021. The Patriarchs Live

The Patriarchs Live

Zec 1:5-6. Your fathers, where are they? and the prophets, do they live for ever? But my words and my statutes, which I commanded my servants the prophets, did they not take hold of your fathers? And they returned and said, Like as the Lord of Hosts thought to do unto us, according to our ways, and according to our doings, so hath he dealt with us.

Reflections upon the shortness of human life, and the uncertainty of sublunary enjoyments, naturally present themselves, in the various changes which we daily observe, and daily feel. But alas, our reflections are too superficial and transitory, to produce habitual superiority to the world, uniform submission to the will of God, and efficacious impressions of eternity. Wasting and decaying every hour, we form and prosecute schemes of futurity, as if “our strength were the strength of stones, and our bones brass.” Reasoning and reflecting as men, we live and act as children; and pursue the bauble of the moment, as if it were “the pearl of great price.” When the drama of human life is ended, and the curtain drops, lo, it has shrunk to a measure so small, and contains events of so little importance, that it is difficult to render a reason why man should have existed at all; and we are constrained to cry out with the Psalmist, “Verily, every man at his best state is altogether vanity; surely every man walketh in a vain show; surely they are disquieted in vain.”[*]Psa 34:6-7 But my text greatly relieves this apparent insignificancy of our fleeting existence in this world, by conveying to us this important idea, that the Divine Providence is carrying on its great and wise designs, by feeble, short-lived and even worthless instruments. And the date of our latter end is wisely and mercifully hid from our eyes; and every man is taught to consider himself, his life, his actions, as of importance, that we may exert ourselves to the last, and “do with our might whatsoever our hands findeth to do.” Though our fathers are no more, and the prophets do not live for ever, yet the words and statutes which God commanded his servants the prophets, “took hold of our fathers, and they returned and said, Like as the Lord of Hosts thought to do unto us, according to our ways, and according to our doings, so hath he dealt with us.” This leads us, in a direct road, to make a just estimate of the lives and actions of other men; and to consider seriously how we ought to order our own conversation, how we ought to spend our own days and years. In the preceding course of these Lectures we endeavored, beginning at Adam, and ending with Abraham, historically to delineate, and practically to improve, the lives of those venerable men, by whom the world was first peopled, instructed, and governed: and who, in their persons, by their actions, or the events which befell them, successively typified, or foretold to their contemporaries, the great Savior and Deliverer of the human race, during a period of more than two thousand years. By entering into the spirit of the prophet Zechariah, in the words now read, we shall be enabled to review that period with profit and delight. And this review shall serve to introduce the history of the other lives, which the sacred volume in succession, presents to our observation, and has sketched for our information and improvement. In Adam, we behold at once our natural first father, and our federal head: from whom, as men, our existence is derived, and by whose conduct our character has been deeply affected, and our state in some respects determined. “Our father Adam, where is he?” he fulfilled his day, he accomplished the purposes of the eternal mind, he then fell asleep, and is now seen no more. But, however remote the date of his formation, and of his death; however distant from us the region in which he lived, however apparently unconnected with us in interest, in fame, or fortune, we are, we know, we feel ourselves deeply involved in what he was, in what he did. In Adam we all died; we all forfeited a natural, and lost a spiritual and divine life and, in Adam, we received the promises which have since been fulfilled, and to him first were opened prospects, which the course of Providence has realized, even the restoration of our fallen nature, by one “greater man,” who has regained for us seats more blissful than those from which by transgression he fell; namely, the “seed of the woman, who has bruised the serpent’s head.” Our first father, where is he? Lost indeed to us, but not to God. All traces of him, excepting those only which perpetuate the memory of his guilt and its woeful consequences, are effaced and forgotten; but his station before God remains unchanged, his importance undiminished. Dead to us, he lives to Him, with whom “a thousand years are as one day, and one day as a thousand years.” Can we meditate upon the first man who was created upon the earth, without rising in our thoughts to Him who created him out of the dust of the ground, and” breathed into his nostrils the breath of life? And who has of one blood formed all nations of men to inhabit upon the face of the whole earth.” Can we think of our father after the flesh; and not connect with him the idea of our Father who is in heaven? Is not the painful recollection of him in whom all died, happily relieved and done away by reflecting on the glorious second Adam, in whom an elect world is made alive? And O, how is the loss of an earthly paradise compensated by the promise of “new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness;” that paradise of God, in the midst of which grows the tree of life, always blossoming, always bearing fruit, and exempted from the dangerous neighborhood of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Our brother Abel, where is he? Cut off in the bloom of life; fallen, fallen by the hand of a brother; but immortal by his faith and piety, qualities not liable to the stroke of death. “By faith he offered to God” an excellent and an acceptable sacrifice. In presenting the firstlings of his flock, he had a respect to the great Lamb of atonement, and thereby, “being dead, he yet speaketh.” Prematurely taken away, but not for a crime; “a victim to malice and envy, he typified Messiah, the Prince, cut off, but not for himself,” crucified and slain in the prime of life, by the impious hands of his nearest kindred. And, living under the influence of the same principle, we too shall become immortal, shall “endure as seeing him, who is invisible, and present our bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is our reasonable service.”[*]Rom 12:1 In the life, and more particularly in the exit of the patriarch Enoch, life and immortality were more clearly brought to light. Hitherto, men had terminated their earthly course by descending into the grave and seeing corruption. But, when we come to inquire concerning Enoch, “where is he?” The Scriptures reply, “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.”[*]Heb 11:5 “He was not, for God took him.” Our thoughts here settle, not on the gloomy mansions of the dead, “the house appointed for all living,” but on the regions of eternal day, irradiated with the glory, and beautified with the presence of God. We rise in faith and hope to that bright world from which Christ descended, and to which, having finished his work, and achieved his victory, he afterwards reascended, leading captivity captive. And all who are partakers of the same precious faith, contemplate with joy that same mansion of everlasting rest, “prepared for them from the foundation of the world,” and “ready to be revealed in the last time,” when the body shall be redeemed from the power of the grave, and the Savior, lifted up on high, shall, draw all men unto him.” In Enoch, “walking with God,” and passing immediately, soul and body, from earth to heaven, the world that then was, saw, in a figure, Him that was to come, whose meat and drink it was to do the will of his heavenly Father, and who has opened a passage, through the very gates of death, into the heavenly world, and that not for himself only, but for all who believe on his name, and who love his appearing. Enoch, our father, where is he? There, O my soul! there, O my Christian friend, where, through the grace that is in Christ Jesus, we have everlasting consolation, in the good hope of arriving also. O death, where is thy sting! O grave, where is thy victory! Thanks be to God, who giveth us the victory, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”[*]1Co 15:55;1Co 15:57

