Carried Through the Storm

ReCAST Church of Mattawan

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Welcome to the podcast of Recast Church in Madawan, Michigan, where you can grow in faith, community, and service.

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This is a message from the series Beginning with God, Walking Through the Book of Genesis by Pastor of Teaching and Vision, Don Filsek.

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If you'd like to learn more about Recast or access our sermon archive, please visit us at recastchurch .com.

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Here's Pastor Don. All right, good morning and welcome to Recast.

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How y 'all doing this morning? Face is shining. Y 'all look so good.

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We're happy you're here today. As usual, you have a worship folder or handout there, and there's some important announcements in there.

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We encourage you to go through that. You'll see an envelope there, and you are welcome to make a gift if you'd like to do that, and you put the money in the envelope, drop it in that box back there.

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There's also a connection card if you'd like to like to give us your information, your name, and an information.

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We'll put you on an email list so that you can see what's going on in the life of the church, and we'd love for you to do that.

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And also you can put your prayer requests there, and we as the elders pray for you. Pray for those cards every

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Tuesday morning, and we encourage you to connect with us that way. And then just one announcement there, and maybe you saw them up on the slides too, but we want to highlight it.

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The Madawan Area Food Pantry, we need volunteers for that this Saturday. It's Recast's turn to to staff that and serve our community there 8 to 12 this

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Saturday. And as of this morning, Scott only had one person signed up for that, so if that's something that you could do on Saturday, it's an awesome way to help our community and connect with people who might be in need there.

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So please, and encourage you to do that, and see Scott Quackenbush to sign up. So this morning,

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I'm going to do the intro for Don as he has viral bronchitis. He's not contagious, don't worry, but he's trying to save his voice.

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And I'll do my best to kind of enter the sermon and read with you. But as you know, we're in a series called

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Walking Through the Book of Genesis, Beginning with God. And we are coming up on Genesis 7 and 8 this

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Sunday, or this morning. And as we get to this text, we're diving into the tempest.

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And if you know the story of Noah and the flood account, you know that things are going to get crazy here. And that has been because of what we saw last week, that essentially

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God looked down on humanity and saw everything that was happening. And the thing that he had made that was so good, this creation that he had made full of beauty and wonder and peace, and his life had now become corrupted.

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And the language, Don pointed this out last week, you know, that the language paralleled in the beginning when he said, at the end of the day, you know, he looked and he saw that it was good.

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But last week we saw that he looked and he saw that it was not good anymore. That life was not as he had intended it.

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In fact, as we look back in verse 6, it talks about how the earth was filled with violence and God saw the earth and behold it was corrupt for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth.

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And it talks about the every intention of the thoughts of our hearts had become evil all the time.

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And what a difference. And so in this passage that we're going to read today, we're going to see that God's judgment finally comes.

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And he sees the need to do something cataclysmic, to basically hit the reset button.

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And of course, it seems like, wow, God must be angry to do something like that. But what we understand from God is that his judgment just doesn't come from anger at disobedience, but it also comes from sorrow.

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He is sorry that he has seen the sin and that he made us and that we have fallen so far.

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And Don kind of uses this illustration. He talks about it's like a parent who has a child who has gotten mixed up with drugs, right?

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And you walk with that child and you go again and again with them and you're trying to rescue them from that.

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But there's a point where there's a stop and there has to be a cutoff. And in some ways that's what we see

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God, that point that he's gotten to this morning, that he's not going to let it continue anymore.

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He's going to stop it. And so we see the flood come. But in this really difficult picture of death and judgment, we also see

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God's grace and favor. And that's going to be highlighted for you today as Don preaches that yes, wickedness resulted in judgment, but God made a way and he built an ark and he saved his people through it.

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And there's an opportunity there and it wasn't just an opportunity for them, but it's an opportunity that continues for us today in Christ.

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So please turn with me to Genesis chapter 7. And this is a lengthy text, but it's a word of God, so it's good.

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So we're going to read from Genesis 7 chapter 1 through 8 -19.

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And it begins on page 5 of the Bible in the pew there in front of you.

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Then the Lord said to Noah, Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you are righteous before me in this generation.

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Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and his mate, and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and his mate, and seven pairs of the birds of the heavens also, male and female, to keep their offspring alive on the face of all the earth.

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For in seven days I will send rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and every living thing that I have made

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I will blot out from the face of the ground. And Noah did all that the

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Lord had commanded him. Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came upon the earth, and Noah and his sons and his wife and his son's wives with him went into the ark to escape the waters of the flood.

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Of clean animals and of animals that are not clean, and of birds and of everything that creeps on the ground, two and two, male and female, went into the ark with Noah as God commanded

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Noah. And after seven days the waters of the flood came upon the earth.

