CHAPTER VI
The
Deluge
Gen. 6, 7, 8
Agnes M. Lawson
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to Bible Study
The Colorado College of Divine
Science
Denver, 1920.
The
Elohistic and Jehovistic accounts of
creation are distinct documents, but some
enterprising editor has so woven together
the two accounts of the Deluge that to
the lay mind they read as one narrative.
Should the reader desire to follow this
more closely than is possible in this
condensed course, he is referred to Lyman
Abbott’s “Life and Literature
of the Ancient Hebrews.” He will
find here in detail the Elohistic and
Jehovistic accounts, and the original
Assyrian Account, from which both were
evolved.
The Hebrew
saw in all natural phenomena the approval
and disapproval of God, whose reward and
punishment of his children were
unfailing. We are too young yet in
spiritual discernment to know how far the
thoughts in the race mind affect the
natural elements. That they do is the
belief of many spiritual students. Let us
be careful, however, not to branch out
into theories that we are unable to
prove. Let us keep our feet on terra
firma, even though we walk through the
sky. Washington Gladden has left us the
legacy of a beautiful idea in his sermon,
“Where Does the Sky Begin?”
It begins at the surface of the earth. We
walk in the sky all of the time. Were we
merely earth creatures like the moles we
should have to burrow in the ground. We
are creatures of the sky, air and
heavens, and we walk through the sky
always.
“The
sons of God saw the daughters of men that
they were fair; and they took them wives
of all that they chose.” Only he
who can unite the spiritual and the
natural is on safe ground. This is merely
a plea that as we study this great Book,
we be careful that we read the truth out
of it, instead of reading our own
preconceived ideas into it.
The Deluge
story is beautiful in its spiritual
significance. “My Spirit shall not
always strive with man, for that he is
flesh; yet his days shall be an hundred
and twenty years.” God will never
cease to strive with us until we cease to
resist the spiritual guidance, and cease
to identify ourselves with the flesh man.
Our text-book tells us, “Man is
either drawn or driven by Love to his
final destiny.” God in our final
destiny “rests” in man, His
finished creation.
If
one’s life be true as was that of
Moses, at an hundred and twenty years,
the natural vigor should not be abated.
Spiritual man knows no age, for he
transcends human limitations, he belongs
to another order. There must, however, be
a distinction made between natural man,
and mortal man. Mortal man is like Satan,
he comes from nowhere and to nowhere is
he doomed to return. He is a false
concept, and all false concepts die when
the true are born. Natural man is
legitimate, he is the forerunner of
spiritual man.
“But
Noah (rest) found grace in the eyes of
the Lord. Noah was a just man and perfect
in his generations and Noah walked with
God.” If we do not perfectly
fulfill our natural life we cannot come
into the life of the Spirit. Natural life
is the life of “generations.”
It is the chaste, normal expression of
all of our natural life in all true
functioning. There must be no
perversions, no sense of repression.
There is never a sense of repression to a
perfectly directed life, hence the
spiritual law fulfills the moral law. The
Botanist tells us that every successive
stage of the plant life is the transmuted
lower one. The blade is the transmuted
root, the stalk and leaf the transformed
blades, the leaf is lost in the blossom,
the blossom is found again in the fruit,
while all are culminated in the seed. If
at any stage it becomes defective then
progress ceases. To be perfect in our
generations is to have in ourselves the
power to be transmuted into the life of
regeneration.
Everything
that hath the breath of life from
“under heaven” will always be
destroyed. It is impossible to save it,
it is eternally doomed to destruction.
Only that into which God breathes the
breath of His own life can come into the
ark of safety, for it is all that
has life.
The covenant
is established with the one who is true,
he alone will find “rest” in
God. Forty is the number four multiplied
by ten. The Hebrews wrote under a system
of numerical symbolism, and when they
desired to emphasize a truth they added
another cipher. One is unity, totality;
two is duality, complements; three is the
trinity, continuity; four is perfection,
of time or condition; five is law,
orderly sequence; six is finished, the
way a thing is; seven is completion.
“Forty
days and forty nights” used in this
sense means the full time until the
destruction is complete and all that is
untrue and unreal is destroyed in the
downpour of the divine perfection.
Noah’s six hundred years is another
instance of numerical symbolism. It is
doubly emphasized, for did not Jehovah
make a covenant with Noah, something that
He never could do with Adam? Noah’s
“six hundred years” means
that he had come into another cycle than
that occupied by Adam.
“And
God made a wind to pass over the earth
and the waters assuaged.” The wind
and spirit are the same in Hebrew. A new
cycle is commenced, a higher one, the
earth is to be reinhabited by
Noah’s descendants. The beauty of
the whole allegory is the immunity of the
ark to which one may always flee and find
safety, and the Bow of Promise, the token
of the covenant between God and man. Its
beauty transcends any earthly beauty and
it promises us the beauty of a kingdom of
which this earth is but an imperfect
reflection. It is the symbol of infinity
for we never reach the rainbow’s
end; like the ideal it recedes and
recedes, luring us onward and upward into
that world that hath “no need of
the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in
it; for the glory of the Lord did lighten
it, and the Lamb is the light
thereof.”
* * * * *
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