What the Story of Noah Gets Wrong About God

Hello, and welcome to the Grove Church podcast. I'm Charlie Loften, the lead pastor there, and we are so glad that you are joining us. Whether you are a member and you're just catching up on a sermon that you missed or you're someone who's brand new, we are really glad that you are joining us. And if you are new in some way, and I know that a lot of people will do that, we'll listen to sermons first before they visit. I want you to know that we would love to meet you at any point.

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Good morning. My name is Mark. I'm the small groups discipleship pastor here. Excited to worship together. Excited on days that we get to open up the garage door.

Those are just good days, especially with the hard rains last night and everything. It's pretty awesome. Well, if you weren't here last week, we have just kicked off this new series called Foundations. We're walking through some of the stories from the Bible, really some of those key moments that set up the story and kind of lay the backdrop, the foundations of what this whole thing is about. And I'll be honest, a lot of these stories, we may have not heard the full story, even if we've grown up around church or, you know, there are things that VeggieTales just didn't cover, right?

The flannel board was just incomplete. Like, there's certain parts of it that maybe were shaded or maybe people didn't feel like were appropriate when you were in third grade, I don't know. But to really understand who this living God is and our relationship with Him, these stories are just really critical. And maybe none more than the one we're going look at today, the story of Noah and the flood, right? The story of God wiping out mankind.

All right, it's going to be a fun one, I promise. But is it not true that of all the stories, maybe this one is just often misunderstood, often maybe sugar coated? Because if you really just stop and look at it and think about this flood that took out mankind, like that's crazy and horrible. And yeah, it is, it's not just always a rainbow and a pretty picture of a pretty boat, you know? Like, there's something more going on here.

And I do think it often gets misunderstood, and I don't know if you're like this, have discovered that being misunderstood is one of my biggest pet peeves. I just don't like it. And I don't like it when people and when I have misunderstood who God is, for sure, but I personally just don't like being misunderstood. Whether it's something that I said and that I intended to communicate, this thing, but the way it was received was this, and I'm like, I didn't even say that. This pretty much sums up most of Terry and I's fights.

It's like, I was trying to say this, I promise. I know it came out this way, and that isn't, you know, and I just don't like I don't like being misunderstood in in the things that I say or maybe even even in my appearance at times. You know, Terry has said that I need to be real careful to smile a lot, so I'm gonna smile because evidently, I can tend to look pretty intense and serious, and that makes me look mad. And I promise I'm happy. I promise.

I just need to I just need to always be careful to show my pearly whites, I guess. But one of the biggest for me, and this has been true since the time I was little, Me and Perspiration have this relationship that's not good. And I get it rightly, my dad, he would talk about this being true of him when he was young as well. But even as a kid, I go out to play some basketball, and in two seconds, nobody else is sweating, but I'm drenched. And so everybody just looks at that and assumes I'm tired, but I'm really not tired.

I just sweat a lot. I tend to sweat a lot in the armpit area, and that would make people assume, you know, if I was wearing a colored shirt today, it would be obvious that maybe I'm nervous. And I am appropriately nervous anytime I stand up here in front of everybody, but not beltline nervous, you know. There's a limit to my nervousness. But maybe the worst is, y'all, I absolutely love spicy food, but the chilies that I like the most, the peppers that I like the most push some kind of button in this regard and just release the sweat, and it just whew.

And so I look like I'm in pain, but I promise I'm not in pain. And if I'll go all in, I have to pull back a lot of times from what I really want to order or, like, when we're at the Thai restaurant and they're saying, how many stars? And I'm like, I really want the five star, but I'll get the two. If I eat the five star, then the conversation I'm trying to have is gonna get really uncomfortable, and you're gonna be looking across the table at me like, man, are you hurting? In fact, I have had this happen more than once where somebody looked across the table and said, Mark, are you okay?

Because you don't look like you're okay. But I promise I am. And so to assume that I don't like spicy food would just be missing it. You wouldn't know me if you thought that that was true. And I feel like there are just a lot of these stories that we have just misunderstood who God is, and I imagine how frustrating that must be for him.

Like, this is what I was trying to communicate, but you're taking it this way? That's not who I am. And especially a story like this, when we're forced to ask the question, a good a good God a good God Did this? I'm sure you've seen enough life that in the lives of others, you've probably asked the question, how did a good God how was a good God awake when this happened? I know, in our life, I've been tempted to ask that question, or have asked that question sometimes.

