The lesson taught us may be the profoundest in the mind of the Spirit, but the school where it is learnt may be a despised place. Look, for instance, at Genesis xlviii. You are there at the bedside of a dying old man-a common homely spot. But there, some of the deepest and richest secrets of the mind of God are, in a figure, conveyed to us-the great mystery of our adoption, according to divine good pleasure; and then our welcome into the family of God, in the day of our manifestation, or conversion. And what richer counsels of grace are there than those? And yet in what more common or homely school could they have been taught us?
As in still earlier days, in Genesis xvi. There you are introduced to the domestic arrangement of Abraham's family as to the servant and her mistress, and their disputes; and yet, in all that, you get the profound mystery of the two covenants. Gal. iv. And again, in the act, the ordinary act, of discharging a servant, another feature in the same mystery is presented to us, in chapter xxi. The wisdom of God delights in these scenes and materials; they rebuke the erring thought of man's heart, that important things must be done or said by imposing methods-that the prophet must come forth and strike his hand over the place. 2 Kings v. 11. But it is with rude and inartificial instruments that both the wisdom of God and the power of God are commonly seen. Rams' horns blew down Jericho, and fishermen turned the world upside down, as was said of them. But these homely methods of God's wisdom aid in carrying the instruction home, and lodging it deep in the intimacies and recollections of the heart. I may therefore still say that Noah's ship had no pump in it. Indeed it could not. Such a thing would have witnessed against it. God's provisions would have declared their own insufficiency. That could never have been. God's provisions and God's works always tell whose they are by being what they are. Simplicity, and yet sufficiency, give them their character. "Let there be light, and there was light." "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved;" and the sinner, believing, rejoiced in God with all his house.
So, in like simplicity, in these earlier days. The heart of Noah was not soiled by a suspicion. He rested in the sea-worthiness of his vessel, because of God's appointment and approval of it-nay, I may say, because of God's building of it. Faith keeping his heart quiet and assured as to the judgment, hope fills it as to the coming glory.
Such is the beautiful way of this "prisoner of hope." A prisoner of hope is one of the Spirit's titles, I may say, for all the saints of God. Jeremiah was such an one in his day. Jeremiah was shut up in "the court of the prison, which was in the king of Judah's house," and this, too, for Christ's sake. He was God's prisoner, and such an one is always hope's prisoner. Jeremiah is told to purchase Hananiah's field, and that was food for hope, like the olive-leaf in the mouth of the dove. It told the prophet of good days to come, though at that moment he was in a prison, the Chaldean army at the city gates, and all the land deserted. The waters were again all around and abroad; but the ark of the prophet, like that of the patriarch, had a window in it.
So was Israel a prisoner of hope in the night of the passover. With shoe on foot, staff in hand, and girded loins, Israel waited in the very midst of the judgments of the Lord; but, like our patriarch, they waited there only to pass out to the inheritance of the Lord. And having the pre-eminence in all things, Jesus again and again shows us the perfect way of a prisoner of hope, looking for a resurrection portion. As when He entered Jerusalem, in John xii., the Jewish multitudes and the Gentile strangers being drawn thither to inquire after Him, and all the dignities and joys of the Son of David seeming to wait on Him, His heart waits on the resurrection hope still, "the joy set before him," and forth from that attitude of soul, or place of expectation, He speaks of the corn of wheat falling into the ground and dying. Steadily and desirously did His eye rest on the glory which lay, not in that hour, but beyond it. In a spirit of entire consecration and sacrifice, He surrenders that hour (bright to Him in the world as it was, and big with the promise of all its kingdoms and the glory thereof) to the Father: and the voice from heaven then visits this perfect, blessed "prisoner of hope," with assurances that, in due season, even resurrection times, His name and victory and honour should all be provided for and secured.
