Before we get into the main text of our message today I want to just spend a little time in Genesis five and pull out some important highlights. I would like you to notice that as this lineage is listed, everyone died after a life of around 8 or 9 hundred years, except for one man, Enoch.
The narrative breaks pattern with Enoch and says he walked with God and then he was no more, because God took him away at the young age of 365 years. It is significant that Enoch didn’t see death and lived about a third as long as most men on this list. Can you think of another person who only lived about a third of a lifespan and didn’t see death?
There seems to be a link between walking with God, having a shorter lifespan, and not seeing death. I don’t think we necessarily need to see an early death of a Christian as a tragedy, it could in fact be a blessing that allows them to go home early. If truly walking with God includes suffering, then perhaps, being brought home early is actually a reward. Ok, let’s get back to Noah and look specifically at His lineage.
I. Noah’s Lineage (vv 1-4)
Noah’s father was Lamech who lived 777 years. This is not insignificant. First of all two chapters earlier, we read of another Lamech who was evil, saying that his revenge would be seventy sevenfold. An interesting point of contact with his namesake, all these sevens.
The number 7 in Hebrew also signifies completeness, and these three sevens together imply that Lamech had a very complete life, highlited by the birth of Noah, who God would use to save life on earth. Lamech even prophesied about his son saying, “He will comfort us in the labour and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the Lord has cursed”. Noah’s name means rest or comfort.
Now in chapter 6 we read about the flood and Noah’s family, including his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
Man is increasing in numbers on earth and we see an interesting play on words here as daughters were born to men, and the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, so they chose any of them they wanted to marry. When we read this we wonder two things, is there a difference between these men and the sons of God? It seems clear that God is making a distinction here, and in verse 3 God expresses unhappiness about these marriages, why?
First of all some have suggested that the sons of God are actually fallen angels marrying human women. This has been proven to be a very weak interpretation.
The most likely interpretation of this is that the godly line of Seth was intermarrying with the ungodly daughters of Cain, the Canaanites. This is something we will see for centuries in spite of God’s open disapproval.
Remember later on God instructs the Israelites, God’s chosen people, to completely wipe out the Canaanites (the line of Cain) when they entered the Promised Land of Canaan. They didn’t however, and the Canaanites were constantly bringing sinful, sexually perverted spiritual practices into the lives of God’s people. This seems already to be what God is against, and he punishes humanity by decreasing their lifespan to about what it is now. This chronic sexual sin is why we only live the length of life we do now.
The Nephalim are also mentioned. This word means giants and fallen ones, and they are also Canaanites. Again the son’s of God are having children with them, and these children are called the men of renown and heroes of old. These are strong mighty warriors. If you remember in Numbers 13 the spies are sent into Canaan and they return saying “we can’t attack these people because they are huge and strong” (the Nephalim) and likened them to the ancient men of renown mentioned here in Genesis.
So here already in Genesis God is giving us information about why the Canaanites were such a problem later on when Israel returned from Egypt. These were no godly people, but were very violent and sexually immoral people from the cursed line of Cain. This whole thing is the beginning of the unending battle between good and evil, and the people of God versus the people of Satan. Between those who are blessed and those who are cursed. This conflict continues today with violence and sexual immorality still being the primary sins.
This is just another reason why it is so important to really understand the book of Genesis as a foundation for the rest of the Bible, and even to understand that what is happening in the world today is nothing new. So then in verse 5:
II. Man’s Corruption is described
God sees how great the corruption is becoming. He saw nothing but evil intentions of the thoughts of people’s hearts, all the time. Here is where we see that the biblical word heart includes the mind. Now I think this is where we need to stop and think about things for a minute.
God saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that we continually had evil intentions. It that your perception of us humans? We need to look at what God is looking at here. What was so bad? From the brief description we get, we see that men found women beautiful, were having children with them and marrying them. So far we hear nothing of God forbidding this.
People might have been a little violent and there may have already been some murder and wars. I ask you as I ask myself, does this sound any different than the world today?
Now I’m sure most of us would not say that the thoughts of man are continually evil, would we? But that is our perception, and God’s is much different.
When he says their thoughts are constantly evil, He is saying that they are constantly focused on something other than Him, and I’m pretty sure he is just as disgusted with us today as he was back then, but he has promised to never wipe us out again, and if you look closely, it’s not just about what they are doing. In fact it is more about their intent and their thoughts. This is very important. What is God so upset about?
