The Gospel in Genesis No.5 Four minutes to Judgment

I want to speak to you tonight on a very somber topic. As some of you know, it's been my practice on a Sunday evening to be going through the book of Genesis and to show you that there are glimpses of the Gospel in the first book of the Bible. Incredible, though it may sound, thousands of years before Jesus came, God's revelation of his saving purposes were in the process of being written up.

And even in Genesis we have some understanding of what God can and will do for those who put their trust in him. Now I want to speak to you on the very solemn subject of four minutes to judgment. And you may say, what on earth has suggested that title to you? Well, it was only on Friday I was listening to the BBC television and on the second channel I was attending to a lecture, a memorial lecture given in the honor of a great scientist.

And that lecture conducted by a Dr. Nicholas Humphrey was entitled Four Minutes to Midnight. You say, what's all that about? Well, he was taking the title of his lecture from the fact that there are certain trained scientists, men of renown in our present decade who have a sort of cosmic time clock in their imagination. And occasionally, and alas, more frequently than what one would really like, they adjust the fingers of the clock.

Twelve denotes destruction caused by war. And they soberly and somberly believe that the world is so close to total disaster that they have put the time at four minutes to twelve. Four minutes to midnight.

I'm not speaking about theologians, let alone Bible-believing Christians. I'm using the illustration from the realm of scientific thinkers, men with no religious bias. It was that title that Dr. Nicholas Humphrey used as he gave an account on television of the state of play as he saw things in our world today.

And you can read his lecture in the magazine The Listener, published this next Thursday, if you want it in its entirety. But there is another reason why I have opted to speak to you in this area. Not only did I by chance, so to speak, turn on to the lecture on Friday, but by design, because I'm a paid-up subscriber, my edition of Time magazine popped through the door on Thursday, and that is given over to the subject of arming the world.

It's not the sort of magazine, at least this edition, that you want to take to bed with you with your cup of cocoa or Horlicks or whatever you have at night, because the magazine will act against the Horlicks and you won't get to sleep very easily if you're a thoughtful person. What is happening in the pile-up of nuclear arms amongst the major powers, let alone amongst the subsidiary political powers, is frightening in degree. Another reason why I want to draw my thoughts around the concept of four minutes to judgment as I'm revising the title of that lecture is because also there were at least a quarter of a million people meeting in the capital of this country and Italy yesterday, and they were holding a protest demonstration over against the pile-up of nuclear arms.

And because I believe I'm addressing a thinking congregation on a Sunday here at the TAB, it occurs to me that there must have been some of these news features that hit you also during these last few days. And perhaps you're wondering in your mind, what as a Christian ought I to be doing? After all, if we are facing a terrible holocaust, a terrific disaster, if we're just four minutes away from midnight, then maybe we ought to be ensuring that our lives are lived in such a fashion that brings honor to God and helps our fellow man. So the problem that we have to confront this evening is how do you live four minutes away from judgment? Is there any help that Scripture can give at all? What should we be about? Should we write off and join the ranks of CND? Should we be on the streets protesting? Should we be writing to our Prime Minister? Should we be engaging in some political activity? After all, the time is running out.

It's not just someone like myself in an evangelical pulpit who is saying this. There are other men who from differing viewpoints are coming to the same conclusion. Well, of course, as a Christian preacher, my requirement is to try to answer this problem and the situation that confronts us in the latter part of the twentieth century biblically.

How do I go about it? Well, I try to find something in Scripture that would bear an illustration being run from it to present days and see if there are not certain things that Scripture teaches me that will help me in the complex, dangerous world of the twentieth century. No, it so happens, not by chance, but I believe in the purposes of God that I had designed to speak to you from the sixth chapter of Genesis before any of these events which I have just related occurred in my experience these last few days. And it seems to me very significant that here in this chapter and the following chapter you are confronted with the story, and I use not that word in a mythical, legendary sense, you are confronted with the account of a man who was facing disaster himself.

And the eclipse of a total civilization was well nigh just round the corner. I refer, of course, to Noah and the flood. I'm not bothered this evening.

I don't have time to get involved into such a debate as to whether it was a universal flood or a local flood. Sufficient to say that there was a flood, a terrible disaster, of which there is a great deal of evidence, even today in the Middle East as a result of the fruits of the science of archaeology. And here is this man, Noah, and he has some understanding by divine revelation, by divine intuition, that come the death of Methuselah, the man who lived the longest according to biblical chronology, at the time of his death there will be a tremendous outpouring of the judgment of God.

Faced with that, what did Noah do? My first comment this evening is this. He lived a life that was different from anyone else in his civilization. Look at the eighth verse of Genesis 6. Sorry, the ninth verse.

Never can read the numbers of this NIV version of the Bible. This is the account of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God.

