Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / June 12, 2022 | RETOLD - Noah's Ark

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June 12, 2022 | RETOLD - Noah's Ark · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: How's everybody doing?
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: We are continuing our series called Retold this morning.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: If you haven't been with us before, we are on a series that might mean a lot more to you if you grew up with a felt board in Sunday school class.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: And by that I mean that we are going through a lot of stories that typically are characterized as children's Bible stories.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: And if you had a picture Bible growing up, or if you didn't grow up in a Christian home, these are just some of the most popular Bible stories that we've got, and the ones that are interesting for children.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: We said that, well, sometimes when we put it in that context, when we tell the story to a child, we can lose the greater story that God is trying to communicate, and we get the sense that we know everything about the story, even though we actually only know the fun parts.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: So last week we looked at Daniel and the Lion's Den, and this morning we are going even further back in the Old Testament into what is, I'd say, one of the most popular stories in the entire Bible, which is Noah's Ark.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna be talking about Noah's Ark this morning.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: And if you know anything about the story of Noah's Ark, what probably comes to your mind is either the Veggie Tales episode or something about obviously the water, uh, the ark itself, the animals, maybe the rainbow.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it's there's a lot of things associated with the details of the story and some of the fun questions that might come with it.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like, where did the water come from?
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: How big was the ark?
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: How did the giraffes fit inside the doorway?
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, how did Moses get, or not Moses, Noah, get all of these people onto the Ark?
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna make that mistake multiple times today.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: So it just happened earlier than it did in the first service.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Nevertheless, um, I want to, this is a good time to set your expectations because we're not going to talk about really any of those details.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and the reason why, the reason why is because um not that I want to deprive you of something, but rather that I want you, when we're done talking about this story, to understand the most important parts of the story.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the most important part of this story is that you understand what God is trying to communicate through Noah's Ark, you understand how it connects to the rest of the Bible, and you understand how Noah's Ark connects to your life as well.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because you see, the details that are often associated with in the pictures of Noah's Ark are not the most important.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: They are not essential for your faith.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh every week we do a podcast where sometimes we, or every week we take a look at the things that kind of hit the cutting room floor.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: We'll have a greater discussion about some of this stuff.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: But today we are looking at the thing which is most essential, which is that we understand what God is trying to say.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when we get to Genesis six, because see, Noah's Ark is a four-chapter long narrative, and so there, even with that, there's some things that I have to cut out this morning.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: But when we get to chapter six, what the expectation is, is that we already have an understanding of Genesis 1 through 5.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Because when we get to chapter 6, it's going to help us understand what the flood is doing and why it's happening.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: And when you look at the beginning of the Bible, Genesis 1 through 5, you'll see that there's a particular narrative that's taking place.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: God's overarching story that's happening, and Noah's Ark is taking place in context.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you look at, for instance, like Genesis 1 through 3, you get the first big story, right?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: The main characters are introduced.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: We see the theme is set up, which is the righteous versus the unrighteous.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: We see God and Satan that are present there in the narrative, and then we see something that is picked up on throughout the whole Bible, which is basically there are two lines of people, those who are being faithful to God and those who are following after Satan.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: And in Genesis 3.15, we see that God makes a promise.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: He says that he is going to raise up a Savior to redeem everybody who has fallen under the curse of their sin.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Because that was one of the big problems was God said the world should be going a certain way.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: A whole bunch of people said, No, thank you.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Well, that's your decision, but there are going to be some consequences for that.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: I desire for you to be righteous, and you are choosing to be unrighteous.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that's Genesis 1 through 3.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: But this idea, it's almost left as a cliffhanger, there's going to be a Savior that's coming.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so what you would expect narratively, as you're reading this story, if you had no other knowledge of the Bible, is that you would expect this Savior to appear on the scene pretty quickly.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so in Genesis 4, 5, and the beginning of 6, we see this story play out.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Almost in these little like vignettes, these little narratives.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: They're not as big as the first one, but for instance, like Cain and Abel, right?