Matchless Jesus! – This voice from heaven was again the food of hope's prisoner. And what was the transfiguration on the holy hill but the same? Jesus had been speaking to the disciples of His death, and encouraging them (as He would us, beloved) not to love their lives in this world, when, soon after, six or eight days, as we read, the holy hill shines suddenly with the light of resurrection or millennial regions. And what was all that visitation of glory, but the grapes of Eshcol brought from Canaan to the camp of God in the desert; or as the return of the dove to Noah, with the olive-leaf in her mouth?
The time, however, for "rendering double" to this "prisoner of hope" (Zech. ix. 12), comes in due course. "And God spake unto Noah, saying, Go forth of the ark, thou, and thy wife, and thy sons, and thy sons' wives with thee! bring forth with thee every living thing that is with thee, of all flesh, both of fowl and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." And Noah went forth. He landed on the renewed earth, where, at that mystic moment, all was, in a great sense, according to God's mind again; no longer corrupt, as when he had last trod it in its old estate, but clean, under the refining of the judgment.
Not a thing had gone into the ark thirteen months before, which did not now come forth. The small and the great had been in it, and the small were as safe as the great; the creeping thing of the ditch or the hedge, as free of all danger or harm as Noah himself. Precious mystery! We may be little, and we are little, as the heart knows full well; but heaven, or the coming system of glory, has fitted itself like the ark, for the receiving of the small as well as the great. "A voice came out of the throne, saying, Praise our God, all ye His servants, and ye that fear Him, both small and great." We may be calm, though we know ourselves to be "small" in every way, even as the creeping thing that went in with Noah-for such a little one was equally in the covenant, or "the family settlement," which made each and all, in their way and measure, inheritors of the new world. The Father's house on high has surely made its reckoning according to these differences of "small and great." As in ancient days of typical glory, all the congregation of Israel, the distant ones of Dan and Naphtali, as well as the princes of Judah, joined in the shout of triumph when the fire came down, and in mystery, the kingdom was entered. Lev. ix. Clement and others were not Paul in the measure of their labours, or in the energy of the Spirit; but they were Paul as having their names, alike with his, in the book of life. Phil. iv. 3. The Father has built His house in the heavens, on the very plan of its receiving the saints as well as Jesus Himself. It was part of the original design. Ere foundations were laid, that plan and purpose were laid. In counsels of everlasting love it was provided that the house should be a large one, a many-roomed or mansioned house, that all the children might be there.
What say we, beloved? Do our thoughts of it and glances at it do justice to this love of God? As well might you say, your prospect from the highest of the hills could do justice to God's creation. Could your glance then measure the ten thousandth part of the earth? The length, the depth, the breadth, the height-the love of Christ which passeth knowledge!
"And Noah builded an altar unto the Lord; and took of every clean beast, and every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. 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; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth: neither will I again smite any more every thing 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." The cleansing of the waters of judgment had made no change in the imaginations of the thoughts of man's heart. They were still evil, and that only. The heart was uncured, for "that which is born of the flesh is flesh," though there be water to cleanse or fire to refine. It was no change there which gave the Lord thoughts of peace and not of evil towards men.
"Faith eyes the blood of Christ, and not victory over corruptions," as one has said, even where there is such victory. But here, in spite of corruptions, that blood awakens thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give the sinner an expected end. Christ was under the eye of God, and that was enough; as in the day of atonement. The blood of sprinkling is then seen everywhere. That was the great secret, the great principle, of that mystic day in Israel. The blood of the lamb (Lev. xvi.) went into the presence of God, attended by a cloud of incense; so that Aaron himself was hid, and there was no man in the tabernacle of the congregation, as the holy service of putting the blood on every thing proceeded. Christ in mystery was seen, and nothing else-and the fruit of that was the bearing away of sins into the wilderness, a land not inhabited, a place of forgetfulness, where there was no voice to accuse, to judge, or to condemn, where nothing could be heard but the voice of that blood which speaketh better things than the blood of Abel.
That blood, now under the eye of the Lord God, had moved His heart. Do I speak as a man? No, the word is, "The Lord said in His heart, I will not again curse the ground." As the Saviour Himself says (in spirit bound for the altar), "Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life." The heart of the Lord God has sealed the acceptance of the sacrifice. It did so here, in the times of Noah.
