When the angelic salutation aroused the shepherds, the advent was announced of the celestial Ambassador in the twofold character of Savior and Lord. The world was in danger; He must be its Savior; the world was disorganized: He must be its Lord. These two titles God has joined together and no man shall divorce them: But that is just what men wish to do: they do not object to any benefits that may accrue through Him as Savior, but will not submit to His authority as Lord.
Yet see how indispensable and natural it is that He should be Lord. If a Camillus or an Alfred will deliver Rome or England from anarchy and peril they must command and lead, for they only are worthy of such position, and they only can adequately fulfill its duties. Hotham denied this principle when he insolently told Colonel Hutchinson that he would not obey him, “he fought for liberty and he expected it in all things.” But Hutchinson was just the man to teach him that liberty does not mean anarchy. The puritanic Colonel—a man of singularly noble and pure spirit—had, himself in turn, to learn submission to the iron will of Cromwell. If Israel, groaning under the bondage of Antiochus, cries to God to “grant a leader bold and brave, if not to conquer born to save,” the savior whom He grants must be their chief, rallied round and obeyed. Mattathias unrolls his standard and the people flock thereto. It is thus that in the plan of salvation we have not only the ark—the means of our salvation—but also Noah the Captain of our salvation—not only Jesus (Savior) but the Lord Jesus; a Son over His own house. It is well for us to dwell frequently on this and consider how unnatural, ungrateful, and unwise it is for us ever in any way to ignore the claims of His authority upon us. “He is thy Lord (adonai), worship thou Him.”
The difference between that kind of authority typified in Adam and that typified in Noah is the difference between the reign of a king and the rule of a Lord. Christ is King of kings and Lord of lords. The ancient idea of these titles seems everywhere much the same as is suggested by Mr. Carlyle's remarks: king, konig, konning—cunning, the canning, knowing or ableman—Rex, Roi-Regulator. I think it is he also that gives “law word” as the origin of lord, but whether that or the more generally credited heaford (bread giver) be it, the distinction always seems to have been that whereas the ancient king in a broad comprehensive way legislated, arranged and commanded, the lord was the executive ruler to carry out in detail these comprehensive schemes. What the king established in theory, the lord executed in practice. It is the difference between Agamemnon the “king of men” marshalling and ordaining the rival and scattered Grecian hosts and fleets to attack Troy, and Ulysses, “wise in the council, glorious in the field,” acting under him—leading in the van; quelling the insurrection; smiting Thersites with rough blows; “a much experienced man.” It is the difference betwixt the wise and comprehensive shepherd-care of David and the strong, ready energy and practical expediency of Joab. And the allegiance due in each case is different but consistent: the objects of Christ's salvation owe. Him not only a general loyalty, an attitude of broad and comprehensive submission; they owe Him that and also an implicit obedience in every detail of their lives. Consider what an unnatural thing it would be for Japhet and the others to set aside Noah and arrange everything in the ark according to their own caprice: it is infinitely more unnatural for the saved within the ark, either in the present or the future dispensation, to set aside the rule and ignore the will of the Lord Jesus Christ—say for instance in His church, where not only Japhet and his brothers, but every living being down to the very “creeping things,” seem to want everything arranged their own way or rather their own ways. It is to out—Hotham Hotham and say, “Thou foughtest for liberty and I mean to have it in all things.” Liberty is good: obedience is better.
Noah then represents Christ, as the righteous and devout ambassador to a corrupted and anarchic world first calling to repentance (preaching not grace but righteousness, like Jonah's preaching) and then when there is no hope of improvement—when judgment becomes the greatest mercy—gathering up with him his people, regulating and conveying them securely through the flood of fearful judgments foretold in Revelation, into the “Rest” and happiness of a new earth, where the fragrance of his sacrifice ascends to an azure sky overarched by the iridescent beauty of the symbol of eternal hope. His name signifies Comfort or Rest, into which he conducts the redeemed who go through the great tribulation after the Church's—Enoch's—translation. This rest is entered into in his seventh century: it appears by no means improbable that the earth's sabbatic millennium will correspond with its seventh historical millennium in the same way: if so it is comparatively near at hand. Finally Noah is head of the redeemed race in the new earth.
In an interesting and useful essay on “The Aversion of Men of Taste to Evangelical Religion,” John Foster condemned the too—frequent use of figures relating to eating. Well, there may be some ground for that, but after all eating is a matter so generally understood, and of such strong and practical interest to every one that the numerous classes of figures relating thereto are amongst the most striking and important in the Bible. I shall only now say that its general significance is obvious enough. It is the means of sustaining life; it is the means of pleasurable satisfaction of a (more or less) painful demand of the body—or soul; it is the building up of the eater by something from outside, which is taken in to the body, or soul, and assimilated, made part of oneself. Can the reader conceive any other figure which would convey one tenth of the concentrated and vehement emphasis with which the soul's need of Christ is expressed when it is said, “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you!” Men of Taste—the dilettanti few of a pseudo-culture, may object to a figure like that if they wish; but men of hunger, the thronging myriads that people the vast continents, to whom the others are but as “a drop in a bucket,” will understand it more readily than any other—metaphor which could be used.
Thus we find the redeemed are not left to their own resources when saved from the approach of judgment; that would be a poor starveling salvation, unworthy of a God of such affluence and benignity. No, He gives gracious direction to provide for them “all food that is eaten.” As in this dispensation we have Christ the sustenance of our spiritual life strewing the wilderness as the Manna—the especial presentation of the four gospels—so in that or any dispensation, the saved shall find in some form or another that in Christ Himself is their perennial source of sustenance, strength and satisfaction. “All food that is eaten": all that can fully satisfy every renewed nature from the lowest to the most developed, from the dwarfed mind of the idiot Yeddie to the masculine intellect and capacious heart of a Wyclif, or a Paul.
I never noticed, till Juvencus lately pointed it out to me, the singular beauty of the final injunction. God does not say, Go into the ark, but Come into the ark: He was “in Christ," and, when He invites them to Christ, He invites them to Himself. When the storm-threatened wayfarer approaches to make the divine Ark his refuge and dwelling place, he discovers that Another is there to welcome him: God has made it His own retreat and tabernacle. The crowning and final glory of Ezekiel's Temple is this—JEHOVAH SHAMMAH!