Joy is a serious issue. We give up too quickly on experiencing it, especially if it has been a long time since circumstances have been favorable. I think part of the reason why we give up on it is because we think that joy is optional in the Christian life, when it isn’t. I said at the beginning of this series that the fruit of the Spirit isn’t multiple choice. You can’t decide that you are going to be peaceful without having any self-control. You aren’t going to choose love and leave patience on the table. And you cannot take goodness and leave behind joy.
So is joy just another word for lack of sadness? Well, as I’m sure you’ve heard many times before, joy isn’t just another word for “happiness,” something that changes by circumstances. Jesus wasn’t slap happy all the time, as His weeping before the then-occupied tomb of Lazurus, and the then rebellious house of Jerusalem. Jesus experienced sadness to the point that Isaiah said that He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Yet in all of that, He didn’t fail God’s commands in any way, including this command to rejoice always. So what is joy? Joy, as we will see in a moment, is happily self-forgetful worship of the transcendent Christ. And this is to be done in all circumstances, even sad ones. How are we to do that? The quick answer is, “Have a good long look at Jesus and what He has done for you.” My old seminary dean once put it this way when defining joy, “Christian joy is marked by celebration and expectation of God's ultimate victory over the powers of sin and darkness, a victory actualized already in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ…" (Timothy George, 401). Christian joy constantly keeps the cross, resurrection, and consummation in mind. Let’s see how I got here. The first step is to see that joy is commanded of you. Did God really say that? Well, yes! In fact, we aren’t just called to rejoice, but we are to rejoice always! The Bible doesn’t say in our passage here in Philippians 4:4, “Rejoice…when it is convenient” or “Rejoice…when it comes to mind,” or “Rejoice…when you’re feeling it.” It is, “Rejoice always, and again I say, rejoice.” It’s not like Paul just got a little overzealous on this point in this letter, as the exact same command is given again in 1 Thess. 5. One preacher put it this way, “Unsaved people do not rejoice in God, pray to God, or give thanks to God. Religious people rejoice sometimes, pray when they feel like it, and give thanks when things are going well. But Christians rejoice always, pray without ceasing, and give thanks in all circumstances. This is not the believer's response because we are impervious to life's dangers, toils, and snares. It is our response to life because we are in Christ Jesus" (H.B. Charles, here). Now, perhaps, Paul and Pastor Charles are just forgetting about how hard people’s lives can be! It is also no accident that the command to rejoice comes from Jesus as well in Matthew 5:11-12, “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad…” Did you catch that? Jesus is commanding you to rejoice and be glad when you are being persecuted, made fun of, and slandered because you are following Jesus. Jesus is saying, “Hey, following me is going to make the world hate you, and when that happens, you should be rejoicing.” Now, why does Jesus get away with saying that? If any of us were to command that for ourselves, we would be called total narcissists at best. Delusional is probably the better word. So why does Jesus get to say it? If you can answer that question, then you are well on your way to experiencing joy. So what is the answer to the question? The answer to the question of why can Jesus say we are to rejoice, sing, be glad when people are slinging stones at us to kill us, or slinging words at us to get us canceled because of our stand for Jesus, is because Jesus is the main character of this world’s story. You and I are not the main character. We are not the center of the universe. Jesus is. So when we are contributing to Jesus’ will on earth, yet the earth doesn’t like it, we are still advancing the main character’s agenda. We can see this play out on a small scale when we see a mom give birth. I’ve been in the delivery room twice now for this process. I’ve never birthed a child and never will, but as an outsider, I can tell you, with deep conviction, that it is a rather painful process. Prior to children, I could never imagine why people would sign up to do that more than once. But it wasn’t until I held my children in my arms, and watched my wife hold our children in her arms, I understood. At the end of a pregnancy, there is a baby. What makes a mom sign up for that process again is self-forgetfulness. I don’t mean she doesn’t remember the pain. I mean that she isn’t thinking about herself in that moment. She is thinking about her child. Yes, pain is real, but it is in the context of a birth of new life. And in that the mother finds joy. Again, I say that this is a small scale. Because even as significant as that child is to that mother, that child isn’t the main character of the universe either. It is one of approximately 385,000 other babies that were born in the world on that day. Advancing through the pregnancy process advances the life of that little one, but living the Christian life advances Jesus’ agenda. So no matter what happens, we can rejoice. This requires a great deal of self-forgetfulness, though. But how? How do we forget ourselves when we live inside us? Well, walk with me on this. The starting point to self-forgetfulness and then to joy, is to recognize that you are not enough for yourself and you never will be long term. There is no amount of fun that you could have to satisfy your heart. No amount of money will ever grant you peace. No amount of affirmation will grant you confidence. No change in marital status that will ever grant you wholeness. You have to be convinced of this. Otherwise, you will constantly fall into the trap of seeking out things for yourself and be disappointed eventually over and over again. But you can’t just stop at forgetting yourself. Because if that were all that it was, then the Buddhist could have told you that. Buddha will tell you that the reason why you are sad is because you have desires. If you would just get rid of those desires through self-denial and meditation, you will be above feelings of disappointment. Now, besides desiring to get rid of desires, which is apparently the only desirable desire, that only gets you to non-feeling. God wants something more than numbness for you. He wants you to have joy. Joy isn’t found in you. Joy is found when you see God. From Earth to the sun is 93 million miles. That’s a good distance, but there is a lot more of the universe that we can see. It turns out that, as near as we can tell, the observable universe is about 93 billion light years across. For reference, light travels nearly 6 trillion miles a year. Now multiply that by 93 billion and you get the size of the universe as near as we can tell. Honesely, that is such a large number, it doesn’t even really compute. And God is bigger than that. He made all that. He didn’t need to make it that big, but He wanted to show us just how big He is and how small we are. The God who made all of that is who we are talking about. That’s the one who commands you to be joyful. Now are you able to look at that God and say, “Well, He can’t make a difference to my joy.” Well besides that being ridiculous and sinful to say, let’s go with it for a minute. Maybe the bigness of God didn’t impress you. What about His relationship with you? Did you know that God is actually committed to your joy? He sends the Holy Spirit to produce Joy in you. He tells you that He works out all things together for good for those who love Him. That’s true. Do you believe that? Psalm 16:2 says, “I say to the LORD, “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.” and verse 11 says, “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” God isn’t some sort of toxic boss who demands you be happy or He is going to get you. God is inviting you to see where your true joy comes from, and it is Him! He wants to do good things! We cut Jesus off earlier in Matthew 5:12. Remember when He was saying, “rejoice and be glad” under persecution? He gave you the reason! “FOR great is your reward in heaven!” Why can we, must we, be joyful under persecution for Jesus’ sake? There is something greater coming. What is that thing? It apparently makes all the suffering here worth it. Paul tells us just that in Romans 8, where he describes all of the horror of life as a “light, momentary affliction” compared to the glory that is coming. It is better than having the power to boss around the spiritual world. When the disciples were able to cast out demons in Luke 10, Jesus said not to rejoice in even that but rejoice that their names were written in heaven. How can heaven stand up to that kind of hype? Because God Himself is there! Not only the One who created all of that, but came down from that exalted throne to live among us, suffer and die to take away our sins! We were so audacious as to disobey a God like that who is above all things and wants our good, and instead of simply getting rid of us so He could delight in billions of galaxies He made who do exactly as He commands, He goes down to take our punishment for us. In order to maintain His perfect justice sin against an eternal God must be eternally punished, but in His creativity, Jesus takes all the punishment on Himself. He becomes sin who knew no sin, who hates all sin, BECAME sin so that He could bear the punishment for sin, so we could go free. And it is freely offered to you. We did everything wrong, He did everything right, and is offering to switch places with you, so you can be considered perfect in God’s eyes and thus have a place in heaven. And not just a place in heaven, a place of God’s joy over you, not because of who you are, but because of who you are in Christ. When He looks at you, He sees His Son Whom He loves eternally. Catching a vision of that is finding transcendence. Forgetting yourself isn’t enough. It is looking into the face of God where you find joy, even as you are being persecuted for it. Well, what if all that isn’t enough for you? It could be that you haven’t applied all of what I have just said to your situation. You might have been content thus far to have the Bible be true over there but not in your real life. You could have just made God to be a philosophy that works for some people rather than a Real Person who has done real things in your real life. But it could also be that you just can’t see it yet. It could be that God hasn’t moved in your life. Because there is one last step to joy. Yes, it requires self-forgetfulness, yes it requires a view of transcendence, but it finally requires full dependance on God to grant it to you. You cannot obey the command to be joyful without God’s help any more than you can obey the command to be truthful without God’s help. And just like you sin in other ways, you will sin in not being joyful in all things. You will get wrapped up in yourself and try to worship yourself by doing what you command. That’s not joy. That’s not obedience. Joy is worshiping God despite any and all circumstances fueled by the good news of the gospel. But if you have never experienced that, then today I invite you to come to Jesus. Leave yourself behind, there won’t be room for that. Transfer your trust to Christ, and leave behind your sins, including your lack of joy in Christ. Christ invites you to not just serve Him, but enjoy Him. Taste and see that the Lord is good. Glorify God and enjoy Him forever. If you don’t know how to do that, then I would encourage you to keep coming back here. As Sinclair Ferguson points out, keep looking at the means that God gives you, His church, His Word, His listening ear in prayer, and in them you will see Him. And you will find joy. So what does this mean on Monday? God is committed to your joy in Him, and the world is committed to distracting you from it by reminding you of yourself. When your body hurts, God is doing something with that. When you are facing another day in a role you hate, remember the gospel and not just that it means that things will be alright in the end, but that you can begin to enjoy that now. Heaven is near and it is sure. Focus on that. Kids are actually good at that. Have you ever promised a kid something? They remember. And when you don’t deliver, the disappointment is impressive, because they have been thinking about that all day. They have modified their behavior around that promise. Patience may not be their strongest quality, but those kids can believe. We have to warn them about disappointment when their joy gets to be too much! Y’all, we have been promised more. He who promised is faithful. He never breaks a promise. So preach that to yourself, ask for joy, ask for what God commands you to have, and you will find it.
