Keep Alive
Genesis · Vern Peterman · Mar 9, 2008
Genesis, No. 15
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926055293807

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Good morning. We're privileged this morning to look into God's Word and continue on in our study of Genesis here. And we have To begin with, just sort of a snapshot looking at Genesis 6, which was studied last Sunday in Genesis 7. Genesis 6 here tells us about this widespread moral and spiritual vacuum before the flood. Characterized here in Genesis 6, 5, the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great upon the earth. So not just that it was present, but it was great and that, boy, and this is extreme, that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. Wow. That's superlatives.

God gave Noah a warning, having seen that, and appointed Noah to build an ark to keep some alive through this coming flood. Chapter 7 that we'll be looking at this morning then talks about how Noah followed through on God's instructions and how God preserved Noah and the other seven that were with him and the pairs of animals and a few extra animals for sacrifice and other purposes. And it takes us up to the peak of this rising flood, up to the worst of the time of the flood.

And one of the things that I think it's important to recognize, sometimes it takes 120 years just to get ready, okay? And you probably know people like that, okay? I had a great-grandmother who, she was married to my great-grandfather, who was a judge in Great Bend, Kansas. And I never got to meet her, but the story I heard is that she always waited until it was time to leave to begin getting ready. Slowly. So I'm sure he experienced this 120 years to get ready.

Nonetheless, God had given Noah 120 years notice here, 120 years warning, and he gave him all the details for how to build this ark. I don't doubt that the Lord may well have given Noah more detail than what we are particularly revealed. In other words, we may be given the quick summary, and the Lord may well have given Noah more particular details about how to do this. But nonetheless, we do have the detail that has been given to us here. Chapter 7 is about loading the ark, getting all the beings into it. Because it was interesting, as you read through the account, the animals were brought miraculously by the Lord onto the ark.

So it wasn't a matter of Noah running around trying to catch these. Here's this giraffe out there running around and he catches one and the other one gets away. Oh, you can imagine that madness. No. They all came into the ark. And so there was that. There was also food preparations and water, getting all that on the ark, and whatever else you're going to have there on the ark. Remember, you've got to have whatever games you're going to play. This is Noah-era Scrabble, or whatever else they played, I don't know.

Noah, it says, was 600 years old when the Lord sent the flood upon the earth. First the people and the animals entered, and then, here's a key distinction, God closed the door to the ark. Why would it be that God would close it and not just say, hey Noah, you built the thing, why don't you close it? The Lord, in closing it, did not make Noah have to bear the weight of having closed the door on the people on the outside.

Did not make Noah bear that weight. It's interesting, bring it forward. If we go back to our time when we studied through Revelation, that was over five years ago. We studied Revelation and one of the things we noticed there is that the people who had been brought up to the heavenly scene were not required to participate in bringing about the judgments of the people on the earth. Similarly here, Noah was not told, you close the door. The Lord closed the door so that Noah would not have to bear the weight of that judgment, which would certainly be heavy.

You have on the bottom half of page one a chart that looks like this. We're going to step our way through this chart. and take a look at it. Because this chart covers Chapter 7 and Chapter 8, when we get into covering Chapter 8, we'll continue it and kind of finish the rest of it.

The first item you have there is Noah enters the ark. That's simply stated because, in fact, it was Noah and his wife, and Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham, Japheth, and their wives, so eight people had to get on the ark with all their stuff, Scrabble games and everything, okay? and all the supplies needed for those eight people and the animals. And so this entering the ark simply stated, here's Noah, but it's really all the people and all the creatures on the ark at that time.

You can imagine, okay, here come the animals. That must have been quite a sight, you know. All right. See these creatures, large and small, moving towards you and, you know, getting on the ark. That must have gotten their attention. Must have been something to see. I can also imagine the people who thought Noah was nuts beginning to wonder if they were nuts as these animals start moving of their own accord onto the ark. can imagine what that day might have looked like. And so it must have been quite a time, quite a sight.

Then a week later, the flood begins with 40 days of rain. Now rain, as we look at the biblical description, doesn't appear to have been something that the people had seen before. It seems, especially the way we see the earth watered as described earlier in our study of Genesis, this was a fresh new experience for them. Forty days of rain. This is a phenomenal rain event.

