Leaves From the
Book
THE TRIAL OF CONSCIENCE IN THE
AGE REFORE THE FLOOD.
WITH Adam fallen - even from the first moment of his fall
- we enter upon a new period. Sin and death, now come into the world,
necessitate new dealings of God with man, if. indeed, judgment do not bring all
to a sudden close, And this was not in His mind, who from the first had
foreseen and provided for the rebellion of the creature. Judgment does indeed
follow, such as God had previously pronounced but that was no final one, but
(as we shall easily see) one anticipative of the mercy to he shown, and which
could be made to take itself the character of mercy. It is in confounding the
provisional death, threatened to and inflicted on Adam and his posterity, as
the result of the primal sin, with the second ''and final'' death of the lake
of fire, that much error and heresy of the present day finds apparent
countenance. Scripture being strained to establish what is a mere foregone
conclusion in the minds of its interpreters, and what none can in fact deduce
from its straight forward simplicity of statement. In the day that thou eatest
thereof thou shalt surely die" is defined so clearly, in the Lord's words to
fallen Adam, as to put its meaning, one would think, beyond serious question.
"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the
ground for out of it wast thou taken for dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt
return"
To read into this eternal judgement is to misread it thoroughly.
The death announcement, which we know to be everywhere in the world, through
the first man's sin, is in reality a thing which, in its very nature
necessitates the suspension of eternal judgment until it is taken out of
the way. Not till the dead are raised will the white throne be set, and the
dead - the wicked dead - be judged ever man according to his works." And thus
the resurrection of the unsaved dead is as much a "resurrection of judgment"
that is, what it implies and necessitates, (as the resurrection of the saved is
similarly a "resurrection of life" The final judgment is thus in no wise the
result of Adam's sin : it is that in which emphatically each suffers for his
own. The second death and the first are in no wise to be confounded - they are
incompatible and contrary things.
Nor can spiritual death, or "death in
trespasses and sins", he possibly what God speaks of in His threatening to
Adam. This is indeed the spiritual state which is the result of the fall but
the moral state of a criminal is a very different thing from the judgment upon
the criminal. Man's depravity is what he is condemned for, not what he
sentenced to and these things cannot be synonymous. Dust thou art, and
unto dust shalt thou return" is thus the only possible, as it is the divinely
given, interpretation of the announcement, "In the day thou eatest thereof thou
shalt surely die."
Yet it is quite true, and to be pressed, that this
death, coming not only upon the first sinners, but upon all their posterity, -
and surely by no mere arbitrary decree on God's part,- marks the changed
relation to Him of the now fallen creature. Everywhere does Scripture recognise
this, and in God's ordinances for his chosen people of old it comes fully out.
Death is associated ever with uncleanness and defilement. If a man die in a
tent, all that come into the tent, and all that is in the tent, are unclean
seven days. Every one touching a dead body, a bone, or a grave, is similarly
defiled. Nor must we look at this as merely symbolic teaching. The psalm of the
wilderness is plain enough in its doctrine here: "For all our days are passed
away in Thy wrath. We spend our years as a tale that is told. The days of our
years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be
fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut
off, and we fly away. Who knoweth the power of Thine anger? even according to
Thy fear, so is Thy wrath." (Ps. xc. 9-11.)
Yes, if God had thus to turn to
destruction the being over whom, as first created, He had rejoiced with
unfeigned delight, surely the state of the creature it was that was thus marked
out, not a causeless change in God. Death was the stamp upon the creature
fallen away from God, and every sign of its approach a standing admoitition to
him as a being thus under sentence - not final indeed, or there would be no use
in the admonition, but still a sentence of condemnation, which cut him off from
all pretension to righteousness, or natural claim to favour and left him but
the subject of mercy, and of mercy alone. True, he may (alas! he does) resist
and strive against the sentence graved upon his brow. He may condemn God, that
he may himself be righteous. This changes nothing - no, not a hair of his head
from white to black. He may complain of himself as the victim of circumstances,
impossible to be "clean" as "born of a woman." He may plead that he did not
give himself the evil nature that he carries with him, but conscience will not
be satisfied with this. It will not excuse actual transgressions by any plea as
to a fallen nature. We feel and know, every one of us, that we ought
nevertheless to be masters of ourselves and of our nature, and that our
responsibility has been in no wise destroyed or lessened by the fall. So in the
day of judgment also God will render to every man, not according to his
nature but his deeds, and upon this ground is the whole world
brought in "guilty before God."