This word that broke from the heart of the Lord God in Noah's day, the passage of the burning lamp in Abraham's day (Gen. xv.), and the answer of God to Solomon (2 Chron. i.), all witness to the value of the cross of Christ with God established. The rending of the veil from top to bottom, the breaking of the rocks, and the bursting of the graves, witness the same, when the true offering was once and for ever accomplished. In rich variety of form and character is the acceptance of the work done in "the place that is called Calvary" testified and published-in every tongue and language, as it were, in Hebrew, and Greek, and Latin.
And Noah becomes at once the object of fresh and multiplied blessings, blessings in glory and inheritance now, as already he had blessings in election, an acceptance of grace and the righteousness which is by faith. "God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. And the fear of you, and the dread of you, shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea: into your hand they are delivered."
Noah was blessed in the new world. That blessing conveyed to him property and dominion in the earth, and the use or enjoyment of the creatures good for food. "Every moving thing that liveth" was given to him, that it might be meat for him.
Here was a large grant, as wide as the scene which lay around him. He was monarch of all he surveyed, lord, like Adam in the garden, of the new world. Instructed, however, as well as honoured and enriched-taught that the blood of the animal was not to be eaten with its flesh: "the flesh with the blood thereof, which is the life thereof, thou shalt not eat" – a principle which involves all the thoughts and counsels of God in His way with sinners-as suited a prohibition, or limitation to the grant made to Noah now, as had been the prohibition of the tree in the midst of the garden, to the grant of all things else made to Adam.
The blood was the life, and man was not to eat it. It would have been a bold re-assuming of that which through sin he had lost, a challenge to regain life by forcing the passage kept by the sword of the cherubim. For this ordinance told the sinner, that having lost his title to the tree of life, he can never return to it in his own strength. The life has reverted to God. Blood is His. And the gospel comes to tell us how He has used it, even providing with it and through it new, eternal, infallible life for the dead sinner.
The way of God in the gospel was, therefore, rehearsed to Noah in this ordinance: "The flesh with the blood thereof, which is the life thereof, thou shalt not eat." His altar had already told us that he stood with Adam in the faith of the woman's Seed, and that that mystery was the principle of his religion and his worship. But here, while making over every thing to him for property, dominion, and use, the Lord will not pass by this great exception out of the grant; conveying, as it does, the great secret or principle of His gospel. In the changed circumstances of Adam and Noah, in the difference between an upright creature and a ruined sinner, this exception was as fitting and necessary, as I have said, as that of the tree of knowledge out of the grant of all with which the Lord, the Creator, had of old, furnished and filled the scene.
We take life from Christ who has made atonement by His blood. But we deeply own we can get it nowhere else. We do not look for it elsewhere, but we refuse it not from Him. We know we were dead in trespasses and sins, but we know that we have life in Him, though only in Him. Adam learnt these things in the promise of the woman's Seed, and in the sword of the cherubim; Noah learnt them or witnessed them in his altar and in this ordinance; these things the whole book of God declares; and eternity will celebrate them.
Further, however, still-for in this blessing we find Noah with the sword of justice in his hand. His fellow-man was to be both protected and avenged. Man's person was sacred; and his life or blood, if shed by either man or beast, would be required. "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."6
Who does not instinctively approve of this? All that we feel judges the fitness of thus treating the person of man as sacred. While every other moving thing that lived was submitted to the use of man, his fellow-man was to be sacred in his eyes.
We instinctively approve this. But this scripture accounts for this instinct. The reason lies here-"in the image of God made He man." There is a dignity in man that is entirely his own. He is the natural head of creation. Man is the possessor and governor, and not part of the conveyed inheritance, or of the delegated dominion. He is the object and not the subject of the divine grant. The instinctive verdict of our own hearts is thus divinely accounted for.
