Ships Of The Bible

We love cruising! We took our first cruise in 2007 and decided that as long as we were able to, that we were going to cruise every year. And we have, mostly Caribbean but one Alaskan and we are looking at the possibility of a Baltic Sea cruise, maybe in 2019.

And cruising seems to be a natural fit for us, both of my parents and Angela’s mom come from an island and I come from a long line of sea farers, at least my father and grand father and my great grandfather were ship’s captains so maybe it’s not that long.

I first went to sea when I was fifteen, and after four years of throwing up decided that might not be the best place for me to spend the rest of my life.

Lord Nelson had advice for people like me, because he reportedly said that “The best cure for seasickness is to sit under a tree.”

I’ve tried it and it works.

But even with sea sickness it’s hard to break the allure of the of the sea, it’s hard to get the sea out of your blood my office is decorated in nautical stuff and I have a plaque on my office wall with the words of Psalm 107:23-24 Those who go down to the sea in ships, Who do business on great waters, They see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep.

So coming home this week ships were on my mind and what’s on my mind usually ends up beoming a message and so my first thought was to preach on the ships of the Bible, you know worship, fellowship and discipleship. But then I thought, “no that’s really stretching it a too much”

And so I came back to the Psalm 107, which is a poem about those whom God has touched and redeemed. Verse two asks this question Psalm 107:2 Has the Lord redeemed you? Then speak out! Tell others he has saved you from your enemies.

And then David, the author of this Psalm goes on to talk about various ways God delivered his people, the people He redeemed, and one of the things he referred to was, those who went to sea in ships. And I began to think about different instances in the bible where people of God were on ships, or involved with ships.

Probably the first time a boat of any kind is mentioned in God’s word is way back in the book of Genesis, which is the very first book of the Bible. It’s a story that most if not all of you are familiar with and that is the story of Noah and the ark. And the entire story is summed up in one verse in the Book of Hebrews in the New Testament. It is here that we read this account.

Hebrews 11:7 It was by faith that Noah built an ark to save his family from the flood. He obeyed God, who warned him about something that had never happened before. By his faith he condemned the rest of the world and was made right in God’s sight.

So the first ship in the Bible was The Ship of Redemption. The world was going to hell in a handbasket, so to speak and God spoke to the only righteous person on earth, a man named Noah. And he commanded Noah to build an Ark, which would save his life as well as the life of his wife, his three sons and their wives. And as a bonus the ark would preserve a sample of each species of animal alive at that time. You’ve heard the story. And there are a couple of things we can learn from the story.

The first thing that Noah had to do and we need to do We Need To Admit Our Need. It must have been a tough one for Noah to believe, he had never seen a great flood before, and why would a loving God destroy the world? And besides that, what God was talking about was impossible.

I’m pretty sure that Noah must have had a whole list of objections, but eventually he had to say “Ok, I’m not that good of a swimmer, this is a pretty rotten world that we are living in, so maybe I better do something”

Each person here today who is a believer, who has come to the point that they have accepted Jesus Christ not only as their saviour but also as the manager of their life had to first come to the place that they acknowledged their need. That they realized that the Bible was right when it said in Romans 3:23 For all have sinned; all fall short of God’s glorious standard. And tougher yet they had to acknowledge the truth of Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is death. . .