[0:00] Well, we're continuing on, looking at Genesis being made by God for a purpose. God being the one who defines our lives for us, as we see in Genesis.
[0:15] I wonder if any of you are familiar with the world's largest treehouse. It was built just a couple hours up the road, up in Crossville. Y'all familiar with this? A guy named Horace Burgess built this treehouse outside of Crossville by a bunch of people donated wood, and it was just kind of scrap wood.
[0:33] And he built this in this grove of seven white oak trees, the tallest of which is like 80 feet high. And he built up and went beyond it. This house has five stories.
[0:44] It has a kitchen. It had a worship space. It had this like bell tower that he had made that overlooked all of kind of the surrounding countryside up in Cumberland County.
[0:56] He built it about 10 years ago. This was the third such large treehouse that he had built. He built it because he had a vision that God wanted him to do something significant in honor of him.
[1:09] About two years ago during COVID, it was all shut down because, of course, like it was definitely not up to code. So it was definitely shut down and people would break in and vandalize it and stuff. It caught fire and burnt down in 15 minutes.
[1:22] There's some great YouTube videos. I put some links on the website if you want to take a look at that. You know, but it strikes me. Every time I remember about Horace Burgess and his desire to do something big, it makes me think, have you ever taken a risk that you thought was just impossible?
[1:43] You know, a risk that's just too much. It's too crazy. It's ridiculous. I shouldn't do that, but I'm going to do it anyway. Have you ever taken a risk like that? Maybe it was a job change. You know, stepping into a new role that you weren't sure about or a move back home or a move away from home.
[2:00] Or maybe it was spending money on something that you weren't positive about. Or maybe it was deciding not to spend money on something that was the risk. Maybe you decided to move forward with a relationship.
[2:12] Or maybe you broke up a relationship that felt like a huge risk to you. You know, maybe some of you took the risk of showing up to church today.
[2:23] If you did and that felt like a risk, I'm really thankful that you decided to do that. See, all of us come to these moments where we have to decide whether or not to take a risk. To start an endeavor.
[2:34] To step out of our comfort zone. And I think all of us desire that when we get to those points, that they would be something that we are acting out of faith. You know, we want to live in a way that reflects the faith that we have in God.
[2:50] That God is going to be with us. That He's going to be a part of what we're doing. That this decision is somehow blessed by God. But it's hard to know, isn't it? You know, was Horace Burgess, you know, making a statement of faith?
[3:05] Or was he just a, you know, hillbilly who's pretty good at carpentry? The story of faith is the story of Noah. That's the story that we get here with Noah.
[3:17] Faith can be confusing and scary. Can you really live by faith? What can we see from Noah? That's the question we want to deal with. And so, I want to look at just three pieces of this.
[3:28] I want to look at the problems that we find in faith. I want to look at the obedience that comes with faith. And the power that we have for faith. So, the problems, the obedience, and the power.
[3:39] So, let's start at the beginning of this Noah story. Don't worry, we're not going to read the whole thing today. Because it would take a while. But we are going to read some.
[3:50] So, start at verse 9. These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God.
[4:03] And Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Now, the earth was corrupt in God's sight. And the earth was filled with violence. And God saw the earth. And behold, it was corrupt.
[4:14] For all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth. And God said to Noah, I have determined to make an end of all flesh. For the earth is filled with violence through them.
[4:26] Behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Make yourselves an ark of gopher wood. Make rooms in the ark. And cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you are to make it.
[4:36] The length of the ark, 300 cubits. Its breadth, 50 cubits. Its height, 30 cubits. Make a roof for the ark. And finish it to a cubit above. And set a door of the ark in its side.
[4:47] Make it with lower, second, and third decks. For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life under heaven. Everything that is on the earth shall die.
[4:58] But I will establish my covenant with you. And you shall come into the ark. You, your sons, your wife, your sons' wives with you. And every living thing of all flesh you shall bring, two of every sort into the ark, to keep them alive with you.
