Genesis 6_9–17 ~ In the Ark or Under the Wrath？
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Summary
Join us this week as we begin our journey through Genesis chapter 6 of the Book of Genesis, where we see God's faithfulness in preserving the seed of the woman, the messianic line, and the creation of the Ark of the Covenant.
Transcript
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well it's good to be back in genesis um by god's grace we will be starting the journey to the
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famous flood narrative i've never taught through the flood narrative before and so it's a great
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privilege to study this text deeply um since we've taken a few weeks off i just want to remind you
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of the context of how we got here where are we at in chapter six
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during the fall and humanity's expulsion from the garden in genesis chapter three we saw the
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initiation of god's promise and there was a promise that there would be enmity between the
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seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman and cain represented that seed of the serpent and he
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murdered the righteous seed, which is Abel. But God raised up in his grace, Seth as a replacement
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for Abel. And he became that promised line. Now, Cain was cursed and he was driven out from his
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people and he was caused to create a civilization apart from God. Whereas Seth and his descendants,
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in contrast, called upon the name of the Lord. And so there's this division that's happening
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between Cain and his people and Seth and his people,
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the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman.
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And we read about that in the genealogy in chapter five.
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In Genesis chapter six, we encountered the Nephilim
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And the Nephilim, whom we understood to be some form of angel-human hybrids where demons came down from their abode and their home,
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and they had relations with the women of the earth, creating these demonic-human hybrids that were also giants.
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And that was part of Satan's attempt to corrupt and extinguish the seed.
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It's all about the seed. It's about the war between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman.
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And if you can pervert or distort or extinguish the seed through biological perversion,
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then it's a great effort to get rid of that serpent crusher that's coming down to the line of Seth, the preserved Messiah.
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And this was that effort. This is that war of those seeds.
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and all of those events during these events the world became increasingly corrupt not just morally
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but also biologically you had giants you had demon human people you had um violence you had
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this wicked wicked place here on the earth and it was setting the stage for global judgment
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And so all of this is kind of working towards this global judgment of the flood.
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Now, our passage, we're not only going to see God's faithfulness in preserving that seed of the woman, the messianic line,
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but we're also going to see how the ark serves as a type of Christ.
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And what I mean by a type of Christ, it is typological.
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It is a kind of a hint, a vision of what Christ does for us.
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It is a parallel that I want you to see in the fact that it preserves Noah from the wrath of God
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in the same way that Christ preserves us from the wrath of God.
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So we'll make these connections as we get through the text.
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it says these are the generations of noah noah was a righteous man blameless in his generation
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noah walked with god and noah had three sons shem ham and japheth all right first if you remember
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uh genesis is literally the book of beginnings that's what it means it is the book of beginnings
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Now, 12 times we see this phrase, this is the generations.
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And each one of those times is a distinct section in the book of Genesis.
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And it divides the book into these covenantal movements.
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They're almost like if you had a table of contents, those would be the key areas when
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you see these are the generations of the heavens and the earth.
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These are the generations of Adam, or these are the generations of Noah.
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So this verse tells us that we're entering into a significant portion,
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a new portion in this chapter, the sixth chapter of Genesis.
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Second, this verse is intended to be a statement of contrast.
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we're not these people who just don't know how to interpret our Bibles,
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So you're going to look back to chapter, or verse six, chapter,
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and you're going to see the context that was said right before this.
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It was the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth
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and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continuously.
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So you hear that and then boom, Noah was a righteous man walking with God,
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yet you have this beautiful, righteous, blameless man in Noah.
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And so, this is not meant to show that Noah had no sin.
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Well, because Genesis chapter 15, verse 6 says of Abraham, it says,
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And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.
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So if Noah's righteous, how does God impute righteousness to a sinner?
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This is a very important, fundamental theological question.
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How does God take an unrighteous person and make them righteous?
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Well, he imputes the righteousness of God to him by faith.
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And we see this in Genesis chapter 15, verse 6.
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It says, and he believed the Lord, faith, and he counted it to him as righteousness.
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That is that belief, not works, not being better, not being good, but works or faith is the means
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by which God views a man as being righteous and blameless, not because he is righteous and
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blameless in and of himself, but because he has the righteous and blameless character of Christ
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imputed to him by faith. That's what you need. You need someone else's record on judgment day.
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I need the record of Christ, the perfect law keeper, the perfect righteous man.
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Not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, that comes from works,
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Do you have a righteousness that comes from faith?
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The question every person needs to ask themselves is
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but am I righteous because I have faith in Christ?
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You will need a righteous verdict on judgment day
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and it's not going to come on your sinful record.
