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Let us note the way that Scripture leads us to conclude that Noah was a type of Christ
as "The second Man and the last Adam".
Jehovah, being the God of the age, His covenant is called the age covenant (A.V.
everlasting covenant Gen. 9: 16):
"While the earth remaineth (or while all the days of the earth continue), seed time and
harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease"
(Gen. 8: 22).
Day after day since this promise was made, the Lord has looked down upon man
whose heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, and has never again
interfered with the universal ordinances here specified. Famine and other judgments
there may have been in places, but never universally, like the Flood. The Lord, while on
earth, drew attention to the fact that the Father "maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on
the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust" (Matt. 5: 45). The Apostle Paul
declared that God, while suffering all nations in time past to walk in their own ways, yet
"left not Himself without witness, in that He did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and
fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness" (Acts 14: 16, 17).
The Lord appeals to the unchanging continuance of the ordinance of day and night to
indicate the like character of His covenant with Israel:
"Thus saith the Lord, which giveth the sun for a light by day and the ordinances of the
moon and of the stars for a light by night . . . . . If those ordinances depart from before
Me . . . . . then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before Me all the
days" (Jer. 31: 35, 36).
It is useless for those who claim to be `spiritual' Israel, and so make the promises of
God of none effect, to expect us to believe them when they confess that `they really
believe that all Scripture is given by inspiration of God'.
The A.V. and the R.V., by using here the words `for ever', instead of `all the days',
commit the Lord to perpetuate Israel as a nation throughout eternity, and also an eternal
perpetuation of the ordinances of the sun and moon. Neither of these propositions can be
established by Scripture, and there are some passages which speak of the cessation of the
ordinances of the sun, moon and stars; therefore the earnest student will be careful not to
go beyond what is written. Paul, as we have seen (Acts 14: 15-17), speaks of these
things as `a witness'. Rom. 1: 19, 20 teaches us that Gentiles, by the `things that are
made', might have known the `eternal power and deity' of God, and thereby have been
deterred from idolatry. In the same manner these covenanted ordinances are God's
witnesses. The recurring seed-time and harvest are a standing witness to the whole race,
apart from the written revelation. How often the present life with its opportunities is
likened to a seed-time, and how many are the warnings and the encouragements in view
of the harvest at the end of the age! The day, too, when man may work, the night that
cometh when man's work is done; the daily miracle of sleeping and awaking is a
foreshadowing of that sleep of death and that morning of resurrection which is so
prominent in the N.T. Scriptures. All these themes the reader can pursue with profit; we