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What is the one thing we are all actually after? Peace. We work hard to earn enough money so we don’t have to worry about life, which is just a negative way of saying that we would like peace. Why do we go to war as nations? Because someone either has upset or threatens to upset peace. Imagine that! War to get peace. Killing each other to get peace. It is the most sought after gift in the world, yet here it is, sitting right in the fruit of the Spirit. It’s not even the first one listed! Now, what is peace? I imagine that many of you have different answers to what that would mean for you. Some in here, I would imagine, would feel peace if this physical problem would just go away. If only you could hear like you used to, see like you used to, move like you used to, then there would be peace. Peace is found in a return to the past. For others in here, particularly the youth, peace is found in finally reaching the future! If only you could look ahead to see if life is going to be ok for you, you would find peace. For those of us in the middle of those two sections of life, we don’t want the past or the future; we don’t want time to move at all! In fact, if life could just be still for a minute, THEN there would be peace. All of that is a lie, and it isn’t even the first thing about what real peace is. Those may be pieces of peace, but they are not peace itself or even the things that lead to peace. Peace is a person, the one Who’s arrival caused the angels to sing that verse we’ve just read, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!” What impresses angels so much that they would say that? Well, let’s take a look at what peace means. I’ll give it to you up front, and over the course of the next few minutes together, you’ll see it come from the Scriptures. Peace is the feeling of wholeness solely founded on the fact of Christ's work for you. The word translated “peace” in the passages we will look at today is the same word that is used to translate the Hebrew word for peace: Shalom. Shalom is an absolutely beautiful and massive word that isn’t limited to the state of not being at war, but is a sense of wholeness (Dictionary of New Testament Theology, 165). To be whole is to not be missing anything. Everything is as it should be when you experience shalom. Are you beginning to see how what Christ offers you when He offers peace is more than just physical wellness, lack of anxiety, and a nap that lasts longer than an hour? What or Who could possibly promise shalom, rightness with everything, wholeness in your life? Well, it starts at the birth of Christ the night sky lights up with angelic glory as they herald the birth of Christ, closing with a praise to God (Glory to God in the highest) and a proclamation to Earth, “peace, among those with whom He is pleased.” This Child that has been announced here is the key to this verse of praise! His arrival is the cause of God’s glory and peace among those with whom He is pleased. He has sent a Savior. Now think about what this might mean for the people there. Who is currently over the known world at this point? The Romans. They’ve brought what they call the pax Romana, the Roman Peace. Who is to stand in the way of the might of Rome? They have conquered so many nations there isn’t anyone really able to stand against them. Sure they tax a lot, but not having to worry about invaders is a pretty sweet gig if you can just get on board with Caesar's agenda. What is this Jesus offering? And how is He going to offer it? Does He have something better than even the Romans can provide? We do well to answer this question today. America is way more powerful than Rome ever was taking modern military tools into account. Can you imagine Nero having access to an atom bomb? If we wanted to, we could close our borders and never talk to another country again with about 5 years lead time to put together some factories. And for many Americans, that is what peace would look like. But is that how Jesus defines peace? Well, if we skip to the end of the story, Jesus is all grown up, and here comes this peace talk again at the end of John 16. To give you context, Jesus is about to go to the cross, and these are the final things that He wants to tell them before He goes. In verse 33, He says, “I tell you these things so that in me you might have peace.” Ok, well, what are “these things”? Well, it points back to everything that has been said since chapter 14, which opens with “Let not your hearts be troubled.” Why is He saying that? He knows He is about to go to the cross, but the disciples don’t know that. He is about to go and be the Savior that He was announced as being in Luke 2, but the disciples can’t see that yet. So He tells them plainly that Peace exists solely in Him. It’s not in Rome or riches. How? First, because He is going to prepare a place for them (and us) in heaven and be the way to those who are going there. Jesus is not only building the room, He is being the road. You may know peace because you know Jesus. But how do you travel on the road of Jesus? John 15:4 answers that. Abide in Him. It turns out that Jesus isn’t a bridge to heaven that you’ve still gotta figure out how to walk across. It turns out the way to heaven is being still. It is living with Christ. Listening to Him. Obeying Him (vs. 9-10). This comes from already having a relationship with Christ. You are already filled with life, Little Branch, by being connected to the Divine Vine. Connection with Jesus is connection with God, and that is peace! What is wholeness! You and I are broken and rebellious. And if you’ve been on that path for any length of time you know you are doing what you need to. And if you’ve ever attempted to reform your ways, you know how often you fail. Abby watched the movie “The Star,” an animated movie about the nativity, with the kids the other day. She said that it was a cute movie, but they missed the gospel at the end. At the end of the movie, the villains are all gathered around the Christ child, look at Him and one of them says, “Are we good now?” Another replies, “We can try.” Doh! So close! No, you don’t look to Jesus for inspiration to live a good life, you look to Him for salvation to the good life. He is the road, He is the life-blood who gives you salvation. So what about this stuff about obeying Jesus? Well, peace exists solely in Christ, but Peace is experienced in obedience to Him. If you remember a time where you were joyous in Christ but now not so much, take a look at how you are living your life. Sin isn’t the only reason you lose peace, but it is a big one. Look at Phillipians 4:4ff: Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you. In other words, if you aren’t doing these things, then it should be no wonder to you that you don’t have peace! If you are contemplating that which is ugly, worldly, and sinful, it should be no surprise to you that you don’t have peace. It has been well said that, “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” but it is equally true that feelings care deeply about the facts. What are you labeling as fact in your life? Are you keeping Christ and His work at the forefront of your mind? Do you see peace as only existing in Christ and experienced in obedience to Him, or do you think it exists and is experienced in money, sex, political dominance or even good things like a happy family? Feelings care a lot about facts, but they wait for you to tell them what the facts are. Are you telling them Jesus’ words here in John or cable news’ words? Are you giving them Biblical wisdom or your own? If you wander from the source of peace, Jesus loves you enough to take it away to draw you back to Him. It is Jesus’ loving discipline, like a good father, that will not only bring you back to Him, but expand your peace. Hebrews 12:11, in context tells us that God disciplines those He loves like a good father, so in verse 11 we read, “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (emphasis added). Discipline will bring you peaceful fruit! Oh, talk to someone who has gone through something like that way back in their lives (often it takes a while to see), and they will tell you that though what they went through was hard, it has brought them closer to God than ever before. Sometimes we just put things in the way of our own peace. Your life in Christ is like running a race, but Jesus is carrying you as He is running. Meanwhile, you’re looking at your shoes going, “Whew! Glad I’ve got these shoes on. Don’t know how I would run the race without those.” Jesus then takes the shoes off, you panic, and grip hold of Jesus. At that point you say, “Oh, wow, look at Jesus go! It’s a good thing I’ve got strong arms to hold Him with!” then Jesus weakens your arms so you can’t even lift them. You panic again, but then you realize that Jesus is holding onto you. It turns out it was never the shoes or your ability to hang on that got your through the race. You feel more peace than you ever did with shoes or strong arms, because now you know it wasn’t anything you had or anything you could do that kept you in the race. It was Jesus the whole time. Now, you’re just grateful that you can see Him. And then, he covers your eyes. But this time you don’t panic. You’ve realized that He has always been there, and even if you can’t see Him, you know He’s there, and that is peace. Wholeness in spite of your circumstances not because of them. You know that peace only exists in Christ, is more richly experienced in obedience to Him, and is even expanded under His discipline. Peace has a name, and His name is Jesus. Look at Isaiah 51:12-16 with me. The quick translation of this verse? “How dare you trust anything else?” As John Piper put it, “Who do you think you are to trust something other than God?” Look at John 16:33, “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” Or as D.A Carson translates it, “I have conquered the world.” So don’t trust that which Jesus has beaten! Jesus has cut the arms and legs off of the world, and all the world can scream is “I can still bite you!” Why are you throwing in your peace with that? You don’t have to trust the world. You don’t have to find your peace in circumstances. Romans 8:31-39 “What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Piper points out that “in these things” means that all those horrible things can and do happen to us, yet! We Are More than Conquerors! How? Because Christ won the victory. He went to the cross, paid for our sin, reconciled us to God, and can therefore bring you peace. So what does this mean for you? Well, if you don’t have any peace, you should take it like the check engine light. Something is wrong. I don’t mean that anytime you are sad you are being disobedient. God gave ⅓ of the Psalms as laments, so He expects you to lament the sinful world and its effect. Peacefully lamenting is like swimming at the bottom of a deep lake with scuba gear. You feel the pressure, but you can still breathe. But if you are consistently missing peace, it is time for reexamination. Come to Jesus. Don’t run to distraction. We live in a time where you can recreate the “feeling” of peace without the facts to support it. You can forget about your troubles for a moment by scrolling through the internet. You can forget about them even longer with psychedelics, as many turn to those. You can forget your troubles even longer by pretending that the world is just atoms crashing into one another, and all of this Jesus stuff is just a crutch and probably doesn’t matter. It’s all a distraction that God will one day pull you back from or give you over to. We’ve built the modern Tower of Babel, the tower of distraction. God tells us to come to Him for peace, and we’ve gone to anything else. Don’t do that. You want peace? It’s right here. Don’t you dare run to the internet to get through your day. Don’t do that to yourself. Find true peace in Christ.
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We have a complicated relationship with presents at Christmas time, don’t we? We wrestle with the idea that Christmas has become too commercialized and hate that stores have taken the meaning of Christmas from good tidings of great joy to great spending on good toys. That is true as far as it goes, but who can deny how good it feels to give a child a great present that they are so thankful for? It’s a great feeling to do that for adults as well, especially if it is a practical gift that they will use everyday. One of the most useful gifts I got from Abby was an electric kettle. You fill the thing up with water, set it on the little base, turn it on, and in a couple of minutes, you have water heated perfectly for tea or coffee! It is a perfect gift for me that has been going strong for a couple years now. The thing is though, it is so much a part of my everyday life, that I often forget that it was a gift. It just blends into the kitchen. I think that is often what happens with the gifts that God gives to us. They are so freely given to us, and often so perfectly suited to our needs, that they just become part of the background of our lives. And I’m not even talking about the physical gifts like the car you got here in today, or the house you came from, I’m am talking about the gifts that are given to you in your life that you don’t notice are there. I’m talking about the fruit of the Spirit. There is no gift more practical, more satisfying to oneself and others than the fruit of the Spirit. You’ll notice that I say “fruit” not “fruits,” and that comes from something that Pastor Reader would always point out. This list of virtues in its entirety is present in the life of a true Christian; they are not multiple choice. We are expected to have all of them, even if we have more of one virtue than another. There isn’t a way to cover all of these virtues comprehensively in just a few weeks, so I have selected a few that correspond more or less with the theme of the advent candle for that week. Unfortunately, for this sermon, hope is not on the this list in Galatians, but I think that the one I’ve picked out today is often not talked about, hence the title of sermon, the forgotten virtue of gentleness. Part of the reason why gentleness is forgotten is because we as a society have abandoned it by changing its meaning. Instead of how the Scriptures define it, we think that gentleness is a limp-wristed, weak excuse for lack of action. For example, a basically punishment-free approach with one’s child is called “gentle parenting.” Speaking “gently” implies today a soft tone of voice, safe words, and subtle coaxing rather than confrontation. We certainly wouldn’t apply the term “gentle” to someone who flips over tables and chases people out of a temple for defiling it, but that is exactly the term that Jessup applied to Himself (Timothy George, 404)! Far from a limp-wristed excuse for lack of action, gentleness actually requires a great deal of strength. Listen to how my old seminary dean, Timothy George puts it: "As an expression of the fruit of the Spirit, gentleness is strength under control, power, harnessed in loving service and respectful actions. One who is gentle in this sense will not attempt to push others around or arrogantly impose one's own will on subordinates or peers. But gentleness is not incompatible with decisive action, and firm convictions” (404). You see, gentleness isn't the absence of correction, it is the manner of correction. It isn't the absence of passion (see Jesus flipping over tables) or strong action, it is the heart's posture while doing so. The dictionary definition of the greek word for gentleness is “the quality of not being overly impressed by a sense of one's self-importance” (BDAG, 861), or as I have put it on your outline, The ability to live in humility. Why is this a gift? It is something that we don't naturally have, it is something that our society actively discourages, and it was something that Jesus embodied. So let’s look at the Scriptures and see how this term is used. Our main text is going to be Titus 3:1-7, because this sums up very well how gentleness is the ability to live with humility. Paul writes to Titus, a young pastor, what he needs to be teaching the church. Chapter one talks about what the leadership is supposed to look like. Chapter two tells us what the whole church needs to be taught, namely, “sound doctrine” and how that is practically applied. When we get to chapter three, that thought continues. Paul points out that we are to be gentle, as opposed to quarreling, but verse 3-7 gives us the motivation, the reason, the proper perspective on why we need to be gentle. We need to be gentle because we were just like the people we don’t want to be gentle towards, namely, sinners. We were just like them in kind if not in degree. We committed the same sorts of sin, even if they weren’t as visible as other people’s. We were saved from those sins not by anything that we did, but by everything that Christ did! So since we were just like the people we want to be harsh with, AND the only reason why we aren’t like that anymore (sort of) is because of the grace and mercy of Jesus, we are not in a position to be pompous and arrogant towards people. So what does it look like practically? What does gentleness look like when there is sin that needs to be dealt with in the church? Well, we turn to Galatians 6:1-2, where we see Paul telling us to restore someone with gentleness when they are caught in transgression. We do so knowing that the roles could just as easily be reversed even post-salvation! True Christians can and will fall into sin, and we want grace when it is our turn! So extend that to others. We need to be reminded of this, because this approach is strange to us. Is this how the world operates? No, it is not. When someone commits some sort of online sin (usually a thought that hasn't been approved of), what does the internet do? They cancel you. If you haven't said anything bad lately, people will dive back to the beginning of social media posts and dig up stuff from a decade ago. And then somehow the way to deal with someone being mean online is to be meaner to them. The internet doesn't forgive because it can't. You can't forgive what wasn't directed at you. The internet does not restore because it can't. If someone tries to restore someone who has been disgraced, what does everyone think about you? You must have done the same thing! They come after you as if they had never sinned themselves. And it isn’t just online, isn’t it? Our southern culture lives in honor and shame, and once you’ve moved to the shame category, it’s nearly impossible to get back to honor, isn’t it? It doesn’t take much to get a reputation around here, and it is very hard to get that back, especially in a small town. If people do manage it, it doesn’t come by grace. It comes with years of grinding work. A graceless honor/shame culture, online or otherwise, can only exist as long as someone thinks that they don’t sin, too. This is exactly the point that Galatians is trying to make, isn't it? We can restore someone with gentleness because we know that we are susceptible to sin, too. The humility of knowing our own susceptibility to sin makes gentle correction in the church possible. Pride makes that impossible. "Good, good," you may say (channeling Palpatine for some reason), "we should be gentle to those who are around us, so let's spend our time sharpening up the knives for those outside the church!" Well, let's take a look at 2 Timothy 2:24-25. The opponents here are thought to be false teachers (Guthrie, Tyndale), so even here the requirement for gentleness stands. Again, this is meant for people who are undermining the church with their teaching and yet the call is to correct with gentleness and to do so patiently. Notice that in verse 24. It isn’t a quick process. You know, oftentimes the gentleness part of correcting with gentleness doesn’t look like talking. Take the story of Rosaria Butterfield. If you've somehow never heard of her, she used to be a lesbian literature professor whose goal was to make this sin acceptable. She was married to her female partner at the time, and was in every sense of the word a gay rights activist. Now, she wanted to understand how Christians thought about this, and one pastor, named Ken Smith, offered to have her over for lunch to explain the Bible and how he came to the positions he did about homosexuality. She was intrigued by his hospitality and kept coming back. Take a guess as to how many meals it took before she came to Christ. 