I propose, with the Lord's help, carefully to trace the line of testimony from Adam downwards, embracing, as far as I can be assured, the state of man under each phase of testimony. I trust the attentive reader, or still more, the earnest student of the word, may be led from these pages to dwell on this wondrous subject, even how God has maintained a testimony for Himself from the beginning of man's history on the earth, That He did preserve such a testimony we may safely conclude; for though now and again it may have been reduced to a single thread, yet that thread was a golden, a divine one.
Whether it would be possible to trace the line outside revelation, I cannot determine. My business now is with the Scriptures.
There are two things which must strike every thoughtful man. First, that the Supreme Being, God, must be supremely good. Secondly, that if God be supremely good, why is man so miserable? Now if the first premise, that of God's goodness, be granted, we cannot account for the second, man's misery, on any other ground than that he is under penalty for transgression. Man in himself is in a twofold misery: he is thwarted in his moments of greatest enjoyment by the uncertainty of life- a fear which the lower animals know nothing of-and his superior intelligence, because of this felt uncertainty, imparts an additional misery to his existence; and he is; also liable at any moment to be made a prey of by Satan in a way that none of the lower animals could be. Every one admits that man must be impelled by an evil spirit more powerful than himself, or he never would commit the crimes of which he is guilty.
Scripture opens with an account of man's fall, which explains all to us fully. It presents him to us as placed in a circle of blessing where everything was suited to him; and with a suited companion. But notwithstanding all, he acts on the instigation of Satan; distrusts the love of God towards him, and incurs the penalty of disobedience. Thus the sentence of death falls on him, which entirely explains why man, notwithstanding God's goodness, is in so miserable a plight, uncertain of his life, and exposed to the power of Satan. He has yielded to Satan's representation of God, and has brought judgment on himself as well as placed himself in subjection to the enemy whom he obeyed. While surrounded in the garden of Eden with everything that his heart could enjoy, and with all that the kindness and love of God could group together; then and there, in the very enjoyment of all these indications of God's thought about him, Satan suggests that God has not heart to advance man's interests as He might according to His power. The power he admits, but the very admission is only to enforce the denial of God's heart to use His power for man's advancement. Man adopts this impression, acts on it, and thus incurs the penalty of death; while at the same time he becomes exposed to the thraldom of Satan, to whom he has lent himself without knowing the malice of the one who had beguiled his wife.
For a moment Adam was God's witness in Eden. Made in the image and glory of God, he was set in the finest group of natural blessing as God's representative on earth. Adam was at first the witness of God's purpose in man; lord over every other creature, naming them as he approved. And again in the espousal of the woman as formed from himself, as bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. In both testifying of the two great circles in which our Lord will be manifested by and by as the last Adam. He sinned, and death came in, but even for the moment that be occupied this great position he prefigured and foreshadowed the last Adam, the second Man, the Lord from heaven, in whom every one of the blessings and glories forfeited by the first Adam shall be reproduced and set forth with surpassing glory and perfection.
Hence the testimony in the hands of man has a double interest for us, for we see therein, not only God setting Himself forth and maintaining an expression of Himself through fallen man on earth; but that every phase of that testimony, so feeble and imperfect as it is in the descendants of the first Adam, will be reinstated in all the greatness and might of the last Adam. What a captivating view of the purposes of God we obtain when the vision of His testimony, marred as it was in the hands of the first man, serves all the more to engage our souls with the assurance that all shall be presented anew in the power and dignity of the last Man, the Son of God! The day will come when our blessed Lord, with His Bride, will, as the center of every, blessing, set forth the glory and purpose of God in man. And in that day " the city shall have no need of the sun, neither of the moon to shine in it, for the glory of God doth lighten it and the Lamb is the light thereof."
