Genesis 6
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So every college and university has its traditions, little things that you're supposed to do at various times or little things that you're not supposed to do. Every college has them. You could tell me stories about whatever college or probably even high school that you went to and the traditions that it had. Well, the college that I went to, Yale University up in New England, is full of those kinds of traditions. It's a very old university, and so these things have just kind of built up over the years. One of those traditions is that in one of the main courtyards of the university, there is built into the sidewalk, it's sort of, you know, stone sidewalks, and there's built into this one intersection a millstone that tradition says belonged to Eli Yale, one of the founders of the university.
And the tradition is that on the day you begin classes at the college, you walk across that stone as you're headed to your first class. And then you never set foot on that stone again until the day you graduate and your entire class walks across it. Well, I had a friend who was a Christian, and she was particularly unsuperstitious and didn't respect any of these traditions. and so one day I was walking to class with her we had a class together and so I was walking next to her and she said you know what I'm going to step on that millstone and I was like I don't think you should do that and she said yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna do it I am gonna step on that millstone this is like our junior year so it is not time to step on the stone she said I'm gonna do it I'm gonna step on the on the rock and so we walked to that particular place on our way to class and you know normally what you do as a student you don't even without thinking about it you just sort of you know walk around it just like I'm walking around that pulpit you just don't mess with it. Well, she stopped, and she looked at the stone, and then as if she were daring
it to retaliate against her, she spit on it, and then jumped with both feet, and landed right in the middle of it, on her heels, and both her heels went out from under her, and she slammed down in the middle of the stone. And I laughed my head off. It was what is sometimes called karmic justice.
She committed the offense and she got nailed for it. Karmic justice. You've had those kinds of experiences in your life, right? Where the punishment just exactly fits the crime. It doesn't seem like it's coming out of nowhere. It just seems like the punishment is tailor-made to fit the crime. Karmic justice, meticulous justice, talionic justice. It's a big word, right? But it just comes from lex talionis, the law of the talon, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, that sort of thing.
The justice fits. It's talionic. Well, that's what I want to talk with you about today as we continue our study of the book of Genesis. For the last several weeks, we've been looking at these very first few chapters of this very first book of the Bible. They are incredibly important chapters because basically all the great themes of the storyline of the Bible, in fact, all the great themes of the gospel that you all have been singing about already this morning, are launched from right here in these chapters. And already, having studied five of them, we've seen them. We've seen the origins of sin and rebellion against God in the human heart.
We've seen the beginnings of judgment, the beginnings of grace. even in chapter 4 the beginnings of sacrifice it all starts it all gets defined right here in these first few chapters well last week we looked at the genealogy the that's a big word again that means just a list of generations the genealogy that's contained in chapter 5 we saw in that genealogy how sin's claws have dug deep into the human race and it's got an iron grip on humans and now every single person who comes along the line through the generations is dying.
It's said of them like that, you know, the drumbeat, and he died, and he died, and he died. We also saw that God seems able to break death's grip on humanity anytime he wants. You have that one entry at number 7 out of 10 where it's said that Enoch walked with God and then he was not, for God took him, and the expected line, and he died, is just not there. Well, today we're going to be looking at chapter 6, which begins, at least, the telling of one of the most epic stories, not just in the Bible, but in all of human history.
It's a story that's told in various forms, not just in the Bible, but even in other ancient texts that sort of post-date and maybe even pre-date the Bible. The story is just absolutely world famous, and it's the story of the flood that wiped out the human race and the one man and his family who survived it. And they survived it by building a huge ark that floated above the death and the chaos. The story is long.
If you look down at your Bible, we're going to be in chapter 6 today, but if you look down through it, you can see that the story really goes on for four chapters, 6, 7, 8, and 9. And today, we're just looking at the beginning of it. But what you've got here in chapter 6 is a kind of, it's a new section. You're going to see that phrase in chapter 6, verse 9. These are the generations of Noah. So that's kind of launching a brand new section. And it's advancing the story that we've been looking at for the last five or six weeks of God's relationship with humanity.