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

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On the very same day Noah and his sons, Shem and Ham and Japheth, and Noah's wife and the three wives of his sons with them, entered the ark.

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They and every beast according to its kind. And all the livestock according to their kinds, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth according to its kind, and every bird according to its kind, every winged creature.

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They went into the ark with Noah, two and two of all flesh, in which there was the breath of life.

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And those that entered, male and female of all flesh, went in as God had commanded him. And the

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Lord shut him in. The flood continued forty days on the earth.

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

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And the waters prevailed so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered.

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The waters prevailed above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep, and all flesh died that moved on the earth.

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Birds, livestock, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all mankind.

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

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They were blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those who were with him in the ark.

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And the waters prevailed on the earth 150 days. But God remembered

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Noah and all the beasts and all the livestock that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth and the waters subsided.

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The fountains of the deep and the windows of the heaven were closed. 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 water 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. In the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen.

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At the end of 40 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. 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 to the ark. 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. He waited another seven days, and again he sent forth the dove of the ark 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. 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 anymore.

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In the six hundred and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried from off of 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. 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.

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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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Let's pray. Father, we thank you and delight in your word.

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We thank you, God, that you inspired Moses to record this for us, and to leave us this record.

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And God, we read it today, and I know that sometimes we read it as a children's story, as if it was just that, about rainbows and cute animals,

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Lord, but it's really a tragic story, and yet one full of redemption and hope.

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And I pray, God, that as we come to worship this morning, and as we sing to you, the

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God who would require something of this, who would implement a plan like this, God, I pray that we would tremble in our hearts, knowing that you are a mighty and awesome

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God, capable of judgment. But God, I pray that truly, in the depths of our being, we would sing to you out of gratefulness that you have made a way for us to pass through the tempest.

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And I pray that this morning, that would be what we celebrate. God, that we would recognize that that you are a

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God of love, who weeps and is grieved over our sin, and yet who makes a way for us,

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Lord. And I pray that we would not miss or fail to understand what that way is that you've provided for us to be rescued,

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Lord. So we sing to you, and we give you all the praise and the glory, because you are worth it.

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And it's in Christ's name that we pray. Amen. Amen. Thanks a lot to the band for leading us this morning.

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Very grateful for them and their work. Encourage you to get settled in. As I say, most weeks, there's more juice.

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There's, I think, some more donuts and coffee. I know we just took a break, but you might need to tank up before the end. So, and then on the other hand, there are bathrooms available back here as well.

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We've been drinking coffee all morning anyway. So, but I encourage you to have your Bibles open to Genesis chapter 7.

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And just to get this out of the way at the beginning, I didn't really say this for service, but if my voice goes through the stages of puberty during this morning, just know that I finally hit puberty.

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So this is happening right now. But I've had this bronchitis thing, and it's, this morning

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I woke up and I was very pleasantly surprised to find it in my throat. So that's the way it's going this morning.

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But we see in the text here, what we saw last week really, is that God selected a man who trusted him.

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Told him to build a big boat and said, my judgment is coming. Build this thing huge.

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We saw last week that Noah was chosen by God based upon his faith. That his faith is trusting

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God that he is good, that he is true, and that he has our best interest in mind. It's kind of not far off.

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A real genuine faith is not far off of the word love. In that, that Noah adored

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God and said, I really trust in you and I really believe you have my best interest in mind and that you are going to fix all of this mess that humanity has caused.

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And ultimately going back and believing the promise that God had issued to Eve, that one would be born of the woman who would crush the head of the serpent and would restore all things.

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And so there was some level of that trust that was going on in there. We saw last week that in essence, Noah stumbled upon the grace of God back in verse 8.

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If you were to just glance up the page, I don't know if it's there on your page or if you turn one back, but verse 8 of chapter 6 said,

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But Noah found favor in the eyes of God. We made much of that verb found in the text because that word found is like to stumble upon something.

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It is not that he earned it. It's not that he gained it. It's not that he worked hard to get the grace or the favor of God. It's like he was walking along in the field and tripped over some of God's grace.

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Oh, what was that? Oh, that was God's grace. And it was something that was given to him as a gift. Grace is always a gift.

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It is not something that is earned kind of like Christmas presents on Christmas morning. You don't work hard all year so that your spouse buys you a

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Christmas present. Because they might not if you didn't earn it or something like that, right? I mean a gift is just that. It is a gift.

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So Noah stumbled upon that. And so in verse 1, we start with this God who has called out

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Noah among the peoples of the earth. And it says, So who is this

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Lord that we're talking about? We've seen that word Lord multiple times in the text and I haven't taken the opportunity to explain it, but I want to this morning because I think it's valuable to understand the name that God gives himself within the context of this flood event that we're going to see that's pretty cataclysmic and on this huge catastrophe on the face of the planet.

