'These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man
and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with
God. And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was
filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth,
and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted
His way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, The end
of all flesh is come before Me; for the earth is filled
with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy
them with the earth. Make thee an ark of gopher wood;
rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it
within and without with pitch. And this is the fashion
which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall
be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits,
and the height of it thirty cubits. A window shalt thou
make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it
above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the
side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt
thou make it. And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of
waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is
the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing
that is in the earth shall die. But with thee will I
establish My covenant; and thou shalt come into the ark,
thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons' wives
with thee. And of every living thing of all flesh, two
of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them
alive with thee; they shall be male and female. Of fowls
after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of
every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of
every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive.
And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and
thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food
for thee, and for them. Thus did Noah; according to all
that God commanded him, so did he.'--GENESIS vi. 9-22.
1. Notice here, first, the solitary saint. Noah stands alone 'in his
generations' like some single tree, green and erect, in a forest of
blasted and fallen pines. 'Among the faithless, faithful only he.' His
character is described, so to speak, from the outside inwards. He is
'righteous,' or discharging all the obligations of law and of his
various relationships. He is 'perfect.' His whole nature is developed,
and all in due symmetry and proportion; no beauty wanting, no grace
cultivated at the expense of others. He is a full man; not a one-sided
and therefore a distorted one. Of course we do not take these words to
imply sinlessness. They express a relative, not an absolute,
completeness. Hence we may learn both a lesson of stimulus and of hope.
We are not to rest satisfied with partial goodness, but to seek to
attain an all-round perfectness, even in regard to the graces least
natural to our dispositions. And we can rejoice to believe that God is
generous in His acceptance and praise. He does not grudge commendation,
but takes account of the deepest desires and main tendencies of a life,
and sees the germ as a full-blown flower, and the bud as a fruit.
Learn, too, that solitary goodness is possible. Noah stood uninfected
by the universal contagion; and, as is always the case, the evil
around, which he did not share, drove him to a more rigid abstinence
from it. A Christian who is alone 'in his generations,' like a lily
among nettles, has to be, and usually is, a more earnest Christian than
if he were among like-minded men. The saints in 'Caesar's household'
needed to be very unmistakable saints, if they were not to be swept
away by the torrent of godlessness. It is hard, but it is possible, for
a boy at school, or a young man in an office, or a soldier in a
barrack, to stand alone, and be Christlike; but only on condition that
he yields to no temptation to drop his conduct to the level around him,
and is never guilty of compromise. Once yield, and all is over. Flowers
grow on a dunghill, and the very reeking rottenness may make the bloom
finer.
Learn, too, that the true place for the saint is 'in his generations.'
If the mass is corrupt, so much the more need to rub the salt well in.
Disgust and cowardice, and the love of congenial society, keep
Christian people from mixing with the world, which they must do if they
are to do Christ's work in it. There is a great deal too much union
with the world, and a great deal too much separation from it, nowadays,
and both are of the wrong sort. We cannot keep too far away from it, by
abstinence from living by its maxims, and tampering with its pleasures.
We cannot mix too much with it if we take our Christianity with us, and
remember our vocation to be its light.
Notice, again, the companion of the solitary saint. What beauty there
is in that description of the isolated man, passing lonely amid his
contemporaries, like a stream of pure water flowing through some foul
liquid, and untouched by it, and yet not alone in his loneliness,
because 'he walked with God!' The less he found congenial companionship
on earth, the more he realised God as by his side. The remarkable
phrase, used only of Enoch and of Noah, implies a closer relation than
the other expression, 'To walk before God.' Communion, the habitual
occupation of mind and heart with God, the happy sense of His presence
making every wilderness and solitary place glad because of Him. the
child's clasping the father's hand with his tiny fingers, and so being
held up and lifted over many a rough place, are all implied. Are we
lonely in outward reality? Here is our unfailing companion. Have we to
stand single among companions, who laugh at us and our religion? One
man, with God to back him, is always in the majority. Though surrounded
by friends, have we found that, after all, we live and suffer, and must
die alone? Here is the all-sufficient Friend, if we have fellowship
with whom our hearts will be lonely no more.
Observe that this communion is the foundation of all righteousness in
conduct. Because Noah walked with God, he was 'just' and 'perfect.' If
we live habitually in the holy of holies, our faces will shine when we
come forth. If we desire to be good and pure, we must dwell with God,
and His Spirit will pass into our hearts, and we shall bear the
fragrance of his presence wherever we go. Learn, also, that communion
with God is not possible unless we are fighting against our sin, and
have some measure of holiness. We begin communion with Him, indeed, not
by holiness, but by faith. But it is not kept up without the
cultivation of purity. Sin makes fellowship with God impossible. 'Can
two walk together, except they be agreed?' 'What communion hath light
with darkness?' The delicate bond which unites us in happy communion
with God shrivels up, as if scorched, at the touch of sin. 'If we say
that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie.'