That's what's been at issue since chapter 1, since God created human beings. And this presses that story of God's relationship with humanity forward. So let's look at it and see how it begins. Chapter 6, verse 1. When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive, and they took as their wives any they chose. Then the Lord said, My spirit does not abide in man forever, for he is flesh. His days shall be 120 years.
The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, And also afterward, when the sons of God came into the daughters of man, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown. 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. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.
But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God, 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, 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. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Make yourself an ark of gopher wood.
Make rooms in the ark and cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you were to make it the length of the ark, 300 cubits. Its breadth, 550 cubits, and its height, 30 cubits. Make a roof for the ark and finish it to a cubit above. And set the door of the ark in its side. 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. But I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons' wives with you.
And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark to keep them alive with you. They shall be male and female, of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, and of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind. Two of every sort shall come into you to keep them alive. Also take with you every sort of food that is eaten and store it up. It shall serve as food for you and for them. Noah did this. He did all that God commanded him. All right, so that's where it starts.
That's where the story of Noah and the flood starts. You can see the main drama in the story, I think, pretty easily. The wickedness of humanity has reached such a height that God decides basically just to abort the whole project and start it over entirely with only the most righteous man on the planet, this man named Noah and his family. This is going back into narrative, so as is often the case with narrative, it can be a little bit difficult to identify sections to talk about and preach on.
Narratives just tend to kind of run from one event to the next. But I think if you look at it, you can see a couple of sections here. So in verses 1 to 8, you've got this sort of introductory section that sets up the problem and then quickly and pretty dramatically introduces Noah at the end there. You're not really expecting something like Noah to show up in verse 8. And yet, there he is in that one little sentence. Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. Then you've got the first part of the story of Noah in the rest of the chapter where we get to know him a little bit in verses 9 and 10.
It tells us just a little about who Noah was. And then for the rest of the chapter, you get God's instructions to Noah. Here's what's going to happen, and here's what I want you to do in response to that. And you get pretty detailed instructions about how to build the ark. Now, this chapter is just filled with questions about this thing and about that thing, and what is that, and what does that mean, and how does that fit, and why is that even said? And we're going to look at them, but I'm going to warn you up front, there aren't really many great answers to a lot of the questions that you're going to ask.
And sometimes what's going on in the Bible is that it just kind of drops these little hints here and there that there is more going on in this world than you and I are really privy to. There's more going on than we can see, and the Bible will often just pull back the curtain just a little bit, show you a little glimpse of what's going on, but then the whole thing shuts again, and you're just left to kind of wonder, what was that? What was that? A lot of that goes on right here. But I think what we get, once you get past the details, once you get past the, you know, the Shiny objects that are in the text that we want to spend a whole lot of time on.
I don't want you to miss how this story is pushing forward several super important biblical themes that are going to really continue throughout the rest of the Bible. Particularly the themes of the pervasiveness of man's sin and the tenacity of grace. Those are the two things that it's pushing on. Man's sin and God's grace. And the main idea of it for you and me and readers of this book is this. I think you're dead unless God intervenes.
You're done for unless God decides to step in and change the situation. That's the main idea. You're dead. You're done for unless God intervenes to save you. I want to look at this chapter by focusing on two major sections, those two that I gave you, and then kind of unpacking that main idea that you're dead unless God intervenes. Two points to the sermon. First looking at verses 1 to 8, then 9 through 22. Number one, the hopelessness of your sin. The hopelessness of your sin. And then second, the tenacity of God's grace.
The hopelessness of your sin and the tenacity of God's grace. All right. So the hopelessness of your sin. Chapter 5 ended with this guy Lamech ten generations after Adam. It's not the same Lamech in chapter 4. The chapter 4 Lamech is bad. The chapter 5 Lamech is good. You know, they shared names just like we do. I don't know how many of you in here are named something like Joshua, right? It's just a common name. And so the same thing with Lamech, not the same guy. It ended, though, with this fellow Lamech ten generations after Adam fathering his son Noah and declaring that maybe, just maybe, this son of mine Noah is the one who's going to finally bring relief from the curse that Adam's sin had brought on the earth.