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Then the Lord said to Noah, Lord there, you see how it's written in the verse? It's all capital letters, but it's kind of smaller caps.

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That is the formal name of God. That is the name that he issued to Moses when Moses was standing before the burning bush out in the wilderness of Midian up on the hillside.

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And he saw this bush that was burning and it wasn't being consumed and it just kept burning and kept burning. So he went and took a peek.

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God spoke out of the bush to him, said you're on holy ground, take off your sandals and then basically called

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Moses into ministry to go back to Egypt and pull his people out through the exodus.

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And some of you know that history and understand that. But God says who should I tell Pharaoh that who should

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I say has sent me? And God says you shall tell him I am has sent you.

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The almighty's title for himself, the way that he calls himself and he says I am.

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You can just tell Pharaoh I am has sent you. The word is Yahweh or Jehovah in various translations.

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I wish we didn't translate it as Lord in the ESV. I wish that it just left YHWH in there or Yahweh or Jehovah or went ahead and translate it as the formal name of God because that's what it is.

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But there's something significant about this title. He is the great I am. It's a mighty and a powerful and a bold and a steadfast title for God.

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What he ultimately says is I mean he declares of himself I am. But it would be sufficient for us to say when we're thinking of God he is like in the third person to call his title he is and to really think of it this way come what may he is.

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In the past he is. In the present he is.

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And in the future he is. You see God is the only one who is self -sufficient and self -sustaining.

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What does God need that he might exist? Nothing. He just is.

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Does that title blow your mind a little bit? I kind of remember as a kid kind of wrapping my mind around that question.

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So who made God? Have any of you had your children ask you that question or where did God come from?

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The answer is his name. He is. He always has been, is now, and always will be.

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And yet he is a God in relationship with his creation willing to share even his intimate name with humanity.

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And here it is that God who says to Noah and we saw in the text last week 120 years of patience, 120 years of preparation for the flood, 120 years of preaching and proclaiming righteousness as we're going to see here in a minute, 120 years of building a boat, pretty big boat, massive undertaking.

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This wasn't a factory operation. Okay, so think about how long it took for Noah to build this boat.

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About 120 years of preparation goes by and God comes to the Lord, Yahweh comes to Noah and says it's go time.

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It's time. His patience has run out and it is time.

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He's given 120 years for the people to repent and now it is time to float the boat.

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Noah stood out in his generation as a man who walked with God we saw last week and the fact that this distinction is based upon faith does not minimize the significance of Noah's blamelessness and righteousness.

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The man of faith will stand out. The woman of faith will stand out.

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There will be something distinct about the life of a person who genuinely loves God, who genuinely trusts him.

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The life of a person of faith is not one trying to match the culture and blend in and fit in. The life of faith is one of obedience that's radical and changes you and is different.

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Do you hear what I'm saying? And Noah stood out in his generation. The same thing that distinguished

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Noah can distinguish you. Now what's declared of Noah has been declared of you and I mentioned that last week that just like Noah was declared righteous and blameless if you are in Jesus Christ, if you've asked him to save you then you are blameless and righteous.

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That's a mystery. Any of you out there who have put your trust in Christ and you go, that is strange that God sees.

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I see myself and I mean I could blame myself on a lot of things but he has pushed all of that over on his son and he has taken it for you and you will stand righteous before God one day because your sins have been put on Jesus on the cross.

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So we are declared that. But there's also a distinction that can be designated and the thing that distinguished

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Noah was faith. So the question that I have for all of you men here, are you a man who trusts

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God regardless of the mess that you see around you? Do you believe he is good? Do you trust him with your life even when things don't make sense around you and you're frustrated and you're struggling?

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Will you put your trust in him? Or for you women, are you a woman who loves

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God and walks with him despite the pain and hardship that you see around you in life and the difficulties and the struggles?

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For all of us, do we wake up praising him and close out our day with gratitude and meditate on him and walk with him in the in -between times?

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Are we living our lives as if we are living before the face of God, walking with him side by side?

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Noah was distinguished not because he was great. This is key. Noah was distinguished not because he was good at acting the part.

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Noah was set aside and distinguished because he truly loved God. Do you hear the difference?

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You see, my fear for us here at Recast is that I could get up and preach and proclaim and you, I fear that on on occasion you might walk out of these doors and walk away with a sense that what

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Don wants from me, what the word of God is preaching to me is that I ought to act better.

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Do you hear what I'm saying? Have you ever walked away from a sermon and felt like what you needed to do is go out and act better?