After this, however, a great subject opens before us. "With thee will I establish my covenant" had been God's word to Noah, before the ark was made, or the waters had come. vi. 18. Now that the judgment is past, and the new earth is inherited, that covenant is fully detailed, as well as pledged again to God's elect. ix. 8-17. And it is here that the word "covenant" is first used. The covenants of which we read in Scripture are all specific, having their parties and their objects well defined and plainly declared. There is no mistaking of them. Whether it be this covenant of the earth with Noah, the covenant with Abraham and his seed, the covenant of priesthood with Phinehas, or that of the throne with David, all is defined-the parties are declared and the objects set forth. Nor do these, nor any of them, I surely judge, contemplate the peculiar calling of the Church. Spiritual calling in heavenly places, and the results of oneness with Christ, are neither described nor conveyed by them. But the Scriptures of the New Testament abundantly declare a purpose, or a counsel, of God according to the good pleasure of His will; a mystery hid in God, before the foundation of the world, in which the Church is directly interested. See Romans xvi. 25; 1 Cor. ii. 7; Eph. i. 9; iii. 8-11; Col. i. 26; 1 Tim. ii. 9.
The inquiry may arise, Does this purpose or counsel take the form of a covenant? Let us call it covenant, or simply a purpose taken of God; still the great and holy and august transaction itself is richly found in the New Testament. But has it, we may still ask, the character of a covenant?
I would not be careful to say that it is ever called so; but I believe we may say, that many things of a covenant nature are intimated as attaching to it. Promises are made, consideration or price contemplated, arrangements formed and fixed, and all this as between distinct parties. "In the volume of the book it is written of Me" – "I was set up from everlasting" – and such words of deepest and holiest import have their place in settling these thoughts that arise. And not only were our election, and appointment to our peculiar glory, as in predestination, matters before the world (Rom. viii. 28, 29; Eph. i. 4, 5; 1 Peter i. 2), but we were then formally or virtually given by the Father to Christ. John vi. 37, 39; x. 29; xvii. 1, 6, 8, 9, 11.
And eternal life is declared to have been promised before the world was-language which intimates Christ as a party to a blessed transaction then, and one that has covenant character in it. Titus i. 2.
I do not, then, say that this transaction is called a covenant, as God's dealing with Noah is, and His dealing with Abraham, with David, and with Phinehas; but it has these qualities, or this form of a covenant; the presence of distinct parties, considerations and purposes all settled, and the whole confirmed and acted on. And how does the spirit of a saint welcome the blessed truth of this great eternal transaction, engaging all the Godhead in the behalf of our souls! – as we read, among other passages, "elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ."7
But what strong foundations are these! what wondrous discoveries of grace! God Himself, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in counsel and in action for us! In the Gospel, man is in the place of vision and audience only. It is God that is active. The activities and sacrifices are God's, and the sinner has but to hear and live, to look and be saved. But these doings of God in the gospel of His grace, are the fruit (as we thus see) of precious and wondrous counsels, taken in Himself ere worlds were framed. And what, I ask, can surpass this? Can title or stability for a sinner, such as may allay all motion and uneasiness of conscience, be conceived beyond what he gets in this? Doings for him by God, and sacrifices made for him, and all this according to counsels ere worlds began! A sinner made happy (may I use this word?) at God's expense!
It is covenant or counselled service that Jesus has rendered us. A promise is made to Noah, that the waters shall not again prevail to destroy the earth, but this promise rests on the strong foundation of the blood of a covenant. Noah's altar had already sent up a sweet savour, a savour of rest, to God, and in the satisfaction and delight of that the Lord had said, I will not again curse the ground for man's sake. That blood was the foundation of the promise. Just as with Abraham afterwards. The land is promised to him, but it is by the covenant of Him who passes through the pieces of the sacrifice. No promisedblessing that is not a purchased blessing also-no throne of grace, as we have said before, that does not stay itself on the ark of the covenant. Gen. xv. 17.