Now that's a reference back to the promise God made in Genesis 3.15. It becomes kind of the agenda-setting verse of the entire Bible, right? Because the whole question is, who is this person that's promised in Genesis 3.15 that's going to do what Adam failed to do? Who is this new king that's going to succeed where Adam messed up? And the whole storyline of the Bible becomes, is it this guy? Is it this guy? Is it this guy? And the answer over and over and over is no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's not this guy until the New Testament opens And Matthew begins his book with his genealogy, basically screaming, this is him, this is him, this is him.
This is the king you've been waiting for. And the whole Bible comes to alight on the shoulders of Jesus as the fulfillment of Genesis 3.15. But Lamech, at the end of Genesis chapter 5, thinks that it might be his boy Noah. And so for the rest of this story, for a really long time, you're left with the question, And is it Noah? Is Noah the fulfillment of Genesis 3.15? I mean, things are looking good, right? He's the righteous one. He's the chosen one.
It's him and his descendants who are going to be the ones to start humanity over. He's like a brand new Adam. Maybe he's going to do what Adam failed to do. And the question hangs all the way into chapter 9. But it doesn't answer the question immediately. From there, from Lamech's hope, maybe this is the one, the camera kind of uses the first verses of chapter 6 to broaden out it. It sort of pans out to give us a broad look at what's going on in the world.
And what's going on in the world at this point is not good. But we're really not told that explicitly until verse 5. You ever notice that? Look down at verses 1 to 4. There is nothing explicit that is said in verses 1 to 4 about any of this that's going on. Whatever it is, we're going to talk about it. But nothing is said about it being bad or sinful, at least not explicitly. Now, you get a feeling that things are not well, mainly from verse 3, where God lessens man's lifespan.
But even there, there's no real judgment. All you get is this statement that man's life is going to get shorter. And that's what you see happening throughout the rest of the story. But there's no explicit statement yet in verses 1 to 4 that anything is bad. That doesn't come until verse 5. Now that's led some people as they've read this story to basically look at verses 1 to 4 and think of it as kind of just that. It's not an indictment of humanity in particular. It's just a sort of summary statement of what was going on at the time.
People were marrying and being given in marriage. They were being fruitful and multiplying just as they were supposed to. They were doing, some people have said, just entirely normal stuff. And so that raises the question, all right, what is going on here? What is happening and what's being said to happen in verses 1 to 4? Well, we're going to try to unpack it a little bit. There are two major issues to try to figure out here, and they both have to do with identity. So, number one, who are the sons of God who are marrying the daughters of man?
Who are they? And second, who are these Nephilim? Those two questions. Who are the sons of man that are marrying the daughters of God? Or the sons of God who are marrying the daughters of man? Who are they? And then who are these Nephilim? So let's see if we can make any progress figuring this out. So let's look at the first question first. Who are these sons of God who are marrying the daughters of man? It's right there in verses 1 and 2. It's pretty clear, I think, who the daughters of man are. They're human women.
There's not a whole lot of debate about that. So the question is who the sons of God are. Now, there are three major possibilities. First possibility is that the sons of God are just human men. And what they're doing is normal human behavior. They're getting married. So people say, you know, that's what I think, right? There's nothing supernatural about them. There's nothing wrong with what they're doing. There's a summary statement of what's going on in the world at that time. That's the first possibility. Just human men doing human things. Second possibility is that the sons of God are human men, but they're a particular kind of human man.
