It's Only Jesus

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I want to invite you to take out your Bible and turn with me to Genesis chapter 9.
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John Calvin was the pastor of the Reformed Church in Geneva, Switzerland.
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In fact, he led the Reforms, and he was known for being both a brilliant theologian and an expositional preacher.
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He made it his mission to preach verse by verse through books of the Bible, and at one point he was exiled from the city of Geneva, only later to be asked to return.
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When he was asked to return, three years later, he picked up preaching at the same verse that he left off when he was exiled.
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He was the model of expositional preaching, to preach verse by verse through the Bible.
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I tell this story because it highlights a commitment to verse by verse preaching, and this morning I'm going to honor that commitment by preaching the verse that I left off on last Sunday.
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Even though today is Resurrection Sunday, we are commanded to preach the whole counsel of God, and if you're a visitor with us this morning, it may seem odd that we're not preaching Luke 24 or one of the other passages of the Resurrection, but understand this.
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This whole book is about Jesus, and everything that we're going to study today will find its culmination and finality in what He did on the cross and His resurrection from the dead.
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So if you are a visitor, I want to at least bring you up to speed as to where we are.
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We've just concluded a long study of the three chapters of what we would call the flood of Noah, or the global deluge.
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Beginning in chapter 6, we see mankind had fallen into a time of wanton rebellion and depravity, and as a result, God chose to bring judgment upon the earth, but He did not choose to destroy everyone.
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He saved, according to Peter in his writings later, He saved eight souls, and that's all.
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He saved Noah and his wife, his three sons, and their three wives.
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From Genesis chapter 6 to Genesis chapter 9, we have the account of the flood, and everything on the dry land, that is every person, every man, woman, child, and animal died.
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Everything outside of the ark perished.
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When it was over, Noah came out of the ark, and he worshipped God for his salvation.
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God made a covenant with Noah, and He promised him that He would never again destroy the world by water, and He set a rainbow in the sky as the signature of His promise, and this leads us to where we are today.
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And what we're going to see today is that after Noah has experienced this tremendous experience with God, after Noah has had this time with God that is amazing and unprecedented, Noah is going to experience a moment of moral failure, and that's going to lead to an even more severe moral failure on behalf of one of his sons, that's going to have repercussions to an entire generation in line that comes from his household.
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And this chapter is going to conclude with Noah prophesying curses and blessings.
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And this may not be, as I said, the most normal Resurrection Day message, but I assure you that even in this difficult passage, we will see the cross.
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So let us stand.
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Genesis chapter 9, beginning in verse 18.
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The sons of Noah who went forth from the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
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Ham was the father of Canaan.
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These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the people of the whole earth were dispersed.
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Noah began to be a man of the soil, and he planted a vineyard.
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He drank of the wine and became drunk, and he lay uncovered in his tent.
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And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside.
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Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father.
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Their faces were turned backward, and they did not see their father's nakedness.
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When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said, Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants! Shall he be to his brothers? He also said, Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant.
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May God enlarge Japheth and let him dwell in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant.
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After the flood, Noah lived 350 years.
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All the days of Noah were 950 years, and he died.
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Our Father and our God, as we seek to understand this passage this morning and to spend time studying your word, I pray first and foremost, as I always do, Lord, keep me from error.
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For God, I am a fallible man and capable of preaching error, and I do not want to for the sake of your name and for your word and for the sake of your people and for your truth and for my own conscience.
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I pray that I would also preach with boldness, and I pray, Lord, that those who hear, I pray for the believers that they would be challenged, reproved and rebuked if needed, encouraged where necessary, and Lord, for those who do not know you, I pray that this message would be to them a word of conviction that perhaps today, even today, you might draw them unto yourself unto salvation.
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We pray this in Jesus' name.
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When I was 19 years old, Jennifer and I got married.
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Not too long after our marriage, Jennifer got saved, and then not too long after she was saved, I got saved.
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I grew up in and around church, but I was not saved until I became a young adult.
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But because I grew up around church, the news of my salvation was not taken with any sense of negativity.
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It was a positive thing.
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But Jennifer did not grow up in a home where the Bible was taught, and so news of her conversion was not well received by her family.
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And she remembers quite vividly that today's passage was used by one of her relatives to actually question the reliability of the Bible.
