Remembering the Rainbow
Genesis 8:1-9:17
Introduction
We have been studying together now for three weeks, “Faith
Lessons from Noah” from the story in Genesis of Noah and the
Great Flood. If you missed either of the last two sermons, I
strongly encourage you to get the cd or read them online, as you need
all three to understand these faith lessons. We left off in our
story last week with Noah, his family, and many animals still being
tossed about upon the stormy flood waters. Let’s pick up
where we left off by reading the rest of the story in Genesis 8 &
9.
Retelling the Story
The Bible doesn’t give us the details of what went on inside the
ark. But just perhaps it went something like this…
Five months had passed and there was no sign at all of the flood waters
receding. Eight people trapped in a boat for five months with
hundreds of animals. The stench was burning, the noise nerve
wracking. The giraffes were seasick. The monkeys
wouldn’t stop harassing the other animals. The parrots
wouldn’t stop teasing each other going back and forth for hours,
“Stop copying me, no you stop copying me, no you stop copying
me…” Every hour Japheth kept asking, “Are we
there yet!” The eight people aboard the ark had just
about all they could take of each other.
And far more tragic, none of them could get the sound out of their
heads of all the screaming men, women, and children who died in the
flood, many while banging on the walls of the ark. Noah’s
wife was waking up every night with nightmares of children sinking into
a watery grave.
Noah had understood that there would be some trials along the way to
receiving God’s promised blessing. After all, he had been
warned of 40 days of rain, and even of the death of many of his friends
and extended family. But it had been five months of darkness,
death, and storms. Noah’s faith was weakening. He
called out in anguished prayer night after sleepless night, “God,
have you forgotten all about us? You never said the journey was
going to be this hard! Where’s this promised covenant
blessing of yours!”
Finally, the ark hit ground on the peak of Mt Ararat.
Noah’s faith began to rise. But as he looked out the
window, all that could be seen on the horizon was water, endless
rolling, green water. “False hope” he called out to
the family. Two and half more months passed by imprisoned in the
ark. Noah, clinging to a drop of hope, peeked out the window
again. Some other mountain peeks were beginning to jut up through
the water. Noah wanted to hope again, but he just wasn’t
sure he could. It hurt too much to hope.
Another forty days passed. Noah no longer even looked out the
window. Noah’s son Shem kept encouraging him,
“Father, we know that our God is faithful. He will keep his
promise. Have hope, have faith.” God used
Shem’s words to encourage Noah, so he rose to his feet, opened
the window, and let out a raven. The raven didn’t
return. “I told you it was a waste of time,” said
Noah to Shem.” No, no try again father, try again,”
said Shem. So Noah let out a Dove, but the Dove retuned to the
boat. Noah walked away from the window.
Our Bible passage for today in verse 8:1 begins with three powerful
words of promise that transforms the entire flood account in a story
far more of grace than of judgment. “God remembered Noah.”
Seven days later, Noah gives into the encouragement of Shem once
again. He released another Dove. And God sent the Dove back
with an olive branch in its mouth, a sign of hope and faith and future.
Noah could feel God’s Spirit blowing upon his barely-glowing
ember faith fanning it back to flame. “God had remembered
Noah.”
Another seven days passed…another Dove was let out….this
one didn’t return. Noah, full of hope and faith pried open
the sealed door of the ark and flew it open. The family and a few
loose monkeys ran to the open door. Fresh sunlit flooded the
ark. Yet, it was still not safe to go out. Land was just
beginning to appear. Fresh air was blowing in through the large
open door, and fresh faith and hope was rising. “God is
going to keep his covenant promise after all,” declared
Noah! Yet still they had to wait two more months before they
could leave the ark. Faith waits…
God had remembered Noah, his family, and all the livestock and
animals. For 1 year and 17 days, God had been silent all through
the horrific storm. God now spoke with Noah once again, and as
recorded in verse 8:15, God declared, “Everyone,
leave the boat, and you animals, scatter across the face of the earth,
be fruitful and multiply, fill the whole earth!” God
had remembered Noah, his family, and all the animals!
There are three more faith lessons we are going to pull from the life
of Noah. They all have to do with God’s remembering.
You see faith is always founded on remembering. Just like trust
in a relationship is built by past acts worthy of trust by another
toward you, so our faith is based on past accounts of God’s
faithfulness to us. And in today’s passage from the Noah
story, we discover three things that God always remembers as he
interacts with us, and three things that we must remember to live a
life of faith.
Faith Lesson One
God had remembered Noah. Indeed, God had never forgotten about
Noah and those on the ark. Though they seemed abandoned and left
to the mercy of the storm, God was doing what He always does, God was
there all along working in the midst of the storm to accomplish His
grander plans. God brought all aboard the ark through the storm,
to higher ground, and then God finally spoke and entered into a
covenant with the entire human race through Noah and his family.
But a way cool thing about this covenant is that God also includes the
entire animal world and all planet earth! This is good news for
all you animal lovers, the Noahic covenant makes all the earth and all
the animals partakers of God’s covenantal blessings.
