Genesis 6-7 Walking in the Shipyard

Hi everybody, as Don said, my name is Kyle Douglas and I'm excited about today. Anytime I get a chance to preach, I get tingly. That's both excitement over what we get to do in opening the word of God and working through it and learning about who God is and what he wants us to do.

And it's also, just frankly, excitement and nervousness over the great responsibility. So, I'm happy to be here. Anyone notice that the Holy Spirit is really good at his job?

Right?

Found out I was preaching today and I was like, well, okay, I'm supposed to tell people about myself and kind of let them see who I am, but also share the word and all of that. And so I landed on Genesis 6.

And Genesis 6 has one of what I would call my life verses in it. And it's Genesis 6 -9 where it talks about how Noah walked with God and there's just, I'll explain it later, but there's something in that verse that just speaks to my heart.

And so I said, well, let's just go there. And then I go there and then I also find out that Genesis 6 is fairly controversial, that there have been some teachers that have wrestled with this recently.

Maybe some of you know about it. And so I just decided to dive headlong into it. And what I saw happening was that as I studied the scripture again and I prepared the sermon and as I wrestled with some of these other issues, I saw that this is a great opportunity to not only be encouraged by the word and to learn about God, but for you to also see kind of what makes me tick and to get a view of how I approach the scriptures and some of the things that I find important.

So rather than shy away from Genesis 6, I just said, let's go for it. And we want to be authentic, right? Right there, right behind me. So we're going to be authentic, but my prayer is that all of us would walk away today both challenged and encouraged by God's truth.

So if you would like, please turn with me to Genesis 6. And we're actually going to read 6 and 7 just because it's a great story. So it's a chunk here, but it reads very, very smoothly. It's narrative, and it'll really set the context for what I'm going to share.

And I don't think Don said it, but these Bibles and your seatbacks are for you if you don't have a Bible. So if you walked in here and you don't have one that you read or you don't even have the ESV version, I know that we want you to take those home with you.

There's a whole box of these in the back, Don says, every week. So feel free to steal that from us.

It's okay.

Chapter 6 of Genesis. When man began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive, and they took as their wives any they chose.

Then the Lord said, My spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh. His days shall be 120 years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came into the daughters of man, and they bore children to them.

These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown. 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 was sorry 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. Make yourself an ark of gopher wood. Make rooms in the ark and cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you are to make it. The length of the ark, 300 cubits.

Its breadth, 50 cubits, and its height, 30 cubits. Make a roof for the ark and finish it to a cubit above and set the door of the ark on its side. Make it with lower, second, and third decks. For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breadth of life under heaven.

Everything that is on the earth shall die, but I will establish my covenant with you. And you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, your sons' wives with you. And every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark to keep them alive with you.

They shall be male and female. Of the birds, according to their kinds, and of the animals, according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground, according to its kind, two of every sort shall come into you to keep them alive.

Also take with you every sort of flood that is eaten and store every sort of food that is eaten and store it up. It shall serve as food for you and for them. Noah did this. He did all that God commanded him.

Then the Lord said to Noah, Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you are righteous before me in this generation. Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and his mate, and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and his mate, and seven pairs of the birds of the heavens also, male and female, to keep their offspring alive on the face of all the earth.

For in seven days I will send rain on the earth, forty days and forty nights, and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground. And Noah did all that the Lord had commanded him.

Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came upon the earth, and Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives with him went into the ark to escape the waters of the flood. Of clean animals and of animals that are not clean, and of birds and of everything that creeps on the ground, two and two, male and female, went into the ark with Noah as God had commanded Noah.

And after seven days the waters of the flood came upon the earth. In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day, all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened, and rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights.

On the very same day Noah and his sons, Shem and Ham and Japheth and Noah's wife and the three wives of his sons with them entered the ark. They and every beast, according to its kind, and all the livestock according to their kinds, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth according to its kind, and every bird according to its kind, every winged creature.

They went into the ark with Noah, two and two of all flesh, in which there was the breath of life, and all those that entered, male and female, of all flesh, went in as God had commanded him. And the Lord shut him in.

The flood continued forty days on the earth. The waters increased and bore up the ark, and it rose high above the earth. The waters prevailed and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the face of the waters.

And the waters prevailed so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered. The waters prevailed above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep, and all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, livestock, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth and all mankind.

Everything on the dry land, in whose nostrils was the breath of life, died. He blotted out every living thing, and was on the face of the ground. Man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, they were blotted out from the earth.

Only Noah was left, and those who were with him in the ark. And the waters prevailed on the earth a hundred and fifty days.

Let's pray.