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One of her family members, upon telling them that she got saved, one of her family members said, don't you know that the people in the Bible, they were all bad? Even Noah was a drunk.
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Maybe you've heard something like that before.
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Perhaps you've heard folks rail against the moral failures of the people in the Bible and use that as a reason to not believe.
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Or maybe you've heard it the other way.
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Maybe you've heard people use the moral failures of the people of the Bible as excuses for their own.
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Doesn't matter if I get drunk, Noah was a drunk too.
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Well, I assure you, neither one of those are the right understanding of this passage.
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And I want to try to explain this passage to you today and what it means, not only in the significance of Noah's life, but in the significance of redemptive history.
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This particular passage bears much weight in regard to our understanding of the Bible as a whole.
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So what we're going to look at today, we're going to look at four parts.
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We're going to look at the main figures who are reintroduced.
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This is verses 18 and 19.
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We're going to look at the moral failures that unfold.
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That's verses 20 to 23.
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We're going to look at the proclamation of the curses and the blessings.
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That's verses 24 to 27.
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And then we're going to look at the death of Noah as we draw to a close.
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So let's look first at the main figures who are reintroduced.
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Verse 18, it says, The sons of Noah who went forth from the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
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Ham was the father of Canaan.
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These three were the sons of Noah.
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And from these, the people of the whole earth were dispersed.
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Now we're familiar with these names, especially those of us who have been in the study.
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Shem, Ham, and Japheth are the sons of Noah.
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These men have been discussed ever since chapter 5 or chapter 6 when their names were first introduced to us.
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And so we are familiar with who they are, but there is a name that is new in this list.
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A name that we have not seen up until now.
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Notice the name Canaan is brought in.
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It says in verse 18, The sons of Noah who went forth from the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
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And then it says, Ham was the father of Canaan.
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And one might ask the question, Why is Canaan being brought into the narrative? He hasn't been part of the narrative up until now.
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He's not part of the story that happens between Noah and Ham and Shem and Japheth.
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Why is Canaan even part of this conversation? In fact, Canaan isn't even the only son of Ham.
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If we go to chapter 10, we see in verse 6 that Ham had four sons.
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He had the son Cush, who the Cushites came from Egypt, or the Egyptians came from, the Puth people, and Canaan.
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So we have four different families that come out of the line of Ham.
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Why this name? Why so important? In fact, Canaan is likely the youngest of Ham's four children.
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Why is his name even being brought up? Well, if you're familiar with biblical history, you're probably very aware that the Canaanites have a very important role to play in the life of the Israelite people.
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In fact, the Israelite people in the wilderness were going toward a particular place, which they called the Promised Land.
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But what else did they call it? The land of Canaan.
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And you remember what God said to the people of Israel.
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When you enter into that land, you are to devote them all to destruction.
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That you are not to leave one alive, and you are to show them no mercy.
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Now, a lot of people have issue with that.
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A lot of people take issue with the command of God to essentially destroy an entire people.
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And a lot of people come to the Bible, and they reach that passage, and they say, I just can't believe that my God, the God of love, would command the destruction of an entire people.
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Didn't we just read about God flooding the whole earth? And now we're going to get upset that He commands the destruction of one group of people? You think God doesn't have His reasons? You think God is wrong? You see, I will tell you this.
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One of the things that most people have as a problem that they never really get over is they come to the Bible as the judge of Scripture, rather than allowing the Bible to judge them.
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They come to the Bible with the attitude that I get to determine what's right, and God is going to have to bend to my understanding of justice, rather than God is just, and I must bend to Him.
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So understand, this book of Genesis, when was Genesis written? Genesis is written by Moses.
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And He's written, He's writing it during the wilderness traveling, right? Where are they headed again? To Canaan.
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So God introduces into the narrative this man whose children would become the enemies of the people of God.
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And He uses this seed of sin to show how this seed is going to grow into an entire people who were known only for their depravity, for their idolatry, for their child sacrifices, for their wanton rebellion against the God of the universe.
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And the seed of this family is right here in the Son of Ham.
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It says in this text, there were three sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
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And it says, from these, the people of the whole earth were dispersed.
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You know what that means? I've said it a few, I've said it over the weeks.
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If you've been here, if you're not visiting today, you know this.
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That means every one of us is either a Shemite, a Hamite, or a Japhethite.
