Real Restoration
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5 For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God,
6 and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished.
7 But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.
Prayer
Introduction
I love this time of year. First, we have Christmas, which we celebrated this week, and that is awesome! Then, coming up this week, we have the beginning of a new year. And if science-fiction stories, books, and television shows are to be believed, this coming year, 2020, we should see the emergence of flying cars and hoverboards, our brains should be permanently connected to the internet, and we will have colonized not only Mars, but also Venus!
In all reality, we don’t know what this year will hold for us or for the world as a whole. But I love the beginning of a new year for two main reasons. For one, it presents us with the opportunity to look back at the last year and take inventory – spiritual inventory to see how we have grown in Christlikeness, inventory to see how God has loved and protected and provided for us over the past year.
On the other hand, the beginning of a new year gives us the opportunity to look to the future. To correct glaring deficiencies in our lives from the past year. It is a chance to start over and give it another try. Isn’t that what New Year’s Resolutions are all about – a chance for a redo!
Scripture
Our passage this morning is . If you are able, please stand for the reading of God’s Word. We do this to show appreciation to God’s Word and in recognition that these are among the most important words we could possibly hope to hear today. says,
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 continually.
6 And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.
7 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.”
8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.
9 These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God.
10 And Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
11 Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence.
12 And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth.
13 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.
“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 regretted 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.”
Thank you, you may be seated.
Sermon
Over the past few weeks, we have been taking a birds-eye-view of Genesis chapters 1-11. Our hope is to see some of the major themes and foundational concepts in Genesis and to show how they weave throughout all of redemptive history. To that end, we have noted that God is the creator and have seen that much of the groundwork for our understanding of who God is laid in the first two chapters of Genesis. Likewise, we learned about the Fall. Adam and Eve sinned against God even though God always only blessed them. We also discussed the promised seed – the descendent of Eve who would one day defeat the Evil One and make all things right again – who we, of course, know to be Jesus.
With all that in mind, let’s circle back to the problem of sin. We saw in our opening verse that, “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.” That is bad news. It is bad news because God is holy and just. God is not accepting of sin. In fact, you could say that God is ultimately intolerant of sin.
As we noted a few weeks ago, sin infects everything it touches, and it touches everything. Mankind who was supposed to be the steward of this good creation God had made, had only brought toil and trouble and destruction. So, God decides that He will destroy everything (except Noah and his family) with a flood. The problem is sin, and the plan is to wipe it out through judgment.
Before we move on to our next point, I want to address something. In our world today, many look at the account of the flood and they are shocked that God would destroy all of humanity and every living thing on the face of the earth. I mean, isn’t God good and loving!? The problem is, because we are sinful creatures, we don’t typically see things rightly. There is a shocking statement in this passage, but it isn’t that God is going to destroy all life. The thing that is scandalous and shocking is the phrase, “But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.” If we really understood God’s holiness, and the seriousness of sin, that phrase is the one that is amazing.
God had just proclaimed how wicked man was and how every intention of man’s heart is evil, so much so that God decides to destroy humanity, then there is this gleam of hope. A proclamation of grace! But Noah found favor – grace – in the eyes of the Lord. If something is going to shock us, it should be the fact that God doesn’t give all of humanity what they deserve.
You know the rest of the story – the ark, the animals, the rain, the dove etc. But there is something about this flood account that we can often miss. When Genesis was written, it was written to an oral culture. Our culture is a literate culture. We, as a general rule are a reading culture. That’s generally how we give and receive information. But ancient cultures were not typically like that. The way they taught and passed down information was through speaking and hearing. Even when an oral culture writes things down, it still has certain oral qualities which we – coming from a literate society are likely to miss.
One of the things that oral societies would do is use words and sentences which sound alike when spoke in order to help the hearer to draw connections between concepts. It is a really powerful tool which is used repeatedly throughout . So, why did I tell you all of that? Because there are some very important parallels between Adam and Noah and between creation and the flood. These parallels aren’t as obvious to us because, frankly we aren’t listening to the story out loud in ancient Hebrew, but the parallels are there, and I want to highlight a few of them.
Big picture, we should see the flood account as a de-creation, re-creation event where God starts over with Noah. The flood basically undoes what God had done with creation. It is intended to destroy and take everything back to a pre-creation state. In , we see that,
2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
There is a parallel in the flood account. After the flood has occurred, and Noah and his family are floating around, we are told in that,
1 But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the livestock that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided.
By way of reminder, in Hebrew, spirit and wind are the same word, so we understand that the Spirit of God was instrumental in the original creation. And the ancient Hebrews in hearing this would make that connection – “Ah!, the Spirit of God was instrumental in creation, and now the wind of God (again, they are the same word) is active in causing the flood to subside and recreate everything. Again, these are not perfect 1 to 1 correlations, but they are intentional parallels.
After Noah leaves the ark, he sacrifices to God, and God pronounces a blessing in where God tells Noah and his family to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, and God tells them that they are basically over the animals. This is again a direct parallel to where God blesses Adam and Eve with these words,
28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
I’ll save you the tedium of us looking at every single parallel one at a time, comparing pre-flood to post-flood. Instead, I’ll read this helpful, yet abbreviated summation of the parallels from one commentator. He says,
“Noah is depicted as Adam revived. He is the sole survivor and successor to Adam; both “walk” with God; both are the recipients of the promissory blessing; both are caretakers of the lower creatures; both father three sons; both are workers of the soil; both sin through the fruit of a tree; and both father a wicked son who is under a curse.”[1]
And I would add to that, both father a righteous son through whom the promised seed flows. Again, I could stretch this sermon out quite a bit by illustrating all of the parallels, but I think you get the idea. Noah, in many ways, is meant to be seen as a second Adam who will right the wrongs. We noted a few weeks ago that Noah’s father had hoped that perhaps Noah was the promised seed, but unfortunately that was not the case.