I've yelled the question at him. Like, well, why? If you're good, then why this? And so I want us to really dig into this a bit and ask a question. When you've got a story early in the Scriptures and God kills everybody, what does that mean, and what does that tell us about Him?

So let's get into it a bit. I want to start out just giving some kind of an overview of some of the details, and then we'll come back through and pick apart some of the specifics. But we're sitting when this story happens, we're sitting about sixteen hundred years after the creation of Adam. And if you're curious the way I'm getting there, just the genealogy that's there in Genesis, that's the number that it gives us. We're about sixteen hundred years in.

The population of the world at that time is highly debated. Moderate estimates are maybe like 1,000,000,000, but chances are it was much more than that because you've also got people living to nearly one thousand years. And so you can imagine if people are living that much longer, what the number could possibly have been. You've got a lot of folks on the planet. In fact, at the first service, somebody was like, Man, I just need my mind.

And I think this was true for me too in my mind. I mean, there were a few people, right? But we're not that many pages in, so how many people could actually be there? But quite a few people were alive at the time. And what happens, it says that God sees the wickedness of man.

He sees it, and he is grieved by it. And he decides, quote, to wipe out mankind. But Noah and his family, Noah finds favor with God, and then he's given specific details from God on how he's going to survive. He's to build this huge barge, and we're talking huge like a football field and another half of a football field long. We're talking about four stories high.

And along with his wife and his three sons and their wives, they're get on this barge, and they're gonna bring male and female of every sort of bird and animal, and rain falls for forty days and forty nights. Water gets so high that it's more than 20 feet above the highest mountaintop, and it stays that way for one hundred and fifty days. And the ark then, this barge, comes to rest on a mountaintop, and Noah sends out these doves to test the height of the water to see if they can live, and finally it doesn't come back. And so Noah, they exit the ark, and he builds an altar and presents these burnt offerings to God, and it pleases God. And then it says that God establishes this covenant relationship, this covenant with Noah, never to flood the earth again.

And He sets this rainbow in the sky as a sign and a symbol of this covenant and this special relationship that He's made. It's a crazy story. I know none of that was maybe new to you. It's a crazy story, and it is a true story. And maybe you can't always do this as clearly, but historians, if you just take away the biblical account, historians find these matching details in flood stories in ancient civilizations the world over.

Nearly every continent has one, and it has a lot of the same details. Mean, y'all, this event, this big flood, this catastrophic flood, it happened. And it's just good to sit and to stop and to consider that this isn't just a fairy tale, that it happened. And I don't know if you guys remember, it was close to home because of our travels in Asia, and I had friends living in Asia at the time. But in 2004, there was this earthquake out in the Indian Ocean, and it sent a tsunami that wiped out different places.

Three hundred thousand people were killed during that flood, and if you've ever watched one of the movies or documentaries about it or saw the pictures of that time, I mean, a mass flood like that where there's that much water, it is just devastating. I personally lost a friend in a drowning accident. I mean, the reality that people die and that this water can be that destructive. And to think about what it would be for that much rain to come and for that much water, it's crazy. It's a horrible scene.

Make no mistake. So what does it really tell us about this good God? Well, let's go back. Genesis chapter six, where we're going to hang out most of the time, beginning in verse five, it says that the Lord saw the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually, and the Lord regretted that He had made man on the earth, and grieved Him. So you see what it says?

God saw it. He saw the condition of man. He saw this wickedness. I mean, that's a huge statement to think about the evil in their heart continually. And God's reaction to seeing that wickedness and that evil is He's grieved.

So God is watching, and what He's seeing, He's not liking, and it moves His heart. He is grieved by this wickedness and evil. Go on a little bit further to verse 11. Now the earth was corrupt. More description of what it was like.

And it was corrupt in His sight, so God is seeing this. It's corrupt in His sight. And the earth was filled with violence, a violent place. And God saw, again, He's looking and He sees it, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth. And God said to Noah, I have determined to make an end to all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them.

Behold, I will destroy them with the earth. A violent, wicked, evil continually plays, and God sees it, and His heart is grieved. And so I want to reframe this question a little bit, asking how could a good God do this, maybe the better question is, how can a good God allow evil to reign in His creation? If God is good, how does he just stand by and watch this violence and watch this injustice and watch this corruption, watch this wickedness, and just let it go. A good, holy God on His creation.