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Every one of us comes from one of these three lines.
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Isn't it interesting to know that all of us are Noahites? Every one of us comes from the seed of Noah.
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But we come through one of three lines.
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Next week when we get to Genesis 10, we're going to look at the table of nations and see how God has divided the nations.
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But for now, we simply see God calls out Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
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He says, the whole earth will be dispersed through them.
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Disperse is actually literally the word for scattering seed.
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The world will be seeded by these three men and one of them will bear great significance and that is the seed of Ham, whose name is Canaan.
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Now, moving on to the plot, if you will.
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That's the introduction.
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That's the characters of the narrative.
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Now we move on to the plot of the narrative as the moral failures are unfolded.
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Verse 20, it says, Noah began to be a man of the soil and he planted a vineyard.
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By the way, that term, man of the soil, King James Version says a husbandman, NAS says he began farming.
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But the Hebrew word is very interesting there.
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The Hebrew word is Ish Adumah.
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Ish Adumah means a man of the land or a man of the soil, but if you hear the word Adumah, you probably notice in there is the name Adam.
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Because Adam was called Adam, why? Because he was taken out of the ground.
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And so it's interesting that I really believe Moses is sort of using a play on words here when he says, Noah became a man of the ground.
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He became a man of the Adam.
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We're going to see in a moment that he actually does very similar to his father Adam.
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He has a moral failure.
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Very similar to Adam did.
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So he is Ish Adumah, he is a man of the ground, and from that he is going to plant a vineyard, which also gives us a little bit of a timetable here, because it takes a little bit of time for grapes to grow.
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Now, I don't know that it's always been the same, but as I was looking and researching this week, it seems like it would take about two years for there to be a vineyard to grow and to have enough to be able to produce wine and then the fermentation.
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So this is not sitting outside the ark.
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The ark, that story is over.
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We're now moved into Noah.
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He's going about his life.
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He's planted the vineyard.
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It's grown up to grapes.
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He's got the grapes.
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He's beat the grapes into juice.
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The juice has fermented, and now Noah has become the first one to exercise what is known as viticulture, which is grape growing, and then viniculture, which is the cultivation of wine.
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Many cultures believe that wine was invented by the gods.
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Many polytheistic cultures that believe in many gods, they believe wine is made by the gods.
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Wine wasn't made by the gods.
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There are no gods, plural, but wine was made by man, by Noah, we see here, and there is a good chance that there was wine prior to the flood.
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We don't know that.
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The Bible doesn't talk about that.
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The only thing we have that does reference that is Matthew 24, 38, where Jesus says before they went into the ark, they were eating and drinking, and I don't think that means they were drinking Kool-Aid.
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It could be.
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I don't know, but I assume that's a reference to wine, and therefore Noah's probably not the first one to make a fermented drink, but he's the first one written about.
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Noah makes a fermented drink, and it says in verse 21, he drank of the wine, and he became drunk, and he lay uncovered in his tent.
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Now we have to understand a little bit about ancient Near East culture to understand why this is such a big deal.
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In our world, nakedness is not even a thing anymore.
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People used to wear clothes that covered most everything, and now we wear things that don't cover hardly anything, and so I don't get too far into that.
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But the idea of being naked and being exposed was a shameful thing, and understand this, the concept of shame isn't even something we really understand anymore.
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We have so conditioned ourselves to get away from any idea of shame.
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In fact, we've become like the Old Testament prophets said, we've become a people who've forgotten how to blush, because we don't know how to be shamed anymore.
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We don't know how to feel shame anymore, because we've become so adept to sin, right? And who are you to judge me? Who are you to say anything? And so the concept of a people who live their lives in an honor culture doesn't even really understand, our minds can't get that.
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But a culture that places honor at a high standard, and dishonor and shame is something that we have difficulty understanding, but that's where they are.
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And Noah has become drunk, and he has dishonored himself in his tent.
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Now, I do want to mention something about that.
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Some believe that Noah didn't know that the wine would cause him to get drunk.
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Now, there's one commentator, Delitz, it's his name, he says, this is a quote, In ignorance of the fiery nature of wine, Noah drank and was drunken and uncovered himself in his tent.
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So here's the argument from Delitz, is that Noah didn't know, so his sin of drunkenness is a sin of ignorance, doesn't mean it's not a sin, by the way.
