THE KING’S BUSINESS
601
He would destroy the earth. But He gave them one hundred and twenty long years’ grace—one hundred and twenty long years to repent; and if they had repented like Nineveh, God might have spared the Old World, and might have spa'red those antediluvians. But I can imagine they talked very much as men talk now, and when Noah brought them that message they mocked him; they laughed at the idea; they scoffed at the idea. “God going to destroy this world! You don’t suppose we are fools enough to believe that, do you ? God going to destroy His own world! God going against the law of nature!. Why it is against our reason! It is against our intellect! We don’t see any reason for it. God going to destroy the world? Away with such a God as that! We won’t have anything to do with a God of judgment—a God who is going to judge this world on account of sin.” Then there was another class of people, men that were atheists, that took the ground that the world came by chance, that there was no God, and that Noah was a fanatic. Some of them, doubtless, went so far as to- think he was out of his mind. If they had had insane hospitals in those days, they would have tried to get him into one of them. “Poor, deceived, deluded man! God going to destroy the world! What madness! God going to drown all in it—our great men, our mighty men, our kings, our princes, our rulers, our governors and our wise men! Away with such a doctrine! We don’t believe it!” ONE MAN’S COURAGE Noah and his family stood alone on that dark day. There was not a man to stand with him, and God told him to build an ark, and the God of heaven was the archi tect. He told him just how to build it. and I will venture to say that every dollar’s worth of material that went into that ark came out of Noah’s property. He could not get a man to help him. When you built this church you got every man you could to help you build it. But there was not a man that would help Noah to build that ark. He had to pay the expenses
the God that created us, teach us. Now, the text I want to call your atten tion to is in the seventh chapter of Gene sis, the first verse. It is a truth that a great many of you, perhaps, don’t believe. A great many people have the idea that no such thing ever took place. But if you make that prayer, we will find out- “If it be true, Lord, show it to me. Reveal it to me.” “And the Lord said unto Noah: Come thou and all thy house into the ark.” That word “come” occurs all through the Bible. It begins in the first book of the Bible and runs clear through Revelation. The prophets took it up and their cry was, ’‘Come, come.”~ When that blessed Master came He took up that same cry, “Come unto Me all ye that labor.” When the Apostles com menced to work after Christ left the earth, they kept ringing out that word “Come.” We find it in the last chapter of Revelation. GOD CALLING NOAH The first time it occurs in the Bible is in this text I have tonight. God Almighty was the preacher, and He was calling Noah in out of the coming storm, out of the coming judgment that was coming upon the earth. One hundred and twenty—years before that, Noah had received the most awful communication that ever came from heaven to earth. God told him that He was going to destroy the earth on account of sin. Sin sprang into this world full grown. The first man born of woman was a murderer. I suppose that we, at this age, know nothing about the sins of the antediluvians. Men had time then to carry out their plans, and their iniquities, and their sins. They lived a thousand years, nearly. I don’t know what would happen now if men should live so long in sin. It says in the sixth chapter'of Gene sis and the fifth verse, “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil con tinually.” The wickedness of the earth had come up to God. God purposed that
Made with FlippingBook HTML5