Sermon Notes + Quotes:
Transcript:
We study through books of the Bible here at The Village Chapel. My great joy and pleasure today to lead us through Genesis chapters eight and nine. We’re calling our study of Genesis, “In the beginning.” And curious minds have always wanted to know the answer to some of the big questions. And we begin in The Book of Beginnings with the Beginner, and that’s God Himself. But these big questions remain and we begin to find some answers in the Book of Genesis, don’t we?
Questions like: Where did everything come from? Does God exist? Does human life have a purpose and meaning? What does the good life look like? What’s gone wrong with the world? What’s been done or is being done with what’s gone wrong with the world? And as we have seen and began to see, especially in Genesis chapter three, and then repeated again in chapter six, sin and the compound effects of sin have begun to show up in the world.
In Chapter 6:5-7, we read, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. The Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. The Lord said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things into birds of the sky, for I’m sorry that I have made him.'”
And that’s so true. Sad but true. As we look back through space, time and history, the question some people have is of course, “Did this flood thing actually happen? Was this a reality?” Well, in addition to the biblical account, of course, we have many other stories. And some of you may be aware of some of them. Dozens, really, of these ancient stories of a great flood.
These include the Mesopotamian version, which is called Enuma Elish, and the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. There are some similarities, but there’s some really stark differences as well. It’s not my intent or purpose to go into all of that, nor to present all of the evidence that may exist for a physical flood of the world in which we live. But I encourage you to look some of that up if that’s interesting to you.
And I also encourage all of us, as we read the passage, like the one I just read, about the wickedness of humanity and how pervasive it was that we not get self-righteous, looking down our noses back through history at Noah and his contemporaries. We’ve all got to admit that we need a little bit of help and we need redemption and we need God’s intervention in our lives to rescue us, don’t we?
Walker Percy was a 20th century American author, known for his novels set in and around New Orleans. He was called a hopeful dystopian, often writing a little bit about suffering and injustice and that sort of thing. And here’s one observation of his about our own day and time.
“You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”
–Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
So there, in summary, from Walker Percy anyway, we have an assessment. And in our own day and time, we’re struggling. We’re struggling to know what it means to be a human person. So we’re still asking some of those really big questions. One of the reasons I’m really glad that we’re studying through the Book of Genesis again. So without much further ado, let’s jump right in.
We were on board the ark, the rains had come down, the floods had come up. The animals had joined with Noah and his family, his wife, three sons and their wives. And they’re on board. And then now, we have today the story of the flood subsiding in chapters eight and nine, if you want to turn there in your Bibles. “God remembered Noah, and all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the ark. And God caused a wind to pass over the earth and the water subsided.” That’s a big, broad general statement about what’s happened. And now we’re going to get a little more detail.
“Also, the fountains of the deep and the floodgates of the sky were closed. The rain from the sky was restrained, the water receded steadily from the earth. And at the end of 150 days, the water decreased. In the seventh of month on the 17th day of the month, the ark rested upon the mountains of Ararat.” Not Mount Ararat, but the mountain range known as Ararat over there in, I believe it would be typically called Ancient Armenia.
“The water decreased steadily until the 10th month. And the 10th month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains became visible.” Notice the live body detail on the dating here, and understand it’s one of the things that separates the Genesis flood record from all of the other kinds of flood records, the non-biblical flood records that you might find.
It’s simpler, it’s more straight ahead and doesn’t contain as much complete mythology, God’s gobbling up humanity and creating them for some nefarious purpose or whatever. It’s a completely different story in many ways, and it’s worth comparing those if you have the time to do it online. Came about at the end of 40 days, “Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made, and he sent out a raven. It flew here and there until the water was dried up from the earth.”
And then we don’t have a record of the raven coming back. And likely not because he was probably looking for carrion that is floating bodies of animals. Could have literally landed on the body of an elephant or a hippo or something like that, and lived there just camping out on that floating body and it would become its meal and everything. That’s the way ravens are.
Noah also though, wisely, sends out a dove, we find out in verse eight, “He sent out a dove from him to see if the water was abated from the face of the land. But the dove found no resting place for the sole of her foot. So she returned to him into the ark for the water was on the surface of all the earth. Then he put out his hand and took her and brought her into the ark to himself. So he waited yet another seven days. And again, he sent out the dove from the ark, and the dove came to him toward evening. Behold in her beak was a freshly picked olive leaf.”
