"The Eternal Gospel of God's Judgment"
Gen. 8:1-22
Sept. 8, 1996 

Text Comment

v. 3 "Waters receded" exactly the same phrase used of the waters of the Red Sea returning to their place and the waters of the Jordan River likewise in Josh. 4, the other two great acts of salvation associated with water in the OT.

v. 4 As I said last week, lit. "the mountains (or hills) of Ararat, the ancient kingdom of Urartu, perhaps the area around Lake Van, if the maps in your Bible identify that large Lake to the NW of Mesopotamia.

v. 9 A particularly tender touch, a beautiful picture of the relationship that ought to exist between man and the animal world; Noah a Francis of Assisi before his time!

v.11 In the Gilgamesh Epic, the greatest of the mythical ANE flood stories, a raven, a swallow, and a dove are sent out.

v.12 This sequence, as one commentator points out [Von Rad], allows us subtly to witness "the waiting and hoping of those enclosed in the ark."

v.17 The language, repeating Gen. 1 as it does, suggests a new creation.

v.21 That God's anger is appeased by the sacrifice is the clear suggestion of the phrase "pleasing" or "soothing aroma." It is no doubt also an expression of thanksgiving on Noah's part and indicates that even so early a fully developed doctrine and practice of sacrifice was part of true worship.

v.22 The promise, clearly, is related to the sacrifice that pleased God. Noah's sacrifice, that brings blessing for all mankind, is a prototype of the sacrifices the Lord Jesus would offer for his people's salvation. The promise doesn't abolish disasters, but does localize and limit them. God is not lifting the curse upon the earth because of man's sin, but he is not increasing it either. Christians should never embrace the doomsday speaking of environmental activists and others who warn of the end of the world. This is God's world and its history is in his hands and he has spoken concerning how it will end.

There is a feature of the consecutive exposition of the Bible, such as is the primary method of preaching in this church, that will commend it to the spiritually minded but prove a challenge, if not an irritation to others. I'm speaking of the fact that the subjects that the Bible chooses to enlarge upon, or, more correctly, that the Holy Spirit chooses to enlarge upon in his book, are not necessarily the subjects we would choose to hear most often. Indeed, if the truth be told, we have often been wearied by the Bible's concentration on what seems to us to be of lesser interest, or importance, or relevance to our living today and wish that we could have more of that teaching we find most interesting, refreshing, amusing, or inspiring. Ministers are subject to the same temptation; I know that I am. Not only does one want to preach what he knows a congregation will be interested and eager to listen to, but, in all honesty, it can be very daunting to have before you a paragraph that seems to say much the same thing that previous paragraphs have said. How is this text to be preached in an interesting way? How can I preach this portion of God's Word without simply repeating what I have said before and what the congregation has heard me say before?

But, in thinking that way, we are imagining ourselves wiser than God. He wrote his book precisely as it should have been written and his choice of topics, his distribution of them throughout sixty-six books, the emphasis that he lets fall on certain themes more than others should be enough to convince us of what is truly important and necessary for us and what truths will bring the greatest blessing if we study them with consecrated minds and hearts. And, as for us preachers, shame on us if we really permit ourselves to think that the unfathomably deep and indescribably profound doctrines of Holy Scripture, cannot be preached a thousand times in a row without a man exhausting the important and interesting things that can be said and the unlimited applications of such truth to our faith and daily living.

And one of those subjects, those doctrines, without doubt, is the enormity, the immensity, the radical nature of human sin and the revulsion of a holy God in the face of that sin.

We have encountered this teaching in the account of the fall and the curse that God visited upon mankind because of sin. In the next chapter, chapter 4 and again in Chapter 6, we found the theme again in the description of sin's spreading reach, of its tendency to deepen its corruption not only in an individual life but through the march of generations, and, now, we have it again in chapters 6-8 in the judgment -- the ferocious judgment -- that God visited upon sinful man in the flood.

But, here, as the waters recede and the earth appears again, as Noah and his family leave the ark, and enter a virgin world, washed clean by God's judgment, we are startled and dismayed to hear the Lord say that, so far as sin and the human heart are concerned, nothing has changed. Indeed, v. 21 of chapter 8 repeats virtually word for word the language of 6:5 in describing the sinfulness of man.

"every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood."

In chapter 6 those words were offered as an explanation of why mankind had to be destroyed. Here in chapter 8 the same verdict is pronounced on man but God promises that, notwithstanding man's continuing evil, notwithstanding man's continuing to deserve such a judgment as the flood, notwithstanding the fact that the life of the world would again be dominated by evil desires, God would not bring such a punishment upon the world until the end of time.