2. Notice the universal apostasy. Two points are brought out in the
sombre description. The first is moral corruption; the second,
violence. Bad men are cruel men. When the bonds which knit society to
God are relaxed, selfishness soon becomes furious, and forcibly seizes
what it lusts after, regardless of others' rights. Sin saps the very
foundations of social life, and makes men into tigers, more destructive
to each other than wild beasts. All our grand modern schemes for the
reformation of society will fail unless they begin with the reformation
of the individual. To walk with God is the true way to make men gentle
and pitying.
Learn from this dark outline that God gazes in silence on the evil.
That is a grand, solemn expression, 'Corrupt before God.' All this mad
riot of pollution and violence is holding its carnival of lust and
blood under the very eye of God, and He says never a word. So is it
ever. Like some band of conspirators in a dark corner, bad men do deeds
of darkness, and fancy they are unseen, and that God forgets _them_,
because they forget God; and all the while His eye is fixed on them,
and the darkness is light about them. Then comes a further expression
of the same thought: 'God looked upon the earth.' As a sudden beam of
sunshine out of a thunder-cloud, His eye flashes down, not as if He
then began to know, but that His knowledge then began, as it were, to
act.
3. What does the stern sentence on the rotten world teach us? A very
profound truth, not only of the certain divine retribution, but of the
indissoluble connection of sin with destruction. The same word is
thrice employed in verses 11 and 12 to express 'corruption' and in
verse 13 to express 'destruction.' A similar usage is found in 1
Corinthians iii. 17, where the same Greek word is translated 'defile'
and 'destroy.' This teaches us that, in deepest reality, corruption is
destruction, that sin is death, that every sinner is a suicide. God's
act in punishment corresponds to, and is the inevitable outcome of, our
act in transgression. So fatal is all evil, that one word serves to
describe both the poison-secreting root and the poisoned fruit. Sin is
death in the making; death is sin finished.
The promise of deliverance, which comes side by side with the stern
sentence, illustrates the blessed truth that God's darkest threatenings
are accompanied with a revelation of the way of escape. The ark is
always shown along with the flood. Zoar is pointed out when God
foretells Sodom's ruin. We are no sooner warned of the penalties of
sin, than we are bid to hear the message of mercy in Christ. The brazen
serpent is ever reared where the venomous snakes bite and burn.
4. We pass by the details of the construction of the ark to draw the
final lesson from the exact obedience of Noah. We have the statement
twice over, He did 'according to all that God commanded him.' It was no
easy thing for him to build the ark, amidst the scoffing of his
generations. Smart witticisms fell around him like hail. All the
'practical men' thought him a dreamy fool, wasting his time, while they
prospered and made something of life. The Epistle to the Hebrews tells
us the secret of his obedience: 'By faith, Noah,' etc. He realised the
distant unseen, because he believed Him who warned him of it. The
immediate object of his faith was 'the things not seen as yet'; but the
real, deepest object was God, whose word showed him these. So faith is
always trust in a divine Person, whether it lays hold of the past
sacrifice, the present indwelling Spirit, or the future heaven.
Noah's example teaches us the practical effects of faith. 'Moved with
godly fear,' says Hebrews; by which is meant, not a mere dread of
personal evil, for Noah was assured of safety--but that godly reverence
and happy fear which dwells with faith, and secures precise obedience.
Learn that a faith which does not work on the feelings is a very poor
thing. Some Christian people have a great horror of emotional religion.
Unemotional religion is a great deal worse. The road by which faith
gets at the hands is through the heart. And he who believes but feels
nothing, will do exactly as much as he feels, and probably does not
really believe much more.
So after Noah's emotion followed his action. He was bid to prepare his
ark, we have only to take refuge in the ark which God has prepared in
Christ; but the principle of Noah's obedience applies to us all. He
realised so perfectly that future, with its double prospect of
destruction and deliverance, that his whole life was moulded by the
conduct which should lead to his escape. The far-off flood was more
real to him than the shows of life around him. Therefore he could stand
all the gibes, and gave himself to a course of life which was sheer
folly unless that future was real. Perhaps a hundred and twenty years
passed between the warning and the flood; and for all that time he held
on his way, nor faltered in his faith. Does our faith realise that
which lies before us with anything like similar clearness? Do we see
that future shining through all the trivial, fleeting present? Does it
possess weight and solidity enough to shape our lives? Noah's creed was
much shorter than ours; but I fear his faith was as much stronger.
