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.
There are few things in the Word of God that God pleads with us to avoid, more than union with unbelievers. He said in Deut. 7, "When the Lord your God brings you into the land, “: . . .Do not intermarry with them. . .for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods."
In the course of time the whole line of Seth was swallowed up by the secularism and the sin of the line of Cain. But praise God, one man stood up, like Enoch before him, to be the exception to this rotten rule, and the Bible tells us three things about his salvation from a depraved world.
First, he was saved by grace (6:8).
, Noah found "grace” (KJV) in the eyes of the Lord (6:8). As we have seen in the case of Adam and Enoch, this means that Noah did not come to God but God, in grace, came to Noah.
But he received grace through faith (Heb. 11:7). The Bible says, "By faith he condemned and became heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.” .
Third, he evidenced faith with works (6:9). The Bible says, Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God (6:9).
James 2:21 says, "Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he offered his son Isaac upon the altar.”
Good works, or what Paul and Jesus calls "fruit,” (Gal. 5 / Matt. 7) are the evidence of salvation.
The word "blameless” does not mean moral perfection. It simply means that as one who walked with God, Noah carried the sins of each day to God and asked for forgiveness and deliverance. First John one, written to Christians (5:13) says if anyone claims to have no sin the truth is not in him. That is John’s nice way of calling him a liar.
II. SHIPBUILDING IN A DOOMED WORLD
(Gen. 6:13-7:9; I Pet. 3:20-22)
THE LAW OF "KARMA"
God does not view the wickedness of the world as an indifferent spectator. He sees it as a moral ruler whose authoritv is being challenged. The flood, which is but a foretaste of the flood of fire at the return of the Lord (2 Pet. 3:10), is God's way of saying, "The wages of sin is death / Whatever a man sows, that shall he reap.” (Rom. 5 / Galatians 6:7-8)
In our pleasure-mad society we forget about God and any responsibility we have towards him. . But God has built this universe in a way that judgments thunder into our lives and remind us we are accountable. Homosexuals come out of the closet and not long after that AIDS came out of the South American rain forest.
Sow an act and you reap a habit
Sow a habit and you reap a character
Sow a character and you reap a destiny
THE LOVE OF GOD
But this is not the whole story.
God also sees our wickedness as a distraught father whose heart is being broken. The NIV says, “His heart was filled with pain” (6.6). It grieved God to see what man had become. I don’t understand how emotions like this apply to an eternal, unchangeable God, but I praise God for them because they show me He cares! He loves! He feels!
That is why He came to Noah and said, "I want you to build me a big boat." Why? Because God wanted to save the world He had made. He wanted to start over with Noah.
Matthew Henry says, "God was sorry that he made man, but we never find Him sorry that He redeemed man."
Now the important thing is not the boat, this huge floating box, designed by God, and built by Noah, capable of surviving the flood and carrying thousands of animals.
The important thing is that what God provided, Noah accepted. When the New Testament looks back at the ark it sees it as a preview of the cross and our baptism into the death of Jesus (I Pet. 3:21-22). Moses was saved in an ark. God met man at the mercy seat on top of the ARK of the covenant. The God of judgment designs the ark that will survive it. And Jesus is the sinner’s ark.
III. SERMONS TO A DYING WORLD (2 Pet. 2:5; 3:1-7)
But Noah was not only a builder, Peter tells us he was a preacher. By his godly life he "condemned the world" (Heb. 11:7) but with his lips he sought to save the world as a "preacher of righteousness" (2 Pet. 2:5).
1. His Preaching Was Natural.
Friends, it is not enough that we are saved, that we and our family are saved; that we and our circle of Christian friends are saved. The most natural thing in the world is share what we have in Christ with others.
We need to get out of the "Ship of Zion" and get into the lifeboats and start to "rescue the perishing." The great tragedy of the modern church is that we do not witness to others and we see nothing wrong with it.
2. His Preaching Was Probational (6:3).
The Bible says, "Then the Lord said, 'My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years."' (NIV)
It was God speaking through Noah for 120 years, striving with men to repent. In the days of the old west a condemned man would sit in his cell and listen to the construction of the gallows outside his window.
For 120 years condemned men listened to the construction of his ark of salvation and did nothing about it. That same God has constructed a cross between us and the judgment of eternity, but for 2000 years men walk past it every day as if it were not there.
3. His Preaching Was Factual (2 Pet. 3).
The people in Noah's day scoffed at the idea of judgment by a flood, just as people today scoff at the idea that Jesus Christ is corning in a judgment by fire.
This is the message of Simon Peter. What an awful scene it must have been when the rain began to hit the ground and God put Noah and his family in the ark! Then they knew the old fool's preaching was true.
What an awful scene it will be when lost men and women die, and wake up in hell; or when Christians are taken up in the rapture (I Thess. 4) and the lost cry out for the mountains to hide than (Rev. 6). Then they will know those “fools” listening to “fools” who preachewere right.
Listen to these strong words from Paschal:
“If we who believe in God find out in the end that we are wrong, then all we have given up are a few hours spent in church. If those who do not believe in God find out in the end that they are wrong, they have made one hell of a mistake.”
4. His Preaching Was Successful.
It is not quite right to call Noah's preaching a failure. He saved himself. He saved his family and he saved the human race. It is not always evident what God is doing through our efforts.
IV. SHAME IN A DELIVERED WORLD (Gen. 8-9)
For one year and ten days (Leupold, Genesis) Noah and his family were in the ark. Picture the scene with the beauty of the bright sunlight, the magnificence of the rainbow across the heavens, and the signs of death all around them.
First came WORSHIP (8:20) as Noah built an altar. Next came God's WELCOME (9:12-17) as he used the rainbow as a sign of His promise never to destroy the earth again until the end of time.
Next came a WARNING. Since God had killed all mankind, He wanted Noah and his family to know that human life was still precious and valuable to Him.
He instituted then and there the principle of capital punishment, saying, "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man" (9:6).
Sadly, however, the next thing was an act of WICKEDNESS (9:18-29). Noah got drunk and as drunks will do, lost all control, and lay naked in his tent. His son Ham looked at him and instead of covering his father up, couldn't wait to run and tell his brothers.
The other two boys took a sheet, backed up to their father so as not to see him, and covered his shame. When Noah learned what Ham had done, he pronounced on him the curse of slavery.
The foul corrupt nature of man survived the earth's baptism and it survives ours. Noah's drunkenness, Abraham's giving up Sara to adultery, David's adultery and Peter's cursing all testify that we have to fight sin all the way to the grave.
And even though we usually condemn vile sins such as drunkenness, the worst sins are those committed by people like Ham, who do not get drunk, but loved to look down on and talk about those who do.
God help us, even when we, by the power of God, conquer sins like drunkenness and profanity, we are still subject to the greater sin of self righteousness. This should not drive us to despair but to the ark of the cross where sinners are accepted and perfected until they are made perfect in heaven.
