ENGAGE
Contrary to what some teach, Jesus never promised us that if we would follow Him we would have an easy life. So as we gather here this morning, it’s pretty likely that all of us are experiencing some kind of difficulties or trials in our lives – obviously some much more severe than others. But that is why I’m so excited about this morning’s message. As we look at the account of a man who undoubtedly experienced far more challenging trials that any of us have ever gone through in our lives, we’re going to discover this good news:
When life is at its worst
God is at His best
TENSION
A lot of what we know, or at least think we know about Noah comes from the cartoon-like Sunday School lessons that most of us experienced as kids. For some of us, our ideas about Noah have been influenced by movies and television programs that make his story seem like one of those Hallmark movies where everyone lives happily ever after. But this morning, I want to take us on a journey through Noah’s life that will hopefully give us a much more realistic view of what his life was like. And I’m convinced that as we do that we’re going to be so encouraged because we’ll see that for Noah, and for us, God really was at His best when Noah’s life was at its worst.
Although we can’t possibly cover all of Noah’s life, which comprises six chapters in Genesis, I do want to briefly review several important aspects of that account before I focus on one brief section at the end of chapter 8 and the beginning of chapter 9.
TRUTH
Last week, we ended with the birth of Seth. Adam and Eve’s son of promise. at the end of Genesis 4. In chapter 5, we find the genealogy that takes us from Seth through 7 succeeding generations to the birth of Noah. The chart on the screen gives you a pretty good idea of how these generations overlap. What is really interesting to me is that Noah is actually born only 14 years after Seth dies, even though there have been 7 intervening generations.
Noah’s name means “rest” or “comfort” and ironically we’re going to find that throughout most of his life he had neither of those. Interestingly, his wife is never named in the Bible. But at the end of chapter 5 we find that Noah begins to have children when he is 500 years old and he fathers three sons – Shem, Ham and Japheth. That should probably be a clue right off the bat that Noah isn’t going to have a lot of rest and comfort in his life. Can you imagine having three sons when you’re 500 years old? Who says God doesn’t have a sense of humor?
As we get to the beginning of Genesis 6, we see that God looks upon the earth and sees that the wickedness of man is great. And in verse 6 we read that God “regretted” that He had made man. This is the first of many anthropomorphisms that we’re going to see in this account. That’s just a fancy word that means that human qualities are attributed to God. This usually occurs in one of two ways:
• God is described as having the physical characteristics of man. In the Bible we read about God “setting his face” or “stretching out his hands” or “stooping down”. Obviously since God the Father is a spirit being and doesn’t have a physical body, He doesn’t physically have a face or hands or legs, but the Biblical writers uses those descriptions to help man, with his finite mind, to better picture and understand the nature of God.
• The Bible also frequently attributes human emotions to God, like it does here when we read that God “regretted” making man. Again we need to recognize that the Biblical authors were doing their best to describe God using terms that man can understand, but we also need to understand that God’s emotions are not equivalent to ours. God isn’t sorry here in the sense that He did something wrong when He made man. Nor does the wickedness of man surprise Him or catch Him off guard.
To a large degree God’s regret here stemmed from His holiness. God knew that man’s sin deserved to be punished and that was going to require Him to pour out his wrath against that sin. And that broke his heart.
But when man was at his worst, we see God at His best. In Genesis 6:8, we see God’s grace and mercy is about to be poured out:
But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.
This is 100% God’s grace. As we’re going to see, Noah was far from sinless. So there was nothing in his life that merited God choosing him.
Sometime after Noah’s three sons are born – again we don’t know the exact time frame here – God comes to Noah and reveals His plan to destroy all flesh, with the exception of Noah and his three sons and their wives. And He gives Noah instructions for building an ark and promises to establish His covenant with Noah and his family. We’ll talk more about that covenant a little later.
I don’t think most of us have any idea of how ridiculous that must have sounded to Noah. After all, there is pretty good Biblical evidence in the creation account in Genesis 1 and 2 that it had never rained on the earth yet.
So I can just imagine Noah talking to God about this:
• “God what is rain? And what do you mean by a flood?”
• “And God, what is this ark thing you want me to build? And how is that going to save us from this flood?”
• “God what do you mean you’re going to kill off all the rest of my friends and relatives?” Maybe he wasn’t too sad about losing his mother-in-law, but there had to be some other people he liked and he couldn’t imagine God was going to kill them off.
