A Whole New World

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I want to invite you to take out your Bibles and turn to Genesis chapter 8.
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And when we read, we're going to be reading the entire chapter, so you can hold your place at verse 1.
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Our world is filled with beauty.
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As we get close to springtime, we notice that the flowers begin to blossom, tree leaves begin to flourish, and here in Florida, the lush green grass reminds all of us of work that's coming.
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The work of cutting that lush green grass.
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One of the most beautiful places on earth, in my opinion, is the Great Smoky Mountains.
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Every few years, our family will make a trip up to Gatlinburg or Maggie Valley, just to see the beauty of the mountains, be reminded of God's majesty and that wonderful beauty.
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And we especially love to go in the fall when the leaves are turning colors and the gorgeous garnet and gold, paint the landscapes along with the crystal streams, feeding glorious waterfalls.
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And it's beautiful.
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I mean, Jack, you know, you spent so many hours there, so many days there, months there, looking at those mountains.
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But when we look at the beauty of creation as it is now, it is easy to forget that what we are actually seeing is not the beautiful creation that God made in the beginning.
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What we are actually seeing is the earth as it was reformed after the global flood.
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We're actually seeing a world which, if we look close enough, is filled with scars, like a man who has gone to battle and comes back with perhaps a limb that's disfigured or a portion of his body that has been burned or hurt.
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We look across the world and we see a world which really has the scars of the great deluge.
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For instance, if you go out west, you'll notice massive holes in the ground, giant holes, canyons like the Grand Canyon, 277 miles long, 18 miles wide, and a depth of over a mile.
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And if you ask a secular scientist, how did that hole get there? They will tell you that that hole got there, it was carved by a little bit of water over a very long amount of time.
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In fact, it's specifically quoted on one website in regard to the Grand Canyon.
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It says, the Colorado River established its course through this area five to six million years ago, and since that time, the Colorado River has driven the downcutting of the tributaries of the retreat of the cliffs, simultaneously deepening and widening the canyon.
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Again, the idea, it was a little bit of water over a very long period of time.
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However, if we believe the biblical account of history, and if we believe the biblical account specifically of the flood, that it was in fact a worldwide catastrophe, as the Bible describes, then we can arrive at a different conclusion.
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Rather than a small amount of water over a very long amount of time, we see it rather as a massive amount of water over a very short amount of time.
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If you remember, when I first began this series, I actually discussed that our elders, and in this church, we hold to a younger earth theology, meaning we believe that the Bible doesn't teach that the earth is billions of years old, but rather we would teach that the earth is much younger than that.
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And part of our reasoning for that is coming to the Bible and finding this narrative about the flood.
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The flood, if it happened as it is described in the Bible, if it happened several thousand years ago, then what we would see now is the result of that, which is a world which is marked by having been underwater.
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And that's what we believe, and that's what we think that we see when we look at the geography of our world.
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And we've seen examples of this.
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We've seen examples of catastrophes totally changing the topography of an environment over a very short amount of time.
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In 1980, Mount St.
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Helens erupted.
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It totally changed the area surrounding the volcano to the point that anyone looking at that now might think that that took hundreds of thousands or even billions of years to lay down that much rock and to carve that many canyons and to make that many streams and rivers that came out of that volcano, but it all happened in one afternoon.
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It didn't take billions and millions of years.
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It took hours and a few days.
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And this is what we believe about the flood.
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So when Noah went on to the flood, or excuse me, when Noah went on to the ark prior to the flood, he left a world that he would never return to.
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When Noah came off the ark, he actually entered into a whole new world, uncharted, perhaps a little intimidating, but it was a new world.
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And that's what we're going to look at today.
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So let us stand and let us read Genesis chapter 8.
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This is the disembarkation passage.
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Noah and the family and the animals leaving the ark.
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But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the livestock that were with him in the ark.
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And God made a wind blow over the earth and the water subsided.
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The fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed.
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The rain from the heavens was restrained and the waters receded from the earth continually.
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At the end of 150 days, the waters had abated, and in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.
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And the waters continued to abate until the tenth month.
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In the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen.
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And at the end of forty days, Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made and sent forth a raven.
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It went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth.
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Then he sent forth a dove from him to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground.
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But the dove found no place to set her foot, and she returned to him in the ark.
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For the waters were still on the face of the whole earth.
