God Remembered Noah: A Picture of Grace and Mercy

It’s great to be with you this Lord’s Day and I am excited to dive in with you into Genesis 8 this morning and we will be covering the entire chapter. This is a fantastic chapter that I have no doubt will have great meaning for each and every one of us here or watching online this morning. We spend quite a bit of our lives waiting. In 2019 there was a study done by an organization in Great Britain that found that we spend approximately 6.7 years of our lives waiting. We may be waiting for a light to turn green or waiting for a cashier, or waiting to move from one spot in line to the next spot. Many of you I’m sure have read Dr. Seuss’ Oh! The Places You’ll God and you remember that there is a whole 2 page spread that is simply called, “The Waiting Place.” There everyone spins there time waiting for a whole assortment of things. Waiting never seems easy. Tom Petty had a song where the chorus simply goes, “The waiting is the hardest part.” Some of you are waiting for something right now. Maybe it is something good, something bad, something that will change your life, but you are waiting for something. This morning, we are going to find Noah in a state of waiting and as we dive into this, we are going to see that throughout the entire process, God is with Noah. God is with us. Our big idea for this morning is: One of the greatest assurances that we can have as Christians is that God is always with us. He is with us when it feels like He isn’t, He is with us in the waiting, and He is with us forever. That’s the path that we are going to follow this morning and that is what we are going to see in Genesis 8 this morning. We are going to do something a little bit different and we are going to go ahead and read the entire 8th chapter of Genesis this morning but before we do that, let’s go to the Lord in prayer.

Genesis 8 NASB95

But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the ark; and God caused a wind to pass over the earth, and the water subsided. Also the fountains of the deep and the floodgates of the sky were closed, and the rain from the sky was restrained; and the water receded steadily from the earth, and at the end of one hundred and fifty days the water decreased. In the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark rested upon the mountains of Ararat. The water decreased steadily until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains became visible. Then it came about at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made; and he sent out a raven, and it flew here and there until the water was dried up from the earth. Then he sent out a dove from him, to see if the water was abated from the face of the land; but the dove found no resting place for the sole of her foot, so she returned to him into the ark, for the water was on the surface of all the earth. Then he put out his hand and took her, and brought her into the ark to himself. So he waited yet another seven days; and again he sent out the dove from the ark. The dove came to him toward evening, and behold, in her beak was a freshly picked olive leaf. So Noah knew that the water was abated from the earth. Then he waited yet another seven days, and sent out the dove; but she did not return to him again. Now it came about in the six hundred and first year, in the first month, on the first of the month, the water was dried up from the earth. Then Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and behold, the surface of the ground was dried up. In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dry. Then God spoke to Noah, saying, “Go out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and your sons’ wives with you. “Bring out with you every living thing of all flesh that is with you, birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, that they may breed abundantly on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.” So Noah went out, and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives with him. Every beast, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves on the earth, went out by their families from the ark. Then Noah built an altar to the Lord, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. The Lord smelled the soothing aroma; and the Lord said to Himself, “I will never again curse the ground on account of man, for the intent of man’s heart is evil from his youth; and I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done. “While the earth remains, Seedtime and harvest, And cold and heat, And summer and winter, And day and night Shall not cease.”