[5:13] They shall be male and female, of the birds according to their kinds, and the animals according to their kinds, and every creeping thing to the ground according to its kind. Two of every sort shall come in to you to keep them alive.
[5:25] Also take with you every sort of food that is eaten and stored up. It shall serve as food for you and for them. Noah did this. He did all that God commanded him.
[5:36] Let's stop there. What's the problem? It's pretty obvious what the problem is. This is insane. That's the problem. There's at least two problems. I can probably come up with more, but at least two.
[5:48] The first problem is to have faith requires that you sometimes confront your own convictions. Faith requires that you confront your own convictions.
[6:02] You know, we have to just talk about this. Modern people, when they come to this passage and this story, they're first confronted by the scientific problems it presents. I mean, to achieve a worldwide flood of this magnitude, here's what it would require in terms of water.
[6:16] It would require so much water that the earth's weight would grow by three quintillion tons. That's three with 18 zeros. You would have to fill and empty 1,700 vertical feet in just 150 days.
[6:36] That's 100 feet a day of filling and letting out. This would triple the amount of water in the ocean. In fact, it would make the earth so heavy, it might change our gravitational, our orbital weight going around the sun.
[6:54] Some Bible scholars, people who are orthodox and who believe the truth of the scriptures and of this story, propose the flood to be a more localized flood in that area of the world.
[7:05] And that answers some of the logistical problems. But still, even if you grant that, there are still challenges to this text. It requires an imagination to believe in these incredible things.
[7:20] And when you have that, you add on that there are other flood stories in the history of the world. If you look up the flood on TikTok, you're going to find all sorts of the Enuma Elish, and you're going to find the Epic of Gilgamesh, and all these things that have flood stories.
[7:34] How does those fit? There are tons of details that I would be happy to talk with you about. But the bottom line is this, that for modern people, we come to a story like this, and we automatically begin to realize how deeply ingrained in our souls is our own skepticism.
[7:55] How deeply ingrained it is for us to wonder, can something actually happen that I can't scientifically understand in this moment? That's not to say that this can't be understood scientifically.
[8:09] It's to say that it's really hard with just what we're seeing here. You know, maybe that assumption that everything that I understand must be something proved by science, maybe that assumption should be questioned in your own soul.
[8:26] Because isn't the belief itself that something that I believe has to be proved by science, isn't that a claim for which you can't prove why that's important?
[8:37] The claim itself is a circular claim. But see, what if there is more going on in the world than we can scientifically explain right now?
[8:49] After all, to be a Christian requires that you believe that Jesus rose from the dead. Again, something that cannot be explained. But in our modern moment, what if we as Christians were actually people who believed that this world was enchanted?
[9:05] That there is mystery in this world. That there's more going on than you can see and touch and explain. It's not different than what you can explain. It's just more. So, we have to...
[9:18] Faith requires us to imagine that there's more going on, to confront some of our convictions. The second thing is that faith requires us to trust God's view of things, God's assessment of things.
[9:31] Verses 11 and 12 are pretty stark. Did you notice this? Three times it repeats that God's assessment of humanity. There's one word that it repeats. Did you notice? Corrupt.
[9:43] The people are corrupt. Just a few verses before this, in chapter 6, it says that the Lord saw the wickedness of man, that the wickedness of man was great in the earth. Every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was evil continually.
[9:58] You know, God is not pulling punches here. He's not hedging. He's not saying, well, those people were really bad, but you know what? I really liked these other people. It is a stark assessment of the reality of the world.
[10:11] The situation among humans was really ugly. I don't know if any of you watched the Noah movie that came out back in 2014, starring Russell Crowe. I put a link to the trailer on the website.
[10:25] I really liked this movie, but disclaimer, disclaimer, it is not a kid's movie. It's really dark, and it is not trying to give you a commentary on the Bible.
