God's Design to be Set Apart From Culture

This week in our lesson, we're going to fast-forward 10 generations from Adam to Noah as we follow God's unfolding story of redemption that is steadily moving toward the cross. And from Adam to Noah, we have about 1,600 years that we have gone over with very little narrative except this carefully recorded genealogy in Genesis chapter 5, and that genealogy is repeated by Luke in his gospel, no doubt to prove that the second Adam, the human side of Jesus through Mary, was indeed the offspring of the woman through the godly line of Seth. So this genealogy we have two times in our Bible. But as we approach this lesson and the subject of a global flood, I want to remind us that not everything in the Bible is easy to understand. We live on promises more than we live on explanations, and when we come to the things of the Lord, we need to leave room for mystery. And so we can look at this lesson as a tough week since it is centered on judgment, or we can look at this lesson as a week of promise because it is centered on rest and our rest. So it's all in how we view it. And I'm not going to read the whole text or really much of the text at all because that would take all 30 minutes to read Genesis 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. So my trust is in the fact that you've done your study guide, you've read that, and we're just going to kind of work through some of the things that we want to bring out. So let's start with this man of rest, Noah. It's tough to study Noah. It's tough to study famous people in general because we don't think about them as a person at all. And of all of the people in the Bible, probably no one is as caricatured and as Fischer-priced and as storybook stamped and all of that as Noah. Probably every one of you in your home right now have a Noah toy, or you have had a Noah toy, or you have, you know what I'm saying? Tough to study, to see now for us to say, I'm putting all that aside and I want to think of him as a real man who really lived. But that's what we're going to try to do. What we learned in our study was that Noah's name means comfort, or it means rest. When he was born, his dad prophesied in Genesis 5, 29, he will comfort us in the labor and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground that the Lord cursed. That is a fitting name for him. And of course, it's also not only a description of Noah, but prophetic of our Savior, the offspring of the woman who is to come. We learn these descriptions about Noah. He found favor with God. He walked with God. He was righteous and blameless. These are all descriptions of Noah and decisions made by the man Noah. We learned about the culture around him, what was his world like. In Genesis 6, 5, we had read that the wickedness of man was great in the earth. Every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And in verse 11, the earth was corrupt in God's sight and filled with violence. And so it was a universal problem. All flesh had corrupted their way. We learned that God had made a judgment, his forbearance and mercy having become, come to their limit. He said in verse 13, God said, I have determined to make an end of all flesh for the earth is filled with violence through them. I will destroy them with the earth. And with that statement, God set 120 year timer in motion that was going to go off about the time that Methuselah died. And we also learned that God told Noah about his secret rescue mission. Even though the world was going to be coming to an end as he knew it, God told Noah because God doesn't keep secrets from those who seek him, right? And so Noah had learned that he could be kept safe through this judgment if he would choose to believe God. God, he would need to build an ark, a chest that he could be carried inside of. God would give him instructions and Noah by faith would follow those instructions. Even if it didn't make sense to him, because why would it make sense to him that the whole earth would be underwater? It's never happened before. That would make about as much sense as Ontario getting 60 inches of snow in six weeks. It's never happened before. It's tough to plan for something that's never happened before, right? But Noah believed what God said about something he had never seen. And for that, he is commended in the hall of faith by the writer of Hebrews. Great thing that is written about him in Hebrews 11.7. It says,

Those two sentences are such a beautiful summary statement of our entire lesson, aren't they? And the verse before that in Hebrews says, for without faith it is impossible to please him. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. Great verses that we have in Hebrews. But let's look at those other people for a minute. What were the other people doing around him? Noah wasn't the only one around. In order to find out, I want to let Jesus answer that question for us because he speaks of it in Matthew 24 verses 38 and 39. These are Jesus's words. He says,