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What I'm preaching for and hoping for and praying for week in and week out is for a heart change from the inside out.

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How many of you know that it's possible to play the part and not be in the boat?

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You can look the part on the outside and you can scrub all of this up and dress right and talk right in these and vows and holy roller speech and all of that stuff.

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Do you know what I'm talking about? And never have had a changed heart and really deep down I would encourage each one of us and here's the test look down and say do

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I love God? Do I delight in his word? Do I long for his presence?

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Am I hopeful for that day when he returns and sets everything straight? Do you love him?

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That's my prayer for each and every one of us. We just sang it and I don't know if we realized what we were singing.

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God changed me from what? The inside out and faith.

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Faith is that desire, that love, that trusting in him to walk with him.

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Noah stood out because he wasn't acting like he loved God. He loved God. And God clarifies instructions then to the man of faith in verses two through four.

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He has to take seven pairs of clean animals and a pair of unclean animals and he doesn't even say how many pairs of clean underwear to take.

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I hope there were a lot because it's going to be a year long and I don't know if they had laundry service there on the boat and that is not in my notes but I did say it in both services, so whatever.

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Along with seven pairs of every bird I think there's reason for that and I kind of speculate about why the birds, why the clean animals.

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I believe that the reason for seven of each clean is for the purpose of offering. Some of the offerings were also birds and so I think that that's part of what's going on there.

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We know that way back in Cain and Abel's time, earlier in the text, centuries before Noah's ark, centuries before that happened, there were sacrifices and offerings happening.

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Cain and Abel were offering sacrifices. How well that was formed, we don't know, but the concept of clean and unclean is expressed here in the text and there was a sense in which there was already an understanding.

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Maybe some of these who walked with God, maybe Enoch came back from one of his jaunts out in the woods with God and came back and said, you know what, he really, these are the kind of animals,

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I don't know how that went down. But they have a sense, are you seeing it in the text? They have a sense of clean and unclean.

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They didn't just offer snakes on the idol or on the altar or something like that. They had clean and unclean.

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We know that some of you might think from Sunday school classes or from hearing this account before that, well, the clean animals they took in because they're going to eat them.

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Right? Anybody kind of heard that notion or whatever? We're going to see in the text next week that it's not until after the flood that God gives permission for humans to eat meat.

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So up to this point, we're basically looking at a vegetarian society prior to the flood. And then at the end of the flood, he's going to say, and now

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I'm giving you all flesh. We saw him earlier in Genesis actually give all plant life to humanity to eat.

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But now he's going to say, I give you, I give you meat to eat as well. So I don't think that's the notion of the clean and unclean there.

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But in verses 4 and 10, look at those two verses for just a second while I take a drink. It's obvious that he allows for a week of final loading of the ark.

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It says four and seven days. So he comes to Noah, there's been 120 years of preparation.

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He had come to Noah before, 120 years prior to this and said, this is going to happen. But now in seven days,

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I will send rain on the earth in 40 days and 40 nights. It will rain. And then look down at verse 10. After seven days, the waters of the flood came upon the earth.

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Basically seven days of loading. Getting final preparations together, getting the animals on the ark.

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And this is all going to happen soon, he says. And just like verse 22 last week, we see here in our text that Noah as a man of faith does all that God commanded to him.

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We know that faith leads to obedience, not vice versa. Obedience doesn't lead to faith. It's very important that we understand the way that those two things go.

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But faith does lead to obedience. Loving God and believing that he has your best interest in mind.

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Therefore, when he gives instructions, you say, I love you, God. I believe you have my best interest in mind.

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So you have given me this instruction because you love me. And therefore, I know that this is best for me to either avoid or to do, depending on the command, right?

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So I look at that and say, faith drives the Christian life. Faith drives our relationship with God.

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And without faith, you're doing something other than living a Christian life. You're beautifying yourself.

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You're making a kingdom for yourself. Or you're building up yourself and making yourself look better in the culture and the society and in the church and whatever.

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But faith, truly trusting God, will change us from the inside out and we will obey.

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And so God says do this and Noah does everything as the

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Lord tells him. Verse six serves to keep dates for the remainder of this text.

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Noah was 600 years old when the flood of the waters came upon him. All the dates given in this text are going to be based on Noah's age.

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So how old was he when this happened? How old was he when this happened? But we know that he was 600 years when the flood started and everything can kind of fit into that.

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Some of you maybe weren't here and you look at that age and you go 600 years. What is that all about? You could go back in online and listen to my sermon from a couple of weeks ago, if you're interested in knowing more about the dates and the times.

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One of my sermons that was basically on the two genealogies and all of the extended life of humanity on the earth during that time.