[10:37] Like, there are, like, stone monsters and stuff. So, like, this is not a commentary on the Bible. Just want to make that clear. But I do think that it gets to some of the tension of this text.
[10:48] And I really liked the movie. So, decide on your own. I'm not telling you to go watch it. What it does is it portrays humanity really in a fascinating way.
[11:01] Every time it looks at the other humans who are on the earth, it's dark. And the people are dirty, and they are violent and oppressive and ruthless, and they're on the very edge of staying alive.
[11:14] And that's the picture you get from Genesis chapter 6. But here's the problem. We don't like to see things that way.
[11:25] You know, we kind of look at that, and we have our storybooks, you know, where everybody looks nice. We have our storybooks, and we kind of think, well, I'm sure that there were some good people who loved their kids, and who gave money to strangers, and had cute houses, and who loved their children, and who rooted against Alabama.
[11:45] And, you know, I'm sure that there were good people like that. But that isn't how things look from God's perspective. There's an arresting holiness to God here.
[11:58] God seems heartbroken over the corruption of humanity. He's heartbroken over the impact that sin has had to diminish and distort, and to take apart the goodness of the creation that He worked so hard to make.
[12:14] And so, He resolved to do something about it. In verses 13 to 17, you see three more repetitions. There's going to be a theme here. Three more repetitions of, you see the word, I there.
[12:27] God taking responsibility. In verse 13, He says, and I have determined. Later on in that verse, He says, I will destroy. Verse 17, He says, I will bring a flood.
[12:39] God is taking responsibility for dealing with the corruption of humanity Himself. What He's saying is, the problem's worse than you think.
[12:51] It's so bad that I'm going to have to do something about it. There's an interesting little textual thing here.
[13:03] The Hebrew word back in verse 11, I think, for violence, it was violence on the earth. It uses that word twice. Here's how you pronounce the Hebrew word for violence here.
[13:16] Hamas. Now, the political organization Hamas did not take that into account when they named themselves because they named it, Hamas is actually named after an acronym.
[13:28] And they, they, the, the Arabic word sounds, for Hamas sounds something like this, which means strength. But it is a fascinating reality that there is, even in our world, the remnants of what was happening here.
[13:45] And, and for us to live in a world where there is true evil and wickedness. Now, we live in a, a nice time. This is a nice place to live. You know, there's great houses.
[13:57] You know, other than traffic, which you'd, you know, we'd love for people to figure that out. But, you know, other than that, it's a pretty good place to live. Things are pretty. It's fall. The weather's been great. And yet, there are parts of the world, and at times, God is so kind to give us times of peace.
[14:15] And yet, the reality is, is that core to our world is violence, corruption. And you, none of us want to believe that this is, that we are part of this and part of the problem.
[14:30] But here's the thing. If you are a Christian, here's how, one way that you know that you're a Christian, is you have looked at yourself and you realize that you really, when you strip it all down, you are part of the corruption of this human world.
[14:48] That you look at the world and you know that this corruption is a part of your own soul. That you have begun to trust God's assessment of this world.
[15:02] To fight against that and to say it's really not that bad, I'm really better than that, is actually a sign that maybe you haven't grasped the gospel of Jesus. Because there is that corruption in our soul and God's assessment shows us that.
[15:17] This story makes no sense if you don't see the corruption of humanity because it just seems capricious on God's part.
[15:29] See, if you refuse to reckon with the reality of the corruption of humanity, you cannot see any sense in this. And here's the other thing. You will not want a God who deals justly with wickedness.
[15:43] But to become a Christian means that you see that corruption in your own soul. And what it means is you look out at a world filled with violence and you long for someone who is strong enough and good enough and wise enough to step in and make things right.
[15:57] That's what Christian hope is. We believe that though things are bad, there is one who has come to make things right. And because of that, what we realize is, is there's no other hope outside of that.
[16:12] There is no political organization that can deal with this. There is no new technology. There is no war if it is justly conducted. There is no moral improvement.