I love that. That’s great. And probably, where we get the whole idea of extending an olive branch there being peace or some resolve to some great trauma or whatever. So Noah knew that the water was abated from the earth. “Then he waited yet another seven days and sent out the dove, but she did not return to him again. And it came about in the 601st year, in the first month, on the first of the month, the water was dried up from the earth. And Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and behold the surface of the ground was dried up.”
And so that 600 years that’s mentioned there, of course, the age of Noah. And we studied some of that a bit earlier in the previous chapters about the length of lifespans back then. And so here you find out, when you do the math, he’s probably along with his family and all of those animals on board, this boat on board the ark, if you will, for a little bit over a year or right out a year.
“In the second month, on the 27th day of the month, the earth was dry. God spoke to Noah, said, verse 16, ‘Go out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and your son’s wives with you. Bring with you every living thing of all flesh that is with you, birds, animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, that they may breed abundantly on the earth and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.'”
And I don’t know about you, but that would have been like, “Man.” What a great moment that must have been after being cooped up on the ark for all this time. And maybe you’ve seen one of the movies where they tried to depict this sort of thing. I think in 2014, there was a movie that Russell Crowe starred in. And Kim and I watched that recently, just trying to get an imaginative take on the story of Noah.
And there’s some amazing things in that movie, for sure. But the whole, as I read those last few verses, just waiting for it to be over, waiting for the trip, “Are we there yet?” You remind yourself of when you were a kid or if you have kids and, “Are we there yet?” You’re just always waiting for this to be done. And there’s nothing I hate more than waiting in life. Maybe you’re that way as well.
But to be cooped up in the ark like that with the same people, with all of those animals and all the smells. How do you keep the lions away from the sheep? And all of that. There’s just so many things about this that are remarkable and amazing when you think about it. And yet, you see how big it was, how big the ark was. You see how many decks there were, and you start to get some of this live body detail. And you can kind of start to see how this is possible.
And at the same time, we got to be careful about in our own day and time and with our own modern sensibilities about engineering and all that sort of thing, trying to imagine what this would’ve been like. But on a personal level, man, being cooped up that long, when you burst out of that ark on that first day, that must have been quite a great feeling.
“Noah went out, his sons and his wife and his son’s wives with him. Every beast, every creeping thing, every bird, everything that moves on the earth went out by their families from the ark.” And this is amazing. What’s the first thing you would’ve done when the door opened and you were like, “Out”? Would you have just run to the first fruit tree you can find and grabbed some food? Or what would you have done? A party? What would you have done?
Notice what Noah does. It’s pretty amazing because it’s the first time this is even mentioned in the Bible. “Noah built an altar.” First time an altar is even mentioned in the Bible. “He built an altar to the Lord, and took of every clean animal and every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar.” And that’s the first time burnt offerings are mentioned.
We know that Cain and Abel brought an offering before the Lord, but not a burnt offering. And this is the first time this gets mentioned. And of course, that will continue on throughout the Old Testament, especially as we see the building of the tabernacle and the temple itself. “Well, the Lord smelled the soothing aroma and the Lord said to Himself, ‘I will never again curse the ground on account of man, for the intent of man’s heart is evil from his youth. And I never again destroy every living thing as I have done. While the earth remains seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter and day and night shall not cease.'”
And so here’s the Lord mentioning a couple of things for the first time. Summer and winter, for instance, the seasons, the idea of seasons and all that. And here we have Noah, for the first time, worshiping the Lord, responding to the Lord out of, I’m sure, gratitude and thanksgiving for what you say. Well, for the fact that God preserved he and his family, that the Lord gave them a new beginning or a fresh start, if you will.
How important that is to us. Even metaphorically, how important for you, for me in our own lives to experience God’s grace like that, to have a fresh start or a new beginning. Well, let me read chapter nine and then we’ll make a couple summary points here. “God blessed Noah and his sons, and He said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth. And the fear of you and the terror of you shall be on every beast of the earth and on every bird of the sky, with everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish and the sea into your hand, they are given.'”