God With Us in the Dark

In verse 1 we come across one of the most comforting phrases in all of Scripture. You have heard me say it before but Martyn Lloyd-Jones used to say, “Thank God for the buts in the Bible” and here verse 1 begins in that exact way. The 8th chapter of Genesis begins with, “But God remembered Noah.” Now let’s stop right there. That statement is a great deal of comfort but it can also cause a great deal of confusion. When the Bible says that God remembered Noah, it does not mean that God had somehow forgotten about Noah. How could God possibly forget Noah when God’s eyes had been set on him from before time began? What we need to know is that God has never forgotten anything. God has also never learned anything. God has never learned anything because He is all knowing. If God were not all-knowing, He would not be God. To understand verse 1, we have to look at it from two perspectives. The first is God’s perspective and the second is from Noah’s perspective. From God’s perspective, nothing is happening on the face of the Earth that God is not completely 100% knowledgable of. God does not float along in the passage of time learning as He goes. He isn’t flying by the seat of His pants hoping to bring in more knowledge so He can govern the present time more effectively with the hopeful optimism that the future will end up the way that He wants. No, God knows the beginning, the middle, and the end perfectly. God knows everything that ever was, ever is, and ever will be. He knows every thought you have ever had, every word you have ever spoken, He knows the day you were born, and the day you will die. He knows who you will or won’t marry, He knows how many kids you will have, He knows the number of hairs that you have on your head and what age you will be when you lose them all. Absolutely nothing happens in this world that surprises God because He already knows every little or major event to happen within the realm of time and this shouldn’t come as a shock to us because God is the inventor of time. Time does not exist unless God ordains time to take place. God doesn’t need time in order to exist, time needs God in order to exist and if time is dependent on God, that must mean that God exists outside of time, outside of space and yet He is knowable and exists within time. God sees all of time in an instant. Moses says in Psalm 90:4 “For a thousand years in Your sight Are like yesterday when it passes by, Or as a watch in the night.” God knows it all. God has never looked through the passage of time to learn what someone would do in order for God to act because there is nothing for Him to learn because everything that takes place has already been foreordained by God. For God to be all-knowing means that He is omniscient. God knows everything that can be known and nothing is hidden from His sight. For God to remember Noah means that God is about to act towards Noah. God has not abandoned Noah. God has not left Noah to figure things out on his own with the opportunity for something good to happen. To understand the depth of what it means for God to remember Noah, we need to consider Noah’s perspective. By verse 1, Noah has been on this ark for months. From the time that Noah and his family enter the ark, 5 months have passed. Now if you are Noah, just think what might be going through your head right now. You aren’t on a cruise ship. You aren’t enjoying a long trip to the Caribbean on a premier cruise line. You are in a box. You’re in a box that has brought you through the destruction of the entire world. Below your feet, is only death. No doubt as the flood waters began to rise, Noah and his family would hear the wailing of dying men, women, children, and animals. As the ark climbs higher and higher, mankind reaches a point where it cannot climb any further and just like that, the population goes from millions, if not billions, to 8. And now Noah sits in this ark, surrounded by death and as far as we can tell, God doesn’t speak to Noah again until verse 15. From the time that God closed the door of the ark to the time when God opens it, God has been silent. No doubt there were times of temptation for Noah on that ark where he began to think, “Has God forgotten me? Has God brought me to this point just to leave me to figure this all out on my own?” No doubt you in your own life have had moments like this where you have been left wondering if God has forgotten you. I know that I have felt like that. I remember my first church and the emotional turmoil that I went through there. You see my first church experience in Georgia wasn’t the end of the world but I would say that it was definitely within walking distance. There were entire months while I was there as a young pastor and a young husband and father, where I really did wonder, “God, remember I’m here! Remember that you said if I knocked you would answer! God remember me!” You see I knew the promises of Scripture, I knew the attributes of God, but I still felt like God had forgotten me. Of course He didn’t. How can God forget the one that He has had His eyes on for all eternity? One of my favorite sections in all of Scripture is in Isaiah 49. In Isaiah 49, Israel brings a complaint to the Lord. They are saying, “God, we feel forgotten. We don’t feel loved.” Isaiah 49:14 we read, “But Zion said, “The Lord has forsaken me, And the Lord has forgotten me.”” But look at how God responds in Isaiah 49:15–16, “Can a woman forget her nursing child And have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you. “Behold, I have inscribed you on the palms of My hands; Your walls are continually before Me.” There is no greater human love than the love that exists between a mother and her child. God is saying to Israel, “Could a mother forget her nursing child? Even if she forgets, I will not forget you. How can I forget the ones that I have inscribed on the palms of my hands?” Many years later, in the upper room we see Thomas and he is feeling like the people of Israel. He is doubting, he is hurting, he needs reassurance and in the blinking of an eye, there is Jesus. You know what Jesus says, “Look at my hands. See my love for you. Thomas, the nails in my hands is all the proof that you need that I have not forsaken or forgotten you. Your name was inscribed on the palm of my hand.” The same is true for Noah. The same is true for every Christian here. God remembers you. God knows you. God is acting towards you. God is with you even when all around you is chaos and the pains of sin and death. God sees you and knows you as clearly as Noah. What a great reminder of us of the awesomeness, grace, and mercy of God. A.W. Pink said, “The apprehension of God’s infinite knowledge should fill the Christian with adoration. The whole of my life stood open to His view from the beginning. He foresaw my every fall, my every sin, my every backsliding; yet, nevertheless, fixed His heart upon me. Oh, how the realization of this should bow me in wonder and worship before Him!”

