The details about the antediluvian believers are very scanty; but through it all there is heavenly character. They do not supply history for the world; but they do supply instruction for the Church. This is heavenly. No spirit of burning or spirit of judgment had purged the blood of the earth, and they shrink instinctively from it. In the spirit of their minds they leave it. "What communion has light with darkness? What fellowship has righteousness with unrighteousness?" their conduct asks. Their religion is that of separation from the world, and so are their habits.
They call on the name of the Lord. The name of the Lord is the revelation He has been pleased to make of Himself. Immanuel, Jesus, "the Lord our righteousness," Jehovah, God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost-these are among His names graciously and gloriously published by Himself. And to "call on the name of the Lord" was service or worship of God in spirit and truth.
This was the religion of these earliest saints. It was simply the religion of faith and hope. , They worshiped God, and, apart from the world, they waited in hope. "The work of faith" and "the patience of hope" are seen in them.
And in their ways and habits they are only seen as a people walking across the surface of the earth, till their bodies are laid under it, or are translated to heaven above it. They rejoiced, as though they rejoiced not; they buy, as though they possessed not; they have wives, as though they had none. All around them is as Babylon to them, and their harps are upon the willows. Cain's family have all the music to themselves. But Seth's family are a risen people. Their conversation is in heaven. They look for no estates or cities. All they take is an earlier Machpelah. Nothing is told us of their place or business. They are strangers where even Adam was once at home, and, much more, where Cain still was. They are without a place or a name. The earth knew them not.
They are the earliest witnesses of this heavenly strangership. Such a life is exhibited afterwards in other saints of God in its fuller, beautiful details; but we have it here in spirit.
The family of God in days before the flood leave the world to Cain. There is not the symptom of a struggle, nor the breath of a complaint. They say not, 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, they invent its pleasures and pastimes. But in all this Seth's family are 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 show themselves to be 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 strangership on earth, and ask for grace to know some of its living power in our souls. It is this which has drawn me to this portion of the Word at this time. It reads us a lesson, beloved. And well indeed, if the instincts of our renewed minds suggest 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 are not mindful of the country around them, but sought a better, that is, a heavenly. May I not therefore say of them, that they are strikingly opposed to the way of Cain, and remarkably apprehensive of the way of God? What I say of this antediluvian family is only as we see them in Gen. 5. I doubt not, as under every trial of man, failure and corruption are witnessed. But I speak merely of their standing and testimony as given to us here. Sons and daughters, as we are told, were born to them, generation after generation, and seeds of apostasy were sown and sprang up among them, I doubt not. But this does not at all affect the lesson we get from this fifth chapter.
After this pattern the Lord would have us:in the world, but not of it; of heaven, though not as yet (except in Christ) in it. Paul, in the Holy Ghost, would so have us, taking example from those whose "conversation is in heaven." Peter, in the same Spirit, would so have us, "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 with a stroke:"We are of 'God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness."
It is for the Church surely, beloved, to walk in this elevation and separateness. What is according to the call of God, and worthy of heavenly hopes, but this? We breathe but feebly, and glow but faintly, in company with those and like witnesses. What a temper of soul, it has just struck me, we get in such a chapter as Philippians 4! What a glow is felt throughout it! What a depth and fervency of affection! What a shout of triumph the spirit raises! What elevation in the midst of changes, perplexities, and depressions! The apostle's whole temper of soul throughout that chapter is uncommon. But if one may speak for others, it is to us little more than a tale of a distant land, or the warmth and brilliancy of other dimes reported to our souls by travelers.
Lead us, Lord, we pray thee! Teach us indeed to sing-
"We're bound for yonder land,
Where Jesus reigns supreme,
We leave the shore at His command,
Forsaking all for Him.
" 'Twere easy, did we choose,
Again to reach the shore-
But that is what our souls refuse,
We'll never touch it more."
But surely it is one thing to be the advocate of Christianity, and another to be the disciple of it. And though it may sound strange at first, far easier is it to teach its lessons than to learn them. But so our souk know full well.
