Noah A (Pre-Flood)

Good morning.

As Doug said, welcome back to everybody who served at camp this week.

Heard it was great. Heard it was also exhausting.

So I will try not to be too boring this morning.

But if you need to fall asleep, no one's going to judge you for that.

Just try not to snore, if at all possible.

So let's jump into the Word of God this morning, starting in Genesis 6, 9.

These are the family records of Noah. Noah was a righteous man,

blameless among his contemporaries.

Noah walked with God and Noah fathered three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and the earth was filled with wickedness.

God saw how corrupt the earth was for every creature had corrupted its way on the earth.

Then God said to Noah, I have decided to put an end to every creature for the

earth is filled with wickedness because of them.

Therefore, I'm going to destroy them along with the earth.

Make yourself an ark of gopher wood. Make rooms in the ark and cover it with

pitch inside and outside.

This is how you are to make it. The ark will be 450 feet long,

75 feet wide, and 45 feet high.

You are to make a roof finishing the sides of the ark to within 18 inches of the roof.

You are to put a door in the side of the ark. Make it with lower,

middle, and upper decks.

Understand that I am bringing a flood, floodwaters on the earth to destroy every

creature under heaven with a breath of life in it.

Everything on earth will die.

But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark with your

sons, your wife, and your sons' wives.

You're also to bring into the ark two of all living creatures,

male and female, to keep them alive with you.

Two of everything, from the birds according to their kind, from the livestock

according to their kinds, and from the animals that crawl on the ground according

to their kinds, will come to you so that you can keep them alive. There we go.

Take with you every kind of food that is eaten. Gather it as food for you and for them.

And Noah did this. He did everything that God had commanded him.

Then the Lord said to Noah, Noah, enter the ark, you and all your household,

for I have seen that you alone are righteous before me in this generation.

You are to take with you seven pairs, a male and his female,

of all the clean animals, and two of the animals that are not clean,

a male and his female, and seven pairs, male and female, of the birds of the

sky, in order to keep offspring alive in the face of the whole earth.

Seven days from now, I will make it rain on the earth 40 days and 40 nights,

and I will wipe off from the face of the earth every living thing I have made.

And Noah did everything that the Lord commanded him.

Noah was 600 years old when the flood came and water covered the earth.

So Noah, his sons, his wife, and his son's wives entered the ark because of the flood waters.

From the clean animals, unclean animals, birds, and every creature that crawls

on the ground, two of each, male and female, entered the ark with Noah,

just as God had commanded him.

Seven days later, the waters of the flood came on the earth.

Let's pray as we begin this morning.

Jesus, thank you for bringing us here to hear your word, to hear what you have to say to us.

God, I pray that you would speak clearly to our hearts today.

Pray that we'd hear what you have to say to us, that we could put it into practice.

Jesus, we need you. We need you every day. And today's no exception.

So we thank you, God. Would you bless us today in the name of Jesus? Amen.

So, earlier this year, there was a podcast that came out, the Joe Rogan Experience.

And I mean, the podcast has been going on for a while, but he released an episode earlier this year.

And in this episode, there was a guy named Wesley Huff.

And if you don't know who Joe Rogan is, he's this TV personality that I think

when this podcast released, he had the number one podcast in the world.

I think it's like number two or three now, but millions of people listening to this.

And he has this guy, Wesley Huff, on the podcast. Wesley Huff is a Christian

apologist, and he had heard him on a previous podcast and said,

well, I got to have this guy on my show.

So, Joe has Wesley on the show, and they talk about all these ancient documents

and Christianity in the ancient world, and it's super fascinating.

It's over three hours long, if you

want to go listen to it. There is some language. Joe's not a Christian.

And so, just be aware. Be aware of that. But it was really fascinating.

It was a really fascinating podcast.

And towards the end of it, Wesley posed a question to Joe.

He said, what do you think of the historical Jesus?

What do you think? And Joe had an interesting answer.

He said, like just the concept of that is interesting to people because what

it can do to people is offer them a very unique way to change the way they feel about the world itself.

And if you do follow that, I know a lot of Christians are, hardcore Christians

are some of the nicest people you'll ever meet in your life.

So it does work. You're right. Like if you do live like a Christian and you

do follow the principles of Christ, you will have a richer, more love-filled life. So it is true.