Death thus, while introduced by one man's
sin, "passes upon all men, for that all have sinned." Were there one man, in
the full sense, righteous before God, he might successfully plead exemption
from the common doom; but "there is none righteous - no, not one;" and death
remains universally a sentence gone forth against man as man, the constant
witness against self-righteousness on his part, the constant witness of his
need of mercy - absolute, sovereign mercy.
The sorrow of all this is thus
God's appeal to man; the trouble to which he is born, as sparks fly upward,
becomes the discipline of holy but merciful government. It is of this that God
speaks to the man and the woman when He first appears to them in the garden; to
the woman, of the sorrow of conception, and subjection to the rule of her
husband; to the man, of the cursed ground, and of its thorns and thistles, with
the toil of labour, till he return to the dust. With them, let us notice, He
makes no new terms - no other covenant is proposed to them. As helpless and
hopeless otherwise, they are made simply to listen to what God announces He
will do - to the message of a deliverance He will raise up to them in the
woman's Seed. It is to faith in One to come they are invited, in the midst of
the ruin they have brought upon themselves. No new trial is proposed. They are
left under the salutary government of God, to realise what and where they are
before Him, and to embrace the mercy wrapped up for them in the bud of that
first promise.
For promise indeed it is, while it comes in the shape of
threatening to the serpent; a promise whose broken echoes the traditions of the
nations have prolonged, even to our own day. Scripture, which cannot be broken,
has alone given us the very words, in their original simplicity and grandeur -
the "let there be light" of a new creative period, exceeding the former as
antitype its typic "shadow." The words are for us today, to vindicate their
imperishable nature, fresh for our souls as the day when they were uttered:
"And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her
Seed: it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise His heel."
It is the
character of the new period we are occupied with, and for this have only to do
with certain features of this promise. It is plain enough that Another is here
given as the Conqueror of the serpent, the enemy of man, but whose "seed"
nevertheless (as the near future would painfully reveal) would be found among
men. This Conqueror is also the woman's seed, and not the man's. It is no
restoration of Adam's forfeited headship, but a new and mysterious beginning,
wherein divine power takes up the frailty and mutability of the creature, which
has its fullest expression in the woman, to demonstrate divine grace, while not
without cost is the victory over the enemy achieved: in bruising the serpent's
head, the Conqueror has His own heel bruised.
Thus does the divine purpose
begin to be disclosed, asking no aid from, and making no condition with, the
fallen creature. From the first, it is seen that all help is laid upon Another
- One in whom, though born of a woman, power from God is found; who suffers,
and in suffering overcomes; and manifestly in behalf of those of whom He is the
Kinsman. Although, then, the Lord's address to the woman afterwards speaks of
nothing but pain and humiliation, and to the man himself of toil and suffering
and death, yet we read immediately upon this that "Adam called his wife's name
Eve ['Life'], because she was the mother of all living." Life he apprehends,
according to the divine announcement, to be in the woman connected by grace
with her victorious Seed; weakness and evil in her thus met and triumphed over,
while the headship of the first man is set aside. Adam bows, then, to this
sentence, while in faith he receives the mercy; and it is upon this that we
find God significantly replacing the inadequate apron of fig-leaves, the first
human manufacture, with the coats of skins, the fruit of death itself, now made
to minister to their need, and by divine gift, not by human acquisition. We may
thus very clearly see how God accepts the faith of Adam, and in this clothing,
how the shame of our moral nakedness is put away forever, clothed, in divine
mercy, with Christ Himself, as the fruit of His death for us. How much of this
Adam and his wife might apprehend is another question, and it is one impossible
perhaps for us to answer. Instead of unsafe speculation, therefore, it will be
better to pass on to that in which, according to Scripture itself, the faith of
one of their children is expressed,- for "by faith Abel offered unto God a more
excellent sacrifice than Cain, and by it he obtained witness that he was
righteous, God testifying of his gifts." The use of sacrifice thus demands our
attention, no single examples merely of which we have in the case of a few
early patriarchs, but a thing which we find, in whatever perverted forms,
pervading all religious creeds from the beginning. That - unnatural as it is -
it could have rooted itself thus deeply in the minds of men, shows its manifest
divine institution, as well as the depth and universality of a common
conviction to which it appealed.
