Tag: Noah

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Noah and the Voice of God

The Voice of the Lord is the important element in Bible stories. We discover this very early in our reading of the Word. See Genesis 1:3 “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”

After falling into sin, Adam and Eve heard the Voice walking in the Garden to find them. Voices generally don’t have feet. This phrasing points to the first chapter of John’s gospel. There, Jesus is referenced as the Word made alive. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

The Bible teaches us about the God who is Here, with us, as Immanuel. The primary problem for us as people is one of hearing Him.

The Lord came to Adam and Eve. They were fearful, but the sound of the Voice drew them out of hiding.

The Scriptures show us just how devoted God is to those He created in His image. Note that God met Cain after he slain his brother Abel. The sad part of that story is that Cain departed from the presence of the Lord, rather than seeking to find forgiveness and rest in His Maker.

Once Cain got east of Eden, we see that he and his family members became busy people. They made tools and instruments. They formed communities and developed cities.

I think this over-activity was stimulated by the fact that they needed to do something to fill in the empty spaces in their lives. Those gaps in their existence were put there by the Lord – eternity set in them according to Ecclesiastes 3:11. And the spaces within were to be filled with time and communication in a relationship to the Lord.

In other words, we were made to listen for God, for the Voice that seeks us and saves us. Without this connection to Him, things go wrong – tremendously wrong as we see when we reach Genesis 6.

Evil Imaginations, Violent Atmosphere

The world God had made “good” and “very good” degenerated into chaos.  What was the source of this turbulence? The imaginations of men’s hearts became only evil continually (see Genesis 6:5-6).

Fallen angels furthered the corruption at work through their relations involving the daughters of men. Many have debated over how these diabolic interactions were executed, but the activity did seemingly result in a category of giant humans (see Genesis 6:4).

Violence dominated the society. One of the first lyrical expressions in Genesis came from Lamech, a man who sang a boast to his wives about how he killed men who insulted him (see Genesis 4:23-24).

The corruptions upon earth were not limited to the human population either. All flesh had grown tainted and poisoned through the practices of the people. “And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth” (Genesis 6:12).

All of this served to bring grief to the heart of the Lord. He lamented at what had brought this atmosphere to earth. He pondered over how to deal with this situation. We get a real taste of how much we are really made in His image from this account. God was heartbroken over how men used their freedom of choice to foster wreck and ruin.

The weight of sorrow over the devastation God oversaw prompted Him to consider a total obliteration. However, there was one man who found favor; one upon whom the Lord chose set His heart upon – Noah.

This man was graced by the Lord. He was there living with integrity amid the confusion and the catastrophe.

Noah’s ears were open. He listened to the Voice. He got a project, a world-saving mission. It came to him in great detail. And it took him 100 years to complete. Through building the Ark at the command of God, Noah served as an heir and preacher of righteousness (see Hebrews 11:7; 2 Peter 2:5).

The ‘Foolishness’ of God

The report of Noah and the great Flood is one of those Bible stories that stimulate reactions of scorn from the educated and sophisticated, those supposedly in the know. How could any Supreme Being unleash such waves of judgment upon His created ones? They say.

The real issue is a lack of comprehension about the nature of sin. There is a profound failure to see the decay and death that sin brings to us in our physique, our psyche, and our psychology. Our bodies, our souls, and our minds have been afflicted to various degrees because of the ways of transgression. All of this gets transmitted into the corporate elements through culture and atmosphere.

Paul wrote that the wisdom of the world sees the things of God as foolishness. Those who gather to themselves facts and data in a natural pursuit of understanding find the concept of divine wrath as abhorrent. You have, I am sure, heard people say that they cannot believe in the God of the Bible because they want a God of love, and no God of love would judge the world so harshly. They want a deity who lets us live and let live.

Love that has no anger at the wrong that can come about is not love at all. Love produces in us something that the psalmist celebrates as “perfect hatred” (see Psalm 139:22).

In His holiness and righteousness, God washed away the generation that had befouled the earth. It was an operation of healing to keep in motion the process of redemption and salvation.

Men refuse to listen to His Voice regarding the matter, it’s just that simple. They also turn to demanding explanations that they could never understand if they were told them.  “Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25).

Jesus confirmed the reality of the Flood and Noah. The reason I believe the Noah account is because Jesus said it was true.

The story also figured large in Jesus’ teaching about the Last Days and indicators of His return to earth. “For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the Ark” (Matthew 24:37-38).

This begs a question for us: How bad could things really get here on earth? As bad as they got in the time of Noah.

Dwell on those words and it is easy to become discouraged.

Think on this instead: God found a man and His family and that’s all He needed to keep mankind alive and ready to flourish.

The Lord remains the God who so loves, the God who gave His very life. He took upon Himself the judgment of righteousness as the Son.

One Lamb — one spotless Lamb — offered upon one Cross won the victory. In spilling His innocent Blood, Christ accomplished what was accounted as the ransom paid for the sins of the whole world.

