The Faith of Noah (Part 1)

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The Faith of Noah (Part 2)

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I want to invite you to take out your Bibles and turn to Hebrews.
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We are in Hebrews chapter 11, and I need to give somewhat of a background of what we have been doing.
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As most of you know, I preach through books of the Bible, verse by verse from beginning to end.
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On at least I attempt to do that every once in a while.
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I'll do a message that's off the subject or off topic, like last week on Mother's Day.
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But for the most part, what we try to do is we try to exegete the scripture.
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And we feel the best way to do that is to go verse by verse, just read it, explain it and apply it.
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And we've been going to the book of Hebrews now for a couple of years and we are in chapter 11.
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And in chapter 11 of Hebrews, what we find is a listing of some of the great heroes of the faith.
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The writer of Hebrews in the chapter in the 11th chapter, what he's doing is he's demonstrating for us God's grace on mankind all throughout history.
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And he's demonstrating how that grace has been instrumental in producing men of faith.
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And so far we have looked at two Old Testament men.
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We have looked first at the man named Abel.
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You'll remember that Adam and Eve had two sons.
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Their names were Cain and Abel.
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And Abel, of course, was killed by his brother Cain.
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And we read that story and we sought its understanding.
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And we did that, I guess, a little over a month ago.
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And then we looked at the story of Enoch.
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That is the second person that is mentioned in the list here in Hebrews chapter 11.
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He is the second character that is mentioned.
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Now, today we come to the third man who is mentioned in the list here in the book of Hebrews.
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And that is a man that I know all of you have heard of.
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In fact, I would venture to say of all of the people in the Bible, this man is likely to be the most famous outside of possibly Jesus Christ and Abraham.
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Of course, the person I'm talking to is Noah.
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The person I'm talking about is Noah.
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Everybody knows who Noah is.
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However, what I find about the story of Noah is that while so many of us have heard the story, most of us have heard it in the context of a children's setting.
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In fact, that's often how people engage the story of Noah, as if it is a children's story.
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Why do we make it a children's story? Well, it has the animals.
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And of course, it's like a floating zoo.
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And who doesn't like going to the zoo? And what children don't like going and seeing all the animals? And could you imagine being on a big ship just full of animals? It must have been the most pleasant thing ever, right? No, but that's how we tend to explain the story.
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And that's how we tend to tell children this story.
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And oftentimes in our relating of the information, we leave out the parts that are most influential or could be most influential in our lives as believers.
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The fact that the very necessity of the art is testimony to the universality of man's sin.
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The fact that God chose to save in the midst of a people who were not deserving of salvation as a testimony to his grace.
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These are all things that are often overlooked.
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And the things that we're going to do, we're going to take at least three Sundays, maybe four.
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It depends on how fast I preach.
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And as most of you know, generally isn't that fast? And we'll see how many weeks it takes.
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But we're going to begin by reading the book of the passage in Hebrews, and then we're going to go back and we're going to exegete Genesis chapter six through chapter nine.
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Obviously not all today, but that's the focus.
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That's what we're going to do.
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So with that being said, let us begin by reading the text in Hebrews 11, verse seven.
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And we stand for the reading of God's word to give it its due honor and reverence.
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So I invite you to do that if you are able.
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And the book of Hebrews says these words.
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By faith.
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Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen in reverent fear, constructed an ark for the saving of his household.
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By this, he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.
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Our father and our God, as we venture into the text of scripture this morning.
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I pray first and foremost.
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That you would keep me from error.
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As I am a fallible man.
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And I am able to preach error.
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I pray that you would keep me from that, oh, God.
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And I pray, Lord, also that you would open the hearts of the congregation to not only hear what is preached.
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But Lord God, move on them, we pray that what is preached would be applied and pray, oh, God, your Holy Spirit to move in this time for the message.
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In Jesus name.
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Amen.
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When we were looking at the story of Enoch and our last time that we looked over these passages.
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I mentioned that Genesis chapter five gives us a very long and extensive genealogy from Adam and Eve through the line of Seth.