10? 30? According to her, 500, and that is apparently a conservative estimate (link). That's gentleness, y’all. Do you see how much ability to live in humility you have to have to do that kind of work? Do you see how little a sense of self-importance Ken Smith had there? Who takes the time to have 500 meals with the same person? Would not after meal 250 we might be tempted to say, “My time is too valuable to give to this one person!”? This kind of gentleness isn’t limp-wristed non-action, this is a robust display of endurance and strength of character. Ken told Rosaria the truth. He called homosexuality what it is, a sin. There was genuine opposition there, and yet, making 500 meals for a person does something, doesn't it? The end of the story is now she is one of the most prominent voices in defending Biblical understandings of sexuality and is married to a presbyterian pastor! That doesn't mean that all you have to do is have several hundred meals with someone and they will guarantee change, but if they haven't changed, did you try that? Have you corrected with this kind of gentleness? There is no denying that that is a big calling. It’s way easier to just call someone an idiot in the comment section. Y'all, so much of our internet apologetics doesn't even reach the first rung of the ladder God calls us to climb. Our efforts for people often drop very quickly. Now, yes, there is a difference between gentle correction like this and enabling sinful behavior. Allowing someone to live in your home so they are free to indulge in their sin, whatever that looks like, liquor, laziness, or lust, isn't gentle correction because it isn't correction! But we are very quick to reach for the easy button, aren't we? Now, you might say, "Well, there is no way we can do this for everyone!" and you are exactly right! This is why gentleness is the ability to live with humility. It takes humility to recognize that you actually can't do it all. Modern life has convinced us that we can live the Christian life in twenty directions at the same time, and we can't! Not like this. You've maybe got time to do this with your immediate family and maybe one or two friends at a time, and that's about it. But can you imagine if we all did that? Can you imagine if we all did that using the different gifts and talents that God gave specifically to each one of us and brought us all together so we could work like, I don't know, a body? Wouldn't that be great? If only that was in the Bible somewhere. So how do we apply this to ourselves? Really, the only way to do this for anyone is to recognize that it has already been done to you. How patient is Jesus with you? You know, Ken Smith had basically a year and a half’s worth of lunches with Rosaria. Jesus spent thirty three full years on Earth away from heaven. Three of those years was nearly constant contact with disciples, eating, drinking, praying, traveling, teaching, all the time. Constantly serving rather than being served. He did so all the way to the cross, being despised and rejected by men, a suffering Servant. Listen to Paul apply all of this to us in Philippians 2:3-8, (1165) “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” Did you catch verse 5? You already have this mind in Christ. In Christ, you are perfectly gentle in the eyes of Christ. Jesus has given you the title “gentle in heart” because you and Christ are united together like a marriage. You’ve already gotten the title. God because of Christ sees you as perfectly gentle, and now, in light of that, be gentle with others. One scholar put it this way: ‘When Paul thinks of (the glory of Christ) he does not look back, he looks up … men [and women] were saved, not by dwelling on the wonderful words and deeds of One who had lived some time ago, and reviving these in their imagination, but by receiving the almighty, emancipating, quickening Spirit of One who lived and reigned for evermore … And so it must always be, if Christianity is to be a living religion.’ (James Denny, from Martin’s commentary in the Tyndale series). You aren’t gentle because you can see a good ethical example in Christ, you can be gentle because Christ, gentle and lowly, is living in you at this very moment. Now, anytime that you are able to display even a moderate amount of gentleness, that is a gift that doesn’t come from you but from Jesus. So take the time to not only notice it, but thank God for it. To forget that last part makes it just pride and an abandonment of gentleness! Notice the gift that God has given to you, and pass it on. Show Christ’s gentleness to your kids, spouse, co workers, fellow church members, it is a gift too precious to be forgotten, too precious to be unshared.
Image by Людмила Аненко
You know what made the holidays so special as a kid? The fact that everything was taken care of by someone else! You could sit back and enjoy watching dad cut down the tree (or struggle to figure out which branches went in which order on the artificial tree), you could smell the food your mother was cooking, and best of all looking under the tree on Christmas morning to see the presents that were bought for you! Those memories are wonderful, but some can look at those days as joys long gone by. Oh, those were the days when someone else took care of you, but now that responsibility is all on you and with it the nagging fear that perhaps you won’t be able to pull it off, that disaster is just around the corner. Now the eggnog makes sense. But perhaps that wasn’t your experience of the holidays. Perhaps what makes them painful to remember was the fact that there weren’t people caring for you when there should have been. The responsibilities of life were thrust on you very early, and now life is viewed through the lens of “I got myself this far, so I think I’ll make it the rest of the way.” This sense of self-sufficiency if it isn’t bravado, is simply the lack of realizing how delicate life can be. Psalm 146 has something to say to the both of us. Quite simply the Psalmist is telling us not to trust in people but to trust in God. What made the holidays so carefree when we were children is that we trusted the powerful people in our lives, and when those people were no longer in power, that simple trust has vanished. And in my short time in ministry, I’ve met a few self-sufficient people who suddenly were reminded how delicate they really are and thus lost that confidence. This Psalm, I trust, will help you regain that sense of childlike joy of this season, not because you are trusting in a new person (even if that person is yourself) but because you’ve got your eyes on Jesus. v 1 The Psalmist is emphasizing the theme of this Psalm which is obviously praise. He uses the covenant name of God, Yahweh showing that this praise is being offered up from the perspective of deep, abiding relationship. We can rejoice when a player we don't even know crosses the touchdown line. We go absolutely crazy! But now let's imagine that it is our own son or daughter making the game-winning play. We go absolutely insane! The action of praising is the same in kind, but it is vastly different in quality. This might be what is wrong with our praise today. We praise "God" like we would say, "Long live the King," but it is very different when the king also happens to be a great father. Do you praise God from the heart that knows, is assured, of God's favor to you? Do you worship Him as someone that you have a covenant with? The Psalmist does. You can as well. v 2 This relationship that we have with God is a love between essentially different beings. The Psalmist, while still praising God, looks to himself and declares that he will praise God for as long as he lives. This idea is repeated, emphasizing the finiteness of the Psalmist. The declaration isn't, like it is in marriage, "as long as we both shall live," because God isn't going to die. The Psalmist will, and so will everyone else that the Psalmist knows. Yet, there is a positive dimension to this as well. Ross points out that the Psalmist is going to praise God his whole life which means this commitment to praise goes beyond just happy emotions in the present (923). v 3-4 Here, the Psalmist points out that trusting in any other being is foolish. There is no salvation in a man. Even if that man is a powerful person, a prince, he can't provide salvation. I think this is something that we need reminding about now more than ever. In the Psalmist's day, powerful men had armies and access to food. That's not nothing, but compared to what is the case today, we have singular men that control nearly all aspects of our lives as we know them today. In our own country, we've seen the power of the executive order, one man making a decision that impacts literally hundreds of millions of people. Up in Canada, protestors found themselves without access to their banks. Speaking of banks, this power extends to the private sector, too. Do you know the names Ryan McInerney and Michael Miebach? They are the CEOs of Visa and Mastercard respectively. Their companies handle about 80% of all transactions of credit and debit cards. How about Tim Cook and Satya Nadella? They are the CEOs of Apple and Microsoft, basically the two major computer companies that control the software that runs 90% of the world's computers. My point here isn't to take a position on whether that's good or not, but the world that we live in depends on the networks that are built and maintained by a few. It is easier than ever to give praise and fear to tech geniuses like Musk or Jobs, because we see how their world impacts our lives. Mark Zuckerburg is making it possible for you to see me right now if you are watching on Facebook. If you are listening to me via podcast, you can thank Steve Jobs, because I am recording on my iPhone that he envisioned. Yet. Yet, when their breath departs, they all will return to the earth, and on that very day their plans will perish. Companies will go in different directions or implode entirely, new figures will be elected into office if that office is still there to occupy, pastors and preachers will die, and with them their plans. Apple is very different without Jobs at the helm. America can feel very different from president to president. So don't put your trust in them. We can be grateful for the good these people do, criticize the evil that the do, talk about safeguards to not let them run their sinful hearts wild with power, but please, don't put your trust in them. What does that look like? Well, don't let what they do change how you sleep at night. Don't let them rule your conversation, your thought life, your podcast listening, or your news watching. They won't last. vs 5-6 Who will? God will last. The God who was the hope of Jacob thousands of years ago is your hope today. That is you if you are trusting in the Lord you are blessed. Who is the Lord? Oh, He is the one who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever. You know, the one Who made all this possible. Every bit of technology is just rearranging the creation that God gave us. Computer chips don't just come out of thin air. In most basic terms, they come from the dust of the ground. God is so powerful, He can create something that grows crops and also can calculate space rocket trajectories when combined with other elements of God's creation. He is still in charge of those things! God holds together the blood cells of all of those powerful men I just mentioned. He actively maintains their heart beats, and will one day cause them to stop just like He will mine someday. We don’t need to fear or trust in them for salvation, for as Ross asks, “How could a man save anyone if he could die at any moment…” (923). v 7-9 That kind of power centralized in one person would normally scare us and did scare people who believed in a pagan system with many gods subject to the same flaws that we have, but God doesn't have those flaws! God executes justice for the oppressed, gives food to the hungry, sets prisoners free, opens the eyes of the blind, and lifts up those who are bowed down. Do we not see this visually in Jesus' ministry, when God walked on the earth among and as one of us? When He cleared the temple, driving out the animals, He was clearing the way for the Gentiles, the sojourners to be able to worship. He fed the 5,000, freed the woman caught in adultery from stoning, opened the eyes of the blind, and raised the widow's son. He didn't just do these things physically, but does these things spiritually as well. And He does it still today, even though He doesn’t have to. God isn’t gracious because He can’t help Himself, but because He has in the past and promises to do so again, we can trust Him (Ross, 925). For example, in the late sixties, there was a proposal in a book called The Population Bomb to put sterilization drugs in the water to prevent populations from outpacing the food growth rate! Right about that time, we had an agricultural revolution that allowed for food to be grown to the point that now we are facing a crisis of people having TOO MUCH food. We live today in an era of God providing for us in way that would have been difficult for even my grandfather to imagine. And as far as bringing the wicked to ruin, God has been at work there, too. This is true of evil empires. The Assyrians once were carting off Israel and many other nations into its fold. Where are they now? How about the Babylonians? The Persians? The Romans? The Ottomans? The Nazis? The Soviets? All these wicked men who tried to burn the world down are now themselves on fire. "But why did it take so long?" you may ask. It’s a question that needs answering, because it deals with the reality that God doesn’t always present grace in the way that we want Him to, which usually means no suffering on our part and other wicked people quickly being stopped. So let’s give two answers to that: 1) God doesn't owe you a solution at all much less a quick one and 2) if God were to strike down evil people quickly, I would be dead before I finished this sermon. God gave even Hitler time to repent. God is more gracious than you or I am. If I were the almighty creator of the universe with my petty personality, it wouldn't have made it past the flood. But God keeps His promise to be gracious, and usually chooses to be gracious through us, His servants (Ross, 925). v 10 And that God, that God is the one who will reign forever. The Hebrew here could be translated in the present tense, meaning that God reigns now and forever into the future (Ross, 926-7). The best days of our experience with God's administration are ahead of us! They will be for our children and our grandchildren. I often hear this from my parents and from many of you who say something similar to, "Well, I'm old, so I won't see the decline of the world, but I worry about my children and grandchildren." Allow me to remind you of Who is the God of your children and grand children! Look at verse 10 again, "The Lord will reign forever, YOUR God, to ALL generations." The same God who has watched and reigned over your life will reign in your children's and grandchildren's lives. So don't despair! The God of Mrs. Clyde brought her through the Great Depression, World War 2, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, The Cold War, September 11th, the 2008 financial crisis, her widowhood, and most recently, the 2020 Pandemic, and He's still in charge to be Augie's God, too in all that he will face (and it has already been a lot, hasn't it?)! I could point to so many of you who have walked through personal crises that would crush people without the grace of God. So many of you who have lost spouses and children. Yet even those lost to us and not lost to God, which means they aren't even lost to us permanently. God is a God of the living (Matt. 22:32), the One who kills also makes alive, and the one who wounds, heals (Deuteronomy 32:39)! For those who are in Christ, even death cannot separate them from God's love and rule (Rom. 8:38-39)! God can make it so that the worst thing that we could ever imagine is just the thin doorway to eternity with God! So what should be our response? Praise. Worship in the midst of hardship, because the God Who keeps covenants is watching over you. Hardships will come, but they are temporary. And the day is coming when they will be no more. So what do we do now? In light of all that we have just said, is there any reason to fear how an election will turn out? No. Now, do elections have consequences, even consequences that can bring a lot of pain? Yes, of course, I'm not minimizing that, but I am wanting you to maximize your view of God's control over those. We act responsibly as citizens because that is one of our God-given duties to the world. We do our duty and then sleep well at night. God controls governments, and your own health. So trust in Him. Feel the sweetness of a child-like trust in their good father. Do you remember the days when your folks did all the worry and care? Or if you didn't, did you long for that? Well, you both can have it, either again or for the first time. And then, be that person for someone else. To borrow one last time from Ross, “The righteous…should demonstrate their love for [God] by emulating his faithfulness to the covenant, championing justice, feeding the hungry, bringing relief to those in bondage, and taking care of the stranger, the widow, and the orphan. It remains true in the New Testament that God most often meets these needs through the ministry of his servants.” (927) God has done a lot to make that happen. In fact, that is what we are about to display in the Lord’s Supper here. That supper shows, as Ross put it, that “God is able and willing to meet all our needs.” (927). Willing! Even at the cost of His own Son. Have you put your trust in that God? And if you do, maybe you will see why the Psalmist is so eager to Praise the Lord.
