p. 162 | God's Long-Suffering by Guthrie

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 25, 1856

God's Long-Suffering.

By Guthrie

WERE there but eight, only eight saved? There were thousands, millions sought. Nor is it justice to God to forget how long a period of patience, and preaching, and warning, and compassion, preceded that dreadful deluge. Long before the lightning flashed from angry heavens; long before thunders rolled along dissolving skies; long before the clouds rained down death; long before the floor and solid pavement of this earth, under the prodigious agencies at work, broke up, like the deck of a leaking ship, and the waters rushed from below, to meet the waters from above, and sink a guilty world; long before the time when the ark floated away by tower and town, and those crowded hill-tops, where frantic groups had clustered, and amid prayers and curses, and shrieks and shouts, hung out their signals of distress—very long before this, God had been calling an impenitent world to repentance. Had they no warning in Noah's preaching? Was there nothing to alarm them in the very sight of the ark, as story rose upon story; and nothing in the sound of those ceaseless hammers to waken all but the dead?

It was not till mercy's arm grew weary ringing the warning bell, that, to use the words of my text, God "poured out his fury" on them. I appeal to the story of this awful judgment. True, for forty days it rained incessantly, and for one hundred and

fifty days more, “the waters prevailed on the earth;” but while the period of God’s justice is reckoned by days, the period of his long-suffering was drawn out into years; and there was a truce of one hundred and twenty years between the first stroke of the bell and the first crash of the thunder. Noah grew grey preaching repentance. The ark stood useless for years, a huge laughing stock for the scoffer’s wit; it stood till it was covered with the marks of age, and its builders with the contempt of the world; and many a sneer had these men to bear, as pointing to the serene heavens above and an empty ark below, the question was put, “Where is the promise of his coming?” Most patient God! Then, as now, thou wert slow to punish—“waiting to be gracious.”—Guthrie.