A Thought on Gen.8:22

"While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter...shall not cease" (Gen 8:22).

At the close of the agricultural year God’s promise to Noah comes with significant emphasis. The cycle of Nature has repeated itself many thousands of times since that word was uttered but its validity extends into the infinite future. It remains as an expression of the Divine determination that there shall be a family of ever‑living creatures, earthborn yet also sons of God, who will live their lives to all eternity in an environment created for them and suited to the conditions of their existence, an environment in which the ever‑repeating cycle of Nature’s processes will produce all that man will ever need and provide also that continual variety of outward things which is so characteristic of all that God creates. No dead, dull uniformity such as man’s own creations tend to produce; no growing of trees and plants in regular straight lines in which each several one is the exact replica of its fellow. No mountains built in the form of exactly square cubic blocks or rivers constricted within parallel straight banks. The world God designs for man is one which, like the tree of knowledge in Eden, is good for food, pleasant to the eyes, and greatly to be desired to make one wise, but unlike the initial effect of that tree, bringing nothing but beneficent results to those who inhabit it. Hence...we can step out into the unknown experiences and circumstances which it will surely bring in the certain knowledge that despite the fear and turmoil, the apprehension and foreboding of the day in which we live, we are that much nearer the time of light and gladness when under the Divine rule of the coming Age, all the strife and suffering and death of the present will be gone, and the time of man’s final period of training for eternity will have come. It is because of our certainty that this glorious future awaits all men that we can truly look forward to the future.

AOH