Noah
Talk 2 of 3 given in the series The Promise-Keeping God at St Nicolas Coogee.
An edited transcript of the talk is below. Talk 3 is Abram and Talk 1 is Adam.
Talk Outline
- The World of Crisis and Confidence
- The World of the Promise-Keeping God
- The Sinfulness that Sorrows God
- The Judgement of God
- The Salvation of God
- The World of the Promise-Keeping God
Series: The Promise Keeping God; Talk 2 Noah
- The World of Crisis and Confidence
Our culture wars stagger between the world of crisis and confidence. On the one hand, we have the prophets of crisis and doom talking about the arms race, the rise of fascism and communism, Islamists, global warming, and population growth. There are any number of ways a crisis will end the world.
Does anyone remember Dad’s Army? They often said, “We’re all doomed; doomed, I tell ya.”
Let me remind the older members of our congregation and inform the younger ones about Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University and his very significant 1968 book, The Population Bomb: Population Control or Race to Oblivion. This is how thebook starts on the opening page
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.
He went on to make many predictions that failed to happen. Some examples are
“The population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make.”
“The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
“If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
These led to a famous bet with the economist Professor Julian Simon (1980-1990) that scarcity would force a price rise in raw materials. The price of all 5 raw materials he chose declined, and so, famously, Ehrlich lost.
However, while the alarmists are predicting our crisis, there are, at the same time, confident, even arrogant people who assure us we have no problems. They would say we don’t need to fear a pandemic or that we don’t need to arm ourselves because war is over. A famous quote of Bob Hawke in the 1987 election launch was, “By 1990, no Australian child will be living in poverty.” Or another quote in the inaugural address of Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, as he led people in the greatest economic depression and subsequent Second World War, “the only thing we have to fear is…fear itself”. Worse still is the combination of crisis and confidence. So Paul Ehrlich defended himself and his predictions with the confidence of science
If I’m always wrong, so is science, since my work is always peer-reviewed, including the population bomb, and I’ve gotten virtually every scientific honour. Sure, I’ve made some mistakes, but no basic ones.
- The World of the Promise-Keeping God
Over these 3 weeks, our sermons are on the promise-keeping God. Our God is faithful, he makes promises and he keeps his promises. The series will look at the importance of promises. The assurances of the future are sometimes conditional, ‘if you do this then …’, sometimes unconditional, ‘this will happen’.
Christians look back to the promises of God; they look forward to when God fulfils his promises and they look upward to the faithful promise-keeping God. They do this by
- looking back to God’s promises in the Bible
- looking forward with hope to God fulfilling his promises and
- looking upward in prayerful trust in God, the promise-keeper.
This frees us from the terror of living under world crisis and the arrogance of human confidence.
Last week, we saw this in God’s promise to Adam and concluded with God’s promise to the serpent, Satan in Genesis 3:15
“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”
As we read the rest of Genesis and the Bible, we look for this son of the woman, the man who will crush the serpent. The Bible’s narrative, plot or storyline is looking for the serpent crusher that God promised would one day come. After the first son of woman Cain failed, killing Abel, we get another hopeful serpent crusher in the birth of Noah, as his father Lamech named him.
He named him Noah and said, “He will comfort us in the labour and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the LORD has cursed.”
But sadly, Lamech’s promise didn’t come true in Noah and the world’s sinfulness in the days of Noah was far greater than in the days of Adam.
- The Sinfulness that Sorrows God
Indeed, the disorder of the world of sin had grown so great that in the next chapter we read of the sinfulness that sorrows God in Genesis 6:5-6
The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The LORD regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.
The sinfulness of humanity is boundless. We all hate lies, envy and greed, yet we all know of them in our own hearts. God sees the human heart, and it brings him into deep sorrow and regret. It grieves him to see what we are like. What an extraordinary statement about God and emotions. He feels his indignation at humanity’s evil ways.
Our media is constantly entertaining us with hate and murders, lusts and frauds. Hollywood could not survive without our passion for being entertained by sin. But God looks upon our broken, grubby world and is grieved with such sorrow as to know that we are not worthy of life. The word for such grief or regret is a pun on the name Noah. Lamech called him comfort–God looked with grief. But note that God’s grief is not simply emotional, but it is righteous and just because he is grieved with sorrow about how sinful we all have become.
- The Judgement of God
The judgement of God is in the very next verse, Genesis 6:7
So the LORD said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.”