God With Us in the Waiting

As we continue to work through this chapter, we see that God is completely sovereign over everything that comes to pass. We see that God causes a wind to pass over the earth and the waters begin to subside and the fountains of the deep and the floodgates of the sky are closed. In the 7th month, on the 17th day, the ark rests upon a mountain range, the Ararat mountain range. Something else worth noting is that as we read this chapter earlier, you probably noticed that Moses, the author of Genesis, includes not just a guess as to when the ark rests or when the mountain tops become visible, Moses gives the day that it happens. Moses isn’t writing a fairy tale, the only reason that Moses would include such specific dates is if it actually happened. If you were making up this story, why would it matter if the ark landed at Ararat on a Wednesday or a Thursday or a Friday? There is no reason to include that if history is not what is being recorded. In verse 6, we see that 40 days after the tops of the mountain become visible that Noah sends out a raven. No doubt a raven was sent out because they are birds that can fly at a much greater distance, at a greater height, than the dove that would be sent out later and Noah is likely sending out this raven because ravens will eat anything. Ravens are scavengers and if anything could be eaten outside of the ark, it would find it. It seems that the raven would go out and then return to Noah until the water dried up from the earth and after he sends the raven, he sends a dove but the dove comes back because there is still too much water on the earth. Noah then waits a week and sends the dove again but this time she comes back with an olive leaf and this is important because olive leaves wouldn’t be up in the mountains. The water has receded enough to where the dove was able to find this leaf and now Noah brings her into the ark again and then 7 days after that, the dove goes out again but this time she doesn’t come back. She has been able to find food and shelter on her own. Yet despite the dove not coming back, despite the waters being gone from the surface of the earth, Noah and his family stay in the ark. By the time that God calls Noah out of the ark, Noah and his family have been in the ark for over a year. John MacArthur and many others say that Noah was in the ark for 378 days. For over a year, Noah waited faithfully. Noah didn’t go barging out of the ark the day he realized that the waters were gone. Instead he waits until God speaks in verse 15. What a tremendous lesson in patience we see with the life of Noah. There is a lot to learn in the waiting. There is much grace that is shown in a God that calls us to wait. For over a year, Noah waited and rather than heading out the door whenever he felt like it was a good time to go, he waited for God to tell Him to go. Some of you today need a lesson in waiting. Many of us often feel like we have to be go, go, going all the time when really the most important thing that we can do is to wait for God to move. We need to wait for God to open that door, to bring about that opportunity. Often we feel like we need to make things happen. Have you ever thought that maybe the thing you are waiting for right now, maybe it’s a new job, a new house, a spouse, a child, that maybe God has you in that moment of waiting for a reason? One of the most important lessons that I ever learned from Tim Keller is that when you wait, it is God that makes you wait. God is the One that is making you wait. The first time that I heard that was the day after I got an email from Ken telling me about Crossroads. For months, I was wondering what I was supposed to do next. I loved our old church, I still love my old church, but I knew that something needed to change. But it was months between finally realizing that I needed a change and finding somewhere to go. But God in His perfect timing put me in a holding pattern. God had me wait until He brought me to you. You may be going through a time in your life right now where all you want to do is go but God knows that it is more important for you to wait. You can serve God in going, but it is just as important to serve God in the silence and in the waiting. You see it is one thing for us to be actively obedient, it is another thing for us to be passively obedient. It is one thing for us to actively live out the Christian life, it is another thing for us to humbly submit to the One that brings us to a newness of life. We all need to be reminded of what David says in Psalm 27:14 “Wait for the Lord; Be strong and let your heart take courage; Yes, wait for the Lord.” As David wrote this Psalm, he was reflecting on the faithfulness of God as he thought about the sheer number of adversaries that had been against him. In a time where it would have been easy to lash out or make a desperate move just so he could feel like something was being done, David resolved to wait for the Lord. The God that is good to you as you go is also the God that is good to you as you wait for Him. Lamentations 3:25 says, “The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, To the person who seeks Him.” The prophet Isaiah in Isaiah 40:31 says, “Yet those who wait for the Lord Will gain new strength; They will mount up with wings like eagles, They will run and not get tired, They will walk and not become weary.” Christians need a lesson on patience too. When it is time to go, God will make it clear. Just as God would have the cloud by day and the fiery pillar by night as a clear sign for the Israelites to move out or stay put in the book of Exodus, we are to look for the sign that we are to wait or we are to go. As we wait, we can wait with a purpose. What can we learn about the Lord as we wait on Him? What can we learn about ourselves? About our own temptations and our own aspirations? As we wait, God is being merciful to us. Thomas Watson said, “Patience is a grace made and cut out of suffering; patience is a sweet submission to the will of God, whereby we are content to bear anything that He is pleased to lay upon us. Patience makes a Christian invincible; it is like the anvil that bears all strokes.” You can have great intentions for the Lord. You can have good reasons for wanting to get the ball rolling according to your time schedule but remember, God is always perfect in His timing. Have you ever noticed what Luke says in Acts 1:4? Before Christ ascends to heaven, Luke writes “Gathering them together, He commanded them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for what the Father had promised, “Which,” He said, “you heard of from Me.” Now think about that for just a second. Christ has been raised from the dead, He is seen by the apostles, and instead of having them run out and tell everyone what has happened, He tells them to wait. They’re going to go to Jerusalem and all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth but they aren’t going to go yet. Instead they are going to wait. They are going to wait for something incredible, they are waiting for a clear sign, they are going to wait for the power that will actually take them to the nations. They are going to wait for the Holy Spirit to come at Pentecost. Do you think that the disciples were disobedient as the waited for the Spirit to come? No, they were doing exactly what Christ told them to do. Your waiting for God is not an act of disobedience. Your faithful listening for God to make plain what you are to do is not disobedience. Be still and trust God to be God. Noah waited for God to make clear what he was to do. Alexander Maclaren said, “God had shut him in, and it must be God who brings him out. Till He speaks we must remain, and as soon as He speaks we must remove.” Spiritual discernment is so important. Through prayer, through reading the Word, through engagement with other believers, wait for the Lord to make clear what you should do but when the time comes for you to go, don’t stay in the ark. Far too many of you know what you need to do but you don’t want to leave the familiarity and comfort of that ark. There are times to stay and there are times to go, are you diligently seeking which one you are supposed to do?

