(4.) Yet another point in this cluster of great moral lessons is indicated for us by Peter (2 Pet. 2: 4–9); “For if God spared not the old world, but saved Noah, the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly:――the Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptation and to preserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished.” That awful word, _retribution_, gathers into itself the fearful significance of these stupendous events. They are God’s foregoing judgments, brought out in this world to foreshadow the sorer visitations of that coming day when God shall bring every work into judgment with every secret thing, good or evil. God surely does take note of the sins of men, how long soever he may stay his uplifted hand and delay to smite. If wicked men were wise _they would believe God’s words of warning_, and take care not to live over again the life of that doomed generation and meet a final judgment more awful even than theirs! (5.) Let us not fail to notice those wonderful and beautiful ways of God with his children, coming down in such condescending and most familiar communion, talking with them apparently almost as man talks with his dearest friend; and this not in Paradise only before the fall, but after the fall scarcely less; and onward as the narrative indicates in the case of Enoch and of Noah. What more could he have done to reveal a _personal God_ to mortals? Surely the God who thus revealed himself in the fresh morning of our race is no dim abstraction, no impersonal Nature or Essence, diffused and diffusible throughout space, the ideal soul of all matter. This effort to dispose of a God with whom it is man’s privilege to walk in positive personal communion, but who also takes cognizance of man’s iniquity, and to transmute him into an empty, forceless ideality, finds not the least countenance in these earliest manifestations of himself to our race. Note how he dwells with men; how he walks with them and lets them walk with him! What is this but free and loving communion? What less can it imply than just what the narrative of man’s creation witnesseth, viz. that God “made man _in his own image_”――capable therefore of real and most intimate communion of spirit with his Maker? This lesson is written all the way through the Bible. It stands out here with beautiful prominence in this first great chapter of God’s revelation of himself to man. CHAPTER VIII. THE FLOOD.