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So he put out his hand and took her and brought her into the ark with him.
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He waited another seven days, and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark.
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And the dove came back to him in the evening, and behold, in her mouth was a freshly plucked olive leaf.
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So Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth.
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Then he waited another seven days, and sent forth the dove, and she did not return to him any more.
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In the six hundredth and first year, in the first month, in the first day of the month, the waters were dried from all the earth.
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And Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and behold, the face of the ground was dry.
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In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth had dried out.
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Then God said to Noah, Go out from the ark, you and your wife and your sons and your sons' wives with you, bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh, birds and animals, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, that they may swarm on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.
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So Noah went out, and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives with him, every beast, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves on the earth, went out by families from the ark.
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Then Noah built an altar to the Lord, and took some of every clean animal, and some of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.
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And when the Lord smelled a 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, neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done, while the earth remains, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.
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Father in heaven, as we study your word this morning, I pray that you would first and foremost keep me from error, for Lord I am a fallible man and capable of preaching error, and I do not want to do that.
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I pray Lord that you would also give me boldness, not only that I would be free from error Lord, but that I would preach with the power of the spirit and the boldness Lord that is needful for a day like today.
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Father thank you for your word, may we be under the word today, in Christ's name, amen.
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For those of you who are new, or maybe visiting with us today, I've been preaching through Genesis now for a long time.
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We have taken breaks here and there, so it's not been a continual thing, but I think we started back in 2019, so it's been a few years that we have been going through the book of Genesis.
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So we're not going tremendously quickly, but at the same time there have been, I have received some encouragements in my own heart that sometimes I think I need to take larger sections, because if not we're going to be here until I die.
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So I do want to try to look at the whole chapter today, so that we can move on to chapter nine next week, that's my hope.
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But the Lord will do as He wills with that.
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But as far as the plan for today, we're going to look at chapter eight in three parts.
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We're going to look at the outline that we have, it's on the screen for you.
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God remembers, that is verses one to five.
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We talked about that last week, so we won't spend as much time on that one.
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But we're going to look at God remembers, the second Noah responds to God, and then that's the largest portion, that's where we'll spend most of our time today.
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And then God restoring, and that begins what we're going to talk about next time, which is the Noahic covenant, the introduction of this restoration that God is going to make and give Noah a promise, and He's going to give him a sign of that promise, which is the rainbow.
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We're going to talk about that some when we get to chapter nine.
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So let's begin first looking at verses one to five, God remembers.
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You'll notice it says in the very beginning, it says, but God remembered Noah.
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Now last week I spent a lot of time on that word remember, and remember, I want to remind you that it does not mean that God forgot, but rather it means God was showing concern and He was taking action on behalf of Noah.
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God remembering someone is God actively working in their life for a purpose, and perhaps after a prolonged time of waiting, they've been waiting on Him, and God is now going to take action for them on their behalf, and so God remembers Noah.
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But notice it also says that God remembered the livestock that were in the ark, and the beasts that were in the ark.
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It's important to remember that God cares for the animals, and if God didn't care for the animals, perhaps it would have been a much smaller boat, because He could have just put Noah and his children and some food for them and their wives, and that would have been it, but God said, God ordained that Noah should build a giant boat that was large enough to take the animals in, and so God cares for the animals, and it says God remembered them as well.
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He's not going to allow them to stay on the ark where they would eventually die from malnourishment and lack of basic necessities, which are only available by going out of the ark.
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They have to eventually leave the ark, and God has remembered them so that they might disembark the ark.
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No intention for rhyming there, but it just happened.
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Now God remembers them in this situation.
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Remember for a moment that the flood had begun with an enormous amount of cataclysm in the world.
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It wasn't just a simple rainstorm that brought this about.
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The Bible doesn't describe it as filling the earth like we fill a bathtub.
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The Bible describes it as filling the earth both from below and from above.
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The waters came from below and from above, and I am convinced, as I said a few weeks ago, that more water came from underneath than came from above.
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I think most of the water that flooded the earth came from within the depths of the earth, and it destroyed the landscape, and what we have is we have a world filled with water, and verse 7 tells us the waters prevailed for 150 days.
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That word prevailed means that they were mighty or that they were strong waters.
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For 150 days, the water was relentless on the earth.
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It was changing the entire world underneath it.
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Water is an incredible force.
