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SERMON XI.

NOAH'S FAITH.

HEBREWS Xi. 7.

"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; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith."

You will perceive that I have taken this text because the first lesson of this Sunday morning is upon the conclusion of the history of Noah -how the whole human race began anew, as it were, in his family. I shall first make a few, I hope not unprofitable, remarks upon the state of mankind before the flood, and then show how Noah was saved, as we are, by faith.

Now, first of all, let us consider the state of mankind before the flood.

In the end of the third chapter of Genesis, we read of God driving Adam out of Paradise, and condemning him to live a life of labour and sorrow instead of the happy life he had hitherto lived. We read also of another very remarkable thing, which was that God did not, as we should have expected, at once destroy Paradise, and uproot the tree of life, but He put at

the entrance of the garden " Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.”

In the fourth chapter we have the account of the family of Adam and Eve-how that this very first family had the stain of murder upon it. Think of this, my friends: the first man and first woman, who had been both created without sin, allowed sin to enter into their souls, and in this state of sin they begat children inheriting their corruption, and the eldest of these children, the first man ever born of woman, commits murder-kills his brother through envy.

We learn from this that the corruption of human nature is not the gradual slow growth of many centuries, but a poison that at once wholly corrupted the soul of man. The first family that ever existed was stained with the foulest crime that can be committed.

But we must pass on. The next chapter is one that I suppose most people seldom read. It is a chapter full of names of certain patriarchs who were born, lived so many years

died at such an age. recorded about these and their ages, and Now why were the

begat such a son, and There are two things patriarchs, their names there the account ends. names of these persons recorded? Because they were all the forefathers of Jesus Christ. It was God's will that we should have the

line of His Son, the Second Adam, traced in the Scriptures from the first Adam down through Noah to Abraham, from Abraham to David, and from David to Joseph and Mary, so that we might be certified that Christ is the seed of the woman, the seed of Abraham, and the seed of David.

But, besides the names, we have the ages of these patriarchs recorded; and from this we learn that the life of man then was prolonged to above nine hundred years.

We now come to the sixth chapter. In it we read that God looked down from heaven, and saw that the wickedness of man was great, -"the earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence." God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of his heart was only evil continually-and God repented that He had made such a race.

From the language of this chapter, it is certain that the wickedness of man was greater than it has ever been since. And I think that it was natural, if I may so say, that men should then be so much more wicked than ever they have been since, if we take into account the lengths of men's lives at that time. Consider what a degree of wickedness a man will reach now in his threescore years and ten, and think how this would be increased and multiplied if the same man had eight or nine

hundred years to grow wicked in. A man then three or four hundred years old would have all the fire of youth, and all the vigour and determination of middle life, united with the wisdom and experience of extreme age, Supposing, then, that a man were to go on serving the devil and growing in iniquity for six or seven hundred years, as was then possible, what a demon would he become!

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Now, let us look at the opportunities that men had then of knowing God-what witness to Himself God had left among them. I mentioned to you just now that the average age of man at that time was nine hundred years, and the flood took place sixteen hundred years after Adam was created; but when God looked down and saw all this wickedness it was more-perhaps much more than one hundred before the years flood, so that, in point of fact, every old manindeed, almost every man of middleage-living at that time, could have seen the first father of mankind. That is, they must have seen him who was such a monument of God's displeasure, inasmuch as he had lost Paradise because of his one sin. And besides this, we never read of Paradise being destroyed; we never read of the cherubim being removed from its gates; so that, in all probability, there remained, for some generations, in the centre of the inhabited world this fair garden, with the Tree of Life towering over the other

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trees in the midst of it, but the gates that led to it closed, and the cherubim, with the fiery sword, guarding them-so that men might, perhaps, climb to the neighbouring heights and see Paradise and the life-giving Tree which they had lost through sin. And yet, notwithstanding this, wickedness increased, so that God repented that He had made man. See, then, what witnesses these sinners before the deluge had, to keep before them the judgments of God. There was the first man amongst them to tell them with his own lips the story of his original righteousness and of his fearful fall through the craft of his enemy, and there was the sight of Paradise with its angel-guarded gates to confirm his story.

But in addition to this, we know of another witness whom God raised up. This was the patriarch and prophet Enoch. From what we read of him in the epistle to the Hebrews, his faith and holiness presented such a contrast to the general wickedness, that God thought him too good for such a world, and He took him away. The apostle Paul says of him, "By faith Enoch was translated, that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God."

Here, then, was a man evidently raised up to be a wonderful example of faith in God; but besides all this, we have the testimony of another

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