This is what most children’s storybooks and songs ignore or censor. They talk of Noah and the ark and the animals and the rainbow. They talk of the flood, but not God sending it and never because people are sinful. They never mention loving God’s broken heart over sinfulness and God’s judgement in sending the flood. It was God’s judgement to wipe out humanity. He loved us so much that he couldn’t bear to see how sinful we had become. The news of the world didn’t entertain him; it saddened him and broke his heart to see how they damaged and hurt each other, how broken and damaged their lives were. So his judgement was to remove the humanity he had created by the flood.
- The Salvation of God
And yet it is amid the judgement of God that we see the salvation of God and that salvation centred on the man Noah, because in the next verse we read, But Noah found favour in the eyes of the LORD, Genesis 6:8.
Maybe Lamech was right. Maybe this man will be the comforter and the serpent crusher.
Then comes the famous account of Noah building the ark and God patiently enduring sinfulness, even though it grieved him so much. For the ark was not a pretty little boat as in our children’s books, but rather a great rectangular coffin-shaped building, 5 stories high and as long as one and a half football fields.
This ark was not built quickly, and during the building, the sorrowful God waited patiently because keeping promises always takes patience between giving the promises and keeping them. 1 Peter 3:20 says
God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water
As the prophet Noah built the ark, His actions proclaimed to the world their coming condemnation as Hebrews 11:7 tells us
By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family. By his faith he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness that is in keeping with faith.
This is what the Bible means by faith. He was
- looking back to the promise which was of judgement
- he was looking forward to the flood which was salvation and
- he was looking upward, trusting in God, the faithful God, the promise-keeping God.
No doubt, while he was building it, nobody thought he was sane; the world thought he was mad! But when God sent the flood to judge the world of sin, the waters that drowned others saved Noah and his family. And when they receded, the dove brought him an olive leaf, indicating the judgement was over and the new world of peace was commencing. The dove with the olive leaf
has become the symbol of peace ever since.
- The World of the Promise-Keeping God
And so we finally come to today’s passage, Genesis 9 and the world of the promise-keeping God where it seems that we have a new world, like a reprise of Genesis 1 and 2. The family in the image of God, told to multiply and fill the earth, washed clean by the flood.However, this time the world still has sin and hostility. This time, every beast will fear mankind, and this time, taking of life and its punishment would be part of the world.
So, will our sin lead to another outpouring of God’s wrath? Will there be another flood to destroy us? God’s answer is clear in Genesis 8:22 – no, not as long as the world exists.
As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.
And this promise of God is foundational to our way of life; foundational for Western civilisation;
foundational for Western science and technology and foundational for Christian living. We live with a certainty about the world that all will continue – spring and summer, autumn and winter. The world will not perish; the world will not cease. A certainty which is the assumption and basis of scientific examination and planning for the future. And with it comes a new promise: a covenant promise with a sign (like the wedding ring signifying the marriage covenant). The sign of the rainbow – shows the sun peeping through the rain clouds declaring God’s promise to us in Genesis 9:11. Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth. It is repeated in verse 15 Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life.
And this promise of God is foundational to our way of life. This saves Christians from the world’s wild swinging between crisis and confidence. The crisis merchants of our day declare, ‘All is about to be destroyed!’; ‘We’re doomed!’; ‘Don’t have babies!’; ‘Don’t bring children into the world.’ So, teenagers are living with anxiety and depression because of the existential crisis of environmental calamity and the hopelessness of world events.
While the over-confident of the world continue to live the dream of materialistic hedonism, saying
‘Nothing is going to go wrong’; ‘There is no right and wrong’; ‘There is no judgement of God’; ‘Let’s eat, drink and be merry’; ‘The sun is shining, let’s go to the beach, let’s drink our worries away, let’s party with our drugs and our friends.’ Some even use the very symbol of God’s promise to be patient with sinfulness as a flag to promote their own sensuality.
But while God promises to patiently endure our sinfulness and not to destroy his creatures with another flood, while this earth continues, we know the earth will not continue forever. God promised another day would come when the world would come to an end, in his judgement. In Matthew 24:37 Jesus said
As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.
And so we stand here week by week, day by day, warning people about God’s patience in keeping the promise to hold back his judgement, not flooding the world, to give people time to repent; to turn back from their sinfulness; to accept the great forgiveness Jesus won by his death on the cross; to accept the great life that Jesus won by his resurrection.
So we meet here at church and sing about God and pray to God and his great faithfulness for every day he is keeping his promises to Noah.
