This morning I got
great encouragement from considering what it was like for Noah to hear what God
told him, wait approximately a century to see God’s word fulfilled, and
persevere through decades of obedience without any new experiences to help him
along.[1]
Message: Noah is an
example of obedient faith as an expression of the righteousness that is by
faith. And, he did not have mentoring from ANYONE!
What hit me first
was that “Noah was a righteous man”
(Genesis 6:9). This was not under the law since it would be a long time before
the law was given to Moses. It was not under the gospel, since that was still a
couple of millennia away.
Isn’t that weird?
Without the law, and without the gospel, Noah was a righteous man. All my excuses
for not living a righteous life… exit stage right!
Did Noah have things
easier than us? Not according to God’s description of the society in which he
lived: “The LORD saw that the wickedness
of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart
was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5).
Isn’t that weird? Noah
experienced the worst our world could ever be. Even our present evil age is
still constantly influenced by the presence of the church living for Jesus. All
excuses… well, you get the picture.
Now consider this:
Let’s imagine that I am one of Noah’s sons. Not long after I am born, my Dad
begins building this ark because he said God told him to do it. During that
time, I don’t see any of his friends support him. I see him living a righteous
life in direct contradiction to absolutely everything I see in the world around
our family. We are the only family living like this. Everyone around us, anyone
outside my family I might wish to have as a friend, is living in godless
contradiction to my family’s way of life.
This really hit me
because of the excuses I have heard from my teen years until now from
professing Christians justifying why they need to have non-Christian BFF, or be
quiet about their Christian faith because they don’t want to stand out, or any
other variation of, “everyone else is doing it!”. If I had grown up in Noah’s
family I would have lived what many church-going kids imagine is the worst life
ever. To miss out on things in the world because Dad says we are not of the
world, what could be worse than that?[2]
Okay, I will leave
it there for now. Simply thinking about growing up in such a home where a Dad persevered
in righteousness no matter what anyone else was doing, having no mentors to
encourage him, and working with him on this project that no one had ever done
before, assures me that Noah and his family would have had more external
problems living in righteousness, and doing this work, than any of us have even
in this present world. And, they didn’t even have power tools to build the ark!
The key is the same
now as it was then: “Noah walked with God”.[3]
Noah walked with God prior to experiencing God’s deliverance through the flood,
prior to God’s covenant with Abraham, prior to God giving the Law through Moses,
and prior to the coming of Christ securing our eternal redemption.
Noah, at least in
some sense, walked alone with God. Or, perhaps it would be better to say, he
walked with God irrespective of what anyone else was doing. Instead of any minimizing
of his relationship with God because he had no mentors or supporters, God was
enough reason to walk with God.
Let me repeat that: GOD
is enough reason to walk with God!
What encouragement
do we have in this regard? That God has poured out his Spirit upon his church
and now every believer, and every church, is given the same opportunity and
provision to walk with God. Paul taught us to “be filled with the Spirit,”[4]
how to “walk by the Spirit,”[5]
how to be “led by the Spirit,”[6]
what it looks like to bear “the fruit of
the Spirit”,[7]
and how to “live by the Spirit,” and “keep in step with the Spirit.”[8]
There is no way we should
look at Noah and think he had it easier than us, better than us, or that he was
stronger than us. He was a man who walked with God, even with the limited
revelation of God’s word compared to what we have today, because God was enough
reason to walk with God.
Now, when a man
walks with God in the righteousness of faith, and God tells him to do something
crazy like build an ark, what does he do?
Let’s personalize
this: if you are seeking to walk with God by faith, and your sark keeps telling
you how hard done by you are, and how no one has such a difficult set of
circumstances to live in, or so many people against you, or so many
disappointments in life, or so many rejections, or traumatic experiences (or
anything else any of us could add as the nagging accusations and justifications
of our sarks), and then God shows you things in his word that require a life of
faith that seems quite impossible to you (because it is),[9]
what do you do next? Is it obedient faith,[10]
or self-justified disobedience?[11]
While we’re
ruminating on an honest answer, consider how Noah responded to God in his
impossibly difficult situation: “By faith
Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear
constructed an ark for the saving of his household.”[12]
So, Noah was warned
by God about the coming judgment, and was given one plan to save himself and
representatives of all God’s land-bound creatures. This was the only plan “for the saving of his household.” What
happened to him? Two things.
First was faith.
