Sin entering and polluting all, and the pollution being left uncleansed, in Seth God called a people away from the earth to an inheritance in heaven.
Then in Noah the Lord God re-asserted His rights here, and took up the earth as the place where His elect might find a home, and His own presence be known again.
After this Abraham is separated from kindred, and from country, and from father’s house, to be a heavenly stranger on the earth, with his altar and his tent, looking for a city whose builder and maker was God.
Israel, in their day, then take up this mystic tale of the heavens and the earth, and in the land of Canaan become the witness of the scene of God’s sovereignty. The ark passes over the river as "the ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth."
And now the Church is set for the full testimony of heavenly mysteries again; and strangership here is the divine idea, till our being taken to meet the Lord in the air.
This wondrous tale these dispensations of God, like day and night alternate, have thus been telling from the beginning; and still are telling. And millennial days ere long will make these pledges good, and be the glorious substance of these foreshadowings.³
³ Such passages as Eph. i. 10 and Col. i. 20 tell us that both the heavens and the earth are equally the scene of divine purposes. And the great argument in Rom. xi. instructs us about those purposes, and the ways and times of their accomplishment.
Now let me observe, that whenever God arises in this progress of His counsels to _assert title to the earth_, He begins by judging and cleansing it. And this, I may say, _of course_; because, the scene of His purposed glory and presence being corrupted, He must take the offence away, for His presence could not brook defilement. Noah’s lordship of the earth was, accordingly, preceded by the flood carrying away the world of the ungodly. Israel’s inheritance of Canaan under Jehovah, as the God of all the earth, was prepared by the judgment of the Amorites and the sword of Joshua. And the future millennial kingdom, when the earth is to be the place of the glory again, is (as all Scripture tells us) to be ushered in by that great action called "the day of the Lord," with a clearing out of all that offend, and all that do iniquity.