We've had times of rain around here and we say, boy, that's intense, but usually it's over after a while. Forty days, I don't think we've seen that. Then you start thinking about this 40 days of rain. What's that like? Well, here's 40 days of rain and the water's rising. 40 days of rain and all of a sudden those who were laughing at Noah are no longer laughing.

Normal activities of life don't continue, right? We don't just continue on, well, the water's really high today, you know. You just can't plan around these global flood events and just continue on with life. Normal life just doesn't go on. You don't have the usual street scene just continuing. And it's really rough on the golf swing. Okay?

The truth is we, I make fun of it here, but the reality is all the life that had continued on, boy, now it's about to end as this rain begins. And as Peter put it, the world that then was perished. The rain continues, and I oftentimes wonder, if we were to take it and put it in our modern context, how would that look? How about the Golden Gate Bridge? How about Las Vegas? If we put it in a modern context, it suddenly kind of drops out of the realm of, oh, this is a story.

But no, this was the world that then was, including all the things that people built and made and everywhere that they lived and all the people who lived on the earth, drowned and ground, ground up. Noah and his wife and his three sons and their wives and the animals on the ark were the ones preserved through the midst of this huge cataclysm, one that the earth had not seen ever before. And as the Lord has promised, and we'll find out in chapter nine, will never occur again. Not like this.

Something else that it says is that the fountains of the deep were breaking up during the same time. It started the same time as the rain and it ended at the same time the rain ended after 40 days. When we look at this fountains of the deep, one of the things that may well be described there is underground water sources.

And one of the things we're often unaware of This goes beyond what Courtney's tapping into here. This goes beyond that. One of the things we're unaware of is like when there's a volcanic eruption. Frequently we're thinking of ash and lava and things like that coming up. One of the things that comes up is a great deal of water. There is still, even after this event, a large amount of water underneath the ground. Dr. John Baumgardner who spoke with us here in this very room last September.

He is a world-class scientist. He developed a cutting-edge Terra geophysical modeling program. That was a massive scientific breakthrough. And he modeled the early part of Noah's, the flood in Noah's day, including a lot of these very same events at this stage of the flood modeled. When I first heard of what he had done, I was astounded because it had been things that I had studied in my geology curriculum. But this level of breakthrough in computer technology had not taken place at that point in time. So amazing stuff. We were really quite privileged to have had them here.

The 40 days of rain comes to an end. Now that doesn't mean that the flood's over. It just means that the rain has ended. It will take quite a while. As a matter of fact, most of the rest of the flood, which is over a year, and we'll see that when we look at Chapter 8. Most of the rest of the flood is still yet to drop back to normal levels and go away. aspect in this. The fountains of the deep cease breaking up.

These two processes seem to have gone on both at once. One of the things that we get as we look at this picture is we have 40 days of extreme turbulence. There is both a torrential rain of a duration and intensity that the world has never seen before and will never see again. But there is also a phenomenon coming from the earth, a huge, massive cataclysm.

Okay. Imagine this. All right. Finally, the fountains of the deep have quit breaking up from down below. The rains have stopped. But it doesn't all quit. Now for months, months, that's what you see. Okay? Finally, it starts to subside. But for many months, that's what you see if you were to look outside one of the windows on the ark. Just water and water and more water. Everything is covered.

We're going to look at the end of this in, chapter 8 as we proceed through the rest of it. And so we'll look at the other points and return to this chart at that point in time. Okay. But as we look at this, there are a number of spiritual principles that can be drawn from this passage. And looking at Genesis so far, let's step your way through them. You have these on your handout there, right under the chart on page 1.

One of the things here is to look at what a walk by faith doesn't look like. We saw in Genesis 5 that it twice said that Enoch walked with God. That was one of the things that was made clear here. Enoch walked with God. In Genesis chapter 6 it says that Noah walked with God. And one of the things we have revealed for us in Hebrews 11, it says that Abel, who comes out in Genesis chapter 4, and Enoch in chapter 5, and Noah in chapter 6, all did what they did by faith.

By faith. By trusting and relying upon God. By depending upon what God said. All of these were done by faith. But think about what did that look like in terms of their lives? What was the consequence in their life? Abel was killed by Cain even though he was faithful. That was the outcome. Enoch was taken without dying. And certainly, especially having said it twice, Enoch walked with God is abundantly clear from that passage, even if we're not given a great amount of detail.