As always, you are welcome to get juice and donuts and anything that you need to just be comfortable. Make yourself at home here. And as Don says every week, rightfully that we want you to be able to focus on the word of God.

So hopefully you won't need donuts to keep you awake today, the sugar, but feel free. So my sermon this morning was titled, it is titled, Walking with God in the Shipyard. And that was kind of before God messed me all up when I started getting in there.

But we're going to get to that, but that's just kind of a part in what I want to share with you. But I have broken it up into four sections. Section 1 is called Ridiculous. Section 2 is called Righteous.

Section 3 is called Responsibility. And Section 4 is called Boats. Because I couldn't think of a fourth R. But Ridiculous, Righteous, Responsibility, and Boats. Genesis 6. Verses 1 -4. Part 1, Ridiculous.

Spirit beings are marrying and having babies with the daughters of men.

What?

Anyone read that and you just kind of go, you go back and yep, it says it. It really does say that, that this was happening. This is a really difficult passage. And I contemplated skipping it and telling Don to handle it because what do you do with spirit beings, sons of God, taking daughters of men and having babies and having them be the heroes of old and all of that.

But what would be the good in letting Don have all the fun? So I'll just take a shot. And I just want to pull out some of the things here. I certainly can't explain everything about this. But there is some debate over who the sons of God are, first off.

Some say they are angels and or demons. Some say it means nobility or the kings of the earth or the godly descendants of Seth, who's mentioned earlier in the lineage of Noah. What I find interesting though is that it's easy to see as you analyze each of those interpretations that people have really struggled with this passage and they've tried to explain it to make it less embarrassing.

Right?

Okay, can we make sons of God mean Seth. Because then they'd just all be humans and it wouldn't be so weird.

Right?

I really think that that's what some of these people are doing. And the Seth explanation was the favorite of some early Christian commentators. Simply because this idea, what this is suggesting was not palatable to them.

But I really think when you consider the language, the Hebrew here, and then you look at the other verses that are found elsewhere in scripture, it really is angels or spirit beings. If you have trouble with the angel idea, well, let's remember that Satan himself, right, is said to have presented himself with who before God and Job 1 and 2?

The sons of God, right? So when the sons of God came to present themselves to the Lord, Satan comes in with them. He was a fallen angel. So we're reminded that not all angels are good guys. But we have this.

So what's the issue? And why include this in scripture? I think probably the most feasible explanation here is that God was not pleased with the mixing. God commanded at creation that kinds reproduce after their own kind, plants after their kind, cattle after their kind, etc.

The law that he would hand down through Moses later on would make some strict rules about mixing, especially regarding human marriage, right? The Israelites were not to intermarry with the other cultures around them.

This was not strictly a racial thing. It wasn't just about the color of our skin. It was a heart thing. God did not want his people who were called by his name or to be representing him to be mixing with other cultures who served other gods, right?

And if you're married, don't you have to kind of get along? You're supposed to, right? And marriage is a blending. It's a coming together of two lives and philosophies and even faith systems. And so God's saying, I don't want you to be distracted at all from me.

So don't intermarry. And as I found in a commentary, I think that's one of the most viable explanations is that God had set a boundary between the spirit world and the human world. Angels have their place and humans have their place and he was not happy with this mixing.

And then if we look at verse 3, right? Then the Lord said, My spirit shall not abide in man forever, free his flesh. And this is kind of sandwiched between these two episodes that the sons of God were taking daughters of men and then the Nephilim come in verse 4.

But there's this almost out of place verse there that talks about how God says, I'm not going to strive with man forever, so I'm going to limit his age at 120 years. And it took a while for that to take place, right?

Noah lived to 600 and his sons lived to... But pretty soon we see that no one's living past the age of 120. And so God introduces a judgment on man, I think partly because of this wickedness. And so God is including this obscure strange passage to show that things were not going well on the earth and that man's depravity was increasing to such an extent that there was a mixing.

And you can take this or leave it, but one of the commentators said that there's no sign in the language of rape or coercion, right? From the sons of God. And so it might have been that the fathers were allowing their daughters to be taken by these beings.

Giving consent to these marriages. Representing again just the depravity and the breaking of God's intention. So those are some explanations that might help us wrestle with why God would include something so strange, so ridiculous, but it's really the believability of these verses, right?

That most of us have trouble with. I mean, spirit guys, babies, heroes, I mean... Isn't this why people make fun of Christians? Partly. I went to a secular school, I went to Western Michigan University and I had a Bible survey class.

And it was one of the toughest classes I have ever taken. And it was a grumpy old man who was the teacher. And I'm compassionate for him because he was really kind of an angry old person and he hated the Bible.