Well back in verse 2 we get a clue. The sons of God SAW that the daughters of man were ATTRACTIVE, and TOOK any that they CHOSE.
Let’s go back to Adam and Eve. What happened at the Fall? Eve SAW that the fruit was ATTRACTIVE or good, she TOOK the fruit, and in both cases the people chose what was attractive to them, not what was attractive to God.
Satan is again at work here. At the Fall, a saviour was already promised, and Satan now has the lifelong strategy to make sure that doesn’t happen. Here he invites God’s people, Seth’s line, to compromise and intermarry with Cain’s line so that there would be no Holy or Godly line for a saviour to be born into. We will see this throughout the Old Testament, but God is always one step ahead thwarting Satan’s plan.
The point here is that God’s people were always to be separate, sanctified, set apart, but they, and we always choose to compromise with the world. We have a privileged position of separation from sin and communion with God, but Satan deludes us into thinking that the world has more value.
So what displeases God more than anything, is our selfish desire to please ourselves and choose our will over his, it’s not just how we physically act that out. Clearly very little has changed in human beings even in those of us who are so called children of God. We continue to choose our own desires over the will of God pretty much all the time.
My friends, this is idolatry and it could be the most important thing in understanding how we fail God. It’s no coincidence that the first commandment is thou shalt not have any other gods but me. Another of the commandments is against adultery, and Jesus says just lusting in your heart is adultery. Putting other things in front of God makes those things gods and it is spiritual adultery.
I am not just talking about going to church, reading the Bible, and praying. Those things are important, but God never commands us to go to church. He commands us to obey His will and have a love relationship with Him.
We don’t understand, as the Israelites didn’t understand, that anything that we put above God is idolatry, adultery is lusting for or choosing something created over the creator. Ideas, things, ways of living, anything can become a small “g” god or an idol. This doesn’t just mean golden calves and cheating on your spouse.
Eve thought the apple was pretty, so she chose it over God. Adam idolized Eve, so gave in when she asked him to taste it, he chose Eve over God. Humankind chose sexual gratification, power, land, family, over God and that is why Jesus had to be so strong in saying you need to hate all those things, including yourself, the part of you that desires only gratification, in order to be His disciple. He needs to be able to trust that you won’t cheat on him after He calls you.
If we look at Cain and Abel, and later in Abraham’s family, we even see that God’s blessing becomes an idol because people want the blessing over the blessor. God wants us to desire the relationship over the benefits of the relationship.
Now the Bible says both that these idols are nothing, which is true, but it’s also true that they have great power, because the powers and principalities use them to keep us away from God. It’s this idolatry that is at the source of all sin and causes:
III. God’s Grief (vv 6-7)
So God is grieved - what a change from Genesis 1:31 when he looked at all he created, including us, and said it is very good, or I am well pleased. The only time he ever said that again was when Jesus got baptised.
So God is literally repenting for creating humanity. That would be like us wishing we never had our children. Who is he repenting to? Remember when he was creating everything He said we? He is talking to Jesus and the Holy Spirit. The trinity is not just symbolic, but is the relationship of God to Himself through the Trinity that has existed for all eternity. God is community. It’s like he’s looking out his window from heaven, and the Holy Spirit and Jesus are sitting down behind him reading the paper and He says, “I’m sorry guys, this didn’t work out too well.”
So what does he do, “well I think I’ll just blot out man and all the other living things I created”. Is this a failed experiment? No, remember a human is writing this stuff under inspiration and is attempting to help us understand God from our limited human perspective. God knew from the beginning what would happen.
This is just his first warning to people that they better shape up. Was it just a fluke that as he was looking at all this, he just happened to catch Noah out of the corner of his eye and say “Oh, I almost missed that guy, he’s pretty good, maybe I’ll spare him.” No, that was his plan the whole time. He knew all of us before we were born.
Well let’s finish by looking at:
IV. Noah’s Favour with God (v.8)
We are going to hear this phrase a lot through the rest of Scripture ...”But God”. Only here it is “but Noah found favour in God’s eyes”. God again shows grace to one person who was godly, in order to save the rest. The only other person in the Old Testament that was described as finding favour in the eyes of God is Moses.
We hear later as was said of Enoch, that Noah walked with God. This means that he lived for God, he didn’t just survive and live for his own desires. Other words that could be used here are righteous and blameless, but this is not to conclude that Noah was sinless, only that when compared with his contemporaries he was a powerful contrast. If you threw one of us into a prison we might stand out too.