They're descendants of Seth. So the line of chapter 5, the sort of good line, who are taking what are called the daughters of man. So that is female descendants of Cain, in other words, kind of the bad line. So that's what some people have said. These are sons of God. They're the good line coming from Seth who are marrying the daughters of man, the bad line, and that's a violation of God's law, right? You don't cross lines like that. That's a second possibility. Third possibility is that the sons of God are angels, fallen angels, even demons, who are taking human women as wives and having sexual relations with them.
All right, so those three possibilities, what can we do with that? Well, I think we can get rid very quickly of the idea that this is just normal human behavior. It's not that. It is not just a summary of what's going on. There is bad stuff that's going on here. You can see that. I think it gets hinted at in verse 3 where God pulls back on the span of human lives. And over the course of the story now, it's not like a drop off a cliff, right, from 800 to 120.
But over time in the story, you're going to see human lifespans going down until Moses finally dies at exactly 120 years old. And so that happens, and that's a judgment on the people for that. For another thing, though, look at the specific wording of chapter 6, verse 2. There's three words that I want you to see here. The sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. That's actually just the word good. The ESV is over-translating that. The sons of God saw that the daughters of man were good, and they took.
Saw, good, took. What does that sound like? It sounds like Eve in the garden, doesn't it? When she saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food, she took it. Now that's deliberate. Moses is doing that deliberately to signal to you that what we've got here is another transgression of some law of God. So this is definitely being treated as some kind of sinful action. So who then are the sons of God?
Let's talk about that for a minute. The sons of God who are taking the daughters of man. Who are they? Are they human men from the line of Seth or are they angels? Well, here's one of those places where we don't have an awesome answer. But the best answer, even though it's hard to say for absolute certain, the best answer is that they are in fact angels. Now there's a couple of reasons for that. One reason is because that phrase, the sons of God, is always in the Bible. Every single time it's used, it's always in the Bible used of supernatural angelic beings.
That's the only way that phrase is ever used. Also, and this is kind of the kicker that locks it in, at least for me, both Peter and Jude have sections in their New Testament books where they're clearly thinking about the flood and Noah and judgment, and they both refer to angels who were judged at the time. So they're thinking about this, and they talk about these judged angels. So Peter refers to God not sparing the angels who sinned. And Jude says that the angels of the time didn't stay within their proper place, but they left their proper dwelling and sinned.
So probably what you got here is fallen angels intermixing with human women. What about the Nephilim? The word there, Nephilim, just means fallen ones, the ones who are fallen. But there's one more place in the Bible where the giant people of the promised land, you remember they come out with the big grapes and ten of the spies are terrified because they say, we've seen giants in the land and we feel like grasshoppers next to them. In fact, in that place in the Bible, they actually say, they're like the Nephilim.
And so that's a little bit of evidence that maybe what we're dealing here is a kind of race of giants that famously lived in the pre-flood world. The most important thing to notice there is that they're human, right? When you look at the end of chapter 6, verse 4, these, Nephilim, were the mighty men who were of all the men of renown. So the Nephilim are not supernatural. If you've seen the Noah movie, they're not some weird rock creature. That is not what they are. They're men, mighty men even, men of renown, but they're men.
Also, they don't seem to be the offspring of these angels marrying human women. It just doesn't read like that. In fact, it says in verse 4 there, the Nephilim were on the earth in those days when all of that was going on, and also afterward they were still here in the days when this was going on. So they don't seem to be the offspring. There's nothing in the text that says that. They were already on the earth in the days when that was going on, and they were also there after that had stopped. So lots of questions there, but I think probably what's going on here is that the Bible is just kind of pulling back the curtain just a little, And it's giving us a glimpse of some really unusual stuff that was going on in pre-flood days.
It's just giving us a picture of it. Which, if you think about it, I mean, just to try to fire your imagination about the Bible for just a minute. It's an amazing thought to think that outside of human history, outside of known history, outside of what we can see and know with our eyes and minds, there is an entire cosmic history that is playing out that you and I are not privy to. And maybe when we get to heaven, there will be some books that we can read, like the history of the angelic world, right?