And this is very much parallel to what happened in the creation event when the Lord created humanity and instructed them that they would be vicegerents of God, they would be over or have some dominion over the rest of creation. And they were to do that as God’s servants or stewards of what belonged to God, of course. So that’s renewed here as well. “Every moving thing that is alive shall be food for you. I give all to you as I gave the green plant.”
So originally, God, in the first bit of chapters one and two there, we read about the Lord giving green plants to humanity to eat. And so now the Lord’s opening up the door for steak and hamburgers and things like that. And I don’t know whether you’re a vegetarian or vegan or a carnivore or what you might be. I happen to be a person that likes a good steak or a good hamburger. We have flat burger Fridays around here, and we smash them all the way down on the grill, feel like they taste really good that way.
But whichever you are, is really okay. I want you to know that you can come to The Village Chapel and be there… Matter of fact, we used to do cuisine-themed potlucks at The Village
Chapel. And I remember one time, we did do a vegetarian one. And it was slightly attended, I got to be honest. There just weren’t that many people there.
And I said something about that. And one of the guys in church came up to me and goes, “Well, I think maybe next month you need to do meat-lovers potluck and we’ll see what we get.” And I thought that was kind of funny. We didn’t do a meat-lovers, we changed to where we were doing Italian or Mexican food or whatever, different kinds of cuisine. Well, anyway, I digress. Let’s go to chapter nine. “God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.'”
And this is exactly, again, parallel to what we read. So again, it’s a new beginning, it’s a fresh start. It’s parallel though to the original creation. When the Lord says to Adam and Eve, “Be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth. And the fear of you,” as we said, we read that, “will be on all of these beasts. And all of them will be entrusted to you, and you’re allowed to eat them.” Verse four.
Verse five, “I will require your lifeblood from every beast. I will require it. And from every man, every man’s brother, I will require the life of man.” And so here, what God is doing is putting regulations on the freedoms that He has given them. Giving them freedoms to eat meat. But God blessed them and charged them with filling the earth. But regarding the animals, told them that they were still going to be stewards of them and still watching out over them, if you will.
And the restrictions on the eating of meat is that they weren’t to eat meat. Verse four says, “With its blood in it already.” And this is because blood will become a theme throughout the Bible. Very important, stands for the life itself of the creature and of the human person as well. And as a matter of fact, it’ll be blood that will be on a cross in the New Testament. It’ll be the blood of Christ that will be on the cross that God will use to wash away our sins.
And we sing about it so often, don’t we, in the old gospel songs. What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. And so here, the restrictions for them, when it comes to the food, is that there’s a sanctity of life and it’s in the blood. And that’s another one of the reasons why we see human life created in the image of God.
Every human person we believe is intrinsic value in God’s eyes, whether they even believe in God or not. The image of God has been imprinted in you, in your life and in my life as well. And so of all of creation, nothing else is said this way, God chooses to create you and to create me in the image of God.
That’s a beautiful thing. And we need to take that very seriously when we consider not only who we are before God and our own understanding of what it means to be a human person, but also when we think about others and maybe even more so. Because it’s really easy for me to love myself and for me to defend myself and be all about myself. I don’t need anybody telling me to do that. That comes quite naturally. Same for you.
On the other hand, I’m so glad we have this instruction from God about viewing all human persons as having intrinsic value. And here, we find it not just a cultural thing, not a political thing at all. This is a biblical thing. And that’s one of the reasons we believe in the sanctity of human life from the womb to the tomb. And so He gives some instruction here, “You’re not to eat any flesh with its life or its blood in it.”
Verse five, “Surely I’ll require your lifeblood from every beast. I require it from every man, from every man’s brother, I will require the life of man.” In other words, we’re responsible to God in every way for our actions, for our deeds, especially when it comes to the way we treat others.
Verse six, “Whoever sheds man’s blood by man, his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God, He made man.”
“And as for you, be fruitful and multiply, populate the earth abundantly and multiply in it. Then God spoke to Noah and to his sons with Him saying, ‘Now behold, I Myself do establish My covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the cattle, every beast of the earth with you. Of all that comes out of the ark, every beast of the earth. And I will establish My covenant.” And there’s that word again, it’s going to show up multiple times, and I’ll tell you why in a minute.