[16:24] No parenting insight. No new diet plan. No windfalls of money. No change in relationship status. Nothing can address the corruption in the hearts of each one of us except for something outside of us.
[16:40] What Martin Luther calls an alien righteousness. Nothing except God would enter in. That's the problem. That's a problematic part of this text. It's a hard thing to wrap your mind around.
[16:51] But it takes us somewhere. What do we do with that? Let's read a little bit into chapter 7. The obedience of faith. Then the Lord said to Noah, Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you are righteous before me in this generation.
[17:10] Take with you seven pairs of clean animals, the male and his mate, and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and his mate, and seven pairs of the birds of the heavens also, the male and female, to keep their offspring alive on the face of the earth.
[17:22] For seven days I will send rain on the earth, and forty days and forty nights, and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground. And Noah did all that the Lord had commanded him.
[17:34] Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came on the earth. And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives were with him. With him went into the ark to escape the waters of the flood.
[17:47] Of clean animals and of the animals that are not clean of birds, and everything that creeps on the ground. Two and two, male and female, went into the ark with Noah, as God had commanded Noah.
[17:58] Let's stop there. One of the most striking features of this passage, once you get past the problem of it, the despair of it, is that the way that Noah just simply takes God's command at face value.
[18:14] God gives him the directions, and Noah does them. Look, this project was crazy. It was crazy. Chris was telling me this week that when they come to the story of Noah and kids' worship every year and a half or so, they will, he's got this big spool of string, and they'll go out to the parking lot, and they'll start at the Oak School across the parking lot, and they'll, he has Jake run down the driveway all the way to the street at the entrance to the driveway.
[18:47] Because that measures out about 450 yards about how big this ark was. It was about 50 feet high.
[18:58] This thing could hold thousands of animals. And we think that it probably took Noah and his sons and whoever else helped them, probably about 75 years to complete this thing.
[19:09] And so it begs the question, honestly, was Noah insane? Like, was he insane? This is ridiculous. You know, was Noah like Noah, Noah, was Noah Noah like Horace Burgess?
[19:25] You know, with his massive treehouse? Did he have just this overactive imagination? Well, there are two details we're given about Noah. The first one is, his character was unique within the corruption of humanity.
[19:37] Back at verse 9, you get three details about Noah, three words. He was righteous, he was blameless, and he walked with God. He was righteous. He was obedient.
[19:48] That's what it means. He was blameless. That meant that he was whole. Whole. He wasn't corrupted in the same way. He was whole and complete. And third, that he walked with God.
[19:59] He had a right relationship with God. Now, I do want to be clear. That does not mean that Noah was perfect. Some people have talked about that. Noah was, you know, unlike any of us. He was just perfect and was better than everybody else.
[20:10] That's not what the Bible is getting at. The Bible is not making some sort of statement about Noah's, you know, his sinlessness. He's saying, though, that among the corrupted humanity of which he was a part, there was a uniqueness.
[20:27] He followed God. He obeyed and he was experiencing the fruits of his obedience. He had intimacy with God as he followed and obeyed God.
[20:39] He experienced joy and peace in his life devoted to him. That's the first detail. The second detail is there's an emphasis on Noah's continued obedience.
[20:50] We have another three times repetition here. Noah did all that the Lord commanded him. See it three times in the text. Noah simply did this crazy thing.
[21:03] Even though, even though for years and years, decades in fact, there was no sign of a flood coming. Noah built this ark in a desert.
[21:17] Where there had never been rain like that. Where he had no concept of what that could be. And yet he continued on.
[21:28] Now, we got to talk about this. This is crazy. The life of faith, what we learned from this, is that the life of faith requires obedience.
[21:40] It requires an obedience that you may not see what is going to be on the other side of. The life of faith is obedience in the midst of conflicting circumstances.
[21:53] Now, this is true in mundane ways, you know. You show up to church every week before you know whether or not it's going to be any good. You know? It could be a total dud.