I mean, you see this kind of thing all over the Bible. Revelation's full of it. Daniel is full of it. Jude makes reference to, you know, the archangel Michael fighting with the demonic prince of Persia over the body of Moses. And we have no idea what that means. but there's a whole history that's working its way out in the cosmic realms, and we have no idea what it is. There are stories that are being told. There are events that are happening. There are heroes that are being made in the angelic realms, and we have no idea of what it is.
What do I want you to see from that? What I want you to see from that, friend, is that this world is not all there is, and you shouldn't treat it like it is. There's more going on around you than you even see or realize. You've been caught up, not even just in an epic story about human beings. You've been caught up in an epic story that centers on God who is different from us. You ever ask the question if there's other intelligent life in the universe besides humans?
Yes, of course there is. Angels. There's intelligent life outside of human beings, angels, and they do things that we have no idea. Friend, this is not a small thing. This is not a small thing that you have been caught up in. This is a cosmic thing. Even if we're not told much, we are told that all of this is just deepening the wickedness and the guilt of man's sin. So I want you to see a few things here.
I want you to notice that the sin of these angels is also the sin of human beings. So when the angels come down and they take these women to be their wives and they have children with them, it's also the sin of humans, which of course is why God shortens man's lifespan in verse 3. It's because the humans are complicit in this sin. They know what they're doing. There's no indication in the text at all of the humans being forced into these marriage unions. There's no indication at all of kidnapping.
There's no indication of rape. There's nothing like that. In fact, the language that's used here is just the normal language for marrying and being given in marriage. So the best guess that I can give it anyway is that these humans are joining in these unions with these fallen angels in a bid for immortality. They see something in the glory of the angels. They're going for immortality. And so, in a kind of talionic justice, God shortens their lives as punishment. Oh, you want to live forever? Well, your life is now shorter, right?
It's a kind of karmic, talionic justice. Well, the whole thing comes to a head in verse 5 with this incredible statement. Look at verse 5. 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 all the time. You would be hard-pressed to find another statement in the Bible that so vividly describes the depth of human sin. I mean, this is just so vivid and so deep that it's almost impossible to think of another single sentence in the Bible that describes it this vividly.
The language just piles up to describe how deep man's sin really is. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth. Every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. There's no escape from that And the thing is, as the Bible plays out What you begin to see and understand Is that that verse 5 is being applied Not just to the people pre-flood But to all of us Because the things that this verse says about them Are said about us in other places Let me show you a few things here to notice First of all, I want you to notice that man's sin is a twisted perversion of what God intended man's sin against God his wickedness is a twisted perversion of what God intended and you can almost feel the anguish of that perversion in the sentence the Lord saw the wickedness of man was great that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually the twisted perversion do you remember
Do you remember one of the last times that the phrase, the Lord saw, is used? What did God see and what did he say after he saw it? He saw what he had made and he declared that it was very good. That's what God's intention was in creating human beings. He intended for human beings to spend their lives worshiping him, doing good, reflecting his good rule of the cosmos to those under them.
That's what he intended. And yet here, what does the Lord see? He sees that the wickedness of man is great in the earth. Adam's job, Adam's whole job was to guard the Garden of Eden from evil and then to fill the earth and subdue it. Put it under his rule and therefore God's good rule. But now, now look what's happened. Look at the perversion that's happened. The earth, far from being subdued under God's good rule, groans under the weight of mankind's wickedness.
And friends, that's just as true, if not more true, of our age and our world as it was of the pre-flood world. All you got to do is look at the headlines. All you got to do is doom scroll through X for a few minutes. And you're going to see that our world groans under our wickedness. Wars, oppression, rape, murder, abortion, homosexuality, trans ideology.
