There is no longer need for controversy, even with the most skeptical of the small scientists, as to whether there has been a general flood such as that recorded in Genesis. The history of every ancient nation on the globe goes back (with more or less vagueness and mythology) to it. Plato amongst the Greeks, Ovid amongst the Romans, Berosus amongst the Chaldeans, and numbers of other heathen writers, bear witness of the universal tradition. Its story is inscribed on Apamean medal, Assyrian cuneiform tablet, and South American monument: but that is the smallest part of the external testimony. In any part of the world, from the trans-atlantic prairies to the pinnacles of the Himalayan mountains, if a man stoop down and question the ground under his feet it will tell him the same story of a great general inundation of waters; sea shells and marine fossils being found on the highest hills and indeed everywhere. The remains of tropical animals and plants have been washed up into these temperate climes, mingling with millions of rounded stone, “boulders” manifestly brought down from the frozen north imprisoned in icebergs, coming by reason of some mighty disruption in that ocean of ancient ice, which Nares calls the Paleaocrystine Sea. In the basins of London and Paris great numbers of the bones of tropical animals are found. In Kirkdale Cave, Yorkshire, are the bones of the hyaena, tiger, rhinoceros, tropical animals, mingled with the bones of the wolf, bear, and deer, of northern or perhaps arctic climes. In many places—especially in Britain—are found fossils of monkeys, cocoa nuts and palms lying within a short distance of boulder-stones and drift clays evidently dropped from floating icebergs. What else could have produced all this except the northward wash of a mighty deluge from the great southern ocean main, with the returning wash of the retreating waves?
When the warring and unstable waters retreated, they left behind, in rock and fossil, manifest and substantial witnesses for succeeding ages of what had taken place; so underneath the conflicting and uncertain deluge of the theories of geology are the hard and established facts of geognosy that nobody at this time of day thinks of questioning. Some geologists may give this or that reason (inconsistent, contradictory, or mutually exclusive reasons) for the above facts. But to one who believes the sixth chapter of Genesis the matter is plain enough—that God's word and God's world alike proclaim that there has been a general deluge. It is right to say that many eminent geologists used to believe this: geognosy reveals what is called a diluvial period in all lands.
These universal evidences of the Flood are monuments, revealing as to the past a mighty disturbance of the normal course of nature in order to punish human sin; and declaring, as to the future, that as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man........."When the Son of man shall be revealed,” that is after the church (Enoch) has been translated, “one shall be taken,” (taken away by judgment) “and the other shall be left” (to enjoy, as Noah's kindred did, the blessings of the millennium). He “gathers out of His kingdom all that do offend. . . then shall the righteous shine forth.” The order and manner of the advent of Christ, as Son of man, to do this is altogether different from His coming—quite unseen by the world—for the rapture, on which occasion those who are taken are taken for blessing and not for judgment. He who stood at Pilate's bar at Gabbatha has been appointed by God “to judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom." And so He judges the quick, or living, at His appearing, as thus described, in sudden and destructive advent; contrasting with the solemn judicial procedure of the great white throne which will be at least one thousand years afterward.
Through this fearful tempest of judgment a saved remnant is brought in perfect safety into the new world, and the manner of their deliverance typifies Christ as (1) the ark—the means of their salvation; (2) Noah, the captain of their salvation; (3) the sacrifices; and (4) the food provided for their sustenance.
The ark then represents Christ as the sole and sufficient means of salvation, “the like figure by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Let the reader notice the following points. It was God's arrangement; it was sufficient and perfect, but humble and inadequate to the outward view; it was of wood-humanity—the man Christ Jesus; it was— pitched within—nothing can leak out—and without—nothing of evil or danger can leak into it; it was divinely and perfectly proportioned; it had rooms—varied dispensations, orders and families of salvation but one Christ; it had three floors, that is, there is development in Christ—progress to higher and still higher altitudes. But manifestly all “in Christ” have perfect salvation, that being no matter of degree or attainment; salvation is as absolute, for the feeble coney creeping timorously for refuge on to its lowest deck as for Noah on its topmost floor—no more so and no less. The ark has a window “finished above:” its prospect is heaven, not the floating corruption surrounding it, its “look commercing with the skies.” It is thus we approach God through Christ.
Gen. 7:1616And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the Lord shut him in. (Genesis 7:16) “And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the LORD shut him in.” It is God as Creator, absolute and sovereign who commands the creature to take refuge in Christ; but notice how, directly he crosses the threshold, the name is changed, relationship is established. “Jehovah” shuts him in. When one approaches the Son of God and touches but the hem of His garment, instantly to that one the whole aspect of the universe is altered; above all things the aspect—and even the name—of God is changed; the anger of an offended sovereign is changed into for us the benign care of a Father. Notice also how this verse crushes the preposterous arguments as to there being separate Jehovistic and Elohistic documents. Here the two names occur together (as in some other passages) and with manifest symmetry and design. J. C. B.