Interesting, an interesting take from Joe. And I think he's onto something when he says there.

He's onto something about belief and the realization of a necessary obedience to God and his ways.

And that when we live that way, we might just have a richer, more love-filled life.

So, however, the passage that we read this morning is kind of a dark one.

This is not the picture of Noah that we read in our kids' Bibles with the smiling

animals, you know, hanging out the windows of the ark, you know,

a rainbow on a really nice sunny day in crystal clear blue waters with dolphins jumping around it.

You know, that's not what we get in the story this morning, is it?

No, we got death and destruction and judgment.

And at the center of that is this guy, Noah. So, let's begin with Noah and who he is.

So, we're told that Noah was a righteous man, blameless among his contemporaries.

Noah walked with God, and Noah fathered three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

So, Noah's a dad, and he's also righteous, and he's blameless, and he walks with God.

And the way that this is written for us is really, it escalates as it goes.

So, we have this escalating language of who Noah is. So, we might say it today

in our vernacular that, hey, Noah, he's a really great guy, just a really great guy.

Everybody really likes him. I mean, you can't really find anything wrong with a guy. He's just great.

I mean, he follows the rules. He does everything he's supposed to do.

And if you want to know somebody who knows God, Noah's the guy you want to talk to.

I mean, he knows God. You have questions about God, go to Noah. He knows him.

So, we have this idea of Noah walking with God, which is a callback to Enoch,

if you remember a couple of weeks ago in our genealogy series that Enoch walked

with God and then God took him, right? He kind of escaped death.

And so we have this picture of Noah here and this special relationship with

God. It's kind of calling us to see that, that special relationship with God.

Noah's name, we know that names have been important in the book of Genesis.

Noah's name means rest. So in some way, God is going to be bringing rest to

the world through Noah, it looks like.

So, we're introduced to this man, Noah, and in the midst of a culture that,

again, as we look back last week, was wicked and evil, and God said that he's

going to wipe mankind who he created off the face of the earth.

So, interesting setup for where we are with Noah. And we're told in this,

in the midst of this story that Noah, he was, three times we're told in this

passage that Noah is obedient. He does what God commands.

We have that in verse 622 of verse 7-5 and 7-9.

It says, and Noah did this. He did everything that God commanded him.

And Noah did everything that the Lord commanded him.

And then in reference to God giving him some commands, it says,

Noah did just as God had commanded him.

Three times we're given this phrase. And anytime we see something repetitive

like this in scripture, it's there for a reason.

We're supposed to see it. It's supposed to stick out to us.

And so, number one, I think it's supposed to stick out to us because of language

that's used. He did everything that God commanded him.

Everything, not most of it, but everything.

That seems to be the standard that God is giving us, to do everything that he commands.

And why would that be important though? Let's jump back. We've been in this Genesis series.

Let's jump back towards the beginning, Adam and Eve, right? So,

why, do you remember why Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden?

Disobedience, right? So they were told, hey, you've got all these trees,

all these fruit trees, everything you can eat in the garden here,

eat from all of it, except for one tree, right? Just one tree.

Genesis 3, 6, and the woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful

to look at, and it was desirable for obtaining wisdom.

So she took some of its fruit and ate.

And then in Genesis 6-2, the sons of God saw that the daughters of mankind were

beautiful and they took any they chose as wives for themselves.

Do you see the connection that's happening there in these two verses?

See, we're given this that Genesis 3-6 just continues into Genesis 6-2.

And we have this, that the fruit was delightful to look at, that the daughters

of mankind were beautiful or delightful to look at. So she took and they took.

We see this pattern of disobedience that's happening that we see what we wanna see.

We see something that's desirable and then we take it for ourselves.

This picture is given to us in Genesis. It's very interesting in that way.

And so as we look at this passage this morning, I wanna look about several areas

of our lives that we see here in scripture, in this scripture,

that challenge our obedience to God.

How are we challenged in our obedience to God that tempt us to see something

that we might like that might be delightful to us in the way that we look at

it and are tempted to reach out and take it?

So we're going to begin here in Genesis 6 verse 11.

Genesis 6:11

Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and the earth was filled with wickedness.