This is not what people want to hear today -- it never was. This is not the theme they want to hear preached Sunday after Sunday. Today in particular, people are offended by such statements as these and by the suggestion that they are as positively bad as the Bible says they are. They resent and reject the statement that every inclination of their heart is evil and has been from childhood.

Americans, by the way, are particularly unreceptive to this negative assessment of human beings. I've been reading the fascinating study of American revivalism by Iain Murray, his study of the transition from Calvinism to Arminianism in the first half of the 19th century and the role of Charles Finney in popularizing -- altar call decisionism -- that had never been before but has for so long been associated with the American Church. Among the factors leading to the change in theology which underlay the change in practice was the new American spirit of self-confidence, activism, and fascination with the novel.

In 1835 W.B. Sprague, the famous historian of revivals and a representative of the older Calvinism of the American church, said in a sermon, that the spirit of the times was manifesting itself in the church in attributing "an unscriptural and disproportionate importance to human agency." It was representing man as "a mighty agent rather than a humble instrument." It was giving rise to the error that "all religion consists in excitement, in action..." in a dislike of the old and a preoccupation with wishing to see things go ahead. New inventions, the discovery and subsequent settlement of new territory made it seem that progress and the future lay open before the new self-made men of the restless, self-confident new republic.

In such an environment so uniquely American, the doctrine of original sin and of human badness, such as had for so long been taught as fundamental truth, the bed-rock of the faith, in Christian churches seemed out of place, old-fashioned, and calculated to stand in the way of progress. Men like Finney capitalized on that sentiment and forced a change in the way people thought about human beings -- no longer the slaves of sin, but fully capable of doing whatever they wanted to do and, therefore, fully in control of their spiritual destinies. Indeed, such was Finney's tremendous optimism that in his Lectures on revivals he predicted that if ministers would change their old way of thinking about salvation and employ his new methods, the world could be converted and the millennium brought in in three months! (282)

Progress! That was the word! Nowadays, it has a hollow sound to it. Progress in our century has been the progress of evil and the progress of woe. As George Will once wrote in a column, "In the nineteenth century, when there was, perhaps, more excuse for investing extravagant hope in 'change,' Tennyson wrote: 'Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.' We should now know that the key word is 'down.'" [Pursuit of Virtue, p. 66] But there was no reason for this higher view of man in the 19th century either!

But that fact notwithstanding, through the years the church has herself grown still more uncomfortable, if not positively embarrassed by such sweeping charges of human iniquity as this in Gen 8:21. They seem foreign and alien, out of date and offensive in a culture such as ours. The church is today far happier thinking of human beings as needy than as wicked. They are needy, of course; the Bible says that too. But, according to the Bible, one will never understand or measure that need aright, nor ever know how to meet that need, if one does not connect it to human sin and sinfulness.

I read an article this week on the direction of modern American evangelical churches. Over and again the pastors interviewed in the article described the people they are trying to reach with statements such as these: they are "spiritually hungry, but they feel like second-class citizens" or "it is not that they don't trust God, its that they don't trust the institutions; they've let them down" or "I think we've got to redefine church. There are a whole lot of people out there with a major failure in their lives -- and they never find themselves acceptable in church again," or "people come to be touched, to belong." Now, I am not denying that, in a certain sense, all of that may be true, it is true and important. But, what was conspicuously absent in this lengthy article was any admission that the "cannot" of American people is first a "will not;" that they are rebels against God, sinful and guilty before a holy God, that their sins are, at the last, their one and only problem, that they are threatened infinitely more by the wrath of God than by their own dissatisfaction with their lives or their sense of ennui, and that the gospel is a message about the forgiveness of sins through the blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ leading to a life of boundless gratitude to a gracious God who did not treat them as they so richly deserved. (A point was made in the article about how modern churches have adopted "non-threatening" architecture. But, of course, take the threat out of Christianity and it becomes little more than therapy for the middle class.)

Without that leading perspective, of human sin and divine wrath vs our sin as the defining facts of human life, attention to human needs in Christian churches is merely one more offering in our culture's cafeteria of nostrums for those who want to feel better about their lives.

For the fact is man is just as God describes him to be in 8:21: every inclination of his heart is twisted by sin and it has been from the beginning of his life. He or she is a bad person, right down to the bone. It is not, after all, all that difficult to prove this, which is why it is so unconscionable that Christian churches are not proclaiming this truth more unashamedly. Sigmund Freud said long ago that the generality of human beings was trash. He meant something different than the Bible and would have deeply resented the suggestion that he was trash himself. But, it isn't all that hard to know why he should say such a thing. Human beings are evil, they are wicked, it is a basic fact of their lives.

Here are three simple proofs among a great many that might be given.