Noah was given this incredible task. If you can imagine being told you are going to build the ship that is going to preserve life on earth. No other people are going to survive except the ones on your ship and you're going to build it. Do a good job. Okay? And this is how you build it. And you can imagine, aside from Bill Cosby's comedy routine, you can imagine Noah being almost mind-blown with the magnitude of this thing. Nobody's ever built a ship like that before. Or maybe even, what's a ship? Right? What's an ark? That may not be too humorous and wild a question. This was a massive structure, a huge undertaking, one that would take twice in rough numbers and round numbers, twice a normal lifetime for our times just to build. And so here Noah's going to build this thing.

This walk by faith doesn't necessarily end up with the same outward appearance, does it? The Lord calls each of us as believers to walk by faith, trusting Him. And what that looks like on the outside may have all kinds of different descriptions. And one of the things you may have noticed, it also may be different in different stages of life.

But the walk by faith does not have some outside appearance that's uniform. A walk by faith won't place us all in the same circumstances. And a walk by faith won't provide us with some specific similar outcome. And it's certainly not a guarantee of earthly blessing.

There's a whole bunch of people even out there now who are making quite a bit of money by telling other people that, you know, if you spend your money this way that you'll be blessed. Or especially if you put it in my pocket, right? Or if you do this and that and the other thing, the Lord will bless you as if the Lord was somehow laid over a barrel because you did this or that. No, there is no guarantee of earthly blessing or some particular outcome because you're walking by faith.

That's just not biblical. What is the same from person to person of each of those who walks by faith isn't visible at all. Quite a bit of difference between one person who walks by faith and another. No, a walk by faith is a fellowship in intimacy with God, and certainly other people may see that, but the Lord is the one who is seeing it.

He is the one who is putting his attention to it. That's, as we mentioned last week, that's what grabs his attention. That's what he notices. It's the person walking in fellowship with him. That gets his attention. It's interesting as you think about what gets people's attention? What will grab people? We can do various things that will get us on the 6 o'clock news. Some of them are probably not a good idea to do. But we can do things that will get other people's attention.

But notice as we go through these chapters, what gets the Lord's attention every time? It's walking with Him. It's fellowship with Him. That's what He values. With all the things that can go on on planet Earth, that's what He's got His attention on. He wants us to walk with Him. He says, that's what I'm looking for. Relationship between you and He.

Mercy and grace are aspects of God's character. can be summarized as withholding of judgment that might otherwise be deserved. We give the picture here of the policeman who might well be justified in giving a ticket that says, no, I can let you off with a warning. Or the judge who could well give you the maximum sentence and says, no, I'm going to tell you, be careful next time. Okay. Withholds judgment. That's mercy. Grace, however, is the giving of blessing or providing in some way that isn't deserved. So mercy and grace are related, but they're two different parts.

Both of those, however, are parts of God's eternal and infinite character. God is infinitely and eternally merciful. He's infinitely and eternally gracious. One of the things that is said in Ephesians chapter 2 verses 4 through 7 talks about the riches, we'll substitute the word wealth, of his mercy and the riches of his grace. Wealth of grace. He has a huge abundance of mercy and grace.

Both of these are aspects of God's character and we see them revealed in God's word one end to the other. And in the flood of Noah, you might think, boy, this is one horrific event. How is mercy and grace shown? Well, think of this. Did God instantly flood the earth?

No. He gave 120 years. As we had earlier on the screen, the patience of God waited, allowing people the opportunity to recognize their need for God and their need to listen to the message that the Lord had given Noah. Giving people the opportunity. And notice, he didn't give the opportunity because he knew somebody would respond. He gave the opportunity out of his character. So waiting, delaying, the flood was one of those areas where he showed mercy. More time. More time for people to have a change of heart and to hear the truth.

He provided Noah as a 120-year preacher of righteousness who could tell all those people about the Lord. It was evident that he walked with the Lord. They could hear the truth from him. And he had this huge billboard called an ark to get their attention. So they also had the message, the message of truth given to them all during that time.

So not just the Lord waiting, but a continual message of truth all during that time. And didn't the Lord make provision for all the creatures on there? And was not the door to the ark open until the last minute? People could have said, hey, you know, I'm kind of stupid for standing out here. I better go in with those people. And they could have walked on at the last minute. But they didn't.