We approached it as literature, but he made sure to include every one of the most difficult passages in Scripture.

That he could.

And he knew that every semester there were Christians like me who were going to come into the class and it was his goal to embarrass us. It was his goal to say, how about this one? Nephilim? Sounds a lot like Greek mythology, right?

And he would challenge us on these. And I have to admit, my face would get red and I would be embarrassed in that class because I... You do look like a fool sometimes, right? So what do we do with passages like this and others like it that don't make sense to us, that embarrass us, that we really, if we were honest, we kind of wish that they weren't there?

A couple of things. Number one, trust the Bible. Trust it. I encourage you to be very wary of neutering the Word of God through euphemisms or grasping at unfounded natural explanations. You weaken it, right?

Even the flood episode. Well, it was just, you know, the earth, the atmosphere was really full and it was a different atmosphere and then eventually it just kind of burst forth. Well, maybe that's how God did it, but God did it, right?

We can weaken the Word of God. This is a divinely inspired book. It's full of human flavor, but it's divine and inerrant in the original autograph, so trust it. Wrestle with it. Study it, but trust it.

God put all of these pieces in here for a reason. I think some passages are kind of like our tonsils, you know? We don't really know what they're there for. You can remove them if they're causing you a lot of pain and life goes on, but they're there for a reason.

And even now, doctors are hesitant, right, to take out tonsils.

Before it was just like, oh, you got a sore throat?

You know, suck on a Popsicle for a while and you'll be fine. But now they're saying, well, no, let's leave them in because they're probably there for a reason. Do you have trouble believing in the spirit world?

Do you kind of doubt that there's like another dimension that's beyond what we can see? Maybe this verse is for you. Similarly, if you have a problem that seems too fantastical, or if you have a problem with this passage that it seems too miraculous or too fantastical, may I remind you that we believe in a Savior who is both God and man, who came and walked the earth, and who died and rose again on the third day.

That's weird. It is awesome and beautiful and holy, but it's weird. It's miraculous. It's not like every day. And if you have trouble believing that, yeah, back in the day before God hit the reset button, there was some weird stuff going on, wait until you get to the cross.

Point number two. That was point number one. Trust the Bible. Point number two. Put the same emphasis on these passages as God does, right? This is four verses describing an ancient time. And angels and demons certainly are talked about later in Scripture, but this particular issue of interbreeding is given little emphasis and little explanation.

Obviously, God did not feel like we needed all the details, like where they went on their honeymoons, and if their kids had a separate Little League conference because they went all Hercules on the other kids, right?

He just left it out. So it's there. Don't speculate too much about it. Just be okay with a little mystery. Trust the Bible. Put the same emphasis on it that God does. And then number three, get the main point.

While seeming somewhat detached, as I mentioned, we have verse three. And he's telling us that he's not happy with this. He's not going to strive with man forever, so he puts limits on our lifespan. And we see in this passage that when things are not going well, God reacts with judgment.

God is an interventionist. He is not passive. He is not idle. So we don't need to worry about whether God okayed this kind of behavior. It's right there that he passes judgment on it. He's not happy about it.

And it does help us set the scene for the rest of the passage. And it concludes the general descent of creation and reminds us that God always punishes sin. So part one, ridiculous.

We tracking?

All right.

Noah's Favor in the Midst of Human Wickedness

Part two, righteous. Verses five through nine. So now we come upon the story of Moa.

Moa? Noah.

And the story of mankind is going from bad to worse. But Noah stands out. Verse five. Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

Some of my verses, too, come from the NASB. So if they don't completely match the ESV, I goofed up and didn't use the right Bible. But you get that? The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

Can you hear the emphasis? It's like the writer is running out of words to make his point. He doesn't know how to help us get how evil people were being. Man is wicked to the core. What's really interesting is that the Hebrew of this passage purposely matches earlier wording in Genesis 1 .31.

When God saw everything that he had made, right? Including man. And behold, it was very good. So God looks on his creation and he says, it's very good. He's satisfied. He's happy. So let's not lose the contrast here, right?

Humanity had come to a place where they were the very opposite of what God had intended. They were undoing his creation. Rather than reflecting his nature and giving him glory by how they cared for the earth and how they treated one another, they were dismantling his image, his creation, his heart.

With every wicked deed, with every thought, it was like they were taking a sharpie to his masterpiece. Have you ever done something really nice to someone and not have them appreciate it? You ever been there?

Spent some time planning a gift or maybe it was a getaway for your spouse or whatever.

And you're so excited for them to do it or open it.

Or go on the trip and then they're like,.

Oh, really?

Or they're just like, oh yeah, thanks, cool.