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: We see righteous Abel is killed by unrighteous Cain.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not just a problem of good versus evil, it is continuing the story from Genesis 3.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's picking up on these lines of people.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: You look at after Cain and Abel, then this guy named Lamech comes along, and Lamech boasts about the sin of Cain, saying that he's a hundred times worse than Cain is.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so you see as you're reading along, you're like, okay, things are not getting better.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Things are getting appreciably worse, which is not good.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then as you keep going and going, Genesis 5 then gets into this genealogy of the righteous and the unrighteous.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: We're picking up this thread.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: And when we get to Genesis 6, which is where we're going to begin our story this morning, we see at the very beginning of the chapter that the world has really gone downhill.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Everything is going wrong.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And though the Savior has not appeared on the scene yet, we see the need for him is even greater.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: When we get to Genesis 6, verses 1 through 8, by the way, this is this is the biggest section of text we have today, so don't fret.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: When mankind began to multiply on the earth, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of mankind were beautiful, and they took away any they chose as wives for themselves.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the Lord said, My spirit will not remain with mankind forever, because they are corrupt.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Their days will be a hundred and twenty years.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: The Nephilim were on the earth, both in those days and afterward, when the sons of God came to the daughters of mankind who bore children to them.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: They were the powerful men of old, the famous men.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: When the Lord saw that human wickedness was widespread on the earth, and that every inclination of the human mind was nothing but evil all the time, the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and he was deeply grieved.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Then the Lord said, I will wipe mankind, whom I created off the face of the earth, together with the animals, creatures that crawl, and birds of the sky, for I regret that I made them.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Noah, however, found favor with the Lord.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: So if you just started here, it sounds bad, but what we need to see is that it has been something that is spiraling out of control.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: And this is presented as an indictment upon humanity, both individually and corporately or worldwide.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: So individually we see that all of these people, and we see, well, first of all, let me take a step back.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of stuff here that I know is very interesting and it's pretty highly debated.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like who the sons of God were, what the 120 years mean, whether it was 120 years until the flood, or that mankind's lifespan would not be uh go beyond 120 years, where Moses is the first one that fulfills that, who the Nephilim are, um, who the powerful men of old were.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: All of those things are interesting.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: They are not critical to understanding this passage.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: What is critical is seeing that things are going wrong, all of these people are going against God's will, and then it is ultimately spread into the entire world.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: God makes this very startling claim that human wickedness was widespread on the earth, and that every inclination of the human mind was nothing but evil all the time.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Everything is going very poorly, and everything is rebelling against God.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so, if we understand where we're coming from in the story, we get to Genesis 6, and we know who God is and we understand his character, then we get to the part about the flood, and it should flow naturally that we say, Ah, yes, God's judgment is coming upon these things.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: But amongst all of the ideas that we could pick up on here, the one that I do want to clarify further is this statement when it says, the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: Some of your translations might say God was sorry that he made man on the earth.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it's kind of a misleading thing to say, because the idea here is not that God made a mistake and was repenting of it, as we would when we say we are sorry.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: God did not make a mistake.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Rather, this is an emotional rather than a mental conclusion.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: We see this word elsewhere that it literally means sort of that he breathed heavily, like he sighed, and that he was in need of comfort.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's sort of an anthropomorphism, but uh you see it elsewhere in Exodus, at the beginning of Exodus, when Moses, right, is in the little reed basket, little baby Moses, and he's floating down the Nile, and Pharaoh's daughter picks him up and says, you know, look at this baby, he doesn't have he needs help, I'm going to take him in.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: It says that she felt sorry for him.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's the same word that's being used here.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost one of like pity.