Noah had faith in God, and so it was settled in his heart that what God said
was true, it would happen as God said, and God’s solution could be trusted.
Noah also knew that, because God gave him a plan of salvation, the coming
judgment would not befall the earth until the ark was completed. However many
decades it took to complete the job, Noah believe God and acted on his words.
Second, Noah did his
work “in reverent fear”. Yes, there
was reason to be afraid of the coming judgment, but not for Noah. His reverent
fear was a loving response to his God. God had declared judgment on the earth,
and told Noah that the salvation of his family required the building of an ark,
so Noah had to involve himself in the work. Every beam that was trimmed to
size; every peg that was hammered into place; every brush-stroke of pitch to
seal the boat from the floodwaters, had to be carried out with the
consciousness that his family, and animals, had to survive the flood. What a
fearfully heavy weight of responsibility for him and his sons.
All of this
consideration this morning was like a sledge-hammer to all my sarky excuses for
not living in the righteousness of faith in our present evil age. Yes, the age
is evil, but no worse than Noah’s age. Yes, we will often find ourselves
working in isolation with nary a mentor or brother to help us figure out what
to do, but no different than Noah’s day.
In other words, Noah
is one of the members of that “great a
cloud of witnesses,”[13]
who give us all the testimony and encouragement we need to live by faith, and
to “also lay aside every weight, and sin
which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set
before us”.[14] Noah
ran his race as it was set before him, and we have every reason to run the race
set before us.[15]
What is more, we now
have the opportunity of, “looking to
Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set
before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right
hand of the throne of God.”[16]
We can, “consider him who endured from
sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or
fainthearted.”[17]
We must believe this gives us at least as much as Noah had in his walk with
God.
This morning it felt
like I had such a brief introduction to Noah as a man who walked with God
without mentors, without brothers bolstering him up in his faith, and without
even one other church or pastor anywhere in the world following God with the
same faith. He simply saw God as enough reason to walk with God.
Now, is it just me,
or does Noah’s example sound a lot like what Paul wrote us:
Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.[18]
For me, it doesn’t
matter if God never gives me mentors, or even brotherly support (or approval
from my parents, siblings, other churches, yada, yada, yada). It is enough that
HE works in me/us, and that he is helping me both “will” and “work” what is
pleasing in his sight, so I only need to join his work with fear and trembling.
If Noah could do it then, I can certainly do it now under the fulfillment of
the gospel,[19]
with the Holy Spirit ready to fill me,[20]
and Jesus building his church that even the gates of hell cannot shut down.[21]
We are destined for
victory,[22]
so, by faith, I am going to keep finding and doing my part. There are brothers
and sisters around the world who ARE doing the same (something Noah never knew),
so often with much greater faith and devotion than I have yet to experience, so
we are not truly alone even though it sometimes feels that way.
Bottom line: God is
enough for me to live in the obedience of faith no matter what is happening, or
who is with or against us. God is enough reason to walk with God.
© 2016 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517,
Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8 ~ in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted,
Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English
Standard Version Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.)
[1]
You can read the whole story in Genesis 6-9 with lots of other references
throughout God’s Book.
[2]
Answer: being of the world, and
receiving the judgment coming upon the world.
[3]
Genesis 6:9
[4]
Ephesians 5:18
[5]
Galatians 5:16
[6]
Galatians 5:18
[7]
Galatians 5:22-23
[8]
Galatians 5:25
[9]
Impossible to “you”, not to God!
[10]
Romans 1:5: 16:26
[11]
Self-justified disobedience is when our sark/flesh exalts our selves as the
most wise guru who can tell us what to do, and so our sarky/fleshly selves tell
us why it makes perfect sense that we do not do the things we ought to do, or
why we should do the things which ought not to be done. Paul, of course,
explains how this works in Romans 7, and gives a thoroughly adequate and
victorious answer to this ailment in Romans 8.
[12]
Hebrews 11:7
[13]
Hebrews 12:1 (based on Hebrews 11).
[14]
Hebrews 12:1
[15]
Of course, brother Paul is also quite delighted to help us with this as well.
His testimony is added to the mix in Philippians 3:1-17.
[16]
Hebrews 12:2
[17]
Hebrews 12:3
[18]
Philippians 2:12-13
[19]
Mark 1:14-15; John 19:30
[20]
Ephesians 5:18
[21]
Matthew 16:18
[22]
I John 5:4; Romans 8:37
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