All of it, God sees. And he declares it to be wicked. And it is not what he intended for us. second thing i want you to see here is that man's sin is deliberate it is not accidental man's sin is deliberate it is not accidental you can see it in that word intention you see that the word intention means a plan the lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and every plan of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually we talked about this a few weeks ago sin is not some little accident it's not a it's not a heavenly traffic violation. It's an intention, a plan. It's a high-handed rebellion against God, and a declaration of independence from Him. Friend, if you're going to ever understand the good news of Jesus Christ, you're going to have to understand that your sin is not an accident, and it's not small. It is intentional, high-handed rebellion against your Creator.
If you don't understand that, the gospel makes no sense whatsoever. It feels to you. You hear us talking about salvation, and you hear us talking about forgiveness, and you're like a kid in a swimming pool who's doing just fine, but his crazy uncle runs up and throws him a life preserver and says, I'm saving you. And the kid looks up and goes, I don't need to be saved. If you don't understand what sin is, then that's how you feel. But when you understand that sin is intentional, high-handed rebellion against the king, and that the right response of that king is to kill you for it.
Well, then somebody running and saying, I'm here to save you, is glorious. Third, I want you to see here that man's sin is deep. It is not on the surface. Man's sin is deep. It goes all the way to the bottom of who we are as human beings. That's the meaning of the words, thoughts of his heart. You see that? And every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
So what does that mean? It means that sin is not just a matter of the actions that we do. It's not just a matter of the things that we do or actually say. And some people will talk sometimes about the fact that, well, I've got a filter, right, between right here and right in the back of my throat. I've got a filter, and it catches most of the stuff that I want to say. Friend, you know that doesn't excuse you. It doesn't excuse the fact that it's your thoughts and therefore your heart that came up with those things in the first place.
I mean, that's what Jesus says. What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart. And it's this that defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person. Moses gets that. Every intention of the thoughts of their hearts was evil. It starts in here.
It starts in your heart. And that gives rise to thoughts. And then the thoughts give rise to actions and worries. Friend, our corruption, our sin as human beings goes all the way to the bottom, which is why we can't fix it ourselves. It's why we can't clean it out ourselves. You can't save yourself from sin just by stopping doing a couple of things or beginning to do a couple of extra things. You can't save yourself like that. It goes all the way to the bottom. You need somebody to take sin and rip it out from your heart by the roots.
The only person who can do that is the one who made you. That's why you need Jesus. That's why you need a Savior. It's why you're not just pitter-pattering around in the pool without a need of a Savior. Your sin goes all the way down. Fourth, man's sin is pervasive. I want you to see that. It's pervasive. It affects and touches everything we do. You can see that at the end of the verse. Every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
Only evil continually. Now, in a tightly packed little nutshell that's going to get developed throughout the story of the Bible, that's the Christian doctrine of total depravity. It doesn't mean, total depravity does not mean that every human being is as bad as he or she could possibly be. You could be much worse than you actually are. The worst person in the world could be worse than they actually are. That's not what total depravity means.
What it means is that everything about us is affected by sin. Everything. Our loves, our desires, our judgment, our will, our reasoning, our motivations. Everything about us is affected and corrupted by sin. Even the things that we think are good. Even the things that we think are good in our lives are corrupted by sin. Because deep down in there, there's a motivation that's selfish. The Boy Scout that helps an older woman across the street.
You may look at that on the outside and say, oh man, that Boy Scout, that's a good deed and there's nothing bad about that. I promise you, because I've been to Boy Scout, he wants somebody to notice. There's always, always deep down in there some selfish, turned-in motivation even for the good things we do. And if you're honest with yourself and if you stare a little bit at your motivations even for the best thing you've ever done in your life, you're going to see that it's all corrupted by sin all the way down.
That's why Paul says that the fleshly mind, the unsaved mind, does not please God. And then he goes on and says, Indeed, it cannot please God. It's because until God acts to save us, our wills are bent and warped away from him, away from righteousness. And everything we do, even the best things, are tainted by sin. Now, here's the thing. If you take all of that that we've just said, if you take it all that sin is a perversion, that it's deliberate, not accidental, That it goes all the way deep and that it's completely pervasive and affects everything we do and say and feel and are motivated by you.