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then we see that he was deeply grieved, that God was pained or saddened by his creation.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: So, really, what you should take away from that is, again, not that God is saying, Oh, I made a mistake in creating mankind.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Rather, what he's saying is, my beautiful creation, which was made in my image and now has spread throughout all of creation, including the plants and the animals, it is breaking away from me, it is rebelling against me, and because God is righteous, that brings judgment, and he is grieving that fact.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: So, all of that being said, I just want you to understand that God is not sorry in the sense that we might consider it.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Rather, he is righteous, but grieving the flood.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now, as we move on, we and we saw at the beginning, or rather the end of verse 8, we see Noah is being introduced.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: And this individual, Noah, is a pretty fantastic person.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: These are the family records of Noah.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: He was a righteous man, blameless among his contemporaries or his peers, Noah walked with God.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: And Noah fathered three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, once more, you might get tired of me hearing this, but because this story takes place in a context, we're drawing things that happened before and recognizing that things that happen after.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so this phrase that Noah walked with God is a verbal signature that Noah is a part of the righteous family.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just that they call him righteous.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: With this particular phrase that Noah walked with God, it's the one that was used about his ancestor Enoch, who we don't get any information from other than he was a righteous man, and apparently he did not have to die.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: He went straight into heaven to be with the Lord.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: So Noah is sort of identified in this righteous line, and everybody else is identified in this unrighteous line.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so Noah is presented here.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Noah, who we'll see in a moment, is brought up in eight other books of the Bible because of not only how righteous he was, but the faith that he had shown and how his story involves the rest of Scripture.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: So then we get to the really hard part.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, this is the one that's going to divide us really into two camps.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: In Genesis 6, verses 17 through 19, God is communicating to Noah, understand that I am bringing a flood, flood waters on the earth to destroy every creature under heaven with the breath of life in it.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Everything on earth will perish, but I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark with your sons, your wife, and your sons' wives.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: You are also to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: So before we talk about the obvious and what the flood represented, you'll notice that it says that everything on earth will perish, which is also a significant statement because up to this point, what we've recognized as being wicked is human beings.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: We are the ones that are bringing sin into the world.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: But as we've seen, we saw it in the Garden of Eden and the Curse.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: And Paul talks about it later in the book of Romans.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: He says, when we sin, both here and then in our current lives, there's this really interesting way that it actually affects the environment around us in a tangible way.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that's such an odd concept for us to consider if we just think of sin as doing something against God.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: But if when we consider that we are rebelling against the Creator, it makes sense that all of his creation would experience that rebellion too.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so part of the statement that God is making here is this wickedness is so widespread that basically everything needs to go.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: All of the plants and the animals and all, every single one of them, they have been corrupted by mankind's sin, and now they are being judged as well.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Not much time to go into that, but if you remember, if you were with us for Leviticus, we talked about how animals could sort of be this substitutionary figure for the sin of mankind.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, now we see that the problems that we have created have extended into other areas.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: But then we get to the obvious the flood is coming, and the flood is going to take out everything.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's going to be two camps that we divide into on this flood, and it is really hinging upon how you view God's character.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: So the first camp is going to be that you see the flood from a what I'm just going to call a biblical perspective, that you understand where this narrative is coming from, what wickedness means to God, and by his righteous judgment, why this flood is understandable.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying that you love it, right?
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: If you do love the idea of the flood and you're on some FBI database somewhere, because they're going to profile you.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: No, I'm not saying that you love it.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: What I am saying is you understand where it's coming from.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's expected, right?