Image by Albrecht Fietz
Have you ever kept a letter from someone that you love, even if that person is still with you? Or maybe you’ve saved voicemails or text message threads of the same. It is an strange thing that we would keep these messages when we still have a relationship with the real person, but then it isn’t. These messages that we have are moments where the other person has revealed something about themselves, and that act is what is special. I still have the first messages that Abby and I exchanged when we were dating because those messages revealed that budding love between the two of us. It was a witness to the relationship we already had that gave the place for those messages to be exchanged. Keeping that in mind will help you understand why Presbyterians get so excited about covenants in the Bible. We’re big on this! We name our churches, colleges, even children after this concept because a covenant is like a letter from God. A covenant reveals Who God is, what He is like, and most critically, how He works. Covenants are the first messages that God sends to His people, and in fact, covenants are how God gathers His people (Myers, 2). We are starting into the Christmas season, and that means the Hallmark movies begin at my house. While every Hallmark movie is basically the same—well, is the same— the favorite flavor of Hallmark Christmas movies in my house is the Royal Christmas genre. You’ve seen it. A handsome prince is supposed to marry the surprisingly indifferent princess, when the “plain” Christmas decorator from the small town with no royal blood comes to the castle, teaches the prince the vaguely “true” meaning of a winter holiday (usually the word “family” is involved), the prince falls in love, but they can’t marry because she isn’t royal until blah blah the prince finds a legal way to marry her, usually in the last three minutes of the film after she has gotten in the taxi to fly home. By the prince marrying her, he bridges the legal gap to make a relationship possible and makes her royal. Now, given that this is a popular film genre, we understand the idea of a relationship between people of unequal status. It should give us pause as to how we have a relationship with God. We know that we can’t just walk into a castle and demand to be married to one of the royal members of the house. The royals have to condescend as it were to us. And it is infinitely more so with God. God not only has to bridge the gap between, you know, Creator and creature, but also holy and sinner (Myers, 9-11). The way God bridges that gap is by making a promise to us. Those promises gather God’s people and reveal who He is at the same time. Today, we are going to look at one of those covenants. Today we are going to pick up where we left off last time in our two points: God provides parameters for people and God provides promises for people. As we pick up from verse 8, we begin to see the promises that God has actually already made to Noah and His family. Hang with me as we do a little mining here! God says that He is going to “establish” His covenant with Noah and his family, and that word is important. To establish a covenant means that there is already a covenant in existence, but now it is going to be confirmed. This is different than “cutting” or making a covenant (Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament). By God saying “establish” means that God has made a promise to Noah before, and that can be found back in chapter 6:18. There, God is establishing the Covenant with Noah that He will be saved from this flood. So, does this mean that Noah was undergoing some sort of trial period? In other words, did God decide that Noah was a good candidate for a covenant but needed to see how Noah would perform first? Does God make promises and then only after seeing some good response does He then confirm that covenant? In other words, how do God’s covenants work? These are important questions to think through. If God needs to see some proof of works, then Noah wouldn’t have been saved by grace. He would have gotten the covenant because he built a boat! Scarier still, if Noah got in by works, then he would be able to work (or sin) his way out of God’s promises. As we will see in the future, Noah doesn’t behave very well after the flood. The man gets drunk and acts lewdly. Believe it or not, the question affects more than Noah. If Noah can blow this covenant, then you and I are at risk. Look at verse 12. This covenant is for all future generations. When Adam broke his covenant, we all now are subject to death. If Noah breaks this covenant, are we all subject to flood forever? Thankfully, the answer is no. This is because Noah got into this covenant by grace. If we go back to chapter 6, we find that word “established” again. That means that there is a covenant promise made prior to chapter six that the Lord is going to confirm. Well, anywhere else in chapter six you look, we don’t see another covenant made with Noah. The only other covenant that God has made was all the way back in chapter 3, the Covenant of Grace (Myers, 131). Adam and Eve broke the Covenant of Works. God promised that if they wouldn’t eat of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they would live forever. That covenant had a condition on it, which they broke. Because of that, they were now subject to death, and since they represented us, we are all now subject to death. After that in chapter 3, God sets up a new covenant, one where everything is going to be set right. God promises to do that by ultimately preserving a line of people who would love God and oppose the line of the snake, culminating in Jesus, and for our purposes today, is found in Noah (Myers, 128-9). Noah found favor in the eyes of God because God was keeping His covenant to Adam and Eve and the rest of us. God was “establishing,” confirming that He was keeping the covenant of grace. Here stays the line opposed to the snake and it is running through Noah. Sounds good so far, but what is God promising through Noah? Is there anything essentially unique with this covenant? The first thing we notice is that this is a covenant with all people and animals. Everyone from Noah, his sons, and all future generations! That includes you! The promises and blessings made to Noah are being upheld for you! God is still giving the earth babies. New children are still being born everyday, and as we saw last week, is a sure sign of God’s blessing. This is a blessing that He gives even to people outside the Church! That also tells us that the responsibilities that we saw last week apply to them as well. This covenant draws the whole world into a community, a community that experiences blessings and responsibilities from God. Now, those blessings are very specific. This covenant doesn’t mean that the whole world is Christian, but it does mean that the world is spared from a very particular form of judgment: the flood. God is sparing the world from ever having that cataclysmic flood happen again. This is something that He would need to promise as I can imagine that every time the storm clouds gathered, humanity would wonder if they were about to be destroyed again. Beyond just saying that He wasn’t going to do that anymore, God gives us a sign. Think about that. It would be enough for God to simply say, “I said it, and I’ll stick with it.” He’s God, but He gives the world the picture of the rainbow in the sky. God doesn’t set it there so that He will remember (God doesn’t forget) but He is setting it there so that we don’t forget that God remembers. As one commentator notes: "A 'sign' points to something beyond itself and therefore requires interpretation, which we find here. Its importance lies in what it communicates and evokes, not the wonder itself" (Matthews, 411). The way we do this today is with wedding bands. On March 10th, 2018, I made promises, a covenant, before God and witnesses that I would be dedicated to Abby. As a visible sign of that covenant, I presented her with a ring, and she did the same thing. She made promises, entered into a covenant with me, and she gave me a wedding band. These are symbols and not the covenant itself, but they display the promise that we have made to each other. This communicates to the rest of the world that I intend to keep my promise, and everytime I look at it, I am reminded of the covenant that I am in. If my band were ever stolen, that wouldn’t mean that the covenant is broken or that my promises are void, but I would want to replace it as quickly as possible in order that I might be kind to my wife in declaring to the rest of the world and to her that I want to be reminded of this covenant I have made. We should feel the same way with God. When God has made a promise, that is enough, but God is kind enough to provide the sign. That’s not the only one that He has given to us either. God has also provided for us the Lord’s Supper, which we will have next week. It is enough that we have the Bible to tell us that Jesus died for our sins. But God has given to us a picture of that reality that we remind ourselves of every month. We hold the bread and juice in our hands to remind us that Jesus broke His body, spilled His blood for us. We eat it individually as a reminder that this promise applies directly to us, yet we eat it together because we are all a part of a family! We have similar workings in Baptism which show that sin is washed away. These sacraments are like looking at our wedding bands. Every time we do that, we are reminded that we have a relationship with our God and reminded what God did to make that relationship possible. When we break the bread and pour the juice, we see a picture of Jesus’ body and blood being poured out for us, and are by faith spiritually nourished by that. Let’s return now to our text in Genesis to take a closer look at this sign that God has given to the world. What does the rainbow do for us? It is a sign given to the entire world that God is holding back His judgment every time there is a reminder of what He did that first time the storm clouds gathered. I was talking to a pastoral colleague at Presbytery this week who was teaching through Genesis, and he had a very interesting point. He noticed the timing of the rainbow, it comes out after the storm is over as if to say, “I could have kept this rain coming. Judgment could have flooded out until the mountains were twenty-two feet deep in water, but I didn’t. Why? Because I’ve made a promise to you all, and here is your reminder of that.” There is more that God is doing with that. One commentator put it this way: "Each day that passes without God bringing history to close does not declare that God is unable to judge the wicked; it declares that God intends to do more than judge the wicked. He intends also to gather His people and give them new hearts" (Myers, 139-140). In other words, the rainbow says that there is still time to turn to Jesus, still time to be forgiven by God. But, time isn’t going to go on forever. As we see, God promises in Genesis 8:22, that as long as Earth shall last. The world is not going to last forever. Judgment will come! One scholar put it this way: "In Peter's reasoning, those who use the regularity of time as a reason to doubt God's final, covenantal judgment have forgotten the flood" (Myers, 145). Yet at the same time, those who are in Christ have something after that final judgment. As one of my seminary professors put it: "Believers attempt to live obedient to their covenant God, reminded every time they see a rainbow that divine wrath will give way to peace, for judgment is God's strange work (Isa. 28:21)" (Ross, 207). We can have confidence that God does not take His Son’s sacrifice lightly. When we come to the table, we are reminded that God has sworn on His Son’s blood to save us. He will deliver us. So what does that mean in the meantime? Well, if you are going through something difficult and feel that God has abandoned you or the world for that matter, look at the sign that God has given to you. God made a promise to the whole world, and He doesn’t take promises lightly. Yes, hard times come, but so does deliverance (Ross, 206).