But man, though fallen, and impressed with the sense of inevitable and impending death-the judgment on account of disobedience-is not abandoned by God; but on the contrary, in the greatness of His grace is sought after by Him. He addresses him, not from heaven, but in the garden, man's own abode, with those wondrous words, "Adam, where art thou?" And the avowal which this great question draws forth betrays to us man's newly-acquired relation and feeling towards God. " The voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day" had made him afraid, and he had bid himself behind the trees of the garden Such was man's position now towards God. But God's thought about him is, on the other hand, most interestingly and blessedly disclosed. Distinctly and yet precisely the whole scene presents the mind of both God and man toward one another. Man, a sinner, in fear of God; his mind and heart alienated from Him; while God in the love of His heart follows the wanderer and opens out to him the purposes of His grace, even that the seed of the woman should bruise the serpent's head. This, the first intimation of the everlasting gospel to be yet preached to all the earth, is revealed to man shuddering in God's presence, and yet with tastes nurtured in a scene of the highest natural bliss, but now checked and clouded by the doom of death under which he is righteously placed. The more we are able to comprehend the mixture of taste, enjoyment, and disappointment which enter into the nature of man, the more do we see what a complex being be is; and thus are we prepared for understanding him, which is a difficulty, unless we combine the elements which comprise his nature. Adam is now set on entirely new ground, the ground of redemption and grace, and is presented to us as a witness of the same. God details to him His purpose, and he calls his wife's name " Eve," " the mother of all living," as manifesting his faith in God's grace now unfolded to him. He thus expresses his clear conviction that life will come where death was in crushing force impending. Thus the certainty of life through God's grace was given. Through the dreary cloud of judgment a ray of assured light had penetrated. Through that grace he could now speak of life, and connect her, through whom death came, with the One " who is our life." Wondrous testimony! How admirable and suited! What must have been the feelings of Adam at the moment when he called his wife's name Eve! What a rebuke to Satan! What a voice to the angels in heaven! In the presence of God condemned as a sinner and under judgment, sensible of the immense contrast which awaited him on-the earth, he had received in his soul this blessed conviction, vouchsafed to him by the grace of God and established in his heart, by the very word of God! How much the infidel loses! He cannot in any satisfactory way account for man's state. If he could but understand revelation, it would charm him by the miraculousness of its disclosures. What more fitting, what more just, what more beautiful? The one who sees the connection and scope of this revelation cannot but admit it to be the profoundest theory that was ever propounded. True, the natural mind cannot enter into its depths, because the grace of God is above it.
But, as I have said, If God be good and man be miserable, must there not be some just reason for man's misery? and must there not be some definite way in which God, as good, would retrieve man from his misery? This God does. His love has been denied by Satan, and Adam has adopted Satan's idea. But now Adam is obliged, through grace, to contradict the ideas he had accepted and acted on, while suffering the consequences of his sin. Adam believes in the love of God and calls his wife's
name " Eve." Love, the greater it is, the more distinctly does it act for me when I most want it. Adam at once laid hold on the life which his condition so required from the love of God. To man in his present state, there could be no real love unless life were the first expression of it. And hence, when God's love is fully revealed, it is eternal life, which is His gift through Jesus Christ our Lord. Adam, who had been the first man to distrust God, and thus, in consequence, to fall under the penalty of death, is also the first man to bear testimony that God is love, and that through His love he can call his wife " The mother of all living." She is the monumental witness of this great and glorious fact.
Hence God clothed them in skins, as a token and guarantee that He would shelter them from the shame they had drawn on themselves; and thus clothed by Him, He compels them to take their place outside the garden. Adam must enter on another scene. He had been happy and innocent in Paradise: and he had been miserable there because of sin and judgment. He had learned from God to rise by faith out of this judgment, and now, outside the garden, as clothed of God, he takes his place. What a beginning is he to the long line of witnesses! How he exemplifies God's purpose and interest in man! As head of our race how he must engage and interest us, and how we may learn from him our proper place, even as though we were beside him, or as if we had lived in his day.
We have now to behold Adam outside Paradise. On this wide earth, dressed in the skins which God had prepared for him, baffling the natural and domestic trials of an ordinary man, children being born to him, and he plodding his way for many a year as God's only witness on the whole earth. In process of time his sons grow up, and there we shall see a new testimony declared in the person of Abel, but the history of it I reserve for the next chapter.