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And if you remember, Seth is the son who was born to replace Abel.
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Abel, and don't let that throw you off, because I'm sure some of you might be thinking, well, certainly a child can't be simply replaced by another child.
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But the idea of there being a righteous son, because we know Cain is the unrighteous son.
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And Abel was the one who brought the faithful, righteous sacrifice to the Lord.
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And Seth, of course, is born as a replacement for that righteous line.
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And here is Seth having been born.
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And the sons of Seth are given to us in Genesis chapter five.
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And that line is in counter distinction with Genesis chapter four, which gives us the line of Cain.
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We have the line of Cain, which is the line of the evil, the ungodly.
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In fact, the very first instance of polygamy that we have in the Bible is in Genesis chapter four in the line of Cain.
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So you have this unrighteous line of Cain in Genesis four.
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And then you have the sons of Seth and many of which of those sons were righteous.
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You have men like Methuselah.
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You have men like Enoch, who the Bible says walked with God.
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And at the end of the genealogy in Genesis chapter five, we come to these words.
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Genesis chapter five and verse twenty eight.
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It says when Lamech had lived one hundred and eighty two years, he fathered a son and called his name Noah, saying out of the ground that the Lord has cursed.
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This one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands.
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Lamech lived after he fathered Noah five hundred ninety five years and had other sons and daughters.
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Thus, all the days of Lamech were seven hundred and seventy seven years and he died and Noah was five hundred years old.
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And we talked about the ages and how this was a antediluvian situation.
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This was prior to the flood and the people tended to live longer before the flood and the time of the atmospheric changes in the world.
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It says after Noah was five hundred years old, Noah fathered Shem, Ham and Japheth and that closes for us Genesis chapter five.
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And we here begin the story of Noah.
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So if you haven't turned there yet, you would like you would need to turn to Genesis chapter six because that's where we're going to begin studying.
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And again, what we do here, how we study the Bible, we read the text, we explain the text, we apply the text because that is what expository preaching is.
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So we stick to the text.
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And in Genesis chapter six and verse one, we begin our exposition.
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It says 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.
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Now, I want to stop there and I want to add an explanation and some commentary.
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When we run into this first verse of Genesis chapter six, we run into the first bit of controversy in regard to not really fully understanding what exactly is being said.
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The text says that the sons of God took for themselves wives from the daughters of men.
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And historically, there have been two divided interpretations of what that means.
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The first is that the sons of God were actually angels.
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Do we find this in the Bible? Do we find that explanation in Scripture? Well, yes, we find the term sons of God used of angels in Job, the very first chapter.
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It says the sons of God presented themselves before the Lord.
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And that is a reference to angels.
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So we know that the phrase sons of God has been used in Scripture to refer to angels.
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So here are some people say, well, what is happening is that there are fallen angels.
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Angels that have not any longer are or who are not any longer within the grace of God, but have fallen.
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We would call them demons.
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But they could still be called angels, fallen angels, they are spirit beings.
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And that these angels came and intermarried with the daughters of men.
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And that as such, they created a hybrid race of evil people.
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That is one interpretation of this passage, and it is a very popular interpretation of this passage.
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In fact, there are many people out there who, upon hearing it, that's the only interpretation they ever are exposed to.
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But that's just the way it is.
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However, as I often do when we come to a controversial text of the Bible, I like to present to you another side.
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I like to present to you another interpretation to give you an opportunity to see that when there are difficult texts in the Bible, it is important that we seek the truth as far as the truth will take us and that we don't simply accept on face value because Pastor X said it or Pastor Y said it or Pastor F said it, that it's necessarily the only way and the right way, because I can be wrong.
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OK, we have to be able to seek what the scripture actually says and the truth of it.
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The second way that men have interpreted this over the years is that the sons of God here reference the descendants of Seth.
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As we have noted, Seth's line is recognized in distinction with the line of Cain.
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This is not to say that every person that ever came from Seth was righteous any more than to say that every person that ever came from Cain was wicked.