“I will establish My covenant with you and all flesh shall never again be cut off by the water of the flood. Neither shall there again be a flood to destroy the earth. And God said, ‘This is the sign of the covenant which I’m making between Me and you and every living creature that is with you for all successive generations. I set My bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a sign of a covenant between Me and the earth. And it shall come about when I bring a cloud over the earth that the bow shall be seen in the cloud. And I will remember My covenant, which is between Me and you and every living creature of all flesh.’ And never again, shall the water become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the cloud, then I will look upon it to remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth. And God said to Noah, ‘This is the sign of the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.'”
Wow, you’ve seen a rainbow. You may have seen multiple rainbows at once. And this all goes back to this time here like this, right? It’s just amazing. And God, from His vantage point, the creator of everything that exists, the creator of the water and of the sunlight that worked together to make this visible, multicolored, beautiful rainbow. God is basically saying, “Here’s a symbol, here’s a sign of My covenant with you.”
And I love that God is a covenant-making, covenant-keeping God. The God of the Bible, that’s the kind of God He is. How does He reveal Himself? Makes covenants and keeps covenants; makes promises, and keeps promises. And it’s so beautiful.
“He’ll never again destroy the earth by water.” And this is the covenant that He has made with Noah and with all of the earth, all flesh that is on the earth. Well, in verse 18, and through to the end of chapter nine, we’ll see that while God has preserved Noah and His wife and their three
sons and their wives and all of these animals, the fact that sin was on the earth has not changed with the cleaning off of the table, if you will, with the flood having destroyed all of those people, all of those animals, all of the world starting over, if you will, with God in His righteous judgment doing that.
Noah, himself, he’s still a sinner, even though we were told he walked with God, that he was righteous. His disposition of his heart was inclined toward God, and that made him so unique in the world in the time in which he lived. Because as we read there, evil was on the heart of every man all the time. And yet, Noah still inclined toward the Lord. But not perfect, not sinless at all. And here’s what happens after he gets off the ark.
“The sons of Noah, who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth.” And Ham was the father of Canaan. And so Canaan, we know, those of us who have read the rest of our Old Testaments know Canaan will become that group of people who will be the constant enemies of Israel. And as God brings Israel out of bondage and slavery in Egypt, and we read about this in the Book of Exodus, which is just around the corner from the Book of Genesis, we find that they enter the Land of Canaan.
It’s the Promised Land, and it’s filled with wickedness. It sounds so much like the way the world was before Noah and his ark. And so God, again, working His judgment, not only through the children of Israel, but as Israel turns its back on God and becomes evil, the Lord uses the pagan nations as a vehicle of retributive justice against Israel as well.
But for now, here we have the fountainhead, Ham, if you will, of Canaan. “And these were the sons of Noah. And from these, the whole earth was populated.” Verse 19 is awesome. So what that means is you and I are cousins. Because we’re all from either Shem, Ham or Japheth. And everybody in the house with you right now are wherever it is you’re watching this Bible study from, we’re all really distant cousins one way or another. So turn to everybody in the room and just say, “Hey, cuz. What’s up?”
We are cousins in a very distant sense of the word and the term. We all go back to Shem, Ham or Japheth. We all go back through Noah. And through Noah, we all go back to Seth and we all go back to Adam and Eve at some point. Well, verse 20 tells us that Noah began farming and planning a vineyard. And so that’s good. They needed food, they needed beverages. And so he planted this farm, got it going and he planted a vineyard. And verse 21 tells us he drank of the wine and he became drunk.
“Noah uncovered himself inside of his tent.” And that probably means exactly what it sounds like. He went into his tent and took off his clothes. And Ham, the father of Canaan saw the nakedness of his father and he told his two brothers outside the implication there is that he came into his father’s tent and he went out and mockingly disrespectfully.
And I’ll tell you why. You’ll see that in the verses to come why we think that’s the case that he would do that, that he would be so disrespectful of his father. Even though his father was being
completely foolish by being a drunk. He goes out and tells him, verse 23, “Shem and Japheth took a garment and they laid it upon both their shoulders and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father. And their faces were turned away so that they did not see their father’s nakedness.”