Image by Anja
When I was growing up, I remember seeing a brand that was outdoors related that had little stickers that said, “Life is good.” It depicted little stick figures relaxing in hammocks or driving little Jeeps. We’ve often used the phrase ourselves after a great meal, or sitting on the back porch watching our kids play in the yard. There’s nothing wrong with that at all; life is good. But when the hammock isn’t out, or when life is hard, another common phrase in our fallen world, the statement “Life is good” can feel glib or in really dark places, can feel like a lie. That’s where this passage comes in to help us. This passage tells us that not only is life good and worthy of preservation, life is precious because it is made in the image of God. Life is good, and because it is, it has real demands, actual, personal responsibilities on how we treat it. Questions 135-136 of the Larger Catechism go into great detail that the command “you shall not murder” goes way beyond just not killing people, but goes into preserving life as well. In fact, in 136, it sees that the sins this commandment forbids goes all the way down to “desire of revenge; all excessive passions, distracting cares; immoderate use of meat, drink, labor, and recreations; provoking words, oppression, quarreling, striking, wounding, and whatsoever else tends to the destruction of the life of any.” This passage has a lot to say to us today! God provides parameters for people Our passage begins with a blessing from God. This blessing is going to be the fact that they will be able to be fruitful and multiply on the face of the earth. Seeing children as a divine blessing is something that one scholar highlights in this way: "Children are the universal evidence of the Lord's creation 'blessing,' who are not to be disparaged nor exploited but celebrated by responsible parenting and societal protection" (Matthews, 399). In other words, we need to see children the way God sees them, the way Jesus sees them in the New Testament as people who were worth His time. As we go on in our verses, we will see that God is going to lay down a lot of parameters for the protection and respect to all life, human and otherwise. God goes on to tell us that all animal life is given to humanity for food, hence the fact that all the animals now run away from us! We’ve gone from protectors and providers in the garden to predators in the post-flood world. Though the post-flood world was allowed to eat meat, God still puts a parameter around it. We can’t eat it in any old way that we want to. God tells them that they are not able to eat the meat with the blood still in it, blood being a symbol of life, something that comes from God. Everytime human beings are to eat meat, they have to pour out the blood in recognition that life is special and belongs to God. Side note: Does this mean we can’t eat medium rare steak? Meat-eaters, rejoice! The answer is no. In short, the red stuff you see coming out of a properly prepared steak actually isn’t blood. It is a protein called myoglobin in animals that turns red when exposed to air. The blood is drained in modern butchering techniques, so go ahead and make your steak medium rare. Be good Presbyterians! Now, since even animal life is precious, one could only imagine what is in place to honor human life, and indeed, that is what we find in verses 5-6. Here, we see God institute capital punishment for murder. If you kill someone (or even if an animal does so as we see in Exodus 21:28), God will require all of your blood as the penalty. Now, this is not meant to be a license for personal vengeance, as we see in Romans 13, that it is the government’s job to do. We don’t get to kill people back ourselves. They are going to have to go through the justice system as established by our government. Now, it is worth spelling out what the government is doing by taking on this responsibility. All told, the government is “…executing God's vengeance." (Matthews, 405). They are meant to be carrying out what God would do in light of these verses. That is an enormous responsibility, and one that cannot be entered into lightly. And just because we here in this building aren’t sitting on the bench, doesn’t mean we don’t have responsibilities, indeed, in our country, direct responsibilities. Our most basic duty is to pray for those in our justice system. Our second duty is to be informed and elect our rulers well. Our government (at least as originally envisioned) is for the people, by the people. In other words, as one podcast I listened to this week put it, the government is us. We elect representatives to act on our behalf. So we must choose wisely whom we are going to have representing us as they execute the vengeance of God and pray for them regularly. It is also worth noting why human life is getting this kind of treatment. Only human life is made in the image of God, so as one scholar noted, “"First and foremost, the taking of human life is offense against God;" (Matthews, 403). The image of God is what makes taking human life different from animal life. Life in all its forms is precious because it is from God, but human life is made in God’s image. There is a special stamp put on by God on human life. That is why the intentional killing of it demands the ultimate response. Why is this important for us to realize and reflect on? One doesn’t have to murder someone to have this verse apply. Anytime we hurt, belittle, or reduce someone we sin against the image of God. I have seen myself do this in traffic. Instead of seeing the person in front of me who forgot to use their blinker as someone who bears God’s image, I reduce them down to an inconvenience to me. Instead of seeing them the way that God sees them, I filter all people down to how they relate to me, how I see them. Often I act as if I am the only one made in the image of God with everyone else around me as either advantages or disadvantages to me. Do you not do the same? Perfectly natural for a sinful human being, but this is not the way that God calls us to act. We are called to something far more profound.This isn’t just how we aren’t supposed to act, but governs how we are supposed to act. One scholar pulls this out of the Hebrew, "Obscured by the modern rendering 'fellow man'...is the Hebrew idiom, 'His brother,' [at the end of verse 5] which possesses a double entendre. Here it echos the first human murder, the fratricide of Cain and Abel, 'his brother' (4:2,8). 'Am I my brother's keeper?' argues Cain...Our passage answers explicitly 'yes.'" (Matthews, 404). Do you hear what he is saying? When someone is murdered by a human being, they are murdered by their brother, and we, as fellow brothers and sisters, need to take care of that. We gotta get involved because the image of God has been insulted. The blood on the ground cries out for justice, and this needs to be dealt with carefully, like we are acting on behalf of God because we are. We are called to care because those are our brothers and sisters. This is why Christians have gotten so involved in the abortion tragedy that is in our country, and I’m going to tell you that the fight is going to extend to adults as well. As I said before, it isn’t just the murder of the image of God, like what we see in abortion, that demands our attention. Things that mar the image of God need our focus as well, and that is found in the trans movement. In the trans movement that we see in our country, there is an assault on the image of God. The trans movement, which is part of a much larger movement called transhumanism, is basically saying that our bodies don’t matter. In this passage, God says that they do. We were made in the image of God, and that includes our bodies. We are not souls zipped up into an “earth suit” that we will one day take off and be free of forever. Paul talks about in Romans 8:23 longing and waiting for the redemption of our bodies. In 2 Corinthians 5:1-5, we see the same hope that our bodies will be renewed and made immortal. Paul is being explicit that the hope is not to be unclothed, but to be further clothed. The goal is not to be rid of the body but to have our bodies redeemed, made immortal, to have and to hold forever! This shows us that God is very concerned about our embodiedness as it really does make us who we are, not just what we have. One secular writer, Mary Harrington, talks about how the trans movement sees our bodies, in a phrase that I desperately wish that I thought of, Meat Lego. We are not meat legos! We are not made of a bunch of different pieces that we can take off and replace. We are a unified whole, body and soul, in the image of God. We care for our bodies. Mary also looked at how we view medicine as going from repairing what was broken to breaking what was perfectly fine (you can listen to the whole podcast here). Hear me when I say that repairing that which is physically or mentally broken is fine. Jesus did that. Having a hip replacement to repair the hip that God gave you that wore out due to our fallen world is a blessing to rejoice in. Again, Jesus restored limbs to their proper function (Mark 3:1-6) backs to their proper function (Luke 13:10-17), wombs to their proper function (1 Sam. 1:1-20; Luke 8:43-48). Restoring that which is lost or repairing that which didn’t form correctly is one thing. But it is quite another to try to fix a mental issue like gender dysphoria with the breaking of a perfectly functional body. In the last 50 years, our culture has lied to us in both directions of what it meant to be in the image of God as body and soul. The abortion movement told us that it was just a body, with no soul, and the trans movement has told us that you are just a soul with no importance to your body. Might as well not have one. This passage tells us, no, soul and blood (i.e. body) are precious and are not to be spilled. To do so is to neglect our brothers and sisters and cause offense against God. So what do we do? One, we need to know what passages like this say to teach the next generations. Even as late as my generation grew up to have somewhat instinctually known that our body is important, but we haven’t really had to know why. We do now. My generation is going to be carrying on this fight that is coming for our kids. Our youth group is dealing with this right now. Those kids in the nursery right now are going to be the ones dealing with the aftermath of this. All of them are looking to us to guide them. It’s time to get serious about knowing what God says. 60 million have died since 1973 because our culture lost sight of God’s view of the soul. Now, around 10,000 people a year are changing their bodies permanently (source) because we’ve lost sight of God’s view of the body. And, yes, it’s happening to young people, too. Knowing John 3:16 and the Lord’s prayer doesn’t cut it. It never really did. God gave us the whole book for a reason, and we’ve got to know it. So that’s the first thing, we’ve got to know what God says. We’ve got to prepare our minds. The second thing we need to prepare is our hearts. I’m going to say that we are going to have a crisis on our hands in about ten years. A crisis of people who have made permanent changes to their body and now feel like nothing. It is already happening in Europe, and some individual stories here and there are popping up in this country. Once the culture has swallowed up people’s money and spat out the person, we have the opportunity to say to them, as Rosarria Butterfield put it, “God doesn’t throw people away. The culture did that to you, but we won’t. Yes, you bear the marks of the sin of envy on your body, but one day Jesus is going to take those away.” We can tell them that Jesus cares about their bodies and will raise them up and be restored. All reference to sin will be erased in the new world, even those that we have put on ourselves. God came to earth in a body. Lived in a body. Died in a body. Raised in a body. And most importantly, ascended into heaven with a body, where even now He sits at the right hand of God overseeing the redemption of your body and soul. That’s the hope that we hold out. And do you know what we can look to in order to remind ourselves of that? The rainbow. We’ll cover this more next time, but the rainbow is a sign to us that God keeps His promises. He is giving us time and mercy. One day all will be restored. One day, all of God’s enemies will be destroyed. And we will have peace. So what do we take from this? God cares about life, and so should we. God gave us bodies that we need to respect and take care of because they, together with our soul, make us who we are. Yes, they break down. Yes, even some of our children and grandchildren break them on purpose, but even then they are not beyond the redemption of God. Approach this issue with that in mind. Tell people the truth. Don’t live by lies. But don’t throw anyone away, because God doesn’t.
