There is a nobility or a discredit in ancestry, according to what the ancestor originally was, Μ the rights of his own person and estate. Dignity and rank may have been conferred on him; another may be noble by descent: so that flesh and blood “hath whereof to glory.” But above all these degrees which are merely human, the first man Adam takes precedence, and claims the pre-eminence, for he was created, and stands alone in this relation to his Creator. Moreover, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him.” Here is indeed true nobility by creative power. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” There would be true dignity in such an ancestor as this Adam, could his posterity trace up then genealogies to the first man when he stood in this likeness of God in the garden which the Lord God planted eastward in Eden; but what herald at arms dare pass by the cherubim with the flaming sword, upon such an errand as this?
But there is a painful and humiliating contrast to this picture. The consequence of the fall, and the loss of this image of God, morally, through sin; and so we read in Gen. 5, “Adam lived an hundred and thirty years and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image.” Alas! how is the crown fallen from the head, and the fine gold become dim! In its turn, descent from such an one as Adam fallen, and expelled from Eden, is a disgrace, for “we are born in sin and shapen in iniquity.”
How this immense difference in the two states and conditions of Adam, unfallen and fallen, affect the whole character of our subject, is evident from the scriptures referred to. But how strange that contrasts such as these, “planting a garden” and creating a man “in the image of God,” and “driving out the man” when he had forfeited and lost all by disobedience should be only historically regarded. Let us however look at these facts closely and seriously, and then see how God in the earliest days brought in His own resources of grace to meet a fallen and an outcast man, and his posterity. If he will reach true nobility now, it must be in Christ, by being born again of the Spirit, born of God. “To as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.” If mankind, in all succeeding generations, have determined to “make a fair show in the flesh,” and to glory in descent, and in man, God has determined on His part “ to stain the pride of man,” to bring down every high look, and to turn this comeliness into corruption. “He will bring to naught things that are,” by choosing “things which are not, yea, base things of the world, and things which are despised hath God chosen, that no flesh should glory in his presence.” “His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.”
In the face of great facts like these, how can it be accounted for that they have so little place between the consciences of men and God — such a feeble hold over the everyday principles and pursuits of the great busy world around us? Is it not because God Himself and the realities which His presence must always bring in before the soul, are excluded — systematically excluded; and men contented to adopt the spirit of the age and to follow the course of the world? Instead of being deluded a second time for ourselves, and instead of being thus doubly, doubly sold by the artifices of Satan, “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience;” how much better to be near enough to truth and to God to detect the wiles of the devil and to see things as they really are! How much better and wiser to accept the remedy and the resource which God has provided by the sending forth of His own Son, our Lord and Savior, as the life and the light of men! “ He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life; and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him.”
Before Christ came, all that prefigured Him was necessarily taught in types and shadows, whether in temple or tabernacle times; and, even earlier, the same lessons of grace to the shiner were taught in outline by typical names of persons in the world before the flood. For example, “Adam called his wife’s name Eve, for she was the mother of all living.” And what is this name, under the guidance of God, but life in the midst of death, life out of death, in her promised seed? for God had said respecting Christ, “thou shalt braise his [Satan’s] head.” Eve was thus made the depositary of promise, and, assuring herself of deliverance from the punishment which God in righteousness had inflicted on her and Adam, when she bare a son, her firstborn son, she said, in the joy of her heart, “I have gotten a [the] man from the Lord, and she called his name Cain.” But she has to learn the deep lesson winch all the family of faith have since learned, that creature effort or acquirement must wait upon and give place to the sovereignty of God. And so we read, “She again bare his brother Abel.” What did she want of another son? What lessons had she to be taught, that Cain did not afford? Was not Cain the promised seed that should bruise Satan’s head? And in her disappointment and sorrow perhaps, she calls his name Abel, or vanity; and so she stamps thus early vanity upon her natural expectations.
But other pages are to be written in the book of human life, and blotted ones too, which will try the heart of this first mother, as they tried the soul of the real and true mother of the promised Seed, to whom Simeon said, when speaking of her Son Jesus, “Yea, a sword shall pass through thine own soul also.” “In process of time it came to pass that Cam brought of the fruit of the ground, an offering unto the Lord; and Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock, and of the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to Ids offering, but unto Cain and Ids offering he had not respect.....and Cain rose up against Abel his brother and slew him.”