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Just because you don't know doesn't mean it's not a sin, that has to be clear.
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But it still is not, he's not fully culpable in the sense that he went about seeking to be drunk.
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Maybe he didn't know.
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But what happens when you get drunk? You lose your inhibitions.
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You lose your ability to stand rightly.
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And so you begin to allow yourself to do things you wouldn't normally do.
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So whether Noah intended to get drunk or not, he has gotten drunk, and it has allowed him to engage in something that would not be the norm.
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He is laying uncovered in his tent.
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Now you might say, it's in his tent, who cares, he's in his, essentially his bedroom.
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But still, again, this is culturally not something that was done.
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To lay exposed where anyone at any time could simply look upon you and your nakedness and you be exposed to them.
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So Noah has gotten drunk, and he lays uncovered.
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And whether it be intentional or ignorant, the Bible does not say specifically.
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But the Bible still tells us that even unintentional sins have consequences.
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And there we find Noah having experienced the only moral failure the Bible applies to him.
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Do you realize that? That the Bible, from the moment it starts talking about Noah in Genesis chapter 6, says he was a righteous man, blameless among his generations, and he walked with God.
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The only person other to have walked with God was Enoch, and now Noah walked with God.
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And so Noah is described as almost perfect, but he's not.
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Here he is, lying, drunk, and exposed before anyone who might look into his tent.
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And of course, along comes someone willing to look.
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His son Ham, it says in verse 22, and Ham, the father of Canaan.
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Notice that keeps coming up.
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He keeps mentioning Canaan.
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He's already told us Ham is the father of Canaan.
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He says it again.
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And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside.
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Now, this is where the story takes sort of an awkward turn, because we're not told exactly what happens.
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The commentators go crazy with this, because when the Bible doesn't say much, commentators say a lot, just so you know.
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That's how the commentaries work.
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And they want to find something in here, some sort of detail, some act of incest or homosexuality or something strange.
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One guy even, some form of circumcision, it was weird.
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We're not going there.
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Here's what we know happened.
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Ham went in, there's naked Noah, and he went out and he found someone to tell.
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That's what we know.
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And that's the sin.
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Accidentally looking at your father naked, there's shame in that.
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But going out into the community and spreading that shame abroad was the sin.
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Going out to his brothers and telling, rather than taking a blanket and covering his father's nakedness, he went out, and some commentators, I do agree, this is likely, mocked his father by spreading his shame.
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And so Ham goes out and mocks his father.
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And this dishonor is then juxtaposed with the honor shown to Noah by his other two sons.
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Ham goes in, sees Noah, immediately goes out, spreads the shame abroad, and what do the other two brothers do? They walk in the tent backward.
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They cover their heads with a blanket so that they can't, even through the peripheral vision of their eyes, look upon the nakedness of their father.
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They back up to their father's naked body, him who is still drunk and unconscious from his drinking.
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And they back up to him and in a display of absolute mercy and love, they cover their naked father's shame.
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And then they depart.
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It makes me think of 1 Peter 4.8.
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You know what 1 Peter 4.8 says? Love covers a multitude of sins.
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Love covers a multitude of sins.
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You see, Ham wanted to display his father's sins.
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Shem and Japheth covered their father's sins.
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Just for a moment, apply that to ourselves.
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Do we seek to proclaim the sins of others or do we seek to cover them? Do we seek to spread or do we seek to, in love, cover over? Think about that the next time somebody hurts you and you feel the need to go tell someone else.
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What are we doing when we go out and tell someone else if we're not seeking to bring them shame? So we have two moral failures here.
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Noah, in his drunkenness, whether unintentional or intentional, Noah in his drunkenness has shamed himself and Ham has viewed his father in his naked stupor and he's gone out and spread the shame.
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And now we see the proclamation of curses and blessings.
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Verse 24, it says, When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his son had done to him, he said, Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants, shall he be to his brothers.
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He also said, Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant.
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May God enlarge Japheth and let him dwell in the tents of Shem and let Canaan be his servant.
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Now, first of all, let me just say this, this is the only time Noah speaks in the whole Bible.
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This is the only time Noah says anything.
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We've had three chapters of nothing but Noah in the ark and leading the people, his children, and making the ark and all of those things, but he never said a word that's recorded.
