Genesis (16) (The Flood of Noah)
Text: Genesis 7
By: Ken McKinley
(Read Text)
Now I can’t say that I’ve ever been in a flood. I’ve seen the devastation on TV, but I’ve never actually been in one. I remember a few years back when the Mississippi River flooded. And we all saw what happened to New Orleans when Katrina hit. Well the flood we just read about… it makes everything we’ve ever seen or heard about in our lives look like a joke.
Noah has been building this ark for 120 years, he’s been warning his friends and neighbors that judgment is coming, until finally it’s time. God tells him, that in 7 days He’s going to bring the flood. And this flood wasn’t just a heavy rain. Verse 11 tells us that the fountains of the great deep were broken up. In-other-words, it’s not only pouring down rain, but God has caused geysers to shoot forth from the earth; like a million “Old Faithful’s” erupting all at once. But they’re not shooting steam, they’re shooting water. And the whole earth is covered in water.
Now it’s interesting because there are over 300 cultures that have ancient traditions that tell of a disastrous flood that took place in ancient history. And they come from all over the world. North American Indians, The Incan Indians in South America, tribes in Africa, Aborigines in Australia, Natives in Greenland, the Japanese, Egyptians, the Chinese, the native people of Siberia Russia, and even the Scots… all of them have ancient tales of a catastrophic flood. And these stories go back thousands of years; long before they had any contact with Christian missionaries. There’s a Chinese pictograph from 2500 B.C. that shows a boat with 8 people in a great flood. In India, there is a story involving 8 people, and the main character is described as a “man who was righteous among his generation.”
HELLO? Basically what that tells us is that all of these different stories originated from a common event which has been kept alive through oral tradition, from ancestors who no doubt were descendants of Noah and his sons, as they spread out from Mesopotamia.
Now I want to point out a few things about this story, and ya’ll probably have heard some of this before, but these are some of the things that stick out to me here.
First off, it’s God who initiates salvation. God is going to judge the earth and its inhabitants. But He has grace upon Noah. And He tells Noah, “I’m going to bring judgment, but I’m going to save you.” Noah believes God and his faith is evidenced by his works. Noah goes to work, building the ark, and 2nd Peter 2:5 tells us that not only did Noah spend 120 years building the ark, but also during that time, he was preaching to his friends and neighbors. During that time, Noah was building the ark, and he was probably saying something like, “Look judgment is coming, but if you’ll just get into the ark you’ll be saved. Do you see it? It’s big enough, there’s plenty of room, and we’ll have plenty of food. Now there’s only one door, and you’ve got to through that one door in order to be saved, but if you just will, then you won’t perish in the flood.” Then in verse one of our text we see God give Noah the invitation to “come.” He says, “Come into the ark… you and your whole family.” And that’s awesome, because when Noah went into the ark, he could look behind him and see his whole family following him. His whole family was being saved.
When Peter preached his Pentecost sermon in the Book of Acts, he said, “This promise is to you, but not only to you alone, but you and your whole family.” Now listen moms and dads, grandma’s and grandpa’s. God’s not just interested in you. He wants your families too. I can’t think of anything that would be worse than stepping into heaven and learning that my wife and kids weren’t going to be there too. Especially if it was because I never took the time to share the Gospel with them. Charles Spurgeon, the great Baptist preacher from England once said, “If sinners will be damned, at least let them leap to hell over our bodies. And if they will perish, let them perish with our arms about their knees, imploring them to stay. If hell must be filled, at least let it be filled in the teeth of our exertions, and let not one go there unwarned or un-prayed for.”
Now look at verse 16, once Noah and his family went inside the ark, the LORD shut them in. That has at least 3 implications that I can think of. First of all – God made sure they were secure. They couldn’t get out, and no one could get them out. The door was big enough to let elephants and giraffes go through, so there was no way Noah could shut it. It has to be God saving man, and it’s God who makes us secure. In John 10:28-30 Jesus said, “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand. My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of My Father’s hand. I and My Father are one.” Secondly; once the door was shut, there wasn’t a 2nd chance for those outside of the ark. Turn with me to Matthew 13 and look at verses 24 – 30 (Read), now go on down a little bit to verses 36 – 43 (Read). That’s why the Bible says, “Today is the day of salvation.” When judgment comes, that’s all she wrote.
