“A Divine Pattern” – FBC Morning Light (1/3/2024)

Well, a good Wednesday morning to you. I hope your week is going well thus far, and your new year is off to a great start.

By the way, have you established some goals for this coming year? Not necessarily New Year's resolutions, but goals.

Goals that you have prayed about, thought about, and asked the Lord to give you wisdom in the fulfillment of those goals.

Pray for the Lord to make you fruitful in the accomplishing of those things, and develop a plan to work them out incrementally, attacking them, doing a little bit at a time toward those goals until you look back and see they have been completed.

I trust the Lord to give you that joy. Today in our Bible reading, we're in Genesis 6, and we're reading verse 9 of chapter 6 through the end of chapter 9.

So again, we're reading chronologically through the Bible this year. Right away in chapter 6, we're coming across the pronouncement of judgment upon the earth because of man's incessant, constant, ongoing wickedness.

The Lord makes it very clear in verse 11 that this is the problem.

He says, the earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. So God looked upon the earth, and indeed it was corrupt.

Then he says, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth.

So he's going to send this flood, and it's going to bring judgment upon all that he has created, except for this one man and his wife, their three sons, and their wives.

In the midst of this judgment, God shows divine, sovereign, gracious favor.

Eight souls are going to be spared, and those souls will become the remnant saved from wrath by God's grace.

You say, why would God even do that? There's a bigger picture here. There is a bigger plan, isn't there?

Because in Genesis 3, verse 15, God promised that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent.

So if in Genesis 6, God says, I'm just going to wipe all man off the face of the planet, boom, done, that's it, then the serpent would have won.

The promise of a serpent -crushing seed from the woman would never be fulfilled, and God would be proved unfaithful to his word.

That of course could never happen. So to ensure that his promise will be fulfilled, that the serpent -crushing seed of the woman will indeed be born someday,

God in his grace chooses Noah and his family to preserve the seed of mankind and the seed of that woman who will eventually bring forth the son whose birth we just celebrated a couple of weeks ago.

But by the way, even though Noah and his family received such expressions of grace, you find out at the end of our reading today that this is not a perfect family, these are not perfect people.

Noah, at the end of chapter 9, takes God's good gifts of a vineyard and wine from that vineyard, and he overindulges in it, gets himself drunk, passes out in a drunken stupor, apparently half -naked in his tent, his one son comes in, and we're not exactly sure what he did in his process of seeing his father and then reporting it to his brothers, but it's clear from Noah's response that it was not a good thing.

And there's consequences from it, and Noah pronounces really kind of a curse on one of the offspring of this son who somehow took advantage of that compromising situation, shall we say.

But what we can conclude is simply this, that the problem of human sin is a universal problem.

Even this family that was so graciously chosen by God and preserved and saved through the calamity of the flood, even they weren't perfect.

Even they failed at the end of our reading. So there again, we're confronted with the root of our human problem, our human condition, and it is indwelling sin.

We ignore that, by the way, to our own peril. So Father in Heaven, I pray that we would not ignore that, we would be very alert to the reality of indwelling sin and the complications and problems it causes, and I pray that by your grace and the saving power of the

Lord Jesus Christ and the indwelling work of the Holy Spirit, you might grant us victory over the destructive power of sin.

This we pray in Jesus' name and for his sake, amen. All right, well listen, have a good