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He preached, the Bible says he was a preacher of righteousness.
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We have no writing from any sermon from Noah.
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We have no writing of anything that he ever said except this.
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The first words out of the mouth of Noah are, Cursed be Canaan.
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And I got to tell you, this is the hardest part of the whole thing.
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This is the part that made me really think maybe I ought not preach this on Resurrection Sunday because people are going to come and they're going to misunderstand this part because this part's hard and it does lead to a mountain of questions.
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So let me just satisfy you maybe by saying this.
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I understand the questions and most common among them is why did Canaan get punished? He wasn't even there that we know of.
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This is his father, not the son.
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Ham is the culprit.
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He's the one who's dishonored the father.
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Why punish the son? And why punish Canaan? He's the only one of four.
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He's not the only son, but he's one of four.
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And many commentators try to make sense of this by saying, well, maybe Canaan participated in it.
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Maybe Canaan was there and he's just not mentioned, but maybe he was laughing along with Ham as they went and told Shem and Japheth, we can't go there.
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The text doesn't go there.
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You know, we could say that's possible, but it's not there.
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One other commentator, I thought this was interesting.
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He said, well, Noah saw in Ham, or excuse me, saw in Canaan the same rebellion as he saw in Ham.
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And that's why Noah cursed Canaan.
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But again, there's nothing, none of that is in the text.
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By the way, always remember this.
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When you are reading commentaries and I'm, and I use, I read commentaries all the time, but always remember that is an opinion based on the commentator's understanding of the text.
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The text sheds light on the commentary, often more than the commentary sheds light on the text.
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So the text is where we have to begin and end our understanding.
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And the text doesn't give us all the answers.
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But one thing that we do see in the text, and this is important, is that the curse and the blessing of Noah comes in what we would call the form of the prophetic oracle.
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Noah is prophesying about his children.
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How does one prophesy? By the Spirit of God.
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So I make that point because when you see the word cursed, you might think of something like some witch doctor or some shaman, or maybe some type of wizard like you've seen in some of these movies about Middle Earth and all that and, you know, cursed be.
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That's not what's happening here.
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Noah's not a wizard.
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He's not a shaman.
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He's not a witch doctor.
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Noah is a prophet of God.
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Therefore, the words that come out of his mouth, beginning with the word cursed and the word blessed, are prophecies from God through Noah to these men.
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I'll give you an example.
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Later in Genesis, and we'll get there sometime in 2030, but later in Genesis we're going to come to when the father of the 12 sons of Israel are prophesying over their sons.
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And you know what one of the prophecies was to Judah? The scepter shall not leave the house of Judah.
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You might wonder what that means, but then you later come and you find out that that's a prophecy about Jesus Christ, that that's pointing forward to the line of Judah and Jesus Christ is the line of Judah.
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But you've got to wonder, maybe, as Judah heard that, that he didn't quite understand how it was going to be fulfilled in its fullness.
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And so we come to these curses and these blessings and we say, yes, it's difficult to understand just from this story how Canaan is involved, but when we go future and we see what only God can see, and that's what's going to happen, and we see the descendants of Canaan becoming the enemies of God, and then we remember that Genesis is based on two lines, the line of the godly and the line of the ungodly.
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Remember that started back with Cain and Abel, and then Abel is destroyed and so Seth comes in and you have the godly line and the ungodly line, and the godly line and the ungodly line continue, and the ungodly line becomes dominant, and so God brings the flood, and now the godly line gets on the ark, but guess what? There was still ungodliness on the ark.
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Like John MacArthur said, sin was alive and well and riding on that boat, and it was riding in the hearts of those men, and Ham demonstrates that sin, and his son in the distant future would have a nation of sinners come from his loins.
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So God says to Canaan, through Noah, cursed be Canaan, who will serve his brothers as a slave, and blessed be Shem.
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Actually he doesn't say that.
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He says, blessed be the God of Shem, and the name of God he uses is the name Yahweh.
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Blessed be the covenant God of Shem.
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By the way, who comes from Shem? Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Jesus, and what does he say to Japheth? You will dwell in the tents of Shem.
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That's a picture.
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I tell you, you can argue with me later, I believe that's a picture of the new covenant because we who were not part of that nation have been grafted in to the tents of Shem.
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We have become, we are now made sons and daughters of Abraham by faith.