Advancing to the times of Noah, we behold the world first deluged with an over flowing flood of sin, and then with an inundation of waters. The measure of human iniquity full, and the vials of divine wrath filled in order to punish it, up to the brim, and poured out upon an impious generation, to its utter extinction and ruin. Nevertheless, a remnant is saved, and mercy rejoices in the midst of judgment. Animated by the same principle which inspired his venerable ancestors that principle which gave value to Abel’s sacrifice, which strengthened Enoch to walk with God, and through which he was translated without tasting of death, Noah “prepared an ark for the saving of his house.” The history and method of redemption, by the Lord Jesus Christ, are so clearly prefigured in every part of this wonderful event that he who runs may read them. Noah, “just man, and perfect in his generations;” Noah, who “walked with God,” and was “preacher of righteousness;” Noah, who “warned of God of things not seen as yet and moved with fear, prepared an ark for the saving of his house,” is evidently in all these characters and actions, a type of the Holy and Just One, whom the world despised and rejected; a type of “the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, and hath declared him” unto men; a type of the great “teacher sent from God,” to warn a guilty devoted race to flee from the wrath to come, and to conduct them to a place of safety: a type of him, who, chosen of God, and moved by pity and affection, prepared a present refuge, and an everlasting habitation, for perishing sinners. Of Noah, his pious prophetic father, when he imposed his name, exultingly exclaimed, “This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord bath cursed:”[*]Gen 5:29 and, in the blessed Redeemer of mankind, all his pious, believing children, enjoy the prospect of a period, and a world, wherein “there shall be no more curse;” and on whom the eternal Father by the tongue of an angel, imposed the name of Jesus, because he should “save his people from their sins.” Noah, our father, where is he? where is the man who was Enoch’s contemporary, who conversed with the sages of the old world, who saw the globe one vast ocean, whom all the waters of a deluge could not drown, who received a grant of the whole renewed earth for an inheritance? All these successive changes led but to the grave, and we see him no more. “All the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years, and he died.” Let the possessor of a continent think of this, and check his pride. Let florid, vigorous youth, think of three score years and ten. Let him who is rearing a mansion of one thousand feet by five hundred, meditate on one of six by two, and learn to die. The ark which Noah prepared for the saving of his house, where is it? It fulfilled its destination, it escaped the wreck of worlds, it preserved, and rendered up, its precious deposit, then fell into decay. It exists but in description, it has no form but what fancy has bestowed upon it in a picture, or upon a coin. But its fame, its use, its end, its antitype, are immortal. That magnificent vessel, not the contrivance of man, but the appointment of God; constructed according to the pattern, formed and prescribed by infinite wisdom; preserved in the wild uproar of conflicting elements, by the almighty power of God;--resting at length on solid ground, and unloading its precious treasure without the loss of a single life--are so many successive, distinct, pleasing, and instructive views of the plan formed, followed, and, in due time, perfected, of man’s deliverance from sin, and death, and hell, by the Lord Jesus Christ; who thus speaks of his redeemed, and of himself, in his last solemn address to his Heavenly Father, “While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name: those that thou gavest me, I have kept, and none of them is lost;”[*]John 17:12 and in another place, “I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish, neither shall any pluck them out of my hand. My Father which gave them me is greater than all: and none is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand.”[*]John 10:28-29 The emblems of the raven, the dove, the rainbow, the altar, the sacrifice, and others which enter into the history of this patriarch, are beautiful and significant illustrations of the same interesting, all-important subject. And the whole taken together, satisfyingly demonstrate, that if “death reigned from Adam to Noah,” and the “offence abounded,” yet “grace did much more abound;” and that out of the ruins of human apostasy, guilt and misery, the hand of Heaven was gradually rearing that glorious fabric of salvation, which, when completed, an enraptured universe shall contemplate with astonishment and delight. “This is the day which the Lord hath made: this is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.” The sight of the world restored, renewed, and blessed to Noah, the second father of the human race, leads us forward, borne on the wings of promise, to the still more magnificent prospect of the “restitution of all things;” to the day when he who sitteth upon the throne shall say, “Behold I make all things new;” when, according to his word, a new, more splendid, and more durable system of the universe shall arise under the plastic hand of the great Author and Finisher of the Christian faith, from the wreck of worlds consumed by fire; when Jesus shall bring all his ransomed ones to Zion, with “songs and everlasting joy upon their heads; when sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”