[22:06] But you show up. In work, in your office, you act with integrity even if you're not sure if that's going to help the bottom line.
[22:17] But you have to act in integrity and treat people with integrity. Children, you have to obey your parents even when you don't understand why they asked you to do something.
[22:28] You may have even asked them, why do I need to do this? And all you get is because I told you so. And yet you still have to obey. But we also do this in much larger ways that are not mundane.
[22:44] I think about our unmarried people. I imagine someone who deeply desires to be married. And yet they are committed to the obedience of sexual fidelity.
[22:57] And maybe so committed that that's actually cost them relationships that they could have had. And yet they've walked in obedience to God.
[23:09] Out of obedience to God, they are continuing on a path even though they do not see what will come at the end of it. They may not get what they want. But they're obeying.
[23:21] I just want to say that some of your unmarried friends are the most obedient and faithful people you know. See, faith requires obedience.
[23:37] Faith is not simply a feeling of confidence about something. It's making decisions based on what you believe to be true, not what you can see.
[23:48] Faith is obeying even when you can't see what good may come. But you obey anyway. But saying that, golly, that is difficult. In fact, that's the real drama of the text.
[24:02] The real drama of the text is that once you see past the problems of the text, you see the obedience of Noah, you get to see how hard this must have really been.
[24:15] I put myself in Noah's shoes for a minute, and I can viscerally feel the kind of self-doubt. You know, laying in bed at night and being like, am I crazy? Like, am I really crazy?
[24:27] I might be. For him to feel the shame of the way other people looked at him. Everybody thinks I'm an idiot. Why am I doing this?
[24:39] It would be better just to stop. For, you know, the long periods of silence from God that we all experience. The days where he just wants to give up.
[24:52] The complaints from his family. I've got two boys. They don't like to work a lot of times. You know, the complaints of his family. The trying to have conviction even when he doesn't feel like he has it.
[25:06] Listening to critics and wondering if maybe they're right. I mean, you know, his critics are not stupid. Maybe they're right. How can you live by faith?
[25:18] How can you live with that obedience? That's the last thing is, where do we get the power for this? There is power for faith here. Because faith is really hard. And obedience is really hard.
[25:30] I'm going to not read the rest of the passage because we just don't have time. But I want to tell you what I want you to see when you go home and read it this afternoon, which I trust all of you will.
[25:42] Take a pen with you. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to go through and I want you to circle every time you see a repetition. I want you to circle where you see numbers and lengths of time and particular details.
[25:57] Because I think what you're going to find is this. I've been talking about how earlier in a couple of earlier passages that the Hebrew way of structuring a story. You know, Westerners, we have a way of structuring a story.
[26:10] We have an introduction. We have rising action. You know, there's a rising action. There's a conflict. There's a climax. And then we have falling action, right? That's how we think about a story. You learned that in your middle school literature class.
[26:25] But for Hebrews, they had a different way of structuring the story because it was a verbal story. And so what would often happen is they would give details that matched at the beginning and the ends of the story.
[26:37] And then they would, it's like a pyramid on its side. So at the beginning and ends of the story, at different places, they would have details that matched. And so as you go through the story, there are pieces that match as you go along all the way until a central piece in the story.
[26:52] It shows where the climax is. This is called a chiasm. It's a literary feature. And you see that in this story. I wonder if you can pick up on some of the details of it at your house.
[27:05] But what you'll find is there is a very clear central phrase to the entire passage. And it's right there at chapter 8, verse 1. But God remembered Noah.
[27:20] But God remembered Noah. In this whole thing with all the water and all the animals and two by two and everything we put into storybooks, all of that for the Hebrew listener, what they were hearing, what Moses wanted the people of Israel who were walking around a desert to hear, was this one phrase.
[27:38] God remembered Noah. See, the idea of God remembering is common in the Old Testament. God is constantly remembering His promises. He's remembering His covenants.