How is that possible? He saw it, and he acted. I've noticed, maybe parents out there maybe have noticed this, like if the kids come up and they're telling me about something that happened and how one of them did something to the other, I'm always taking that story like, yeah, all right, there's more to the story. You probably slapped him first, and then he hit you back. You're saying he hit you, but he hit you because you slapped him.

You probably started it, you know. But if I watch it and I see the whole event go down and I know what's going on, then I am compelled to step in and act. You know, I see it. I heard a story a few years ago of a this is a local story. It's secondhand to me, but you can imagine this probably happened at a private Christian school here.

A guy and a girl in high school, the school was at the church, and they found their way to the baptistry and did some inappropriate things there. Administration called in the parents, and they were telling the parents what had happened, and the parents weren't really buying it. Not my kid. My kid wouldn't do that. And so the administration, there's a video camera on that baptistry, and so they just rolled in the TV and hit play on the video and then walked out.

Well, when you see when you see it, now what do you do? So those yeah, those parents now are convinced. My kid my kid would do that. Yeah, they would. And now whatever the punishment that needs to happen will happen.

Justice will happen now we see it. God sees it all. He sees what all was happening here. He sees what all is happening in your life when you don't think anybody else is watching. He sees what's happening at your work.

Like, he sees it. Something else I was thinking about with this, that if you've got darkness in a place and you want to light it up, darkness darkness has to leave, you can't just have darkness and light in the same place. Sometimes we talk about this maybe like this, like, well, God's good, but then He also allows the bad. And so somehow the two can exist together, but they don't. Good and bad corrupts it.

You to remove the bad to have the good. And while I was preparing for this Sunday, most of you know our house burned down a few months ago, this was Thursday, Friday were the days that we had them come in and bring it down to the foundation. And so I'm sitting across the street in my neighbor's yard watching my house come down while I'm looking at the story of Noah, and this a thought I had. You know, at this point, that house is burnt ash and mold and you know, there's big hole in the roof. It's just nasty.

Terry and I went in there Monday, and it's just It's it's the thing the thing needs to come down. Like, needs to it needs to go away. And you don't just come in and put a new house and start building on top of all of that ash and nastiness. Right? Like, you remove it.

The two don't exist together. A good God and this sort of evil don't exist together, and it needs to be removed. There are several places in the New Testament that there are references back to this event. One of those is in Matthew chapter 24. It says, For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.

Matthew 24 · chapter mention

For as in those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and being given in marriage until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away. So it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. So there's this picture of, hey, when Jesus returns, it's gonna be similar to this story. The wickedness on the earth, the justice of Almighty God, and the way that it's gonna happen in a way that nobody sees it coming, you know, nobody's really thinking that they're ready for it. Like, this wickedness is just gonna go on forever, and there's never gonna be that day of justice.

Y'all, if God looked upon the earth in this time and saw this wickedness and this corruption and this evil and his heart was grieved, you tell me, what does He feel like today, this moment? And let us not be tempted to just say, what? Man, yeah, that out there is really bad. I hope he does something about that out there. What about in here?

What about in you? What about in me? God's heart is still grieved by evil and wickedness and corruption and these things that are that are true. That's the character of our God. And it is insane, if you really think about it, that a good, holy, and just God would hold back His justice and His wrath, that He would hold it back even a moment.

A good God. Right? And you look at things out there and you go, Man, that's horrible. Justice needs to happen there. And why isn't justice coming quick enough?

I saw something in the news this week that it felt like it's taking forever for justice to come against something that needs justice. But it's always easy for me to point out there and not to point right here. What if justice came today? How much of that is in me? Last year, the twins, which I maybe there's a lot of people making fun of me about this, and I just thought there was one person.

But I usually say the twins, and the twins are about to turn 12, and they're here now, so I'm going to start going, the twins, Jack and Darcy. Last year, we were going to Jack's football practice, and Darcy always comes along. And we're walking up to football practice, but the high school team was still finishing up their practice about this time of year. And there was a ninth grader over there, a little bitty guy, and he was flying a drone and filming the practice. And Darcy came in bouncing her volleyball around, and it bounced over and it hit the guy.