We have, however, still to look at the destiny of these saints.
The translation of Enoch was the first formal testimony of the great divine secret, that man was to have a place and inheritance in the heavens. By creation he was formed for the earth. The garden was his habitation, Eden his demesne, and all the earth his estate. But now is brought forth the deeper purpose, that God has an election from among men, destined, in the everlasting counsels of abounding grace, for heaven.
In the course of ages and dispensations after this, this high purpose of God was only dimly and occasionally, slowly and gradually, manifested. But in the person of Enoch it is made to shine out at once. The heavenly calling at this early moment, and in the bosom of his elect and favored household, declares itself in its full luster. This great fact among the antediluvian patriarchs anticipates in spirit the hour of Mount Tabor, the .vision of the martyred Stephen, and the taking up of the saints to the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.
Such was the high destiny of the elect people.
Early last year there arrived in London, England, skeletons of eight prehistoric giants embedded in huge blocks of stone. They are specimens of the now famous "Mount Carmel men" discovered during the previous year by Theodore McCown, a young American archaeologist. They are spoken of as belonging to an entirely new type of extinct man, being found unlike other fossils in their powerful build, their jutting chins and great awning-like protuberances over their eyes. These skeletons came from the Cave of the Kids in the side of Mount Carmel, and were excavated under the joint auspices of the American School of Prehistoric Studies and the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. Of course the scientists say these giants lived about 50,000 years ago, but may they not be of that race of giants which lived in Noah's day and generation, and upon whom with the wicked world of that period God visited the judgment of the Flood? May we not think of these giants having sought refuge from the ascending waters of destruction in the cave of Mount Carmel? Is it not more probable than the wild conjectures of the Anthropologists based on their delusive evolutionary theories?
Dr. Arthur Compton, the famous physicist, who is credited with having penetrated to the bounds of the known physical world, stated in a recent interview that though Science cannot be expected to yield evidence of "a God to whom men are as His children," yet "the evidence for an intelligent power working in the world which Science offers does make such a postulate possible." A Presbyterian by religious connection, but an evolutionist as a scientist, he speaks of the evolutionary program as "moving toward the goal of personality," and this he conceives is being ultimately realized in the making of persons who are capable of learning Nature's laws and sharing God's purpose in Nature as having "part in a great enterprise in which some mighty intelligence is working out a hidden plan." I suppose this is to be called a form of theistic evolutionary doctrine propounded by one who feels compelled to own the existence of God, and yet does not know what is His real and glorious purpose of the ages. Certainly Science cannot reveal that, or bring forth evidence of its truth; it only deals with what God's fingers have wrought in the creation of this great universe; but to learn His mind, His plan, He alone can disclose it to us. This He has done in His Book, written by human fingers perfectly under His control, so that their writings are "God-breathed Scriptures" (2 Tim. 3:16). How fitting that it should be so, and that it was not angels who wrote these living words of truth, since they concern the eternal destiny of men. But after all, the idea is right; this vast creation is "moving toward the goal of personality." On through the storms of Satan's rebellion, man's fall and the long ages of human sin, past and yet to come, the Divine throne is still supreme, and He who sits upon it is the absolute Ruler over all the various processes at work in all the different parts of His universal realm. Like a mighty weaver, every strand is in His hand, and they are being wrought into the perfect pattern of His own choosing. And at the end, when all is done, then we are told GOD SHALL BE ALL IN ALL (1 Cor. 15:28)-glorious goal of Personality, to which the whole great drama moves out of eternity across the stage of time into eternity, when the tabernacle of God shall be with men:"They shall be His people, and God Himself shall be with them, their God." A race of overcomers will inherit these things; they will indeed know nature's laws and share in God's accomplished purpose, He being to them GOD, and they to Him sons (Rev. 21:3,7). But who overcomes? Only those who are cleansed by the precious blood of the Lamb, who can sing now in truth as they will then:
"To Him who loves us, and has washed us in His blood, and make us a kingdom, priests to His God and Father? to Him be the glory and the might to the ages of the ages. Amen." John Bloore