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However, we can say that there was a pattern after the person of Seth that was not after the person of Cain.
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There was a godly pattern.
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With that, some have interpreted this to mean that the sons of Seth who had been trained in righteousness intermarried with the daughters of Cain who had been trained in unrighteousness.
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And what happened was the result.
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What happens, and I'm going to ask you this, what happens when good intermingles with bad? Does good overtake the bad or bad overtake the good? The Bible says that bad behavior corrupts good morals.
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The Bible teaches us that is what happened.
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This is why the Bible teaches, by the way, that a believer, a Christian is not supposed to marry an unbeliever.
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Somebody says, well, I love them.
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Yeah, that that statement hasn't got anybody in trouble ever.
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The Bible clearly teaches that we are not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers.
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Why? Because marriage and family is not all about you.
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Marriage and family is not all about your wants and your desires and your pleasures.
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Marriage and family has an important biblical foundation as well.
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And when you marry intermarry with an unbeliever, my first question is, what are you going to do with your children? And the answer is always, well, we'll let them make the decision for themselves.
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Let me tell you this about that.
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You would never allow your child to have his own way when it comes to his education.
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You would never allow your child to have his own way when it comes to his nutrition.
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You would never allow your child to have his own way when it comes to his hygiene.
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You would never allow your child to have his own way when it comes to how he feeds himself, clothes himself and when he goes to sleep and when he does this.
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And if you do, you're not a very good parent.
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No good parent allows his child to have his way in all these different areas.
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Why, then, would you say to your child, well, hey, the most important decision in your life, the most important thing in your life, your relationship with Jesus Christ and how that's going to affect your rest of life? That's all up to you.
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But when you intermarry in a situation, I know this isn't really what the sermon is about, but I got to mention that when a believer intermarries with an unbeliever, something must be given up.
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And I can tell you, by and large, by and large, the person of faith has to concede to the other person.
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It just is the way it is.
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And when I see this text, I'm simply giving the other side of it.
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The other side of it is that we have the sons of God, which could be a reference to the sons of Seth intermarrying with the daughters of Cain.
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And what is the result of this? We see unrighteousness flourishing.
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Am I being dogmatic in my interpretation in this interpretation? No, I'm saying this is an opposite interpretation over and above an interpretation that I find difficult.
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I find the interpretation of the angels to be quite difficult.
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The Bible tells us angels are asexual, that they do not marry nor given in marriage.
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Jesus Christ himself said that.
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So I find it difficult to accept that the sons of God are angels.
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However, I am totally able.
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To be corrected.
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And I say that from the pulpit.
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But the point is this, no matter what, the most important part comes in verse three, because in verse three we see God's judgment on the situation.
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Verse three says, Then the Lord said, My spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh.
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His days shall be one hundred twenty years.
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Beloved, that is a demonstration of divine disapproval.
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Whatever transpired between the sons of God and the daughters of men, it caused the judgment of God to fall upon the people.
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He is now imposing a limit upon how long he is going to allow this sinful situation to continue.
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Some people say that the hundred and twenty years here is God limiting the natural age of man.
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And there's some evidence for that, because after the flood, we don't see people living hundreds of years anymore.
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We see people living almost a hundred years, sometimes over a hundred years, but not really past one hundred and twenty years.
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And some people have some people have considered that perhaps what God is saying here is now no one is going to ever live past one hundred and twenty years.
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However, a more faithful reading of the text is this, that God is now here giving one hundred and twenty year time of respite.
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He is saying one hundred and twenty years and I will bring judgment.
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One hundred and twenty years and I will bring.
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My judgment and what judgment is coming? The judgment of the flood, verse four leads us to another difficult passage again, this is one of the great things about what we do here.
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Is we deal with the difficult passages because we think of just a chapter six is hard.
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And you know what I'm sure on Sunday morning, you know, it would be a lot easier to preach John 3, 16 or something that we've heard a thousand times.
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But you know what? To dig into the meat of the word.
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That's why we're here.
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So we get to this difficult passage.
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Let's deal with it.
