Can We Ignore God Without Consequence?

Can We Ignore God Without Consequence?

We return to the book of Beginnings this morning. Our text is drawn from one of the most well-known stories in the Bible, found in Genesis 6 through 9. The account of Noah.

With apologies to David Letterman, here’s a Top Ten list of lessons learned from Noah!

10. Don’t miss the boat.

9. We are all in the same boat.

8. When you’re stressed, float a while

7. Stay fit. When you’re 600 years old, someone may ask you to do something big.

6. Build on high ground.

5. Speed isn’t always an advantage. The snails were on board with the cheetahs.

4. It might stink on the Ark, but it’s better than being in the water.

3. Plan ahead. It wasn’t raining when Noah built the Ark.

2. Remember, the Ark was built by amateurs; the Titanic by professionals.

1. No matter the storm, when you are with God, there’s always a rainbow waiting.

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Just about everybody knows the Noah story. Most of the time it’s told as a children’s story, complete with neat pictures of a little, round, white-haired Noah; lots of animals of the African kind- lions, elephants, giraffes, turtles; a vivid rainbow! Back in 1999 Jon Voight starred as Noah in a TV Miniseries that was far from the Genesis account. In fact, the "God" in that series was so ungodly many considered it beyond irreverent and inaccurate.

The story, as told in Genesis, is a serious account of the reality of human accountability to God, a story that, if believed, would cause people to shake in their shoes!

It’s a lesson about Disobedience, Destruction, and Deliverance.

I wish we could read the whole story, but given that it runs to 3 long chapters and 4 pages of single-spaced Bible text, we won’t! Instead, we will look at excerpts from the text.

Turn with me first to Genesis 6:1-8. These verses form a kind of prologue for the story. [READ]

If we try to pull the meaning out of every line in those opening verses, we will quickly be distracted into all kinds of debate about the meaning the phrases ’sons of God’ and ’daughters of men.’ Let me be truthful with you and tell you that nobody knows what those phrases mean. IF we focus on what we do not understand, we will miss what we can understand which is: The world was in a sorry state, morally.

DISOBEDIENCE

Lust and violence were everywhere. It was a decadent world. V. 3 clues us in to God’s displeasure- "I’m not going to put up with these people as I have in the past, so I’ll limit their lifetime to 120 years."

V. 5 says, (The Message) "God saw that human evil was out of control. People thought evil, imagined evil - evil, evil, evil from morning to night."

We live in a depraved society that mirrors that in which Noah lived!

We are a sexually insane society. I’m not a prude, but I find many network TV shows too ungodly to watch. Either they are given to praise of violence as the solution to problems, or they laud materialism as the meaning of life. Or, they feature sex!

Seems that the writers of the sit-coms don’t know much humor that isn’t centered on sex - how much, how often, with how many, and in what varieties. Something I’m not getting at all is the gay-ing of America! I’m not homophobic. I don’t want homosexuals singled out for mistreatment or discrimination, but I don’t want the "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" thrown in my face either!

We are a society of death. A tragedy played out in Florida this week. A woman who had a heart attack in 1990, at age 25, was left severely handicapped by brain injuries. Her husband sought court approval to take away her feeding tube and water so she would die! Sadly, he was praised widely in the media as a courageous hero! Some courage! His wife is severely disabled so he wants her life ended. We need to pray for Terri Schavio and her family.

Our sexual insanity meets our culture of death in doctor’s offices where an average of abortions end over 3000 lives every day of the year! Only a tiny fraction of those abortions are related to legitimate medical conditions. Most are performed to spare a couple from dealing with the result of their sexual choice. I am pro-choice - PRIOR to pregnancy. I believe every woman has the right to say no to pregnancy! But I staunchly defend the little life that is conceived as bearing the image of God.

Greed wracks our economy - everything from workers who waste time and resources to corporate executives who create multi-million dollar deals for themselves while the companies they lead collapse!