THOUGHTS ON GENESIS.-THE ARK.

(GEN. vii.)

Or what was the Ark a type? It was evidently a type of Christ, and a more perfect one than would at first sight appear. Noah and his family alone, out of all the people of the earth, were admitted, without reference to any amongst them being unconverted; but, as just this one family (which should be taken as a whole) were saved from temporal destruction by means of the Ark, so the one family of God are saved eternally in and through Christ Jesus. Likewise the few amongst the animals who were taken into the Ark, "to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth," appear to be a type of the godly seed which are preserved and kept alive in Christ. In 1 Peter iii. 20, the long-suffering of God is represented as "waiting in the days of Noah, while the Ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water." There we have shadowed forth the few who are saved spiritually. We may fairly understand the first part of the verse to mean that God waited until the set time according to His purpose was come for the Ark being prepared, just as it is said in the fulness of time Christ came-that is, the time purposed and agreed upon in the covenant between the Father and the Son; and until such time, according to our ideas, God might be said to wait.

In Hebrews xi. 7, it is said, "By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an Ark to the saving of his house." Noah had faith that he should be saved by the Ark; so that it is by faith in Christ, the true Ark, that we become, like Noah, heirs of the righteousness which is by faith.

"And the Lord shut him in" (v. 16). Our eternal security is provided for by God Himself, and nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, "Who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation, ready to be revealed in the last time "(1 Peter i. 5). "He will keep the feet of His saints, and the wicked shall be silent in darkness; for by strength shall no man prevail" (1 Sam. ii. 9). ·

"God remembered Noah" (Gen. viii. 1). Not that God ever forgot Noah, for "the righteous shall be in everlasting remembrance;" but He remembered His covenant, as He had told him: "With thee will I establish my covenant," that covenant of grace which He had entered into with Christ on behalf of His people, and in which Noah was included; for "Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord." When God pours out the vials of His wrath upon the nations of the earth, He remembers His own dear people, and either mitigates the calamities to them, enabling them by His grace to bear up under them, or He removes them out of the troubles, housing them safely in His home above. "The name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righteous runneth into it, and is safe (Prov. xviii. 10). "For the Lord will not forsake His people for His great name's sake; because it hath pleased the Lord to make you His people" (1 Sam. xii. 22). "My covenant will I not break, nor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips" (Psalm lxxxix. 34). He remembered us in our low estate, for His mercy endureth for ever." Yea, and He remembers us still, through all the devious windings of this present life, and will at last bring us to His heavenly kingdom. True, He knows we are often cowards at suffering; but have we not the example of our blessed Saviour, who proved the weakness of the flesh by the prayer, "Let this cup pass from me," and who excused the weakness of

His disciples by averring that "the spirit is willing, though the flesh is weak"? Thus the Lord (as in Noah's case) continually remembers His people for their good and His glory.

W.

GOOD WORKS.

If not exempted from trouble in times of general calamity, the Lord's people have a refuge in God; they have a Hiding-place, and a good home to look forward to when this poor life is ended; and this marks the difference between the saint and the sinner-between him that serveth God and him that serveth Him not. God has His appointed time and way to gather His wheat into the garner, and to burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire; and times of calamity, such as war, fire, and pestilence, accomplish His purpose in this matter.

Men may deny the doctrine of Divine Sovereignty in salvation, but they cannot controvert it in Providential dealing. They may kick against the goads, but that is all they can do, for we may bring up the old challenge -Who hath resisted His will ?-fearlessly, as no answer can ever be given to that question. God in Providence is more than a match for men and devils. Satan had his commission from God to afflict Job, but he could go no further than God permitted. Divine Sovereignty marked the boundary line. "Behold, he is in thine hand; but save his life."

Satan is in subjection to Divine Sovereignty, and what wonder he should hate it? what wonder he should influence the minds of the unregenerate against it? What wonder that he should inject opposing thoughts in the bosom of the elect, who are saved by the power at which many of them, set on by Satan, ignorantly cavil? My reader, has God broken the neck of your pride, and brought you down to see and admire His sovereign will? "Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of God," said our Lord. It is no small mercy, in the present day of rebellion with, and defection from, God's blessed truth, to be made honest and kept faithful to the light we have received. The doctrine of Divine Sovereignty has hosts of enemies and but few friends in every age. It strikes at the root of creature power and human pride. It lays man as a sinful, helpless being before his Maker and his Judge. To be saved in God's way, and by an act of sovereign grace, without the assistance or co-operation of the creature. The natural man abhors and despises, till God makes a place in his heart to receive and welcome God's way of salvation; but a feeling sense of sin and helplessness will make a man humble and grateful for a remedy that is all of grace from first to last.