And he turned around and yelled at her and said all these expletives at her, And I wasn't standing right there, but she ran over to me, and she said she was just bawling. This guy, and he said that word. And so I I walked over there to him, and you would have been really proud of me. I was I was under control. And I said, hey, man.

She is is saying that you said these things to her. Yeah. That's not appropriate. Right? He said, yeah, that's not appropriate.

And I said, well, tell you what, we'll let it all go. Just admit to her that that's inappropriate and that you're sorry. He said, no. And I thought to myself, I mean, don't know who he's looking at, but I was holding back all of this anger, and I was keeping it in a nice little box. Did he not see that it was about to release upon him?

Like, he not see what I think he should be seeing? So So I said, well, man, you really need to do this or it's gonna become really uncomfortable for you. And he said, what are you gonna do? And so then I started to to step forward, then another coach came over and said, hey, maybe I should take this. And I said, yeah, maybe you should.

And I walked off. Charlie's talked about pastor on the front news of the newspaper is probably going to be sex or money, but for me, it's probably assault. So just prepare yourselves. But this day, this coach saved us. But yeah, I mean, this guy is my little girl, and I was I mean, he deserves to be punished, and I'm holding it back.

Imagine the grace and the mercy, the love of this great, good God, that one more day He leaves the door open for somebody to turn, place faith in Jesus, and know Him, and have life in Him, and to be saved from the coming wrath. One more moment, one more day. That's good God. But to just overlook the offense, to overlook the wickedness, to just let it go unchecked, that is not a good God. So this incredible God that we worship, He holds the two in balance.

And then verse eight, I'm going go back and look at a little bit about what he says to Noah. He says, But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. And these are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God.

Did you catch it? He's talking about all these things that are going to happen and the wickedness, and then he says, But Noah. Noah found favor, not that he deserved favor, not that he earned favor, but he found it. God was looking, look, in the eyes of the Lord. Again, God is looking and he sees Noah.

Noah is walking with God, Noah is leaning in to know God and to be in relationship with Him, and he finds favor in his eyes. Again, the twins act like I'm supposed to just buy them ice cream because they clean their room, that's the way you don't get ice cream in my house. You clean your room because you clean your room. If daddy decides in his benevolent care to give you ice cream, then, yeah, daddy is incredible. But you don't deserve ice cream.

Right? Sorry. I don't want to give that picture of God. But yeah, that's the way dad feels anyway. I give the ice cream.

You don't earn the ice cream. And it sure does help if when I go to run my errands, you jump in the Jeep with me, that you're walking with dad, that you're doing life with dad, that you're leaning into the relationship with dad. You're probably going to get some ice cream. See that, and my response to that is to the fact this is God Noah's walking with God, and God, guess what? He sees Him and He finds favor in His eyes.

And then in verse 17, it says, God says, For behold, I will bring a flood of water upon the earth and destroy all flesh, which is in the breath of life under heaven. Everything that is on the earth shall die, but I will establish My covenant with you, talking to Noah, and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, your sons, wives with you. Do you catch it? He's going to establish this covenant with Noah, in both places, he uses the word but, he's talking about His justice and what's going to happen in the flood, but then He says, But Noah, but I'm going to establish this covenant with you. This contrast word, which just Bible study, if you haven't figured this out yet, when you're looking at your Bible, man, I have just found that the buts, the contrasts, when God said this and then He says this.

The biggest example of this for me is the clearest gospel verse that talks about who Jesus is and what He does for us in Romans six twenty three. The wages of sin is death. And that's what it starts with. This true statement that can't get any worse, sin's penalty. What you earn from the sin, not sins from sin in your life, is death.

But and the minute you see but, you're like, all right then, because whatever was as bad as the first part is, that's how good the second part's going to be. But the free gift of God is life, eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord by faith in Jesus. And so you've got this horrible, your sin has done this, but God, in His great mercy and grace, has done this in Jesus. And you see it all the way back here with Noah, this is what's going to happen because of the wickedness, but God in His goodness is going to establish this covenant with this dude Noah, who ain't nothing special except he he's the guy that God chooses. He's walking with him, and he finds favor in his eyes.

Y'all, our good God is looking to bless and not to curse. He is. Second Chronicles chapter 16, it says this, one of my favorite verses, For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro I don't ever say to and fro, but it sounds cool in a Bible verse, right? His eyes run to and fro throughout the whole earth to give strong support to those whose heart is blameless towards Him. This is what the eyes of the Lord do.

