There are many of the Lord’s gifts to us
as His creatures that we accept as a matter of course, yet without which life
would be impossible. Nothing is so free
as air and sunlight, yet nothing so vital.
The regular sequence of day and night, the recurrence of seed-time and
harvest, the continued rotation of summer and winter we think of as though no
interference with their regularity and order could be possible. The flood, which we were considering in our
last paper, was the most violent interference with “nature” that had occurred
since the fall of man, and it was after the waters of the flood had dried up,
and Noah had offered his burnt offerings, that we read:--
“The Lord said in his heart, I will not
again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil
from his youth, neither will I again smite any more every living thing, as I
have done” (Gen. viii. 21).
There is a parallel with this in ix. 8-17
where God establishes His covenant with Noah and his seed and with every
living creature that there should never be sent a flood again to destroy all
flesh.
Although we often speak of Jehovah as God in covenant with His
people, and God as Creator, we
observe that while JEHOVAH said in His heart that He would not smite any more
as He had done, it is GOD who makes the covenant to that effect. For the dispensational meaning of Jehovah the
reader is referred to the article on pp.40-44 of volume VIII.
Jehovah being the God of the age, His
covenant is called the age covenant (A.V. everlasting covenant, ix. 16):--
“While the earth remaineth (or while all the
days of the earth [continue]), seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and
summer and winter, and day and night, shall not cease.”
Day after day since this promise was made
the Lord has looked down upon man whose heart is deceitful above all things and
desperately wicked, and has never again interfered with the universal
ordinances here specified. Famine and
other judgments there may have been in places, but never universally, like the
flood. The Lord while on earth drew
attention to the fact that the Father “maketh His sun to rise on the evil and
the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust”. The apostle Paul declared that God, while
suffering all nations in time past to walk in their own ways, yet “left not
Himself without witness, doing good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful
seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness” (Acts xiv. 15-17).
The Lord appeals to the unchanging
continuance of the ordinance of day and night to indicate the like character of
His covenant with Israel:--
“Thus saith the Lord which giveth the sun
for a light by day, and the ordinance of the moon and of the stars for a light
by night … If those ordinances depart from before Me … then the seed of Israel
also shall cease from being a nation before Me all the days” (Jer. xxxi. 35,
36).
The A.V. and the R.V. by using here the
words, “for ever”, instead of “all the days”, commit the Lord to perpetuate
Israel as a nation throughout eternity,
and also the ordinances of the sun and moon.
Neither of these propositions can be established by Scripture, and there
are some passages which speak of the cessation of the ordinances of the sun,
moon and stars, therefore the earnest student will be careful not to go beyond
what is written. The apostle, as we have
seen (Acts xiv. 15-17), speaks of these things as “a witness”. Romans i. 19, 20 teaches us that the Gentiles by the “things
that are made” might have known the “eternal power and deity of God”, and
thereby have been deterred from idolatry.
In the same manner these covenanted ordinances are God’s witnesses. The recurring seed-time and harvest are a
standing warning to the whole race, apart from the written revelation. How often the present life with its
opportunities is likened to a seed time, and how many are the warnings and the
encouragements in view of the harvest at the end of the age! The day, too, when man may work, the night
that cometh when man’s work is done; the
daily miracle of sleeping and awaking is a foreshadowing of that sleep of death
and that morning of resurrection which is so prominent in the N.T. Scriptures. All these themes the reader can pursue with
profit; we can but draw attention to the
great age-time covenant, that throughout all dispensations has continued in
unaltered order.
The first great dispensational fact that
is made known in the new world that opened out to Noah and his descendants was
that judgment is deferred. God will not
again visit in the same way the sins of man as He did at the flood; the wicked now may prosper as a green bay tree, the righteous now may be plagued all the day long,
“the end”, as seen in “the sanctuary of God”, reveals the fact of a future day
of individual judgment. So it is that
even though man continues in his sin, seed time and harvest, and day and night,
do not cease.
In the next chapter (ix.) the Lord lays
the foundation of human government. We
must go back further into history than the days of Nebuchadnezzar for the
divine institution of “the powers that be”.
“Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the
image of God made He man” (Gen. ix. 6).
When Cain shed his brother’s blood God made a special protection for him
against the hand of his fellow-man.