God is thus again forced into the place of judgment, not now by disobedience like Adam’s, but by murder and bloodshed, and the words “thou art cursed from the earth,” tells out the deeper shame of man, as he reads aloud his own sentence, “behold, thou hast driven me out.....and from thy face shall I be hid, and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth.” By faith Abel falls asleep till another and a future day, and Cain “went out from the presence of the Lord.” The righteous witness for God is slain and gone, and the murderer left in the world that then was, to fulfill the double character of a fugitive and a vagabond. Wise men, guides of today, tell us that this world since the flood is much more according to the mind of God than the antediluvian one, and far better; but let us see the truth or falsehood of this assurance, where God’s perfect and faithful witness to righteousness brought man’s heart to the test. What do the mock trial and crucifixion of Christ say? What the voices of the High Priest and priests, Pharisees and elders? What the sentence of Pilate, and what the will of the people? “Not this man, but Barabbas!” Jesus, Lord and Savior, the righteous witness between the heavens and the earth, cast out and killed like Abel; and Barabbas like Cain, at home in the world which has done it! The blood of Abel calls to God from the ground for vengeance, and so does the blood of His only begotten and well beloved Son, and He will make inquisition for it in the day which is at hand; only in the meanwhile God is preaching peace, by that very blood of Christ, to His betrayers and murderers, and declaring a free pardon and everlasting life to whosoever believeth in Jesus.
Was there ever anything so dark and full of enmity from man to God, as the dreadful cross where they nailed Jesus? Is there anything so bright, so full of love from God to man, as He turns this same cross round, and beseeches man in Christ’s stead to be reconciled to God by the death of His Son?
“And Adam knew his wife again, and she bare a son, and called his name Seth: For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel whom Cain slew.” What an advance has Eve made in this early school-time of faith, and in her experience of God and His ways! In this new vocabulary the Cain is set aside whom she had gotten from the Lord, and Abel is but vanity stamped on everything outside and around herself; but now Seth is become the man of promise, “For God,” said she, “hath appointed me another seed.” How blessed and secure is that which comes to us from God, through the channel of His own appointing, and what a cluster of first ripe fruit do we find in the record of that day: “Then began men to call upon the name of the Lord.” Precious link, and a moral one too, between God and this adopted family of Seth.
The book of the generations of Adam are in keeping with these ways of God in sovereign grace and power, for Cain and his posterity are out of sight, and out of mind, at any rate they have no place in this new genealogy which recognizes Seth the “substituted seed” and God’s appointed head. In this list of antediluvian celebrities we read of an Enoch, and a Noah, and it is instructive to see the purposes of God budding and blossoming on this new stem.
“We have already learned that “men began then to call on the name of the Lord,” and now we shall be taught yet further advance, and what a triumphant one, in the world in which man is a driven out creature. “And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah, three hundred years.... and he was not, for God took him.” Before his translation, he had tins testimony, that he pleased God! A driven out man from Eden, it is true in the person of Adam, when by sin he had separated himself from God, is the first letter of this early alphabet, but a translated man, the man whom God took, is the last. Enoch walked with God and pleased God: how bright in its day was this pathway of three hundred years in a world which was ripening for destruction! The world, before the flood, has told its brightest tale, and let out the secret of translation to the eye and ear of the appointed seed for the heavens and for God.
It yet remains, that a man, to come out again upon the earth as the new depositary of promise, should be provided before all is swept away by the flood. So Lamech begat a son and called his name Noah, saying, This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed. If Enoch is for the heavens, as we have been taught, so Noah is for the earth, and for rest, or for comfort concerning the place where the curse has taken effect, and done its bidding. In Enoch, one need scarcely say, we have the earliest type of the character, walk, and catching up of the Church to be forever with the Lord, whilst in Noah, the man for the earth, brought out after the terrible judgment of God, into a new world, under the bow in the cloud, as the token of God’s covenant with every living creature, founded upon the sweet savor of the altar, the new ground of his own acceptance — we are farther taught the character and security of all created blessings. Adam and his world are swept away, and have given place to Noah, and the heavens and the earth which are now.
All these covenanted promises will receive then manifested accomplishment in the millennial earth, when the Enochs will be in their place of heavenly glory with their Lord for closer and more perfect intimacies in this day, when that which is perfect is come, and all that is in part shall be done away! How gracious and suited are the lessons which God teaches by pictorial representations and names in the childhood history of the human race, through an Adam, an Eve, a Cain, an Abel, a Seth, an Enoch, and a Noah, till Moses was called up to receive patterns for his people and his day, which the tabernacle and afterward the temple displayed in all their glory and symbolic meaning, till they also give place to the great “mystery of godliness; God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory.”
Bright the prospect soon that greets us
Of that long’d-for nuptial day
When our heavenly Bridegroom meets us
On His kingly, conquering way;
In the Glory,
Bride and Bridegroom reign for aye!