And then Jesus notes a parallel that he is making as he spoke these words. He goes on to say, that is how it will be at the coming of the son of man. And so it tells us we should take note of this because he looks back to the time of the flood, says this is what people were like at that time. And it will be the same for you New Testament Christians before the coming of the son of man. So that's important for us to hear those words. Now when it says, they knew nothing about what would happen, you might ask the question, does that mean that God was just going to sweep them away without warning or opportunity? No, because we know more about the character of God. And we know that in every geographic place and every time, somehow, in the mystery of God's plan, he provides. Paul wrote to the Romans and said this, and this is not in your study guide, Romans 119, but you may be familiar to you. Paul said, what may be known about God is plain to men because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made so that men are without excuse. And when we read that phrase without excuse, again, we leave room for the mystery of God. We do not live on explanations. We live on promises. We don't know what that means, but we believe it. We trust it because we know the character of God. For one thing, Noah was not secretly hammering away with his garage door down. Peter tells us he was a preacher of righteousness. You got 100 years of a guy drawing that much attention, making something that had never been made before. So we can put a few pieces of the puzzle together and know God knows. You can talk about this in your group if you want, but I have come to really rest in the fact that we are, people over all 6,000 years, we are accountable for the amount of light God has chosen to give us in our generation. People in Noah's generation were sinning against the amount of light God had revealed to them. We could be at risk for sinning against the amount of light God has given to us, and God has given us a floodlight. The stadium lights are on in our generation. We have the word of God that you can buy at every Walmart that tells about Jesus Christ, son of God, who came, was resurrected from the dead, and proves everything that is in here. That is a huge amount of light. So regardless of what it was like for those people, what is it like for us? Woe to us if we sin against such a massive amount of light that God has provided in our generation. As Peter goes on to say, if God did not spare the ancient world, what is going to happen to the ungodly at the coming of the son of man? That's the question of our day. So we're going to move on to the middle section of our study, which was the man or the Method of rest and the obedience of rest. And in practical terms, we learned that Noah obeyed God and he commanded what God had told him. It was told us four times in four ways. When God said, build an ark, he went to work and he built an ark. When God said, take in the animals, he did it. When God said, go into the ark, you and your household, they all went in. And the chapters 7 and 8 narrate for us the events and the timing of the flood itself. And although that's very interesting, remember our study, we are trying to move through people to people to people to see God's plan. And so we're going to leave those particular events and timing for a different time. But since we're focused on people, we know that Noah loved God, Noah sought God, Noah chose to believe and rest in God. What about his wife? What about Mrs. Noah? And unlike my husband says, her name was not Joan. She was not Joan of Arc. Maybe she was called Joan, I don't know, we'll find out someday. But what about her? Did you stop this week to ponder her and her role in history, her role in this family? Did she always trust and affirm everything that Noah said God had told him to do? Did she grow weary when he said, honey, we're going to need to plant a forest of trees here so that in 70 years, we can harvest the resin for the... You know, did she try to micromanage his job? Did she try to rule over and overrule everything that he thought to do and organize his tools, organize his garage the way she thought it should be? You know, those things that we talked about last week come naturally to us. She must have learned to overcome some of those implications of being a daughter of Eve, to be a really great helpmate to her husband. Because I just don't think that project would have gotten off the ground without her full support and her, you know, assurances that she was for him. And I feel like Noah and his wife fulfill a little wordplay that I like to use. You might like it, you might not like it. It's not in the Bible, but I think it's biblically based. And this wordplay is that God has given my husband a mission, therefore, he has given me a submission. When God calls a man, his wife comes alongside to help, to guide, to lead. And Noah and his wife, I feel like, just play that out, you know, perfectly. And so, it's maybe a good time just to ask the question to all of us, do we leave room in our marriages? Those of you who are married right now, do you leave room for your husband to have a mission? Did Mrs. Noah ever feel frustrated with the mission that her husband was given? No role models, no front runners that had gone on in that. Are we willing to pray that God would reveal that mission to him, that we can come and undergird? And certainly, we've talked about in the prior weeks, the role of the woman who is not married, and how she has this freedom then. And I think then God allows her the mission, right, to pursue. But I wanna move on to the last section, which in our study guide we called the covenant of rest. And I am gonna read some of the passages here as we move to Genesis 8, verse 20. Because once the water from the flood receded, and Noah and his family went out from the ark, this is what we read in Genesis 8, 20. It says,