An old lady once said to John Newton, of gracious memory, "Sir, I do not like your high doctrine." "I am quite sure of it, madam," said the divine, "you have not been brought low enough." This tells the whole story of all the enmity against the doctrines of grace. Let a man be brought low by the Holy Ghost's teaching, and then he will value God's salvation and God's doctrines. With or without creeds or terms, he will bow to God's sovereignty; and, when the sinner is made to say with Job, "Behold, I am vile," the time is not far off when he will humbly and gratefully exclaim, "I know that Thou canst do everything."

A late event, that high and low, rich and poor, have taken an all

absorbing interest in-the illness of the Heir to the Throne-has wonderfully displayed God's Sovereignty. Through this anticipated calamity, the hearts of the British nation have been bowed down, as one man, to feel that life and death are in the Lord's hands; and the turn the complaint took, when the nation turned to God as the only and all-sufficient Physician to meet so hopeless a case, has a voice of warning to the infidel, who says, "There is no God;" and a voice of encouragement to praying souls, who have cried to God to spare a guilty land the woe pronounced in Eccles. x. 16. Spare the father to his young family, spare the son to a widowed mother, and restore to the nation its hopes for future years!

This country has proved, in past days, the blessing of national prayer; and, when Divine Sovereignty has been acknowledged, Divine judgments have been withdrawn. The following extract from a letter of J. C. Philpott's, written when the cholera visited this country in 1849, is in point: "I hope the Lord may mercifully preserve us from that dreadful disease, which has already carried off so many thousands in other places. I think our Government very culpable in not having a day of national humiliation. Ahab and the city of Nineveh are quite Scriptural precedents; as we are afflicted naturally and nationally, why should we not repent nationally?"

"Kiss the Son, lest He be angry, and ye perish from the way, when His wrath is kindled but a little." This is God's counsel to sinners, and He makes them "willing in the day of His power" to submit to His Sovereignty. Such our Lord described in His day thus: "Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken :"-convinced, humbled, subdued, and taught to cry for mercy at the feet of a dear Redeemer-" but upon whomsoever the stone shall fall,"-in all the weight of Sovereign and Omnipotent wrath—"it will grind him to powder."

L.

THOUGHTS ON JOHN I.

SOME months ago, as a sequel to, and in connexion with, "Thoughts on Gensis i.," it was proposed to carry out a few further thoughts in the same strain-viz., the spiritual lessons to be drawn from Gen. i. and John i., as compared with each other.

Both these portions of God's Word commence with the same three words, "In the beginning"-the first telling of the creation of matter, rational and irrational, which had a beginning; the second referring to Him who absolutely had no beginning, for of Him the Holy Ghost testifies in Prov. viii.: "The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way (eternal as Jehovah Himself), before His works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water;" and so on to the end of ver. 29. Hence, we see that the word beginning, in John i., has a relative and limited meaning, and therefore cannot be understood in its fullest and most absolute sense. There is one other "beginning" spoken of by our Lord, at which we must just glance before passing on. In John viii. 44, we find these words: "Ye are of your father the devil. . . . . . He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth." Now, the words abode not necessarily imply a prior existence, when he was in the truth; thus

clearly proving that here, too, the word "beginning" must be taken in a relative, and not absolute sense.

It is very interesting to see, in this opening chapter of St. John's Gospel, how the first thoughts that meet us form a cheering contrast to those in Gen. i. Here we have Life and Light-essential and communicatingthere we read of an "earth without form, and void, and darkness upon the face of the deep "-no life, and no light!

In Genesis we have, further, the greater light and the lesser light; in John i. 6-8, we also read of two lights-of the lesser light, that he was not that light (though of him it is elsewhere stated that he was a burning and a shining light), but was sent to bear witness of that light, while of the greater light the Holy Ghost, speaking by the same apostle in his first epistle, bears this testimony: "God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all" (John i. 5).