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So there is more to this than an angry drunk cursing his kids.
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It doesn't have anything to do with that.
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This is a prophecy from Almighty God about what is going to happen to the descendants of these men.
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And so the story ends with Noah and his death.
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Verse 28, after the flood, Noah lived 350 years.
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All the days of Noah, 950 years, and he died.
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Now there are many truths contained in this passage and in that sense many applications can be made.
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But there is one overarching point in this whole section of this text that I hope you take away from this today.
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What we see here in this passage is that Noah, even though he is another Adam, he is not the true and last Adam.
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You say, what do you mean? Adam represented humanity and he fell.
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God destroyed the earth.
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Here is Noah, like another Adam.
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Will he be the perfect man? He's righteous, he's blameless, he walks with God, but he's not the Messiah.
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He is not the Christ.
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And this story reminds us that he is more like Adam than he is like Jesus.
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I'll give you a few examples.
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Both Adam and Noah stand at the beginning of humanity.
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Adam stood at the first of the world, Noah stood at the first of the new world.
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Both Adam and Noah are given commands, be fruitful and multiply.
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Adam had two faithful sons and one wicked son.
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Noah had two faithful sons and one wicked son.
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Adam and Noah experienced moral failure.
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Adam failed by eating the fruit of the tree, Noah failed by drinking the fruit of the vine.
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Adam and Noah experienced nakedness in their failures.
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Adam recognized his nakedness and ran for cover, Noah being inebriated exposed his nakedness by throwing off his covers.
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Both Adam and Noah had moral failures which would have consequences for their descendants.
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Adam plunged us all into ruin and Noah's ultimate sin, or rather Noah's curse, curses the line of his posterity, a line of his posterity into bondage.
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This connection between Adam and Noah is important because it shows us that Noah is not the true and final Adam.
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You know who is right? Jesus.
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Turn in your Bibles with me to one passage and we'll close with this passage.
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1 Corinthians 15, I told you we were going to make it to the resurrection.
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1 Corinthians 15 is all about the resurrection.
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But look at this passage in 1 Corinthians chapter 15.
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Look at verse 42.
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So is it with the resurrection of the dead, what is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.
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It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory, it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power, it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.
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If there's a natural body, there's also a spiritual body.
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Verse 45, thus it is written, the first man Adam became a living being.
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The last Adam, who is Jesus Christ, became a life-giving spirit.
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Noah wasn't the last Adam, Jesus was.
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The Bible only has one hero.
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Hear that again.
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The Bible only has one hero.
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There's a song, it's a hip-hop song, and not necessarily my favorite type of music, but I do like this song by Shy Lynn, and the title of the song is, It's Only Jesus.
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And the lyrics are simple.
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Adam wasn't good enough, Noah wasn't good enough, Moses wasn't good enough.
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It's only Jesus.
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Abraham wasn't good enough, Isaac wasn't good enough, Jacob wasn't good enough.
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It's only Jesus.
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David wasn't good enough, Daniel wasn't good enough, Jonah wasn't good enough.
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It's only Jesus.
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You see, that's what this story tells us.
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Noah's not good enough, but Jesus is.
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And if Noah wasn't good enough, I know I'm not.
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If Noah's not good enough, you're not.
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But Jesus is.
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If you are trusting in anything today other than the goodness of Jesus Christ, your trust is misplaced.
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And I will tell you this, if you're trusting in your own goodness, you are trusting in filthy, dirty rags.
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So I call you today, if you're trusting in anything other than Jesus, turn and run to the cross.
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Because, when it comes to salvation, it's only Jesus.
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Let's pray.
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Father, I thank you for your word, I thank you for your truth, and I thank you for Christ.
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I thank you that in Him we have salvation, and apart from Him there is none.
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I pray for everyone in this room, that if there be even one who does not know the Lord Jesus Christ, Lord, that you might strike their heart with terror today.
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May they understand that they lay naked before you like Noah laid naked in his tent.
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Nothing that they can bring to you that would cause you to turn toward them, but Lord God, if they would simply receive your Son by faith, they will be saved.
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I pray for repentance in this place, I pray for faith in this place, and I pray that you would do what only you can do, and that is change the hearts of men and women today.
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By the power of your Spirit, through your Son Jesus we pray, Amen.