And so you see the contrast there between what Shem and Japheth did and what Ham had done. “When he awoke from his wine, he knew what his youngest son had done to him. So he said, “Cursed be Canaan.” And interestingly, he didn’t say cursed be Ham. He said cursed be Ham’s descendant, his son, Canaan, who becomes the entire line of descendants of Ham.
“They shall be servants to his brothers.” He also said, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem; and let Canaan be his servant. And may God enlarge Japheth and let him dwell on the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant.” And so you see there’s this fallout from the foolishness of Noah, which turned into a personal embarrassment, and then some disrespect. And it’s kind of the compounding consequences of sin starting to roll again as we close out chapter nine.
Verse 28 says, “Noah lived 350 years after the flood. So all the days of Noah were 950 years and he died.”
And we, of course, have been hearing that last little bit of the generations or the genealogies as we’ve been studying. And we’ll get into a lot of those in the next chapter with a lot of names that are hard to pronounce. But we will find that the consequences of sin, meaning death entering the world, continue to compound. What’s interesting though, is if this is all consecutive, and it may or may not be, I understand that. But if it is consecutive, what will happen is that Noah will live an extra 350 years, and he will be alive during the time when Abraham is born.
As a matter of fact, Noah will be alive until Abraham is 58-years-old. Can you imagine what that family dinner would’ve been like? Wow. So I would love to have been there. Well, what did we learn here? Let me throw some things up on the screen for you. First of all, if I were going to title this sermon, this Bible study, Genesis eight and nine would be called the God of New Beginnings.
Because I’m always interested in what we learn about God in any passage at all. Doesn’t mean we can’t learn anything from the people, the principal characters. And we do indeed learn some things about Noah from chapter six, seven, eight and nine. Matter of fact, let me throw those up on the screen for you. We learned that Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. And that word, “favor” could also be translated grace. It’s the first time it appears in our Bibles. And yet, all the way from Genesis to Revelation, we keep hearing about the fact that God is gracious.
Isn’t that good news to you? Again, going back to the big questions of life, does God exist? If so, what is God like? Here’s what the Bible says, “Yes, God exists and God is gracious.” Wow. That’s good news to this sinner. That should be good news to you as well. It’s good news to Noah as well. Where did Noah find grace? He didn’t earn it. Matter of fact, he can’t earn grace. Grace is opposed to earning. Grace is for the guilty and undeserving.
We’re all guilty and we’re all undeserving. We don’t deserve anything. And so God is gracious. And what we’re told in chapter 6:8 was that, “Noah found favor or grace in the eyes of the Lord.” You see, because that’s where it is. It’s in the eyes of the Lord. And He’s looking down on you, He’s looking at me as well, and He is gracious.
And that’s how He reveals Himself from the entire scripture throughout. From Genesis to Revelation, there’s a thread of grace that runs throughout. Secondly, Noah, not only did he find favor in the eyes of the Lord, but we learned that he walked with God from verse nine of chapter six. What a great phrase that is. What a great description that is to walk with God. And we studied that, and I encourage you to go back and listen to that study from chapter six again, if you’d like. But what a wonderful thing to be said of Noah.
And the only other person that’s said of is one of his ancestors, Enoch. And both of them walked with God. It’s really a beautiful way of describing their spiritual life. And I want that to be the case for me. I want that to be the case for you that while we aren’t perfect, like Noah, we get on board the ark, but we’re still sinners. The disposition of our hearts though is we’re eager to walk with the Lord, and that that might be said of us, is just amazing.
Thirdly, “Noah worked with God.” Chapter 6:22, chapter 7:5. Both say that, “Noah did all the Lord had commanded him.” Oh, that’s another thing I would love to have said about me. But it’s already too late. And same for all of us. But I love that in these projects that God gave to him to do, building the ark and preserving, bringing all those animals, taking care of the whole thing, participating, if you will, with God, in God’s mission in the world to save a remnant.
I want that to be said of us as well, that we worked with God. Not that we co-opted God for our agenda, but that we found out what God is doing in the world, and we got in on that because we want to be with God in His mission in this world. That’s so important for us brothers and sisters. He waited on God also. We see that in chapter 8:16-19. The minute I would’ve spotted any kind of dry land, man, I would’ve thrown open the door to that ark and gotten out of there as quick as I could.