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Our world is under the judgment of God today. It is not just that the world is doing things that will bring judgment, the things that they are doing ARE the judgment. I don’t have to describe to you what you see on the nightly news about the sexual revolution and transgenderism. I don’t have to rehearse the images that you’ve seen coming out of the various wars around the world. You all see these things plainly every day. And while there will come a day when there will be a great judgment over the whole planet, as we will see in a minute, we already have the seeds of that right in front of us. In Romans 1, we see God hand over people to their sin as part of their judgment. Essentially, God would be saying, “Do you want to bend nature and rebel against God’s rule for marriage and intimacy? Ok, let’s see you do that. Let’s see how far that can take you.” We are seeing this play out in hatred leading to war. We are seeing this play out in apathy to the Bible and faithful living. We are seeing the consequences of God handing our world over to what it wants. Now admittedly, that seems a little scary, doesn’t it? I mean, we have to go along for the ride! Yes, we will be spared ultimate judgment, but boy, it doesn’t look like things are going to be all that smooth leading up to that either. What do we do? How do we react to seeing the world handed over to the sin that it wants and us having to suffer the consequences of that? Well, this passage is going to tell us how to do that. Noah had to literally go along for the ride of judgment on the Earth. Noah didn’t like anything that was going on in the world, yet a planetary flood was coming to the planet Noah lived on. This was going to make an impact on his life. How did Noah react to being in the midst of God’s judgment? Well, he hoped only in God and responded in worship. Coincidentally, those are the main points for today: God is your only hope in the midst of judgment and The proper response to judgment is worship. God is your only hope in the midst of judgment We begin with a final reminder of Noah’s character. The grace that God has given to Noah has been very evident in Noah’s obedience to God (Belcher, 95). It is very similar to Abraham being obedient to God as an expression of his faith in Him (Romans 4). Noah has finished construction, so now his family and the animals are all getting on the boat. Here, there is an expansion of the number of animals that are getting on the boat. We’ve all heard that it was two by two, because that was what was in chapter 6. Here we are given an additional detail that God also wants Noah to bring in seven pairs of clean animals and just one pair of unclean animals. To the original audience, Jews freshly freed from Egypt and who have just been given a list of animals that they can safely eat and offer as sacrifices, I’ll bet this came as a relief. God is providing for there to be more animals that can be eaten and sacrificed for sin. There are also seven pairs of birds that are to be brought in, especially kind given that the dove was the offering of the poor person in the Old Testament (Matthews, 388). God was looking out for the least of these all the way back in the flood. God is always the hope. Even when, as that great philosophical school, REM, said, it's the end of the world as we know it, yet we truly can feel fine because God is setting things up to be ready for future sacrifices for sin, the ability to repair the relationship with God in future centuries, even amongst the poor. We get this message twice as it repeats to us that God has all the animals needed and Noah and his family safely put into the ark. Remember how I said that Genesis slows down when it wants to show us something. People can think that ancient writers were too dumb to notice that they already wrote something down and so this addition is some sort of other writer, wrongly detailing things. That is just a surface reading of the text. If this were a movie, we would be seeing the same scene from two different angles because the Director wants us to really notice what is going on here. They are getting into the boat; they are going to be safe. They have been called into the boat, as Matthew Henry says, "...like that of a tender father to his children to come in-doors when he sees night or a storm coming." And then it culminates in the Lord, the covenant name of God, shutting the door. In the end, it all comes down to God’s gracious mercy. God shuts the door and keeps it closed during what is about to happen. He honors the covenant He sets which He still does. This is why we keep our eyes on Him during times of judgment like we are experiencing now. When Noah turns 600, in fact, the second month of the year, and in fact the 17th day of that month, the flood comes. "Unlike the Mesopotamian flood stories, the Biblical account sets the event in a historical framework. For the author of Genesis the flood event is as real as the birth of Abraham" (Matthews, 376). And what a flood it is. There is water coming from above and below across the whole earth. The fountains of the deep “break forth” a term that calls to mind a very violent event (Belcher, 95), and water is coming down like never before. But in the midst of that, the ark is lifted up. Again, from Matthew Henry, "When the flood thus increased, Noah’s ark was lifted up, and the waters which broke down every thing else, bore up the ark. That which to unbelievers betokens death unto death, to the faithful betokens life unto life." In other words, God is doing a lot of things in the midst of trying times. That which crushes God’s enemies, in due time, will deliver the righteous. But God’s enemies are, indeed, crushed. The waters spread all over the earth, covering even the highest mountain by twenty feet or so. That’s total destruction just as God said there would be. We do well to meditate on this. God always comes through on His promises, and ultimately that includes promises of judgment. Judgment is often delayed, but it is never denied, as I believe R.C. Sproul said. Sin is going to have consequences, and they don’t have to be planetary for them to be destructive to us. Even one sin can be destructive to us. Thomas Watson meditates on that for us, tolerating one sin in our lives is like missing just one piece of armor, or having just one gap in the safety fence, or hiding one rebel to the crown in your house, or just having one drop of poison in the cup. We need to believe God that these sins will hurt us. Can even sin separate one who is truly united to Christ? No, but it can sure hurt one’s effectiveness for Christ. But now, we turn to chapter 8, and we read the most comforting words, “God remembered.” The word “remembered” here doesn’t mean that God forgot about Noah and then suddenly recalled him to His mind. No, this is covenant language (Matthews, 382). When you see “God remembered” it means that God is about to act on a previous agreement. God knows that He has made a covenant, and He is about to come through on His terms. God begins the process of drying out the earth, and does so actively. He sends a wind to move the waters. Does this sound familiar? It turns out that the word for wind is the same for Spirit. Now the wind, the Spirit, the Ruah, is hovering over the waters again, separating the dry land from the water (Belcher, 96). The world is being recreated. But it is a process. The water goes down slowly but surely allowing the ark to rest on the mountains of Arat. Quick side note here: Every few years, news stories go around wondering if we have found the ark itself or at least found this very location. I might not have brought this up, but, as providence would have it, there was a fresh round of stories this week about this again. This wasn’t Answers in Genesis, but Popular Mechanics writing about possible discoveries of human activity, marine materials and seafood in this region. People have made claims like this as far back as the early 1900s, and the results are always inconclusive. Would it be cool to know precisely where the ark landed? Of course! Is it necessary for us to find this ark for us to believe that the Bible is true? No. One day the scientists will climb up the mountain of truth to find the theologians already there. Anyway, the ark comes to rest on the mountain, slowly the waters recede, and the animals are let out to repopulate the earth. The original command of God is set out to cover the earth with life. One scholar comments, “...catastrophe does not interrupt God's desire to bless the world" (Ross, 195). Even God’s own punishment does not take out His desire to bring goodness. Never think that because God is taking you through something hard means that He is out to get you, that you have somehow used up all of God’s goodness, and now all He has is hardship for you. No, as Matthew Henry so eloquently put it, "The same hand that brings the desolation, must bring the deliverance; to that hand, therefore, we must ever look." When the diagnosis is given, when the family member dies, I mean the real hard stuff in life comes, look to Christ. Deliverance is coming, my flock. Say with the Psalmist, “I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth.” Your help comes from the One who also recreated the Earth. The one who flooded also dried. He can do that for you, too. It might take a while. God does things gradually for us so that we stay grateful for the small things (Matthew Henry). And there is one thing that we can always do in response to even cataclysmic judgment: worship. The proper response to judgment is worship. When the floodwaters come down, the first thing that Noah does is build an altar, and puts those clean animals to their use. He offers a burnt offering to God. What does this mean? Ross explains, "The whole burnt offering represented the worshiper's total surrender and dedication to the Lord, and the expression of the Lord smelling the sweet fragrance represented God's acceptance." (197) Nothing is being held back from either party. Noah isn’t getting to eat of that sacrifice, it is totally given to God, and God in His graciousness, accepts that offering. Listen to what God says about that. He is never going to flood or curse the earth again. The word “curse” is a different word than what we saw in chapter 3. So God isn’t lifting Adam’s curse on the ground (after all, Paul mentions it in Romans 8:22), but He isn’t going to lay on anything else to it like the flood. But God goes on to say that man is still sinful "...meaning that despite warrant for another judgment God will exercise clemency." (Matthew, 395). We have deserved a planet-wide flood, but God doesn’t require that again in flood form. He will judge the Earth again in the last day, and this is hinted at in the last verse, “as long as the earth remains.” As Matthews comments, “This shows a permanency for the world, but it also infers that the present heavens and earth will someday cease" (397). But I don’t think that this is the most impressive thing that we see in the Bible here. It is not that God spares the world, but I think our main takeaway as New Testament Christians, is Who does the Lord crush? He doesn’t destroy the world, because He is going to offer up His own Son in its place. For you! He hasn’t crushed our world, our planet, because the Father made an agreement with His Son to satisfy the calls of God’s justice. The Son sacrificed, the Father sacrificed to make your salvation possible. A worldwide flood brings justice, but it doesn’t bring justification. Here the Son of God, Jesus Christ volunteers to take all the wrath that was to be poured out onto a still sinful world on to Himself. And do you know what He was doing during all of that? I heard this from a preacher named Neil Stewart probably a decade ago now and have never forgotten, Jesus is singing Psalm 22. Get this, in the midst of judgment, Jesus was WORSHIPING the Father. That’s your Savior! A Savior who in the midst of pain, suffering, and death that belonged to OTHERS, belonged to you and me, worships God. Can we not do the same? Yes, the world is terrifying. God’s judgment tends to be like that. But the hand that crushes is the hand that cures. The God who is allowing the world to spin seemingly out of control is the same God who will give up His Son to one day make it right. So if you are not taking God up on His offer of salvation, what is holding you back? Come to ark. Flee the judgment. Leave your sins behind you and embrace a God who loves you so much that He made a way at great cost to Himself to rescue you. And if you are in Christ and enduring a world that is in crisis, remember your Jesus. Remember your Jesus who worships in the midst of pain, and worship Him. One day deliverance is coming and is in progress even now. No matter what you are facing, God can turn it for good. The flood waters make take a long time to go down. It may take your whole life. But God will dry out your world. Keep praying. Stay close to God. And one day, God is going to call you out of that ark, and into a new world where there will be no more pain or judgment.
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The story of Noah’s ark is one of the most misrepresented stories in the Bible. We see this story depicted in children’s bibles and nursery room walls in cute, colorful illustrations of animals floating in a boat, with a long giraffe neck sticking outside the boat because it is too long as they float peacefully on the waters. You would never see a children’s book drawn that way about hurricane Katrina. There would be no happy looking people floating in boats in New Orleans. Why? Because people would rightly complain that we wouldn’t be capturing the devastation that the hurricane brought. What we are looking at here makes Katrina look like a sunshower. This story is of the judgment of God against sinners who finally exhaust His patience. But those children’s bibles and nursery walls captured something right about this story. Because it is also the story of surprising grace given to Noah and the future humanity that will come from him. God is going to do something amazing through Noah, and the amount of work that Noah is going to do to make that happen is going to provide a great encouragement for us. Our two points today are God really did flood the whole earth for human sin, and God really did save His people from it. God really did flood the whole earth for human sin We can’t forget that this is a story of God handing out punishment for the entirety of mankind at the time, save one remarkable person, Noah. We find out that he is “righteous” “blameless” and “walked with God.” The last time we saw someone walk with God he walked straight into heaven, so here is another figure who has this same level of faithfulness to God. He is also called blameless and righteous. Righteous means that he is in covenant with God and is living up to the standards of that covenant (Ross, 193). “Blameless” means “'complete, sound' and indicates moral uprightness and integrity in a person's behavior” (Matthews, 358). Lest we think this means Noah is perfect, One scholar comments “This description of Noah does not suggest that he is sinless; rather it indicates that his life reflects a wholeness of character in which what he professes to believe is actually how he lives his life." (94) Indeed, we will see later on that Noah is not morally perfect, but he is certainly better than the people around him (Matthews, 358). Still, he is in need of God’s Grace. Noah’s uprightness is in deep contrast to everyone else around him. Notice that the word “corrupt” is used three times here to really drive home the point of what is going on. The place is absolutely filled with violence, so God needs to respond. Interestingly, when God says that He is going to destroy them, it is a play on words in Hebrew. The same root is used in both “corrupt” and “destroy.” In essence, God is saying, “They have destroyed themselves, so I am going to destroy them” (Ross, 193). This reminds me of Romans 1 where God simply gives people over to their sins, and this seems like a radical example of that. It would be like God saying, “Oh, you like violence and destruction? Well, here, have a flood.” This contrast between Noah and the world should cause us to sit up a bit. All of the Bible is relevant, but this is pretty easy to apply to us today. All around us is a culture of violence and disobedience to God, yet we are called to be different. We are called to live a life honoring to God in spite of our surrounding culture. We are called to a different standard. We are called to righteousness. John Calvin put it this way, “We know how great is the force of custom, so that nothing is more difficult than to live holily among the wicked, and to avoid being led away by their evil examples. Scarcely is there one in a hundred who has not in his mouth that diabolical proverb, 'We must howl when we are among the wolves...'" (252). In other words, we can tend to think that we must live the way our culture does at least somewhat. How would we get along if we didn’t celebrate what the world celebrates, laugh at what the world laughs at, hate what the world hates. Pastor Reeder once said in contrast to this that “the world is not your measuring stick, it’s your mission field.” So often we don’t even know we are howling with the wolves because we’ve never taken the time to seriously examine our lives against the Bible. If you think something is ok for a Christian to do that looks like the world, how did you come to that conclusion? “Well,” you might say, “I’m not living any differently than other Christians around me.” Who says they are the standards? God’s Word is our standard no matter what other people say. The consequences on this are severe. Folks, this isn’t about getting an A+ in life. Living in a way opposed to God brings real judgment. That’s why I’ve called this point that God really did flood the entire earth because of sin. When you were in school, did you have someone whom everyone called “the hard teacher”? I remember hearing of one student getting the following comment on his research paper, “You should have titled this paper ‘A Survey of a Bunch of Opinions’” with an accompanying bad grade. Alone, this might be written off as a student problem, but this particular professor was known for this across the board. His was the only class that as soon as he walked in the door the entire conversation of the class came to a dead stop. Why? Because he had a reputation. We’ve lost that perspective on God. Yes, it is 100% true that in Christ we are completely safe from ultimate judgment, but we treat God like He didn’t one day flood the whole planet over sin, and has already warned us that a judgment of that scale is coming again in Matthew 24, which we read this morning. It could happen today. Will we be found when Christ comes back looking and acting just like the world for whom the judgment is coming? Noah stands as a good example for how to live properly and really condemns us if we don’t (Matthews, 358). The world isn’t as bad today as it was then. “But Pastor,” you might say, “you get to stay in your ivory study safe from all the pressures of the world. You don’t have people threatening to fire you for standing on Biblical principles, you don’t have people in your family living against God’s Word, it’s easy for you to say to be obedient.” You are right, but the command to live for God doesn’t come from me. It comes from the One who rules the world, the One who destroys those who destroy themselves with sin. But it isn’t all judgment. Let’s take a look at our second point: God really did save His people from it. It is quite clear later on that this flood was planet-wide, and the Earth has the scarring to prove it. So the fact that we are all here tells us that God really did save his people from it. God has accomplished this through a command to Noah to build the ark. We don’t tend to mark