The Faithfulness of God

Genesis and chapter 9, let me read again some very powerful words, Genesis 9, 13 through to 15. God speaking, I have set my rainbow in the clouds and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind.

Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. I'll go on to the 16th verse as well. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.

Some old commentator says of these verses, these words are like the blows of a hammer which make the hole more firm and impress it more deeply. These are grand words taken within their immediate context. Noah and his sons being addressed by Almighty God, who as always takes the initiative, I have set my bow in the clouds.

I will do this. I will do the other. They're grand in the immediate context.

They're grand when you view them historically from our vantage point looking down the centuries for God who spoke yesterday still speaks today and he takes initiative in our lives. They're grand words if you've come into the tabernacle to ask the question, what is God like and what are his purposes for me? Well these particular verses they address and answer that question. Nothing is more uncertain than life.

Here we are on what some have dubbed Sputnik Earth. We're out in space and the position that is ours is somewhat perilous. There is really a great hoodwink that has duped large numbers of people in the 20th century and that is the suggestion that somehow in life we are secure.

There is very little security. The United States, they say of the Vice President, he is one heartbeat from the White House. In other words there's no guarantee of life, not even to one of the most powerful men in the world.

We cling precariously on this little planet Earth as we live out our life span. We've had many examples of that, have we not? The perilous nature of life even in our own country in the last couple of years. One hurricane in the span of a few hours takes away one third of the trees that there are in the county of Sussex.

Can you imagine those of you who come in from other quarters from other parts of the globe and think that the United Kingdom is drenched in rain? That down in Cornwall, Dorset and Devon the possibility was that they would be on standpipe supply of water these days because our summer has been so scarcely provided for as far as that liquid gold is concerned. Some of you have watched on television what Hurricane Hugo, why did they give it a man's name? What he has done in the Caribbean and on the coasts of America, spawning tornadoes. I didn't know that hurricanes could do that but the BBC said they did and the BBC is usually right though sometimes wrong and these tornadoes went out from the belly of the hurricane doing further devastation.

Could there be clearer illustration here in this country through the world media that my opening proposition is correct man, woman purchased perilously on planet Earth. So it's good when you come into the Old Testament to discover a man and his family who too knew something of the fragility of life and God addressing that situation as Noah, Shem, Ham, Japheth and their wives come out of the ark and move into a cleansed earth and God speaks to them and gives them a promise. He tells them of his fidelity as they will discover it as year follows year.

These grand words that I've just read to you were uttered at a time, I emphasize a point, when life had been threatened. When life had been threatened. The European economic community to which we have all with great enthusiasm pledged ourselves, discovering that we are not just British we are Europeans, is now taking us to task.

Would you buy shares said someone in the Any Questions program on Friday night repeated on Saturday lunchtime on the BBC, would you buy shares in any company who only manufactures one product and that product is so questionable legal action is pending in a court in Europe? Embarrassing the water officials throughout the land would they like to have had some sort of gag to put on the questioner? It was skillfully put wasn't it? You remember some of you who come on a Sunday evening my little quotation from the Independent letter to the editor, dear sir, when I take my dog for a walk I always give him a drink of tap water. He invariably refuses but the first puddle that we come across when we're walking he stops and drinks. If Noah thought he had trouble, pales into insignificance at least that water wasn't polluted.

God makes this promise when life had been threatened. I've seen the waters gush out from the Ganges Delta and swamp a third of Bangladesh. I've seen something of the ravages of storm, something of a mighty power within the belly of the earth.

Later on in this evening's reading you will hear from the book of Job how Job is given some visual lesson by God as to the puniness of man, of the greatness and the grandeur of the natural forces that there are within our world. Were you there Job when the winds were formed? Do you understand something of the treasures of the snow? Do you know what it is to be in the path of a hurricane? Were you there when the borders of the world and the lands thereof were set out? And Job has to respond if any response is there. No, no, no.

But God makes his proposition clear in the book of Job and throughout the whole of the Old Testament. He says what you never heard at the Green Conference during this past week. That nature and God are so interrelated that it is the power of God that you discover within nature.

And there are times when God allows that power to work not just for man but to remind man of what? Of his fragility, of the fact that as he is perched on this planet he moves and has his being not because of his ingenuity but simply because of the grace of God. And this is what Noah is being informed as he, Shem, Ham, Japheth, their wives, their servants come out of the ark with the animals. He is promising his faithfulness to them.

