The family of God, in the days before the flood, pursue a pilgrim path. They leave the world to Cain. There is not the symptom of a struggle, nor the breath of a complaint. They do not say, nor think of saying, "Master, speak to my brother, that he divide the inheritance with me." In habits of life and principles of conduct, they are as distinct from their injurious brother as though they were of another race, or in another world. Cain's family make all the world's history. They build its cities, they promote its arts, they conduct its trade, and they invent its pleasures and pastimes. But in all this Seth's family is not seen. The one generation call their cities after their own names; the other call themselves by the name of the Lord. The one do all they can to make the world their own, and not the Lord's; the other do all they can to make themselves the Lord's, and not their own. Cain writes his own name on the earth; Seth writes the Lord's name on himself.
We may bless the Lord for this vigorous delineation of heavenly alienation on earth, and ask for grace to know some of its living power in our souls. We need to learn a lesson from it.
The instincts of our renewed minds would suggest that we follow the same heavenly path with like certainty and clearness. The call of God leads that way, and all His teaching demands it. The pastimes and the purposes, the interests and the pleasures, of the children of Cain are nothing to these pilgrims. They declare plainly that they refuse the thought that there is any capacity in the earth, as it is now, to give them satisfaction. They are discontented with it, and make no attempts to have it otherwise.
There lay their moral separation from the way of Cain and his household. They were not mindful of the country around them, but sought a better, that is, a heavenly. They are strikingly opposed to the way of Cain, and remarkably discerning of the way of God.
The Lord would have us to follow this same pattern, being in the world, but not of it; we are of heaven, though not as yet (except in Christ) in it. Paul, in the Holy Ghost, would have us be thus, taking example from those "whose conversation is in heaven." Peter, in the same spirit, would have us be "as strangers and pilgrims abstaining from fleshly lusts." James summons us, in the same spirit, to know that "the friendship of the world is enmity with God." And John separates us as by a stroke: "We are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness." J.G. Bellett