The present season, beginning with this Sunday, is called Advent. We are accustomed, in the four weeks before Christmas, to direct our minds to Christ's advent or coming. This advent, we say, is threefold: First, there is Christ's coming in the flesh, when as a little babe He lay in the manger at Bethlehem, taking upon Himself the form of Abraham, made in the likeness of human flesh, and performing the pilgrimage of an earthly life that He might thus save man. Again, we distinguish His second coming, _i. e._, His return, as we confess in the Creed, "to judge the quick and the dead," when, arrayed in all the power and majesty of Almightiness, He shall come to execute vengeance upon the evildoers, vindicate and take home with Himself those who believed in Him. And between these two comings lies a third, which we are wont to designate "His spiritual coming," by which we mean His coming and knocking at the door of our hearts for admission. This coming is not visible, however, as the other two, but invisible, yet none the less real on that account, and it is carried on by means of His Word and sacraments, through the instrumentality of the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of Holy Baptism and the Lord's Supper, for the execution of which He has founded a divine institution called the Church. To that Church He has entrusted the work of Gospel preaching and sacramental giving. She, if true to her calling and message, is the conservatory of His truth, the disseminator of His kingdom upon earth. It is within her pales that He dispenses salvation. Outside of the Church He does not promise to bestow forgiveness of sin and the blessings of His grace. How these preliminary remarks bear upon the selection and consideration of our text, what precious and instructive lessons we may gather from the comparison, that let us see, and may we be wise and heed. "Come thou and all thy house into the ark," reads the command of God. We immediately perceive with what account of ancient history that connects. The people of the Old World, the antediluvians, as they are generally called, had become so corrupt in morals and life that God determined their destruction and said: "The end of all flesh is come before me, for the earth is filled with violence," yet, to show His desire to save them, He appointed His servant Noah to preach righteousness to them, and directed him to build an ark as an evidence that He was minded to carry out His purpose, and as a means of safety for Noah. Few, however, none, in fact, except Noah and his immediate family, eight souls in all, took the warning to heart. Many a one of that perverse generation, we may surmise, even assisted in the construction of the ark, and the patriarchal minister would exhort them to forsake their sins and worship God, only to be sneered at for his credulity and ridiculed for his nonsensical eccentricity of building such a boathouse.