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I don't have time to get into it this morning. But I believe that Noah was 600 years old and that's not a mistake in the numbering there.

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So Noah had many years of walking with God. He lived in an obviously wicked and perverse generation.

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We saw that things were really really denigrated in his society, in his culture. I don't know how that relates to our culture.

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I can't really say definitively that our culture is as bad as that one or whatever or that our culture is better.

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But one thing is for sure is that the human heart has not changed in its wickedness. One thing is for sure and that is that in our hearts, in our thoughts, in our intentions, we are corrupted through and through.

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And that stands at least. But Noah had many years of walking with God and according to 2

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Peter 2 .5, Noah was declared a preacher of righteousness. He was a man who wasn't just spending 120 years building a boat.

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But he spent 120 years proclaiming to his culture the righteousness of God and the call to repent from your ways.

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Stop living your way and turn to God's way. That's what repentance means. And in all honesty, that's our call as believers to our culture and our societies.

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Stop doing things your way. Your way leads to death and destruction. Turn to God by faith and embrace the way that he has provided for you, which is the way of salvation through his son, right?

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So he was a preacher of righteousness. But also we see in 1 Peter 3 .20, and if you can pull that up Gavin and throw that up on the screen for people to just kind of follow along as I read this, and this is a key passage talking about Noah and the people in his time and era.

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It says, because they formerly did not obey, they being the people that were listening, receivers of the preaching of righteousness from Noah, because they did not, they formerly did not obey when

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God's patience waited in the days of Noah. Why 120 years before the flood?

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Because God is patient. God waited. He wanted

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Noah to proclaim righteousness. He wanted Noah to give a chance to that culture to turn.

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Individuals who could have turned from their ways. So when

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God's patience waited in the days of Noah while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, how many does the text read?

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Eight persons were brought safely through. Noah, a preacher of righteousness, like how many think he passes with a high success rate as a preacher?

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Eight. And what's common about those eight people? What do they all have in common? They're his family.

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They had to follow him. My kids have to come to Recast, at least for now.

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I pray that they want to. Eight people brought safely through the water.

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I believe it by implication. I don't think it's a stretch at all for me to say that 1 Peter 3 20 identifies that more could have come.

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It's a genuine call to the culture. He's genuinely proclaiming righteousness. He's genuinely calling people to repent and only eight show up.

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Only eight come with him in the boat, but it was a demonstration of God's patience. I think it's very much like God.

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I think of, I think, I was thinking through this and I can think of story after story where God does something like this.

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Where when he's getting ready to destroy Sodom, we see, we're going to see Abraham going through and basically bargaining with God.

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Well, what if I find 50 righteous people? Would you spare it? Okay. What if all the way down to 10? What if, what if 10 are righteous there?

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Well, were there 10 righteous? No, there weren't. But he gives that option. And then we see

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Rahab, the prostitute in the city of Jericho, a city devoted to destruction. And we talked about that back when we were in Joshua a couple summers ago.

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How many of you were here for the series in Joshua? We talked about how she was in the city devoted to destruction.

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The spies come in. Everything is supposed to be destroyed. She houses them, hears their message and says,

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I believe in your God. He is true. He is right. And he is the one true God. And she repents.

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And she and her household are saved out of this city devoted to destruction.

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It's just like God to provide an opportunity. But it shows how dire and wicked things were in Noah's day.

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He's preaching and proclaiming righteousness for 120 years and only his family comes in.

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Pretty scary. We might at times give in to the temptation to think that real ministers, people who are really called to the ministry, people who are really called to share the gospel with others, they'll have good success.

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Right? It'll be all good for them because they're called to it. Noah, 120 years and eight people.

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Well, six, seven, his wife too, I guess. But salvation comes from the

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Lord. We are called to faithful proclamation that all are under condemnation. God forbid that you see me and Zach and Rob and Kyle as the leaders of this church and ultimately say, well, that's their job.

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Evangelism is their job. Sharing the gospel, proclaiming the truth is their job. Raise your hand if you think you ran into somebody this past week that you see regularly that I don't know.

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Go ahead and raise your hand if you know somebody I don't know. That's what I'm asking you and you saw them this week. Okay, I can't reach them.

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I can't. But the goal of Recast Church is that you are sent ones when you go out these doors.

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Each and every one of us with a calling to proclaim the reality of Jesus Christ and his glory and his salvation and his forgiveness.

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That indeed there is a coming judgment. Popular message? A good one?

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A great lead into a conversation at the water cooler tomorrow morning. Hey, everybody's under condemnation.

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You too? Is that the way you launch off a good Monday morning conversation? Punch, you're down, right?

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It's over. Well, some of you are stronger than that, but for me, yeah.