This Noahic Covenant includes these conditions and blessings:
• The human race
and the animals will repopulate the earth
• God establishes capital punishment for murder
• One of my favorite blessings, God says we no
longer have to be vegetarians and we can eat
meat!
• But by far, the most important, aspect of this
covenant, is that God promises He will never again
take out His righteous
wrath against sin by destroying virtually all the human race and animal
life
Nothing had changed about God’s holiness, or justice.
Nothing had changed about the permeating state of sinfulness in every
human heart. Nothing had changed about God’s inconsolable
grief over our sin. Nothing had changed about God’s
Sovereign right to destroy us, and remove us from creation as the
wicked cancer we are.
What God changed in this covenant, was how He was going to respond to
our perpetual rebellion. God decided to extend to the human race
from this covenant on what is called “common grace.”
The Noahic covenant establishes common grace. There is a saving grace
that is granted only to those God has elected for salvation. But
what keeps the human race from utter anarchy and self-annihilation,
what grants God’s blessings upon the righteous and the
unrighteous, what allows humans to display any measure of goodness is
God’s common grace extended to all.
Now every aspect of our faith is empowered and founded on God’s
covenantal promises. But since we are now studying specifically
the covenant God made with Noah, we must limit our question to this,
“How does the Noahic covenant empower our faith?”
Our first faith lesson this morning is this:
1. God remembers the covenant he made
with Noah.
When God interacts with a still rebellious world, God remembers the
covenant made with Noah. When God looks down upon the human race,
God right now does not deal with us according to our sin, but according
to grace, saving grace and common grace.
But as we were painfully reminded last week, this age of grace will not
last forever. I am not a prophet, but it doesn’t take an
end-time scholar to examine the signs of the times and discern that
world events are on the fast track to aligning up according to Biblical
prophecy of what must occur before the Second Coming of Christ.
And even if Christ’s return is still another 100 years away,
clearly there are very dark days ahead for the United States. God
no longer directly judges nations for their sin the way he did in the
days of ancient Israel. What God does now is to draw back a large
measure of common grace, and this allows our own natural wickedness to
run unchecked. In Romans, Paul refers to this as God
“giving us over” to our insisted-upon rebellion.
We must be prepared for increased natural and terrorist destruction in
the US. On the positive side, we must be prepared to reap the
harvest of the elect that God will grant us alongside these
disasters. Every other time in the Bible that the Spirit-inspired
authors make reference to the story of Noah, it is used to reveal what
the end times will be like just before Christ returns again to planet
earth. The story of Noah serves as two bookends between the time
that God established the current age of grace and the time that God
will end this age of offered grace. Christ reveals in Matthew
24:37, “As it was in the days
of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man."
A common and powerful way to interpret the sign of the rainbow is
this. The rainbow is God’s warrior bow. God has hung
up His warrior bow and has declared a temporary peace treaty with the
human race. But our just, and holy, and jealous God will once
again pick up His bow, return to earth with innumerable angels and the
resurrected saints of God riding on horses to remove from the earth all
evil and evil doers, and establish his eternal kingdom of peace.
Saints of God, we are fast approaching the end time “Days of
Noah” that occur just before the “Day of the
Lord.” Right now, we are still in the age of grace.
So what our faith requires us to always remember right now, is that God
still remembers the covenant He made with Noah, and so is still
offering salvation to all who call on the name of the Lord. But
this age of grace is limited. We must not waste a single
day! We must seize this day of grace before it is too late, and
this age of offered grace is closed! We must today proclaim the
favorable year of the Lord!
The reason God can declare this age of grace, this favorable year of
our Noah, is not just because God remembers the covenant He made with
Noah, but because of what empowers that covenant, which we discover in
our second faith lesson this morning.
Faith Lesson Two
God had remembered Noah, his family, and all the animals aboard the
ark. The first thing Noah did when he exited the ark was to build
an altar and worship God! We read in verse 20 that Noah
sacrificed burnt offerings. “And then in verse 21-22 we
read this, “The LORD was
pleased with the aroma of the sacrifice and said to himself, 'I will
never again curse the ground because of the human race, even though
everything they think or imagine is bent toward evil from
childhood. I will never again destroy all living things. As
long as the earth remains, there will be planting and harvest, cold and
heat, summer and winter, day and night.' ”
This is an amazing revelation of grace! In the Noah story just
after the passage we read this morning, we read that Noah gets drunk,
falls asleep naked, and one of his sons discover him naked and then
brags about it. It that day, to look upon a father’s
nakedness was a major violation of cultural taboo, and so Noah curses
Ham and his entire future family line!
You see, nothing had changed about the human heart after the
flood. Before the flood, we read back in chapter six, that God
destroyed the human race because “every inclination of the
thoughts of their hearts was only evil all the time.” And
now after the flood, God reassess the hearts of Noah and his family and
all the human race that would come from their lineage, and once again
declares this to be still true of us, “everything they think or
imagine is bent toward evil from childhood.”
But this time, God decides not to destroy us. What changed
God’s mind? Verse 21 reveals what always turns away
God’s wrath, “The Lord was pleased with the aroma of the
sacrifice!” Why? Because God takes delight in the
killing of animals? Because God allows the blood of animals to be
sufficient covering for human sin? No, no, no! But because
when God smelt the aroma of the sacrifice, God remembered the cross!
