Back to the Beginning No.13 The Gospel of Noah

Okay, the readings from Genesis 8. But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded. Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky. The water receded steadily from the earth.

At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down, and on the seventh day of the seventh month the ark came down to rest on the mountain of Arat. The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible. After forty days Noah opened the window he had made in the ark and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth.

Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground, but the dove could find no place to set its feet because there was water over all the surface of the earth. So it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark.

He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. When the dove returned to him in the evening, there on its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf. Then yet Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth.

He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him. By the first day of the first month of Noah's six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry.

By the twenty-seventh day of the second month, the earth was completely dry. Then God said to Noah, Come out of the ark, you and your wife, your sons and their wives. Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you, the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground, so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number upon it.

So Noah came out together with his sons and his wife and his sons' wives, all the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds, everything that moves on the earth, came out of the ark, one kind after another. Then Noah built an altar to the Lord, and taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart, Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood.

And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease. I was thinking when considering coming back to this particular passage of Scripture again, of how the Bible speaks in the New Testament of Noah as though he was a preacher.

And indeed, of course, that is correct. I mentioned last week that he was a man who was gifted in the area of agriculture. He was a man who obviously had abilities to construct, to handle wood, thus the building of the ark.

But he was also a man who was entrusted by the Lord, having received instructions to put the ark together to engage in this construction, which was to last many years in the making. He was also to speak to people, to preach to people. He was a preacher of righteousness.

And I was thinking, what did Noah have to say then that would be relevant today? Because there's only one gospel. There may be two parts to our Bible, but there's only one message. And as you find the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ set out clearly in the last third of the Bible, so there is the anticipation of it in the first two-thirds of the Bible in the Old Testament.

So, if you want a general heading, we're going to be looking at the gospel of Noah. But let me set up some parameters in terms of verses that will help us on our way. Go to the eighth verse of the sixth chapter, and there you discover it is written, Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.

And then to the first verse of the seventh chapter, the Lord then said to Noah, go into the ark and your whole family. And then the first verse of the eighth chapter, God remembered Noah and all the wild animals. And the fifteenth verse, Then God said to Noah, come out of the ark, you and your wife, your sons, and their wives.

And then the twentieth verse of the same chapter, Then Noah built an altar to the Lord. So, I've linked together, and that'll come up in a moment on the overhead projector. I've linked together several key scriptures that help us, if you like, to get the compass of Noah's life on the earth.

But let's break off for a moment, because what concerns me this morning is not, of course, purely to expound history. That's an honorable thing to engage in, but the Bible is... It's a book that has to be handled in a different way from any ordinary historical book. It has an applicatory message.

In other words, it's relevant today. In Noah's day, the society was tottering on the verge of disaster. And who would again say that that same description might apply to us in the twentieth century? I mean, it does seem as though Europe is a little calmer.

But we've had the upsurge of information given us about Switzerland as a nation during the last world war, and its compliance with Germany, and this incredible disclosure that billions and billions of pounds, putting it through into sterling, it was actually gold, they've held that belonged to the Jews for fifty or so years now. Those of you who subscribe or take the newspaper The Guardian would have seen an incredible picture, a heart-rending picture yesterday of some African woman whose hands have been chopped off as a result of internecine strife and tension in the heart of Africa. We have just had something that reminds those of you who are old enough of a picture, so to speak, of the Nuremberg trials, but no longer Nuremberg, no longer Germans, no longer Nazis, but people in Serbia and Bosnia, and the racial problems that there were then.

We know that in the realm of biogenics we are into the possibility of perhaps moving into what many of us believe is God's terrain, messing around with the genetic code, with the possibility, though I concede that the intention for some scientific research workers is good, but with the possibility of redoing what God has placed in our world. We're into the cloning of animals and so on, and you wonder where all this will lead, particularly if it gets into evil hands. Are we ourselves as a civilization tottering on the verge of disaster? You see, the Bible makes it quite clear that the human saga, the human story, will come to an end.

Jesus shall reign where'er the sun doth its successive journeys run. His kingdom will stretch from shore to shore. Those opening chapters of Genesis not only describe what was at the beginning, but what also shall be at the end.

And when I use the word end, it's in the Churchillian sense that it will be the beginning of a new era, right at the end of present time, which shall continue eternally. God will bring in His order. Now, when our beloved Lord was preaching about this and about His return, He says, as it was in the days of Noah.