Nature could never have dictated it.
Cain's way was nature's dictation, not Abel's. How could it be supposed that,
admitting man's sinfulness and its desert, the death of an innocent victim
could atone for the guilty, or that the blood of bulls and goats could put away
sin? Looked at as the product of reason merely, such reasoning were utter
folly. Connected with the bruised heel of the Seed of the woman, and perhaps
with the skins which clothed the first transgressors, a voluntary Sufferer
might be seen, whose suffering and death should indeed have efficacy on man's
behalf. And thus we gain the assurance of a real view which faith had, and
which was offered to faith, of vicarious atonement, as linking itself with the
suffering Conqueror of the first prophecy, even as we are assured of Abel that
his "gifts" had in some way a value in them which God could accept on his
behalf, pronouncing him righteous on their account. With Cain also it would
seem as if we must read God's expostulation, "And if thou doest not well, a
sin-offering coucheth at the door;" thus prescribing a way in which faith, on
the part of a poor sinner, might approach Him with confidence. The way of
sacrifice was thus openly proclaimed as the way of acceptance; repentance and
faith as what, on man's part, this implied, if really apprehended; no legal
conditions, no covenant of works, were in any wise imposed; God starts with
that which He has now, and once for all, returned to: His first thought is His
last - His own thought, in fact, all through, though man's necessity might
require, as we shall see, apparent departure from it. Man's necessity is indeed
his perversity, and nothing else, which, refusing in self-confidence God's
simple way of grace, compelled Him to allow them the experiment of their own
way. But for sixteen centuries at least, God abides, by what He has said at the
beginning. Having made known to man His way of acceptance and approach to Him,
He waits to see how man's conscience will respond to the sentence upon him -
his heart to the grace which has provided for his need. Alas! His next word has
to be a threat of near and approaching judgment. "My Spirit shall not always
strive with man, for that he also is flesh; but his days shall be a hundred and
twenty years."
We see that, after the fall, God purposed no new trial to
man whatever. He revealed the coming of that Seed of the woman who should
bruise the serpent's head. He instituted sacrifice, and thus not obscurely
intimated the way of blessing and acceptance for man. He declared actually his
acceptance of believing Abel, and to Cain the, ground of his rejection and the
remedy that still remained. But He gave no law; He urged man to no fatal use of
his own efforts to work out righteousness. Conscience was to be the teacher of
that need which they had as those outside of Eden, whose closed gate was a
perpetual witness, as were also the sorrow and death which sin had introduced
into the world; while repentance - the truthful acknowledgment of their
condition - would be as ever the way out of it, by faith in that which on God's
part met it all.
The only test for man was this necessary one, whether
conscience would have force to bring him thus to himself and to God. Alas! as
to this, we know the result. The figure prominent in the antediluvian world is
one in whose person the world, at every period, finds its awful representative.
"The way of Cain," as Jude may assure us, has survived the flood, and been
followed by the mass through the many generations thence to the present time.
It is, of course, the exact opposite of God's way; as its first originator
stands before us as the first of that seed of the serpent ever in enmity to the
woman's Seed. He is thus the incarnation of satanic opposition to the counsel
of God. Abel approaches God by sacrifice, the appointed foreshadowing of Him in
whom the conflict between good and evil would find its decisive issue; Cain,
rejecting sacrifice, brings as an offering the fruit of his own labour. Here
begins, with him, the self-assertion which required so many ages of trial to
beat down,-a "ministration of death" and "condemnation." It is man himself who
raises the question of his ability to meet God and merit acceptance at His
hands; and the question being raised must be fully and with long patience
entertained, and conclusively settled.
