Genesis 6: Noah Finds Favor

Genesis 6: 1-22

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*Message: Good Morning Church of God and what a glorious morning it is to be God’s people. It’s always a good morning when we can gather here to worship our Lord Jesus! Amen? Amen! Well! Last week we learned through God’s Word the story of Cain and Abel and the Older brother Cain’s cruel murder of the Adam and Eve’s younger son Abel, the one who had pleased the Lord. God gave Cain every opportunity to repent and come back to Him, but Cain wandered off to the land of Nod, East of Eden, and built cities. He became the patriarch of many children and clans. One of his descendents was the child Lamech was 182 years of age, he fathered the boy Noah, proclaiming: “Out of the ground that the LORD has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands.”

God had foretold to Lamech that Noah was chosen to

save his people, favored by God. Noah had lived 500 years when he had three sons of his own, Shem, Ham and Japheth. Noah and his father Lamech were descended from their ancestor Seth. After Cain was sent into exile by God, 377 year old Adam and his wife Eve bore a son named Seth. The people of Seth were the people of God and the descendants of Cain were wicked and did evil. In those days, the sons of Seth’s people intermarried with those of Cain. The wicked children of Cain took their daughters to the temple and made them prostitutes whom the children of God married. Wickedness filled the earth. The offspring of these marriages were the Nephilim. Many of us who’ve read the Bible all are lives believed the Nephilim were giants, but what we know about them was that they were strong, beastly mighty-men who were known throughout the land for their strength.

Here’s were we get confused and hung up in the Bible.

When we read verse two of Genesis 6 that the sons of God married the daughters of man, many teachers will insist that this meant angelic beings, servants of God were impregnating human women and creating a race of giants. There is a more simple explanation and it has more to do with earthly sin than that: The Godly men of the race of Seth found the daughters of Cain and his evil tribes beautiful and took them as wives and they populated the earth. The thing about this awful story has less to do with the Nephilim and who slept with whom, and more to do with God’s anger at man’s wickedness. These were corrupt, evil people who’d given themselves over to every sexual and immoral practice that angered the Lord their God. He’d had enough and decrees in verse 3 of chapter 6 that the span of a man’s life will be 120 years. Noah’s grandfather was Methuselah, who lived 969 years. No more. God had seen enough of wicked humans and was tired of their face on the earth and shortened human life. God saw that even shortening man’s life wouldn’t prevent his evil and as He looked at man, he saw the ability to nothing else other than sin. It was then that God decided to wipe man off the face of the earth.

There was one righteous, God-fearing man on earth.

His name was Noah. The righteous man Noah was known to all in the land to walk with God, to be upstanding and to do as God wanted. You can’t even imagine what it was like to live on the earth at that time. No laws were kept, murder was commited and violence, just because people were only concerned about their own pleasure. God wanted to blot men from the earth and all His creatures because He was sorry He’d ever created any of them. Man, God’s perfect creation, the reflection of Himself, had broken the Lord’s heart and He was suffering through man’s disobedience. In verse 14, God, in His beautiful and generous grace and mercy, tells Noah this plan. He tells him to make a boat.

God didn’t tell Noah to build just any boat. This wasn’t

God asking the righteous man to put together a row boat in his spare time. This wasn’t a weekend pleasure craft for Noah and the boys to do a little fishing and water skiing on the weekends. This was a floating house! Ark is a word for “chest,” meaning that Noah was building a giant floating footlocker. Not to sail, but to bob up and down on the water. God was upfront with Noah: I’m going to destroy the earth, make me this ship. For most humans, we’d question and plead with God. “Hold up! Go back a second! Destroy the earth?” Noah, the righteous servant of God, simply does God’s will. The size was enormous! Assuming the cubit to be 22 inches, the ark would be five hundred forty-seven feet long, ninety-one feet two inches wide, and forty-seven feet two inches high.

This floating box God called on Noah to make was

wider than the titanic and nearly as long. God instructed Noah to make the Ark out of Gopher wood, which is a type of Cyprus tree that could handle water. He also had Noah coat the inside and the outside of the Ark with tar made from mineral pitch or naptha. The boat was going to be watertight and sturdy enough to bob up and down like a cork throughout the flood. It’s not a nice vessel. This is no pleasure cruise their told to go on. When you look at drawings of the Ark or see photos of the big Ark down south, It’s always a really fine looking ship. There’s a little deck house up on top and it looks like it could just cut through the waves. However, God wasn’t calling Noah to sail this boat. He and his wife and family were climbing into a hot, tar covered box which would toss them up and down on the waves for months. The Ark doesn’t have windows to watch the sky and the water. It had a tarred over window hole. Noah doesn’t even have a chance to argue and protest to God about the destruction of mankind. The better part of righteousness is faith and Noah believed that God would provide a way for him. In verse 16 of Genesis 7 we see the words: “And the Lord shut him in.” Noah was as dependent on God as the monkey’s in the 1960’s space program were dependent on men. They were closed in and sent out into the flood.