But in spite of whatever questions he might have had, he was obedient to God. The last verse in chapter 6 tells us that Noah did all that God commanded him.
We don’t know exactly how long it took Noah to build the ark, but we can get a rough idea by what the Scriptures reveal. We know that Noah had his first son when he was 500 years old. And we know that he enters the ark when he is 600 years old. So depending on exactly how long it took for his sons to grow up and get married, it’s not unreasonable to assume Noah had between 50 and 75 years to build the ark. And can you imagine the constant ridicule that Noah and his family endured that entire time? I can guarantee that it was far worse than any of us have experienced as a result of being disciples of Jesus here in the United States.
According to Peter (2 Peter 2:5), not only did Noah and his family build the ark, but Noah was the first bi-vocational pastor – Peter calls him a preacher of righteousness.
At the beginning of chapter 7, God commands Noah and his family to enter the ark and He calls Noah and his family “righteous”. This is the first time in the Bible that anyone is called “righteous”. But as I’ve already mentioned, that certainly doesn’t mean that Noah was sinless by any means. So what was it that made Noah righteous? The author of Hebrews helps us understand the answer to that question.
By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.
(Hebrews 11:7 ESV)
There is nothing there to indicate that Noah was righteous because of his works, is there? Noah was considered to be righteous by God the same way that we are – by faith. Even though Noah had never seen rain or a flood, he believed God and demonstrated that faith by being obedient to do everything that God had commanded. Obviously Noah didn’t know about Jesus and the cross and the resurrection. But he did believe what God had revealed to him and entered into a relationship with God in which God imputed His righteousness to Noah because of that faith.
Up until now, Noah’s life had been full of trials and difficulties. But it was about to get much worse. But thankfully for Noah and his family…
When life is at its worst
God is at His best
So when Noah is 600 years old, he and his family take all the animals with them and enter the ark and God shuts them in. Immediately the rain began. At the same time the fountains of the deep burst forth. What Noah had his family experienced was far worse than the most powerful monsoon storm any of us have ever seen. The ark would not have just risen steadily but rather would have been thrown around violently in the turbulent waters.
And no doubt as the waters rose, Noah and his family would have heard the cries of those who were fighting to keep their heads above the water and save their lives. Many of those people would have been the friends and family that they had grown up with and who they had pleaded with to repent and turn to God to no avail.
The rain continued for forty days, until the highest mountain peaks were covered by water and all flesh that had once moved on the earth was dead, including all mankind with the exception of Noah and his family.
A number of people have tried to estimate the number of people who might have been alive in the earth just prior to the flood. Given the long life spans and the large families that characterized the roughly 1,600 years from the creation of Adam and Eve to the flood, that number was probably a lot more than we would expect. While there is certainly no way to calculate that number exactly, it is not unreasonable to think that the world population would have approached the 7.5 billion people who currently live on the earth.
Noah and his family remained on the ark for roughly another 11 months after the rain stopped. And just imagine what that must have been like. Being cooped up on the ark with all those animals with no way to remove their waste would have been nearly unbearable. And then think about what was going on outside the ark with the rotting flesh of billions of people and animals.
So when the ark finally settles on land and the waters dry up enough for Noah and his family and all the animals to leave the ark, what Noah and his family saw would not have been the lush green paradise that is usually pictured. Very little plant life would have survived being under water for over a year and the surrounding countryside would have been littered with the rotting, stinking carcasses of people and animals. I can’t imagine how horrific that must have been. Short of being on a battlefield full of dead bodies, I can’t imagine anything in our day that would even approach that.
But, as we’re about to see…
When life is at its worst
God is at His best
With that in mind, go ahead and turn in your Bible to Genesis chapter 8 and follow along as I read beginning in verse 20.
[Read Genesis 8:20-9:17]
Noah and his family step off the ark and see this mass of death and judgment and the very first thing they do is to worship God. Before they pitch a tent or gather food and water or otherwise tend to their own needs they build an altar and offer burnt offerings to God.
And God is pleased by that worship. Here we have another of those anthropomorphisms where God is said to have smelled the aroma of the sacrifice. The idea here is that God observes the worship of Noah and his family and is pleased. As matter of fact, God’s heart is so moved by that act of worship that He decides that even though man’s heart is inherently evil from birth, He will never again destroy the earth and strike down every creature until Jesus returns to the earth and remakes it into a new heavens and a new earth. Up until that time, the earth will continue to experience the rhythms of day and night, summer and winter and sowing and reaping.