Take all of that and apply it to yourself and you can see why I say that you are hopeless and helpless in your sin. That's why the Bible describes us as dead, not drowning, dead in our trespasses and sins. It's not even that there's this, like, one little leftover part in us that's alive. That can, when the moment comes, this little tiny part of us can reach out and grab God and call out in faith. No, there's not even that in you.
You are dead in your trespasses and sins. Every intention of the thoughts of your heart is only evil all the time. We need God to rescue us or we're done. And what do I mean by done? What I mean by done is exactly what Jesus said to you in the scripture reading earlier in the service. That just like the people of Noah went about their days marrying and giving in marriage, eating and drinking until the day the flood came and swept them all away.
So our societies are going to go on doing what we do. Fighting over politics, reading X, shooting rockets into the sky. And we're going to do it until the day judgment comes and sweeps us all away. You know that day is coming, right? You know that day is coming. And one day you will, like we said earlier in this series, you will give an account to God for the way you lived. And what's going to happen if you're not standing next to Jesus is that the verdict is going to come thundering down.
You are guilty. You're done. which is why verse 8 is so good. Point number two, the tenacity of God's grace. If you look at verses 6 and 7, God's first response to mankind's wickedness is not grace at all, it's judgment. The Lord was sorry that he made man on the earth and it grieved him to his heart.
So the Lord said, I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, Man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens. And he goes on in that, you know, two paragraphs later to describe how that's going to happen. It's going to happen through a flood that sweeps over the planet. It's judgment, not grace. And that's the situation. At the end of verse 7, God sees the wickedness that's spread throughout the land. He sees the wickedness that has taken root in man's heart.
And he says, that's it. Humanity is done. Their wickedness is piled up so high that God has determined now to destroy them. But then verse 8 lights up like a candle in a dark room. It's not much. It's just a little bit of light, but there it is. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. The word favor there, if your Bible has favor, the word isn't really favor, it's grace.
And as it does throughout the rest of the Bible, it means that someone is given something that they don't deserve. Now that's important. In fact, it's critical to understanding the story. Because I think sometimes we read this story as if God saved Noah because Noah deserved to be saved. You ever read it like that? God saved Noah. He gave Noah favor because Noah deserved to be saved. And I think that that misunderstanding of the story is even what the ESV is kind of straining to protect wrongly.
He doesn't want to have to give up on that understanding of the text when it translates the word grace, what really is grace, as favor. But if you look at it, what the text actually says is that Noah found grace. He found a treatment from God that he did not deserve. And you notice there, it's not even that he won it. It's not that he earned it. It's that he found it. Like a treasure in a field, he stumbled on it.
It was given to him. Verse 9 goes on and tells us something of who Noah was. You can see that there. These are the generations of Noah. Noah, he was a righteous man. He was blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God. But I want you to notice the order of the verses. Notice the order of 8 and 9. It is not 9, therefore 8. It is not Noah was righteous, therefore Noah found grace with God.
It is not that. And if you've been reading that story like that, you need to dismantle that from your mind. What it says is 8, therefore 9. Noah found grace with God, and Noah was a righteous man. And you realize that's how it always is in the Bible. I mean, unbroken pattern is that grace comes and righteousness results. It's not the other way around. God saves us out of our sin.
He saves us from our sins. And then, after he gives grace, he begins the work of making us righteous, of making us look more like him. Now, sometimes, you know, I know that that takes the form, that whole logic takes the form of a dramatic conversion experience. And some of you have had exactly that, right? Some of you have been saved from some awful rebellion against God that was very visible and very dramatic. Sometimes that's the case. And people are saved out of an absolutely catastrophic life. Sometimes, though, God's grace takes the form of saving us from our sin before that sin has a chance to do its worst on us.
