The Flood

Opening and Introduction

Our text today, is the start of a story that many of us have heard from our Sunday School days. It’s the beginning of the Noah’s Ark story.

Sin had grown so great, that God decided to start over, erase the world, and begin again. It’s a story of the tragedy of sin. But it’s also, a story of mercy as one man and his family were saved.

Today, we’re going to look at the perfect world that God created for us, and how the destructive descent into sin moved God to flood the world with water.

We’ll also look at how God promised to save a small band of people from the torrent of destruction.

Finally, we’re going to examine the character of God as we look towards the mercy, that God shares with us all.

Grieving Father

The Bible starts with the miracle of creation. In six days, God created a perfect earth, with perfect plants, perfect animals and a perfect man. And after He created all of this, “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” (Genesis 1:31, ESV).

God took man and placed him in a perfect garden, a perfect home with perfect food to eat, then He created a perfect companion for Adam, in his bride Eve.

He gave them only one command to follow: “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” (Genesis 2:17, NIV 84) But the perfect world didn’t last long.

Neither Adam nor Eve followed this command. They ate what they were forbidden to touch, and with that first sin, the whole of creation fell, and the world became an imperfect place.

It wasn’t too long after that, that their children also broke the rules. Cain became jealous of his brother Abel and committed the first murder. Additional generations progressed even further into the evils of sin.

Cain’s great-great-grandson, Lamech, showed his arrogance and disregard for God’s creation, and his disrespect for life. He intimidated his wives, by admitting, and even by bragging about, killing men in acts of vengeance. He compared himself to Cain that He was the greater sinner. What a thing to brag about.

Man became unbelievably evil. The problem leading up to the Great Flood was the sin that continued to grow, with man’s heart focused on violence and corruption.

“The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.” (Genesis 6:5, NIV 84)

This “very good” earth that God created, became tainted to the point that God’s actions were both warranted, and required. As a just God, He had to respond.

The words of the Bible, don’t hint at God being sorry for creating life, or mentioning any anger in His actions. If anything, they hint at a grieving Father. God is motivated by a sense of justice as He weights the situation, and looks to erase the undesirable offenders… wipe them all out by washing the world with a deluge of water. But not everything in the world would be destroyed.

God’s Favor

There was one man who followed God. Noah was a righteous man and considered blameless, different from his peers. The Bible tells us that he walked with God. It also tells us that, “Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.” (Genesis 6:8, ESV)

God told Noah of the pending destruction that would cleanse the earth of the wickedness. Everything that Noah knew was about to change. The people he traded with, the friends in the neighborhood, the roads he traveled on… all of that was going away.

But, for Noah, there was another plan. God told Noah to build an Ark to save him and his family. And Noah did everything just as God commanded.

He found the trees and cut them down, hewed the wood to make the planks and timbers, and assembled them to build the Ark that would hold an untold number of animals, and food. The build required thousands of trees to create a structure that was more than 1 ½ football fields long, and may have taken 75 years or so to build. Something that large is going to grab the attention of your neighbors.

And that attention allowed Noah to talk to those around him, for years. The Apostle Peter called Noah “a preacher of righteousness” (2 Peter 2:5, CSB), and what did Noah preach about?

He must’ve told others what he was doing, and why he was doing it. That made the Ark a huge warning of the destruction that was coming, and a constant indication of God’s judgement on those that didn’t follow Him.

The Character of God

The story of Noah is more than a big boat and a world changing flood. It’s the story of the revealed character of God. It shows us His holy nature, His justice, and His righteousness.