Sailing down the current of sacred history, the plains of Mesopotamia and Ur of the Chaldees appear in sight; and we behold an illustrious exile and his family, on their way from their country, kindred, and father’s house, like the first pair expelled from Eden, ----All the world before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.

We behold Abram, at God’s command, going out, “not knowing whither he went;” Abram, the respected father of all them that believe, raised up of Providence, in the same important view, to carry on the same grand design. In the declarations which were made to him, we behold the plan of redemption assuming a clearer and more distinct form; unfolding its nature, and arranging its several parts. The glorious person who was promised to Adam, immediately upon the fall, under the more obscure description of the “seed of the woman,” who should “bruise the head of the serpent,” was now announced to the world, as the “seed of Abram,” in whom “all the families of the earth should be blessed.” And henceforward we have prediction upon prediction, ordinance upon ordinance, promise upon promise, event upon event, leading to, rising above, improving, enlarging upon one another, like the light of the ascending sun, gradually increasing from the early dawn to the perfect day. We observe types, shadows, ceremonies, sacrifices, disappearing by little and little; patriarchs, priests, prophets, lawgivers, and kings, retiring one after another, and giving place to “the Lord, our Judge, our Lawgiver, our King, to save us:” as the twinkling fires of the night hide their diminished heads, and the vapors disperse before the glorious orb of day.