God now speaks to Noah, beginning in verse 1 of chapter 9. It’s important to note that everything in the first 17 verses of chapter 9 is a monologue. Only God speaks here.
The first thing God does is to give Noah and his family some instructions for how they are to live. There are certainly echoes here of God’s original command to Adam to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. But there are also some subtle, but important, differences with the commands that God had given to Adam. In Genesis 1, Adam was given dominion over all the animals, but the nature of that dominion was going to change now. At creation, all the animals had come to Adam for him to name them. And even on the ark all the animals had lived in harmony with Noah and his family. But now, after the flood, the animals would live in dread of man. Those of you who like to hunt can certainly testify to that.
God also gives another instruction here that to me is the biggest proof of all that God is at His best when life is at its worst. Up until this time, it appears that man had been a vegetarian. But now God gives Noah a great gift - permission to eat a big juicy steak. The only restriction was that he was not to eat an animal that still had its lifeblood left in it. Here God specifically reveals that which has been hinted at earlier in Genesis – the fact that life – both physical and spiritual – is found in the blood.
God also reinforces the value of all life here. For the first time in the Bible God specifically established the death penalty for those who commit murder. And then once again God repeats the command to be fruitful and multiply.
And then God does something that is absolutely amazing. He initiates a covenant with Noah and all his offspring who would follow him. Although some people would consider the first Biblical covenant to have been made with Adam, the account of Noah is the first time we find the word “covenant” used in the Bible. So this would be a good time to briefly describe what a Biblical covenant is.
In the culture of the ancient Middle East, a covenant was a formal agreement in which two parties created or defined a relationship. It was much more personal than a contract since it involved loyalty and allegiance and not just a financial exchange.
• Covenants can either be unilateral, in which only one party has obligations, or bilateral, in which both parties have obligations.
• Covenants can also be conditional, in which one party’s obligations are only required to be carried out if the other party fulfill their obligations, or unconditional, in which each party’s obligations are absolute and are not dependent on what the other party does.
• Finally, most covenants are accompanied by some physical sign that ratifies the covenant. For instance, God’s covenant with Abraham was ratified by the physical act of circumcision.
The covenant that God establishes with Noah here is unilateral and unconditional. God is the one who initiates the covenant without any action or intervention at all on the part of Noah or his family. God makes a promise that He will never again destroy the earth and cut off all life with a universal flood. That promise is 100% God’s grace and is not conditioned at all on anything that man must do. In fact, God makes that covenant right after acknowledging that man’s heart is inherently evil.
And then God seals that covenant with a sign – a rainbow. Actually, as the ESV accurately translates, the word rainbow isn’t actually used here, but rather the word “bow”. It is the same Hebrew word used to describe a bow used in battle, a weapon of death and destruction. And God is often depicted in the Old Testament as a warrior with His bow. In the flood, God has bent His bow in wrath, but He now promises to hang it up in the sly where everyone can see it.
Once again, we need to consider how important this promise would have been to Noah. Remember that Noah’s only experience with rain was not pleasant at all. So without the covenant that God made here, every time that a rain cloud began to form in the sky, Noah and his family would have been terrified, if not paralyzed. And the minute the first drop of rain hit his forehead, Noah likely would have grabbed Mrs. Noah and his sons and their wives and headed for the safety of the ark. I’m reminded here of “The Croods” where every time there is danger Grug gathers up his family and ushers them back into the cave for their protection.
This covenant is just one more indication that…
When life is at its worst
God is at His best
The sign of that covenant remains with us today. And even though we don’t have the same kind of fear of the rain that Noah and his family had, the rainbow is still a reminder to us that grace triumphs over judgment. Although this word deserves judgment, we live in the age of grace where God has postponed His universal judgment until the very end of this age when the entire universe is destroyed by fire as described in 2 Peter 3.
APPLICATION
So let me close by sharing a few things we can learn from this account that I hope will really encourage you this morning:
Some encouraging truths from this passage
1. Trials do not mean God is judging me
Out of all the billions of people on the earth at the time, God chose Noah and his family to build the ark and preserve a remnant who would repopulate the world. And because Noah responded to God in faith God spared Noah and his family from death, but He did not, spare them completely from the trial of building the ark and going through the flood and then rebuilding their lives.
But the fact that Noah and His family experienced those trials did not mean that God was judging them. Instead, for them, the flood became an experience of God’s grace and an opportunity to give God glory.
