Genesis 7-8 Sermon Notes

Genesis 7:1-8:22

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Saved by the Ark

4/29/2018

Lynchburg, Virginia

EXHORDIUM

         We saw in previous sermons from Genesis, that God created the universe about 6000 years ago. He created all that we see, the sun and moon and stars, the earth and sky and sea, all the flora and fauna and mankind to subdue and rule the earth.

         Adam and Eve sinned. Sin and death entered the world and this was personified tragically in the person of Cain, who killed Abel. After that, God gave Eve a son, Seth, to replace Abel. But the Cainites persecuted the Sethites. Eventually, the godly seed is mixed with the rebellious ones and the result is an Earth filled with violence and men, women and children whose thoughts are only evil continually. 

         God regrets that He has made man and decides to wash the evil men and their sins off the face of the Earth through a flood. There is only one righteous man on the Earth, Noah, who can find no rest in the Earth. His righteous soul is vexed by the sins of man.

         God determines to destroy the Earth and kill all men, women and children and all the animals of the Earth. God saves Noah and his family and all the animals in an ark. 

         Noah builds the ark over a 100 year period of time, all the while preaching repentance to his friends and neighbors. But they do not heed him and the judgment of God comes in the flood.

         Like previous sermons, we should see the manifold grace of God in these events. We should also see His awesome power and His willingness to punish sinners.

         In God’s statements about men, we should learn that all mankind is guilty before God and deserving of God’s wrath and curse. We see this play out in the flood. While humanity was at its worse at this time, we can still see how wicked man is, especially when man is separated from God, His Word, His Son, His Spirit. In such a state, mankind is wholly undeserving of God’s favor. Thus, man must be a recipient of God’s grace and mercy.

         Thank God, thank our heavenly Father, that He is a God of grace and mercy. Out of His love for us, He intervened on our behalf. He is ever faithful to His covenant promises and through His own perfect character and of His own free will, He looks upon us with grace and mercy. Thus, we are wholly dependent upon Him.

         This is the lesson we have learned from the beginning and it is no less true now. In Noah, we see a new creation of mankind. But it does not take long to see that mankind is stiff-necked and resists God. Sin is strong and leads us away from serving the Lord. At Babel, man is scattered and only God’s grace and mercy can regather Him. 

Thanks be to God that He does so. He sends us His Spirit which continually reminds us to turn from our own ways to His. We have the Spirit but we also have a battle in our flesh. We are made new but we are not completely new. This is one reason we must come again and again to worship, to confess sins, to lay hold of Christ with new affirmations. Jesus has done everything needful for us to live and walk in the Spirit but we need continual reminders, exhorting one another on to love and good works in Christ.

We must not think too highly of ourselves but we can never think too highly of Jesus Christ and of His Holy Spirit. The more we grow in grace, the more we realize that our hope and salvation is all of grace by faith. And that is once again the lesson we see from the beginning.

While we teach that man is to obey God and to grow steadily in that obedience, we recognize that from beginning to end, our calling and election is from God. We are completely reliant upon Him for creation and our own recreation. 

EXEGESIS

Gen. 7:1  And the Lord said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation. 

Ark here is the same word used for Moses’s floating bassinet. 

In all the world, there is only one righteous? Wow. This truly was the low point of humanity.

2 Peter 2:3- Noah was a preacher of righteousness.

²Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that arenot clean by two, the male and his female. ³Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth. ⁴For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.

Forty days and nights of rain is a lot of rain. Also, the deeps are opened to flood the earth.

Gen. 7:5  And Noah did according unto all that the Lord commanded him. ⁶And Noahwassix hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth. ⁷And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood. ⁸Of clean beasts, and of beasts that arenot clean, and of fowls, and of every thing that creepeth upon the earth, ⁹There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God had commanded Noah. ¹⁰And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth.

Gen. 7:11  In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. ¹²And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.

Noah was 600 years old when the flood came. It was a continuous rain of forty days and nights as well as all the opening of the fountains of the great deep.

Flood was 2348 BC.

Gen. 7:13  In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark; ¹⁴They, and every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort. ¹⁵And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, whereinisthe breath of life. ¹⁶And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the Lord shut him in.

Two and two of every animal and seven pairs of the clean animals and birds.

The Lord shut them in. Imagine the size of the door. Maybe they contrived some sort of pully system to enable them to pull the door up but they still needed to make it fully waterproof. The Lord did this for them.

Gen. 7:17  And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth. ¹⁸And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters. ¹⁹And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that wereunder the whole heaven, were covered. ²⁰Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.

The water continued to rise until all the high hills were covered. Then it raised even more, over 20 feet above the highest mountains.