The 3rd thing here we find when we look at the literal Hebrew. God shut them in. In the Hebrew, we are given a picture of being totally encased, almost like a pressurized plane. Now I might be presuming a little too much, but I believe that God pressurized the ark. If you think about it, the flood waters went above the mountains. Mt. Everest, the highest mountain we know of, is 29,000 feet. Pressurization is essential at 9,800 feet above sea level. God had to have done this, otherwise Noah and his family, and all the animals would’ve gotten hypoxia. Now the Book of Genesis was written by Moses, probably when the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness for 40 years – that would’ve been around 1440 B.C. – that’s about 3,500 years before the Wright Brothers.
Now the main point of the story of the flood, or I should say, the implications of this story, at least for us, is also three fold.
First of all it shows us how serious sin really is. A lot of people now days, don’t seem to get the seriousness of sin. They don’t think its that big a deal. And they say, “What’s up with God flooding the whole world? Isn’t that a little bit harsh?” But I’ve said it before; that’s the wrong way to think about this. If you were driving to Wooward, and all of a sudden 2 ambulances and 4 highway patrolmen sped past you with their lights flashing. You’d probably wonder what was going on. You wouldn’t be saying, “Man, what’s wrong with those ambulance people and those highway patrolmen? What the heck is their problem?” You wouldn’t say that because you know that most likely, something serious has happened. You wouldn’t be asking what was up with them, because you know there’s a reason for them speeding by you, and most likely they are doing what was needed to provide for whatever situation they were responding to.
Well the same sort of thing is true with God. When we read here about God responding to human sin with this world-wide flood, we shouldn’t be asking, “What’s up with God?” Or, “What’s wrong with God?” Or that He’s somehow over-reacting.
That’s not the question. The question is, “Man, what’s up with US? What’s up with humanity?” I don’t think that any human being… any finite creature, can fully understand how offensive… how cosmically offensive, our sins are to God. We can’t understand how offensive our sin is to a perfectly holy, almighty God can be. I mean; if sin is so offensive, that God would destroy the world over it, then we must not be taking it seriously enough. And I do… I think we trivialize it, and marginalize it, and we have no understanding when it comes to that.
God wiped the world out because of sin. He wiped out the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of sin. And He’s going to do it again when the LORD returns. The flood demonstrates for us the holiness of God, but it also shows us that sin is serious! And I pray that we all, each and every one of us, would by God’s grace, be able to get a better understanding of that.
Secondly; Noah was a preacher of righteousness. He was an agent of God’s righteousness and judgment. And in a similar way; we are too, at least we’re supposed to be. If we’re willing to tell people the Good News of forgiveness and salvation in Jesus Christ, and if we’re willing to tell them the bad news of judgment and the wrath of God if they reject Christ – we’re dong essentially the same thing Noah did.
And here’s the 3rd thing. In the Genesis account, Noah’s family goes into the ark with him, even though Noah is the only one described as being righteous. Now righteous in this instance, means that Noah was in a right relationship with God, not that he was sinless, because again; we see Noah sin in chapter nine. But there’s a typology here that I want you to see. Noah is described as a righteous man, but his family benefits from that, it’s like they are carried along by that. Now in this instance, the salvation here is a limited, temporal sense. They are saved from the flood. But in a similar, more eternal sense, this is sort of like what happens with Christ and those who are a part of His family. It’s His righteousness that delivers us from the wrath of God and saves us. Turn with me real quickly to 2nd Corinthians 5:20-21 (Read). See; we’re ambassadors for Christ, just like Noah, and God is pleading through us every time we share the Gospel, that men would be reconciled to God. And look at verse 21 again. We are the righteousness of God, in Christ. We are carried along by Christ’s righteousness, and delivered because of His righteousness.
This story of Noah and the flood is just a shadow, a type, of the greater salvation we have in Jesus Christ. If Noah’s family benefitted from his righteousness, how much more do we benefit from Christ’s righteousness? If Noah’s family was carried along and saved because of the righteousness of Noah, how much more will we be saved from the wrath to come because of the righteousness of Christ?
To the utmost.
LET’S PRAY
