Bible Commentaries
Exodus 31

Verses 1-18

Exodus 31:3-4

The ambition of art, to come ever nearer to a perfect work, is an evidence that the spirit of the Master-Artist stirs and quickens the human spirit. 'See, I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works.' In the spirit of God every art is latent.... Faith and art have all the sympathy of mother and child. Neither of them is content with nature's conditions. Faith discerns a higher world, and art would fain body it forth.

Dr. John Pulsford, The Supremacy of Man, pp. 97 f.

Compare Adam Bede's words to his brother, in the opening chapter of Adam Bede: 'There's such a thing as being over-speritial; we must have something beside Gospel i' this world. Look at the canals, an' th' aqueducs, an' th' coal-pit engines, and Arkwright's mills there at Cranford; a man must learn summat beside Gospel to make them things, I reckon. But t' hear some o' them preachers, you'd think as a man must be doing nothing all's life but shutting's eyes and looking what's a-going on inside him. I know a man must have the love o' God in his soul, and the Bible's God's word. But what does the Bible say? Why, it says as God put His sperrit into the workman as built the tabernacle, to make him do all the carved work and things as wanted a nice hand. And this is my way o' lookin' at it: there's the sperrit o' God in all things and all times week-day as well as Sunday and i' the great works and inventions, and i' the figuring and the mechanics. And God helps us with our headpieces and our hands as well as with our souls.'

Reference. XXXI. 3-4. G. Matheson, Voices of the Spirit, p. 8.

Exodus 31:13

If we measure things not as they were divinely intended, nor as they are in themselves, but as they are subjectively entertained, it might be a question whether the Scottish Sabbath was not for 200 years a greater Christian Sacrament, a larger, more vital, and more influential fact in the Christianity of the country than the annual or sometimes semi-annual celebration of the Lord's Supper, or the initiatory rite of Baptism, or both together.... We are born, on each Lord's day morning, into a new climate, a new atmosphere; and in that new atmosphere (so to speak), by the law of a renovated nature, the lungs and heart of the Christian life should spontaneously and continuously drink in the vital air.

W. E. Gladstone, Later Gleanings, pp. 342 f.

Where every day is not the Lord's, the Sunday is His least of all.

George Macdonald, Donal Grant, chap. VII.

There is a deep Christian instinct in England, an instinct which has come down to us through many generations, and for the last 350 years at any rate, founded in a large measure on Puritan belief, fed by what may be called the 'two Puritan Sacraments' the Bible and Sunday.

Father Dolling in The Pilot (10 Nov., 1900).

References. XXXII. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xli. No. 2398. XXXII. 1 . W. C. E. Newbolt, Church Times, vol. xxxii. 1894, p. 244. W. C. Magee, Outlines of Sermons on the Old Testament, p. 28. XXXII. 1-8, 30-35. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture Exodus, etc., p. 171. XXXII. 1-29. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. liii. No. 2884.