God saw how corrupt the earth was for every creature had corrupted its way on the earth.

Then God said to Noah, I have decided to put an end to every creature for the

earth is filled with wickedness because of them.

Therefore, I am going to destroy them along with the earth.

Now in this passage here, we see there's actually a word that's used several times in here.

We have the word corrupt, we have the word corrupt, and we have the word corrupted.

It's used three times really quickly. And actually it's in the scripture four times.

This word destroy right here, it's the same word.

Corrupt, corrupt, corrupted, destroyed.

It's the same word in the Hebrew language. It's a word that means corrupt or

destroy or ruin or annihilate.

It's this idea of destruction that's happening there.

And so the implication of the scripture is yes, God is going to destroy humanity.

He's going to destroy everything.

But it's also saying that God is completing the destruction that mankind has

already begun on the earth.

They're just walking. It's what mankind is walking right into, this destruction.

And I think this can be helpful when we view judgment, because I think a lot

of times we view judgment as this fickle God, you know, who's up there in the

sky somewhere, and he just kind of gets tired of his humanity,

gets tired of his creation. And so he's like, I think I'll just get rid of you.

Just kind of tired of you. But that's not what the scripture is saying.

Instead, it's saying he's giving them over to what they're already heading for,

to what they're already doing, destruction.

And in the midst of this culture that is destroying itself, we have Noah.

It's our first challenge to living an obedient life with God.

So obedience within culture, being obedient to God within culture.

And so when we look at the story of the ark, we can take this in several different

ways when we think about it. Because you've got this ark that's being built.

Noah is building this ark and he's building it in a place where they might not

have, you know, normally been building massive ships all of the time, right?

And so with that, we could have a culture that is coming along and giving him

a hard time about it, you know, just making fun of him.

And so we have this theme of standing strong in our faith in the midst of persecution.

And we can look at that, that's a biblical narrative that's in the Bible in

many places, standing strong in the midst of persecution.

But I want to look at how Jesus looks at this culture. What does he have to say about it?

So, we're going to take a look at Luke 17.

And the context for the scripture we're about to read in Luke 17 is Jesus is

talking about the final judgment and what's coming and how suddenly it's going to come upon us.

So, that's kind of the context of where he's talking about that here.

And he says, just as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be in the days of the Son of Man.

Okay, so what do we know about the days of Noah? What's what we've been talking about, right?

They're wicked, they're evil, and I mean, as Doug said last week,

their minds were nothing but evil

all the time, right? So we have this culture, so we've got that. Cool.

Thank you, Jesus. Can you please continue now?

All right, so Jesus says, people went on eating, drinking, marrying,

and giving in marriage until the day Noah boarded the ark and the flood came and destroyed them all.

Eating, drinking, marrying, and giving in marriage.

I don't get it. Why is this a problem?

I mean, we do this all day, right? We do this all the time.

What's the big deal with this? And Jesus, Jesus, we got to, Jesus, hold on.

You participated in all of these things. So Jesus, why are you now telling us

that these things are wrong? What's the deal?

We know, we know you're feasting, you're eating with people and you're giving

out all this wisdom and these amazing things.

You turned water into wine, drinking at a wedding.

You gotta help us out, Jesus. What do you say in here?

What is really going on? And this is what Jesus does a lot of times.

He wants us to wrestle with what he's saying because we start to get the heart

of what he's saying when we wrestle with it.

So he gives us another story that's of similar nature to this one.

And then he jumps down into verse 33 here, where he says, whoever tries to make

his life secure will lose it.

And whoever loses his life will preserve it.

Again, though, what's he saying?

Because security doesn't sound that bad either. Living a secure life?

See, the question that Jesus is really giving to us here for us to wrestle with

is not if we're putting our security in something else or someone,

but who or what is the real source of our security?

That's what we're to wrestle with. That's what we're to look at.

He's hitting us between the eyes with what these things mean to us.

What is it? What is it that adds security and comfort to our lives that we put our trust in?

Where is it that we say, if we could just achieve this, then I'll finally have made it in life?

Or that we tell ourselves that's where true happiness is. So that's where I

really want to be is over there.

This is what really fulfills me, you know, is where I want to be.

If only I could have, or I could be, or I could do, then all those stresses

that keep me up at night would probably go away.