The other remarkable similarity we must further notice between these two opening chapters; in both we have the Triune Jehovah clearly manifested. In Genesis, as was stated in our January paper, the Hebrew word which we translate "God" in ver. 1, being a plural noun, is still more distinctly rendered in ver. 26 by the plural pronoun us. So here, in John i. 33, we read, "He that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit, descending, and resting upon Him, the same is He which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost. And I saw, and bare record that this is the Son of God."

But one thought more, and we have done.-In Gen. i. we find that the grand effect and result of light and heat was productiveness. After the sun was created we read, "The earth brought forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit;" and so was it with the True Light which lighteth every man which cometh into the world—or, as it is more correctly rendered, which, coming into the world, lighteth every man. See how the kingdom of grace grew and increased, even as the kingdom of nature in creation story. No sooner is the Sun of Righteousness heralded by the glorious proclamation of His forerunner, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of the world," than two of John's disciples followed Him. They came and saw where He dwelt, and abode with Him that day. One of the two findeth his own brother Simon, and saith unto him, "We have found the Messiah." The day following, Jesus findeth Philip, and saith unto him, "Follow me." Philip findeth Nathanael, and saith unto him, "We have found Him of whom Moses in the law and the prophets did testify, Jesus of Nazareth." Thus we see that, within the limits of one chapter, the True Vine had already produced many a rich cluster, and more and more sons were born into the family of the Second Adam, till at last we read of a great multitude whom no man could number. "Another parable put Jesus forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: which is indeed the smallest of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a great tree." M. C. C.

A WORD IN SEASON.-"Cheer up! Whatever comes in this world must, at the longest, be very short; and think what comes after!"-The Lord alone knows how timely was this remark from one of His little ones. It was attended with a power and a preciousness indescribable.

D.

MEDITATIONS BY THE LATE RUTH BRYAN.

January 6, 1852. MR. SEARS, this morning, spoke of Christ as the "good Land." It has been glowing to my soul to think of Him as the "joined One." "Thy land shall be married." Thus, our land is joined to this good Land in eternal wedlock. All the pains and penalties of our mortgaged estate He took upon Himself by virtue of marriage union, and all His wondrous benefits He confers upon us by the law of the same union, sweet and clear. This is joining indeed. All the honours of Jehovah's holiness He maintains gloriously. All the disgrace of our unholiness He bears lovingly. He is joined to both, and both are joined in Him (John xvii. 21). With Him is the covenant of life and peace, because in Him judgment was laid to the line for our sins, and righteousness to the plummet for our justification. The judgment He has borne, and "made an end of the sin; the righteousness He has brought in, first into His Father's presence for His approval, and then into His Church for her covering; and now this "joined One can take away our vile covenant with death and hell, our refuge of lies, our short bed and narrow covering, and all other spiritual miseries of our fallen condition; so that we no longer inherit death and barren land, but have the rich flowing of milk and honey to our souls' content. To the first Adam it was said, "In sorrow shalt thou eat of it (the fruit of the ground) all the days of thy life." In him we all inherit sorrow and dissatisfaction, but when our old man comes to crucifixion, and the days of the second Adam begin in our souls' experience, His reign is righteousness and peace; "in His days shall the righteous flourish;" in Him we find bread without scarceness; in Him we "eat in plenty, and are satisfied, and praise the name of our God, who hath dealt wondrously with us.'

What a mercy the fallen Adam was not permitted to eat of the Tree of Life, and so he and we "live for ever" in the fallen image, for, indeed, “I would not live always," subject to the felt and hated workings of indwelling sin; I loathe it, I loathe it. But at death the saints do lose the image of the earthy, and at the resurrection will take their bodies in the image of the heavenly Man, who is the Lord from heaven, and in whom their nature is now before the throne in that glory-likeness, to which they shall each be conformed, and never lose. This is a great mystery; but faith as certainly expects it, as sense realizes that I now write these lines with these mortal fingers; "for He shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, by the effectual working whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself." And then shall I be satisfied when I awake with Thy likeness. We shall cast the leaves of this withering mortality, but the holy seed (Isa. vi. 13) will still be our substance, and because of that undying seed (1 Peter i. 33) we shall be clothed with fresh greenness at the morning of the resurrection, to fade no more for ever.

Proud man, by nature, whom the Spirit alone can humble: but the