There is a remembering of the past. But there is also a
remembering of the future. This is what hope is all about, we
remember the future. God’s plan of salvation throughout all
times has been the same, by faith trough grace. Throughout the
Old Testament, grace was administered through the elaborate systems of
animal sacrifice. Because every time the aroma of sacrifice
reached the throne of God, God would remember the cross.
This is our second faith lesson:
2. God remembers the cross
Every time God the Father looks at you, He remembers the
cross! Our merciful Father does not deal with us according to our
sin, even though every intention of our heart is polluted with
evil. Instead, our Father looks at us and sees us hidden in His
beloved Son Jesus Christ. This is the gospel! Because the
Father always remembers the cross when he looks at you, the Father
always delights in you, dances over you, calls you His beloved!
God always remembers the cross, and in return, we must always remember
this next truth to have a strong faith. Our faith is always a
borrowed faith from Christ.
Faith Lesson Three
Faith is always a gift on loan from God imparted to us through the
indwelling Holy Spirit. We never possess faith as a
possession. The power of this truth is that we don’t have
to depend on our own power or ability to have a powerful faith.
Remember our first three faith lessons from the first sermon in this
series. Faith is a gift from God, and an ongoing relationship
with Jesus Christ wherein Christ continually imparts to us His faith,
hope, and love.
Faith is a relational term. Faith is not doctrine to believe but
a relationship to embrace. You see of all the things that God
remembers and that we must remember to live a life a faith, none is
more important than this, our third faith lesson this morning:
3. God remembers us
God had given Noah a promise. God promised that the story of
salvation that God was writing through the human race was going to
through Noah and his family. The flood was not going to end the
story of the human race. And Noah understood that to be included
in God’s story didn’t mean that life would be free of
trial. But he didn’t expect so much trial.
I would suspect that this same pattern has played out in many of your
lives as well. I know this is true for me, and so perhaps this is
true for many of you. I must continually deal with the gap
between what I expect from God, others, life, and myself and what life
actually brings me. My expectations very rarely match
reality. I expect either too much or too little. Expecting
too little brings mediocrity. Expecting too little is often the
product of having a weak faith.
Expecting too much brings disappointment. Expecting too much is
often the product of having false or naïve faith. This
morning I want to address this category of disappointment that comes
out of a false faith, or a naïve faith.
Here is how the pattern often goes. With live out our life and
faith driven by our expectations. Each of us hold beliefs
regarding who we think God is, and what God is like, and what we think
we can expect from God. We all have certain expectations of how
God will grant us His provision, protection, pleasure, and purpose.
Now, to the degree that what we expect from God matches what God really
promises us in the Bible, our expectations are healthy. But most
of us hold some expectations that are not grounded firmly in the
Bible. So, we are often shocked and disappointed when God
doesn’t bless us the exact way we thought God should.
These misplaced expectations are most keenly felt when it comes to the
area of personal trial and sorrow. As Americans, inbreed into
most of us, is the expectation that we have a God-given right to
happiness, success, prosperity, and a mostly pain-free life.
Here’s the huge problem. This expectation is no where to be
found in the Bible. It is an American expectation not a Biblical
one.
So except for the rare few, who for reasons infuriating and unknown to
me, can go through life with very little real trials, most us encounter
significant sorrow and overwhelming trials some time in life.
Seasons of trial reveal the true character of our faith. If we
hold a naïve faith that believes that Christians are guaranteed a
mostly trial-free life, than seasons of trial will take us down two
possible paths. One path is where we allow God to refine our
faith and move us from such naïve faith to authentic faith.
The other path is where people refuse to process their shattered faith
and deep grief, and so they enter into an extended season of
bitterness, anger, cynicism, and isolation from fellowship. They
get stuck in the storm believing that God has forgotten all about
them! There is only one way out of the storm. There is only
one way to move from a naïve faith or a lost faith. We must
remember that God always remembers us.
In the midst of your season of trial,
• when God seems
silent in the very storm when you need to hear His voice the most,
• when you’re being tossed about on the
dark waves and God seems so distant in the very time
when you need to feel His
presence the most,
• it is in such stormy seasons, that you must
cling to the truth,
• even if only by a finger tip, that God always
remembers you!
• God has not forgotten the promises He made to
you.
• In His silence, God is doing his deepest work.
• Through the storm, God is preparing his
greatest blessing.
Long ago, when Kelly and I were going through a season of storm that
extended over many years, we had reached such a place where we wondered
if God had forgotten all about us. Just when we thought we were
going under for the final time, God remembered us, reached down through
the hands of close friends, and through His Word, and once again placed
us on high ground! Out of that season, I composed a definition of
faith that has sustained me and continues to do so, through all my
ongoing trials and still unanswered questions. Perhaps it will
help some of you:
Faith is trusting that God is writing a
grand and good story, with a happy ending, with all of human history
and with your life, despite all the data that screams this can’t
be true, and no matter how many chapters of this story are tragedy.
A shorter version is this:
Faith is trusting that God is writing a
grand story with my life, and with all human history, and it will end
with “and they all lived happily ever after….