IN the face of the coming destruction of the earth's corrupters God is pleased next to indicate His intended use of the ark Noah was directed to build.
“But I will establish my covenant with thee; and thou shalt go into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy son's wives with thee. And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every [kind] shalt thou bring into the ark to keep [them] alive with thee; male and female shall they be. Of the birds after their kind, and of the cattle after their kind, of every reptile of the ground after its kind, two of every [kind] shall come to thee, to keep [them] alive. And take thou to thee of all food that is eaten, and gather [it] to thee, and it shall be for food for thee and for them. Thus did Noah according to all that God commanded him, so did he” (vers. 18-22).
He that walked with God, a righteous man, blameless in his generations, is the object of His care; and God would have Noah to know it, especially when so tremendous a blow was hanging over a careless unbelieving world. Therefore to him that believed does He intimate His intention to deliver himself and his wife and his family in the way appointed. The execution of this was a suited and notable trial of Noah's faith, involving a long time of waiting, continuous labor, and entire but active submission to God's word. Noah had before his spirit habitually, on the one hand, that the world was doomed, and that judgment would fall upon it at God's hand because of its iniquities; on the other, that he and his would without doubt be sheltered from it in the ark, with the creatures needed to renew the world to come after the flood.
It was a dealing most evidently divine in both its parts for destruction and for rescue, and with ample testimony beforehand. “Shall there be evil in a city (says Amos), and the LORD hath not done it? Surely the Lord GOD will do nothing, but He revealeth His secret unto His servants the prophets.” So it was now when He disclosed to Noah that the waters should overspread the earth, yet with mercy glorying against judgment as ordinarily. No doubt it was an outward temporal judgment of His, as we find even at the fall of man; yet just as there it furnishes principles of the profoundest importance for what is inward and everlasting. Though this last is the gravest beyond question, yet is the former of so much the greater moment, as Christendom has been long prone to forget it or to merge it in the final judgment of the dead. Not so the Lord or His apostles, any more than the O. T. prophets, who constantly urge the judgment of the world (i.e., of living men here below, before He reigns in righteousness over all the earth, and therefore long before the scene of His Great White Throne). In this the unbelief of Gentiles under the gospel is in contrast with that of the Jews under the law, who were apt to overlook the everlasting judgment through preoccupation with the day of Jehovah which shall judge all the heathen and the apostates of Israel. The N. T. reveals the final judgment for the dead, small and great, far more clearly than the older books of Scripture; but it is no less distinct in warning that God commands men that they should all everywhere repent, inasmuch as He has established a day in the which He will judge the inhabited earth by the Man Whom He has appointed, giving assurance to all in that He raised Him from the dead. This is beyond controversy His judgment of the quick, not of the dead; and the deluge is its counterpart, as the Lord shows in Matt. 24, and elsewhere.
It has been supposed by some that Moses introduced previously existing records here and there with that which was more strictly his own. But this is a gratuitous fancy to account for seeming repetitions that occur, or even for what they call discrepancies. Now, to say nothing of the irreverence implied, how vain is the expedient! For the differing accounts are presented by Moses without the slightest comment; which no human historian would think of doing. We can easily understand inconsistent reports in two distinct works. Do they really mean that such a one as Moses from different sources put together in immediate juxtaposition accounts which, do not tally, either without perceiving their opposition, or indifferent to the perplexity of readers? On their own ground is the hypothesis reasonable? If inspiration be allowed in any real sense, there can be no question.
For the intelligent believer there is, not only not a shade of difficulty, but the evidence of divine wisdom in the design which governs these respective accounts, as in fact all scripture. Take the case before us. It is God as the faithful Creator preserving a line to perpetuate the succession of all flesh, notwithstanding the flood of waters He was about to bring on the earth, when everything else there akin, in which was the breath of life, must expire. Hence in this point of view, as “Elohim” (God) is required for precision, and not “Jehovah,” so of the human family, as well as of the subordinate creatures, we find simply pairs, male and female. We shall find another aspect following, where different thoughts and languages are necessarily employed, in order to convey the truth with divine exactitude. A man left to himself would in all probability have written but one statement, and contented himself with the general fact modified by certain exceptions. God has been pleased to lead His inspired servant to give the double account, so as to mark off that which He ordered according to His rights as Creator from His specific dealings in moral government. This distinction may be trivial in unbelieving eyes; but it is of deep interest and profit to the souls that ponder His word, and learn His mind thereby. Inspiration explains it all, as nothing else can. And if we believe that the scripture is inspired, one can readily understand God using Moses to present both views distinctly; whereas it seems surely a roundabout and cumbrous alternative to imagine two unknown men uninspired to write separately each of these accounts, and Moses as a third, but inspired, editor employed merely to tack them together. The fact is however that those who keenly urge these suppositions betray for the most part their aim and desire to blot out true inspiration altogether, or, which comes to the same result, to allow inspiration only in a sense which leaves out therein divine action and the certainty of truth. For the same men strive to persuade themselves that the accounts contradict one another, that the compiler was so weak as to accept them as consistent and true, and that Christendom has had the narrative in the same easy-going faith, till the self-styled “higher critics” arose to open men's eyes and give them a Bible without God's truth. Such is their “growth” of scripture.