This was exhibited in Abraham. Abraham was the object of the call of God; and accordingly the Canaanites find no rival in him. He does not dispute with them the title or possession of the soil. He finds them, and he leaves them, lords of it. He desires only to pitch his tent and raise his altar on the surface of it for a season; and then, for another season, to have his bones laid in the bowels of it.
So with the Church in this age. She is likewise under the call of God. But her call leaves the Gentiles in power, as it found them. "Let every soul be subject to the higher powers." The saints have only to obey them unreluctantly, or to suffer from them patiently, according as the demand made by them is or is not consistent with their subjection to Christ and the call of God. They cannot strive with the potsherds of the earth. Peter's sword is to be put up, and Pilate is to learn that the servants of Jesus cannot fight. Their warfare is not with flesh and blood. They are defeated the moment they begin it. The call of God has marshalled the hosts of God against principalities and powers on high, and the battle is there. It does not connect us with the earth. Our necessities do, but not our call. We need the fruit of the ground, the toil of the hand, and the skill of the heart, to provide things needful for the body. Our necessities thus connect us with it, and we have to do with it for their supply; but our call separates us from it. Joshua went into the possession of the Gentiles, that his sword might make it the possession of the Lord; Paul went into the places of the Gentiles, to take out of them a people unto God, linked with the disallowed Stone, despised and rejected of men.
The family of Seth were, in like manner, under this call of God. It was intimated to them by the charge to leave the blood of Abel unavenged, and they understood the intimation. If the earth be left in its defilement, God is not seeking it (as we have now seen all His ways declare), and this family of faith are in that secret. They will not seek it either. Cain's house was in possession of it, and Seth's family will leave them there, without a rival or a struggle. The mind of God in them took this knowledge of the way of God, and of His pleasure touching them; and they acted on heavenly principles in a blood-stained earth, whose judgment was now for a time to linger and to slumber.
I own, beloved, that I greatly admire this fine expression of the mind of Christ in these earliest saints. They take the only way which the holiness of God could sanction. They are "partakers of His holiness." The light they walked in was God's; the holiness they partook of was God's. 1 John i. 7; Heb. xii. 10. This is a peculiar thing. That light is not merely righteousness. It is the light of grace also. Yea, and the light of heavenly strangership in a polluted world. It is a light which reproves the course of this world, and makes manifest other principles and hopes altogether. There may be righteousness, and the watching and praying which escapes temptation; but there must be a walk according to these principles and hopes, to form a walk "in the light, as He is the light." These earliest believers beautifully shine there, I believe. They were not under law. They come between Adam and Moses. They had not precepts, as I have already shown. But they were in the light, as God is in the light. And if afterwards Abram did not need to be told to have his altar and his tent--if he needed no precept from the Lord how to order the marriage of his son, or how to answer the king of Sodom--so these saints of still earlier days understood the holiness of the call of God, and took their journey for a heavenly country at the bidding of the pollution of the earth.
I own indeed, again, that I greatly admire this. It is the beauty of the Spirit's workmanship in His elect vessels. All is His. "How great is His goodness, and how great is His beauty!" They learn the word in spirit ere the voice of the Spirit uttered it--"Arise, depart, for this is not your rest; it is polluted."
The details about these antediluvian believers are very scanty; but through it all there is this heavenly character. They do not supply history for the world; but they do supply instruction for the Church. This is heavenly. No spirit of burning or spirit of judgment had purged the blood of the earth, and they shrink instinctively from it. In the spirit of their minds they leave it. "What communion has light with darkness? what fellowship has righteousness with unrighteousness?" their conduct asks. Their religion is that of separation from the world, and so are their habits.
They call on the name of the Lord. The name of the Lord is the revelation He has been pleased to make of Himself. Immanuel, Jesus, "the Lord our righteousness," Jehovah, God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost--these are among His names graciously and gloriously published by Himself. And "to call on the name of the Lord" was service or worship of God in spirit and in truth.
This was the religion of these earliest saints. It was simply the religion of faith and hope. They worshipped God, and, apart from the world, they waited in hope. "The work of faith" and "the patience of hope" are seen in them. Something of the Thessalonian spirit breathes in them. For they served the living and true God, and waited for the Son from heaven, who had already delivered them. 1 Thess. i. To "call on the name of the Lord" is faith, and salvation, and worship. It bespeaks the standing of a saint, and his spiritual service. It shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved. Joel ii.; Rom. x. I will offer to thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving, and will call upon the name of the Lord. Psalm cxvi. And such was their religion, such was their worship. It was worship in spirit. No temples, or costly carnal services, or institutions of man appear.
And in their ways and habits they are only seen as a people walking across the surface of the earth, till their bodies are either laid under it, or are translated to heaven above it. They rejoice, as though they rejoiced not; they buy, as though they possessed not; they have wives, as though they had none. All around them is as Babylon to them, and their harps are on the willows. Cain's family have all the music to themselves. But Seth's family are a risen people. Their conversation is in heaven. They look for no estates or cities. All they take is an earlier Machpelah. Nothing is told us of their place or their business. They are strangers where even Adam was once at home, and, much more, where Cain still was. We may follow them, and in spirit abide with them for a day; but where they dwelt we know not--like the disciples who followed the glorious Stranger from heaven in the day of His sojourn here. John i. 38, 39. They are without a place or a name. The earth knew them not. Like the stranger Rechabites, they are, throughout their generations, one after another, of the wilderness, and not of the city (Judges i. 16); or in Levitical language, they were a standing order of Nazarites, more separated to God than even Israel themselves.
They are the earliest witnesses of this heavenly strangership. Such a life is exhibited afterwards in other saints of God in its fuller, beautiful details; but we have it here in spirit.