The patience of God kept waiting out of God's grace and God's mercy in the days of Noah. God repeatedly reveals the riches of His mercy and His grace. A number of people have mistakenly concluded that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are different gods. You ever hear that? Ever hear somebody say that? The God of the Old Testament, He sounds so cruel and severe. And the God of the New Testament is a God of mercy and grace and love.

No. It's not a different God. There isn't a change in God's character. No, in fact, it's exactly the same God, and both the Old and New Testaments say that God doesn't change. God's character is the same. He is not severe in the Old Testament and loving in the New. If we look at the Old Testament, it points ahead to things that are going to happen in the New Testament. and that are revealed in the New Testament. If we look at the New Testament, it points back to the character of God in the Old Testament. They are inspired by the same Holy Spirit. God warned of the flood out of His mercy and grace.

He appealed to people through Noah. He provided this way of salvation through the flood. salvation not meaning eternal salvation, but meaning salvation from the consequences of this flood. One of the things that I've wondered about is, was it possible that some people actually did come to believe after the door was shut? And were they not eternally saved? Possibly. I don't know. Were they not eternally saved if they came to believe them?

The Lord himself made comparisons between this flood in the days of Noah and the Lord's own coming. The second coming, this event yet to take place. Here's Matthew 24. The coming of the Son of Man, that's the title that the Lord called himself, will be just like the days of Noah.

For as in those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage until the day that Noah entered the ark. Everything went on just as it had been. And they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away. So will the coming of the Son of Man be.

So this day of Noah is not some time of cruelty and the New Testament is all some time of just pure love. No, there is judgment both in this day of Noah and in this coming time, the second coming of the Lord. The Lord himself makes that comparison. The God of the Old Testament is not a different one from the God of the New Testament.

It's the same Lord. Here are just the last couple of verses in that same passage. Then there will be two men in the field. One will be taken and one will be left. Now, this is not a passage about when the Lord takes people up to be with him, or sometimes it's called a rapture passage. That's not what this is. This is a judgment passage. Remember, it's right after talking about the days of Noah. It is the one distinction between the flood, which wiped out all but those eight people, and this coming time, which will be a great loss of life, but not everyone.

There will be two men in the field. One will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding at the mill. One will be taken and one will be left. The typical household mill was a two-person operation. And one person would pour the grain into the middle while the other person turned it. So that's why you would have two at the mill. One will be taken up.

This is a time of judgment that's coming up where the Lord Himself will come. And many, there will be many who will lose their lives in this. Something else, another spiritual truth that comes out of these passages is the spiritually worst actions may not have immediate consequences. Ever witness or hear about somebody doing something just awful and they don't seem to get consequences for it? Or maybe not right away?

One of the principles that comes out of here is things were very bad. As a matter of fact, the description there in Genesis was a great deal of violence. There was thoughtless violence against others. And that violence at the moment seemed to have no justice. And so one of the things for Christians to kind of get in our minds is while it's good to see justice, in our own lifetime and for us to witness it and for it to be paired up with the injustice.

The reality is that the Lord's timing may work out quite differently. The consequences in this case didn't get bad for 120 years. When the Lord declared that the whole earth would be flooded, it was 120 years later when that took place. We may not see justice immediately here on planet earth.

In some cases, maybe not even in our own lifetime, or we might, but God's going to deal with every injustice in His time. There will be everything, every injustice dealt with either at the cross, because Christ paid the price for every single sin, for every single person on the planet, or sometimes in our own lifetimes, or in eternity. But the Lord will always deal with every injustice, but not always in the time that we would think would be fitting.

Another principle is let God measure our walk with Him. We humans are prone to judge our outcomes of walking by faith in human terms. We want to see even, for example, even in our church gathering. Well, how do we know if the church is being successful? How do we know? Well, there are certainly people who are inclined to go, let's count.

And they may even put a little placard on the wall that keeps track of that. You can put it, these days, with spreadsheets and bar charts. You can just do wonderful things with all that. You can, total dollars given and put that up there. We could have a thermometer on the wall, you know, all sorts of things. People in attendance, you know, pack the pews. We could have all kinds of programs going. I think the term that Hal used to use was counting nickels and noses. It is real easy to get caught up in that.

But you know, that's not what the Lord's looking at, is it? The Lord's not looking at that. God spoke through Noah directly. Noah, you're the guy I'm going to do this through. And here was Noah, a preacher of righteousness for those 120 years. I can imagine out there working away on the wood and turning around for a preaching break. And so here he is, a preacher of righteousness for 120 years with a very unusual item to get people's attention, this huge ark that's under construction. So here's Noah, this preacher of righteousness over this 120 year period, speaking out to people.