I’m a guy that doesn’t like confined spaces. I get so excited to be able to just leave the house. When I’m recording this right now, anyway, I don’t know when you’re watching this. But when I’m recording this, we’ve been quarantined for a long time. I’m of an age where I need to stay quarantined. So I can’t go anywhere, I can’t go very much of anywhere. But man, it’s a really exciting day when I get into the car and drive over to the grocery store and park in that little… and make the phone call and they bring my groceries out to me. I’m excited.
That is a huge thing for me. And so I would’ve been jumping at the bit to get out of the ark, man. But he waited on the Lord until the Lord said, “Go out of the ark.” There’s something about that. There’s a phrase that runs, especially through the Psalms, and I want to encourage you to do a phrase search through your Bible about those who wait upon the Lord or those who wait for the Lord.
It’s really powerful. It actually runs throughout the Old Testament too. They were told that those who wait on the Lord will renew their strength in the Book of Isaiah. This is so powerful, isn’t it? And even though it’s one of the worst things in the world for us, here we are encouraged by the fact that Noah waited for God. And lastly, “Noah worshiped God.” We saw that in chapter
8:20-22. His first response after experiencing the salvation that was being saved from that flood, being saved from all the wickedness in the world at the time.
Think about it, before he got on that ark, never being able to have a good night’s sleep because of the fact somebody might break into your tent. Not only take your stuff, but take your family or kill you or whatever. If wickedness really was as bad as it’s described, there would’ve been no peace at all in being alive on the planet. And I know that for some of us, that sounds a bit strange, but I want you to understand something.
There are places in the world right now, even as Walker Percy said that, where it is incredibly dangerous. And it’s incredibly dangerous to be a Christian person, to be a believer. And there are a lot of places in the world where wickedness is just unbridled and untethered and running wild. And so it’s so important that we take sin seriously and we take God’s holiness seriously.
And I love when I look at the lessons from Noah’s life, again, though he’s not the hero of this story, I love though that we see these things about him, that he found favor in the eyes of God, that he walked with God, that he worked with God, that he waited on God and that he worshiped God. Well, there are at least three things that I want you to learn about God because we see how God reveals Himself, this God of new beginnings.
And so very briefly, I want to run through those. First of all, “The God of new beginnings remembers His people.” Again, that was right there in verse one of chapter eight. Then God remembered Noah. And I want you to know something, He’s remembering you each and every day, He’s remembering me each and every day as well. God does not have a lapse of memory. What that means is that God engaged again and proved Himself faithful to all the promises He had made to Noah.
And that’s one of the reasons why I love the way it closes out, or almost closes out, with the symbol of the rainbow. It’s God just painting across all of creation, the entire skies that I’m the faithful God, I’m the God that makes promises, I’m the God that remembers My promises and I’m the God that keeps My promises. And He remembers His people. And if you belong to Him as I belong to Him, we can take great comfort in knowing that God will never leave us or forsake us.
A.W. Tozer said it this way,
“We need never shout across the spaces to an absent God. He’s nearer than our own soul, closer than our most secret thoughts.”
–A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
And folks, every heartbeat, every breath of yours belongs to Him and they’re a gift to you. Do you understand that? This is wonderful. It puts me in constant communion with God to keep that in mind. And I hope you’ll keep that in mind as well. “The God of the new beginnings remembers His people. The God of new beginnings also rescues His people.”
And how can you miss that, right? There is this flood, it’s coming. And God tells Noah to do this thing that probably sounded kind of crazy. There’s no ocean here, there’s no river here, there’s no lake here. “And you want me to build a what? A boat?” And yet, as he responds to God in faithfulness. Here’s God, using this very thing that Noah may have been ridiculed for, that people may have laughed at him about, as we’ve seen in some of the fictional tellings of this story, may have indeed taken all kinds of social heat for building a boat where he built a boat.
But here is God, not only remembering him but rescuing him through that very thing that people may have been ridiculing him about. Well, as Martyn Lloyd-Jones says,
“There’s no message in this book except that God, the very God whom people insulted and against whom they rebelled, is so concerned about them that He Himself did the only thing that could be done to rescue them and to redeem them.”