Noah hardly needs to be reminded that he is utterly dependent upon this God who has devastatingly shown his wrath to his contemporaries. That Noah's future depends upon the charity and the grace of God. Hold on to your safety belt.

Some of you won't like this statement. God gets mad with people. You don't hear that preached very often and it doesn't make me popular in this town of Worthing to emphasize it.

But the Bible tells us in the eighth chapter of Genesis on a couple of occasions that God was annoyed with man as for the reasons that he was living his life badly. I said the eighth chapter, chapter six, verse five, the Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. Verse eleven, now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence.

God saw how corrupt the earth had become, etc. God was mad with man. Romans chapter one, the wrath of God is directed against man in all his ungodliness.

This God of whom you hear so much in terms of his love and his gentleness, and those are true attributes, needs in your comprehension of him for you to take into this thought that he is so holy your sinfulness is repugnant. And were it not for his grace we would all be consumed. But Noah having come through this terrible expression of the righteous judgment of God with his family now has this pledge from the Lord that he will be faithful to him and there will never be another time when the world totally shall be in deluge, in flood.

These words of promise were spoken when life had been threatened and they are spoken because God shows grace. Look at verse eight of chapter six. If you had it in Mrs. Jeffrey's Bible it would be translated because that's the A.V. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

I like that better than the N.I.V. Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. You wouldn't have had to tell Shem, Ham and Japheth to say grace as they had their meals. They knew full well that if they had been in the ark with one hundred master bakers that would not have provided bread for them.

Man cannot create bread. It's not a nonsense that man can create life. Let our biologists, let our medical, those in the realm of medicine who explore with test tube babies say what they will.

Man cannot, man will not, it is impossible for man to create life. Only God can create life. Man can change things.

Man can dabble in areas where he should not be dabbling. Man can transform one substance to another substance but he at starting point is dependent upon God. Noah, Shem, Ham, Japheth, they realize this.

What's the point of having master bakers on the ark if you've got no corn, no wheat, if the waters never subside? You're utterly dependent upon God. You didn't have to teach the Jews that. You don't have to teach the Africans that, nor the Asians.

It's only we in the West who by and large will credit the possibility that God is not. God is and we are contingent dependent upon God. We work in cooperation with Him for our advantage or we work against Him for our disadvantage.

Noah, Shem, Ham, Japheth and their wives, they know these things. They know that God exhibits grace. Do you know what grace is? It's not just what you say before you eat your food, though I trust you do.

Grace is not something that you get in terms of deserving it from God. Grace is something that God bestows towards you and He does it not because you deserve it but because of who He is, a gracious God. I could give you a little Bible study at this moment going off on a tangent as I often do but can't because time has gone.

On many verses of Scripture that talk about the God of all grace, the God of exceeding grace, Peter says, now I'm going down the tangent anyway, aren't I? Peter says that God multiplies grace like Jesus multiplies loaves and fishes. Two things I'll teach you about grace and come off the tangent. There is common grace, there is special grace.

The commonality of grace is not to be thought of in terms of that which is cheap. There is no such thing as cheap grace. When I was a lad I was brought up just during with my brother, the Second World War.

We never went hungry. Our food was always free. The table was always spread, not with sumptuous fare but with sufficient.

But the price was paid by my own parents, what they were prepared to do. So the Apostle Paul said to his disciples, he says, as far as our food is concerned, as he's directing some comments to some pagan people at Listerian Derby, you can read of it in Acts 14, he is saying that the food that we have, it comes from the benevolence of God who gives common grace to all men and women. So whether you live in Moscow or Manchester, Los Angeles or Kuala Lumpur, if you've breakfast today you have breakfasted because of the commonality of grace.

Our lives are dependent upon God's goodness in terms of the cycle of the seasons, the conjunction of heat and rain so that crops can grow and food can be prepared. The little boy who was puzzled and said to his mother that he wanted to discover the identity of our Father was really engaged on a very permissible and a very praiseworthy task. You know it's so easy for us as adults to believe that our kids understand what we're saying.

Those of you who are teachers will agree with that. But it's easy to believe that they do and they don't. Our Father which art in heaven? I knew when I was at school one lad who thought, or it was rumoured in the staff room, that he believed that God's name was witch art.

