Genesis 8 shows God’s remembrance of Noah and every living thing. Here it would not have served His purpose to say, “Jehovah remembered every living thing,” because every living thing was not in moral relationship with God. Noah was undoubtedly; but it is not always, nor here, the aim to draw attention to what was special.
In due time the ark rests upon Ararat, and then follows the strikingly beautiful incident of the raven and the dove, which has been often before us, and from which therefore we may pass on. Afterward God tells Noah to come forth – he and all the other creatures.
“And Noah,” it is written in verse 20, “builded an altar.” Unto whom? Unto God? Most appropriately it is to Jehovah now. Without loss, these two things could not be transposed. He took then, it is said, “of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl.” Yes, Jehovah is in question. It is the relationship of Noah which appears here. It is the special place in which he stood that was witnessed by the sacrifice thereon offered. And there Jehovah, accepting the sweet savor, declares that He “will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake. For the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”
Here again how observable is the transparent and self-consistent truth of scripture. The statement before us may look at first unaccountable; but when carefully weighed and reflected on, the propriety of it becomes manifest. That man’s being evil was a ground for sending the flood we can all see; but what depth of grace in the declaration that God knew perfectly the ruined condition of man at the very time when He pledges His word that there shall come no more flood on the earth! This is brought before us here.
Here then we enter on an entirely new state of things, and a truth of capital importance for everybody to consider who has not already made it his own. What was the ground of God’s delays in the previous time? Absence of evil in earth; innocence in man; it was a sinless, unfallen world.
What is the ground of God’s dealings now? Man is fallen, and the creature made subject to vanity. All the delays of God now proceed on the fact that the first man is in sin. Leave out the fall; fail to keep it before you and test all with that in mind, and you will be wrong about every result. Next to Christ Himself, and what we have by and in Him, there is nothing of greater importance than the confession of the truth, both that God created, and that His creation is in ruins. Your judgment alike of God and man will be falsified; your estimate of the past and your expectations of the future will all be vain, unless you steadily remember that God now in all His dealings with man acts on the solemn fact of sin – original and universal sin.
Will it be so always? By no means. There is a day coming when the ground of God’s action will be neither innocence nor sin, but righteousness. But for that day we must wait, the day of eternity – of “the new heavens and the new earth.” It is a real joy to know that it is coming; but until that day God always has before Him, as the theater and material where He acts, a world ruined – ruined by sinful man.
Thanks be to God, One has come who is before Him in unfailing sweet savor, so that if sin be in the background, there cannot but be also what He introduces of His own free grace. If His servant bids others behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world, how much more does God Himself behold Christ and His sacrifice! Need it be said that as far as its efficacy is concerned, and God’s delight in it, He does not wait for the new heavens and the new earth, either to enjoy it Himself or make known its value to us? In short, Christ has intervened, and this most weighty consequence is connected with it – that, although everything manifests evil and ruin increasingly, God has triumphed in grace and in faith after the fall and before “the new heavens and the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.” God, having introduced His own Son, has won the victory, the fruits of which He gives to us by faith before our possession is displayed by-and-by.
Let it suffice to refer to the great principle, remembering that the theater of the ages or dispensations of God is the world since the flood. It is a mistake to include the world before that event in the time of dispensations. There was no dispensation, properly so called, before it. What dispensation could there be? What does it mean?
When man in Paradise was forbidden to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, he broke the command immediately – as far as appears, the first day. Not that one could say positively that so it was; but certainly it is to be supposed that little time could have passed after receiving the woman, his wife. And the patent fact lies before us, that to join his wife in the sad sin is his first recorded act. What dispensation or age was there here? And what followed after it? There was no longer trial in Paradise, because man was turned out. By what formal test was he proved outside? By none whatever. Man, the race, became simply outcasts morally – nothing else – from that day until after the flood. Not but that God wrought in His grace with individuals. Abel, Enoch, Noah, we have already seen. There was also a wonderful type of deliverance through Christ in the ark – happily so familiar to most.
But it is evident that dispensation, in the true sense of the word, there was none. There was a trial of man in Eden, and he fell immediately: after that there was none whatever in the antediluvian world. The history supposes man thenceforward allowed to act without external law or government to control, though God did not fail to work in His merciful goodness – in His own sovereignty.