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: If we are reading the story from a Bible perspective, when we get to the flood, we should say, like God, this makes us sad.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: We grieve this, but we see where it's coming from.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: We expect it.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: The other side of the coin is going to be that this is some sort of unconscionable brutality from a cruel being.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: That the judgment of the entire world is something that you cannot imagine a loving God doing, and therefore you reject it out of hand, that God is, oh well, the conclusions are many that you might come to, that either the story is fake or that God is wrong or that he made a mistake here, all of which are incorrect.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: But those two things are important distinctions, and though I say two camps, you might find yourself on a spectrum somewhere in the middle.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because if we come from a biblical perspective, we say that this is expected and we grieve it and we understand where God is coming from.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: And on the other side, though, you have to recognize if we're coming from a self-centered perspective, what is probably in the back of our minds, or maybe the front of our minds, is the idea that we hate that God is ever going to judge sin in this world.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Most likely because we put ourselves into that category, which we should, but you hate the idea that God is going to judge it.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so you similarly hate the idea that you might not have made the cut as I would not have to get onto the ark, and we would have been considered having fallen short of God's standard and being under his judgment as well.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: And because of our self-centered perspective there that we can so easily hold to, it alters the way that we view this narrative, and it makes it so that we say that God was some sort of cruel being.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: When in fact we are going to see that he was being reasonable here, and actually the unexpected and the merciful thing that he does comes next in the story.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: But before we get there, we see that God speaks with Noah.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: Lord said to Noah, Enter the Ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you alone are righteous before me in this generation.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now, let's talk about what, maybe just for a second, God is powerful enough to do.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: God is powerful enough to create new human beings.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: He did it.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: He hasn't, you know, at the beginning of the Bible.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: He hasn't done it since then, but nevertheless, he could do it.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: So Noah and his family getting onto the ark is not some sort of like pragmatic decision so that humanity can continue.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: What's actually happening is God is carrying, he has remembered his promise that he made, that from the line of the righteous in Genesis 3, one would emerge who would become a savior.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: And Noah is maintaining that line so that even though humanity, sort of the tree, has been cut down to Noah and his family, from it will emerge once more the line of the Savior.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so God is maintaining his promise to them.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: But the other thing I want you to see, which is so beautiful, this language about entering the ark, ten times more often, that word that is said enter here is actually translated as come, as an invitation in the Bible, in the Old Testament.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't make much sense if you put come to Noah in this context, unless you see it as God inviting them deeper into his presence, the one who is going to sustain them during this judgment.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: One way you can look at it as God saying, enter into the ark, and the other one is God saying, Come, join me in the ark, those who are righteous, and those who are going to, you alone and you and your family, be sustained during this judgment.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: It is the first kind of its invitation in the entire Bible where God is inviting people into what you could say is salvation of a certain kind.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so Noah and his family is being offered this option.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now we come to the part where we need to say, like, one, two, skip a few, because we are just at the beginning of Genesis 7, and this goes through Genesis 9.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so what we're going to hop over is the part where the floodwaters come, they rise, uh, what happens on the ark, which Noah's on there for like a year, okay?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then the floodwaters recede and then Noah gets out.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: One thing I want to show you, though, about this, and to sort of bridge that gap, is that sometimes when we uh are studying the Bible, there are these structures that come out in the way that the ancient literature was written.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: And if like 90% of your eyes just glazed over, like, stay with me for a second, because this is really important.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, this was actually true last week in our story in Daniel 6.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: I just had to cut it out because we didn't have time.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: But when it comes to Noah's Ark, the way this story is written is critical to us understanding the main point that is trying to be communicated to us in this narrative.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so what happens is it is written in something called a chiastic structure.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: And all that means is that there is a midpoint in the story, and everything up to that point is mirrored after this midpoint.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: So for instance, and well, and then the things that are mirrored, they correspond to each other.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's like they're hitting the same story beats, they're just a little different.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: So, as an example, there's a bunch of them, but uh in chapter 7, verses 1 through 9, the Lord commands the remnant, the righteous, to enter the ark.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: In chapter 8, verses 15 through 19, God commands the righteous to leave the ark.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: You can see how they're indelibly linked there.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so there are a bunch of these things, but they're all pointing towards a main idea.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: And we're not that unfamiliar with this concept.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's just sort of in our English literature, we normally wait for the main point of something to come at the very end of the story, sort of like the parable or the lesson.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: But here the main point is coming in the middle.