Our Father witch art, he wanted to know who witch art was. See you can take so many things for granted. Well this little boy, he wasn't quite as dull as that, we bred them like that in Tottenham in my day.

I'm sure that teaching has improved subsequently, that's why I came into the ministry because I wasn't making an impact upon boys and girls. This little boy wants to know who our Father is. He thinks it's his dad and his mum says, no it's not your dad.

He doesn't get the food, try the baker. So he goes down the shop and he asks the baker and he says, no I'm not, try the miller, I get my wheat from him, my flour from him. The miller says, no it's not me, try the farmer.

And the farmer says, well it's not me that's referred to because if it wasn't for the sun and the rain, the seed wouldn't germinate, there would be no crops for me. And according to the story, the little boy goes to sleep that night and he has a dream about the God who creates the heavens and the earth and causes the water and the heat and so on and so forth. And he comes to a realisation that behind nature there is God.

Every time you take a morsel of bread, do you hear me, you should be thanking that God for the commonality of his grace. For it's only by his grace that we are not consumed. It's only by his grace that we have the ability to live life on this earth and would to God that all those people amongst the great unchurched would recognise their dependence upon God.

But not only does Noah appreciate this but in a special way he receives grace in abundance. You see there is not just common grace, there is the grace of God whereby he in a most remarkable fashion makes his love so personal and so intimate as it's directed to you. Here's the Apostle Paul and he highlights what I'm getting at.

He talks about common grace, I've referred to Acts, I could have taken you to Acts 17 where he speaks to Athenian philosophers and says of God in him we live and move and have our being. But now to the Corinthians he's referring to the Lord Jesus and he says you know, you know the grace of our Lord Jesus. Now what does he mean? Not the common grace of Jesus because not everybody knows about Jesus but the Corinthians did.

What do they know about Jesus? That he is the Lord God's son, that he died on the cross of Calvary for their salvation. He died so that they may not be terrified to fall into the presence of the living God. He died so that they might have their eternity secured.

Now not everybody responds to this. Not everybody has received special grace. But Noah has received special grace.

Noah found favor in the eyes of God. Do you know what the important thing is as far as the Bible is concerned? For you to recognize common grace and special grace. For you to say thank you Lord for the food that I eat and for the food of your word.

Thank you for my creation. Thank you for my preservation and all the blessings of this life as the beautiful prayer puts it in the prayer book. But thank you too Lord God for salvation and regeneration and something to live for.

That's what Noah enters into as he typifies having come from the ark with his sons and their wives as he typifies the church of Jesus Christ. Understood the word church in terms of all those who recognize for whom Jesus died. And so our Lord God who has always been good at visual aids because he recognizes what preachers often don't that people take in two-thirds more of what they see than rather what they just hear.

He puts a bow in the clouds does he not? Translated I think rainbow in the NIV literally it's the bow as far as the Hebrew is concerned. But we understand more when we use that qualifying adjective rain to gather that God has placed a specific bow, a rainbow in the sky and that is going to be sacramental of what he promises Noah in terms of fidelity, in terms of faithfulness. You say what is sacramental? What does that mean? Well it's easy.

Down here bread and wine, they're sacraments. Here in the church we recognize two sacraments. The sacraments of the Lord's table and the sacraments of baptism.

When we take bread and wine they remind us of what? Our Lord Jesus and his death on the cross. Our Lord Jesus asked us to continually remember his death. Now there is a sense in which we could say that the bow that God places in the heavens, in the skies is a reminder to Noah of the fact that he is a bearer of the work of salvation.

When God sees the rainbow, he says verse 16, I will remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures, every kind on the earth. And so here is Noah and his sons and their wives and whenever there is this confrontation between storm and calm and the resulting natural miracle of the rainbow, they will remember that that rainbow is the underlining of the promises of God that no longer will he flood, never again will he cause a worldwide deluge. Some customs that have gone by the by, I regret, don't you? I regret the fact that these days we perhaps don't show priority to ladies, you're going to like me for saying this when we're in a tube.

And in my day as a lad on Sheffield Corporation, you would never have been sitting down if an adult stood up. I like the custom that there used to be in olden times that when you saw a rainbow, you removed, if you were a man, the hat from your head because you were appreciating that somehow God was still speaking through the rainbow. I like the custom of teaching boys and girls to say the Lord's Prayer when they saw the rainbow.

