22:16-18. The record shows that Abraham believed God, and that his faith was accounted to him for righteousness—Gen. 15: 5, 6.

35 After a long period of waiting, Isaac, the seed of promise, was born; and God renewed the covenant with him. It must have seemed as if the promise was then about to be fulfilled; but Isaac died, and the blessing of all the families of the earth was still far from being accomplished. When Isaac was old, the covenant was renewed with his son, Jacob, or Israel as he was afterwards named. Later, Israel with his household was brought in the providence of God into Egypt, where a few years afterwards he died. When on his death-bed, he called his sons together and foretold the destiny of each of the twelve tribes which would spring from them. As it was God's intention to cause these twelve tribes of Israel to grow rapidly into a nation, and then set them apart to carry out his purposes, their propagation proceeded miraculously, insomuch that the Egyptians became afraid and adopted drastic measures to diminish their numbers ; but they could not succeed against the Lord—See Exod. 1: 7-22.

36 At the appointed time, during the height of their oppression by the Egyptians, when their number had increased from 70 to 600,000 who were able to go to war, God

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