This is the reference in Matthew's Gospel, Matthew 24 and verse 2. As it was in the days of Noah, as men and women were going beyond what God permitted, as they were rebelling against the Lord, as they were living independently of God, so it will be when our Lord Jesus Christ returns. And the Apostle Peter, in the two letters that bear his name, he tells us in the second epistle that as Noah was saved in an ark, as the waters cover the world, so it will be possible for men and women in those days, and indeed in Peter's day, to know the same salvation, but living their lives in a climate of apocalyptic disaster. He says exactly the same in the first epistle, in which Peter, along with our Lord Jesus, establishes, reaffirms what I was telling you last week, that the whole of the Old Testament and the New Testament, when they look back upon these chapters that describe the flood, see the flood not just as poetry, not as purely parabolic, though there is spiritual application found in this account.

They see it as unadulterated history. They see it as a description of a catastrophe of international consequence that affected the world at the very beginning, and they hold it up as a sort of illustration of what will happen at the end. And as God pledged Himself to Noah, as God pledged Himself in degree to the created world then, so He pledges Himself to humanity now.

So He pledges Himself to His church. So He pledges Himself to the world. The earth is the Lord's.

He has not given up His ownership of the earth, and He will return the earth to its pristine glory. And at the end time, as there was a cataclysm, as there was a disaster, which is described in the beginning in the book of Genesis, so similarly there will be a catastrophe. But there is no need whatsoever for undue panic.

There is no need for undue concern on the part of all those who have discovered what Noah discovered, that God is working His purposes through, that there are those who can exercise saving faith in Him. So it's with this back cloth in mind, from the 20th century that we reach back to the time of the antediluvians, that we grapple with the story, the account, the challenge of Noah. So I want us to look briefly at the ark and its floating.

The ark and its floating. Noah was told to build an ark in a similar fashion as the mother of Moses was also told to build a very miniscule version of the ark. For you remember, Moses was placed in a little ark made of bulrushes.

And as Noah built a construction far, far larger than that, both Noah and Moses later on in his life was to appreciate that the waters which could have consumed them were actually going to be the waters by which they would be saved as they entered into the ark. Noah and his family, Moses and the church. When you read about the church in the gospels in Christian history, you'll find that often the imagery of the ark, be it the ark in Genesis 6, or be it the ark in the bulrushes into which Moses entered, is typified by the church.

Not the church building, rather men and women who have confessed Jesus as Lord and Savior, who are members of the church, the redeemed community, who know the security that there is in having expressed faith in Jesus Christ. Romans chapter 11 and verse 22 says two things, brings together two aspects about God. It says, Behold the mercy and the severity of God.

And in the account of Noah, you find the mercy of God. A man in his household saved. With Moses in the bulrushes, the mercy of God.

With the church, the mercy of God. But over against the mercy of God, there is a severity of God. You cannot make light of these incidents.

You cannot deal capriciously with scripture. Neither can you come to this God and ask him why he behaves as he does. For you are mortal man.

You believe in order that you may understand. You do not understand in order that you may believe. God determined that in the time of Noah, the world was so displeasing, it would go through the cataclysm of flooding, and there would be a sort of rebirth.

There would be an anticipation of what will happen at the end time. Noah is found righteous before God. As was Jesus Christ.

And the righteousness of Noah and its benefits spilled over to his family. As the righteousness of Jesus Christ and its benefits spill over to all those who have saving faith in him. But outside the security of Jesus, outside the mercy of God, there is only the severity.

Is that coming through clearly? The flood is an illustration of both mercy and severity. Noah is instructed by God to build an ark. The ark is of God's design.

As the tabernacle which was built later on in the wilderness is of God's design. As the church of Jesus Christ is of God's design. Salvation is not man-made.

Salvation is made as a result of the involvement of God on the earth. This is why Jesus comes into the world. This is why it is so important that you know Jesus.

You know his teaching. You embrace him as a person. For there is no other salvation designed by God that is offered man so that he may escape the severity of the Lord.

Noah found grace, verse 8, chapter 6, in the eyes of the Lord. But actually that could be translated by reversing the subject and the object. Grace found Noah.

Grace found Noah. Listen to John Newton. Amazing grace.

How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. Here is Newton the drunkard. Here is Newton the slave trader.

Here is Newton the foul-mouthed man. And yet out in Africa God confronts Newton, sorts him out, brings him back, plunks him in a major pulpit in London. And he influences the metropolis.

And when Newton looks back he says it was all God's grace. He loved me, said the apostle Paul, and gave himself for me. I who am less than the least of all the saints.