And I feel like there's so much packed in those three verses that I want to spend a little time on it. Let's start with the sacrifice that we see here. The first thing Noah does when he comes out to this quiet, empty, barren land, is he sacrifices to the Lord. And I think that that's really well placed that we have that statement there, because it reminds us of the earliest presentation of the gospel back in Genesis, when God sacrificed that innocent animal so that he could cover Adam and Eve. And it reminds us of how Abel picked up and was a willing carrier of that concept, that gospel message of a sacrifice, and his offering was regarded by the Lord. And even though Noah couldn't see Jesus, Jesus is way in the future. There's mountaintops, there's too much in the way between Noah. He couldn't see Jesus, but yet by faith, he was honoring God's plan for a redemptive sacrifice by sacrificing. And he was aligning himself with what was yet to come in the future. Now we can maybe understand why it says it was a pleasing aroma to the Lord. Not that God delights in the sacrifice of animals, but he delights when his people catch the vision for the drama of his unfolding story. And Noah caught the vision, and he was participating with God in that drama. Well, then we begin to see some promises on God's part in these verses. He says, I'll never strike down every living creature, and I'm gonna give you stability in the rhythm of your lives so that you don't need to worry about this happening again. As long as the earth remains, he says, there will be seed time and harvest. There will be cold and heat. Can I remind us today here, there will be heat? There will be cold and heat. There will be summer and winter, day and night. This is the rhythm that we can depend upon as long as the earth remains. And then in the next chapter, God begins to give Noah some instructions that bear a striking similarity to Adam. He says, be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth. Same instruction that was given to Adam, right? And he tells him that now every moving thing will be food for you. For Adam, it was every living plant, but it is different here. God says, now every moving thing is food for you. With one limitation, don't eat flesh with the lifeblood in it. Because the blood is representative of another drama that is important. So that was the one limitation that God had given. And then he reminded the value in human life in chapter nine, verse six, when he said, whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image. So there was this reminder of the image of God. And it's a reminder that there's a strong distinction between the man and the rest of creation and the animals. And then finally, in chapter nine, we get to what we call theologically the Noahic covenant. To us, I'll call it the covenant of rest. But I also wanna read this together with you. So in Genesis 9, verse 11, and I'll skim a little. I'll try and keep you on board with where I'm going. But it starts,

He restates it forward and backward multiple times in that passage. But the sign of the rainbow is for us to see and to take comfort. The sign of the rainbow is for God to see and remember his covenant. Now, we think of a rainbow in our world as something really fun that we see in summer after a thunderstorm, right? We always point out, look at the rainbow, did you see the rainbow? We think of a rainbow as a cute little thing on little girl's clothes or on the rear flank of my little ponies, right? Did anybody have rainbow my little ponies? That's dating me, my kids, not me. Or we think of a rainbow like an art project or a science project. Do you all know Roy G Biv, right? Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, on and on. Or we think of a rainbow as a portent for something that's going to happen. Just Tuesday, I had seen on Facebook that people in Israel observed a triple rainbow. I don't know if I've ever really seen a triple rainbow. And on Tuesday, their Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was meeting with Donald Trump. And the people in Israel were just going, a triple rainbow. Like, it is a sign, you know. I don't know, that's not what God said it's a sign for, but what I want to talk about is something, maybe another layer to a rainbow that you've never thought about, and that is the meaning here of the word bow. Because the Hebrew word, which I won't pronounce for you, is a word that means a battle bow, as in a bow and arrow, an instrument of war. So when you point, maybe we think of our instrument of war as a gun, right? You point a gun at someone and the intention is for that raft to come out of the gun and strike that person. The same thing would be for a bow and arrow, right? You have the shape of the bow this way, you draw the arrow and it is heading somewhere in particular. So think about why the arrow is pointed. How does it relate to this time in history? Well, God explained our dilemma in these verses. He said, the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. That puts us at war with God. We are naturally at war with him and his righteousness. But rather than ever striking down the whole earth again, he is setting that instrument of war, that bow in the sky, and pointing it directly toward heaven. And heaven itself will take the wound, will take the brunt of what is deserved to us because we are evil from the beginning. Isn't that a neat image of the rainbow? God is saying, I'm not pointing my wrath down to earth, I will never destroy all men. My wrath will be pointed now toward heaven. And that is exactly where God's story of redemption is going. It is headed to heaven. It is headed to his son, taking on the flesh, coming and taking that wound. It is pointing to Jesus. Jesus will ultimately suffer, die, take the wound from that bow for us that any who believe God, who receive forgiveness of sins are now sheltering. We are sheltering. Think of yourself next time you see a rainbow as sheltering under that rainbow. No longer any condemnation for us. No longer at war with God. Isn't that beautiful? So so far in our story of redemption through Genesis, we've seen Adam and Eve covered by means of a sacrifice. We've seen Noah and his wife carried through judgment by means of God's provision. And for us, are we not also covered by means of a sacrifice? The blood of Jesus covers our sins. And are we not also carried? We as Christians like to use the phrase that we're in Christ. That's a little difficult to process and think about. How are we in Christ? Well maybe the ark now gives you something to, you know, an image to put that on. But we are in Christ. John 14, 20 says,