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I don't know if you've ever spent any time doing anything in the water, but when I was a young man, I used to do, some of you think I still am, but I'm really not, but when I was a younger man, I used to scuba dive, and I was certified open water scuba diving, and when you certify open water scuba diving, you are only allowed to go 60 feet down, and there's a couple reasons for that.
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One, it's because that's how safely you can come back up quickly.
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If you can only hold your breath for one minute, you can only come up one foot per second.
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You don't really need to know that, but that's part of the reason for 60 feet, but it's also a point of pressurized changes, and after you begin to go 100 feet, 200 feet, you begin to experience pressure that your body simply cannot take.
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The pressure of that much water over you and around you would begin to damage your body and perhaps even begin to bring you to a point where you could no longer survive, but think about how much water is on the earth at this time, enough to cover the highest hills, and remember we said we don't believe the mountains were as high before the flood, but there were still hills and valleys.
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The highest hills were covered by over 22 feet of water, and so that water pressure was bearing down on the earth.
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This is the experience that we see, and this water prevailed over the earth, according to verse 7, for 150 days, half, almost half of a year, the water totally restructured the earth's topography, and as the great fountains opened, they tore the landscape, and the water flowed over the landscape.
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Nothing under the dark deep of the great deluge would ever look the same.
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I'm convinced that the world before the flood was more beautiful than it is even now, and perhaps a better picture of what we will see in the new heavens and new earth one day.
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But God, as easily as He opened the great floods of the deep, and as quickly as He opened the waters of heavens, closed them, according to the scripture.
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The judgment is over, it has ceased, and now this watery chaos, this watery destruction is going to give way to a new world.
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And I want to remind you, just for a moment, that there's a picture here that should remind us of something that happened earlier in Genesis.
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The Bible says when God created the world, He created the world first as water.
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You remember that? And it says, out of that water He brought forth the land.
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And so this is almost going back to a pre-creation moment for the world.
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It's bringing it back to this point of utter chaos where all of this water has brought in an opportunity for reconstituting the world.
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In fact, I want to point to a connection here, and I don't want to ride this connection too hard, but I do think there's a connection here.
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You'll notice it says in our text for today that God made a wind to blow over the water, and that's what brought about some of the recession of the water.
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The receding of the water came from a great wind.
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Well, if you go back to Genesis chapter 1 and verse 2, when it says that the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters, it's the same word.
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The word for wind and the word for spirit in the Hebrew language is the same word.
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So there is at least a connection pictorially here that God is essentially recreating the world under Noah's feet.
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And he's re-establishing the world as he did in the beginning here again so that Noah has a new world to come onto.
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And in creation, God brought a beautiful world out of a watery mass, while in this re-creation, God brings a new world out of watery chaos.
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And at verse 5, Noah is still on the ark, but the great ship has run aground on top of a mountain, and so it is now no longer drifting.
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And can you imagine that moment? You've been drifting for many months in the ark, and then it just stops.
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You know you've hit something.
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You know that the swaying back and forth, and I don't know how many of you have ever taken cruises, but you sort of get used to the movement of the ship, and you sort of get used to moving with that movement as you walk around.
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And then boom, it's done.
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It's over.
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You're now run aground on the mountains of Ararat, and by the way, the mountains of Ararat are where today we would say eastern Turkey.
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One idea of where he's at.
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And Noah must now begin the process of disembarkation.
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Big word.
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I learned that when I was on a cruise ship too.
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So now we get to verse 6.
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And in verse 6, we have the familiar scene where Noah begins to use birds as tools to check the terrain around him.
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Even though the waters had receded, it was still not safe to come out of the ark.
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So Noah uses two different types of birds as his tools to determine the landscape.
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The first bird that he uses is a raven.
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The second bird he uses is a dove.
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And the Bible doesn't tell us why he chooses these particular birds, but we can extrapolate based on what we understand about ravens and doves.
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We can kind of make some conclusions.
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The first thing we know from the text is a raven would be considered an unclean animal, and the dove would be considered a clean animal.
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So that's one thing.
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But more specifically, a raven is a very large bird, more the size of like a hawk.
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It's not a crow.
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He's not sending out a crow.
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He's sending out a raven, a bird of prey, a very fierce bird at first, a bird essentially that could take care of itself if the land has not dried up yet.
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If there is, you know, a bird that's sort of self-sufficient.