[27:49] He's remembering His people. He acts according to His prior promises. He remembers His people. And that's the focus of this. In fact, let me say it another way.
[28:00] But oftentimes we come to this passage and what we want to see from this passage, what we focus on is this. We say, well, look at how great Noah is for obeying in faith.
[28:15] And that's true. We just pointed that out. But that's not the point of this passage. The point of this passage is, look how great God is because no matter how hard life gets, no matter how hard obedience might be, no matter how clouded the future may get, God always remembers His people.
[28:36] That is the point. And this simply isn't an Old Testament message. This pops out all over the place in the New Testament. In fact, when the angel came to Zechariah, the prophet who, well, we won't get into all of his story, but he came to Zechariah.
[28:52] Zechariah was mute for a season. And when he spoke, he prophesied. And the primary thing he said was that God has remembered His covenant.
[29:04] God has remembered, and Jesus was the verification that God remembered. God had not forgotten His people. It had been 400 years, but God had not forgotten His people.
[29:15] He remembered His promises. See, look, if you are somebody who has struggled a long time in attempting to be obedient to God, you need to hear that God has not forgotten you.
[29:35] Your obedience is important. Some of you are trusting God for something that seems completely impossible and impractical. God hears your prayers.
[29:49] The fact that you do not see the end of this does not mean that God doesn't remember His promise. Some of you have been praying for wayward children for decades.
[30:03] God has not forgotten about you or His promises. Some of you are seeking to obey in the midst of besetting sins that you seem to not be able to get free from.
[30:16] And you need to hear that God has not forgotten you. Some of you are looking at taking a risk. You're not sure whether to do this thing or maybe to not do that thing that you thought you might want to do.
[30:32] You're in a place where you're not sure what sort of risk to take. And I want to tell you, your risk may not turn out the way that you want to. This is not a promise that whatever you decide to do just because you think it's in faith is going to work out.
[30:43] It's not. But what it is saying is that sometimes you are called to a risk that you just have to live into and believe that God has not forgotten you.
[30:54] Whether it succeeds or fails is less important than the fact that God has not forgotten you. Some of you are just struggling with the headwinds of our culture right now.
[31:06] You know, the ineffective politics and angry people and the unceasing waves of sexuality and materialism and technology and financial pressures. You need to remember.
[31:17] You need to hear that God remembers you in the midst of that. God has not left us in this. Some of you, maybe there's a couple of you that have found over the last months that your heart is being stirred to take a risk for God.
[31:37] To do something that is totally out of your comfort zone. And I want you to hear that you can confidently move forward in faith because God remembers.
[31:49] See, if your idea is that the hope for your life is that you're going to have some sort of self-improvement, that you're going to obey enough, that you're going to figure out how to get it right, I just want to remind you that that is not the message of the Bible.
[32:09] The message of the Bible from beginning to end is that there is a major problem in this world, and you and I are a part of it, and God remembers His people.
[32:20] He's going to show up, and when He does, it will be more than you or I can imagine. And in the meantime, we are called to obey, even when it's hard.
[32:33] We are called to believe in something that we cannot see yet. We are called to take our circumstances now and to lean into something bigger and better and more solid and more secure.
[32:49] That is what the gospel teaches us. That's the invitation for you. Lean in more deeply. Lean in deeply.
[32:59] Lean in deeply. People may call you a hillbilly who wants to build a treehouse, or some dude who wants to build an ark.
[33:12] Don't worry about it. You've got the God of heaven and earth who remembers you. Amen. Let's stop there, and I'll pray.
[33:22] Lord, it is so hard for us to live by faith. We desperately need your help. There are so many parts of our lives that feel out of control that we don't know which way to turn next, and we need your grace to empower in us faith.
[33:40] Would you do that even as we come to your table, the place where the gospel is shown to us, where we taste and see the truth that you remember us?
[33:51] For we pray it in Christ's name. Amen.