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: We can also see this mirroring effect in the numbers that are used throughout the story.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: Though they refer to slightly different things, the 7, 7, 40, 150, then it's the midpoint.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: It mirrors 150, 40, 7, 7.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: You can see how these things build up to a main idea.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: The main idea for the text of Noah's Ark is that God remembers Noah.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's what everything is pointing to, and everything afterwards is pointing back at it.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: God remembered Noah.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now, okay, this is not like you forgot the stove was on, sort of remembering.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: God did not see Noah, you know, floating on the water, and he's like, oh no, I had I had lifted him up, I need to get back to him here.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: This language of remembering is used throughout the Bible, and it simply means that God did not forget his promise.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you might hear it elsewhere when you think of somebody who prays to the Lord.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: And God says, I remembered their prayer, because they're typically invoking something that God had already said he was going to do.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: So God's like, I remember that.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: Not that I'd ever forgotten it, but rather I have not forsaken you.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm maintaining my promise.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's what's happening here.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: God remembers his promise to Noah.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: He recognizes that.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: And as well as all the wildlife and all the livestock that were with him in the ark.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now God caused a wind to pass over the earth, and the water began to subside.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: So here we see this is the midpoint of the story.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: We see that now it is the mirror is sort of reversing, and everything that we read about leading up is going to be sort of undone in order.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: When we get to this, though, one thing that's interesting here is that the Lord, once more, this story is done in context, but it's part of God's overarching narrative.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: And this phrase about God causing a wind to pass over the earth and the water beginning to subside is not the only time we might hear that phrase.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: I will give you two seconds to think of where else it is.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, it is in Exodus 14.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: So this is where Moses is leading the Israelites through the Red Sea.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: The Moses stretched out his hand over the sea.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: The Lord drove the sea back with a powerful east wind all that night and turned the sea into dry land.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Think about this.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: How these situations are being mirrored.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: That Moses is leading a group of the righteous from the unrighteous Egyptians.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: They are being preserved from a body of water, and as they go through it on dry land, it eventually consumes the unrighteous because Pharaoh's army is taken over.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, we've got Noah now, and the righteous are being preserved from a judgment of water, and they are ultimately preserved on dry land.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: Same language that is denoting these kinds of things.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: God's Bible is beautiful.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: But we must continue with our story in Noah's Ark because we do have a conclusion to come to.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: We see that Noah, now the water has receded, and the whole thing about the raven and the dove and the olive branch has happened, and now he is on dry land.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: He has walked out of the ark.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: In Genesis 8, 20 through 21, what does Noah do first?
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: Noah built an altar to the Lord.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: He took some of every kind of clean animal and every kind of clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: When the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, he said to himself, I will never again curse the ground because of human beings, even though the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth onward, and I will never again strike down every living thing as I have done.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: The two camps we were in, you're activated again.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you think that the flood was the unconscionable brutality of God, this is the part that you expect.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because you're saying, well, of course, because God is a loving God, this makes sense, that he would say something like this.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: What he did with the flood, that was uncharacteristic.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is the God that I know.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: And we have changed the identity of God based upon the way we feel about how he should respond to our sin, which is a bad deal.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: The other way that we need to look at this from a biblical perspective is we say the part about the flood was the part that's expected.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's what should be happening when we talk about sin and a worldwide judgment for a world that has gone wild.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's what should be happening.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: The unexpected part, if you're coming from the biblical perspective, is that God would ever do something like this, even though he recognizes that the world is just as evil or will be just as evil as it was before the flood, even though, I mean, imagine if you're Noah, right?
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: And you just come out and it's like you and your family, and you have been cooped up for a year with animals and your immediate family, which you can decide which one of those would be worse for you guys.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: But you're like, oh Lord, you know, worshiping you, you are the giver of all good things, uh sacrificing the animals that you've provided for me, because in your mercy we have survived as the righteous.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: And then God's like, it's gonna happen again.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: But what is beautiful here is the unexpected part is God's mercy.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't mean that we wouldn't expect God to be merciful, but rather what I'm saying is that is out of his own volition.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like because of his character, right?