Many of you don't even know of these customs, it just goes to show how far down we've gone as far as our claims to retain Christian customs and traditions in this country are concerned. I'm not making a fat out of those things, but I am just indicating to you that it used to be the case that when the rainbow was seen, people of an earlier generation would recognize, with perhaps the same sort of glow of enthusiasm as did Noah, that God was affirming His purposes, once again underlining His promises. But the thing that I regret most is not so much that the sacramental nature of the rainbow has largely been forgotten in Western civilization, but that of which the rainbow speaks.

You see, the rainbow is God's bow. Not a weapon used to take life, but a bow in the hands of God that is now used as a testimony that life will be preserved. Read Roman, read Revelation on two chapters, in two chapters you will discover our Lord Jesus referred to in terms of the rainbow.

You know, there's something about a rainbow that seems to suggest there's more to it than meets the eye. They say that humorously of grapefruit, don't they? If you're sitting next to someone having grapefruit, there's more to that than meets the eye. Well, there is so in the rainbow.

There are those who believe that actually if you could fully perceive the rainbow, you would discover that it's a circle. References made to the circle of the rainbow in Revelation, referring to our Lord Jesus. The rainbow personifies all that is white.

It has the colors of the spectrum, does it not? There is a beauty in the rainbow. The rainbow appears when there is a contrast between the calm and the storm, and our Lord Jesus Christ appears on this earth, and there is a contrast between the judgment of God and the mercy of God, and He picks it all up. And in the wondrous colors of His life, which really are illustrated by the primary color white, you discover all the holiness and the beauty that there is in our Lord Jesus.

God underlined His covenant with men and women, a greater covenant than that of Genesis 8 and 9. When the Lord Jesus died on the cross of Calvary, God says through the inspired Paul that He has set forth the Lord Jesus to be the propitiation of our sin for our sins. In other words, all the blessings of salvation. And all the means of preserving our lives are traceable back to God having sent His Son into the world.

Do you know this, my friend? Do you appreciate the grace of life? You see, when God made the covenant with Noah, He said that just to live on earth was a privilege. So be careful how you handle the earth. Be careful how you look after the animals, because God makes His covenant with the animals.

You remember my quotation from Roland Hill in Notes and News last week, that the man who is not improved in his conduct toward his dog, because he's a Christian, has really no claims to have partaken of the divine nature of the Lord Jesus. Are you concerned about animal welfare? Are you concerned about ecology? I'm not saying this because it's fashionable to talk green. The Bible was talking green ever since the beginning of creation, for it has a green creator.

Do you deliberately purchase things that you know have been produced with a minimum amount of discomfiture for the animal world? Or do you take perfume that was besquirted into the eyes of a rabbit to ensure that it's safe for you? Is that necessary? Is that what we should be doing as Christians? Should we not respond to common grace by living Christianly in our world? And as for the special grace of our God, do you take it lightly? No people were better educated than Noah and his sons and their wives as they came out of the ark. They realized that all their life was as a result of God's grace. Now do you live your lives like that? Are you going to continue to share your food? This one-off harvest display, that's fine.

I approve it. It is beautiful. Thank God for those people who spent time with these lovely arrangements of flowers and so on and so forth.

But that's not sufficient. What about taking what you have in surplus and ensuring that those who have inadequate supplies benefit by the surfeit of stuff that we have here in the West? What about the opening of your home and the opening of your heart to other people so that coming into your home are not only your small group of friends, but you're extending the love of Jesus Christ through yourself to those who are unloved, unwelcomed, never invited to a house, never asked for a cup of coffee in somebody's home? You say, what's this to do with common and special grace? My friends, it's everything to do. If what I'm preaching now does not hit you and make an impact upon you, then in God's name I ask you, what is this Christianity all about if it's not to change our lifestyle and make us more sensitive to our fellow creatures and also to the inanimate brutes of the world? God enters into a covenant with Noah who has found grace in the eyes of the Lord and he enters into covenants with people today.

Make your own response. I want to take a moment to make a fabulous gospel note that I've sounded both to Christians and careless unbelievers at this moment. Amen.

Oh, praise Him, oh, praise Him, All glory to Him, All glory to Him, All glory to Him. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia, He was the Savior and the Lord. Oh, praise Him, alleluia.

In my soul He may find a home. Alleluia, alleluia, Him, Him, Alleluia.