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By Noah being warned by God about things not yet seen,
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in reverence prepared an ark for the salvation of his household.
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God saves households right there, a little Presbyterian plug.
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So again, you have the New Testament confirming
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Then the text also says that Noah walked with God.
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I hope that on my gravestone, it says, walked with God. What a great phrase to be remembered
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by. Do you walk with God? The word actually means that your proximity to the godliness
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of his ways is marked upon you. Is that your life? Do you walk with God or are you kind of like,
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I walk about 150 yards away from God. No, you want to be walking shoulder to shoulder with
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the Lord. Is that true of your own life? Next, we are introduced to Noah's three sons. We see
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Shem, Ham, and Japheth. But interestingly, the order of age, according to Genesis 9, 24, 10,
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21, 6, 18, 7, 13, tells us that Japheth is actually the oldest. But why do we have this
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order where you have Shem, Ham, and Japheth. What's the order there? Now, the reason Shem is
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always listed first every time you see these three boys is that he has the most prominence
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of redemptive history. Shem is, as I mentioned last week, Shem is the Shemites or where we get
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the Semites, right? In the phrase we often hear today is the anti-Semites, right? Well, no,
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Shem is the father of those peoples, and it's the people of the Middle East and the people
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of Jerusalem and Israel. And he is listed first because of the prominence that Christ would come
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through his line. Now, Ham, the second in this list, of the three boys, is not actually blessed.
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Himself is not blessed. Cain and his son is actually specifically cursed. We'll see that
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in Genesis chapter 9. But Ham's descendants go on to form many of the nations that interact
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specifically with Shem. And so they form the Philistines, they form Egypt, they form the
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Amorites. And so in terms of the redemptive narrative, you have Shem, you have Ham, and then
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you have Japheth. And so the reason you have this connection where you have Ham, who's the youngest,
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is actually put second here is because of the order of relationship to the redemptive history
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of the Bible. And then Japheth, who's last in this list, is blessed and is said to dwell in
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the tents of Shem. And this is really a prophecy we'll talk about when we get to Genesis chapter
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nine, but it's a prophecy. Japheth is the father of the Greco-Roman European arm of humanity.
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And so it's really a prophecy about the Greco-Roman European Gentiles receiving Christ,
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that we will dwell in the tents of Shem. There's a connection there. So when you see
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how the faith has gone through Rome and Greece and Western civilization to Europe and to the
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Americas, that's actually a fulfillment of this prophecy that we're going to be talking about
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here in Genesis. And so Moses continues in verse 11 and 12 with another contrast. So follow along
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if you want, if you look at your Bibles, it says, now the earth was corrupt in God's sight, and the
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earth was filled with violence and God saw the earth and behold, it was corrupt for all flesh
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had corrupted their way on the earth. Now, in comparison to Noah's righteousness and
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blamelessness, he looks, God looks back at the world and he's like, okay, first it's like
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everybody's evil. Noah's righteous. Everybody's evil, right? That's kind of the trend that we're
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seeing there. It's trying to highlight this contrast that's being demonstrated here. And
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the entire world was corrupt. It means a ruin beyond repair. It means falling apart. It was
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characterized by wickedness and unbelief. And Moses says in verse 12, he says, all flesh was
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corrupt. Now, this certainly refers to the moral reality of the flesh, but it's also referring,
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I believe, to the corruption biologically. You have the Nephilim coming in, you have these weird
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demon-angel hybrids. The world was wild before Noah, right? And you see this corruption.
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And so when all flesh is corrupt, you can certainly mean morally, certainly mean spiritually.
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I think it also means, could mean biologically with these Nephilim involved.
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And what's also great is you get this picture that Noah's family is like this last preserved
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purity of humanity. You know, this last hope. And unfortunately, many retellings,
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you might've heard this as a child, many retellings of Noah's Ark portray Noah,
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like pleading with the crowds because scripture says that he was a preacher of righteousness.
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But you never see in the scriptures, Noah pleading with the crowds and inviting anybody
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onto the ark. Okay. There was never one invitation, come, please repent and come sit on the ark. That
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is totally extra biblical. There's nothing in the text that says that. The world was thoroughly
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corrupt. And Noah's household stood as this final preserved line. And it was guarded by God from
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this total corruption. And nobody was going to be saved except Noah and his family. If they were to
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be saved, they would have been saved. And so nobody was to be saved. And so from a narrative
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standpoint, it's kind of like a scene out of the Lord of the Rings, right? It's like this army,
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You have like this handful of people against this like massive army of orcs and evil people
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And the story, however, is never about the size of the army.
