Sermon Text: Genesis 6:9-22
Genesis 6:9 This is the account of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among
the people of his time, and he walked with God. 10 Noah
had three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth. 11 Now the earth
was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence. 12
God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had
corrupted their ways. 13 So God said to Noah, "I am
going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence
because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. 14 So make yourself an ark of cypress [a] wood; make rooms in it and coat it
with pitch inside and out. 15 This is how you are to
build it: The ark is to be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. [b] 16 Make a roof
for it and finish [c] the ark to within 18 inches [d] of the top. Put a door in the side
of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks. 17 I
am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the
heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth
will perish. 18 But I will establish my covenant with
you, and you will enter the ark—you and your sons and your wife and your sons'
wives with you. 19 You are to bring into the ark two of
all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. 20 Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of
every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept
alive. 21 You are to take every kind of food that is to
be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them." 22
Noah did everything just as God commanded him. (www.biblegateway.com)
Sometimes
there are passages in the bible that one could spend hours talking about, and
at other times there are those passages where a few words say it all. In many ways, this passage is both but since
we don’t have hours, yet we have more than a moment, we will find a happy
medium. But let me give you the few
words up front: God doesn’t ask anything of us that is impossible to accomplish. Keep that in mind as we explore the beginning
of the story of Noah, the ark, and a flood.
The story of Noah and the Ark has been romanticized over the generations. Children play with little arks and move the animals, two by two, onto the ark so the ark can float along the waters. But there is much, much more to it than the animals. It’s a story about a man who listened and obeyed God and a God who was very, very disappointed with the creation he called “good.”
When one reads the story from start to finish you can be overwhelmed with the many directions this story goes.
First, there is the genealogy involved. Noah was the son of Lamech who sired him at the age of 182. He was the grandson of Methuselah who fathered Lamech at 187. Methuselah died at the age of 969. Lamech died at the age of 777. Methuselah is thought to be the oldest person named in the Bible.
Second, you could spend much time on God’s disappointment in his creation. When we just read about the creation five chapters earlier, we read that God declared all to be “good.” But now, some time later, Eugene Peterson says in the Message, “God saw that human evil was out of control. Sorry he had made the human race in the first place, it broke his heart. God said, “I’ll get rid of my ruined creation, make a clean sweep, people, animals, snakes and bugs, birds – the works. I’m sorry I made them.”
The direction we want to explore today is that while God declared human evil to be consuming the world, God loved Noah and offered him the chance to be the start of yet another beginning. And that when God calls, God equips.
Noah was 500 years old when he had his sons Shem, Ham and Japheth. He was 600 years of age when the rains came.
Noah was a good man, full of integrity. Noah walked with God, and everyone knew it.
One day God told Noah that there was going to be a clean sweep. God was going to rid the world of all the violence and people and animals. Except God was going to save Noah and his family. God made a covenant with Noah that if he built the boat as directed, and took along his family and animals two of every species, male and female, and gathered up enough food for everyone, God would protect them. Remember, God didn’t ask anything of Noah that was impossible.
Today let’s see what we can glean from this small passage.
First, it took Noah a long time to build the ark. We are given the information that a span of 100 years occurred between, at the very least, when his sons were born and when the rain began.
God asked Noah to build a boat. A big boat. One made of teakwood or gopherwood or maybe cypress wood, different versions of the Bible have differing opinions. But it was to have rooms in it. Coated with pitch inside and out. 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. It was to have a roof on it and a window 18 inches from the top, plus there was to be a door on the side of the ship, with three decks – lower, middle and upper.
If you want to figure out how big that is – I walked off around 75 of “my feet” from where Ed is to the communion table. And that is just the width of the boat. The length would be six times that.
I think we can assume that either Noah was a carpenter or could learn to build a boat or God wouldn’t have asked it of him. He knew about following directions. He knew about the workings of building a boat.
This ark was like the hulk of a ship, fitted not to sail upon the waters (there was no occasion for that, when there should be no shore to sail to), but to float upon the waters, waiting for the waters to recede. (Matthew Henry Commentary).
And building it took a long time, a very long time, maybe the full 100 years. Which says to us some things just take a lot of time to build.
Second, God didn’t make Noah go looking for the animals. The animals came to Noah. That hadn’t registered in my brain before this past week. All of my life I have thought of Noah going out looking for the animals, checking to see who was a male and who was female. Trying to corral them all together and keeping them from running off again. Now it all makes sense. The animals probably didn’t come until the last moment. Maybe until they sensed the rain was coming.
It is interesting to note that while over 200,000 people died in the 2005 tsumani, few animals died. There were reports of elephants screaming and heading for high ground, dogs that refused to go outside, zoo animals that refused to leave their habitats. (National Geographic Magazine, January 2005) What a great use of Noah’s time! To be building the ark, and not worrying about bringing in the animals. God did that for Noah, allowing Noah to use his time to prepare for the time they would live on the ark.
You see, Noah’s job, beside building the ark, was also to get on the ark along with food and supplies for the journey. He had plenty to do.
The last point brings us back to the beginning. God did not ask something of Noah that he could not do. God does not ask us to do things that are impossible --- not as a church; and not as individuals.
When Rosa Parks sat on a seat on that bus, I don’t imagine she was thinking that by refusing to move she would start the Montgomery bus strike and that one day people would walk by as she lay in state in the nation’s Capitol.
When Billy Graham began preaching I don’t imagine that he ever envisioned that one day he would preach to millions and counsel presidents.
When Jimmy Carter was born to a peanut farmer and a nurse in Plains, Georgia, who thought he would become president of the United States and be known as an American statesman.
When an angel told Mary that she would have a baby, even though she had never had sexual relations, who would have believed that she would be the mother of the Messiah.
None of these people, along with all of the people we read about in the scriptures, were called to do something that could not be done. God simply does not call us to impossible tasks.
Not as individuals and not as a church.
To be a church that is not only present, but also vital to the neighborhood is not an impossible task. It is a difficult task and may take longer than we’d like, but since God doesn’t ask us to do impossible things, we can be sure that when God calls us to do something, God will equip us for the task. And warts and all, we have been called by God calls reach out and transform lives. We’ve been serving God for 170 years and there is more to do, more lives to touch, more hurts to heal, more confusion to settle. And it is absolutely possible.
Perhaps you feel God nudging you to do something. To try something new. To talk to someone about your faith. To start a new business or a new ministry. You can be sure that if it is from God, you can be equipped for the job. And if you wondering if you are right or not about what you are feeling, let us know so we can pray for you about it. Join us here at 9 a.m. on Sundays and we will pray for your specific needs.
Noah had to be nervous about the task before him. He was probably wondering if he was going crazy, if God’s words had just be a dream, no, a nightmare.
Remember in the movie, “Field of Dreams” when our hero hears a voice in the cornfield saying, “If you build it he will come.” So he plows under his cornfield, his livelihood, and builds a baseball diamond. Townspeople laughed at him. Bankers wanted to foreclose on his farm. His family was ridiculed.
Noah probably went through the same thing. While he was supposed to be farming, he was building a boat and they didn’t live near the water or have any way to get the boat to the water. Neighbors went by and laughed. And then when the animals showed up, they just laughed harder. Then despite the ridicule, he, his wife, his sons and their wives get on the boat, with the animals and waited….waited for seven days for the rain to come.
When God calls us to a task, God equips us to accomplish it. And nothing we are called to do is impossible with God.