There is one last parallel that I want to look at, and it involves the tower of Babel. If you will remember, just before God decided to flood the world, He declared that wickedness was full blown and rebellion against God was basically at a fever pitch.
God had told mankind to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, but what does mankind decide to do instead? says,
4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”
God says to fill the earth, and they rebel and seek to avoid being dispersed. They want to make a name for themselves, so instead of properly seeking and worshipping God and honoring Him and worshipping Him by obediently subduing and managing creation, mankind basically decides to do the opposite. Their rebellion and wickedness is rampant, and so the cycle is complete. The destruction of the world through the flood didn’t solve the root problem.
Now, I don’t want to make it sound like God was sitting in heaven, trying to figure out how to fix the sin problem and devising various plans – that’s not the case at all. Jesus was always plan “A”. God is sovereign over all his creation and doesn’t need a plan “B”.
What the flood account does is it teaches us that God is holy and powerful. God does not take sin lightly and is angry over sin. Your sin, my sin, our neighbor’s sin, and our nation’s sin. But at the same time, the flood account shows us that God is merciful and gracious, in allowing Noah and his family to live – by allowing humanity to continue despite our rebellion. Even in blessing mankind through procreation and forcing mankind to continue filling the earth in the face of their refusal to do so.
The flood account also teaches us that true renewal is hard to come by, and so points to something greater. See, our sin problem can’t be solved by changing our surroundings. Our sin problem can’t be solved my moving across the nation. It can’t be solved by buying new things and filling our lives with stuff. Our sin problem cannot be solved by numbing ourselves to it through distraction, entertainment, or substances. Nor can our sin problem be solved by resolving to do better.
This time of year, we make resolutions to eat less, exercise more, be less cranky, read the Bible more, enjoy more sunrises, whatever it is. And there is good in those things, but we must never forget that true renewal comes only through Christ. We can’t pick ourselves up by our own bootstraps and conquer our sin.
Again, isn’t that what the flood account teaches us? That even destruction and recreation doesn’t actually bring true, lasting renewal. Really, that is a huge part of the story of the Old Testament – No one can defeat the problem of sin. Sacrifices, prophets, patriarchs, kings – every thing and every one fails to defeat sin. And again, God isn’t in heaven brainstorming different ideas and trying them out. What God is doing is using all these other things to point forward to Christ.
After every other method of dealing with sin has been shown to be deficient – even the utter destruction of the world – when God shows that nothing else will suffice, we then realize how dependent we are on Christ Jesus our Lord.
Jesus, the Eternal Word, fully God took on flesh, becoming fully man – lives a perfect life, never sinning. Never rebelling against the Father. Always obeying and doing good. The true second Adam – a better Adam who overcomes temptation from the serpent. Christ, who for the joy set before Him endures the cross. Freely gives up his life. Suffers and dies, bearing the sin and guilt of His people. Jesus is crushed by the Father. The wrath of God towards sin is poured out upon Christ. He breathes his last. Is buried, but three days later, Christ rises again, showing that He has, in fact, finally conquered sin and death.
The destruction of the world could not solve the sin problem. Only the destruction of the perfect Son of God could. And only by trusting in Christ and repenting of our sin can we be freed from the power and guilt of sin in our lives. Nothing else can solve our sin problem – nothing but Christ.
Why do I love the beginning of a new year? Because it is an annual reminder that true renewal - real restoration - comes through Christ and Christ alone.
Conclusion
In a moment we will transition to a time of worship through response. We have this time of response because we believe that people always respond to the Word of God when they hear it. We either respond in worship by gladly receiving the Word and obeying it, or we respond in rebellion by refusing to be changed by it. As we sing during our worship through response, I will be on the front row worshipping with you. If you need someone to talk to or pray with, I would be delighted to do that. If you have questions about true renewal and what it means to have victory over sin, I’d be happy to talk to you about that, just come up and talk to me. Or if you’d rather stick around and talk to me after the service, I’m available for that as well. Finally, if you simply wish to pray up front, you are welcome to do that as well.
Before we transition to that time of worship through response, I want say just a couple more things.
If you are here this morning, and you have been trying to conquer sin on your own, you have to know by now that its futile. But there is hope. As I said before, if you will repent of your sin – that means to turn away from it, and turn to Christ, trusting in Him and His perfect obedience to God, you will be saved. Delivered from God’s wrath and destruction. Or instead, you can keep trying to do things your own way, trying in vain to defeat sin, and eventually reaping the full punishment you deserve.
Believers, those of us who are resting in Christ this very moment. Let us use the next year to press into Christ. Let us flee to Him, realizing that He, alone brings renewal. Where we have sinned and failed to live up to our calling, let’s repent of that, not merely resolve to do better, but let’s flee to Christ who has conquered our sin. He has the power to break the chains of sin.
Let’s pray, then worship Christ for all He has done.
[1] K. A. Mathews, , vol. 1A, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1996), 351.