Toward Cain himself, who at once
shows how murder can lurk under the specious form of righteousness, this
patience is exercised. He abuses it to build a city in defiance of his doom of
vagabondage - a city which his sons adorn with arts and appliances, which, like
man's first invention, are made to cover from themselves the shame of their
nakedness. Adam wove his girdle out of fig-leaves; Cain's sons weave all nature
into a web for the awful purpose of self-deception, forcing it into unwilling
revolt against God, and idolatrous usurping of its Maker's place. As with their
first father, so with these imitators of his apostasy and not his faith,
conscience but drives them to hide from the insupportable presence of God,
under the cover of His own handiwork. They are pioneers of progress, which,
with all its mighty results in the ages since, has never sufficed to lift off
the curse from the earth, or take the sting from death, or satisfy the craving
heart of man, or deliver from the corruption that is in the world through lust.
It has built up luxury, has added burdens to the already burdened, has kindled
wars, which come of the "lusts which war in the members." The last of Cain's
family is but Tubal-Cain-" Cain's issue." Its Lamech, "the strong man," with
his two wives (first of polygamists) and his argument for impunity because of
the long-suffering patience of which Cain had been the subject - shows us
clearly and conclusively the moral result.
But Cain and his seed do not
fill the whole scene here. The forefront they do; and history at the beginning,
like all history since, has little to tell of outside their doings. Yet there
is a remnant, beginning with one who, by divine appointment, takes the place of
the martyred Abel. His son's name, Enos (in a day when names still had
meaning), tells us of the acceptance of the humbling reality of man's condition
- Enos, "frail man." And "then," we read, "men began to call on the name of
Jehovah." God gets his place when man takes his. And so it ever is.
Here,
then, a new beginning, as it were, is found; and the divine record, leaving out
Cain and his apostate race, gives us now a fresh genealogy, in which we are
once more told how "in the day that God created man, in the likeness of God
made He him; male and female created He them; and blessed them, and called
their name 'Adam,' in the day when they were created. And Adam lived a hundred
and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image, and
called his name Seth." Of the men of this generation it is but noted that they
lived and died, although now first we find - what is wanting as to Cain's race
- every year of their unobtrusive lives noted before God. Divine interest is
shown in what for man has none, and contributes nothing to the world's history.
When, indeed, we come to Enoch, seventh from Adam, God can keep silence no
longer, "And Enoch walked with God . . . three hundred years . . . and Enoch
walked with God; and he was not, for God took him."
Precious and emphatic
commendation of Enoch! Solemn and decisive judgment as to the ruin of all on
earth! for the one who walks with God He takes from the earth. How plain an
intimation that this pious seed is not as yet to fill the earth! Nay, surely a
very clear one that that seed itself begins to fail. This Enoch-walk is as rare
as it is precious. Indeed, we know that but two generations later Noah stands
the solitary representative of it upon earth. Even in Noah's father, Lamech,
though he speaks piously of God, we can detect deterioration. Is he not, even
in his name, sadly linked with Cain's race?-another Lamech, a "strong man;" not
an Enos, taking his place in self-humiliation before God. It is striking, also,
that like his Cainite namesake, he too has his memorable saying. And though at
first sight they may seem quite diverse, and in some sense really are, there is
yet, spite of all, a striking similarity. For if the Cainite Lamech prophesies
impunity to himself for his wrong-doing, from the false argument as to God's
long-suffering, the Sethite no less, upon the very eve of judgment, speaks of
comfort to a generation soon to be swept away by the flood. "And he called his
name 'Noah,' saying, 'This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil
of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed.'"