5. We may think, finally, of the vindication of his faith. For a
hundred and twenty years the wits laughed, and the 'common-sense'
people wondered, and the patient saint went on hammering and pitching
at his ark. But one morning it began to rain; and by degrees, somehow,
Noah did not seem quite such a fool. The jests would look rather
different when the water was up to the knees of the jesters; and their
sarcasms would stick in their throats as they drowned. So is it always.
So it will be at the last great day. The men who lived for the future,
by faith in Christ, will be found out to have been the wise men when
the future has become the present, and the present has become the past,
and is gone for ever; while they who had no aims beyond the things of
time, which are now sunk beneath the dreary horizon, will awake too
late to the conviction that they are outside the ark of safety, and
that their truest epitaph is 'Thou fool!'
'CLEAR SHINING AFTER RAIN'
'And God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all
the cattle that was with him in the ark: and God made a
wind to pass over the earth, and the waters asswaged;
The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven
were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained;
And the waters returned from off the earth continually:
and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the
waters were abated. And the ark rested in the seventh
month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the
mountains of Ararat. And the waters decreased continually
until the tenth month: in the tenth month, on the first
day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen.
And it came to pass at the end of forty days that Noah
opened the window of the ark which he had made: And he
sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until
the waters were dried up from off the earth. Also he sent
forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated
from off the face of the ground; But the dove found no
rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him
into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the
whole earth: then he put forth his hand, and took her,
and pulled her in unto him into the ark. And he stayed
yet other seven days; and again he sent forth the dove
out of the ark; And the dove came in to him in the
evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt
off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off
the earth. And he stayed yet other seven days; and sent
forth the dove; which returned not again unto him any
more. And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first
year, in the first month, the first day of the month,
the waters were dried up from off the earth: and Noah
removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold,
the face of the ground was dry. And in the second month,
on the seven and twentieth day of the month, was the
earth dried. And God spake unto Noah, saying, Go forth
of the ark, thou, and thy wife, and thy sons, and thy
sons wives with thee. Bring forth with thee every living
thing that is with thee, of all flesh, both of fowl,
and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creepeth
upon the earth; that they may breed abundantly in the
earth, and be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth.
And Noah went forth, and his sons, and his wife, and
his sons' wives with him: Every beast, every creeping
thing, and every fowl, and whatsoever creepeth upon the
earth, after their kinds, went forth out of the ark.
And Noah builded an altar unto the Lord; and took of
every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered
burnt offerings on the altar. And the Lord smelled a
sweet savour; and the Lord said in His heart, I will
not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for
the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth;
neither will I again smite any more every thing living,
as I have done. While the earth remaineth, seedtime and
harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and
day and night shall not cease,'--GENESIS viii. 1-22.
The universal tradition of a deluge is most naturally accounted for by
admitting that there was a 'universal deluge.' But 'universal' does not
apply to the extent as embracing the whole earth, but as affecting the
small area then inhabited--an area which was probably not greater than
the valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris. The story in Genesis is the
Hebrew version of the universal tradition, and its plain affinity to
the cuneiform narratives is to be frankly accepted. But the
relationship of these two is not certain. Are they mother and daughter,
or are they sisters? The theory that the narrative in Genesis is
derived from the Babylonian, and is a purified, elevated rendering of
it, is not so likely as that both are renderings of a more primitive
account, to which the Hebrew narrative has kept true, while the other
has tainted it with polytheistic ideas. In this passage the cessation
of the flood is the theme, and it brings out both the love of the God
who sent the awful punishment, and the patient godliness of the man who
was spared from it. So it completes the teaching of the flood, and
proclaims that God 'in wrath remembers mercy.'
1. 'God remembered Noah.' That is a strong 'anthropomorphism,' like
many other things in Genesis--very natural when these records were
written, and bearing a true meaning for all times. It might seem as if,
in the wild rush of the waters from beneath and from above, the little
handful in the ark were forgotten. Had the Judge of all the earth,
while executing 'terrible things in righteousness,' leisure to think of
them who were 'afar off upon the sea'? Was it a blind wrath that had
been let loose? No; in all the severity there was tender regard for
those worthy of it. Judgment was discriminating. The sunshine of love
broke through even the rain-clouds of the flood.
So the blessed lesson is taught that, in the widest sweep of the most
stormy judgments, there are those who abide safely, fearing no evil.