Is it an amount that we could have in our bank accounts? Certain home that we

really want that would make our lives better?

A promotion at work or that job that we've really been wanting?

Maybe it's a relationship that we've been dreaming about being in. What is it?

And maybe you've reached it. Maybe you've hit where you want to be in life.

What is that thing that you just can't lose?

What is that thing in your life? So when we think about it that way,

when we start looking at it that way, it can be just about anything.

It's not just eating and drinking and marrying. It can be anything in our lives.

What is it? What is that thing for us? And this is the culture that Noah's living in.

It's that same deal of reaching out, seeing something as desirable and taking it.

I think we do this as well. We take, and we take, and we consume,

and we consume, and we consume.

And it's our American culture, of course. We have other cultures that we live in as well, right?

We have Florida culture, we have Ocala culture, we have a church culture that we live in.

We have family cultures, we have work cultures that are all around us.

We have cultures that are telling us things, telling us truths that we're to believe all the time.

In Matthew five, we have this section of scripture called the Beatitudes,

where Jesus talks about the way that we should be living our lives,

the way that we should look at our lives and live them.

And he says this, he says, you have heard that it was said to your ancestors.

That's how he starts it. In other words, this is the truth that your culture has been telling you.

This is the truth your culture has been telling you. Do not murder,

do not commit adultery, do not divorce, love your neighbor, hate your enemy.

And then he follows it up with, but I tell you.

And so we know that again, he's gonna tell us something different.

But Jesus, what do you have to tell us? Because some of these things are in the 10 commandments.

Do not murder. What else could you possibly be telling us here?

He says, but I tell you, everyone who is angry with his brothers is subject to judgment.

Anyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery. Love your enemies.

See, he's doing it again to us. He's doing it again. We have to wrestle with

what he's really saying here.

See, we think that our obedience means our behaviors, but Jesus is going after

our hearts because it's our hearts that are the source of our behaviors.

What's going on in our hearts is what's giving us the actions that we're actually taking.

And so we can say, we can look at the culture around us and say,

you know, no, I don't really need what the culture's offering.

That truth of the culture is telling me, I don't really need that.

That's not really who I am. That's not really what I want. But what are our

hearts saying in that moment?

What are they saying? Are they in alignment with God and his ways or do they

really want what our culture wants?

Money, sex, fame, power.

Are we really that different than the age of Noah?

The reality is that we are obedient people. We are obedient people.

The question is, what is it that we are obeying?

What is that thing?

Obedience in the midst of our culture is hard. We have truths flying at us from

all sorts of places. What are we going to obey?

Let's keep going. Genesis 6, 17. God is speaking to Noah and he says,

understand that I am bringing a flood,

floodwaters on the earth to destroy every creature under heaven with a breath of life in it.

Everything on earth will die.

It's a heavy passage this morning. It's a little bit heavy, isn't it?

Our second challenge to living an obedient life to God and his ways is obedience

in the midst of pain and loss.

Obedience in the midst of pain and loss. In the creation account,

we see God breathing life into his creation. And now we see him taking it away from his creation.

And I think when we look at this story, a lot of times we look at it and we

see Noah and he's getting in the ark, he builds an ark and he floats away to

safety, but we forget how much he loses.

Everything around him, his home, his land, his way of life is gone.

And even if he's at odds with the culture, that much loss of life has got to be just disturbing.

I mean, that can't be easy to deal with.

Obedience in the midst of pain and loss is hard.

And while no one in this room has experienced a loss of life to that totality,

you know, to that magnitude, the entire earth, it doesn't really matter, does it?

Because when we're in the midst of pain and loss and suffering,

it feels like the whole world is being destroyed around us. It's hard.

We find ourselves disoriented and confused in that place.

And pain and loss have this unique ability to show us just how out of control,

we are, how little security we really control in our lives.

C.S. Lewis, after experiencing the loss of his wife in his book,

A Grief Observed, he said this, not that I am, I think, in much danger of ceasing to believe in God.

The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.

Why has God done this? Why is he allowing this?

What is he doing in the midst of this?

And in the scripture we just read, verse 17, it starts with the words, behold or understand.

Understand, Noah, what I am doing. And he's asking us to understand as well.