I remember one, one dear woman, you know who you are, a member of Third Avenue, when she kind of got a chance to introduce herself to the church, she, she stood up here and she said, when I was seven years old, God saved me from a life of drugs, prostitution, and rebellion against him. And everybody kind of went, what? Seven years old? God saved you from prostitution and drugs? And then she grinned and everybody got it. She never lived a life of prostitution and drugs because God saved her from it when she was seven years old.
He saved her from the worst effects of sins. Without the grace of God in her life, who knows if those would have been the particular horrible things that she'd have fallen into, but without the grace of God saving her at a young age, there's no telling what would have happened to her. For many of you, that's your story. God saved you from the worst ravages of sin before it had a chance to do its worst on you, And it seems to have been that way with Noah, too. God seems to have protected him from the worst of the world around him.
I mean, think about it. He was, for all of his life, surrounded by godly men. You ever think about that? With all of those crazy long lifespans in chapter 5, Noah would have known almost all of those men. He would have known Adam's grandson, who could have told him about the garden, who could have told him about God's care of Adam. He would have known Enoch, who walked with God and then was not. He would have known his own father, Lamech, of course, who apparently knew the promise of Genesis 3.15, had his hope firmly set on it and probably taught his son, your hope needs to be set on the promise of God as well, Noah.
And all of that being surrounded by those godly men, it had effects in his life. Look what's said of him there. He was righteous. He was also blameless in his generation, which probably means in the eyes of his generation. Excuse me, his generation. In other words, people could see that he was a follower of the Lord. And then there's that phrase, Noah walked with God. Does that sound familiar? It's exactly the same phrase that was used of Enoch. When it says that he was not, for God took him.
He walked with God. He obeyed God. Which, of course, is also the point of what comes in that next long paragraph. I mean, essentially what you've got there in that long paragraph are instructions for how to build and provision the ark. There's a lot of detail. We're not going to go into it all because it's not really germane to the story. It talks about the length of it and the width and the depth and what the windows are supposed to look like. And, you know, it talks about bringing the animals into the ark, which we'll talk more about next week. But there's all kinds of detail in it.
It's supposed to have rooms and three decks and bring food on for both you and the animals. It's pretty meticulous in its instruction. And that's the point. The point is not what gopher wood was or how long a cubit was and whether it was a Babylonian royal cubit or an Israeli unroyal cubit. That is not the point. The point is that God's instructions to Noah were meticulous. And look at the very last verse. Noah did it.
He did all that God commanded him. You know where else the meticulous instructions show up? They show up when God tells his people how to build the tabernacle. They show up when God tells his people how to build the temple. And in both of those cases, the people follow the instructions exactly. And Noah did the same thing. You see the point, right? Noah's whole life, his whole life was a life that's lived in the knowledge of who God is, In the knowledge of what God has promised and a heartfelt desire to obey God.
And the outworking of that was that Noah did what God commanded. He believed God. He believed God's promises to him. And he lived in obedience because of that. Here's how the book of Hebrews puts it when it celebrates Noah's life. By faith, Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear, constructed an ark for the saving of his household. And by this, he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.
Now, did you hear how that statement, that celebration of Noah's life, both begins and ends? It's the same two words. By faith. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. By faith. Noah trusted in the Lord. Ultimately, the work that God gave Noah to do was not just build an ark. It's trust me and obey me. Friends, that's the Christian life.
That's the Christian life distilled right down to its core. It's to hear God's word, to trust him by putting your faith in Jesus, and then to obey him as we live until the day of judgment. Let's pray. Our Lord Jesus, we thank you and we praise you that you are the one Savior who can pull us out of our sins, out of the wreck of our iniquity against you, and set us on high to live in your presence forever.
Lord Jesus, we have praised you in so many different ways this morning, And we do so again right here at the end by saying thank you for the work you did on the cross through your death and resurrection in our place so that we might live. Lord, just like Noah, you have made us heirs of the righteousness that comes by faith. And we praise you for it this morning. Lord, we pray all of these things in your name, the name of our Redeemer and our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.