We have many exhibitions of this way of God in different forms of it. The Lord, for instance, would have no altar in Egypt, uncircumcised as that land was. He would not have a throne in the land (in the full glory of it) till the day of Solomon, when all was sanctified for His royal presence. Afterwards the glory was grieved away by the abominations which were done in the temple. The captives, in like spirit, hang their harps on the willows of the Euphrates; for how could they sing in a strange land, or let the songs of Zion be heard in Babylon? Separation was the rule of the divine mind. Separation was holiness. Pollution demanded it, and faith rose at the bidding. And with all this the Seth family, the household of God in earliest days--days before the flood--are in company. They are one in spirit with Jehovah Himself in Egypt, with the glory in the defiled temple, with the harps of the captives in Babylon, and with the Church of God in "this present evil world." We have to distinguish between these two things: _God’s assertion of His title to the earth, and God’s call of a people out of the earth_. These different things have been again and again exhibited in the progress of the dispensations. And they have been exhibited, as I have long judged, alternately. The Lord began, in Adam, to claim and display His rights on the earth. The man in the garden was to own the sovereignty of God, and the earth was the rest and the delight of the Lord, and the place of His glory. Sin entering and polluting all, and the pollution being left uncleansed, in Seth God called a people away from the earth to an inheritance in heaven. Then in Noah the Lord God re-asserted His rights here, and took up the earth as the place where His elect might find a home, and His own presence be known again. After this Abraham is separated from kindred, and from country, and from father’s house, to be a heavenly stranger on the earth, with his altar and his tent, looking for a city whose builder and maker was God. Israel, in their day, then take up this mystic tale of the heavens and the earth, and in the land of Canaan become the witness of the scene of God’s sovereignty. The ark passes over the river as "the ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth." And now the Church is set for the full testimony of heavenly mysteries again; and strangership here is the divine idea, till our being taken to meet the Lord in the air. This wondrous tale these dispensations of God, like day and night alternate, have thus been telling from the beginning; and still are telling. And millennial days ere long will make these pledges good, and be the glorious substance of these foreshadowings.³ ³ Such passages as Eph. i. 10 and Col. i. 20 tell us that both the heavens and the earth are equally the scene of divine purposes. And the great argument in Rom. xi. instructs us about those purposes, and the ways and times of their accomplishment.