Here, however, man is appointed judge and executioner. A change also in the food of man is
made. To Adam God gave every herb
bearing seed, and every tree in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; now, “every moving thing that liveth shall be
meat for you, even as the green herb have I given you every thing”. To this divine change in human diet the
apostle Paul alludes in I Tim. iv. 4, 5, “For every creature of God is good and
nothing to be refused, being received with thanksgiving, for it is sanctified
by the Word of God and prayer”. The
false teaching of the apostacy, the doctrines of demons, included the
forbidding of marriage, and the abstinence from foods which God created to be
received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth.
To progress in what is called Spiritism,
abstinence from flesh foods and from marriage is essential; the seducing spirits with their doctrines of
demons seem to be characteristic of the “latter times”. The days of Noah are to be repeated, and the
spirit activities that brought about the corruption of the earth that ended in
the flood are to be expected again. If
the abstinence from flesh food and from marriage makes intercourse with the
spirit world easier, we can perceive the wise provision in the change of human
food as given to Noah, and the reason why such an institution should be
discontinued as a prelude to demon activities in the latter times.
After blessing Noah, and saying, “Be
fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth”, God speaks of man’s new
relationship to the animal world; this
is exactly in the same order in Gen.i.28. There are one or two modifications, however,
that indicate a change from Gen. i. 28; man is
told not only to replenish the earth, but to subdue it, a type of Him who will
yet subdue all things beneath His feet; further,
he was to “have dominion”, another type of the Lord from heaven. This appears to be directly connected with
the fact that man was created in the image of God. That the image remained after the fall and
after the flood is abundantly testified by
Gen.ix.6, and James iii. 9. Instead of the word “dominion”, we have in
the re-institutions of Noah, “the fear of you and the dread of you” shall be upon
every beast, fowl and fish. This is
something lower than dominion, and harmonizes with the general character of the
age.
When Nebuchadnezzar was made “the head of
gold”, he became more than king of Babylonian Empire, or the first of a new dynasty,
a dispensational change took place, almost as great as is indicated in Genesis ix. When
Daniel interpreted to Nebuchadnezzar the meaning of the great image he said:--
The words, “hath He given into thine
hand”, are an echo of the words of Gen.
ix. 2, “into your hand are they
delivered”; there is also more than a
coincidence in the fact that in Gen.
i., ix.,
& Daniel ii. these things are associated with an image, in
the one case “the image of God”, in the other a “great image whose brightness
was excellent, and its form terrible” (Dan. ii. 31). One other consideration and we must
close.
The question as to the extent of the flood
is perennial, and we just briefly deal with it here. First of all, the extent of the flood must be
considered not from a geographical point of view, but from the standpoint of
its purpose. Genesis vi. 17 declares that the flood was intended to
destroy all flesh, and that everything in the earth should die. This is again stated in Gen. vii. 4,
“every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the
face of the earth” [adamah,
ground]. This is recorded as an
accomplished fact in vii. 21-23:--
“All flesh died … and every man, all in
whose nostrils was the breath of life, and all that was in the dry land died,
and every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground
… they were destroyed from the earth, Noah only remained, and they that were
with him in the ark.”
These statements are sufficient proof that
the flood was universal in extent so far
as life was concerned, and we might waive the question of its geographical
extent did not the Scripture (Gen.vii.19) use such an expression as
“ALL the high hills, that were under the
WHOLE heaven were covered.”
Had the passage read, All the high hills
that were on the earth or the ground, there may have been room for an argument
as to the meaning of these terms, but surely no such limitation can be set to
the whole heavens!
Dr. Kitto points out another witness:--
"If the deluge were local, what was
the need of taking birds into the
ark, and among them birds so widely diffused as the raven and the dove? A deluge which could overspread the region
which these birds inhabit could
hardly have been less than universal … if the waters of the deluge rose fifteen
cubits above all the mountains of the countries which the raven and the dove
inhabit, the level must have been enough to give universality to the
flood."
We believe that the human race began anew
in Noah and his sons, and with them commenced the order of things that was at
the base of the national life, soon to be instituted; the beginning of the nations and their place
in the divine economy we must consider in our next paper.
Space will not permit a lengthy
examination of all the varying features of the new dispensation which commenced
with Noah and his saved family and the lower animals. We feel that the evident relation between the
dispensations connected with Adam, and that connected with Noah is important
enough to receive the following tabulated list of parallels and contrasts, and
we trust the interested reader will pursue the theme more fully than we are
able to do in these pages; we write
always for BEREANS:--
Many other details could doubtless be
collected, and many instructive lessons be learned from the changes introduced
into the new dispensation. We trust that
sufficient has been given above to stimulate the reader to individual
effort.
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