- Noah: Faith Does What God Asks

04 - Noah: Faith Does What God Asks
PEOPLE ALL AROUND US REMEMBER NOAH because he built a mammoth boat on a dry hillside—and they are still laughing at him. The Bible remembers Noah for his faith in God—and commends him for doing exactly what God told him to do.
If there were comics in Noah’s day, they surely worked over the old man—building his big boat so far from water. While they were getting their laughs, they refused to believe that God had said to Noah: “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them” (Genesis 6:13).They refused to believe that God is sovereign.
The weight of the Bible is on the side of Noah’s faith. “Noah,” the Scriptures declare, “did everything just as God commanded him” (Genesis 6:22). The New Testament measurement of Noah’s faith is brief, but stirring and memorable:
By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family. By his faith he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness that comes by faith. (Hebrews 11:7)
Noah was not a popular figure in his day. But he was God’s man in history’s worst crisis, and he was faithful in the prophetic ministry God gave him.
Now, when we discuss Noah and the Flood, we must discuss sin and judgment and alarm—and none of these are topics likely to make any twentieth-century person popular. But nevertheless we will find out where the Bible takes us as we review the faith and obedience of Noah.
Unlocking the lesson of Noah
There are some teachers in our churches who are strong on what they call “Bible analysis.” They are always searching for the “key” to the book or the “key verse” of the chapter, or perhaps even the “key word” in a Bible verse.
Although it is helpful in Bible study to discern the variety in the sections and segments that compose the Scriptures, a “key” is something else. Personally, I do not think our Bible was formulated in that way. If you need to find a key and do not find it, the message remains locked in. That is not the way the Bible speaks to us and guides us.
It is often remarked that the Bible is really a love letter to us from God. Suppose a sailor is stationed somewhere in the western Pacific. He writes a tender, loving letter to his wife, at home with the children half a world away. When it arrives in the mail box, the sailor’s wife quickly opens the envelope.
What is that wife’s first thought as she begins to read? Is it, “I wonder if I am going to be able to find the key to the message in this letter”? Oh, no! That is not her thought at all. She reads with joy and blessing and satisfaction. She senses the love that authored the letter. She does not need a college degree to understand and absorb the message of every paragraph.
In considering Noah’s faith, we do not have to search very far for understanding. The Bible gives us a straightforward message concerning Noah. It is simply this: “Demonstrate your faith in God in your everyday life!”
It is evident that God did not say to Noah: “I am depending on you to hold the proper orthodox doctrines. Everything will be just fine if you stand up for the right doctrines!” No, that is not what God demanded of Noah. Yet we have many religiously inclined people in our day who hold to an illusion that the learning of doctrine is enough. They actually think that somehow they are better for having learned the doctrines of religion.
What actually did God ask Noah to do? Just this: to believe, to trust, to obey—to carry out His word. In essence, God said to Noah, “I want to demonstrate to the whole world that your faith is genuine and that I am a rewarder of those who believe Me and trust Me!”
Doctrine must be enfleshed
I have been impressed by a statement on Christian doctrine made by Martin Lloyd-Jones, the English preacher and writer, in a published article. The gist of his message was this: It is perilously close to being sinful for any person to learn doctrine for doctrine’s sake. I agree with his conclusion that doctrine is always best when it is incarnated—when it is seen fleshed out in the lives of godly men and women.
Doctrine merely stated has no arms or legs, no tongue and no teeth. Standing alone, it has no purpose, no intentions, and it certainly carries no moral imperative.
Our God Himself appeared at His very best in the Incarnation, when He came into our world and lived in our flesh. What He had been trying to say to mortal man about Himself, He was now able to demonstrate in the person and life of Jesus, the Son of Man.
How can we best explain faith? Read the Bible account of Abraham—you will see faith in his life. How can we best explain courage? Read about Elijah and his challenge to the 400 prophets of Baal—you will find courage incarnated in a man. How can we best explain faithfulness? Turn to the life of Moses. Forgiveness? Turn to Joseph.
Now, what do we see in the life of Noah? Noah demonstrates many aspects of faith, but the particular emphasis is this: Faith pays heed to the warnings that come from God.
In the kind of world in which we live, men and women can easily come to the conclusion that so many alarms are false alarms that there is really no need to be concerned. But when God sounds a loud and commanding alarm, we should listen and exercise concern. When God said to Noah, “I will destroy man, whom I have created, from the face of the earth,” Noah believed God and acted in the light of the serious nature of that alarm.