And they move on.

Does that hurt? It does.

It makes you feel really bad.

What do you think God felt with the way that people were treating his perfect creation? Verse 6, and I think this is one of the most important verses in the Bible. I don't say that lightly. The Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth and he was grieved in his heart.

He was grieved in his heart.

He was sorry.

Some translations will render that he repented of having made man. And the Hebrew there for grieved means grieved or hurt. He was aching on the inside because of humanity. We learn some really important things about God here.

Number one, God hates sin. God has a standard. He has expectations. And he's not pleased when they aren't met. He is a holy, perfect, righteous God. And sin does not go over well. Number two, God can express regret.

God is not some robot who succumbs to our human definitions of perfection. If our understanding of God doesn't allow him the right to feel or have emotion or wish that he had done things differently, then we have a broken view of God's sovereignty.

God doesn't change. He is light and truth now and forever and he will never feel differently about sin. He will never fail to be grieved at good things gone bad. He will never fail to act to make things right.

But he's big enough and personal enough to be sorry. I think we do a disservice to ourselves if we try to undo a very clear statement about God's character, about his emotions, based on limited human definitions or doctrines.

I love how the commentator Gordon J. Wenham put it, that God should change his mind might lead to his being accused of capriciousness or flip-flopping. Which scripture firmly denies. God is not a man that he should repent, Numbers 23, 19 and 1 Samuel 15, 29.

Such remarks obviously raise various questions for the doctrine of divine sovereignty and its correlate human responsibility, but theological systemization is hardly the concern of the biblical narrators.

For them, divine repentance is a response to man's changes of heart, whether for better or for worse. That's from the word biblical commentary. Do you hear what he's saying there? We have the raw Bible.

We study it. We have to let our doctrine be influenced by what the Bible says. And I'll speak a little bit more on that later. So that's number two, that God can express regret. He's a personal God. Number three though, we, me, you, can break God's heart.

God was grieved in his heart. And he's not some sterile ruler. He's not a computer, right? You did five bad things. You are 20 evil and I only love you 80 with a margin of error of plus or minus 1%, right?

It's not just like a grid that you plug in. And I did just do a robot voice.

Awesome.

He's not a robot. He's a loving personal father who aches at the core of his being over our sin. Your sin, my sin, our opposition to him in thoughts or deed reflect the respect and love and admiration we have for him, which is terrifyingly little sometimes.

Amen?

I know reflecting on my own life that I have many times broken the heart of God. Have you? I don't mean to presume to know you, but I'm betting that if we sat down for coffee and we talked through some things, we'd find a couple stories where God was looking down on you and crying over you because you were breaking his heart.

Parents understand this, I think. Charlotte, my youngest daughter, is our Spitfire kid, right? We got Adelaide, the very typical mother number two, firstborn. And then we have Evie, who's a dancing princess.

And then we have Charlotte, who's the one who will be on top of the piano, like ready to parachute. She's just a spunky little kid. And there are times, I've been watching her, and she's almost two, so really fun age, right?

And she and Evie are starting to play more and interact more, and there's a couple times where Evie will have a toy, and Charlotte really wants the toy, and Evie, who's bigger and stronger, can keep Charlotte from having the toy.

And Charlotte runs in and tries to grab it, and Evie kind of does this and nudges her out, maybe a couple elbows, and she kind of keeps playing. And I remember one time specifically, Evie kind of pushed Charlotte to the side, and Charlotte kind of sat there and she looked at Evie, and you could just see on her face that she was like, I don't like you, right?

She kind of grimaced and she kind of scowled, and Evie doesn't see this, because she's on the couch looking at her thing, but Charlotte's just looking at her, right? And then out comes the fist. Right in the back of the head, you know?

And it's kind of cute when you're two sisters, right?

But in that moment, I saw that my child was a sinner. And parents, you might know what I'm talking about. There are moments, and usually it has a hard time crowding out the deep love that you have for your kid, but there's moments where you go, that hurts me.

My kid is bad. And I don't like seeing that in my child. And if we can have that feeling as fallen human parents where we can grieve over the sin of our kids, think about what God feels. But verse 7, let's not worry about God's emotions making him weak or passive.

Like maybe he'll just slink away to an easy chair and sip some tea and feel sorry for himself, right? We see that he always confronts evil and sin with judgment. He will always move to set things right, and in this case, it's a total wiping out.

Anybody depressed yet? I mean, this is not the floating zoo story in our children's Bibles, right?

This is hard.

But, verse 8, and this is a big but. Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.

What?

In the midst of this wretched evil, there's hope? Though God is brokenhearted, though he is grieved and angry, he allows a but. He finds favor in Noah. And the term favor in the Hebrew is the term for grace.