But what is it that we're supposed to understand?

We're supposed to understand God, his ways, who he is, his character, his nature.

But to understand that, to look at that can be scary because what does all of this mean?

And this is a difficulty with pain and suffering and loss is that we just feel

so out of control when it hits us and we just want something to make us feel okay.

And so we reach out like Adam and Eve and we take what looks good to us.

We get angry. We get bitter at the world, at God.

We become distant in our relationships and we know that none of these things

are okay. We know that it's not right, but it feels right.

It feels good. It feels like what we should be doing in that moment.

But again, we have to ask the hard questions here. Is it possible that there's

an opportunity in pain and loss to see God in a way that we couldn't manufacture otherwise?

Is there a way? Paul thought so, the apostle Paul.

In Philippians 3.10, he says, my goal is to know him and the power of his resurrection

and the fellowship of his sufferings being conformed to his death,

assuming that I will somehow reach the resurrection from among the dead.

Did you catch that? His goal, his goal to know the power of the resurrection.

Great, we like that. But the fellowship of his sufferings, being conformed to

his death, his goal, that's ridiculous.

And then assuming that it's through those things that this is the pathway to life in Christ.

We know, we know that Jesus suffered and he died on the cross for our sins. We know that.

But what could there possibly be in the fellowship of his sufferings for us?

How was that good for us at all?

Tim Keller, pastor and author from New York City in his book,

Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering had this to say.

If we again ask the question, why does God allow evil and suffering to continue,

and we look at the cross of Jesus, we still do not know what the answer is.

However, we know what the answer isn't. It can't be that he doesn't love us.

Somehow, somehow, it's right in the middle of pain and suffering and loss that

God communicates his love to us in a way that we can't get otherwise.

And look what he says here in Genesis. So he gives it, you know,

everybody's going to die.

And then he says, but I will establish my covenant with you,

Noah, and you will enter the ark with your sons, your wife, and your son's wives.

It's in the midst of our suffering that if we will just take the risk and look,

what we're going to find is a God who's still there with us.

He hasn't left us.

He hasn't forsaken us like we feel like He has.

He's still here helping, holding on to us, sharing His life with us, walking with us.

But again, that's hard.

Obedience in the midst of pain and loss is hard.

Our final challenge to living an obedient life with God and to his ways is remaining

obedient within the call of God.

Remaining obedient in God's call. Now that sounds funny because that should

be the easiest place for us to remain obedient, right?

You just read the instructions and you do it, right? Noah, he's given the instructions.

He's just given the instructions. I'm not going to read the scripture,

but if we can pull it up, he's given all these instructions.

It's gonna be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, 45 feet high.

And he even says like, yeah, the animals are gonna come two by two on the ark.

I'm gonna bring them to you, Noah.

That's all you gotta do. You just build the ark. I'm gonna bring you the animals.

And then you guys just get on the ark, right?

It sounds easy if we look at it that way.

But again, we have to look at Noah's perspective on this.

Number one, it took a while to build the ark.

Tradition, I've heard tradition states like 100 years. and we don't really have

any scriptural support for that. We know it took a while.

Most scholars have estimated 25 to 75 years is how long it took to build the

ark, which is still a long time to build something, to have a project like that.

1 Peter 3.20 even says to us, God patiently waited in the days of Noah while

an ark was being prepared.

So it's acknowledging this took a while to build this.

And we all know that it's really hard to remain obedient. for a long time.

That's hard to do.

You're not having any evidence. There's no animals walking around,

waiting to get in the ark. There's no flood that's happening.

You're just building this boat.

It's hard to remain obedient in that place. I also wonder though,

what kind of temptations Noah faced.

You have this big boat with all these animals getting on it.

You get on it with your family and surely there was enough room for like one more family, right?

Couldn't just one more person have gotten on the ark? Maybe two.

That family down the street that he was really good friends with,

couldn't they have gotten on the ark as well?

And I know that's complete speculation. I know that. That's not in scripture

anywhere. It doesn't say that.

But I think that that theme is in scripture all over the place.

I mean, again, we've been talking about Adam and Eve, right?

They were obedient in almost everything.

Almost everything.

Except for one thing, where they were disobedient.

Noah's positive in our story here,

but he's really only one small decision away from being a poor example for us in the Bible.