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And he sends out the raven first.
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And this large bird of prey, if there were bodies that were still there after the flood, if there were things that had died, it would eat them because it was a bird of prey.
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It eats dead things.
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So again, we don't know whether the water would wash them all away or not.
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So the raven is a big, strong bird, kind of sort of takes care of itself, so he lets that bird go first.
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But then he switches to the dove.
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The dove is much more gentle.
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The dove is much more gentle.
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I don't know why I said it so weird.
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And the dove would not stay outside of the ark if it were not safe.
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So he sends the dove out, comes back, okay, it's not safe.
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The next time he sends the dove out, I find this very interesting, the dove brings back in its mouth an olive branch, which I was always interested like how quickly things began to grow again, until just a couple of weeks ago, I tried my hand for the first time at planting.
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Jordan has been helping me because he's a gardener, and he's been helping me plant a little garden in my office at the house.
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And it's been less than two weeks, and they're already this high.
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I was amazed that green beans get this high in two weeks.
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So I have pictures, I ain't lying.
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And so I thought to myself, there's already, God has seeded this new world, and there's already growth happening to the point that the bird can go out, can pluck up one of those leaves and come back and demonstrate not only is the world dry, but the world is also flourishing.
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It's flowering, it's budding.
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And so Noah gets to experience hope.
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There's a leaf, that's a picture of hope.
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But he still doesn't go, right, seven more days, which I said last week, you got to imagine the conversation, how that went with his wife.
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Okay, we know the bird's safe, he brought back a leaf, but we're going to wait seven more days.
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Noah, we've been here for months.
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It's hot, it smells, I'm breathing recycled air, I want out.
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And I'm sure Noah wanted out too, I'm not just blaming the wife, I'm sure that all of them wanted some freedom from the ark.
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But seven more days after the dove brought back the olive leaf.
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Tremendous patience, by the way, on behalf of Noah.
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He wants to make sure that his family is safe, he wants to make sure that he's moving in God's timing and not his own.
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Don't we often, so quickly, and I could go off on a 30 minute application, which I don't want to do, but don't we often want to move in our timetable rather than God's, and we want to push things forward quickly rather than waiting on God's timing.
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And Noah's willing to wait, wait until it's God's time.
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And so he, in verse 15, prepares to disembark.
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Disembark into an uncharted world.
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For the first time in over 300 days they set their foot on dry land, almost a year, some estimates say over a year, depending on how you count the days, and there's a little bit of debate about that.
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But we're looking at about a year being on the ark.
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The animals are released, it says, according to their families.
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First time the word family is used of animals, by the way, in the Bible is right here.
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I find that just as an interesting side note, it's not a huge deal, but the animals go out according to their families, right? And the big question then is like how quickly and widely do they disperse? Well we look at our world now, which has animals all around the globe.
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At this time there was only animals in the mountains of Ararat.
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So these animals go out by their families and they quickly begin to disperse.
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And not to get too pointed as to how I think things happen.
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I believe after the flood, I believe the waters receded to a lower point than they are today and then the waters began to balance themselves.
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I believe there was a time where the equilibrium had to come back.
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Therefore I think places like Australia and even the Americas and places like that could have been reached by land, which cannot be reached now by land as the water began to come back and more balance was held.
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So people ask the question, well how did the kangaroos get to Australia? They hopped, you know, they hopped, they just, you know, there was, I believe there was land that allowed them to get there and eventually the water rose and they became trapped and that's why we have animals that are designated to certain areas now that wouldn't necessarily have been at that time.
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So we see the animals go out by their families.
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And you might think Noah's desire at this point would be to build himself a home or perhaps to get on with the building of society or perhaps to get on with, you know, reconstructing some form of civilization, but that's not what he does.
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Or maybe take a nap.
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You know, maybe get out and build a hammock and just take a break.
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Been at this for a year, it's been a little rough.
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Go take a break, but that's not what he does.
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Noah instead focuses his attention on the God who has saved him.
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And Noah worships God.
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At the end of this salvific experience in the life of Noah, Noah worships the God who saved him.
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The one who was the great ark builder now becomes an altar builder.
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And like his spiritual ancestor Abel, Noah chooses to bring a sacrifice to the Lord.