He's confronting a crisis. He knows that the balance of civilization, or rather civilization itself is in the balance because God is angry and He's going to judge the world. And with catastrophe facing him, his family, and his generation, Noah lives a life that is different from anyone else.

Now this may seem to be crass naivety, but I believe the first responsibility of Christian people and those groping their way to the faith in the twentieth century, faced with all the problems that are in front of us, is to live godly and pure lives, and to show to an unbelieving world that there's a lifestyle, there's a way of living that is completely different from the ones that the average person knows right now. If ever there was a time when we needed to reproduce Noah, it is today. Noah lived in a day that was ungodly.

I haven't time to paint the context of this chapter. Read it for yourselves and parallel references also in the New Testament. And over against the sin and the immorality and the permissiveness that caused God's judgment to pour down on that society, Noah stood out different from the rest of his contemporaries.

And before you face the challenge of CND and all the other political problems that may be impress themselves upon minds of Christian thinking, of Christian thinking, the first requirement for you and me, my dear younger older brother and sister, is this, to live a different life, a godly life that displays something of the characteristics of our Lord Jesus. The other day, you may have read it in the paper, the press rang me up as to what my feelings were as to the proposed opening of a sex shop here in the town. I'm always cheery whenever the press phone me up.

I've never yet known the experience of them getting right what I have said, and this was no exception. I tried to show that my concern in wording is not to be a negative person speaking against sex shops and gambling shops and bingo halls and all the rest of things that unfortunately appease and play towards the addiction of weak men and women. Our concern as Christian people is not just to expose sin for what it is, but to show that within the Christian gospel there is a satisfaction that makes pale into insignificance the bizarre experience of sexual malpractice, the experience of the drug addict.

Within Christianity itself, within the kingdom of God, there is so much thrill, there is so much excitement, there is so much pure wonder that it's not just a question of Christians being negative, though we will expose sin, whether it be a sex shop or anything else in that area. But the thing that we're called to do is to show that in the gospel of Christ, within the redeemed community, there's a joy, there's a hope, there's another option as to the way in which we are to live. The people of God are called to be triumphant people, even in a world that is facing so many, many difficulties.

And here is the illustration of Noah living differently from the rest of the people in his generation. And it was the difference of Noah, his attempts for purity and for blamelessness that won him favor in the eyes of the Lord. And that's the first thing I reckon, with the clock at four minutes to judgment, that you and I are called to do ourselves, to live differently in this generation.

What's more, you will discover that Noah lived obediently. Verse 22 at the end of the chapter says, Noah did everything just as God commanded him. And you get a repeat of that phrase on two or three occasions during the whole narrative that describes the life of this remarkable man.

Here was Noah confronted by God with a plan for him of salvation. He was to build an ark. We're told about its dimensions.

We're told of its instructions. They're somewhat detailed. Noah recognizes that this is God's word.

It doesn't make sense. Whoever built an enormous chest that apparently was to sail on water when you were miles removed from an ocean at a time when flooding had never been known. But you see, this is the point that I'm really angling for this evening.

Noah, confronted with catastrophe, recognizes in the revelation of God that there is a way in which he and his family can be saved. It doesn't make sense. Noah will become the laughing stock of his day.

But he will put reason on one side and he will enthrone revelation. And he will believe because God has said that the way whereby he will be saved from the impending catastrophe is by being obedient to the commands of the Lord. And that's the second thing that I want to impress upon you in these troubled days in 1980-odd.

There is a plan of salvation. It's the fact of Jesus being crucified and being raised from the dead. It's the plan of God whereby men and women can be released of the consequence of their sin.

It's the gospel of Christ, which is a laughing matter for many people who live today. But it's the gospel that needs to be preached in obedience. Noah was not going to adjust his ark.

He wasn't going to soup it up and make it a more sophisticated sort of vessel. God had spoken and Noah believed it as God has spoken through Jesus and laid down the principles of the gospel. And for you, for me, to change those principles in the latter part of the 20th century is disastrous.

It is foolish. We are called in the complex world of the 20th century to believe God when He speaks to us through Jesus Christ. Now our Savior warned that as the days went on and drew near to His second coming, it would be increasingly difficult for Christian people to maintain faith.

They would be tripped or attempts would be made to trip them in a variety of ways. There would come forth false messiahs, Jesus said, who would lead thousands of people astray. The New Testament enlarges on the predictions of Jesus and gives some indication of the phenomena of the world of the cults which we are seeing today.

And in these days when men and women are often paralyzed with fear, we're watching thousands of folks deluded into putting their trust in a Korean messiah by the name of Sang Myung Moon. We are watching thousands of people in the West adopting the so-called philosophies of some of the Indian gurus and taking up practices which are contrary to the law of God. We are seeing people come to the Bible and reject it and call it the gospel of the simple-minded, the gospel of the butcher shop.