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It's always about God and that somehow God's will cannot be, his sovereign purposes cannot
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And that the most bleak situation that you could possibly imagine, all of humanity, millions
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upon millions upon millions of people are corrupted and evil. And all you have is Noah
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and his family sitting right there. And you got to be thinking, how is this going to work?
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And even when things in our own lives appear just utterly corrupt,
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you know, they're dark, they're chaotic, they're frustrating, they're completely overtaking.
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When you see crime, when you see division in our world, when you see the wars, the moral decay, and you're tempted to believe that it can only get worse, that God has just let this place go, remember that Noah stood and stared at a circumstance that was far more complex, far more wicked than anything you have ever seen.
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and God turned that extremely wicked situation into good. God causes all things to work together
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for good for those who are called according to his purposes. It's an amazing promise.
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And so whatever your circumstances are, they were not as bleak as Noah's. And the next verse,
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This is a great science fact for you kids that are in science class with Mr. Johnson.
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You cannot separate the condition of the earth from the condition of humanity.
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Adam was formed from what? The Adamah. Adam was formed from the Adamah.
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And if you remember Genesis 3.17, God does not merely curse Adam personally.
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curses the ground because of you. And it shows that the earth is covenantally bound to its federal
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head, which is Adam. So when Adam falls, not only does all humanity fall, but creation falls with
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him. And so when man, as God's image bearer and vice regent on the earth, when man rebels,
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the earth under his dominion also inherits the consequences of that fall.
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so paul actually confirms this in romans 8 i did one of my favorite sermons and i only said that
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because the text is so wonderful but one of my favorite sermons is in romans 8 20 through 22
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it says the creation was subjected to futility and has been groaning together in pains of childbirth
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until now in other words it's it's really easy to look at creation and think like you look out
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and you go, oh, it's so pretty. Or you go stand in front of a waterfall and you go, oh, it's so
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wonderful. And you think to some degree that humanity is evil and creation is good. And you
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go, no, the reality is humanity is broken and creation is broken. When you look to the Grand
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Canyon and you go, oh, how beautiful is this? And then you got to realize, wait, this is actually
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a scar from God's wrath upon the earth. You have to remember that, wait, this isn't supposed to
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look like this. You see a tree fallen over and it's a beautiful bridge over a river. And you
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think, wow, how wonderful. And you're like, no, that's actually a dead tree that has fallen and
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we walk over it and it's actually not supposed to be this way. And so the earth that we have,
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as beautiful as it is, it is actually corrupt and fallen. And when God restores the earth,
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it's going to be a completely different thing. Beautiful. I think it's going to be the same
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earth restored, but it's going to be restored in a way that is so much more beautiful than it is
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today. Therefore, the flood, God's judgment upon the physical earth, he's not just killing all
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flesh. It actually says that he's killing the earth. It's not arbitrary that he's doing that.
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He's actually punishing humanity and the earth judicially.
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When humanity is redeemed, the earth will be redeemed as well.
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the length of the ark 300 cubits its breadth 50 cubits its height 30 cubits make a roof
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for the ark and finish it to a cubit above and set the door of the ark in its side
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i love that god didn't use fractions there so helpful um okay there are two words for the word
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ark in hebrew teva and eron and teva is it actually means vessel like a floating vessel
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it's the same word you actually see when moses is put into a basket he's put into a teva
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an ark, and he is floated and pushed among the reeds. Same word that we see there.
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Iran refers to a container. So they're both containers at some sense, but Iran is a different
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expression. And it's the container as we see like in the ark of the covenant, it's the container
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of God's word. And so God tells Noah to make a vessel of gopher wood. And gopher wood was a type
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of cypress or cedar. It naturally contains particular resins that make it more water
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resistant. Some scholars believe that gopher wood was some sort of ancient lamination process where
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they would take the wood and they would put pitch between it and mold them together to make some
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strength there. So there's lots of arguments about how it happened. We don't know exactly,
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But the ark was to be massive. I mean, absolutely massive. The Hebrews had two cubit lengths.
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There was a long cubit and a short cubit. The long cubit was 20 inches and the short cubit
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was 17 and a half inches. And so one commentator said, on the basis of even the shorter cubit,
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The site of the ark was 437 feet long, 72 feet wide, 43 feet high.
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Since it had three decks, it had a total deck area of approximately 95,770 square feet,
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equivalent to slightly more than the area of 20 standard college basketball courts,
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and its total volume was 1.4 million cubic feet.
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The gross tonnage was about 14,000 tons, which would place it well within the category of large modern metal ocean vessels that we see today, end quote.