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: And this is actually the promise that is signified by the rainbow.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: God says, because of this, because of my promise, that you the same thing is not going to happen again, that even though humanity is evil from youth onward, even though every inclination of their heart is goes against me, I will never again strike down every living thing as I have done.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean that judgment isn't going to happen again, but it does mean it will be different.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: God has promised in his mercy that we won't do the exact same thing.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: So this is the part that you should really be saying in this story wow, I can't believe God would ever do something like that.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: In a wicked world that is worthy of God's wrath, God says, I love you and I'm going to protect you.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: That is the unexpected part.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: In the final uh part, though, of our narrative here with Noah's Ark, we see in chapter 9, verse 1, God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you might also recall this is something you would recognize from the beginning of the Bible because it's the same thing that God says to Adam and Eve, be fruitful and multiply.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so we see that Noah and his family are being set up almost as this like redo kind of thing.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like you are the second Adam.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so there are many parallels.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: Noah and Adam both have three sons.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: They are righteous men, they are working in a garden as Noah ends up planting a vineyard.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: There are many parallels to be drawn, not of the least of which is the command that God gives them.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: But this is where in the story we would get disappointed.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: Because up to this point, Noah has acquitted himself as, if you will, the righteous Savior that was expected in Genesis 3.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, we don't know who that is.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: We know from the rest of the Bible, but we don't know if we're just stuck in the beginning of Genesis.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so we've been anticipating the Savior, and up to this point, Noah has shown himself to be righteous, and here he falls into the exact same sin as Adam.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: In the garden, for Noah's in a vineyard, it is the fruit that takes him down.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: He makes wine, he gets drunk, he gets naked, and he gets ashamed.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: The exact same thing that happened to Adam.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: Ultimate, and we'll pick up on part of that narrative next week when we continue in another retold story.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: But nevertheless, Noah shows himself that even though he was righteous and believed in God by faith and was removed from the judgment, even still he required the mercy of God because he was not the perfect Savior.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: So all of those things, as we that concludes the part of Noah's Ark, rather his story about Noah making it through because of God's mercy, a worldwide judgment.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: We take that now to the New Testament.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because I said, I want you to understand Noah's Ark.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to understand how it connects to the Bible, and then here I want you to understand how it connects to you.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: And we're going to see that there are three main differences between our story and the story of Noah's Ark.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because I will tell you, outside of that, it is almost identical.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: We are all people who have fallen short of God's glory.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: We're all people who are deserving of judgment.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: If we're tracking with a biblical framework, we're all people who have fallen short of him and fall under his judgment, yet we are all people who have been given mercy because of him, and through faith in our faith in the Savior that did come, we are counted as righteous, and we make it through the judgment.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that in a microcosm is not only the gospel, but that is Noah's Ark's story, and that is your story.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: That is my story.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: But there are three important differences between Noah's Ark and our story.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: The first is the promise that God made.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: He says, I will never again strike down every living thing as I have done.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: If you read the Bible, you know that God is really good about keeping his promises.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: There isn't a single one that he hasn't kept.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: That idea of him remembering his promises, he never forgets them.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so the promise that he makes to Noah, the one that's signified by the rainbow, the one that says, I will never again do what I have done, is still holding true to this day.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so the promise that we have from God is not that judgment won't come again, but it won't be worldwide as it was previously.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: The judgment is going to look different.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: The judgment isn't going to be a worldwide flood.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm never again going to destroy every single living thing, God says.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: So we have this promise that we get to hold on to.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: And we can hold on to this promise because God has fulfilled another promise that he was keeping to Noah, actually through Noah, in our story, which is that God ultimately did raise up a Savior.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: The individual who is recognized in Genesis 3 comes about, and we know him to be Jesus Christ, God incarnate.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: God says, nobody has really been able to fulfill the righteousness that I've required, and so I am going to do it.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so he comes, taking on human flesh, and he dies for our sins and the sins of wicked mankind, as God says.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: Every inclination of their heart is evil from youth, and Jesus says, I'm going to cover that.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so God fulfills this promise.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so, because of that fulfilled promise, if you're tracking with me, that means and opens up the door so that the future promise of a judgment that will be different can still hold true.