For the record, Noah did not have cranes or a dry dock

facility to build the Ark on. He had to use the mind God had given him along with physical strength from above and the help of the sons God had blessed him with. People love to argue about how long it took him to build the Ark. One writer in the ninth century did some poor math and decided Noah built the Ark in seven years. We know by the age that Noah had his sons and the age he went into the Ark, 600 years old, that it took him about 75 years. The span that he worked on the Ark isn’t important, though. The important lesson from Scripture is that Noah remained faithful to God through every trial and tribulation. Think about 75 years in terms of the average working life. At some point, people think seriously about retirement and enjoying their elder years. At 500 years of age, it seems inconceivable that anyone would be looking forward to 75 years of labor building something the size of the Titanic, but Noah loved God and when the Lord God called on him to serve Him, Noah was willing and did as his Lord commanded. All righteous old Noah knew was that the God whom he loved and worshipped was planning to wipe out all of humanity and start over and the the same God had set a task before him.

God saw Noah. He saw everything about him. God saw

Noah’s worship of Him. He saw Noah trying to raise his boys and lead his family in a perverted world. God saw Noah not going along with the crowd. He saw him not selling his daughters in law into prostitution. God saw Noah living apart from the world and it’s sin. Noah lived in a lawless time. There was no justice among men. People murdered because there were no consequences. Men and women engaged in every perversion they could think of. Prostitution in the places of worship. These were not normal times. Righteous men were led into sin and evil marriages dishonoring God. The same God who’d seen everything man did and was fed up. The same God who saw Noah’s life and loved him enough to use him as the prophet of redemption for mankind.

God sees you, as well. He sees the way you care for you

family and your friends and for His church. He sees that you’ve been faithful in your prayers and your offerings and that you’ve been a good steward of every gift He’s given you. We can look at the world and know that it’s in the same straights as when Noah built the Ark. We have laws, and governments, but people are as greedy and godless as they were in Noah’s time. Today’s people just do it differently. There are more places to hide evil, or so we think. The courts sometimes protect the innocent, but often protect the evil so that they can go right out perpetrating crimes. We don’t sell our daughters into temple prostitution, but we see them marry those who flee from salvation that only comes from Jesus Christ.

God has a heart for His creation. We see that in verses 7

and 8 when the writer declares that Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord, despite God’s being sorry he’d created humans. We love God in part, because He never fails to love us. In that moment when he readies for the time that He’s going to wipe out every living thing-every worm, every roach, every child, every grandparent, every pet, every bride and groom- in that moment he saves Noah and that little band of his beloved relatives and humanity is going to be saved. We didn’t deserve that salvation and that chance at redemption. Noah was a sinner like us, and he certainly didn’t deserve it. Nobody did - or does. God saved humans anyway. He cares too much for us to waste us and wanted us to return to Him in repentance, faith and righteousness. Nobody in that time repented and worshipped God except for humble Noah.

The story of God’s redemption of that rag-tag remnant

of humanity - Noah and his family - reminds us that throughout history, God could have been finished with the people He’d created, but instead, he saved us for His own glory and because He loves us as precious, wayward, sinful children. That is the truth of Scripture. The story of Noah is reflected in the story of Jesus Christ. In Noah’s day, God wiped out and destroyed all who lived and spared the one righteous man who served Him. In Jesus, we see God destroy the one righteous Son of Himself, who walked the earth in righteousness in order that all people had the chance to be spared from eternal death and misery in hell. That’s the beautiful thing. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. God promises later in Noah’s story to never again wipe out humanity with a flood. Instead, he offers up His own perfect Son Jesus Christ in place of humanity’s need to perish and suffer.

What I want to add to that is this: In every case of God’s

redemptive acts toward miserable, sinful humans in the Bible, both in the Noah narrative and the life, death and resurrection of Christ, there is a second chance offered. A chance for humans to come back to the Lord, run into His arms, shout “Father, forgive me for I’ve sinned against you in my thoughts and my deeds. I don’t deserve you!” and then to live faithfully forever after worshipping Him. A lot of people would rather die than take that “get out of jail free” card. Lots of us humans think that life is simple and that a relationship with God is complicated, so we might as well go on with life until it’s over and God is just extra frosting on our cake. Again, I would say that God sees all. He saw Noah’s deeds and He sees our lives. As we’ve read in Sunday School, the instructions from the apostle Paul in Romans 2:8–11 are clear: “but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury. There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. For God shows no partiality.” He loves all of His creation, but God will separate the wheat from the chaff and judge those who’ve obeyed their own wants with harshness. Verse 8 says it all: Those who obey unrighteousness will face only wrath and fury. Noah knew this, Christ taught this and we’re to live this way.

