Noah - The Man Who Saved The Human Race Series

NOAH - THE MAN WHO SAVED OUR RACE

Gen. 6-9; 2 Peter 2:5

A missionary to China drew on a blackboard an ancient Chinese word for flood. Chinese words are actually line drawings or pictures. The word for flood was a boat and eight people. Like many other ancient cultures China pointed back in time to some gigantic flood in which a small group of people were saved.

An example is the American Indian. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia says that studies of 120 different tribes in North, South and Central America, reveal not a single tribe that did not have "distinct or vague traditions of such a calamity, in which one, or three, or eight persons were saved above the waters upon the top of a high mountain.” (Page 822; Vol. II)

Thousands of years before Christ, this world underwent a tremendous convulsion that has baffled archeologists through the centuries. There was far more than mere rainfall.

The Bible says that "all the springs of the great deep burst forth and the floodgates of heaven were opened" (6:11).

It says the "waters rose and increased greatly on the earth. . .and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. . .Every living thing that moved on the earth perished - birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind" (6:18,19,21).

Some scholars connect all this with the end of the Ice Age when vast sheets of ice covering North America and Europe melted into the sea. Even the mysterious Atlantis could have existed and have been lost at this time. If it had not rained up until the flood, as many suppose, then the whole course of nature as we know it, was altered by this catastrophe. Some escape the scientific objections to a global flood by limiting it to the Euphrates region where all human beings lived.

Archeology points to some mysterious devastation common to all ancient people. There are also evidences for a global flood. In Europe, the Irish elk, the cave lion, the rhinoceros and the elephant all disappeared suddenly. In the cave of San Ciro, near the plain of Palermo in Sicily, an enormous mass of bones from hippopotami of all ages was found mingled with bones of deer, oxen and elephant. (See ISBE article "The Deluge of Noah.).

This is what happened PHYSICALLY but our main interest is what happened SPIRITUALLY.

The Scripture says,

"The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of his heart was evil all the time. The Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth and his heart was filled with pain. So the Lord said, I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth - men and. . .for I am sorry that I have made them. But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord" (6:5-6; 7, 8 NIV).

From the Garden of Eden three streams flowed for several thousand years right up to the time of Noah, the tenth figure mentioned in the godly line of Seth. The three streams were civilization, sin and salvation.

But slowly and surely it was sin and not salvation that took over civilization. Like an infected boil, cultures grew worse and worse until God was sorry he had every created man.

If cities were built, they became cesspools of shame. If musical instruments were fashioned, they were dedicated to iniquity. If iron and bronze were fashioned into tools, they were also fashioned into weapons to hurt and to destroy. The further civilization went, the dirtier it got.

Clovis Chappel put it well, “. . .the supreme tragedy of sin is not that man should cease to live, but that he should cease to be fit to live.”

I. SALVATION IN A DEPRAVED WORLD (Gen. 6:5-11)

God said the wickedness of man was great, every imagination of his heart was only evil continually (6:5) and the earth was filled with violence (11).

They did not do evil through carelessness, but deliberately, in cold blood of set purpose and design.

The specific sins mentioned were violence and that the “sons of God” had sexual relations with the “daughters of men” and they give birth to “the mighty men of old, the men of renown” (6:4).

Some see this as angelic beings leaving their order (Jude 6) to have relations with human beings. But since angels are described as sexless (Matt. 22:30) and since saved men are often called “sons of God” (Gal 3:26; Jn. 1:12, 13), the sin was probably the mingling of the saved and the unsaved, the line of Cain and the line of Seth.

When the world gets into the church the result is a dead church and a depraved world. When, through marriage, the world gets into the families of the people of God, there is little hope for the home, for the church or for the nation. The world will pull a home, a church and an individual down to its degraded level.