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And something very important in the text that should not be missed is that when Noah builds an altar to the Lord in verse 20, it says in verse 21 that when the Lord smelled the aroma, the Lord, it was pleasing to the Lord.
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Notice it says that it says that when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, I'll never again curse the ground.
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That word pleasing has been sort of rattling around in my brain, not only this week, but last week as well, because I wonder sometimes if we understand the importance of our worship being pleasing to God.
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Noah came off the ark, and again, he could have went and rested, he could have went and built him a home, he could have went and began to rebuild civilization, but he didn't.
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He focuses on worship, and his worship was pleasing to God.
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I really think that one of the main issues today in the church, and not just our church, but the church in general, by and large, is that I think that we have come to the conclusion that God is just happy with anything we do that we call worship.
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That God's just satisfied with anything that we are willing to call worship.
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But do you understand that the Bible does not teach that? That the Bible teaches that God gets to declare and demand what it means to worship Him, and the way that we are to worship Him.
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The Reformers believed in something called the Regulative Principle.
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Now we have to be careful not to push the Regulative Principle to something it's not saying, because some people get into arguments about how to apply the Regulative Principle and all these things, but the Regulative Principle simply means this.
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God chooses how we should worship Him.
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God regulates, that's what the word Regulative Principle means.
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God regulates what we do in worship, which means worship is not about being creative.
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Worship is about being obedient.
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Worship is not about what can we come up with to worship God, but what has God given us to worship Him.
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He's given us song, so we worship Him through song.
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He's given us the prayers, so we worship Him through prayers.
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He's given us the offering.
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Offering is an act of worship, and so we do that as an act of worship.
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He's given that to us.
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He's given us the preaching of the Word of God.
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He's given us the Lord's Table.
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He's given us baptism.
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All of these are acts of worship.
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In a few weeks, we're going to be having a baptism.
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We're going to do it during worship.
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It's not its own thing, separate from worship, but it's an act of worship.
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As we receive a person having been baptized, we're going to witness it as a church, and we're going to confirm as a church that we've been a part of this activity of worship when this person receives baptism.
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All of these are things that God says, these are how I am to be worshipped, and these things are pleasing.
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We should hope that our worship is pleasing to God, because if there is such a thing as worship that is pleasing to God, then we must understand by mere process of deduction that there is worship that's not pleasing.
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And our goal here, every Lord's Day, is that we would offer up worship that is pleasing to God.
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And so Noah builds an altar.
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He worships God.
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He sacrifices clean animals.
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This is why, by the way, he took seven pairs of clean animals and only took a pair of the unclean animals, because the seven pairs of clean animals would give him extra animals for which to sacrifice.
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So not only did God tell him, bring two of every kind, He said, bring seven pairs of the clean animals so that you will have animals for use in sacrifice.
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God said, be prepared for worship.
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Boy, couldn't that be its own sermon.
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Again, every part of this text could be an extra week, because do you prepare for worship? You know, I'm always thankful when folks reach out and they say, what are you preaching on this week? I want to read the text beforehand.
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Now when I'm preaching through a book, you don't have to ask, because you know where we're at.
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But I like it when people come in ready to study the text, ready to worship together.
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And I send out emails.
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I try to get you involved.
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Know what we're going to sing.
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Know what we're going to preach.
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Know what we're going to be talking about, so that you're prepared for worship.
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All right, I think I've said enough.
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I'll move on now, because we need to move on.
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Because now I want to look at verses 21 and 22.
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This is God restoring.
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I'm a little incorrect on my notes on the board.
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That was my fault.
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It should be 6 to 20 is Noah's response, and 21 and 22 is God restoring.
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Because in 21 we see, it says, And 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, neither will I again strike down every living creature as I have done.
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While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease.
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Noah worships God.
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God receives his worship.
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And then God makes a proclamation.
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In the midst of worship, God makes a promise.
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And this will be further expressed in chapter 9.
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But here we have the heart of the promise.
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God will not destroy the world again.
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And we find out in chapter 9 what he means is in this way.
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He's not going to destroy the world by water again.
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Which again is proof that this wasn't a local flood.
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Because if this was a local flood, that's happened many times since then.
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But he says, I'm never going to destroy the whole world.
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I'm never going to take away all life.
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I'm never going to take away all the animals.
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Because I'm not going to do this thing again.
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In fact, what do we know about the next time the world will be destroyed? It will be destroyed by fire.