things in cubits, which would be from the tip of your tallest finger to your elbow, or roughly 18 inches. With that estimate, this boat that God is telling Moses to build would be about 450 feet long (or a little longer than your regulation football field), 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high (Matthews 364). Noah only has to accommodate kinds of animals, not every individual species, and he probably took on juveniles of the animals as they would be smaller (see more here.) I won’t spend the time here to show that this could have actually happened because that has been done in many other places. There are a variety of ways in which you can explain how Noah could have achieved all of this, but the point isn’t really how Noah mathematically accomplished it but rather that he was obedient to God. Certainly, I believe every word that is written here literally happened; God doesn’t lie, and He is very powerful. And most surprisingly of all, He makes promises to His people. Here we see in our passage the very first mention of the word “covenant.” This is an especially gracious promise, as one scholar draws out: "Divine charter is a proclamation made by the Lord and is not in agreement. We find this in the Noahic covenant where the Lord obligates himself…to save the Noahic family and preserve the new world, also forever, without specific demands placed upon the patriarch…” (Matthews, 368). This would be something that Noah would have had to cling to in earnest for the rest of this project. Even Noah, while better than the people around him, still could not have earned this covenant. God made the covenant with Noah before the first tree came down. But this doesn’t make the work that Noah did meaningless. It was a great demonstration of the faith that Noah had. We oftentimes forget what a massive undertaking this would be for Noah. When I was studying for this John Calvin was the only one to take the time to walk us through what Noah was asked to do. In order to build this 400+ foot boat, Noah would begin not by going to Home Depot, but by felling all the trees, by yourself (after all, it's not like the rest of humanity is going to help you). Yes, you have three sons, but that doesn’t lighten the load by much. Then you have to carry all of those trees, again by yourself, to the place to put it all together. This is going to be done over the course of 100 years of very hard manual labor. This has been looked at, and it is indeed possible, but boy is that a lot of work. Beyond that, everyone around him is given to violence, and Noah is out there hogging up all the trees to build his yacht! Plus, it wouldn't be surprising if the people around him messed up his work to set him back (everyone is given to evil in all of this). And if all that wasn't enough, once you've got the boat put together, now you gotta gather up enough food to last you the year's voyage for yourself, family, and oh yeah all the animals! And let's be real real here: you're on a boat with animals; it's not like they don't create a stink while they're on the boat. (259-261). This is all being done when it had never even rained before, much less flooded in this sort of way. This is an unprecedented amount of work for something that no one had ever seen before. In short, we are looking at nothing less than an absolute, total commitment to serve the Lord no matter what He asks. Another scholar put it convincingly, "'Noah did according to all that God commanded him – so did he'" is most important. Here the reader may catch a glimpse of what it means to walk with God, or to be righteous." (194). In other words, walking with God isn’t something that makes sense to the world. Noah has faith, acting on what cannot be seen or materialistically proven (Matthews, 369). Calvin ties off this section by saying this, “Moses, indeed, says in a single word that he did it; but we must consider how far beyond all human power was the doing of it: and that it would have been better to die a hundred deaths, then to undertake a work so laborious, unless he had looked to something higher than the present life" (261). God has a habit of having His people do things that don’t make sense to the world. Moses, who wrote down this story, while out leading sheep around was asked to go back to the country where he was a wanted man for murder to lead millions of people, representing the most powerful country’s economic engine, out of the country, across the desert, into the promised land (Exodus 3). I can imagine Moses thinking, “Me, too, Noah.” Later on, those same people would march around Jericho and take down the city with a shout (Joshua 6). These same people would later form a nation attacked by so many powerful armies yet defending themselves with jars and trumpets (Judges 7), and sometimes by doing absolutely nothing at all (2 Kings 19:35). What all of these things have in common is the fact that God is the one making them possible. Yet, Israel had to trust that God would defend them, Gideon had to take 300 people against a countless army, Joshua still had to march his army around the city for a week, Moses still had to travel into Egypt, and Noah still had to build the ark. But here’s the key: they all did so under the covenant of God. All of these people had their eyes on God to do what they did, and the same call goes to you. It is going to make less and less sense (from a worldly logic) to follow Christ. Sure, a hundred years ago, going to church made you a respectable member of society, but increasingly, that is going to make you a bigot. How do you hold on? You hold on by keeping your eyes on the ultimate act that doesn’t make any sense: Jesus dying on the cross for you. Why on Earth should God the Father give His Son to us and indwell us with His Holy Spirit? We’ve not done anything to deserve that, but Jesus did. Judgment is coming again, but rather than running to a ship, we run to a Savior. Noah built the ship with lots of work. Jesus built our salvation by breaking His body, and pouring out His blood. By keeping our eyes on what He has done, we will have the strength to do what He calls us to, not to earn our salvation, but to display the salvation already received. We’ve been called to a committed life, but we do so under the covenant of God, which we have a picture of here in bread and grape juice before us.
Image by Nile
Doesn’t it seem like the world is falling apart? There are many times in history in which one could say this. Just in the last century we have seen two world wars, the development of the atom bomb, worldwide terrorism, and most subtly, the terrifying falling population rates that will cause some countries to disappear nearly entirely in the next century (China is looking like its population will be halved in the next thirty years). If you are watching the news nightly, or heaven help you if you are getting your news constantly on your phone, you will find many reasons to think that this is a hopeless situation. If you were alive at the time of Genesis 6, though, these days would seem tame! In Genesis 6 we are seeing the beginning of the first end. We are going to find out why a world-wide flood was the proper response to this world. But there are a number of confusing things in this text! Is this text talking about fallen angels having super-babies with humanity? Is God giving the world 120 years to repent, or is he setting the new human age limit? What is this saying that God regrets making humanity? Did God not see this coming and thus doesn’t hold our future? AHHHH! Indeed, these are important questions, and it is right here, in some of the scariest parts of Scripture and our lives where God’s promises shine the brightest. Some of the above questions are matters of debate and mystery, and some are going to be left unsolved, but what we are going to walk away from our time together with is a new confidence in God’s ability to both know and control the future. Our two points today are Evil has dominated in the world before yet God knows how to save His people Evil has dominated in the world before After a look at the faithful line of Seth, we turn our eyes to the story of his great-great-(x many) Grandson, Noah. Things are not getting better in the world. In fact, we are going to see that humanity had descended to the point that “every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (v.5). That’s a pretty bleak view of humanity at this point. Later on, we will find out that there is literally one family on the entire globe who bucks this trend next week. For now, the world is in a terrible place. Of course, verse 5 is the summary of the verses that came before it, so let’s take a look at some details into why this situation was just so bad. It is here where we come to our first controversy and question, “Who are the ‘sons of God’?” There are a number of viewpoints on this question, but typically, people will prefer one of two possible answers. Either “the sons of God” refer to angels, or it refers to the people of Seth’s line. In the second instance, the daughters of men would be of the line of Cain, the line of the serpent. The first possibility would have angels copulating with human beings, something that would be beyond their place to do, and the second possibility has the faithful line intermarrying with the unfaithful line of Cain, also beyond their place to do. The hard part about deciding between these views is that there are good, Scriptural reasons for either conclusion, and this has been a debate going back to the Jewish Rabbi’s! Many Jews took the angel position, but there was a time in which Rabbi’s invoked a curse on those who held that view (Ross, 178)! On the “sons of God are angels” side of things, there are a few New Testament passages, specifically in 1 Peter 3:19-20, 2 Peter 2:4ff (which we read) as well as Jude 6-7, that seem to read quite clearly in favor of them being angels. It would appear in each of these passages that the NT writer is marching through Genesis which would seem to place fallen angels right there in Genesis 6. However, as R.C. Sproul points out in his commentary on 2 Peter, it could just as easily refer to the original fall of the angels where the angels overstepped their bounds, and that is actually the sin the NT writers are pointing to (248-9). Indeed, a careful reading does show that these passages don’t have to be referring to Genesis 6 sin. Really the decision that you make about the New Testament passages has to do with what you do here in Genesis 6. If you decide that they are angels, then the NT passages make perfect sense. If you decide that the sons of God are of the line of Seth, you can harmonize the New Testament passages with that approach. One commentator makes a strong argument for it being the line of Seth. Basically, he sees this passage as telling Seth’s family story, as the genealogy doesn’t end until Noah’s death in chapter 9 (Matthews, 330). Further, looking back at Genesis 3, when the snake and humanity sin both are punished for it, whereas here it would appear that the fallen angels suffer no consequences (334). Verses 3, 5-7 make clear that the flood is God’s judgment on man, and it would seem that the angels aren’t held liable for their obvious part in all of that (327). However, if the sons of God and daughters of man are both human, then the flood against humanity makes perfect sense, as now the human race which once was two separate lineages is now forming into one that has become very corrupt. The passages in the New Testament, then, would simply be referring to the original rebellion of the angels in heaven without their needing to sexually sin. As an aside, whatever direction you take here will have some impact on who you think the Nephilim are, but not too much. There is some evidence in our passage that they existed at that time and after, which makes it look like that these guys existed prior to humanity’s sin, whether with demons or each other. Whoever they were, it appears that they were drowned with the rest of the world (the reference to them in Numbers 13 was probably an exaggeration [Mattehews, 337]). While I lean towards the sons of God being of the line of Seth, there is a strong case to make for angels, but I think the true point of the passage isn’t how humanity sinned per se but rather the fact that humanity is just so sinful as to be completely “beyond self-help” (Kinder). Whether heaven itself is turning out sinners or humanity has become so sinful that there is just one righteous family left in the whole place, we are left with a very scary picture of evil’s rule on the earth. The point for us to take away from this whole thing is that man is extremely sinful to the point that there is no way they figure this out on their own. They are nothing but evil here. One commentator put it like this, "So monstrous becomes the sin of Noah's generation that the gravest of measures is the only proper response from heaven" (Matthews, 340). So why is this important for us to know? It is important for us to know that God has lines that He draws that we cross at our peril. We cannot treat sin lightly. God knows how to save His people The response is going to be a world-wide flood, and the limitation of the years of man’s life to 120 years. While there will be one hundred years before the flood waters come, it is not 120 (Calvin, 243), and this would nicely explain why everyone suddenly doesn’t live for a super long time anymore. The few exceptions that are yet to come, like Abraham who lived 175 years (Genesis 25:7) can be explained with the same mercy that was given to Adam and Eve: The punishment wasn’t set out immediately (Matthews, 335). All these issues that we’ve looked at so far one can come to different conclusions on and not much is really going to change about how you look at the Bible. However, I think what we have to look at closely is this idea of God regretting something. Usually, when we say that we regret something, it means that they didn’t know how something was going to turn out and now that they see it, they would do it differently. This can be something as frivolous as a haircut that we thought looked great in high school and now want to bury all evidence of it, or something as serious as a life-altering accident. Now that we are on the other side of the decision, we wish we could go back and change it. Is this how God works? To answer that question, we turn to the only place for information about God, the Bible. Specifically, we are going to turn to 1 Samuel 15:11 and 29. God is talking about Saul’s kingship, that while it started well, Saul began to go down the path of disobedience. In verse 11, we get the same word that we have in Genesis 6. It would seem that we have a theme here of God’s regretting making Saul king in the same way that he regrets making mankind. However! The key to understanding all of this is in verse 29, where we find that God does not regret like a human being does. John Piper explains it this way: "The difference would most naturally be that God's regret happens in spite of perfect foreknowledge, while most human repentance because we lack foreknowledge...Even in our own experience, there are times when we look back on difficult decisions we made and feel both sorrow at making them and yet approve making them" (Providence, 361-2 n5). He explained what this might look like. Let’s say that you had to discipline a child for something that they clearly did wrong and needed correction for it. Yet, because of that discipline, they ran away from home or became otherwise estranged. While you would look back on that discipline with sorrow, you wouldn’t change what you had to do, as it was the right thing to do. Piper concludes by reasoning that if he can have complex emotions like that, then surely God is capable of such things as well (you can read the whole article here). The difference, as we’ve already stated is that God is doing this with total foreknowledge that they are happening, yet can be grieved that they happened. This is something that is important for us to understand. God doesn’t second-guess Himself. Because if He did, no one and nothing would be safe. If He could second guess creation, then why couldn’t He second guess your salvation? But we find that God doesn’t need a second plan. Numbers 23:19 tells us "God is not a man, that He should lie, Nor a son of man, that He should repent; Has He said, and will He not do it? Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?". Or look at Psalm 33:8-11, “Let all the earth fear the LORD; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him! For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm. The LORD brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples. The counsel of the LORD stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations.” God isn’t thrown off by what people do because he didn’t see it coming. If that were true, then we would have every reason to fear. If God doesn’t know the end from the beginning (which he does, according to Isaiah 46:10), then we could never be sure that God’s promises would stand (Piper article). But God doesn’t repent like a man does. So why use this language? I think Matthews is on to something when he says, "God's response of grief over the making of humanity, however, is not remorse in the sense of sorrow over a mistaken creation; our verse shows that God's pain has its source in the perversion of human sin. The making of man is no error; it is what man has made of himself.… But his regret is not over destroying humanity; paradoxically, so foul has become mankind that it is the necessary step to salvage him." (343) In other words, God knows that humankind is going to go in this direction, and knows that the wisest way to deal with it is with the flood. But this doesn’t mean that God is unfeeling. Matthews continues: “In Christ we see God is so moved by grief and love that he chooses to take upon himself the very suffering of our sins. Do we not appeal to the incarnational role of Christ is our vision of the nature of his Father (cf. Matt 23:37)? God is not a dispassionate accountant overseeing the books of human endeavor; rather he makes a personal decision out of a sorrowful loss to judge Noah's wicked generation" (344). In other words, we see in Jesus that God is capable of emotion, even emotion over things directly in his control. Jesus wept over Lazarus even though he was going to raise him from the dead five minutes later. Lazarus’ death was totally in Jesus’ control (God said in Deu. 32:39 “See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand.”), Jesus still wept. While it looks like the world is spinning out of control, God is still in charge, still going to judge that sin, and yet still feels it. In fact, God feels it enough to do something permanent about it, which is why He sent His Son to Earth to take the penalty for sin. You don’t serve a robot God, but neither do you serve a sniveling, emotional wreck. You serve the God who introduces Himself in Ex. 34:6-7 by saying, “The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation.” That’s complex, but that’s our God. God genuinely loves you. And He is really working to bring you right along in his plan. It won’t always be easy or pleasant, but in the end and along the way it will be good. So what is our takeaway? God can work through some seemingly impossible circumstances and deliver his people. That won’t always happen in pleasant ways, but evil will be defeated. No matter what happens on the nightly news, judgment will come on those who sin, and forgiveness will be given to those who are united to Jesus. God is very patient, and for that, I am personally very grateful, but God’s patience doesn’t last forever. At some point, God will come in judgment, and the only way to be safe in that is to put your trust in Christ, turning from your sin and to Him. Psalm 2:10-12 “Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth. Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him. .
