The Patriarchs. Bellett John Gifford

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СКАЧАТЬ the other do all they can to shew 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 were not mindful of the country around them, but sought a better, that is, a heavenly.4 May I not therefore say of them, as I have said, that they are strikingly opposed to the way of Cain, and remarkably apprehensive of the way of God?

      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 by 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 what 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 Phil. iv.! What a glow is felt throughout it! What 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 the tale of a distant land, or the warmth and brilliancy of other climes reported to our souls by travellers.

      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.

      "'T were 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 souls know full well.

      We have, however, still to look at the destiny and endowments of these saints, as we have already looked at their faith, their virtues, and their religion.

      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 favoured household, declares itself in its full lustre. 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 in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.

      Such was the high destiny of the elect people.

      The prophecies of Enoch and of Lamech are samples of their endowments. And rich indeed, worthy of their dignity, these endowments were. For those prophecies under the Holy Ghost tell us that glorious secrets had been entrusted to them. They were treated as in the place of friends. "Shall I hide from them," the Lord was saying to them, as afterwards to Abraham, "that thing which I do?" For such privileges belong only to dignity. See Gen. xviii. 18. And if Abraham knew the doom of Sodom beforehand, Enoch, in a deeper, larger sense, knew the doom of the whole world beforehand. And his prophecy lets out a mystery of solemn and wondrous glory-that the heavenly saints are to accompany the Lord in the day of His power and judgment. And, as of a character equal with this, Lamech's, which comes after, in its turn, with happier anticipations, sketches the scene that lies beyond the judgment, days of millennial blessedness, "the days of heaven upon the earth." The Lord has not given up the earth for ever. And these saints before the flood can speak of that great mystery even before the bow in the cloud becomes the token of it. But they know the judgment of it must come first; and they can speak of that mystery also before the fountains of the great deep were broken up.

      Rich endowments in the Spirit thus attach to their high personal dignity with God. As with the Church now. "Stewards" they were "of the mysteries of God." They could "sing of mercy and of judgment;" unto God and of His counsels they could sing. Profoundest secrets feed their souls. "The deep things of God," the things both of prophets and apostles, the things of the epistles and the apocalypse, are theirs. Paul was entrusted with the circumstances of the heavenly calling. He speaks of our being caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and of that great expectation as being our comfort and relief against the day of the Lord and its terrors; Enoch in himself, long before, illustrated that very thing. John speaks of the raptured saints accompanying the Lord in the day of His power, joining in the breaking of the potter's vessel, and in the warfare of the Rider on the white horse; Enoch in his prophecy, long before, testified the same. Jude 14, 15. Prophets tell of the wilderness by-and-by rejoicing, and of the desert blossoming, of the blessed One renewing the face of the earth, and instead of the brier, the myrtle flourishing; but long before Lamech had told of this same comfort in the earth again, and this rest for man from the curse of the ground. Gen. v. 29.

      Rich indeed were these endowments in the Holy Ghost. There is even peculiar vividness in these earliest utterances of the prophetic spirit. There is commonly a haze over the distance. It is not clear, as if it were the foreground. Indistinctness invests it. And this, in contrast with the nearer landscape, only heightens the impression of the whole. So the notices of the prophets, and the things reported by apostles. They are delivered in different style. Properly so. The haze of distance commonly invests the communications we get of the future. Such is the perfectness of the way of the Spirit. The very drapery under which the distant or the future appears sets it off fitly. Clearness, or literal definiteness, would be offensive, as glare or nakedness. This is commonly so, and this is all admirable. But if at times the distance is illuminated, we can delight in it; and in these earliest notices the latest scenes of divine action are thus set off in strange and beautiful distinctness.

      Such was the heavenly calling, its virtues, its dignity, and its endowments, of this antediluvian family of God. The end of their path was heavenly also, as heavenly as any feature of it. I speak not of the fact of its ending in heaven, but of the very style in which it so ended. No sign among the nations gave notice of it. No times or seasons had to mark or measure it. No stated age or numbered years had to spend themselves. No voice of prophecy had so much as hinted the blessed, rapturous moment. "Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him." Nothing peculiar ushered forth that glorious hour. No big expectations or strange events gave token of its coming. It was the natural heavenly close of an undeviating heavenly journey.

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