1. First, the best, the holiest, the most generous, the purest, and the godliest people have always acknowledged this about themselves, that they are deeply selfish, dishonest, hypocritical, unkind, judgmental, envious, and all the rest.

Whether it was King David a thousand years before Christ saying that he had been sinful from the moment he had been conceived in his mother's womb, or Paul in the generation after the Lord's death and resurrection, admitting, near the end of his life that he was ashamed of himself every day and that he remained in so many ways a slave of sin and a doer of what he knew to be evil, or Lancelot Andrews in the 17th century saying of himself that "I am made of sin," or George Whitefield in the 18th century saying "I am sick of all that I do," or Robert McCheyne in the 19th century saying "I find in my heart the seeds of every known sin," the best men and women have always acknowledged a profound badness, an inclination toward and the positive practice of what they themselves know to be wrong and evil.

We may not expect unbelievers to see this, but Christians surely should not hesitate to confess it true, that men are really that bad. Because nothing could be more obvious than that we, even we who know God, who have had his love shed abroad in our hearts, who have been given every reason to love and serve the Lord, struggle every day to do the simplest things we know we ought to do and, indeed, we want to do: love one another deeply, maintain peace between ourselves, trust the Lord in all things, keep our hearts pure before God, and so on.

2. Another proof that Gen. 8:21 remains an accurate assessment of human beings today is its concentration on the heart, or the spiritual nature, as that out of which the life comes and by which the life is measured.

This was exactly what Finney and American Christianity after him denied: that man had a corrupt nature, that his heart had been corrupted by sin and, therefore, could produce nothing else but a corrupt life. If that were true only a sovereign, mighty work of God could produce the salvation of a sinner, because God alone can change a man's heart, deliver his nature from its natural bondage to sin and unbelief. That was the old doctrine he thought pessimistic and defeatist.

In a sermon he titled "Make yourselves a new Heart," Finney argued that man's problem was simply the decisions he had made and the solution for him was to make different decisions, to change the governing purpose of his life, as Finney put it, to decide to become a Christian. Man's problem was sins not sin!

But the Bible will have nothing of this. Man's sin comes from deep within him; it controls the core. From beginning to end it teaches that "out of the heart flow the issues of life" and that you cannot get good fruit from a bad tree. God must make a man's heart new or it will never forsake sin. Man is not in control of his destiny, he depends entirely on the mercy and the working of God within him.

This concentration on the heart shows us, you see, why we cannot accept the glib assurances of so many that they are really good people -- they pay their taxes, they give to charities, they love their children -- though, if the truth be told, fewer and fewer folk in our culture even do that! [One of you told me the other day that Radio Shack has determined that while only some of their employees wanted to work for Radio Shack precisely so that they could steal from the store, fully 80% of their employees will steal if presented with the opportunity.] But more than this, people forget that God looks upon the heart, and also sees our every act in its completeness, not only as a piece of behavior, but as an attitude, a motive, an intention. And here the goodness evaporates, and what we wanted others to think proof of our goodness becomes only more evidence of our selfishness, our small-mindedness, and our utter forgetfulness of God. For even the good things that are done are never done with pure, unmixed motives.

3. And, third, Gen. 8:21 is proved by the fact that we ourselves are constantly, daily, and profoundly failing to meet the very standard we accuse others of failing to meet. Human morality is a vast hypocrisy, in which we all, day after day, look down on others for failing to do what we don't do ourselves.

Dr. Schaeffer used to say that we would all hang ourselves a hundred times a day, if we only wore little tape recorders around our neck and were held responsible only for the ethics we required of others and condemned in others and failed to live up to ourselves. We are all pots constantly calling kettles black.

"God looks down from heaven on the sons of men to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. Everyone has turned away...there is no one who does good, not even one." (Psalm 53:2-3) Oh, if only you and I saw our lives as God sees them, if only we have a true glimpse of his holiness -- all of this ridiculous pretense we maintain and all others around us, would evaporate in a moment and we would be on our faces on the ground before God pleading for him to depart from us because we are so sinful.

But now, here me! I make these points about our true and profound sinfulness only to make another point. That is always the Bible's way. It is never interested in demonstrating human evil merely to make the point. No, this is the backdrop against which is revealed the Bible's true interest: the love and mercy of God. 8:21 is followed by 8:22, 8:21 is preparation for 8:22, 8:21 is designed to make us appreciate 8:22.

This is the real message -- not our sin, but God's love, patience, mercy, longsuffering. 2 Peter 3:3-9 is a commentary on Genesis 8:21-22. After recalling the flood as a warning of the certain eventual judgment upon mankind, Peter goes on to remind us that the delay in that judgment, that has convinced so many that the judgment will never come, is really nothing else but God's kindness.