God's grace is the thread of hope that runs through our broken world, past, present, and future. Who is Noah? Verse 9. Noah was a righteous man. The general idea here is that he was a good person. He did right and stayed away from evil.

Noah was blameless in his generation. This is an even higher honor than being called righteous, even. The term was often used in conjunction with sacrifices, which were to be spotless or perfect. And this was in the context of his generation.

It was hard to accuse him of wrongdoing. If he were running for office, a smear campaign would not be an option for his opposition. But I would caution us from making this too relative of a term, right?

That Noah really wasn't good, he was just better than all the evil people around him. Well, maybe that's true to a degree, but I don't think it was like, hey, look, Noah only serves two other pagan gods, and he's only sacrificed three of his children on the fire.

He was a good guy. He was a good man, and God saw fit to inspire Moses to record that he was blameless. But then there's this last statement, Noah walked with God. And this is the verse that sticks out to me, right?

He walked with God. I find this really inspiring. There's only one other person in Scripture of who it said he walked with God.

Anyone know?

Enoch. It was Enoch, and as a reward for Enoch's righteousness, he was swept up at the young, young age of 300 to go and be with God. 300-ish. Moses was a friend of God, Jacob wrestled with God, and you, of course, have the disciples with Jesus, but in terms of this particular honor, only these two guys.

Enoch and then Noah. They walked with God. And I think we need to point out that there's a crescendo here. Noah was righteous, good guy, did the right things, kept himself from evil, he was blameless, he did it really, really, really well, and he walked with God.

I want to be like Noah. I want it to be said of me when I die that Kyle Douglas walked with God. I'm off to a bad start, but is that such a bad thing to want that? To be able to say that I walked with God?

Should something in my heart flutter when I consider that possibility? It's unlikely I will ever, I know this, I will never achieve the status of Noah, but I ought to hunger and yearn and work with all my energy to walk with God.

I should desire to be righteous. 1 Timothy 6 .11, Paul equipping his young protege, Timothy. But flee from these things, you man of God. A whole list of bad stuff, right? Part of righteousness, say no to evil.

And pursue righteousness. Godliness, faith, love, perseverance, and gentleness. Pursue righteousness. It's a good thing to want to be righteous. And we could go to a lot of other verses, Proverbs is filled with them.

Psalms is filled with references to the righteousness that we are to desire. But can I be righteous? It's one thing to want it, but can I be righteous? Well, no. And yes. This is where some people get really hung up.

In this concept, if you look through all the examples in Scripture of righteousness, it's a broad word. And it applies to both God and man. More often to God than to man. But if you simply count them up.

But some people's first reaction to the question, can I be righteous? Is to say no, because God alone is righteous.

Well, yes.

And no.

Responsibility, Doctrine, and the Righteousness of Noah

Part three. Responsibility. Mark Driscoll, anyone know Mark Driscoll?

Okay.

Pastor out in Mars Hill. And really influential pastor. Great teaching, good guy. But he was teaching from 2 Peter a couple years back. And the verse mentioned Noah, and so he kind of had this little aside.

And he said some things about Noah that became fairly controversial. And you can look it up on the internet, just type in Driscoll, Noah. And you can find the debate. And this was brought up to me as I threw it out there that I was going to do Genesis 6 this week.

And so I looked it up, and I saw what he said, and it burst my bubble. I like Noah.

I want to walk with God like Noah,.

But there were some things said that kind of said, well, if you like, one way to take his statements was to say you can't really like Noah because he wasn't that righteous. He said if you grew up in church, you don't know the story of Noah.

The story you think you know will probably make you a heretic. He said I don't want my children to grow up as heretics, so he changes his children's Bibles to make sure that they understand what the story of Noah is really about.

And I kind of went, well, that's interesting. So I looked into it. And I say this very humbly, right? Mark Driscoll is a stud, but he's a man. And I'm giving you maybe an opposite side here, an opposing side.

I think what happened was that to make a theological point, which is that no one is righteous before God, that none of us has any option of standing before God based on our own works and say, I'm good enough to get into your heaven, right?

He wanted to make that point. But he took this story, and he didn't handle the story very well to make that point. In fact, he kind of twisted it a little bit to make it say what he needed it to say. He said he really understood the story, and what he kind of did was, what the text really says, or what the text seems to plainly say, it doesn't really say.

And that's always dangerous, right? Anytime someone says that. So the question is, does our doctrine dictate how we interpret Scripture, or do we build our doctrine piece by piece by what we read? If a rightly understood verse doesn't fit in your doctrine, then your doctrine needs some adjusting.