God With Us Forever

As we continue with Noah, we see in verse 18 that Noah, his family, and all the animals exit the ark. Noah enters really into a new creation. For the first time in over a year, Noah steps on solid ground. Noah sees a creation that he has never seen before. Due to the pressure of the water coming out of the surface of the earth, entire mountain ranges exist that did not exist before. I am sure that there is a sense of joy as the family leaves the ark but I also believe that there is a spirit of worry. Now begins the task of navigating this new creation and repopulating the entire earth. Noah is like a new Adam and life seems to be almost starting from scratch. That’s a lot of pressure, there is likely a good amount of worry about what comes next. But notice what the first thing is that Noah does as he exits the ark in verse 20. He builds an altar to the Lord. I love how D.L. Moody said that before there’s a house, there’s a church. Notice even here in this moment the faith that Noah has in the Lord’s ability to provide for him and his family. While there were countless animals on the ark, they weren’t unlimited. When we think of Noah’s Ark, we usually think of the illustrations of the animals coming 2 by 2 but in chapter 7 we see that there is actually only true of the unclean animals. For the clean animals they went 2 by 7 for a total of 14 animals. It is out of this group that Noah offers sacrifices. For Noah to take 1 of 7 takes a lot of faith. It would be easy to be tempted to think, “God there isn’t a lot of meat up here to eat. There isn’t a lot of animals to repopulate the earth so that life could continue. Wouldn’t it be better to keep all the animals happy and healthy until their is a surplus?” No, Noah freely gives of what he has because all that he has has been given to Him from the Lord. I would even encourage you all to think like that. Everything that you possess is from the Lord. James says in James 1:17 “Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow.” If we are to be living sacrifices for the Lord, if we are to give faithfully to the Lord, why would we think that He would be pleased if we only give Him the surplus? Everything you have is already His. Trust Him to use it! “God I only have 7, if I give you one I’m left with only 6!” The God that brings you through the chaos of the flood will see you through. Noah gives to the Lord this sacrifice of thanksgiving and this sacrifice of worship. In verses 21 and 22 the Lord smells the soothing aroma of the sacrifice and He makes a promise. That phrase of the Lord smelling the soothing aroma, that does not mean that God smelled this burning flesh and suddenly His hunger or His anger was satisfied. In ancient religions, similar language would be used to say that the god’s were these ravenous creatures that needed these sacrifices to appease them but that is not what we see in this verse. Really what it means is that the Lord accepted and was pleased with Noah’s act of worship. Really it comes down to the nature of the sacrifice because all sacrifices in the Old Testament were just a shadow of what would come in the New. Paul writes in Ephesians 5:1–2, “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.” Jesus Christ propitiates the wrath of God in His sacrifice. All the Old Testament sacrifices were just a picture or a shadow of the perfect sacrifice to come. R.C. Sproul said,

The Purpose of God: Ephesians Imitators of God

Jesus’ love was a love that manifested itself in self-sacrifice. He offered himself for others. His offering and sacrifice fulfilled all of the ritual sacrifices of the Old Testament. The sweetest fragrance, the most beautiful aroma that God has ever detected emanating from this planet, was the aroma of the perfect sacrifice of Jesus that was offered once and for all on the cross.