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It says the Nephilim were on the earth in those days, the Nephilim were on the earth in those days.
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And also afterwards, when the sons of God came into the daughters of man and they bore children to them.
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These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.
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Again, I can see this passage is almost as difficult to interpret as the one before it, because the Nephilim is not given an explanation as to who they were.
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And some Bible translations, in fact, I'm not sure if the King James does.
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Ray, are you here? Does it say Giants? OK, great.
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And other and some others say, OK, I can always count on this rate to have a King James so I can always ask.
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So we have the word Giants there.
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If your Bible says Nephilim, this is translating.
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It's transliterating the Hebrew word.
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Because it's hard and difficult to understand what the Hebrew word originally meant, the same term is used in Numbers 13, 33 to describe a race of large people.
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So in that case, we could say, yes, these were giant people.
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However, more important than the stature of the people, many scholars believe this is talking not so much about the size, but about the quality of their tyranny.
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The Nephilim were tyrannical people.
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They preyed on people.
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They wielded their authority by the power they possessed.
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And that may have been from a larger physical size.
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Yes, larger people sometimes can be tyrannical people.
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We know the story of Goliath when he stood before the people of God at nine foot tall.
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And he said before the people of God, I'll fight any one of you.
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You know, he was a southern guy.
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You know, I'll take on the whole lot of you.
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You know, Goliath stood before at nine foot tall and he stood against them.
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Why? Because he had the stature to do it.
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They couldn't defeat God, but he felt like he could defeat all of them.
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And that's why when we read this and this is why the King James translates it as giants, because the parallel passage in the book of numbers parallels this word.
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But I want to read to you just a quick commentary, says the term in Hebrew, the term Nephilim implies not so much the idea of great stature as of reckless ferocity, impiousness and daring characters who spread devastation and carnage far and wide, end quote.
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The point of the Nephilim was they were the mighty men, the men of renown.
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That meant they were powerful and they used their power for wicked purposes, which is why in verse five, the Bible says this.
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The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth.
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There were these men that had power.
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They influenced the world with evil and that evil permeated the whole culture.
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And again, I don't like to make too many applications saying this thing that happened five thousand years ago necessarily reflects what we see today.
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But you know that it's true when there are powerful people that have influence over a culture and they are wicked, their wickedness influences the culture.
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You look at our world, just like this very last week, one famous movie actress said that marriage is a dead institution and everybody is, well, she said marriage is a dead institution.
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I said, yeah, she's going to say that she's a liberal, but she gets to say these things publicly and people expound on it because they think it's important.
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Why? Because she made a film.
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But you say power allows influence into a culture and you have these men who are powerful.
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The text says they were men of renown and the wickedness of mankind is spread and there was wickedness in the culture.
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And it says in verse five that every intention of the heart was only or rather it says this and every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil.
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Continually, the author of Genesis goes out of his way.
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This is Moses writing this and he's going out of his way to emphasize the depth of human depravity at this time.
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He says every inclination of his heart and his thoughts was only evil all the time.
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And beloved, you might say, well, that expression really that really only that's only talking about then mankind isn't so bad anymore.
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I want to show you something very quickly.
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You're in Genesis six.
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I just want to flip.
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People say, well, after the flood, everybody was cool.
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Look real quick.
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Genesis chapter eight.
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Genesis chapter eight, verse twenty one.
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This is after the flood.
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This is after all those people have been destroyed.
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This is after now we've only got eight people left.
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Noah and his family.
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I know we're jumping ahead in the story, but I want to show you something because you can't look at Genesis chapter six and say, oh, well, the intention of his heart was evil before the flood.
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But after the flood, man became good.
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No, because this is what it says in verse twenty one.
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And when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, what was the aroma? The aroma was Noah was making a sacrifice.
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It says that when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, I will never again curse the ground because of man.
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For the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth.
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Notice it says is evil, not was.
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You see, the intention of man heart is still evil.
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The Bible says for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
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The Bible says there is none righteous.
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No, not one.
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Those statements are made after the flood.