What lesson do we take from the story of Noah’s

faithfulness and God’s getting ready to wipe every man, woman and beast from the earth? Is it another story we tell ourselves about some great flood and people who escaped on a boat? Is it just a variation of Gilligan’s Island where a group of people get stranded after a storm. No! The story of Noah and God’s saving humanity through faithful Noah and his family is a story that should resonate with all of us even to this day. Now, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but the story of the flood exists in almost every ancient world culture. Historians of the ancient Mesopotamian world and scientists who never agree on much of anything, find evidence that the flood was real and God did ravage the earth with water. Most cultures who wrote about the flood came up with excuses for it. “Oh, the God’s wanted to toy with people, so they caused a flood they couldn’t control and it just got out of hand.” Humph! Doesn’t sound like my God who created and controls all that there is. The God we know and cherish loved humanity so much that He chose to wash the evil out of it through the flood.

As I said, this story should resonate with all of us in so

many ways. Let me make this first point that you can take with you. When we were in Sunday school as kids, the teachers always used to talk about the sinful people of the earth making fun of Noah as he built the Ark. That’s not a bad lesson to keep in our minds as adults. Here was the most evil and perverse group of humans to ever live. It was harder than any time in human history for Noah to stay alive, let alone spend 75 years faithfully building the Ark God told him to. Can you imagine being faithful to God when there is so much excitement going on around you? Of course you can, because you’re doing it. Instead of assaulting every politician because you don’t agree with them, you’re faithful to God. Instead of sitting around getting wasted because TV tells you that’s what real people do, you’re here with your friends and neighbors loving on them. Instead of spending your days in places that cause you to stumble in sin, you’re building your church and community for the future. It’s not easy. For Noah, his life was like building the Ark God told him to on the Las Vegas Strip. The lights are flashing, everybody’s doing what makes them feel good and he’s getting up every day at the crack of dawn and building an Ark the size of the Titanic with the tools of the day. It’s hard to live as a Christian in today’s world, just like it was near impossible to live as God’s own in Noah’s day. We live in the new world of influencers. An influencer is a person who gets on the internet and the TV and does things that make other people want to copy them. What she wearing? How many chains has that guy got on? What’s his car like? Who’s she dating? That’s what the world cares about and we get caught up in it. People in Noah’s day were no different. Those who were wealthy, hoarded up their riches and lived in an ongoing orgy of doing what pleased them and God had seen enough and wanted them gone. In our day, people spend their money doing what pleases them. One day in Chicago, I watched a struggling family taking their pre-schooler into a Gucci store. It’s none of my business what they do, but the world is so tainted by sin that what matters to us is the name on our bag and not the name on our soul. As it was in Noah’s day, so it was in Christ’s day and so it is now. You can be like Noah, however, the influencer for the life of humility and simple living, the influencer who chooses to love God more than whatever this world is offering from one week to the next. The names of the influencers change from generation to generation, but God always sees the Noah’s of this world.

Here’s my second take away for today: It’s never too

late to get on that Ark until the door closes. It’s never too late to get on that Ark until God has shut the door and Christ has returned for His people. A flood is coming. Not a flood of water, but the day in which God judges humanity and separates the Noah’s from those who are headed for destruction. As Revelation 1:3 states: “Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near.” That flood is coming. The day of judgement is approaching. Most humans are no better than kids who think their invincible. As one song writer of some years ago put it: “ I am invincible as long as I’m alive.” We love to throw the dice and wait until the very end of life before repenting before God, but we don’t know the day, nor the hour of His coming, or even of our own death. I know you are the Noah’s that God sees, those who’ve repented and believed. It’s up to us to keep building like Noah did and to keep being the example for those whose hearts are hardened and who refuse to believe in God.

Lori and I were talking the other day about a movie of a

few years ago that was enjoyable. In the movie, Morgan Freeman plays god, because, you know…who else? He comes to this congressman and tells his to build an Ark. The congressman’s wife tells him things like “Maybe god just meant a flood of understanding is coming.” No, friends, the flood that’s coming isn’t understanding or even water, but the final judgement of sin. The world is fun and it’s full of entertainment, but God sees us and He sees the faithful servants like Noah.

Allow me to close with this final point: Things are going to get a lot worse for faithful, righteous Noah in chapter 7 of Genesis before they get better. Noah isn’t going to be cruising lake earth in his pontoon Ark. He’s going to be shut up with angry, filthy animals in a hot, stinking box for 377 days. His faith will be tested over and over again. He’ll be battered and bruised and exhausted. And he’ll continue to do the will of the Lord. Those whom God has called will be tested and tried. The world will make fun of them. Their Christian faith will be tested by death and tragedy and temptation and by lost friends and lost fortunes. Yet God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth remains. His Son Jesus Christ remains. His Holy Spirit dwells in those who continue to call His name, even in the hardest of time. God will test you, but as we’ll see with Noah, there is an end to the flood and a time when we can glorify His Holy name forever, knowing that he’s seen us through every storm and flood of life.

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