–Martyn Lloyd-Jones
And you see this in the last words of Christ on the cross, don’t you? What does Jesus say? Jesus, the greater Noah; Jesus, the greater ark even. Jesus says this, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Wow, that is just mind-blowing to me. The greatest injustice in the history of humanity is the fact that the Son of God Himself took my sin upon Himself and died on the cross to pay the price for my sin. He experienced injustice. You may have experienced injustice too, but He experienced injustice to the utmost.
When you think about that, it’s remarkable, it’s amazing, it’s humbling, it’s astonishing. And it causes me to drop to my knees and lift up the empty hands of faith and respond, kind of like Noah did when he got off the ark to worship the Lord, to give thanks to His name for what He’s done for us. John Stott says this in Authentic Jesus,
“Christianity is in its very essence a rescue religion.”
–John Stott, The Authentic Jesus
If you’re in a place where you actually realize you need rescue today, I want to encourage you, He’s a rescuing God. Now, if you want God’s grace, all you need is need. All you need is nothing but need. Turn to Him in faith, believing. Thirdly, not only does the God of new beginnings remember His people and rescue His people, but He renews His people. And we saw this in chapter nine with the covenant that He makes with Noah. And He tells Noah that this rainbow in the sky, this is going to be a sign of the covenant that I’ll never again destroy all living creatures by flood.
You see, folks, the Christian faith is not always about explanations. I’ve got questions about the flood story. You’ve got questions, I’m sure. I’ve got questions about some of the stuff that Jesus did. I’ve got questions about lots of things I read in the Bible. You probably do as well. But I want you to know something, the Christian faith is not always about explanations, but it is always about promises.
And that’s the great thing about this God of the Bible. See, He’s a covenant-making, covenant-keeping God. He makes promises, and His promises are based on His character. And what you read from beginning to end is that He’s eager to save sinners, He’s eager to call out to people that He can call His own. And if you want that, if you would like to find favor in His eyes, that’s exactly where you find grace in the eyes of the Lord.
Why wouldn’t you turn to Him? Even if you became a Christian a long time ago, and you haven’t been walking in this. Because a lot of us, we understood grace at one point and became Christians at one point, but we function as if we don’t even believe it anymore. And we’re walking around beating ourselves up all the time, struggling really hard to earn points with God. And we don’t have to.
This is the good news, folks. This is the gospel. This is His promise to us, you see? He loved me when I was yet a sinner. So the fact that I didn’t do anything to earn His love also means I can’t do anything to lose His love. And the same is true for you as well. J.I. Packer, in Knowing God says,
“The goal of the covenant love of God is that He should have a people on earth as long as history lasts, and after that should have all His faithful ones of every age with Him in glory. Covenant love is the heart of God’s plan for His world.”
–J.I. Packer, Knowing God
I love that. And Alister McGrath, another one of my favorite theologians, says,
“God wants and intends the restoration of a lost world to Himself and to its true nature and destiny by breaking down whatever barriers are placed between it and Him, and in Jesus Christ, He actually makes this possible.”
–Alister McGrath, Studies in Doctrine
So let me ask you today, what’s the first thing you would’ve done when you got out of the ark? What’s the first thing you would’ve done when you escaped all of that wickedness? What’s the first thing you want to do when you find out that God is this kind of God, eager to forgive sinners? Man, I just crumble to my knees, lift up the empty hands of faith and pray to God, giving thanks. And at the same time, giving the life He gave me, giving it right back to Him.
And I encourage you to do that today as well. I don’t know where you’re at in your walk with the Lord. But I would sure encourage you to know that He intends to reconcile a people to Himself. And in the person and work of Jesus, He’s done everything necessary for that. Why don’t we turn to Him now and sing to Him? And if this is the desire of your heart, I want to encourage you to turn to Him, mean every word of this song we’re going to sing together.
And then, if you’d like someone to pray with you or someone to talk to about what it means to commit your life to Christ, I want you to send an email into the church at [email protected], and we will get back to you. And we would love to pray with you, we’d love to get some literature in your hands.
(Edited for Reading)