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You see what I'm saying though? I mean, but that's our message. We are all under condemnation, but the glory is we're going to see in the text there's a way through the judgment.

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Never declaring condemnation without also including the glorious cross of Jesus Christ where our condemnation was carried for us.

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But condemnation nonetheless is our message that all are deserving of this punishment. All are deserving of the flood as we're going to see by the end of this.

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It's clear that the hearts of Noah's generation were hardened to the truth. I know that many have speculated about the mocking that Noah might have received and I don't see it in the text here, but you kind of take it for granted to some degree knowing human wickedness.

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Do you picture him getting a little bit of mockery? Some people making fun of him for building a boat out in the middle of the desert.

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How dare you say that your way is the only way kind of business? But the reality is verse 7.

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Verse 7 is clear. That there are only eight persons, only eight people on the ark and I might as well list them by name.

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Because it's a short list and they're deserving of being named Mr. and Mrs. Noah, Mr. and Mrs.

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Ham, Mr. and Mrs. Shem, and Mr. and Mrs. Japheth. I don't know what to make of this.

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I just throw this out there, let you wrestle with it, a little bone for you to chew on. Seven pairs.

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How many pairs of clean animals? Seven. How many pairs of unclean animals?

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One. One. How many pairs of humans? Four. Only four.

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Four couples made it. Seven of each clean animal. Four humans. Four pairs.

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Verse 8 through 13, cycle back around and serve the Hebrew style of writing. It's very, very common in Hebrew to repeat things that are important.

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As a matter of fact, even they're poetic. The nature of poetry in Hebrew is repetition. They like that.

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We like to rhyme things in English. I guess someone back at the start of the

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English language kind of thought, hey, rhyming stuff sounds cool. I'll make poems out of it and we'll sing songs and stuff and it'll rhyme.

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In Hebrew, they thought that repetition was kind of cool. Repeating it with a little bit of a different word here, a different word there to kind of tease things out and spell them out.

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And so that's what we see here is cycling back around to declare the things that are important.

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How many of you think that it's important, it's reasonable that there'd be this repetition in a passage that's talking about the salvation of the human race and all the animals?

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Would you say that that's probably a pretty important theme in the Bible? It's probably important for us to understand that all the animals made it on the flood and that some humans made it on there to preserve us through this righteous judgment of God.

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And in verse 11, we get a very specific date for the start of the flood. Very specific date.

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Noah was 600 years, one month, and 17 days old when the waters burst forth.

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The dating system in the text allows a very detailed calendar for the flood event. If you're a calendar geek, you can just geek out on this passage all you want and you can get down to when was the dove released?

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It's fairly, I mean, pretty close you can get that down. Or when was the raven released, rather. You can get some very clear timing.

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As a matter of fact, we know that just from what's shared in here, that it was one year and 11 days that they spent in the ark.

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To that precision, one year and 11 days in the ark.

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And it's very clear that the author wants to place this flood in a historical context. Now, you have every freedom and every right to believe that this is not a historical account.

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But I do not believe that you can, in integrity, read this text and suggest to me that the author didn't think it was a historical event.

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Are you hearing what I'm saying? So you have to disagree with this text to say it's not historical.

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You have to disagree with the dating, with the system, with everything that he puts down. Because he wants to show us that this happened rooted in history, in the context of a real dude's life that lived on this planet.

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And he dates it, puts time frame to it. Within history and time, this occurred.

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It's not fable, it's not myth, it's history. And it happened in the context of a real guy's life.

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And it's all set in the duration according to his age. And on this day, the humans enter the ark last.

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After all kinds of animals have been securely loaded, they're all on there. The phrase, according to their kinds, cannot be narrowed down to the specific scientific categories.

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Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. That classification that we have for living things, for biology on this planet.

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We don't know if it was genuses that were included, if it was species that were included. It's not a scientific designation to say all kinds.

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But I anticipate that this included far fewer animals than many of us think were necessary. I wrote a blog about this this past week, about the flood, and I encourage you to read it.

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But one of my old roommate from college commented on it and said something to the effect of, do you really believe that polar bears came from Antarctica, swam all the way across the ocean to the

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Middle East and loaded on the ark? And my answer to that is probably pretty simple. I don't think that that's what happened.

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I think a pair of bears were on the ark. I don't know that there were polar bears per se.

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I imagine a pair of dogs, not a pair of Great Danes, and a pair of poodles, and a pair of cockapoos, and name all the dogs, and that all those dogs were on there.

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No, there was a pair of dogs. Are you getting what I'm saying by that? I think it required far fewer animals than what we're thinking.

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But we do know that Moses goes over the top to make sure that we're confident that the animals were in there because three different cycles of repetition in this text, where he says the animals were there, the animals were there.