When God warns a nation or a city, a church or a person, it is a grievous sin to ignore such warning. In conservative Christianity, we believe that the Christian message does indeed contain an element of alarm. Not all Christians believe this. Some have been taught that the Christian gospel is “good news” exclusively. The only way some people try to explain the full meaning of the Christian gospel is to quote one verse: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31). That is it! That is all there is to it, they say.
The positive suggests the negative
But I want to mention something here about the use of language. It is impossible to make certain definite statements without bringing to mind that which is exactly the opposite. If I should say, for example, “I was introduced to one of the largest men I have ever met,” I am making a comparison in my mind. I try to describe the man as large, and I cannot do that without having also a small man in my mind. If a small man did not exist, I could not be describing the other man as large.
So when the Scriptures admonish us to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ to be saved, there comes to our minds the fact of mankind’s lost condition. Why should I have to believe in Christ to be saved? Because I am lost. Because I am a sinner. Because I have believed the devil and all of his works unto near damnation! I am alienated from God.
Even in John 3:16, the most beautiful and rose-colored verse of all, there is an element of alarm sounding continually for the lost: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Salvation is there, yes! But the word perish is plainly there, too. And the alarming lost condition of the human race is there.
This is the basic reality of our faith—the reality of believing and trusting. The Christian gospel always has been and must continue to be a gospel of alarm. The Christian gospel cannot always be a gospel of honey and sweetness! It follows that there is a kind of faith that responds, that believes in the soundness of a warning that comes from God.
The gospel message is a gospel of hope and good news to those who respond and believe. But the gospel message is starkly plain to those who do not believe. “Whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son” (John 3:18).
Noah accepted the reality of God’s warning of judgment to come. He demonstrated his faith by acknowledging that God’s way is best and the best of all courses of action.
But why did Noah “fear”?
Now, some voice a negative reaction to the expression in Hebrews that declares Noah was moved by a “holy fear” to do all God had commanded. The English language does not always give us a proper perspective of the word fear.
If we are familiar with the Bible and the many godly men and women who have trusted the Lord, we know that holy fear is a kind of faith closely associated with high moral wisdom. It can only be the part of wisdom for a human being to fear irrecoverable spiritual loss. It is a wise kind of fear that is willing to consider the meaning of permanent and eternal separation from God, the source of all good.
Noah demonstrated a high quality of human wisdom as well as spiritual concern when he was moved to trust God and His word. Noah did not argue about his rights. He did not argue about God’s assessment of man’s nature and man’s violence. He did not argue about God’s course of action.
Noah’s high regard for God’s person was intermingled with his own reverent faith and holy fear. His knowledge of God was firsthand and personal. God had revealed Himself, and Noah said, “I will trust, I will follow, I will believe!”
Because Noah’s fear was a holy fear, he was moved to prepare for the acts of God that were to follow. Noah’s fear moved him. It is that simple and that significant. Nothing but the will of God was of any consequence to him.
I must note here a modern method of dealing with human fear, human guilt, human sin. Psychology is somewhere at the center of it. I speak of the expansion in our day of the old Greek idea that realistic drama could be utilized as a moral catharsis. The Greek authors said they wrote all of the harshness and terror, anguish and sorrow into their famed plays so those in the audience could experience the complete sweep of human emotions. Men and women were supposed to be able to live through it all by watching the portrayal by someone else.
I have never believed that the Greeks succeeded in bringing their idea to any desired moral fruition. In our day, however, the concept is still advocated. It is being carried out to a ridiculous extreme.
Many persons who make up our television and theater audiences, who may have never shed a real tear for any real person, will actually weep over the emotional trials and tribulations of the TV and movie actors. A moral catharsis, the Greeks said. Get yourself so identified with some imaginary character that you can live out all of your emotions. Then you will experience a kind of purification.
You will experience nothing of the kind!
What will happen is that you will become an artificial zombie! You will get so wrapped up in your feelings for what is unreal and artificial that you will never have right feelings of concern for what is real and true.
Noah faced reality
That may sound like it is far and remote from Noah’s faith, but there is a connection. Noah was moved—but he was on no emotional binge. He was not moved by depraved, guilty human fear. He was moved by the personal knowledge of a revelation from a holy and sovereign God.
When something unusual happens to us, we exclaim, “That is unreal!” Noah had word from the Lord. He said: “This is real! I know this is real! It is the better part of wisdom for me to do just what God has commanded!”
Many people around us are moved by their emotions, but they are not moved enough to do anything that matters. They are not happy until they have had “a good cry.” I have met some of them. They can cry at the drop of a handkerchief. Then, just as suddenly, the tears are gone, and they look pleased, saying they feel “so much better.”