But the covenant comes with its seal, as well as with its blood. As here. There is the bow which witnesses it as well as the blood which sustains it. Wondrous thoughts keep themselves before the soul in all this! The foundation and the witness, the blood and the token, the consideration and the attestation of the great act and deed of God come to mind here. The like figure whereunto even circumcision afterwards; for as the bow in the cloud, so circumcision in the flesh, is a sign of covenant engagements.
All such signs, however, beautiful and sure as they may be, are lost when we think of the great original. For it is the Holy Ghost Himself that is now given as the great sign, the seal of our adoption, the earnest of our inheritance, the witness of the accomplished work of Jesus, and of the acceptance of it in all its sufficiency and preciousness.
What thoughts are these! The promise of God sustained by the blood of the Son, and witnessed by the presence of the Spirit! How has God imparted Himself to us in this marvellous act and deed for sinners! The soul can conceive nothing richer. In divine activities we are interested, but such activities as are founded on everlasting counsels, and which make manifest to us and for us the name of God, "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost."
How should it take us out of ourselves, to stand in sight of this! What a mystery it is; and what have we to do, but with Moses to "turn aside and see this great sight," turn aside from all else! The grander "this great sight" presents itself to our eye, the more commanding will it be. Let us get rich thoughts of this mystery. "The secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him, and He will shew them His covenant." Let us see this great transaction settled ere worlds began, see it calling forth all the energies of divine love and power in Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, see it undertaking the most deep and marvellous purposes of grace and glory for the elect, keep the eye on it, like Moses, till, like him, we discover Him who dwells in the midst of it, and whose name explains it all.
"Oh, all ye rich, ye wise, ye just,
Who the blood's doctrine have discussed
And judge it mean and slight-
Grant that I may, the rest's your own,
In shame and poverty sit down
At this one well-spring of delight!"
If it be but a man's covenant, there is both the consideration and the deed, the purchase money and the muniments, the price and the witness of its payment. God treats with our souls in language thus well understood, and tells us thus of the considerationand the deed, or that which sustains and that which witnesses the counsels of His sovereign good pleasure. It is a deed of gift to the elect, but it is nothing less than the blood of the Son which sustains it, and the presence of the Spirit which witnesses it.
What a secret! By nature I am at a great distance from God, an alien and a foreigner. I am also shut up, so that I cannot come forth. But in this great transaction God Himself undertook to travel this unmeasured distance, and assail the house of my strong enemy; and in His incarnation, sorrows, and victory all this mighty doing of love is accomplished, and I am "compassed about with songs of deliverance."
Can it be, as I gaze at such a mystery, that I fear lest the distant one be not brought nigh, or the captive one be not delivered? "Surely in the floods of great waters they shall not come nigh unto me." I may say-"Thou art my hiding-place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance."
"Strong Deliverer!
Be Thou still our strength and shield!"
This may well be our confidence in the faith of such truth. But to these general thoughts on the covenants and their signs, I might add, the token given to Noah has a beautiful significancy. The bow, as it were, rode triumphant on the cloud. It rolled away the stone and sat upon it. Its form and bearing were those of a conqueror. It said to the cloud, "Hitherto shalt thou come and no further, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed." It gave the angel of death his measure, and said to him, "It is enough, stay now thine hand."
And all this lives in the divine remembrance. The earth and the covenant that secures it are there. "The bow shall be in the cloud, and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth." Accordingly this promise to the earth is remembered, the bow in the cloud is looked at, through every stage and variety of the dispensational actings of the Lord.