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According to their kinds, they were all there. The livestock were there. The creeping, crawling animals were there. And he just kind of cycles through.

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And the humans were there. And he keeps talking about Noah, his wife, and their children, and their children's wives as well.

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So that's very, very clear that he wants to keep repeating that cycle. But most importantly, God, who is punctual in his promises, it says in the text, personally closed the door of the ark on the very day that the geysers and springs burst forth and the expanse above gives up its waters.

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You see the terminology in the text says the great deeps burst forth and the windows of heaven opened up.

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And those are clearly idioms. They're metaphors. It's not like there's really windows up there. If we flew a spaceship up, we'd find the windows of heaven, where the water is under pressure.

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And boy, if you just open those, it's going to happen. I think there is an interesting thing that is reality here, is that even if you interpret the metaphors, even in interpreting them, you find that floodwaters rose from below and from above.

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You have these springs, these underwater springs that burst forth, and you also equally have rain for 40 days and 40 nights that comes down torrentially on the face of the planet.

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This is a cataclysmic influx of water rapidly over a short period of time. I want to point out to you,

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I think there's significant theological weight in this statement that it is the Lord who shuts the door.

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Now, why did he give us 120 years according to 1 Peter? What will his patience?

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But now what's happened? His patience is gone. It's done. And there's a coming a time where his patience is done.

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And here in our text, we see an example of that. And he himself closes the door.

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I believe that any who responded to the preaching of Noah, as I've already said, would have been welcomed on the ark, but that there are no takers shows the truth of God's assessment of human condition by the time of the flood.

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Nobody is willing to believe God or his chosen prophet in that culture. The waters prevailed.

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The ark finally floats. And the flood is so substantial that even the highest mountains under heaven were covered.

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And again, I point out to you the trouble of interpreting this as localized flooding. Some people have posited that Noah is just talking in terms of that which he already knows.

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And so the whole world to him was the Middle East. And that's all he had reference to. And that's if you read it, you're not going to come away with that conclusion.

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Now, again, I say you have the freedom to believe that this is a localized flood, just like you have the freedom to disagree with any text of scripture.

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You can disagree with it if you choose to. But it is abundantly clear from the Hebrew text of this passage that the author believed that every single mountain under the heavens, a word that means sky, every single mountain under the heavens was covered to at least 25 feet of water.

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Okay, so do you see that in the text? So you have the freedom to think a black sea overflowed in ancient history and everybody that lived in that area, that's the only place that human population was.

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And so this is every single animal that breathes breath out of its nostrils died that lives on the face of dry ground.

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It's the superlative nature of this text, everything alive on the planet, including the birds.

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How many of you know birds are smart enough to fly and get clear of this bad thing? Okay, they can get away from this flood.

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The birds don't have a place to land and they all die. You're getting what I'm saying? And that's what goes on here in the text.

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I think I kind of just like push that out on like one little sentence in here. So hold on a second.

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Oh, just, I don't wanna get into a lot of science here this morning. And again, read my blog to talk.

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In my blog, I explained to you why I'm not gonna get into a lot of science here this morning. But there are a couple of things that I just wanna point out that might answer just some very generic, honest questions that you might have.

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It's been proven that if the land mass of the earth were more spherical, this is a fundamental question. Is there enough water?

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Anybody ever thought that? Is there enough water on the planet to actually do this thing? One person has thought that.

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So maybe I should talk with you afterwards or do the rest of you wanna hear this? A couple of you wanna hear it. I'll go ahead and just throw this out there.

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Won't take long. If you were to level out the, make the mountains less tall. So you just basically level out the land mass to some degree, like maybe take some off of Mount Everest and put it down in the

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Mariana Trench, which is the deepest part of the ocean. So if you just have a leveling, you can still have some mountains and some higher hills and some lower places.

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But if you just level it out more, which we don't know what the geology and the geography was like in those days, we're talking about pre -flood, how many of you would acknowledge that the way the world looks now does not look the way that it looked before a global flood?

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If you were to level that out to give some degree of more sphericalness to the earth, the water that we have, that we know of currently on this planet would cover all of the dry ground to a depth of 1 .7

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miles. There's a lot of water on this planet. There is the majority of, almost a majority of the water on this planet is frozen in the tundra, in the top and the poles.

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And if that melts, it's not gonna melt again. Don't worry about the global warming thing because when it really comes down to it, we're not gonna be flooded again.

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God's gonna tell us about that next week. I'm not saying that you don't be responsible, but I don't believe the polar caps are gonna melt on us.