There was
truth in this. It was of Noah's day that we read, "And the Lord smelled a sweet
savour; and the Lord said in His heart, 'I will not again curse the ground any
more for man's sake.'" Lamech's prophecy was true, then, as to the "comfort"
God had in store for man; false only as to the application to a generation the
survivors of whom were cut off by the judgment that preceded the blessing.
If we go on to the next chapter, the marks of fatal declension are yet more
manifest. However we may interpret the "sons of God" of the first paragraph
there, it is abundantly evident that Seth's line, as a whole, are no longer
exempt from the universal corruption. God declares His Spirit shall not always
strive with man, and fixes the limit of present patience to a hundred and
twenty years.
Yet it is just here that the world's mighty ones are found,
and giants appear upon the earth-men whose famue survives their awful judgment.
God on His part saw "that the wickedness of man was great upon the earth, and
that every imagination of the thought of his heart was only evil, and that
continually. And it repented Jehovah that He had made man upon the earth, and
it grieved Him at His heart."
When at last all flesh had corrupted His way
upon the earth, and Noah alone is found walking with God, the flood closed the
time of His long-suffering; and the earth, emerging from its baptism, bears
upon its surface but eight living persons, as the nucleus of the new
world.
The Trial of Human Government
JUDGMENT was executed
and over, and in Noah and his family the human race began anew the history of
the world. There are many features of difference from the former beginnings,
whether inside paradise or without. It was now first that on the fallen earth
the trial of man formally began - a trial which, as we have seen, man had
forced God (if we may so speak) to make. Already He had indeed pronounced, in
answer to the challenge of Cain's altar, that "every imagination of the thought
of man's heart was only evil, and that continually,'' and after such a sentence
could never for His own sake - as if He were in any doubt - institute a fresh
trial of such a creature. So, too, when He brings out Noah upon the restored
earth, He is at pains to show that He is not possessed with any fresh hopes
concerning man. "I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake," He
says, ''for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth." Thus He
could not for His own sake institute trial. But man has need to know himself,
and as he will not recognise himself in the subject of God's verdict, hc must
be permitted to make practical proof. Hence, once more his responsibility is
solemnly proclaimed, and with the solemn lessons of the past fresh in his
memory, and once more with the fresh tokens of divine mercy on every hand, he
is bidden gird up his loins and begin again his course, to triumph now, if it
may be, in the scene of his former disastrous failure.
Before we examine
this in its details, as they are given in the divine Word, let us try to
realise the meaning of one solemn change which the renewed earth presents from
that old one which the flood had swept away. .Paradise is no more to be found
there. Euphrates, Hiddekel, Gihon, Pison, may be there; but the garden from
which they once issued is gone forever. Where it was, and whether it was, men
may now dispute about as they list The flaming sword has no need to keep any
more the way of the tree of life. The cherubim are also gone. The earth is
discrowned and empty.
And must we not connect this displayed glory in Eden,
however intimately connected with man's fall and punishment, yet also with the
mercy that manifested itself toward him, as we have already seen with other
tokens of his condition, in which judgment united itself with and ministered to
mercy? Labour and sorrow, and death itself, thus ministered, and do minister;
and this flaming sword with its cherubim, like Ezekiel's cloud and fire, speak
of that presence of God which is not mere judgment only. So even for Cain there
was a "face of the Lord" which he evidently identified with Eden, near to, if
still outside of, paradise. "Behold, Thou hast driven me out from the face of
the earth," he says, "and from Thy face shall I be hid" and again we read that
"Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on
the east of Eden." It is the easier to realise, because after this, as we know,
it pleased God to localise His presence thus in Israel, and there also with
fire and cherubic emblems. It seems not doubtful that this was but in some
respects a reproduction of what had been before at gate of paradise, where
sacrifice which had so essential a part in the Mosaic economy confessedly
began.