Was this grace revealed? It is exactly the same you see in Noah's day. It is exactly the same today. We are grateful for the grace of God.

God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform. He plants his footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm. Noah is told in the grace of God about what he is going to do.

You see when you keep company with God as Noah kept company with God, as Enoch did, as Abraham did. God reveals his secrets to his friends. Jesus said you are my friends to his disciples.

You are no longer my servants. You are no longer my slaves. You are my friends.

Servant doesn't know what his master is doing but friends do. This is the basis on which we will relate says our Lord Jesus. And all this is anticipated by Noah.

You my beloved friend are a colleague of God. Having fellowship with him by his grace. Because you have entered into the salvation that he has designed through Jesus Christ.

The Lord. But you see this grace in no way means that one can deal in a light fashion with the whole concept of judgment. What you find in Genesis 6 and 7 don't you see is the inverse of what you find in Genesis 1. I mean in Genesis 1 you start with chaos and then you get cosmos.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty. Darkness was over the surface of the deep.

And the spirit of God was hovering over the waters. So you get this concept of the world flooded. The world as it was at the very beginning.

Then God speaks. Because this world that he has created shall know his influence even more. And God causes through deep movement in the heart of the earth an eruption.

So that the land surfaces and the waters fall back. So there is a possibility of earth. Of foliage.

Of vegetation. Of bird life. Of animal life.

And then of man and woman coming onto this earth which God has caused to come about. And now I say that you get the inverse here in the 6th and 7th chapter. God who moves his restraining grace allows those great forces that are in the earth to move again.

The foundations of the deep, they open up. The sleuth gates of the heavens, they are lifted. With the net result that water gushes over the earth.

And man is in great difficulty. There is nowhere for him to turn. There was an opportunity of course.

He was Noah. He's been preaching for 120 years. But men don't want to listen to what Noah has to say.

Look at this crazy man. So concerned about righteousness. So concerned about God.

This Bible tells us that the world in which we live is still controlled by the Lord. Those great forces that could wipe us off the planet earth. We are so frail.

We are so feeble. It may seem at times that man is the measure of all things. He can put a rocket out into space.

He can live there for months or years. He can put a man on the moon. But man is as slender, as fragile as a spider's web.

God is only to go. And man is no more. Behold the goodness and the severity of God.

The might of the sea in the Bible is often used as an illustration of the forces of nature. The Jews tended to be afraid of the sea. They were never great seafarers.

The Bible puts in the sea, so to speak, both poetically and also with a degree of literalism, the sea monster. The Psalms speak about the monsters of the deep. So does the book of Job.

And when you move into the teachings of our blessed Lord and see the experiences of the disciples, they're so concerned at times because of the sea. Carest thou not that we perish? And they have to appreciate, as we'll see this evening, that Jesus Christ is master of sea and of storm. So here in the early chapters of Genesis, we have this point affirmed.

God, by design, has made the possibility of salvation. God, through grace, has called Noah to himself. But God is going to deal severely with the world, which has, in effect, those sons of Adam declared independence on him.

This, then, I suggest, is what we should be considering as we open out those three chapters once more. The ark and its floating. But I move you on to the door and its closing.

You see, not only are the dimensions of the ark given in the sixth chapter of Genesis, and actually, if you want a visual aid as to what the ark looked like, then go to Brighton. From the main railway station in Brighton, as you look down the valley, you will see an Anglican church. You can't miss it.

It stands out on the horizon like a sore thumb. It is built on the exact dimensions of the ark. And it's a salutary experience, actually, to go inside that building and have a look at how high it is, how capacious it is.

But you find that in that sixth chapter, and taken over to the seventh chapter, that not only is Noah given instructions in terms of the dimensions of the ark, verse 15 of chapter 6, he is also told in that verse, put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle, and upper decks. Now, when these waters come, we are told as we move into the seventh chapter and again to the 16th verse, the animals went in, male and female, of every living thing, as God had commanded Noah. Then the Lord shut him in.

This seventh verse is an epic poem. That means to say, following the tradition of ancient poems, there's repetition. We're told on two or three occasions about men going in, the descendants of the family of Noah.

We're told about the animals going in. And having engaged in repetition, we get this remarkable touch that as these creatures and as this family have gone into the ark, God closes the door. What's the significance of this? When I was a kid in Sheffield, in this Sunday school, we used to sing, some of you perhaps know the chorus, one door and only one, and yet its sides are two.