One of the questions I asked when looking at this passage is, why does God continually use people to redeem mankind? Can’t he just snap his fingers and make things different?
I’ve titled this series, “Friends of God”, and I think the reason he does his work through people is because he desperately wants a relationship with His creation.
This is no surprise, he tells us this throughout the Bible and really it’s the main reason he gives us salvation through Christ, so that we can have a relationship with Him. I think we need to realize that the Bible does not cover even close to all the people God used throughout history, and it obviously doesn’t cover all the people he has used since the first century.
I would suggest that the practical point for us today is that God has always, and will always continue to choose people to do his work on earth. And if we look at what the Bible says about who he uses, we see one common characteristic of all of them, they are different from the people around them. He either chooses them at birth or at some other point in their life, and he chooses people he knows will do what he tells them to do.
The first thing he looks for is people who love him and follow his word. Now we don’t hear much of Noah’s life before he was chosen, all we know is that later in the chapter it says he was righteous and blameless amoung the people of his time, and he walked with God. We have to assume that if he was willing to build this ridiculous ark without any questions, under intense ridicule, that God had probably seen him obey smaller things in the past.
For us and our world that doesn’t seem to see God working very much, we need to look at the fact that there are few people, especially in our western culture who are very obedient to God’s commands. God uses people, so he tests people with little things to see if they are worthy of giving bigger things to. The only conclusion we can draw as to why he is not using many of us for big things is because he has seen how poorly we do with little things. He has determined so far that there is no way we will take on the big tasks. Not that we can’t, because He will empower us, but because we won’t, we are not willing to.
Ask yourself, if you were praying and heard Jesus say, “I’m coming back on October 14th and you are the only person I am telling this to, and I want you to gather everyone in town together at the Shamrock Center at noon that day, so that the believers can all float up to heaven together. So get some people together and go door to door throughout the town and tell them what I have told you to do. Make sure you tell the non-believers that they will be left behind on the 14th if they don’t hurry up and surrender their lives to me.”
How many of us would just say OK and go and do what he asked? Most Christians are afraid to even let people know they are Christians, never mind risk the ridicule that these kind of explicit instructions could bring.
I have to tell you, I am so sick of being so afraid. I’m a pastor, and I hesitate to share my faith, tell my testimony, tell people I don’t know that I love them and don’t want them to go to hell for eternity. If God is with us, what do we have to be afraid of? The worse that would happen to most of us is a little short term humiliation.
Am I not willing to put up with that in exchange for what Christ did for me? Even if I suffer or was killed for doing it, are we not told to rejoice in that if we do it for Christ?
I want to see God work mightily, and what a privilege it would be if he included me in that in some way. But I’m ashamed to say that I don’t think he would, based on how I have handled the little things he’s asked me to do. Yeah I have obeyed in some things, but I don’t want to just be saved, I want to be used.
I’m telling you how I feel, and you know what, by the time I get home today, I might be right back into my comfort zone. It’s easy for me to stand up here and speak passionately about this stuff. I sometimes get criticized because I don’t just relax in God’s grace, and talk about the love of Jesus. I want to say to those people, “get behind me Satan”.
God loves us, and he certainly doesn’t use all of us for big things he wants to do. And our salvation has nothing to do with what we do other that put our faith in him. But he gives us opportunities to prove our faith. So if we all go home after this service and it has no impact on us, we don’t make any changes, yeah, I might feel like I haven’t done a good job of preaching, but I’m certainly not going to judge anyone, because I am the same as you. But I don’t want to be like that.
But here’s the thing. Maybe individually we are too afraid or weak, or faithless to pull off big things for God, but what if we all did it together. What if we were not hung out to dry by our fellow brothers and sisters? What if we were all humiliated together? At least we would still have each other, and it might even be fun. What if we joined with other churches and did this? What if we stopped being so stubborn and competitive with other churches and realized we are all on the same team?
Don’t ever think God doesn’t want to use you, but we need to be useable. Good ole Noah was, and we’ll see later that he was a sinner just like us, but he saved the world from annihilation because he kept saying yes to God.
That is God’s love, he doesn’t want to be our dictator, in fact he never is, he always gives us a choice. He wants to use us because he wants us to experience Him as fully as we can. He saved us to use us, and living on the edge for Him promises to be the most rewarding thing we can ever experience, if we are willing.
So this week for the action step, I just want us to think about how we are walking with God. Would God say we are walking with Him? Try to think of one thing you could be doing or stop doing that would please Him