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: God in his will has never failed.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: But when Jesus came, Jesus really liked talking about the story of Noah's Ark.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't about the animals or the size of the Ark or the square footage of the Ark, but rather it was how it related to something that he would be doing in the future.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_00: Concerning that day and hour, no one knows, neither the angels of heaven nor the Son, except the Father alone.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_00: As the days of Noah were, so the coming of the Son of Man will be.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: For in those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah boarded the ark.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't know until the flood came and swept them all away.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: This is the way the coming of the Son of Man will be.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: The coming of the Son of Man is Jesus returning.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's the second coming of Christ.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: And depending on where you fall, on your idea of the end times, all of it includes judgment.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so when Jesus returns, part of what he is talking about is a judgment for the whole world.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: But remember the promise.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the other thing that's different here is the Son of Man is going to return.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus is going to return, and he says there are a lot of similarities to Noah.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that even Jesus, this is this is a statement right here, that even the Son of God does not know when he is returning, only the Father.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: It should make us pump the brakes on trying to figure it out ourselves.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: But nevertheless, Jesus says, because I don't know, I can tell you it will be like Noah.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: It will be like Noah, and what it will be like is people who are living their lives without any concern for God's desires are going to be caught up and they're going to be surprised.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it is not because it is God's intention to sort of play gotcha.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's not really where God's at here.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: See, this is the second amazing difference between us and Noah's story, is that Jesus is giving a warning.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: Something that Noah's people, his generation, did not receive.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now, once more, the camps, okay?
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: God, if you understand from the biblical perspective, God did not need to give them a warning or a heads up.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: God was not required to do that.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: He gave them instruction, and they deliberately and consistently disobeyed him.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: And God had told them that that would bring judgment.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: The mercy and the unexpected part is that God gives us this warning.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: He says there actually is going to be a judgment coming in the future.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_00: There is going to be another one.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it is going to be when my son returns, the Son of Man, and He is going to bring about a judgment over the entire world.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: Only it will not destroy the entire world like it did before.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: The earth will be made new like it was in the Garden of Eden.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: And instead, this is where my kingdom will be.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: But yet the same thing remains, that the unrighteous will be judged.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: It is the righteous who will survive the judgment of God.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: This warning that this is the way the coming of the Son of Man will be was given to us as a mercy.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're again coming from a place where God is cruel, then you're saying, well, how could he ever judge people again?
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he would judge people again because he is righteous.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: And whether or not you believe it, you really want to believe in a righteous God.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: You want to believe in a God that judges evil.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that we are also evil, and so we are included in that.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, all of that being said, there is one final and beautiful difference between us and the story of Noah's Ark.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: And we see a glimpse of it in Hebrews 11.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: What is sort of colloquial I'm gonna mess up the word?
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: It is also known as Hebrews 11 is the hall of faith instead of the Hall of Fame, right?
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: The Hall of Faith.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a list of people in the Bible who have had an amazing faith.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: And Noah is highlighted in verse 7.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: By faith, Noah, after he was warned about what was not yet seen and motivated by godly fear, built an ark to deliver his family.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: By faith he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: If you were reading through the story of Noah's Ark, you wouldn't be wrong to assume that what is highlighted is really Noah's action, his works.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: But what we see here in Hebrews 11 is a greater sort of, which is always beautiful about the New Testament, is when it greatly more greatly informs the stories that we are familiar with.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's that actually what was credited to Noah as righteousness was his faith in God's plan.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: And we see that throughout the Bible.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same thing that's given to Abraham and everybody else, that what was credited to them as righteousness was their faith in God's plan, that this idea of a Savior was going to come true.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: And even though they might not have known his name as being Jesus Christ, they trusted in the will of God.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so Noah, after he was warned, in this case, this is right, the difference is Noah was warned.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: Here, everybody has warned in our story.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: But Noah was warned about what was not yet seen, and motivated by godly fear, that's something that is good for us to hold in the proper proportion.