It was remembered, of course, all the time the Lord had His seat in Zion, for then the glory made the earth its residence. The Lord then dwelt between the cherubim, in the temple at Jerusalem, in the land of Israel. But when the throne of the Lord leaves that city, and the sanctuary loses the glory, because abominations had grieved and disturbed it, the throne and the glory are accompanied by the rainbow to heaven. Ezek. i. 28. Though the earth then ceased, for a while, to be the dwelling-place of God, still it was before Him in counsel. He would be mindful of it, as the object of His faithful care, according to the promise.8
And therefore when heaven is opened to our view, we see the faithful and remembered bow encompassing the throne. Rev. iv. And further still. The rainbow is seen when the Lord is presented as coming down for the direct, immediate execution of judgment. The mighty angel, the divine executor of the day of the Lord, comes down to the earth clothed with a cloud, the symbol of judgment, and the fearful vessel of wrath. Gen. ix. 14; Rev. i. 7. But even then the rainbow is with Him (Rev. x.); as much as to tell us, that to the end, and at the end, God remembers His promise to the earth, and will debate with judgment. The cloud is to descend, it is true-"They shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven." The judgment must sit-the books must be opened-the vials must be emptied; but it is only to take out of the kingdom them that offend-to destroy them that destroy the earth. The cloud, as it executes its commission, must stay itself at the beginning of the bow. The day of the Lord, or the judgment, must give place to the presence of the Lord, or the refreshment and restoration. Time shall be no longer, the mighty angel may cry; the present course of things may cease again, as once it did in the days of Noah; but the bow shines, in the eye of the Lord, as brightly as ever, and His promise lives in His heart. The earth is still beloved, for Noah's sake, as Israel is for the fathers' sake-that true Noah, in whom (but in whom alone) all the promises of God are yea and amen; and of whom it shall be said, in all its fulness and truth, "This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed."
This earth of ours, given to the children of men, therefore outlives the judgment. It stands the shock of the descent of the mighty angel, though clothed with a cloud, planting his right foot on the sea, and his left on the earth, and crying aloud, as when a lion roareth. Rev. x.
And what is it reserved for? For more than the bow had promised it. It is not only preserved-with its seed time and harvest, its summer and winter, its day and night, its cold and heat-but it is to be delivered into "the liberty of the glory of the children of God." This is more than had been promised.
Such was the token, and such will be its acknowledgment-such was the pledge, and such will be its redemption. Beautiful mystery! The covenant, with its blood and its sign! God's promise, with the sacrifice of the Son as its foundation, and the presence of the Spirit as its witness!
But here this thought occurs to me: Are we, beloved, to stand before such ways and revelations of God in the same calmness in which they are delivered to us? Is that the thing that becomes us? The Queen of Sheba did not stand before the glories of Solomon in the same way that Solomon himself dwelt among them. Solomon was at home in the midst of them. They were all his own. It was his wisdom, and his house that he had built. The meat of the table, and the sitting of the servants, with their apparel, were all his. The ascent by which he went into the house of God was his. But the Queen of Sheba, from the distant south, was but introduced to it all. Fitting it was that he should be at ease there; and fitting it was that she should be all rapture. So with the book of God and the disciple. All the profound and precious mysteries which the Spirit is unfolding there are His own-the thoughts and counsels of the divine mind. There is no effort to produce effect in the communication of them; the tale of the wonders of grace and glory is told artlessly. But is the soul, introduced to them, to be, in like manner, unmoved? Such an one may rather gaze with more of rapture than she who came from the uttermost parts of the earth, for "a greater than Solomon is here."
And it is more of this Sheba-rapture we want. We too easily afford to talk of God's things as though there were no more preciousness and excellency in them than our hearts could measure; but as secret after secret comes forth from the wisdom of the greater than Solomon, surely our souls should say, "Happy are thy men, and happy are these thy servants, which stand continually before thee, and hear thy wisdom."
Endowed and blessed, enriched and honoured-instructed too, and ordained as "the power" under God, and with all this, at ease, in conscious safety, "no evil or enemy occurrent," Noah is seated in the new world. A new trial of man, under new circumstances, was proceeding; and, as with Adam in Eden, nothing is left undone on God's part. The oxen and fatlings were killed, and all things were ready. But where is man's sufficiency? If Adam failed before him, and lost the garden; if Israel failed after him, and lost their land of milk and honey; it may be said to Noah, "Lovest thou me more than these?" In Christ, and in Him only, are unfailing fidelity and strength. And Noah, like the rest, fails, and the virgin soil of the new world is quickly tarnished by the very first foot that trod it.