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It will go from the flood of Noah to the fire of judgment.
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But he says, I'm not going to do this in this way again.
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He also says, even though man remains evil.
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By the way, again, whole sermon could be preached on this.
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Because one of the things that's important is when Noah came off the ark, the sinful nature is not corrected.
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Noah didn't come off and begin to have children who didn't have a sin nature.
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The children of Noah continued to have a sin nature.
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All of Noah's descendants would maintain a sin nature.
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And by the way, that includes all of you.
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Everyone in this room is either a Shemite, a Hamite, or a Japhethite.
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Or a mixture of those.
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But that's the three.
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That's the three children of Noah.
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And every man and woman on this earth is a child of Noah.
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But in that sense, we are also children of Adam.
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And we bear the Adamic nature.
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And we are by nature children of wrath.
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According to Ephesians chapter 2.
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We are sinners both by nature and by choice.
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And we choose to sin because it is our nature to do so.
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And so we come to this text and it tells us that God says, I'm not going to destroy the world by water again.
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And even though man is evil from his youth.
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People say, well children aren't sinners.
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No, children are born sinners.
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And if you don't believe it, I will send you home with a few of mine.
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And after a few days, you will believe.
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They are a viper in a diaper, as Votie Baucom says.
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They have a sin nature.
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You don't have to teach a kid how to lie.
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You don't have to teach a kid how to be mean.
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You don't have to teach a kid any of those things.
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It is by nature that they know those things.
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That's why we all need to be saved.
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So God declares a promise.
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And verse 22 is very important as well.
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Verse 22 ends the chapter.
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I would say it doesn't end the idea though.
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Because as we begin chapter 9 next week, we're going to see that this continues.
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But verse 22 ends with a very interesting passage that I think is important for many modern concerns that people have, particularly in regard to people who are concerned about things like climate change.
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Now time does not allow me to go into the arguments for and against climate change.
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But you understand what the concern of the climate change alarmists is.
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It's that the world is going to experience such a radical change due to man's influence in the production of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
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And that that massive change is going to create temperature variations that are going to make it impossible for man to survive.
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And this started back even in the 60s and 70s where the argument was at that point the world was going to get super cold and we were no longer going to be able to grow food and things like that.
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There was a fear of a coming ice age, another ice age.
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Well then back in the late 70s and the 80s it became a fear of global warming.
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Now it's not going to get too cold.
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Now it's going to get too hot.
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Plants won't be able to survive the massive heat and people are going to die.
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And I don't know if you remember a few years ago there was a movie that came out.
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Former Vice President of the United States created a movie called An Inconvenient Truth which said basically by, I think it was like 2020, crops are going to be failing, the world was going to be in a massive cataclysm and all these things were going to happen.
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Well we've passed the date of no return, we're still here.
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And the earth still gets cold in the winter and it still gets hot in the summer, it still gets dark at nighttime and it's still light in the daytime.
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And that's the promise of this text.
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That's going to continue.
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Now does that mean we're not going to have some pretty harsh winters? I mean Texas wasn't really prepared for what happened this year, right? They had a pretty massive winter and things happened differently than years before.
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But is that climate change or is that just a variation in the overall temperature of the world? What am I trying to say? Let me make it simple.
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Please do not live in fear that the seasonal cycles will cease.
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Please don't live in fear of that.
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Now does that mean we shouldn't be clean and try to clean our environment and things like that? That's not the issue.
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The issue is we are forced into those mindsets by people who are so afraid that the world's going to stop working like the world's created to work and that God doesn't have a plan.
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We don't live with a sense of what if all the time.
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We live in the sense of the sovereignty of God over all things.
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And he declared right here in this verse that there are certain cycles that are never going to cease.
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The cycle of cold and heat.
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The cycle of day and night.
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The cycle of springtime and harvest.
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Basically the seasons are not going to cease.
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So we don't have to live in fear of that.
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Enjoy your SUVs.
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Be careful.
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Be careful.
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So here we find ourselves at the end of the chapter and I want to draw to a conclusion with a few thoughts about what we've seen.
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Because now Noah's off the ark and when we go into the next chapter is basically the Noahic covenant and then the beginning of rebuilding.
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Now the water part's over.
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Now we're on dry land again and we're going to begin looking towards what the world looks like after the flood.
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The post-Diluvian period begins next week.