Gen. 7:21  And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: ²²All in whose nostrilswasthe breath of life, of all that wasin the dryland, died. ²³And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remainedalive, and they thatwerewith him in the ark. ²⁴And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days.

The water continued to rise until every earthly beast died. Birds, cattle, beasts, all the creeping things and every man. The waters prevailed above the high mountains for 150 days, about five months.

Gen. 8:1  And God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that waswith him in the ark: and God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters asswaged; 

God remembers Noah. God remembers the animals.

1Pet. 3:21  The like figure whereuntoevenbaptism doth also now save us (not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God,) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ:

²The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained; ³And the waters returned from off the earth continually: and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters were abated.

The great waters now begin to recede. They recede into the crevices of the earth, from whence they came. Also, evaporation is gathering the waters into the clouds of the earth. As the waters recede and the plants begin to grow, water is also taken up in all the plants of the earth.

Gen. 8:4  And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat. ⁵And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month: in the tenthmonth, on the firstdayof the month, were the tops of the mountains seen.

The ark came to rest in the seventh month and the waters slowly receded until the tops of the mountains were again visible.

The waters covered the mountains for five months. At the beginning of the tenth month, the mountain tops appear.

These mountains are in Turkey near the headwaters of the Tigris River.

Gen. 8:6  And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made: ⁷And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth.⁸Also he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground; ⁹But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waterswereon the face of the whole earth: then he put forth his hand, and took her, and pulled her in unto him into the ark. ¹⁰And he stayed yet other seven days; and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark; ¹¹And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouthwasan olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth. ¹²And he stayed yet other seven days; and sent forth the dove; which returned not again unto him any more.

Gen. 8:13  And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first year, in the firstmonth, the firstdayof the month, the waters were dried up from off the earth: and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold, the face of the ground was dry. ¹⁴And in the second month, on the seven and twentieth day of the month, was the earth dried.

         A year after the flood had started, the waters were dried up.

Gen. 8:15  And God spake unto Noah, saying,¹⁶Go forth of the ark, thou, and thy wife, and thy sons, and thy sons’ wives with thee. ¹⁷Bring forth with thee every living thing that iswith thee, of all flesh, bothof fowl, and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth; that they may breed abundantly in the earth, and be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth. ¹⁸And Noah went forth, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him: ¹⁹Every beast, every creeping thing, and every fowl, andwhatsoever creepeth upon the earth, after their kinds, went forth out of the ark.

God’s creation was now washed from all its sin. Noah and his family were saved by the ark and the waters. After the water abated, they enter into creation with the creation mandate repeated to them. Be fruitful and multiply and fill all the earth.

Gen. 8:20  And Noah builded an altar unto the Lord; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. ²¹And the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heartisevil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done. ²²While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

Noah’s first act after leaving the ark is worship. He built and alter and took of the clean beasts and clean birds and offered burnt offerings to the Lord. The Lord received these offerings from Noah as a sweet savor.

God promises to not curse the ground again. He says, “I will not curse the ground anymore for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”

This is interesting. Man, without God, is a failure. His imaginations are evil from his youth. God knows this. And God has called man to be obedient to Him but man always fails. Thus, man deserves God’s wrath. And yet, God has determined to not destroy or curse the earth again because of man. The world was cleansed from this first version of man that only failed continually and God establishes His covenant anew with Noah and his family. 

Covenants are agreements between two people. If one of them breaks the bond of the covenant, then the covenant is broken. But in the case of God’s covenant with man, God always keeps His promise and even overcomes the unfaithfulness of man to fulfill His promise. God has every right to nullify the covenant. In the Old Testament, we even see that God divorces Israel. But God always keeps His covenant with mankind, sending Him a redeemer. This covenant keeping promise always points forward to mankind’s eventually salvation through Jesus Christ, the one true man.

EXHORTATION

1Pet. 3:18  For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: ¹⁹By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison; ²⁰Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.

1Pet. 3:21  The like figure whereuntoevenbaptism doth also now save us (not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God,) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ: ²²Who is gone into heaven, and is on the right hand of God; angels and authorities and powers being made subject unto him.

The ark of the covenant. The great ark of God that saved Noah and his family. The little ark of God that saved Moses, who saved Israel. The ark of the testimony, in which the promise of God is kept and over which the Shekinah glory resides. In the ark, the law of God and Aaron’s rod which budded. 

It takes life from death to be saved in the ark of God and only God can grant that. Here we are in this church, the ark of God. God holds out His promises to you. We have entered into His Church through baptism and we are to fear Him, to do His will, to be righteous. It is a righteousness not our own. It is the free gift of God, the Father, through the Son, by the Holy Spirit. Receive this gift from God and walk according to His will.