There are two leading principles which we find constantly showing themselves in the record of God’s ways and actings toward man.
The first is, that when God sets up any thing on the earth, He commits it to the hands of man in responsibility to maintain for Him.
The second is, that man always fails in the maintenance of this responsibility.
We see these in creation. First of all, when God had finished the work of creation, He placed man, as the center and head of it, in the garden, where he was tested. The result of the trial was, that man listened to the voice of Satan, and forfeited his place with God. He failed, and that by disobedience.
We see the same thing in the history of Noah. After the world had emerged from the flood of judgment, Noah was placed in it to act for God in government. But the next thing we read of is that Noah planted a vineyard, drank of the wine thereof, and was drunk; thus showing his total incapacity to maintain the position in which God had set him.
We see the principle again in the conduct of the children of Israel at mount Sinai. They had heard the voice of Jehovah, and they had just said, “All that the Lord hath spoken we will do”, but before the forty days had elapsed that Moses spent on the mountain with Jehovah, they had made a golden calf, and thus had broken the very first commandment of the law.
Again, when the priesthood was set up, the same thing appears. Before Aaron had time to enter the holiest of all in his garments of glory and beauty, his two sons had offered strange fire before Jehovah.
In short, the whole history of God’s ways and dealings with men presents throughout the same two principles that I have stated — man responsible and man failing in his responsibility.
But there is another general principle very closely connected with this.
When once man has thus failed in his responsibility to God, the thing in which he has failed is not reestablished, but removed by judgment to make room for the introduction of something else.
The examples already given present this principle, as well as the two first named. Adam’s fall in Eden was followed by the sentence of death and expulsion from the garden. In the priesthood, though judgment was not executed at the moment when the failure came in (save on those personally guilty), the system was really ended as a true testimony for God, and so it ever is. The first act of failure puts the stamp of failure upon the whole thing. In the Kings too, we have an example of the same principle. The ten tribes are rent from the hand of Rehoboam on account of the sins of Solomon (1 Kings 11). There is never the reestablishment of that in which man has failed; it is invariably set aside, and that by judgment.
I have mentioned these instances to show that these principles prevail generally throughout the Old Testament. Let us see if they apply with equal force to the present time and to the Church of God.