In verse 21, we see that the Lord promises to never again curse the ground on account of men and will never again destroy every little thing. In between those 2 statements, we see that the condition of man, is still the same. Sin is still going to be an issue and the Lord goes as far as saying that the intent of man’s heart is evil from his youth. He says almost the exact same thing that he said at the beginning of chapter 6. Sin does not stop at the flood and we are going to see this next week with Noah and his own children. To deal with the evil of man’s heart, something even more extraordinary than a planetary flood will need to happen. Sin and evil must be dealt with in full. In order to address the evil of man’s heart, in order to atone for the evil of their sin, the Son of God will have to die. In these verses we see grace upon grace, we see mercies unending. Despite the evils of man’s heart, God promises to never destroy the entire planet again. This doesn’t mean that localized disasters won’t happen. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be tornados or hurricanes or floods or earthquakes ever again. What it does mean is that God will never destroy the earth in the same way that we see happen in the book of Genesis. Look again at Genesis 8:22, the Lord says, “While the earth remains, Seedtime and harvest, And cold and heat, And summer and winter, And day and night Shall not cease.” The natural order of the earth will continue until the day that the new heavens and the new earth are created. What this means is that global warming will not destroy the world. Solar flares will not destroy the world. Greenhouse gases will not destroy the world. The sun will not burn out and destroy the world. Everything will proceed exactly as it should until the time that Christ returns. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be good shepherds of the world that God has given us. Surely, we should take care of the good creation that God has given to us. God is with us forever. Time will continue on this earth until the day that Christ returns and even then, the people of God will be with Him forever. In the story of Noah, we see the story of the Gospel. Peter in his letters, multiple times points back to the story of Noah and how the ark is an image of the church. It is an image of God saving out of wickedness and it is an image of God’s sustaining through chaos. The Church will survive just as Noah was to survive. The world around us may seem like a massive flood of sin and evil but God’s people are save in His arms. You may look around the world and think, “How can the Church survive in a world like this? How can the Church survive in a world full of woke nonsense and sinful agendas? How will our children survive in a world where we can see plain as day that the intent of man’s heart is evil from his youth?” The gates of hell cannot defeat Christ’s church. Noah was in the minority and yet God always has a remnant that is chosen by grace. The Church has always been a minority and yet it is the minority that God uses. Paul says in Romans 11:2–5 “God has not rejected His people whom He foreknew. Or do you not know what the Scripture says in the passage about Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel? “Lord, they have killed Your prophets, they have torn down Your altars, and I alone am left, and they are seeking my life.” But what is the divine response to him? “I have kept for Myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” In the same way then, there has also come to be at the present time a remnant according to God’s gracious choice.” There will always be a remnant that will be faithful. Thousands of years of church history has proven this. A handful of fishermen from Galilee, empowered by the Holy Spirit, became a group that reached the entire known world within a century. To steal a line from one of my favorite pastors, big doors swing on small hinges. God is able to save by many or by few and it is not the size of the majority that will dictate the work and the success of God. Dear friends, have you been saved? Has God brought you into the ark with His sovereign hand and gracious heart. The Lord will show mercy on whom He will show mercy and the fact that you are here today is proof that God has continued to be merciful to you. But the day will come when the door of the ark will close and the floodwaters of God’s wrath will come upon every sinner that has not come to Christ in faith. What side of the door are you on? You must either be with the minority within the ark and be saved or you will be outside of the door with the majority and be lost. God was patient with the people of the world while Noah built the ark and yet only 8 were saved. You might look at the world like those at the time of Noah and think, “Where is there God? Where is the promise? There is no way that this is true.” The same thing was mentioned in Noah’s day. Peter writes in 2 Peter 3:3-9

2 Peter 3:3–9 NASB95

Know this first of all, that in the last days mockers will come with their mocking, following after their own lusts, and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation.” For when they maintain this, it escapes their notice that by the word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water, through which the world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water. But by His word the present heavens and earth are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men. But do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day. The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.

God is patient and now is the day and now is the time to come to repentance. Christ is ready to receive you today. I’ll leave us with this quote from the great Puritan commentator Matthew Henry: “As Noah put forth his hand, and took the dove, and pulled her in to him, into the ark, so Christ will graciously preserve, and help, and welcome, those that fly to Him for rest.” Let’s pray.