But it is here that I may pause for a moment, to notice the dispensational character of these days of Noah.
The earth, as the scene of God’s delight, and of His people’s citizenship, had been lost by the apostasy of Adam; and the hopes and inheritance of the saints, all through the days before the flood, were heavenly--the Lord thereby disclosing, though faintly, certain portions of the great secrets of His own bosom--the secrets of the good pleasure purposed in Himself ere worlds were, that heaven, as well as earth, should be connected with the destinies of man. The heavens were opened to man, when Adam, the man of the earth, failed. Gen. v. 24.
That was so. But earth was not shut because heaven was thus opened. The divine counsel ran otherwise. It was this--that God would "gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth." And the heavenly calling having been already revealed in the story of the saints before the flood, the due season had now come for the revelation of God’s great purpose concerning the earth, and to make it known that He had not given it up, because, in His dispensational ways, He had taken up the heavens.
As in Rev. iv. When the heavenly saints, "the fulness of the Gentiles," the mystic elders and living creatures, are seated in their heavenly places, the thoughts of Him who sat on the throne there return to the earth. The rainbow is _at once_ seen around the throne--the witness of this, that the covenant which gives security _to the earth_ was about to be the spring of action in heaven. And so now in these days of Noah. When the heavenly family had ended their course, and Enoch was translated, the Lord’s thoughts returned to the earth, and that, I may say, _at once_; for the next thing of character in the progress of the hand, or the Spirit of God, is the prophecy of Lamech, pledging God and His mercies to the earth again, and introducing Noah--"This same [Noah] shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed."
This is all simple--scarcely capable of being misunderstood. The prophecy of Lamech, which introduces it, tells us what we are to expect and find in the mystery of Noah. "The key of the parable lies at the door." The recovery of the earth, the return of God’s rest and delight in it, all this will be made good in the coming times of the true Noah, in whom, and in whom alone, all the promises of God are yea and amen.