We know that's all that it takes. And as we walk with God, as we walk with Jesus

and we get closer to him, we find that there's these gifts in our lives that

he gives us. And He gives us these gifts so that we can minister who He is to the world around us.

But a temptation often comes with those gifts as well. The temptation to think that we're the gift.

Even in our callings, we might have the gift of giving and we start to believe

that that person or that ministry or that church, that nonprofit,

well, they wouldn't really exist if it wasn't for me.

Or we have a gift of compassion. We can sit with the brokenhearted and serve

them and help them and love them.

But we start to believe that we're the ones they really need.

Or we might have the gift of service, but we start becoming critical and we

start looking around the world and we start seeing people who aren't serving as much as we are.

We're like Adam and Eve, tempted to try and be like God, to be everywhere for

everyone, to be able to fix people's problems, to know everything that we're supposed to know.

Being obedient within our call is not easy either. It's hard.

It's hard to be obedient, period.

And yet here's Noah, obedient in his culture. He's obedient in pain and loss.

He's just obedient, obedient in his call.

But that's not your story, is it? It's not my story either.

Scripture tells us that Noah walked with God intimacy with God is the pathway to obedience,

but I often feel more like Paul from Romans 7 saying for I do not do the good

that I want to do but I practice the very evil that I hate.

We oftentimes make a mistake with Noah when we look at him we think that it

was his obedience that saved him it's his obedience that got him on the ark

but don't we see that it's not his obedience that saves him it's God God's the

one who saves him do we realize that,

Noah is obedient to build the ark after he gets the rescue plans.

After rescue is already sent his way, that's when obedience begins to happen.

Oftentimes I think that we get it in our heads. We can be Christians for years,

but we still have it in our heads that if only I can be just a little bit more

obedient, if only I can just be a little bit better in my life,

if only I can just obey him a little bit more,

then I'll really I'll really experience God the way I want to experience him.

I'll really experience his presence that I've been missing out on.

And that's what I really need to do is that it's just obedience.

But we miss the point so often that our obedience to God is not the root of who we are.

It's the fruit of our rescue from the penalty of judgment.

1 Peter 3.18 says it like this, for Christ also suffered for sins once for all,

the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring you to God,

after being put to death in the fleshly realm, but made alive in the spiritual realm.

Do we see what he's done for us?

Do we see how much he's done for us?

That in our wickedness and our evil, He comes along and He takes our records.

He takes all of the mess that we've become and He gives us His righteousness,

the righteous for the unrighteous.

Do we see how much He loves us in that?

Because that's the truth that we need. That's the truth that sets us free to

be obedient when we see that.

I think one of our greatest struggles that we have in our lives is that we struggle to see God's love.

I think that we struggle because it's not like anything that we can comprehend in this world.

It's so hard for us to understand because something like that just doesn't exist

in this broken world that we live in apart from Him.

And so we struggle to believe it. We struggle to see it.

And just how wonderful it is that while we were still sinners, He comes to set us free.

See, the pathway to obedience is not that we would change our behavior. here.

We can't. We fail at it every time.

The pathway to obedience is that we have to change our hearts.

But again, how do we do that? Because we still seem to fail doing that as well.

How do we change our hearts?

We change our hearts when we see all of our disobedience.

We see every time that we have looked and seen something desirable and we've

reached out and taken it for ourselves and we see it over and over and over

again we see all of our addictions,

that we have and those temptations that we fall to that we seem to be prey to

all the time we see that we see our brokenness we see our wickedness we see

our evil that lives in our lives,

and then we see a savior, Jesus.

And he sees all of that too. And he's looking at us and he's saying, I still want you.

I still want you.

Will you come and take a walk with me?

We've got two more weeks still with the ark here, but I love how the scripture sets the stage for us.

God hasn't abandoned us, but it's really quite the opposite.

He's sending rescue.

Let's pray. Jesus, we're grateful to be here, but God, we need you.

God, we need you to be obedient in this world. We can't do it without you.

We need to see just how deeply you love us, just how much you care about us.

Would you help us to see that, Lord Jesus?

Would you help us to see that, God?

We thank you in the name of Jesus. Amen. 1 Peter 3.18 says,

And that is good news.