Page 172 - Through New Eyes

168 THROUGH NEW EYES
tion, His announcement that He is going to change the world.
We shall call this phase of history God’s amozmcanent.
Second, having grasped His people in His hand, God moves
them from one place to another, from one situation to another,
from one world to another. We shall call this transition an exodus.
The exodus from Egypt is the most celebrated of these transi-
tions, but hardly the first or the last, as we shall see. The end
result of this exodus or transition is the establishment of a new
world order.
Third, once the exodus has been accomplished, God gives
His Word of promise and command: He distributes the new
world to His people, and gives them laws and rules to obey as
they exercise dominion over it. In connection with this, God sets
up a symbolic world model as His sanctuary. We shall call this
stage by the word establishment.
Fourth, once the new world order has been established, God
gets history moving again. This post-establishment history is a
time when God makes evaluations of His people, in terms of
their faithfulness or disobedience. It is a time of the application
of positive and negative sanctions, in terms of the treaty or cove-
nant set up at the establishment. Before the Cross, this phase
was always a time of decline toward judgment. After the Cross,
we have a promise that it will be a time of growth. (See Chapters
18 and 19 on this.) We shall call this phase by the phrase histoy
and decline.
Fifth, and finally, God comes in judgment. His judgment,
however, is always simultaneously an announcement of His in-
tention to create a new world; and so the cycle or spiral begins
again. In Genesis 1, this fifth point was God’s sabbath, His rest.
After tasting and evaluating, we said, comes relaxing and enjoy-
ing. Because of the sin of man, however, God kept having to
start up new worlds instead of relaxing in the existing one. With
the coming of Jesus Christ, however, this cycle is broken. God is
willing to “relax and enjoy” the Kingdom, knowing that it can
never fail.
There are two observations I wish to make at this point, be-
fore we turn our attention to Noah. First, God’s coming to His
people to make evaluations is a sabbath phenomenon, also
termed Day of the Lord or Lord’s Day. The sabbath was the sev-