AS we open the roll of Time, the many centuries of the Age without Law first present themselves to us. From the fall of Adam to the promise given to Abram reckons some 2000 years. Long as is this period, it has a remarkable moral fact attached to it, which in one sense brings its events together within a small compass. Men lived long lives in those early days, and but three of these lives covered the whole of the 2000 years, so that Abram might have heard from Noah’s lips, not only the story of the flood, but also what Noah had heard Methuselah recount of paradise and the fall, as he had heard it from Adam! Let the reader examine our diagram, and he will see how this fact clearly presents itself to the eye. No doubt the story of the past fails to stir man as does the prospect of the future, but none the less is our future greatly governed by our knowledge of the past. In our short lives it is not uncommon for four generations to assemble together, and for the little ones to hear the story of the past from their great-grand-parents’ lips; and we may imagine with what wrapt and awe-struck hearts the believing children in the early days of this world’s history would hear the stories of the tree of life and of the knowledge of good and evil from their grandparents.
We have placed in our diagram a figure of as tree and a sword upon the right-hand side of the roll of Time, and on the left of it, a figure of a city. The fiery sword of divine justice guarded on every side the tree of life, and that tree and that sword lifted up their witness to men for more than 1600 years. It as patent to all then, by the evidence of the ground that was cursed for their sakes, that paradise was not man’s portion on earth; gut, alas too few then, as now, would hearken to the witness, that life could not be reached by man through his own right or might. Jehovah had planted the tree of life for man, but man had turned to the Enemy, instead of, to his Almighty Friend, and had chosen the forbidden tree, and henceforth and forever, life for man could only be attained through death by the fiery sword of judgment.
Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and built him a city. He built and beautified, and he made merry, afar from the testimony that God had established on the earth. He chose him death, for he refused life through death. Abel received the lesson of life through death, and lived. He brought in faith, the victim as his offering to God, and was accepted. True, he died at Cain’s jealous hands, who could not bear that Abel should have the favor which he so wantonly refused, but Abel, being dead, yet speaketh, And of the last days, it is written of the men who refuse the testimony of the sword and the tree, of the sacrificial blood, and by it, the approval of God; who choose religion, progress, science, and arts in the stead of life through the death of Jesus: “Woe unto them! for they have gone in the way of Cain.”
Woe unto them for they speak evil of the things they know not; they denounce the atoning blood of Jesus; they scorn the reality of life everlasting obtained through His death, which alone met all the requirements of the sword that turns every way―woe unto them, let them be as religious as was Cain, or as wise as was he and his sons. And wise men though they be, in what they know naturally―that is, apart from the revelation of God―in these things they lower themselves, corrupting themselves by their science to deny man’s high estate as the creature of God.
As we open the revealed record, and read the stories of the lives of the children of faith and of the children of the world, the former have but a brief account attached to their worthy names―they lived, and they died! They were strangers and sojourners on God’s once beautiful earth, but scarred by sin, and tangled with thorns! Of one of them, Enoch, it is written. “He walked with God!” But what does this honor count with the world? Of another, who called his son Noah (Comfort or Rest), we read, “This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed.” He who walked with God was called up to the paradise above, and the “Comfort” looked for, came in due season, but in God’s way, through death; for out of the deep waters of the flood arose the earth, as in resurrection, and then it was that in the sweet savor of the sacrifice which went up to God, He said, “I will not again curse the earth for man’s sake”!
As man began to multiply on the face of the earth, evil of the worst kind developed, for in the progress of wickedness the sons of God and the children of men entered into alliance. There were giants, or, “fallen ones,” in the earth in those days, and beyond these fallen ones, there were also, by reason of the alliance, men of renown upon the earth. How the mystery of the alliance between the sons of God and the children of men was accomplished, we are not told, but the sons of God took the initiative― they courted the daughters of the children of men; and so it is now, Satan waits for man to lure him from God to destruction. There is no small significance in the joining of hearts with demons today in Christendom, as Spiritualism teaches, for this surrender of man to Satan is one great sign of the coming wrath of God upon the world. We may be sure as the times develop in unbelief, rejection of His word and determined departure from Him will proceed onwards to men becoming allied with Satan in some spiritual bond, for which Spiritualism is preparing the way.
Ah! how blind, how deaf, how dead, are men to the ways of God! Christendom begins to join hand in hand with the enemy, and, rejecting Christ’s sacrifice, to call down upon it fire from heaven, as the men of the early earth, by their sins and alliance with Satan, called upon themselves the judgment of waters.
Before the flood swept away the ungodly, God took Enoch to Himself. “He was nor, for God took him.” Even as it shall be, of them who walk with God, “In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,” they shall be removed from the world, and be “forever with the Lord,” before the foretold judgment falls on the world. Those who walk with God learn His secrets. He does not hide from the children of faith the thing He is about to do.
Methuselah’s name, “He dies, is sent”―given to him by Enoch―shows that God had communicated to the prophet the things which were to come to pass in the early days, while Enoch’s prophecy of coming judgment in the latter day, Jude records; and so it was that, in the year of Methuselah’s death, the judgment came.
As “the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah while the ark was a preparing” (1 Peter 3:2020Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water. (1 Peter 3:20)), so is the Lord now “longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Pet. 3:99The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. (2 Peter 3:9)), for God is God, and changes not. Noah had heard from his father, Methuselah, of the call of Enoch, his grandfather, to the paradise above, just a few years after Adam’s death, and “Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, he walked with God”―separate from the ungodly and the terrible union of man with demons. To him, in his father’s days, came the word from God of coming judgment―of the flood and the end of man, and during the one hundred and twenty years while the divine judgment waited, he built the ark for the saving of his house, and preached righteousness to sinners!
“As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of Man” (Luke 17:2626And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man. (Luke 17:26)), the Lord Himself declares, and His coming to the earth is near, and that coming will be by judgment and by fire from heaven. As the early age of this world’s history ended in judgment, so shall the latter age end. The faithful to Christ should stir themselves the more earnestly to follow the example of the patriarch Noah, who walked with God, built the ark, and preached righteousness.