"Bearing the Cross"
Gen. 6:9-22
August 25, 1996
Text Comment
v. 9 "Walked with God" otherwise said only of Enoch.
v. 13 The point is that what God decided to destroy, had virtually destroyed itself
already. The words "corrupt" and "destroy" in vv. 11-13 are the same
Hebrew verb. The idea of ruin, both in passive and active senses, occurs five times in the
three verses. Not the last time such corruption has overtaken the life of the world. If
you read William Manchester's dismal portrait of so-called "Christian" Europe
during the middle ages, you will think, if the truth is half what he claims, human life
could not have sunk much lower, however much there may have been, like Noah, gracious and
godly and high-minded people scattered among the beasts. I read the other day that one
manual of manners told people of that day not to break wind while sitting at the table,
nor spit on the floor, nor to pick their noses, to look for lice in their hair, and men
were not to fondle the breasts of the women sitting next to them. And this of men and
women made in the image of God! There are many places in the world where it is just that
bad today and our own culture is headed the same way, with only a thin veneer of
sophistication blinding us to that fact! What must all this beastiality appear to a holy
God. But God has promised not to destroy the world again until the Lord Christ comes in
judgment.
v. 14 The NIV editors' decision to stick with "ark" is probably a failure of
nerve. The only other use of the term in the OT is in Exod. 2:3,5 where it is used for the
basket of bulrushes in which the infant Moses is hid. Scholars suppose that it is an
Egyptian loan-word meaning "box" or "chest." The use of the term
emphasizes the sole purpose of this vessel -- it is not called a ship -- to protect and
preserve those who enter it.
v. 15 The ark was a huge box, 450'x75'x45' (deep). Buildings of such size were not
unknown in antiquity and, of course, it did not require launching.
v. 16 "finish to within 18 inches of the top", one commentator calls
"the most obscure remark in the flood story." It may mean that an opening of
that depth was to be left at the top, under the roof, as in some buildings of the ANE;
others suggest it could refer to the distance the roof was to overhang the walls of the
ark.
v. 18 The first mention of "covenant" in the Bible. Noah is not merely to be
a survivor of the catastrophe that God is about to bring upon the world, but the conveyor
of God's promise of salvation for the world.
We have said several times already in our study of the early chapters of Genesis that
we are here being taught the most basic and fundamental principles of human life and of
God's way with his creatures. The foundation for the rest of the Bible is being laid in
its first eleven chapters. This has been true as well of the history of the flood as we
have considered it so far in two sermons on Gen. 6:1-8. Here we have revealed for us, for
the first time, both the reality and the terrible ferocity of divine judgment, a fact that
will receive ample elaboration in the rest of the Bible, indeed a fact that is the great
presupposition of the great story of salvation that unfolds through the remaining books of
the Bible. Our sin pays a terrible wage unless we are redeemed from our bondage to it and
to its guilt. On a number of occasions, the flood is used elsewhere in the Bible as the
supreme illustration of the judgment, 2 Peter 3:3-7 being a chief example.
But we have also seen that this history as well reveals and illustrates the
faithfulness of God to his promises. Immediately after the fall God promised a descendant
of Eve would crush the head of the serpent. The entire account of Noah and his
preservation and that of his family is the first of many demonstrations in Holy Scripture
of the lengths that God will go to remain faithful to his promise of salvation. The Exodus
will be another such demonstration, and the cross the greatest of them all. God promised
salvation through a human deliverer and he kept his word: kept the line of the promised
seed alive in the world until the time for his appearance had fully come. But here at the
flood, for the first time, we have God preserving the seed of the woman and so his
promise of that promised offspring who would bring deliverance to mankind. These
fundamental themes of divine judgment and redemption are key to the meaning of the flood
and to the history of Noah.
But when we have considered these subjects we are still not done with the fundamental
perspectives that are being disclosed for the first time in this history of the
catastrophe that God brought upon mankind so early in its history. Even judgment and
salvation do not exhaust the meaning of this history!
There is also in this account of Noah and the ark the first clear and comprehensive
disclosure of a fact that is to loom very large in the rest of the Bible's account of
believing man's relationship with the living God. This history of Noah is also the
revelation of Christian life and living in the world. Noah is an exemplar of those who
trust and obey the Lord and of their fortunes in this world.