Paradise passes away. however, with the flood, and the presence of
God, as displayed there, is gone also. It is simple in principle that while the
fall itself had not done so, man's maintenance of his righteousness compels Him
to more reserve. For man's sin He had resources which in the presence of
self-righteousnesss could not be brought out. This must be met in a way far
different from the other; for "the proud He beholdeth afar off." Thus, as Cain
before, so man now, (and by his road also), "goes out from the presence of the
Lord." Yet He, as consenting to man's trial, does not withdraw simply, and
leave him to himself. On the contrary, He solemnly inaugurates the trial
Himself, making men afresh to know His power and goodness, as by their recent
deliverance from the otherwise universal destruction, so also by the new
condition of blessing into which the earth enters, in covenant with Him. Still
His goodness was, if it might be, to lead them to repentance. And this goodness
of His it is the apostle refers to as God's perpetual witness in all times and
lands.
Nevertheless, if God thus declare His purpose of loving-kindness, He
is careful to ground it all upon that sacrifice rejected by Cain, but fully
accepted by delivered Noah. "And Noah builded an altar unto the Lord; and took
of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt-offerings upon
the altar. And the Lord smelled a sweet savour, and the Lord said in His heart,
I will not again curse the ground for man's sake; for the imagination of man's
heart is evil from his youth: neither will I again smite any more everything
living, as I have done. While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and
cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, shall not cease."
So clear is it that, if God take up man now to go on with him again, it.is only
upon such a ground as sets him altogether aside that He can do so. Just as
afterward, in the giving of the law, it is only on the ground of redemption -
to a redeemed people - He can give this. If He allow man thus the new trial
that he claims, He keeps His own ground still, even while allowing it; and
proclaims still, in man's reluctant ears, sacrifice-atonement - as the only way
of acceptance, and the impossibility of his standing on his own self-chosen
ground.
And now, blessing them as He does so, God delivers into the hand of
Noah and of his sons, with something of the old sovereignty, the lower
creatures. Significantly, also, death is to be for them the food of life; while
the reservation of the blood, the vehicle of life, maintains the divine claim
to what God alone can give. Above all, man's life is sacred; the deed of Cain
is to go no more unpunished, and man is directly affirmed to be his "brother's
keeper:" he is to exact blood for blood, and that as the instrument and
vicegerent of God on earth. "And surely your blood of your lives will I
require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man:
at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man. Whoso
sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God
made He man."
Here, then, human government begins, not as an expedient
suggested by man, as so many think it, but as a divine institution. From the
commencement of it it could be said, "The powers that be are ordained of God."
Not any particular powers, as yet indeed, such as we may find afterward, but
"the powers that exist," whatever their form. There is no need to prove, what
every one that has a right thought will at once admit, the blessing that there
is for man in civil government. Few would doubt that, if it were removed,
corruption and violence would overflow all bounds, as it did before the flood,
or as in the French revolution of the eighteenth century. Better the worst form
of government the world has seen than absolute anarchy. Darkening of sun and
moon, the falling of the stars, and convulsions of the earth are its symbols in
Scripture; and these are signs of the near end of the dispensation.
As a
moral discipline, subjection to government is of the utmost value. It is seen
in the family as what has its root in the divine ordinance by which the whole
human race is compacted together. The immaturity of infant years has
necessarily to submit itself to the superior power and wisdom by which alone it
is able to attain maturity. And this immaturity, so long lasting in the case of
man as compared with the lower animals, implies a long discipline of
subjection. By the ordinance of civil government the period of this is
lengthened to the whole term of man's life. And this subjection is one not
merely to the will of others, but in which also self-mastery is learned and
attained. It is true that man's self-will - the very essence of sin - breaks
all bonds that are possible to be devised; and the inadequacy of such means is
one of the very lessons - nay, a main one, which these dispensations teach us.
Yet were not the means themselves such as should be efficacious, their failure
would not have the same significance. And amid all the failure this is still
apparent.
The failure is on two sides,- that of the governed and that of
the governors alike, for both are men. On the part of those in authority is
found weakness, the want of self government, as in Noah, which exposes it to
the contempt of those who need most the display of power; or, as in Nimrod, the
abuse of this, tyranny and oppression. Babel ends this scene in a general
revolt against the source of all power-against God - the issue of which is to
bring down judgment and stamp the whole scene, even outwardly, with the brand
of "confusion." The failure begins with Noah, and this is the occasion of Ham's
sin and the curse upon his posterity. The break-up of government is primarily
the fault of those to whom God has committed the authority, with the
responsibility, of government. God would be with His, own institution
necessarily to maintain it, if only those to whom it was intrusted did not
betray their trust. "If God be for us, who can be against us?" But then
subjection to Him is the secret of subordination on the part of the governed.