Though the waters are out, there is a rock on which we may stand safe,
above their highest wave. And why did God 'remember Noah'? It was not
favouritism, arbitrary and immoral. Noah was bid to build the ark,
because he was 'righteous' in a world of evil-doers; he was
'remembered' in the ark, because he had believed God's warning, obeyed
God's command as seeing the judgment 'not seen as yet,' and so 'became
heir of the righteousness which is by faith.' They who trust God, and,
trusting Him, realise as if present the future judgment, and, 'moved
with fear,' take refuge in the ark, are never forgot by Him, even while
the world is drowned. They live in His heart, and in due time He will
show that He remembers them.
2. The gradual subsidence of the flood is told with singular exactitude
of dates, which are certainly peculiar if they are not historical. The
slow decrease negatives the explanation of the story as being the
exaggerated remembrance of some tidal-wave caused by earthquake and the
like. Precisely five months after the flood began, the ark grounded,
and the two sources, the rain from above and the 'fountains of the
deep' (that is, probably, the sea), were 'restrained,' and a high wind
set in. That date marked the end of the increase of the waters, and
consequently the beginning of their decrease. Seven months and ten days
elapsed between it and the complete restoration of the earth to its
previous condition. That time was divided into stages. Two months and a
half passed before the highest land emerged; two months more and the
surface was all visible; a month and twenty-seven days more before 'the
earth was dry.' The frequent recurrence of the sacred numbers, seven
and ten, is noticeable. The length of time required for the restorative
process witnesses to the magnitude of the catastrophe, impresses the
imagination, and suggests the majestic slowness of the divine working,
and how He uses natural processes for His purposes of moral government,
and rules the wildest outbursts of physical agents. The Lord as king
'sitteth upon the flood,' and opens or seals the fountains of the great
deep as He will. Scripture does not tell of the links between the First
Cause and the physical effect. It brings the latter close up to the
former. The last link touches the fixed staple, and all between may be
ignored.
But the patient expectance of Noah comes out strongly in the story, as
well as the gradualness of God's working. Not till 'forty days'--a
round number--after the land appeared, did He do anything. He waited
quietly till the path was plain. Eager impatience does not become those
who trust in God. It is not said that the raven was sent out to see if
the waters were abated. No purpose is named, nor is it said that it
returned at all. 'To and fro' may mean over the waste of waters, not
back and forward to and from the ark. The raven, from its blackness,
its habit of feeding on carrion, its fierceness, was a bird of
ill-omen, and sending it forth has a grim suggestion that it would find
food enough, and 'rest for the sole of its foot,' among the swollen
corpses floating on the dark waters. The dove, on the other hand, is
the emblem of gentleness, purity, and tenderness. She went forth, the
very embodiment of meek hope that wings its way over dark and desolate
scenes of calamity and judgment, and, though disappointed at first,
patiently waits till the waters sink further, discerns the earliest
signs of their drying up, and comes back to the sender with a report
which is a prophecy: 'Your peace shall return to you again.' Happy they
who send forth, not the raven, but the dove, from their patient hearts.
Their gentle wishes come back with confirmation of their hopes, 'as
doves to their windows.'
3. But Noah did not leave the ark, though 'the earth was dry.' God had
'shut him in,' and it must be God who brings him out. We have to take
heed of precipitate departure from the place where He has fixed us.
Like Israel in the desert, it must be 'at the commandment of the Lord'
that we pitch the camp, and at the commandment of the Lord that we
journey. Till He speaks we must remain, and as soon as He speaks we
must remove. 'God spake unto Noah, saying, Go forth ... and Noah went
forth.' Thus prompt must be our obedience. A sacrifice of gratitude is
the fit close of each epoch in our lives, and the fit beginning of each
new one. Before he thought of anything else, Noah built his altar. All
our deeds should be set in a golden ring of thankfulness. So the past
is hallowed, and the future secure of God's protection. It is no
unworthy conception of God which underlies the strongly human
expression that he 'smelled the sweet savour.' He delights in our
offerings, and our trustful, grateful love is 'an odour of a sweet
smell, a sacrifice acceptable' to Him. The pledge that He will not any
more curse the ground for man's sake is occasioned by the sacrifice,
but is grounded on what seems, at first sight, a reason for the very
opposite conclusion. Man's evil heart the reason for God's forbearance?
Yes, because it is _'evil from his youth_.' He deals with men as
knowing our frame, the corruption of our nature, and the need that the
tree should be made good before it can bring forth good fruit.
Therefore He will not smite, but rather seek to draw to repentance by
His goodness, and by the faithful continuance of His beneficence in the
steadfast covenant of revolving seasons, 'filling our hearts with food
and gladness.'