So we are now in Christ in the same way that Noah and his family was resting in the ark. We're at spiritual rest all the days of our life as believers under the rainbow because of the punishment that has been directed to Jesus. I want to make just a couple final notes about the drama of Noah that makes plain the gospel of grace to us. First of all, the ark was the only way that Noah could have been saved. There was no other method of salvation going on there. And Jesus said, I am the way and the truth of the life. No man comes to the Father except through me. We have that parallel. The ark was safe and it was secure. It was enough to carry them through. And Jesus said, whoever comes to me, I will never cast out. Jesus will never come and pluck us out of that place, out of the ark, and cast us out. And we learned that everyone outside of the ark perished. That's a really sobering thought that everyone else perished. And Jesus also said, whoever does not believe is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. So there's some really sobering things about this passage. On day two in your study guide, we asked the question, in your world right now, would you consider yourself more like Mr. and Mrs. Noah, believing and obeying God's voice, or more in line with the general population of the earth, eating, drinking, and marrying as you please? And that's a really important question. Like we said last week, it's old-fashioned to talk about judgment. In our culture, love wins, justice loses, because they're considered to be in conflict with one another. And it's difficult to reconcile because it doesn't make sense to us. But the warning of Jesus stands. He said, so it will be the coming of the Son of Man. So I want to review for us something we read when we studied 1 and 2 Peter. At the end of Peter's second letter, he encouraged us to be sober-minded by using this same comparison that Jesus did. And he said this, that people deliberately overlook this fact that he was talking about, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these, the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. By the same word, the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment, the destruction of the ungodly. It's out of fashion to read verses like that in our culture. We don't do it very much because it doesn't make sense to us. The reference is 2 Peter 3, 5, and 7. No, it's okay. It doesn't make sense because it's never happened before. Jesus has never come before. We've never had a rapture before. Can we trust in something that we've never seen before, just in the same way that Noah did? Well, we need to respond to God's rescue mission, and not only us, because I look around the room and I think, yeah, I've probably got a pretty good-sized group of ladies here who already are resting inside the ark. But also, it's why people around us need to hear and understand God's rescue mission. And I would just pray that each of us, the Spirit of God would enable us, in however that looks like in our world and our life, to be a preacher of righteousness like Noah was. The final exclamation point that I just want to put on this is for us to enjoy the imprint that God put on those first ten generations to give us the gospel of grace through the names of the men that we listed in this genealogy. And you can just listen, it's on the last page of your study guide, but you don't have to open it up right now. I just want to close by listing the men and what their names mean, and I'll just only read the meanings. So for ten generations, this message that we have is that man is appointed mortal man of sorrow. The blessed God shall come down teaching. His death shall bring the despairing comfort or rest. Isn't that awesome that God gave us that message of the gospel? See, he has a plan, and his plan is moving forward in his time and in his way. Father, thank you for your plan. Lord, I just want to thank you and rejoice this morning, Lord God, that part of your plan was to send the judgment back toward heaven. Lord, I don't think I can fully in my lifetime understand the judgment that I deserve for being separated from you, being at war with you. I don't think I can understand, but Lord, when I see Christ on the cross, I can begin to have a glimpse of what was done for me, Lord. Lord, I see in this that you love, you are a God of love and mercy that reaches out and stretches out to us, even just giving us the sign that here, all these centuries later, we still enjoy the sign of the rainbow. And Lord, now we can know that we are sheltering under that rainbow and that your goodness and your grace has been just lavished upon us, Lord, and so we thank you for that, Lord God. Lord, I pray for my sisters as they discuss the lesson, and I pray that you would give them grace and open up their hearts, each one, to something that you want them to carry away and motivate you to love you more, serve you with their whole heart, and stand against the tide of the culture that we live in. Lord, I pray these things in Jesus' name, amen.