The same thing is true in our lives. While it is true that God may use trials as a means of discipline in our lives when we’re disobedient to Him, that does not mean that He is subjecting us to His judgment.
This is a principle that we see throughout the Bible. Let me just share two examples – one from the Old Testament and one from the New Testament:
• When we get to the life of Job in a few weeks, we’ll see that even though Job’s so called “friends” concluded his suffering was God’s judgment due to Job’s disobedience, God had something completely different in mind. God was using that experience to prove Job’s loyalty to Him and to deepen his relationship with God.
• When the disciples see a man who had been blind from birth they immediately assume that was God’s judgment for either his sin or the sin of his parents. But Jesus told them that rather than God’s judgment, that was an opportunity for God to receive glory.
So when we go through trials, we should certainly evaluate our lives to determine if perhaps God is using those trials to discipline us in same way. If that is the case, then we need to heed that discipline and make the appropriate changes in our lives.
But if that is not the case, we just need to trust that God is using that trial in our lives to develop our faith or draw us closer to Him or to provide an opportunity for Him to receive glory. But in any case, we need to be encouraged by knowing that those trials are not God’s judgment.
2. God often takes me through trials rather than removing me from them
As we’ve seen this morning, God did not spare Noah from all of the devastating effects of the flood. Even though Noah was faithful to do everything that God had commanded, he still had to go through those flood waters and start life all over again in the midst of some horrific conditions.
But what God did do was to sustain Noah and his family through those trials. He warned Noah about the judgment to come and provided a way for him to be able to survive in the midst of that judgment by building the ark.
We often see God working this way throughout the Bible and in our lives today. God is more than capable of removing his people from trials and sometimes He does do that. We certainly see this with many of the healings that Jesus performed in His earthly ministry, for example. But it seems that just as often, God chooses, in His infinite wisdom, not to do that:
• Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego had to endure the fiery furnace, but God was present with them in the furnace and brought them through it.
• Daniel was not spared from the lion’s den, but God did protect him while he was there.
• In the years after the resurrection of Jesus, many of His followers went through tremendous trials. All but one of the apostles were killed and many others in the church suffered tremendous persecution. But God was with them in those trials and today they are all in His presence.
• Even Jesus, in His humanity, was not spared the ordeal of the cross. But His resurrection proves that God brought Him through that trial.
• Paul prayed for God to remove his “thorn in the flesh”, whatever that was. While God didn’t do that, He did promise that His grace would be sufficient to sustain Paul in that trial.
So I can’t promise that if you’re going through a really difficult trail right now that God is going to remove you from that. He may choose to do that, but there is no guarantee he will do so. But what I can promise you is that God will bring your through it if you hold tight to Him.
3. Worship is the best antidote to worry
The fact that the first thing that Noah did when he came out of the ark was to worship indicates to me that worship had consistently been a priority in his life. Instead of looking around at his circumstances and worrying about where he was going to live or about what he was going to eat and drink or even about what he was going to do with all the decaying corpses of men and animals, Noah worshiped instead.
When trials come in our lives we can choose to worship or we can choose to worship, but we can’t do both at the same time. When we make the choice to worship and focus on God, rather than on our circumstances, God gives us the ability to weather those storms of life, no matter how dark they may be.
ACTION
I want to encourage all of us the take some time this week to consider whatever trials we might be going through right now and apply all three of these truths to our own personal situation. As we think about those trials, let’s take them to God in prayer and thank Him for his grace and mercy in the midst of those trials, thank Him that even though we don’t completely understand what He is doing that we can know that those trials are not His judgment and thank Him that even if He chooses not to remove us from those trials that we trust that He will bring us through them. That’s the kind of worship that will drive worry far from us.
INSPIRATION
When life is at its worst
God is at His best
I don’t know what trials you might be going through in your life right now, but the good news is that God does. And I can promise you this, based on the Word of God that we’ve looked at this morning. The tougher the trials you are facing, the more that God pours His grace and mercy into your life because He loves you more than you could ever imagine.
Discussion questions for Bible Roundtable
1. How has your view of Noah’s life changed as a result of this morning’s message?
2. Why is it significant that God called Noah and his family “righteous” after they had been obedient to all that God commanded.
3. Some people claim that we should not eat a steak that is cooked rare because it still has the blood in it. Do you think that is what God intended in his instructions to Noah?
4. What do you think God means when He says he will “remember” His covenant with Noah when He sees the bow in the cloud? Is it possible for God to forget?
5. How should God’s covenant with Noah impact our lives today?