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Now, the Bible does not explicitly state how long it took to build the ark, but we do know that when Noah is first mentioned in the narrative, he's 500 years old.
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for behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth
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to destroy all flesh and which the breath of life under heaven.
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And which is the breath of life under heaven.
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humanity had never experienced a flood or rain.
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and we know this because genesis 5 6 2 5 through 6 tells us the lord had yet not caused it to rain
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upon the earth but a mist or a spring went up from the land to water the whole face of the ground
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and so we don't have rain at this particular point rain as we know it today began after the flood
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and we see that in genesis chapter 8 22 while the earth remains seed time and harvest cold and heat
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summer and winter, day and night, shall not seize.
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when you see that those trees don't have leaves on them,
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that pattern is a pattern of a post-flood world.
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everything was blooming all the time in a pre-flood world.
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And he promises these patterns of seasons and climate
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that will continue to govern until the final judgment
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would not only have sounded extreme as a judgment.
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When you just say, all of you, you 150 million people
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or however many people were there, you're all gonna die.
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you add to that, you're going to die by a supernatural phenomenon that you've never
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seen before. Water is going to fall from the sky. Water's going to come up from the earth.
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And now you have a double reality of going, the first one's unbelievable. The second one's also
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unbelievable. And so if God told us he was going to send a massive flood to a particular region,
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we would believe him. We'd go, yeah, I saw the tsunamis of 2003. I know what storms and rain
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and rising waters look like. You have no problem comprehending that as a reality. But for Noah,
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imagine the kind of faith you need. Everybody's going to die but you. Okay, that's heavy as it is.
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And it's going to happen from something you've never ever seen before. And I want you to build
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a boat to survive something you've never seen before. Just think about the degree of faith
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It says the waters came from both below and above.
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In Genesis 7, 4, the text says that God sent rain,
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And it says, and the windows of heavens were opened.
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Essentially, it was speaking of a degree of a flood and water and rain that would be catastrophic,
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like just absolutely catastrophic. Now, if we assume the flood rose to say 10,000 feet,
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I know it covers the mountains, but I don't believe that there were mountains that were
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higher, much higher than that. I think the mountains that created the tectonic plates
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were a result of the flood, meaning that we are seeing the mountains that you see today,
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the jagged tops of erosion. I don't think that's how the world was prior to the flood. I think it
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was rolling hilltops with topsoil and beautiful things all across the mountains. What you look
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as beautiful from these jagged mountains is actually scars on the earth. Now, let's just say
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for mathematical reasons that the flood rose to 10,000 feet. And let's just say that only 20%
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of the waters came from rain while the rest came from the ground. I think that's maybe realistic
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from what I've studied a bit in this topic. That would mean that 2,000 feet of rainfall
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over 40 days occurred, about 25 feet per day at roughly 12 inches every hour without stopping.
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All right, it's a massive amount of rain. Now, to give you some context for how much rain that is,
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the heaviest hurricanes today drop about three inches of rain in heavy bursts and so this would
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have been four times that rate sustained for weeks and this is not like a heavy storm coming
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it was it was god's wrath made visible through nature with rising waters
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and falling waters at a rate that's almost impossible to comprehend
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And it's why God says at the very end of verse 17,
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when god judges when god's judgment comes down everything outside of his provision dies
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okay everything outside of god's provision dies and this is a sobering picture of what awaits
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for every person who does not have faith in christ this is what will happen to you it may
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not be water, but everybody will die who are outside of Jesus Christ. No one can withstand
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the wrath of God. So just as the ark bore the storm of God's judgment, the ark is bearing the
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storm of God's judgment, Christ, who is the true and greater ark, who has borne the wrath of God
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on our behalf and for everybody who has faith in Jesus. So the question is, again, it's not,
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am I a good person? The question is, are you in Christ? Do you have the protection from the wrath
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of God? Are you in the ark? Because outside of Christ, there is only a flood of wrath.
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There is only a flood of wrath if you are outside of Christ. Inside of Christ, there is life and
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peace. Inside of the ark, there was only life and peace. There was literally this beautiful
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transfer. If you see, it's the old world and it's being transferred to the new world. We will have
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the exact same thing, except we will not be in a wooden ark. We will be in Christ and he will
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transfer us from an old sinful world into a new world. And although that Noah did not go out
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pleading with the people to enter the ark, Christ now goes and he calls
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all men from every tribe, every nation, every tongue
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it for every man to die once and then the judgment.
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I don't know if you're gonna die in 10 years.
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I don't know if you're going to die from cancer.
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and every one of us are going to stand before the court