In particular, what we have in the account of Noah is the first great illustration of
the alienation from the world of those who side with God. Here we see, for the first time
in the Bible, what it is going to cost a man or woman who follows the Lord in this world,
in troubles, in the rejection of his or her peers, in personal isolation, in the reproach
and scorn of others.
Now don't make of Noah a stone. Indeed, the Scripture makes a point of telling us that
he was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time. He was a good man and like
all truly good men, he was a man who loved others and was loved by others. He was a man of
tender affections and deep feeling, a man, no doubt, with many friends. Many of those who
loved him and whom he loved, he left behind when he entered the ark he had made. His own
brothers and sisters, perhaps. His wife's family. His cousins, his nieces and nephews,
aunts and uncles. His neighbors, those who had worked for him. He was ordered to shut the
door against those people when he entered the ark.
But, what is almost more certain is that they had long since shut the door against him.
It is not said in so many words, but these were human beings with human nature and that
nature is no different today than it was then. We are left to imagine what life was like
for Noah during the years that the ark was in the building!
"Noah's folly!" they would have called it. Look at that crazy fellow now; a
real Chicken Little with his endless talk about how the sky is falling! How they must have
laughed at him. And what is more, imagine how it was at the last. We read in 7:10 that
Noah and his family entered the ark and shut the door a full week before the rains began.
Whether they hooted at him or pitied him, we have it from our Savior's own lips that they
paid his message no mind. "For in the days before the flood, people were eating and
drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they
knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away."
[Matt 24:38-39] What a fool he must have appeared to them, how silly his
"righteousness" must have appeared to them then.
No, when God's commandment came to Noah and when he believed what God told him, it was
the end of his comfortable life in the world, the end of his happy associations with so
many who were not righteous as he was.
This is what the Lord Jesus would thousands of years later call "bearing the
cross." Unless a man take up his cross and follow me he cannot be my disciple. And he
also said such things as these: "I came not to bring peace but division" and
"if they hated me they will hate you also."
And his apostles taught similarly. "Anyone who would live a godly life must suffer
persecution." And, "Through many tribulations it is necessary that we inherit
the kingdom of God." And, "Come out from among them and be separate." And,
"[through Christ and his cross] the world has been crucified to me and I to the
world."
But, in all of these famous statements of the separation, the genuine opposition and
antagonism, the adversarial relationship that exists between the world and the true
followers of Christ, we have only the repetition, the reiteration of a view of believing
life that goes all the way back to Noah and the flood.
Noah is just the first. So it is with all believers whose lives are reported in
Scripture as an example for us. Abraham, because he was a man of faith and a friend of
God, had to be a pilgrim in this world, a stranger, an alien. And, using Abraham as an
example, the Bible teaches all believers that they must be the same; that they cannot make
this world their home and, if they would be faithful Christians, the world won't allow
them to settle in it. True Christians must be pilgrims.
Now, from time to time, readers of that spiritual classic wonder about what Christian
in The Pilgrim's Progress. How can it have been right for him, they ask themselves,
to have left his wife and his children to go on that journey to the Celestial City. How
can it have been right for him to become a pilgrim if it meant leaving his loved ones
behind.
But the wise and discerning and even the little children among them, after a little
thought, realize their mistake. For Bunyan's Christian made his entire pilgrimage -- that
long, difficult, painful, costly journey, -- in and out of the Slough of Despond, through
the wicket gate to Interpreter's house, down into the valley of humiliation, through
Vanity Fair to the castle of Giant Despair, into the Delectable Mountains, on to the
Enchanted Ground and at last to the River - I say, Christian made that entire trip while
living in his own home, seated at his own fireside, and at his own table with his family
gathered around him. But it was as if he took leave of his family, because they had
refused to join him in his pilgrimage and he had had to travel alone.
And so it was from the day that Noah entered the ark -- God's faithful ones have had to
turn their backs upon this world, its fellowship, affection and its approval and its
acceptance, and live as strangers and aliens in the land.
It isn't at all obvious, if you think about it, that it should have been so. After all,
this is God's world and we are his people. Why should we, of all people, be the strangers
here? Why should it seem that the wicked and the unbelieving belong and we do not? Why
should we be excluded and not they?
But such is what sin has done to the world. It has stood it on its head and made it,
for us, merely a place to pass through and hostile to us.