When man gave up his supremacy over the beast, then the beast rose up against
him. He had sunk down to their level, practically, by giving up God - for the
beast knows not God. "Being in honor and abiding not, he is like the beasts
that perish." Thus, long after this, Nebuchadnezzar is driven to the beasts,
until he should know that the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men. His own
account is very striking:
"And at the end of the days I Nebuchadnezzar
lifted up mine eyes unto heaven, and mine understanding returned unto me; and I
blessed the Most High, and praised and honoured Him that liveth forever, whose
dominion is an everlasting dominion, and His kingdom is from generation to
generation At the same time my reason returned unto me; and for the glory of my
kingdom, mine honour and brightness returned unto me; and my counsellors and my
lords sought unto me; and I was established in my kingdom, and excellent
majesty was added unto me.''
Noah's departure from God was not what
Nebuchadnezzar's has been; but it was as real, if not so manifest. We have in
him the beginning,- the root, and not the full ripe fruit. A root is not
manifest; but it is what the other springs from. Noah's failure is easily read
as the unguarded enjoyment of blessings away from the restraining presence of
Him whose gifts they are. But this is the very secret of a departure the limit
of which is then only with God and not with man. The soul has lost its
anchorage, and cannot choose but drift. Noah is drunk, loses his garment, and
is naked. In many points it is the Eden - scene repeated. This nakedness is
matter of contempt to those who are themselves wholly away from God, and who
use it to their own worse shame and ruin. From this family of Ham comes, later,
Nimrod, "the rebel;" and the beginning of his kingdom is Babel.
The order
is instructive and important.' God's thought for man is weakness, dependence,
subjection, but so, blessing. To realise this, they are to be scattered abroad
upon the earth. But of all things, the pride of man refuses the acknowledgment
of weakness, as his will resents subjection. Power and a name he covets. "Union
is strength" is his watchword. "And they said, 'Go to, let us build us a city
and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest
we be scattered abroad upon the face of.the whole earth.'"
Now God's
thought for man is a city too. Faith looks for a "city which hath foundations,
whose builder and maker is God." Cain's city was not original with him, nor is
God's thought caught from man's. It is itself the original; only that it must
wait for another scene for its accomplishment. For He cannot build in a
storm-vexed and shifting scene, such as the present; and the anticipation of
God's time is unbelief, not faith. Man's union is thus confederacy, a compact
of selfish wills, of which the cross is the outcome.-" Let us break their bands
asunder,. and cast away their cords from us."
Meanwhile, God is digging
deep, in the sense of emptiness and nothingness and guilt, to have Christ as
the foundation of a city whose walls shall be salvation, and whose gates
praise; where union shall be communion with the Father and the Son, and thus
accord with all things that serve God. Jerusalem shall be therefore "the
foundation of peace." The outcome of man's confederacy - judgment only stamping
it with its true character - is Babel, "confusion." And this is the beginning
of his empire who is the type of the great final "rebel," who, crushing all
lesser wills into his own, shall be at the same time the "lawless one" and the
iron despot. 'I'hus "man's day" will come to an end, and the kingdom of Christ
be seen to be the only refuge; all other kingdoms but its shadow, this the
substance. The perfect Man must come - Himself the perfectly obedient One, - in
whom shall be no failure; no degradation of power, and no lack of it: whose of
right the throne is. Till then the trial of government, however this may be
needful (and therefore "the powers that be are ordained of God," and "he is the
minister of God to thee for good "), becomes only one of the things that
manifest more and more man's hopeless ruin. He who could not maintain himself
in blessing cannot recover himself; nor is there redemption for him in his
brother's hand.
Trial By Law
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