Now, how successful was he? Oh, imagine with that ark. And matter of fact, he had a whole lot more time to practice this preaching. He must have gotten a huge response from that, right? Lots of people heard this. People must have talked about it and sent people out to look. Have you seen that thing? What's that guy up to? So there was great success with it, right? How do you count success?

The response? Zip. We know of not one that responded. One way you could put it is Noah was preaching to the choir. Here's his wife and his three sons and their wives. And those are the only ones that ended up going on the ark. It would be real easy for us to look at Noah and say, man, that guy really blew it. Where's the nickels? Where's the noses? Let God measure. Let God measure the success. He's going to focus on our walk with Him. He's responsible for the results.

Noah did, as this passage says, what God told him to do. Noah walked with God. What Noah did was by faith. That got God's attention. Noah was successful because God said so, not because of any human measure. Noah's name, as we saw earlier, when his name was first given, meant rest. It truly did rest in, trust in, what God had said. And what's interesting is that meant working really hard. Wow.

We are privileged to know more by God's grace and through his word, more about what that resting and trusting and depending means than what has been revealed to us about Noah's day. But as with Paul, this resting has some commonality. Our being motivated by God's mercy and grace, two aspects of his character, Depending on His provision and His ability in every task, it may look like hard work on the outside. Isn't that something? Resting and depending and trusting in the Lord, depending upon the Lord, may look like hard work on the outside.

Here is Paul, I point in this passage to Colossians 1.29 where he says, we teach every man and admonish every man with all wisdom. And he says three times, everyone, everyone, everyone. And what does he say after that? To this end I labor. That word for labor means I labor to exhaustion. Empowered with God's enabling. His empowerment. His enabling. On the inside, Paul is resting.

On the outside, it looks like really hard work. That's the amazing paradox of the person who walks with God. Resting in God's provision, resting in who he is and what he has said and what he has done on the outside may look like a lot of hard work. And you can imagine from this, Noah worked hard, but he rested in what the Lord said.

Another point that comes out of this, when circumstances are the worst, God shows Himself faithful the most. God's always faithful because that's who He is. That's His character. He shows us His faithfulness the most at the time when the human circumstances are the worst. And I think that's an important thing for us to remember. His faithfulness shows up when the human circumstances are the worst.

If Noah Just said God's faithful, but nothing ever challenged it. He wouldn't really be seeing God's faithfulness. It was in the midst of this horrific event that he could see God's faithfulness. It showed. In our own lives, God's faithfulness shows the most when the circumstances are the worst. Here is Noah. What he was told to do looked like craziness, insanity for 120 years. Can you imagine looking like a complete fool for 120 years?

Here's this guy in the bottom of this picture. I'm going to blow it up a little bit. This guy is cuckoo. This guy is nuts. What is he doing? He's being faithful to the Lord. He is listening to the Lord. The impression from the outside is this is bonkers. This is nuts.

When all outside were dead and dying, then God showed that he was faithful. When it was really, really awful outside, God's faithfulness showed the most. God, in the end, is the one who keeps us alive. He is the one who made Adam from the dust of the ground, who made him alive, made him a living being. He is the one who kept these eight people alive on the ark and through the flood. And as the Lord himself promised, God the Father is the one who raised Christ from the dead and who made us alive in him. And God is the one who, through Christ, is right now keeping us spiritually alive. in giving us his life.

In John 10, 27 and 28, by the way this was spoken during Hanukkah, Christ is speaking to the Jews who don't believe and he says, my sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me and I give eternal life to them. The Greek there has this sense, I am constantly giving eternal life to them. Isn't that something? He is constantly giving eternal life to us.

He is the very source of life. Colossians 3, 4, Christ who is our life. He is our life. The Lord kept Noah and the seven others and the animals alive. He is the one who sustains life. He is in our own lives the one who sustains life. He is the one who is constantly giving us life. He's the life giver and he is the life preserver. The one that we can count on. He is the promise keeper.

Let's pray. Lord, we thank you that we can indeed depend upon you. That what you have promised we can count upon. And we just pray that you would bring these spiritual principles to heart and mind in our own hearts and lives. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.