So it was for Moses and for David and for Jeremiah, and so it was for our Savior
himself who was despised and rejected of men precisely because he was so faithful
to his Father in heaven, the maker of heaven and earth. So it was for Paul, who was
crucified to the world and suffered all manner of trouble from it.
Remember Paul? Do you remember what the Lord said to Ananias, the disciple of the Lord
who lived in Damascus? Saul was sitting blinded in a house on Straight Street in Damascus
where he had gone after his encounter with the Lord on the road. And God told Ananias to
go to Saul and tell him "how much he must suffer for my name." What a beginning
to the life of a Christian: to hear how much he must suffer for the Lord's name! But the
entire life of Paul was suffering as we read in Acts and his own letters and, especially,
in 2 Corinthians chapter 11.
And so it has been ever since. The more faithful a Christian, the more the world turns
away from him, the more it finds to mock and scorn in his life. Tertullian, in the third
century, wrote, "We get ourselves laughed at for proclaiming that God will one day
judge the wicked." Just as they laughed at Noah, they laugh on today. They scoff and
say, "Where is this 'coming' he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything
goes on as it has since the beginning of creation. But they deliberately forget
that long ago by God's Word the heavens existed and the earth was formed out of water and
by water. By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. By the
same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of
judgment and destruction of ungodly men." [2 Peter 3:3-7]
No, you can count on this: just as it was with Noah, so it will be with you if you
would be righteous and blameless in God's sight. You must believe and speak, you must
think and behave in a way that must forever separate you from many that you know and even
from some that you love. What is more, you must think and speak and behave in a way that
-- however completely and utterly true -- the world will take to be the purest foolishness
and if the worldly folk around you don't say it to your face, it is only because they are
too polite to tell you what they really think.
Now, what a strange and what a hard thing this is. To be God's sons and daughters and
to be thought fools for it! How hard it is -- just as it was for Noah, those years when
the ark was being built for a flood that everyone knew would never come -- to be at odds
with virtually everyone, to look out on a world that others see so utterly differently
than you do. But this is the calling of righteous men and women and has been from the
beginning. To believe what God tells you and to act upon it, even though it may be a
very long time before it comes to pass and during which time you appear the fool to most
around you.
This is the essential character, mark, and test of real faith and godliness. To follow
God when all around you scoff and scorn and when for so long they are allowed to be
sure that they are right!
But here is the end of the matter. They are wrong. The rains did come, the waters did
rise, the earth was destroyed. And it will be again. "For do not forget this one
thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years
are like a day." [2 Pet. 3:8]
And this one thing more. There is a reason for this, after all. It is the truest
loyalty, the truest devotion, the truest love, the truest trust for a man or a woman to
believe against the evidence of one's eyes; to take God's Word when all the world around
you can for so long get away with laughing at it. This is why God requires faith of his
children, is it not? It is simply what real love amounts to.
It is heavy, this cross, this alienation from the world, this scorn that they feel so
comfortable in pointing our way. Our faith is weak and we are always wanting to lay down
this cross and to assure the world that we have much more in common with them than they
thought. This is, you see, what is now happening among evangelicals who are embracing
feminism. They cannot bear the world thinking them so primitive, so strange, so evil as to
believe the Bible's outdated and disgraced doctrine of gender. They rush to change the
church's teaching and practice if only the world will think better of them for it. The
scorn is too much to bear. But, at last, we cannot lay this cross down without turning our
back on him.
This is what our Savior did -- live according to the Word of God everyone else thought
nothing of -- and so he loved his Father in heaven. And far worse than Noah, whom they
laughed at but probably patronized and pitied, Jesus so faithfully fulfilled the Word of
God, so perfectly kept all of God's commandments, that the sinful world did not even
regard him as a good man. And they never gave him time to build his ark; they killed him
first.
And by no other means than that can we love God so well ourselves. To be faithful to
whatever word it is that God has told you and that those around you will scorn you for
believing, for really believing and acting on.
Hast thou no scar?
No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand?
I hear thee sung as mighty in the land,
I hear them hail they bright, ascendant star,
Hast thou no scar?
Has thou no wound?
Yet I was wounded by the archers, spent,
Leaned me against a tree to die; and rent
By ravening beasts that compassed me, I swooned:
Hast thou no wound?
No wound? No scar?
Yet, as the Master shall the servant be,
And pierced are the feet that follow me;
But thine are whole: can he have followed far
Who has no wound nor scar?
|