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The Bible says there is none who seeks after God, that it's actually God who has to seek after us before we would even turn and be saved.
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That happened after the flood.
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So don't think that just because men were evil before the flood, that we were somehow good after the flood.
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No, the evil in man's heart is still there.
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We are still depraved and we still have to be saved.
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All right, going back to Genesis six, five.
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Now, the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intention of the hearts of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
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And here comes another difficult passage.
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And I'm not going to lie.
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This one is one that many people find difficult.
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Because in verse six, it says, And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth and it grieved him to his heart.
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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 heaven, for I am sorry that I made them.
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Now, before I get to the nature and character of God and how the phrase grief and sorry applies to a sovereign God who sees and knows all things, let me just say this.
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That sentence should stab us in our heart before we even try to understand God's grief.
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And before we even should try to understand the sorrow and understand it in view of his omniscience and sovereignty and omnipotence.
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Let us first just meditate on the fact that God grieved over our sin, because beloved, we live in a culture and in a time when people say to themselves publicly, God doesn't care what I do and he's going to accept me any way that I am.
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God doesn't care if I'm the most reprobate.
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God doesn't care how I behave.
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And beloved, it's not going on in the world only.
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It's going on in the church.
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The idea that God would expect from us righteousness and that God would demand from us righteousness.
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Now, are we saved by our own righteousness? No, we are saved only by the blood and the work of Jesus Christ.
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That is how we are saved.
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But does that mean that we are to live unrighteous lives? People use the grace of God as a license.
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To sin, and Paul says in Romans chapter six, that we are never to use the grace of God as a license to sin.
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But our culture does it all the time.
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Well, God's going to forgive us.
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So it doesn't matter.
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Beloved, it is a sad thing.
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And when you see this here, where it says the Lord was sorry that he made man on the earth, it grieved him to his heart.
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So he said, I will blot man out.
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Do you realize God can do that? Do you realize that the only thing that holds your very being together is the grace of God, that if God for one moment were to remove his hand of grace from you, that the very air within your lungs would cease to exist and you would cease to exist? This is why I say this is not a children's story.
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God said, I will blot out man from on the face of the earth.
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Did he display grace? Yes.
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In a moment, he's going to talk about how he chose one man to basically reboot the world.
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But at this moment, let us meditate on his grief.
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That man is so evil and so sinful.
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That God would even have to come to this point of bringing judgment, we talk about judgment all the time, talk about hell.
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But do we really consider the eternality of it? We tell this story all the time, but do we ever consider the reality of it? That God, in his anger and in his grief, chose to literally split the world open and allow the waters to come from above and below and bring a torrent of judgment.
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You see, that's the part of the story we miss, the broken heart of God over the sinful heart of man.
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Now, some say, well, if this text tells us God was sorry, that means he's not omniscient or omniscient.
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Or some will say, well, this text says that God was sorry.
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So that means he's not sovereign.
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However, this text does not deny the sovereignty of God, neither does it deny the omniscience of God.
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When this text says that God was sorry that he had created man, this does not indicate in any way that he wished he hadn't done it or that he had no control over it.
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That's usually what we mean when we say we're sorry or that we're grieved over something.
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It means we wish we could change it or that we would go back and that it would never have happened.
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What this text, however, describes is the nature of how God responds to sin.
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God, in his sovereign will and in his all knowing understanding, still responds to sin by grieving over it.
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Just because he's sovereign doesn't mean he doesn't grieve when his creation rebels against him.
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And just because he's omniscient doesn't mean that he, because he knew it was coming, would not grieve when it came.
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God is sovereign.
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God is all knowing.
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God is God.
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And it is because he is God that he is grieved over sin.
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Beloved, we sung that song earlier.
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And I got to tell you, outside of Martin Luther's great song, which he wrote during the Protestant Reformation, which is my favorite song.
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And for the life of me, I can't think of it right at the second.
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Mighty Fortress, which is my favorite hymn.
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Thank you, Richard.
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Outside of Mighty Fortress, Holy, Holy, Holy is my favorite hymn.