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But what have we learned over the last few weeks? Well, when Noah came off the ark he was in a whole new world.
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Certainly it would have had some semblance of the previous world but it would have been mostly unrecognizable to him and to his family.
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And as I began to think about that I began to think about how this entire narrative starting back at chapter 6 going through chapter 8, this entire narrative is an analogy in a sense for believers, in fact for us.
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Because when Noah and his family entered the ark they were within the walls of protection which God had provided for them and they were safe from his wrath.
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Now I've already explained to you in the last couple of weeks the picture that gives us because when we repented of our sin and trusted in Christ, the Bible says the Holy Spirit entered us and He created a union between us and Christ and He actually placed us in Christ where we are now safe from the wrath of God.
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And when the wrath of God was pounding outside the ark and Noah could hear the water hitting the hull of the ship and I'm certain there was discomfort and anxiety at times but he was still safe within that ark and in the same way we who are in Christ live in this world sometimes experiencing times of difficulty, sometimes experiencing times of pain, sometimes even feeling anxiety but yet we are still safe within the ark which is Jesus Christ.
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If you are in Him you are safe.
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See we talk about being saved, yes you're saved but you're also safe.
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Nothing can touch you unless God decrees it and what God decrees for you is for His glory and your good ultimately.
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So you're not only saved but you're safe in the ark and when the wrath of God was completed Noah stepped out of the ark into a whole new world and one day, one day the wrath of God will fall again and those of us who are in Christ will be safe and when it has concluded we will step into a whole new world and our desire is going to be to worship God like we never have before.
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We're going to worship God without the flesh.
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We're going to worship God without sin.
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We're going to worship God without theological arguments and debates.
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We're going to worship God in spirit and in truth in a way that we never have.
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In the new heaven and in the new earth when the wrath of God is done we will step into a whole new world.
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I want to share one last passage of scripture with you.
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I want you to turn all the way over to Revelation and go to Revelation chapter 20 and verse 11.
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This is the scene of God's judgment, what we call the great white throne.
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Then I saw a great white throne and Him who was seated on it.
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From His presence earth and sky fled away and no place was found for them.
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And I saw the dead great and small standing before the throne and books were opened.
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Then another book was opened which is the book of life.
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And the dead were judged by what was written in the books according to what they had done and the sea gave up the dead who were in it.
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Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them and they were judged each one of them according to what they had done.
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Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire.
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This is the second death, the lake of fire.
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And if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life he was thrown into the lake of fire.
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Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.
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For the first heaven and the first earth had passed away and the sea was no more.
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And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
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And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.
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He will dwell with them and they will be His people and God Himself will be with them as their God.
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He will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more.
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Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore for the former things have passed away.
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This is the beauty folks.
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A new earth is coming.
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A whole new world is coming.
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But the scary part is that there are those who will not experience a whole new world of joy and peace and comfort.
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But there are those who according to chapter 20 will go to a place of unending torment.
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And you might ask the question, you might say, I don't want to go to hell.
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I don't want to be lost.
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I need to be saved.
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What can I do? For just one moment, indulge me.
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Turn one more page over to Revelation 22.
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And I know you might say, how is a Calvinist going to read this? I'm going to read it as a Calvinist because I still think that even as a Calvinist the call to the unbeliever is come.
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Come to Jesus.
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There's no hope outside of Christ.
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You won't come unless he granted to you, but I still call you to come.
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And this is what the scripture says in 22 verse 17, the bride and the spirit say, come and let the one who hears say, come and let the one who is thirsty come.
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Let the one who desires take the water of life without price.
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So I say to you today, if you are outside of the ark, if you are outside of Christ, come, come to Christ.
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Repent of your sin.
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Come to Christ.
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There is no salvation outside of him and no one will step foot on the new heaven and the new earth unless they have come through the ark of Jesus Christ.
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Let us pray.
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Father, I thank you for this opportunity to study your word.
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I thank you that you have called us to repent of our sin and trust in you and that you have enabled us to do so for apart from your divine enablement, we would not come.
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We could not come.
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We dare not come.
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So Lord, as we now prepare ourselves to receive from your table, the reminder of the promise of what you did on the cross, Lord, by your grace, would you be merciful in the reception of your table? And Lord, for those who are not in the ark of Christ today, Lord, that you might give them the heart to come in Jesus name.
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Amen.