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: He built an ark to deliver his family.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: But by faith, he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: An heir of the righteousness because one of his descendants is Jesus.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: And he is also an heir of the righteousness because what Jesus accomplished is that through his death and believing in him and having faith in him, everybody can be included as an heir of righteousness.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: Through Jesus Christ, we basically have an unlimited arc that anybody who trusts in him can be saved.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so the third and final difference is that we have been given a specific invitation that is far greater than the one that was given to Noah.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: I told you that in Genesis, when God was speaking to Noah and his family, the word is translated ten times more often as come.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's the first time an invitation is presented in the Bible.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: And here, this both the Spirit and the bride say, which is Jesus, come.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: Let anyone who hears say, come.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: Let the one who is thirsty come.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: Let the one who desires take the water of life freely.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: That is the last time the invitation of salvation is presented in the Bible.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's in the last book of the Bible, in the last chapter of the Bible, in Revelation 22.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so we see these bookends are presented here.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yet the difference for us is that we might have this righteousness from God by faith freely.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_00: We do not have to build an ark in order to survive.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: All we have to do is trust that Jesus was the Savior that was promised, that he died for our sins, and that the judgment that is coming in the future can be avoided if we believe in him.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_00: But the last thing I want to share with you, though, is a very important distinction to be made.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, Noah operated with a measure of godly fear.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, it is very important that we don't go to the God of all creation because we are terrified.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_00: That should not be our primary motivation.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I went to a Baptist seminary and we kind of like using fear a little bit to scoop people along out of the pews.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, if this was a Baptist message, there would be a real invitation where people would be coming down the aisles, but calm down.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: So but what I want you to see though is though this godly fear is important, like you shouldn't think callously about the future judgment.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, the greater encouragement is that like Noah, you may have a full and complete and joyful relationship with God, because through him and through that pathway, you are experiencing what was originally intended in the Garden of Eden, and everybody since then has failed to live that up.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's why Jesus needed to come, is because the Savior needed to rise up that God promised, and nobody had been able to do it.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: And certainly not since then anybody has been able to be fully righteous.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_00: So even though you and I, or for those who trust in Christ rather, have been counted as righteous and are able to avoid the coming judgment that we have been warned about.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, the greater encouragement is that we can find our true relationship with Him now that we were intended to have long ago.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that relationship with God is felt, the Bible uses different phrases.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_00: Some of it is like looking in a dusty mirror, that we understand all the joy that should come with that relationship, but yet it still not does compare to what happens after that judgment.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: See, just as Noah walked out onto dry ground and to God's beautiful promises and worshiped him, when we experience that final judgment, that will be the faithful response as well.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: Is that we will desire to worship God and thank him and give him all praise and glory because he did the expected thing, which was judge the world, and yet also did the unexpected thing, which was give a bunch of sinners like us a whole lot of mercy so that we could be with him even though we did not deserve it.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: That is the gospel, and that is Noah's Ark, and Noah's Ark is much deeper than how did the giraffes fit onto the ark.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: It is much more about God preserving the righteous through a worldwide judgment that he had every right to bring about.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_00: So, in that vein, let's go ahead and pray.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, we thank you for today.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: God, you are good.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: And Lord, you are righteous, and we thank you for being righteous.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: And Lord, you are merciful, and we very much thank you that you are merciful.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: God, we expect that you would handle the wicked because that is what a good God does.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yet, Lord, we recognize and we repent of our wickedness, that every inclination of our hearts has been evil from youth.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: And Lord, even as we have drawn closer to you in righteousness, we still realize all the ways that we fall short.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so, Father, we are thankful that you are good to remember your promises, that you have warned us about a coming judgment, so that we might not dally, Lord, but that we might tell other people about you and draw closer to you ourselves so that we can find joy and deliverance from that judgment.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: Father, we thank you for the invitation that you've provided, the way that you have given to us through Jesus Christ.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: And we ask that, Lord, not only would you help us to see that and feel that more deeply, to be obedient to your word, but that Lord, anybody who hears this or that we get to speak with about this would understand what it means to trust in you.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_00: Not because we're afraid, but because that is where true joy is found.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: Father, we love you and we thank you.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's in Jesus' name we pray.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: Have a great week, everybody.