It's becoming more and more difficult to apply the ethic of the New Testament in the 20th century when on the part of many people there are no absolute moral standards allowable at all. And in these days, my dear young friend, my older friend, what we are called to do is to be obedient to the gospel of Christ and to recognize that in that gospel and only as a result of that gospel is there any hope, is there any salvation possible. We are called to live differently.

We are called to live obediently. One more thing. We are called to act sensitively.

Peter tells us that Noah, who was the eighth descendant of Adam, spent time preaching to his civilization. In other words, he did not engage in what has often been called today the evangelical cop-out. What do I mean by that? Well, I was reading an article by a very gifted, charismatic leader in America, Bob Mumford.

And he writes in this particular article about the tendencies of evangelicals knowing that the coming of the Lord draws nigh. To develop a little holy club. To cut themselves off from moral, social, and political responsibilities.

And to say, oh well, things are going to get worse and worse, therefore there's nothing that I should do about it, but just let them progress in the way that they are. Mumford puts it more eloquently, the terminal generation mentality has been produced in recent decades by an ostrich-like perspective which buries its head in the eschatological sands of Bible prophecy and believes Christians don't really need to concern themselves with the future since the Lord is going to return and set aside the world system sometime in our generation. And he goes on, like Jonah, the prophet, there is a temptation to withdraw to an unaffected hill and watch on a reprobate society waiting for the final judgment and collapse to descend.

Jonah, Mumford said, misinterpreted God's call to deliver the world to Nineveh, to deliver the word to Nineveh as a mandate of destruction rather than a witness of love and concern for a blind people. Noah was not insular. Noah was not insensitive.

And neither are we in the 20th century who belong to the Lord Jesus Christ to become in a sort of evangelical state of being in a compartment where no one else comes in and we don't go out and relate to the world in the 20th century. We have a ministry. We have a responsibility.

We recognize that people are worried. They're worried at the thought of Hiroshima repeating itself. 120,000 people died at Hiroshima as a result of 25 pounds worth of uranium packed into a little vessel no bigger than a cricket ball.

And we have the capability of delivering thousands and thousands of those cricket balls around our globe in a nuclear holocaust the like of which we could never survive. No wonder people are afraid. No wonder the most sensitive ones are walking the streets with their placards.

It's disgusting. It's vile. It's obscene.

Out there in the West now they're starving to death. In the Sudan they have not sufficient food to eat. And here we are in the West with our ammunitions, with our stockpiles and there they are in the East with an equivalent if not greater amount of horrific weapons.

It's absurd. It's a nightmare. No novelist could ever dream up such an absurd thing as is happening in our world today.

And we realize puny individual men and women we realize the absurdity of it all. But it seems there isn't a thing we can do about it. Oh yes.

You can join CND if you like and I'd be the last to criticize you. I believe that at a citizen level we ought to be doing all that we can to make our position clear and known. But you see the thing that most philosophers and politicians and sociologists do not recognize is this that you can't discuss this world into peace.

You can't draw a conference together and have men believing one another. It never has happened. And this side of the return of Christ it can never happen because the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.

And at that level I see no hope. At that level. It doesn't mean to say that I'm to be doing nothing about it.

I'm to use my opinion. I'm to use whatever influence I have. I am to agitate for reform for peace for a sensible application of this world's finances and wealth and food for an equal distribution.

I must do all that I can but as a Christian I can't blind myself to the fact that man is a sinner. Man is in rebellion against the Holy God. And unless you can step into the heart of men and women and do something about that then you'll never resolve the problem.

So the point is this. Four minutes to midnight I'm called to live for Jesus. I'm called to be obedient to him.

I'm called to be sensitive to the needs of ordinary people. I share their fears. I quake as the world trembles.

But this I know God has not abdicated his authority on planet earth. Jesus Christ will return. There shall be the recreation of the new heaven and the new earth.

And after I've done all my demonstrating and after I've got myself up to my eyes involved in using influence if I should have any amongst the politicians the most important thing to do is to proclaim the gospel of Christ. You see it's only the blessed gospel that will change a man's heart. What's wrong with our world is what is wrong with the individual man blown up in gigantic proportions.

There was a letter in the Times some years ago. The discussion had ensued what's wrong with the world and if memory serves me right it was George Bernard Shaw who wrote one of the shortest letters ever produced ever printed to the editor of that paper. What's wrong with the world? Dear sir I am yours faithfully.

The only answer starts with the individual and the only power to change the individual is the gospel of Christ. Work as hard as you can as a sociologist as an educationalist as a politician but the greatest delusion is to believe that man can put this planet together again of his own initiative. He cannot.

He will not be able to. And the imperative is for the proclamation of the gospel to reach the whosoever until that time and there are many indications that it may not be far hence when the trumpet shall sound and when the Christ shall return. On that I stake my life.

On that I invest the whole of my faith. How do you live? Four minutes to midnight? Obediently. You also live differently and further you live sensitively.

Let us pray. Let us pray.