I'm on the inside, or which side, on which side are you? There was only one door to the ark. And it must have been a door of immense proportions. I mean, these are not days of hydraulic hinges and so forth.

Coming through that door was not just Noah and his wife and his sons and their wives. Not only just the slender animal, but here is the lumbering elephant. Here is the giraffe.

Here are all sorts of large animals in the minority, numerically, but nonetheless there. I mean, you can't get an elephant in by a two-by-three door, can you? So here is this magnificent door through which all who will be saved have to pass. And don't you see that as these animals go through and as man goes through, a God in sovereign control closes the door, aligning animals and man again in this whole concept of divine interest and the future of both species.

The door is a way. It's important because of its exclusivity. The door is important in biblical history.

You Hebrews, there you are in Egypt, the angel of death will pass over, and the only way he will differentiate between you and the Egyptians is by you daubing blood where on the doorposts of your home. Here is Hosea in his ministry. You can read of it in the book that bears his name.

He's speaking at a critical time. The Jews are in problem as a result, again, of their spiritual unfaithfulness. And God, through Hosea, says, nonetheless, despite your troubling, I will place a door in the valley of Acre.

If you return to me and go through that door, you will be saved. Here is our beloved Lord. I am the door.

If you enter through me, you shall find salvation. Here is the apostle John, that venerable figure on the Isle of Patmos. He has an insight into God's salvation.

And God is, once more, using the language of the door. He places a door which no man can shut, which no man can open. What door is this? It's the door of escape.

Door, door, door, door. Throughout the Bible, the imagery is used. You see why I argue.

To understand the New Testament, you have to grasp the Old. To grasp the New Testament, you must go to the Old. These books, this is not just by chance.

These books are divinely inspired by one author. There is a door through which the antediluvians could have passed. Had they responded to the mercy of God as proffered through the ministry of Noah.

Then God, at the end, closes the door. One modern commentator says, God's fatherly touch. And it remains shut until God deems otherwise.

This will prevent Noah from attempting any ill-timed mercy directed towards last minute penitence. Luther says, the ark was made secure from the deluge, not by human artifice, but by divine miracle, the secret power of God. It wasn't the bitumen.

It wasn't the tar that Moses put on the ark that guaranteed its security. The ark was secure because God had designed it and God closes the door. And don't you see that's a perfect example of salvation.

How do I know I'm saved? Well, because of human ingenuity. Because of the cleverness of the preacher's words, not of it. I'm saved because of the design of God.

Because God makes it possible. Because God, so to speak, having called me to go in, closes the door. And no force can open that door and pull me out.

Once in Christ, in Him, forever secure. Even though the waters come up from the earth and down from the heavens. Even though there is wind.

Even though there is storm. Even though I don't understand God's dealings. I judge Him not with my feeble sense.

I trust His all-prevailing providence. And the door remains shut. And for 40 days, we're told, the waters break forth.

40 days represents a period of trial, often in Scripture, terminating in the victory of good and the overthrow of evil. Moses, 40 days in Sinai. Elijah, 40 days at Horeb.

Our beloved Lord, 40 days in the desert. And after He's been raised from the dead, 40 days appearing to the disciples. 40, 40, 40.

And at the end, at the end, there is hope. At the end, God moves. He does here in Noah's time.

He does throughout the whole of history as recorded in the Bible. Which means I can hasten on, having looked at the door, and it's shutting to the flood and the abating. Imagine what it was like in the ark.

I mean, quite frankly, I'm glad I wasn't around. It would have been wonderful to have experienced this tremendous salvation, but to have been in that place for 40 days. The earliest recollections I've got are an airy shelter, and as a result, I've always hated the darkness.

Because my memory just brings back days in my home city when we had to more or less live in the air raid shelter. And this place is not exactly a five-star Hilton that Noah goes into. I mean, I love animals, but sometimes at a distance, as far as certain habits of the animals are concerned, imagine what it must have smelt like.

Imagine what it must have been like for Noah. But Noah is the man of comfort. Noah is the preacher.

Nor is the family who at this stage is ruling his household well. And maybe God miraculously allows these animals to have a year of hibernation or 40 days of hibernation extended because the period in the ark was going to be well beyond 40 days. That same instinct that's brought the animals into the ark, maybe God prevailed on that to ensure that all was relatively peaceful in the ark.