2 Chronicles 16 · chapter mention

He's looking. He sees this wickedness, and he is going to respond because he is a just God. And at the same time, he is looking. He's looking for the faithful one. He's looking for the one that would truly trust him.

He's looking for the one whose heart would be blameless so he can he can support him. He saw the the wickedness and evil, corruption and violence, but he's looking for that faithful person. And in Genesis chapter six twenty two, we learn some more about Noah. It says, Noah gets all these things that he's supposed to do, and it says, verse 22, Noah did this. He did all that God had commanded him.

Obedience. Shocking, especially if you consider. I mean, consider the situation. He's being asked to build this massive boat in the middle of this I mean, this time, all this energy, imagine the ridicule he was taking from everybody around him. And then it says it again, chapter seven, verse five, And Noah did all that the Lord had commanded him.

Obedience. Noah obeyed. And then, again, a New Testament reference back to this, Hebrews chapter 11, and this great chapter about the people of faith, the people who really, even though they couldn't see what was going on, they believed God and they acted on it, It uses Noah as an example: By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household, and by this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith. Noah is this example of what it looks like to see and to believe. Noah believed in this good God, and he acted on that belief.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

He believed it so much so that he took action. He had faith. And we also learn from Hebrews 11, this is the way that you please God, this is what it is. The way that we wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God in Christ Jesus is by we take that gift by faith, by seeing and believing it. We take it.

Terry and I are getting to that age where you're supposed to go to the doctor and get all these things checked out, and there is a vast difference between she and I. I don't know if this is true in your household, but she actually goes to the doctor and gets them all checked out. I do not as of yet. I believe that things happen and you probably need to get things checked out, but not so much so that I have made doctor's appointments. There is evidence of true faith when action is taken.

Noah believed, and the evidence that he believed wasn't just that he said he believed. Noah built an ark, y'all. Again, a football and a half long and four stories high, Noah acted. And then there's how the story ends, chapter nine, and I won't read all the way through this section, chapter nine, verse 11 to 17, but it talks about God, how He establishes this covenant, and He mentions the word, uses the word covenant six times in this little section. The rainbow is the sign and the symbol of the covenant that He's making, that He's never going to flood the earth again.

And we're going to see as we walk through these stories, this word used over and over again, and this picture of God making these covenants. And when we're talking about covenants, we're not just talking about a business transaction or something that doesn't have a whole lot of depth or meaning. These are these relational commitments, and God is saying, here, I'm not going to do this again, and I'm going to leave this symbol so that you know this is who I am, a really sacred and permanent bond of relationship. This is the God we serve. He makes and He keeps covenants.

So if you see me out in a restaurant and I'm sweating really bad, just know I'm really enjoying myself. If you're tempted to look at things and misinterpret who God is, stop for a second and think about this story a little bit, about how His goodness and His justness, how His mercy and His wrath, how these two things, they do work together or else God would not be good. His goodness demands it. And Noah, great in faith, choosing to walk with God. Not perfect, because as the story goes on, then he grows a vineyard and he overserves himself and he ends up lying drunk, naked in his tent, and all kinds of bad things happen.

So not that Noah's perfect, but in spite of Noah's imperfections, he's got a really, really incredible God. He's got a really, really incredible you have a really, really incredible God that deserves for us to believe in him big, to trust him big, and to walk with him, and to look at the sin in our life and to realize that it's not not only is it hurting us and hurting others, but it's grieving the heart of our holy, good God. Alright. Let me let me pray for us. Father, I do.

I think there's just so much depth. We hear just even scratching the surface here, making our best attempt to try to understand. But I think these stories are just so rich. So would you, for each of us, really bring attention to those things that you want to teach us about your character and your nature and our relationship with you and these covenants and how vital they are and how we can rest in them and in your promises and in your goodness. Father, what it looks like to chase you and to believe in you and to act on that on those beliefs.

Father, would you just grow us so much in these days this summer as we walk through this series.

Their And of a of get of more so a dealing with culture or theology, those kinds of things, you can check out our Cultivate podcast, which is on the same feed, however you found this particular podcast. So again, this is Charlie, the lead pastor at The Grove, and thank you so much for joining us.