Some great commission, connected with the resurrection of the dead, appears to be held by the chief spirit of the angelic world.  “For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and the trump of God.”  The burial of each and every body which is destined to the resurrection of the just, is, therefore, not improbably an object of interest with him who, under the God-man, will have the supervision of the last day.  With a view to that harvest of the earth, he will now see the furrows made, the seed planted, the hill prepared.  He will have a care that every thing lies down, whether by seeming accident, or by violence, or by design, in just the place from which the arranging mind of Him who is Lord both of the dead and of the living, has appointed it to come forth.  Every circumstance attending that event, the great object of hope in heaven and on earth,—­our resurrection,—­is of sufficient importance to be the subject of thought and preparation on the part of Christ, himself the first fruits of them that slept.

The care of the patriarchs concerning their burial places is like one of those premonitions in an antecedent stratum of geology, or species of animals, of a coming manifestation;—­a prophesying germ, a yearning, created by Him who, with all-seeing wisdom, establishes anticipations in the moral, as well as in the natural, world, concerning things with regard to which a thousand years are with him as one day.

Not on earth alone, as it seems, is an interest felt in the death and burial of the righteous.

For when the leader of Israel in the wilderness went up to the hill top to die, the two great angels, of heaven and hell, met and contended over his grave.

Denied the privilege of burial in the promised land, Moses may have appeared to Satan so evidently under the frown of God, as to encourage his meddlesome efforts to inflict some injury upon him, through dishonor done to his remains.  Perhaps he would convey them back to Egypt, a gift to the brooding vengeance of the Pharaohs, who would gratify their anger by preserving that body in the house of their gods;—­thus showing their spiteful satisfaction at the disappointment of the prophet whom Jehovah would not permit to enter that promised land, in hope of which the great spoiler had led away the bondmen of Egypt.

Perhaps the devil would gratify the desire of some idolatrous nation, craving new objects of worship, by leading them to canonize this Hebrew chief; and thus make of the lawgiver and prophet of Israel a false god.

Perhaps he could even prevail on some of the Israelites themselves, if not the whole of them, to worship this revered form; or might he but have the designation and the custody of his grave, he would, perhaps, fix it where it would be most convenient for the nation to assemble, at stated times, for some idolatrous rites.