Yes, men’s hearts and imaginations are desperately wicked to this day. But the heart of God for our salvation remains ever true. Reconciliation, restoration, recreation – these define the purpose of the Almighty.

It is a purpose that shall not fail.

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Noah Found Grace, God Told Him to Build

Noah was a man who found grace among a grace-less population. The age in which he lived is described as one when every imagination of every heart was only “evil continually” (see Genesis 6:5).

Violence dominated human society. Bloodshed was common and celebrated it seems. We read of a man Lamech who made up a song about his killing prowess and sang it to his wives: “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. …” (Genesis 4:23).

Grieved, the Lord determined to “blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land. …” The earth needed a thorough cleansing, a refreshment and renewal. Human practices so violated the design of God that even most mammals, birds, and creeping things were designated for destruction.

Think of the heart of God at this point. Consider the sorrow and hurt that must have touched Him. His purposes involved making beings with the power to choose. And with that power they decided to turn from Him and His ways.

A third of the angels followed Lucifer in his rebellion. A perfect, wise, and talented angel turned against the One who gave him his perfection, his mind, and his abilities.

The Lord formed man from the dust and quickened him to life with His very breath. Men and women multiplied as God has told them to do, but along with that multiplication grew a propensity with them toward deeper and deeper sin. Adam and Eve took the first bites from the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in Genesis 3. Their descendants swallowed more and more of what that tree had to offer. They imagined vain things and raged against each other (Psalm 2).

The results reached far – even beyond what had happened with the angels. Among the hosts of these creatures, the Lord could count two-thirds, a majority, on His side.

On earth, almost all seemed gone. Was there any among the millions upon the planet walking with God?

Yes. There was one.

“But Noah” — just one man, a solitary father with a small family –“found grace in the eyes of the Lord.” From this man, God would start again.

Obedience Before the World

The Lord told Noah the truth. The sins of man stunk, and their smell had reached high into heaven. A drastic measure was necessary now. The waters were coming, a flood would swamp all the land, even the highest of mountains and wash away the results of wickedness.

God’s plan required Noah’s obedience. He and his family would not be transported away as Enoch had been. This one man was given a plan and instructed in the way of salvation. Noah would build a boat according to a specific design and that vessel would hold all that God chose to call and rescue from the judgment He determined.

Where would Noah find the material for such a project? In the woods, that’s where. God sent Noah to the trees, to cull gopher wood. With this, Noah formed the boards, the beams, the rutter, and the rooms for the Ark.

This takes us back to the beginnings of mankind. Adam was told to dress and keep the trees of the Garden. Following his Fall, Adam and his wife hid away among those very trees as the Voice of God sought them in the cool of the day.

Noah was instructed to go back to the trees.  Make an Ark. Make it of wood. Cover it, inside and out, with pitch. This last substance likely came from pine resin, boiled and painted upon the vessel to make it water tight.

It was a big job. Notice that Noah was not given a deadline or even a timetable. He was called and told to build. That’s it.

A man called to stand alone in his generation had a lot to do. And he did it.

Noah’s work spoke for God. Peter makes reference to Noah as a “preacher of righteousness” during his days (see 2 Peter 2:5). Were there mockers and scoffers around him? I am sure there were. Those watching him could not understand. God was not in their thoughts.

Many mornings Noah likely had to drag himself out of bed and to the work site. He had to discipline his mind to hold fast to the promise of God.

Build, Noah did, day after day. He sawed the wood, drove the nails, made the rooms; he followed the plan given to him. It was simple, hard, unglamorous work stretched over years.

Faithful, this man made the Ark ready. Trust and obey, that’s all he could do. There was no other way. Work, watch, wait – these words Noah kept in mind.

Every now and then, he looked to the sky. I wonder how he felt at the sight of a cloud or two.

The Lord Shut Them In

One day animals started to show up. They, too, were moved by God, commanded by Him to come to the place of salvation. Noah welcomed all that God had sent – clean and unclean entered in to the rooms prepared for them.

At last came the word came from the Lord: “After seven days, I wills send the rain.” The animals entered the Ark followed by Noah, his wife, his sons and their wives – eight people in all. “And the Lord shut him in” (Genesis 7:10-24).

The waters poured down for 40 days and nights. The earth was soaked; its creatures drowned. Man’s sins brought judgment upon the world made for him.

“But Noah.”

The story of this man is a revelation to us of how God sees and how God knows. Another age of great evil is coming, and we see the seeds of it now. Jesus spoke of this age in teaching His disciples about the time of the end. “But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be” (Matthew 24:37).

Just how bad will things get on the earth? As bad as things were in Noah’s time, Jesus said. This should come as no surprise. We see the direction of “civilization” and the road it is on.

How are we to think? What should we expect?

We should think with God and expect His promise to hold true.

“Fear not little flock, it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom” (Luke 12:32).

We are on the inside of the Ark, looking out. God called us. God saved us. God keeps us.

We wait. We watch. We pray. We look to the sky.

And, we work, building as “preachers of righteousness,” shut in as His people to reveal His glory.