But, Abraham our father, whither is he also gone? Even the faith which surrendered an Isaac at God’s command, and which has forever preserved his name from death, could not rescue his body from the power of the grave. It sleeps and is dissolved in the cave which was purchased from Ephron the Hittite. He had not a principle of life in himself, nor the power of communicating it, to either his natural or spiritual posterity. But the “words and the statutes, which God commanded him and his other servants the prophets, took hold of them,” and continue to lay hold of us. In the midst of all this mortality and change, one thing is immutable and eternal, the word, the purpose, the decree of the Most High. “Heaven and earth may pass away, but it shall not pass away.” Our father Abraham, where is he? Behold him in yonder world of bliss, with “Lazarus in his bosom,” resting from all his own troubles; and cherishing the poor, the outcast, the afflicted, the tormented; enjoying “the end of his faith, the salvation of his soul,” and waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of his body; “beholding him face to face, whom once he beheld afar off, and as in a glass darkly.” Who is this that breaks in upon us at once in meridian glory? What bright day dazzles the wondering eye, preceded by no dawn, succeeded by no evening? It is Melchizedec, that “king of righteousness and peace,” that priest of the most high God, whose generation none can declare, whose nature and person none is able to describe. Is he but as one of the prophets, or is he the Lord of the prophets himself, pronouncing the blessing which he alone can confer; celebrating in an early age, that eucharist, which should be the memorial of his office and glorious achievement, till time expire? In him, whatever he were, a type, or the son of God revealed; a shadow, or the substance; in him we behold the great leading object of Providence disclosed to our view; that priesthood which is unchangeable, that kingdom which shall never be destroyed, that Prince of peace, who has reconciled guilty men unto God, that righteousness through which we have access with humble confidence to the throne of grace. “Abraham rejoiced to see that day.” It strengthened him to wait patiently for the promised seed; it cheered his wanderings from place to place; it fortified his heart to the sacrifice of his Isaac; it laid his hoary head with hope in the dust.

Having from this eminence surveyed the ground through which we have traveled; a delightful landscape, terminating in the distant hills of Eden, and watered by the fair river of Promise, meandering through its whole vast extent--we look forward, in hope and desire, to the happy plains where Isaac pitched his tent, and Jacob fed his flocks; to the nations which Joseph saved by his wisdom, and ruled by his power. And, in our intended progress, Eternal Spirit of Wisdom! vouchsafe thou to be our instructor and our guide: point out to us the objects which deserve our notice: enlighten thou our eyes, guard our hearts, direct the paths of our feet. What we know not, that do thou teach us, what we do know, help us wisely to improve. Following thee, “the crooked shall become straight before us, and the rough places plain. The sun shall not smite us by day, nor the moon by night. We shall go from strength to strength,” after them who “inherit the promises, till every one of us also, in Zion, appeareth before God.” Have you ground of pride and joy, my friends, in the acknowledgment or recollection of your forefathers? Were they wise and good; blessed in themselves, and a blessing to the world? Take care that ye degenerate not from their virtues, that ye dishonor not their name, that ye swerve not from “the good old way” of piety, in which they trode. Is there in the line of your ancestry, any circumstance humiliating and painful? Efface it, annihilate it, sink it, in a new existence, derived from a celestial stock. Change the tainted, corrupted current of an earthly pedigree, for the adopted honors, the gratuitous inheritance, the ennobled spirit of your Heavenly Father’s love. Strive to be the first of your race; and leave to your heirs a possession infinitely better than the demesnes of princes, even the savor of a good name, a pattern worthy of imitation, the remembrance of qualities which are not subject to the stroke of death.

You see, Christians, what is the leading, the commanding object, in the eye of eternal Providence. The salvation of a lost world by Jesus Christ. Adopt the same object, cleave unto it, keep it continually in view. All things else are vain and worthless; for they are passing quickly away. Our interest in, our hold of the world is diminishing every hour. Our consequence, as candidates for immortal bliss, as the heirs of glory, is rising in proportion. When we cease from importance, as the citizens of this world, our real importance begins to be felt and understood. I recommend not sullen distance from your fellow-creatures, nor peevish discontent. Live in the world, associate with mankind, enjoy your portion which God allotteth you. But “use the world so as not to abuse it;” and while you are cumbered about many things, never forget that one thing is needful; and make choice of that “good part which shall not be taken away from you.”

While we speak and hear, we change; and the hand of the executing angel hastens to number us with the dead. We are going to join the venerable men whose memory we revere, whose faith we profess to follow, whose virtues we are bound to copy. Yet a little while, and time shall be no more; and we shall be contemporary with our fathers who, have preceded, and with our children who are to follow us, until the dissolution of this system. We look back to Adam, the father of us all, and we look forward to his youngest son. We look up, and “see heaven opened, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God.” We look around and behold “the nations of men that are saved” bending before the throne. We hear the Savior’s voice, “Here am I, and the children thou hast given me.” We hear the word of the Eternal Father proclaiming aloud; and the myriads of an assembled universe, angels and men, joyfully echo it back, “All is good, yea, very good.” Amen. Hallelujah!