Genealogies don’t get much love. These are often the place where our eyes glaze over in our Bible readings, wondering why these things are even here. There are all these strange names, often strange places they lived that are just so unfamiliar with. But just because we don’t immediately understand something doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from it. We covered at the beginning of our time through Genesis that these genealogies serve as introduction to new sections of the Genesis story. You can tell the family that is going to be focused on by whatever name shows up near the end. They also tend to start with the name that the previous section told us about. But they do more than just provide us with a Star Wars-like title crawl to a new episode. As we will see today, there is much that we can learn from the details of this particular genealogy, as well as some of the other ones that we will study in the future.
Today, from this chapter, we are going to be looking at our two points today. First, we will see that God is faithful in His blessings and judgments. Second, Walking with God brings a life of blessing. God is faithful in His blessings… One of the first things that we notice in a genealogy like this is that God has fulfilled His promise. In fact, one pastor and commentator Dale Ralph Davis said something to the effect of every name that you ever see in a genealogy is another promise that God fulfilled. God promised Eve that she would have children, and so she has! God promised that the tribes of Israel would have a portion in the promised land, and centuries later in the book of Numbers, all those names represent a real person who got what was promised to them by God. As you will notice, this particular list of names doesn’t record every person born by name. All through this list, you will see that so and so had sons and daughters, but there is only one particular line that is being focused on here. This doesn’t mean that the other people aren’t valuable to God, but rather that there is a particular family tree that we are watching here that for the purposes of this chapter ends with Noah. Ultimately, as we see in Matthew and Luke, the family tree is leading us all the way to Jesus. In that sense, even if we don’t know anything else about these people other than their name, they were still important because they advanced redemptive history. They brought humanity one step closer to Jesus, and for that, they are remembered. Most of these people didn’t build an ark, rule a kingdom, or perform a miracle, but their day-in-day-out faithfulness of seeing to it that the next generation called on the name of the Lord as much as they could, they did something. Even if you never have children, you can do this to. You might not be able to bring the whole world closer to Jesus, but you can bring Jesus to someone’s whole world. That’s significant. That’s something to be remembered by. All glory, of course, goes to God in this, just like it does in this list. God is also faithful to bless humanity, as we are reminded that He has done so in the opening verses of this chapter. We are reminded that mankind is made in God’s image, that image is being passed down to each successive generation, along with the attendant blessings. One of those blessings that we see is the extraordinarily long lives that these individuals had. While obviously people don’t live that long now, there was a special blessing at that time that allowed for this sort of span, something that expired after the flood. …And His Judgments But as long as those lives are, there is one, mostly consistent line that comes at the end of each of these entries, “and he died.” In other words, these important events like the continuation of Adam’s line, the ascension of David to the throne, all the way to the birth of Jesus, these are not fairy tales that begin with “once upon a time.” They begin with a historical account of how we got here. Nothing is more historical, more life-like, ironically, than an obituary. The obituary, the paragraph summary of one’s entire life containing two dates, names of children, and maybe a line or two about something that they were known for. It’s how they are written today, and as we can see in Genesis 5, it looks remarkably similar. This list doesn’t begin with “once upon a time,” and ending with “lived happily ever after.” No, this is a grounded, real, life and death account that is as real as the obituary pages in our newspapers today. The reality of this list should drive home the point of the final line of each of these entries, “and he died.” Just as God was true to His word about blessing, He is true to His word about judgment. Adam, along with (almost) all of his descendants experience death, the biological cessation of life. Their deaths are as real as our own. The penalty for sin is still very much in effect. What is interesting is that Adam doesn't die until Lamech is basically sixty years old. These lists run concurrently, so Adam lives almost long enough to see Noah! The first natural cause of death that we have recorded doesn't take place until nearly a thousand years in. The curse is real, the physical results permanent. Many of us remember what it was like when we encountered death for the first time. For me, it was my grandpa. He used to live next door to our house, so I would see him nearly every day for most of my early childhood. Losing him was disorienting at 12 years old, but I at least had a context for this. I had been to many funerals by that point and knew what this was, but it certainly brings it home when it is a founding member of the family. One can certainly imagine what it would have been like for the human family to see Adam pass away. I'm sure losing Abel was a shock, but I can certainly imagine people thinking that maybe that one was a fluke. As long as you stay away from murderers, you will be fine. Adam dying from simply living must have been devastating and tremendously focusing. We don't think about death and dying as a culture very much, especially when the young often dictate was captures the popular imagination. I speak with many of you whom the Lord has granted a long life, and one thing that I hear often is the fact that you all think about death often. This is actually a product of your wisdom. The Psalmist (90:12) asks God to teach us to number our days, which is something we who are younger do well to listen to. We functionally live like we are going to live on this earth forever, and it is often not until the obituary pages are filled with our own friends do we begin to think about it more seriously. Thousands of days, millions of hours summed up in a paragraph, only to be skipped over by future generations. Walking with God brings a life of blessing. But that is not all that this chapter has to say. There are a couple of exceptions here. We have Enoch who walked with God who suddenly was not. Considering how every other name ends the same way, I think we are supposed to see the break in the pattern. This is purposeful. Hebrews 11:5 tells us for sure that Enoch didn't die, but was rather taken to heaven immediately. Wouldn't you have liked to know what *he* was like? He walked so closely with God, he was spared even death, joining the ranks of only two other people in all of human history (Elijah and Jesus)! Why God did it that way is up to Him, but I think this shows us the beginnings of a hope for after death. Enoch went somewhere and that somewhere must be close to God. But we only have the very slightest hints here. Of course, wouldn’t you know what it would look like to live that faithfully? One commentator has an answer. For one, Enoch didn’t just live with God, he walked with Him (Ross, 175). There is a verb, a way of life, purposeful, intentional. What might that look like? Another scholar puts it like this: “This is the general nature of walking with God; it is a persistent endeavor to hold all our life open to God's inspection and in conformity to his will; a readiness to give up what we find does cause any misunderstanding between us and God; a feeling of loneliness if we have not some satisfaction in our efforts at holding fellowship with God, a cold and desolate feeling when we are conscious of doing something that displeases Him. This walking with God necessarily tells on the whole life and character." (Ross, 175, quoting Dods). In a word, walking with God is a relationship, a living relationship that defines the rest of one’s life. Everything that you do in your life, what you think, you say, you feel is run through the lens of a relationship with God. We see this in marriage, or we should anyway. I remember one of my friends from seminary had the opportunity to do some ministry in Africa, and as the time neared for him to make the journey over there, they called and asked if he could stay a week longer than planned. Without missing a beat, he said, “Sure!” The person on the other end of the phone was shocked that he could give an answer so quickly! He replied that he wasn’t married and thus didn’t have anyone that he needed to check with! These days he’s married with children, so that sort of thing isn’t possible anymore! Why? Because he lives his life (as he should) in relationship with his family. He doesn’t just live for himself. He takes his family into account. In the same way, we need to take God into account with whatever we do. What does God think about that new job, that new sport, that new schedule, that different opportunity? That is walking with God. When you separate from him, that should be apparent very quickly, and there should be a desire to quickly get back to Him. I remember once being in line with my family for a ride at Disney as a little kid. We were waiting a very long time, and I wasn’t paying too close attention to what was in front of me. I decided to give my dad a hug and wrapped my arms around the gray shirt my dad was wearing that day. The trouble was, it wasn’t my dad! It was someone else of similar height, build, and fashion sense! I realized I might have been mistaken when the man suddenly pulled away, which is what you do when some strange kid attacks you, causing me to look up and see the different face! I realized my mistake and ran back to dad (who was BEHIND me, as it turned out), and hid behind him. That’s the Christian life. We hug things that we think are right only to find that it isn’t our Father. The answer for that isn’t to run from our Father, but rather to run to Him, hide behind Him, because only there is the place of safety and hope. That’s what Enoch found, and while we aren’t guaranteed a death-free life because of it, we are going to find blessing in His presence. One scholar put it this way, “Certainly the length of a person’s life is of negligible value compared to the quality of his relationship with God” (Matthews, 315). No matter how long or short your life is, if it is close with God, it is a blessed life (Ross, 176). But there is one last break of pattern in this list. The other exception is Noah. Now, Noah eventually dies, but what makes him exceptional is his name, and the meaning of it. The word “Noah” sounds like the Hebrew word for "comfort" and implies the meaning of “rest” (Matthews, 317). Lamech knows what death is now. He's seen it first hand. By the time Noah is born, Seth has also died. Yet this is the generation that calls on the name of the Lord. And it is here that Lamech proclaims hope in the midst of death. That's the Christian response! That's not whistling in the dark, but living in the light of God's promise! There is hope! And Noah is going to proclaim that hope, literally build in that hope, when every single person on earth except his family tells him otherwise. Do you have that hope? I’m not talking about wishing that you will probably get into heaven but certain of it. Are you able to look at the world with all of its problems, disease, and death, and proclaim that your God is faithful? Some of you know the answer to that question because you’ve been taken deep in the catalog of human grief and been brought out the other side. Some of you have yet to experience that, and there is no reason to be in a hurry. If God has spared you such trial thus far, then use this time to grow closer in your walk with God. Examine yourselves to see if you are in the faith. Put your trust in Christ, repent of your sin, and find the blessing of a life walking with God. So what is our takeaway? These genealogies proclaim a faithful God that works through real people in real time.You can trust this God who rules over life and death, judgment and blessing. What difference is that going to make in your life tomorrow? Young people: spend time with our older saints who have walked with God a long time. You have a lot to learn from them. I know I do whenever I visit them. These are living testimonies of God’s faithfulness. We’ve just read about those who have already died; now study those who are still alive. Older people: They’re watching. They’re listening. Tell us what you are learning and have learned in years of walking with God. Let us hear the defeats as well as the victories. Remind us that we need to think about death; we need the reminder, but don’t you dare do that without pointing us to Jesus. Show us what it means not only to made in God’s image, but what it means to be remade in Christ’s image (Ross, 174). |
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