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And let me tell you why.
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As I said in my communion meditation earlier, when we think about God.
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See, so many people have such a skewed view of God today, they cannot see God for who he is because they do not look through the lens of his holiness.
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They only look at God through the lens of his love.
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And here's the problem with that.
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Yes, the Bible says God is love.
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The Bible also says God is justice and God is.
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Righteous.
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The Bible says a lot about the nature and character of God.
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But there's only one thing it says to the third degree, and that's that God is holy, which means to me that when I think of God's justice, it is a holy justice.
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And when I think of his righteousness, it is a holy righteousness.
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And when I think of his love, it is a holy love.
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And when I think of his wrath, it is a holy wrath.
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And because God is holy.
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The Bible says he does not even look upon our sin that he cannot.
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Because our sin is such an affront to him.
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Do you know what holiness means? And I know some of you have heard this before and probably some of you have heard me preach on Isaiah six before.
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But I want to describe this to you because some of you've never heard it.
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And I must say, I didn't invent this.
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Dr.
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R.C.
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Sproul, one of my favorite pastors, preachers, one of the favorite men of the faith that I listen to.
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Dr.
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R.C.
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Sproul coined this term, I think.
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And when I heard him say it, it made so much sense to me.
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Hopefully it'll make sense to you.
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When you talk about the holiness of God, what the word holy means is God's otherness.
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That there is none like unto him.
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You say, what is God like? He's not like anything.
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He is wholly other.
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He is totally separate, totally different.
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He is not defiled.
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And we are an affront when we sin, we are an affront to God.
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And to his holy nature, as such, he says in this text, I'm sorry that I have made my heart is grieved.
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By their sin.
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Beloved, I'm going to have to draw to a close much sooner than I thought, because I see that my time has run away from me as it often does.
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But I want to end with this proclamation of truth in Genesis chapter six and verse eight.
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It says, but Noah found favor.
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Favor.
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In the eyes of the Lord and beloved, that word favor, if you want to, if you write in your Bible or if you're taking notes, you write next to that word, the word grace, because that's what it means.
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The word favor here, in fact, the King James Bible actually uses the word Noah found grace.
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What is grace? Grace is favor that is unmerited.
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And beloved, if it were not for the grace of God, we would all, all experience the same judgment as those in the days of Noah.
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And we would be deservingly so in our judgment.
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But God's grace has reached down into the muck and the mire of our sin.
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And if you cannot see yourself as sinful, then you have not seen God as holy.
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The one man in the Old Testament that saw God's presence and fell to his knees and put his hand over his mouth and he said, woe is me, is Isaiah.
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And I got to admit, Isaiah was probably a pretty righteous guy when you compare to all the people in his area.
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He was probably a pretty righteous man.
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But what did he say when he saw the Lord? He said, woe is me.
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I am a man of unclean lips.
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Beloved, that's where we need to be.
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We need to be able to fall down and put our hand over our mouth and say to God, I am nothing apart from your grace.
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Noah would have went the way of the world were it not for the grace of God.
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We, too, would go the way of the world if it were not for the grace of God.
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So this morning, if you're a believer, you should proclaim the grace of God and thankfulness for what he has done for you.
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And if you're not, I encourage you, call upon the Lord in repentance and faith that he might give you the grace that is necessary for your salvation.
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Let us pray.
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Father, as we have examined this text of scripture and will continue to over the next few weeks, I just pray, O Lord, that our time spent together in studying the word has been fruitful, that it has spoken to the hearts of your people and has thus encouraged them.
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And Lord God, that you would use this now to open the hearts of any among us who might not be believers, that you might open their hearts to faith and trust in you.
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For we know, O God, that your grace must even precede our faith, that your grace must even precede our belief, that you must even open our hearts for that very thing.
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As such, O God, we pray your grace now, we pray that it be upon us, we pray now that as we prepare for our time to depart, that we would not depart worship, but just simply depart the congregation.
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But that our worship would last throughout the world.
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We pray all these things, O Lord, in Jesus' name and for his sake, Amen.