But it must have been a frightening experience at the human psychological level. But Noah is told to go into the ark by God. And the implication is he shall know the presence of God there because Noah will not be, neither will you be, once you've trusted him ever outside the surveillance of God.

So in the first verse of the eighth chapter you read, God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him. How good is our God! His memory extends not only to the family of man but also to the animal kingdom. God remembered.

And the Hebrew word is technical. It means remember with favor. Remember with the determination to do something about it.

He began again to act on their behalf. The inhabitants of the ark must have known that the rain had stopped. They must have known that there was a calm.

And maybe in that eerie silence they too were calm themselves. And we've got some ideas to the way that they reacted in this little story of the releasing of the birds in the sixth and eighth verses after 40 days, Noah opened the window he'd made in the ark and sent out a raven. And then he sent out a dove.

And old-fashioned preachers have had a field day interpreting what the raven stands for and what the dove stands for. The raven apparently is the law which actually does man no good and the dove is grace and so on and so forth. Well, it's all very wonderful but Scripture doesn't indicate that at all.

All it tells us is that in the humanity of Noah and the inhabitants of the ark, his family, they determined to release these two birds. And the raven never returns. But the dove does.

Maybe the raven spies some floating carcass and stays on the carcass and feeds because it's that sort of unclean bird. The dove, however, comes back and seven days later is released again. And the dove, seeing some of the trees which are now exposed, takes a little twig and in its beak brings the twig back to the ark.

And Noah knows, though he knew in his heart in any case that what God had promised was the case, the waters were subsiding and the earth was beginning to return, not just as it was at the beginning and subsequently in the days, the early generations of Adam, but it was cleansed, a rejuvenated earth. And so Noah, using uncommon discipline, keeps the people in the ark for some while longer and then on the 371st day they leave. They leave the ark, the animals.

Noah, his wife, his sons, their wives, they leave the ark and they move out into this cleansed world. And what do you discover? That from the ark and the building of the ark, Noah occupies himself with an altar and the building of an altar, verse 20. Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and taking some of the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it.

And here is this picture of man in this cleansed earth. Now notice, he's not through his difficulty. In fact, the difficulty in the genes of man, the difficulty in the soul of man still persists because God makes the point in the 21st verse, and never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood.

You see, this is not the end of God's saving purpose. Noah and his like will still unfortunately sin. They still therefore will be rebelling against God on the earth.

But God has demonstrated in a remarkable fashion that he is still in control. And he promises that there will never be another universal flood. And he demonstrates throughout the whole of the experience with Noah and his family and the animals that he is linked to this world.

And as you see Noah leave, and as you witness this offering that Noah makes before God, you have got once more a picture of the way that you and I should behave as we find ourselves as those who are living after the flood accountable to God. And we are to recognize too that God will maintain his promise as far as this world is concerned. It may well be, as I mentioned right at the beginning of this address, that we are tottering on the edge of disaster as were people in Noah's day.

But God has pledged himself to the future of mankind. A new creation is possible. And indeed this is what the New Testament writers tell us from the story of Noah.

As there was the flood and God preserved Noah, so at the end time God will preserve his church. There will be a disaster of cataclysmic proportions not just in terms of flooding but seen in terms of the very elements of the earth melting. But from this disaster God will again bring into being his purposes for a remade earth.

And those who have followed the example of Noah and have responded to the grace of God, they will be bound into this future where with man and animals and with an earth and a universe that is cleansed of every vestige of sin, we shall live on eternally for our God, knowing his blessing, knowing his touch, heaven having come down on earth, the earth and the universe filled with the knowledge of the glory of God. As the waters cover the sea, God has pledged himself to those who confess faith in Jesus Christ. God has pledged himself to this earth and to this universe.

And as Noah escaped from the flood by faith, so it is possible for you to escape the judgment of God through exercising faith in Jesus Christ. Behold the goodness of God as on the cross the ark of salvation is constructed and made perfect the third day as Jesus is raised from the dead. Behold the severity of God.

There is escape in no other way but by confessing Jesus as Lord. Noah steps out of the tomb of his ark into the fresh air and daylight of his Easter morning and one day we who trust Jesus as Savior shall step out into the dawning of a new era in this universe when God shall be all and in all. The problems and the pains and the difficulties and the inequalities of this life shall be no more.

Jesus tells us to learn from Noah. And so, dear friends, we must. Amen.

Stand. Of His sinners, poor and needy, grave and wounded, sick and sore, Jesus, there is chance to save Him through the pity, love, and power. He is able, He is willing, He knows Christ at heart.