"The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise [that is, his promise to judge the world], as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance."

This is the remarkable thing: though human sin continues unabated and causes so much offense to God as well as woe to his world, he waits, and waits... unwilling to bring his judgment because of his desire to see men saved, to see them repent of their sin and come to him for forgiveness, which he is always ready to give them.

In Revelation 14:6-7, we are told of an angel flying in midair who had the "eternal gospel" to proclaim to those who live on the earth... He said in a loud voice, "Fear God and give him glory because the hour of his judgment has come." How could that announcement, of God's impending judgment of the world, be called the eternal gospel? the everlasting good news? Because the doctrine of sin is always connected with the doctrine of God's compassion for sinners!

8:21 with its dismal but so accurate portrait of human beings and human life before a holy God is absolutely essential. We cannot allow it to be lost because it is so unpopular and people take offense at it and the church so widely believes that they can reach more people if they leave this message out. There can be no true coming to Christ and no true salvation without repentance before God, without the acknowledgment of one's sin and guilt and need of forgiveness, without humbling ourselves before the Lord. "What comfort can a Saviour bring to those who never felt their woe?" Christ is a savior from sin -- only those who face their sin will see him for what he is, love him and trust in him. No one is likely to be moved by v.22 who is not moved by v.21

But, if you know that your sins have mounted up against you and that God must be displeased with you for all that you do and fail to do toward him and other human beings -- if you could say of yourself what the great English preacher Charles Spurgeon said of himself -- "Before I thought upon my soul's salvation I dreamed that my sins were few" -- but now you have learned as he did, that your sins are not only many, very many, but ugly and vicious and utterly without excuse -- if you know that your "needs" are first and foremost the consequences of your estrangement from a holy God, then the gospel comes to you, then it becomes clear why God should make such a promise to Noah that he would not again destroy the world with a flood, then you can see his patience for what it is, exactly what you needed, for God to be willing to wait for you, for God to be so gracious, so tender-hearted, so compassionate as to wait for a miserable rebel like you to come finally to see your sins for what they are and to come to him for forgiveness.

As John Duncan, the wise and discerning Scot missionary and professor put it: "Love is the great attraction. Without the sternness of holiness and justice [such as we have demonstrated in the flood] it would be the love of an unholy and unjust God; yet the holiness and justice of God repel the sinner." [Cited in Murray on Spurgeon and Hypercalvinism, p. 92] But it is God's love that draws the sinner; the knowledge that he has compassion on even wicked people, that he will forgive them and that he wants to forgive them, that, as Micah the prophet put it, he delights to show mercy. What do we see all the time during the ministry in Jesus himself but this compassion and love? He wept over Jerusalem, wanting to gather her children as a hen gathers her chicks, but she would not.

If the love of all the most tenderhearted in all the world, Spurgeon said, could be combined, and added together, it wouldn't make a drop compared to the love of Christ and the compassion he always has for this world that has rebelled against him but which he stands always ready to forgive.

Here we have at the end of the flood, the great beginning of the Gospel story and it begins, where it must begin, with God, a God willing to be patient with his creatures so that they might be saved. A God willing to stoop so low, that he, the Creator of all things, the Sovereign King of Kings, should plead with petty criminals such as ourselves to be reconciled to him, should be willing to forgive us all that we have done and, even all that he knows we will continue to do, should be willing to have us even though we would never come to him unless he change us first.

The flood reminds us what is coming for those who will not repent and seek forgiveness with God through Jesus Christ. The long delay reminds us that God does not desire the death of the wicked and calls on, and pleads with, everyone to come to him and be saved.

As Spurgeon concluded his sermon, I'll conclude mine: "We say, 'Sinner, only trust in Christ.' Ah, ye do not know what a great 'only' that is. It is a work so great that no man can do it unaided by God... But if anything can call faith into exercise, it is the knowledge that Christ is willing to receive you.'

I love it when my heroes come together. I was reading C.S. Lewis and he said:

I have been reading Alexander Whyte...He brought me violently face to face with a characteristic of Puritanism which I had almost forgotten. For him, one essential symptom of the regenerate life is a permanent, and permanently horrified, perception of one's natural and (it seems) unalterable corruption. The true Christian's nostril is to be continually attentive to the inner cesspool." Why? I suppose there are many reasons, but the chief among them is this, you cannot trust or believe in Christ without loving him. Trust and love are two sides of the same coin. But no one will love Christ until he knows how much Christ has loved him and no one will know how great is God's love and Christ's love until he knows how much God has endured and suffered and born in us in order to have compassion on us. [C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, pp. 97-08.]

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