I cannot keep up with that kind of temperament or personality. I must confess it nearly kills me to cry in public. I am not one of the weepy kind. My tears are very far down in the well. If anything is powerful enough to get them to the surface, I am undergoing some deep and demanding experience within my being.
But we should be moved and we should be stirred about eternal realities. Noah was moved—and he moved on to do that which was right and important.
I once heard a very fine speaker, an effective preacher, describe what he had found in the emotional responses of an audience. He said he had told the story of a faithful old sheep dog. In the midst of a great storm, the herder knew that eleven young lambs were missing. Once, twice, three times he sent Old Shep, the dog, out for the missing lambs. And again and again, until the weary but faithful dog had returned with ten of the lambs.
Once again the master took Old Shep to the door. “One more, Shep, one more,” he said. “Bring him in!” The dog, utterly exhausted, went out into the storm again. Much later he returned, bearing the missing lamb. The old dog slowly placed the weak, wet lamb on the floor, then slumped to the floor himself.
As the shepherd finished caring for the stray lamb, he turned to Old Shep to express his gratitude. But it was too late. Shep was dead. The faithful dog had given his all to rescue the lambs.
But reality failed to stir them
The preacher who was describing his telling of the story said his audience was in tears as he finished. To that audience, then, he made the gospel application, deliberately and intentionally. He told of the faithfulness of the Son of Man as He was led to Calvary. He described the kind of love that motivated Jesus to die on Calvary’s cross.
“I painted the picture of Jesus as vividly as I could,” said the preacher in recounting the experience. “I let the Savior hang there for men and women to see.”
And what was the result? “An obvious look of stony indifference came over those people,” the preacher concluded. “They had been moved by the story of the faithful dog. They had been moved to tears. But the Savior’s dying on the cross? They had heard that before—and they were no longer stirred by it.”
Yes, Noah had feelings. Noah was stirred. But he did not standstill, wondering and debating. He was moved to face the consequences in the glare of an unbelieving and godless generation.
Noah went out to the hillside and began the long, weary task of building the ark. He constructed it exactly to the pattern God had given him. He condemned the world in its unbelief. He became heir to the righteousness that is by faith.
What would Noah say to you if he could come and counsel you today concerning your faith? I know what he would say—and I think you know, too.
“When you hear the truth,” Noah would say, “whenever you hear God’s truth, God’s Word, you will go either in the direction you are moved, or you will just wait. If you wait, you will find that the next time you hear the truth, it will not move you quite as much. The next time, it will move you less, and the time will come when that truth will not move you at all!”
Then Noah would probably finish his counsel, saying, “If I had refused the very first time to go out and build the ark, God might have spoken again. But each time it would have been a little easier to say, `No, Lord, I don’t think I am going to do it.’ Soon I would be able to disregard completely the alarm that God was sounding!”
Do not disregard the warning!
We have to confess that there is a distressing kind of brazen unbelief all around us. Because they are completely without fear of God, men and women in our generation are paying little heed to any of God’s warning signals.
As a youngster I was a farm boy, and I came to recognize that birds and animals had their own methods of communication particularly when danger or harm were near. There were always some hungry crows flying around, and they communicated in their own ways. But only one of their sharp cries was the cry of alarm, the urgent warning of danger.
Some of the crows were brave enough to land in the field and pick away at the corn. But they had an advance and a rear guard—wily old crows perched on the stubby branch of a nearby tree, or on a post. Their instincts warned them of the farmers with their rifles who never gave up in their contest with the greedy crows. One man on the edge of the field brought that warning cry from the crow in the tree—and all of the crows took off as one, escaping to their places of safety.
Here is my point. It would have been a very foolish crow that would have belittled the alarm, that would have lingered for one more kernel of corn. He might have rejected his bird instinct and declared, “I am staying! I am not going to be stampeded.” But you know what would happen. The farmer with the rifle would blow out his poor little bird brain and that would be the end of him. He had heard the warning—it was up to him to heed it.
I also learned the lesson of the little chicks—an easy prey for the hawks overhead. Sometimes before we could even see the hawk we could hear its high-pitched cry—a piercing whistle-like sound. Mother hen also heard it, and she would use her own special cluck-cluck of warning. Her chicks would scamper to her side and soon she had them all tucked away safely under her feathers. Those chicks did not lose any time debating the value of an alarm. They responded quickly and were safe from the danger overhead.
There is such a thing as faith that believes in the soundness of a warning. There is a faith that is not ashamed to move in the direction of the ark of safety.
Noah is an everlasting example. May God give us ears to hear and hearts to obey!