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But again, I say, I don't wanna get too scientific on you. I figured that there's very little room in this text for scientific convincing, primarily because we see

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God in it. God is doing something here and that makes it supernatural because God is doing it, right?

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Does that make it supernatural? All of a sudden, we're talking about God. What isn't supernatural about that?

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But one amazing thing that has to be accounted for, and this is the last scientific thing that I'm gonna throw out there, is that you have to cross over literally tons of clamshells at the summit of Mount Everest in order to get to the top of that mountain.

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Near the summit, there are whole sheets of fossilized clamshells that pictures have been taken of them.

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You can see this. These are not people who are friendly to Christians who have taken these pictures. They don't have a desire to prove the flood story.

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As a matter of fact, how many of you know that that does not prove the flood, right? Is that watertight proof?

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Okay, we found some clamshells up on the top of a mountain. How many of you know that if you have a bias, if you go into that observation, that fact, that there are clamshells on the top of Mount Everest, that that does not equate you bowing your knee before God and going, oh my goodness, the flood happened.

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Do you see what I'm saying? If you come at that data with the perspective that there is no

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God, you're gonna find another way to explain it. Even if it's just to believe that aliens deposited them there, right?

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Are you gonna find an answer for you? So I think scientific argumentation is pointless and fruitless and it misses the point of the text.

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And yet so many believers, I think have just poured all their time and energy in trying to prove that this flood occurred.

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And there's so much deeper a message found in this text and we're on our way there right now. Whatever the geology of the pre -flood looked like, its highest mountains were covered to about 25 feet.

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And in verse 21 through 23, we find out in very gentle terms what was going on outside the ark.

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How many of you are grateful that Noah doesn't get too graphic in this text? Anybody? What's going on out there?

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Everything died. Everything. Everything living on the dry land died, the creepy crawlers, the livestock, the birds and all of mankind.

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And how this story has become a great children's story told to our youth is a mystery to me. People decorate their nurseries, you know, with scenes of this event.

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I'm not judging because when Adam was born, we got the curtains with Noah's Ark on it with the little crib bumper and all of that.

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Anybody of you know what I'm talking about? Anybody of you had that? Maybe a couple of you? Okay, cute little

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Noah's Ark. If you're like me, a vivid imagination doesn't serve well in this account.

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Any of you struggle with a vivid imagination? You read it and you're picturing it and you're seeing it in your mind and your mind kind of goes a little bit crazy with it.

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Anybody like that? People climbing to roofs to higher ground, fighting with animals for the higher ground.

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Moms clinging to their children. And you get the picture. This is a devastating thing.

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It's not an event well represented by a kid. It's a cute cartoon ark with the giraffe's head sticking out of the top.

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And of course, the coup de gras is Noah standing there with an umbrella protecting the giraffe's heads from the water.

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You guys know the image that I'm talking about? You saw it, didn't you? You knew what

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I was talking about. He's got the umbrella and a smile on his face and the giraffes are all cute. It's not an accurate picture of what we're talking about here.

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Look at the end of verse 23. Well, first he blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground and only

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Noah was left and those who were with him in the ark.

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Only Noah was left. How narrow was this salvation? How narrow?

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How small and focused was this salvation? How close -minded and arrogant was

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Noah to call out to others and say, come to my boat. My way is the way of salvation.

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Can you hear people in our culture saying, that's so narrow. How dare you say that there's one way?

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There was one ark. How dare he suggest that people need to come to God his way.

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But I don't doubt, again, maybe an imagination. I don't know how sanctified it is, but I do not doubt that there were some fishermen who sought their salvation in their own boats only to be either overwhelmed in the storm or to die of thirst or people clinging to planks of wood, thinking that that would save them and they didn't last.

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There were not other ways. Only those who were with Noah in the ark were left.

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How many of you would agree with me that the ark is small on a global scale? This 400 foot boat by 75 feet wide by 40 some feet tall, pretty small on a global scale.

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The ark represents a narrow way of salvation. The ark represents God's given way of salvation.

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Take it or leave it. Either you're in it or you're not. It's not a popular message for our culture, but it is reality.

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And we'll talk about how that plays out into the new covenant. We're talking about an old covenant here. And I don't desire to manipulate you, but I do just want to point out that I wonder how many people as the floodwaters began to rise stood outside of that ark and let us in.

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Noah, Noah, the water is rising out here. Let us in, let us in.

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It's getting desperate out here and the door is closed. Without getting too dramatic about your life and you personally,

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I just want to ask you a question. Who do you know that needs to hear the message of salvation before it is too late?

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I think God was gracious to give Noah a ministry of calling people to repentance that I'm sure is still messed with him psychologically.

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This is a real guy. This is a human like you or me. What would it be like to be there in the ark going, this is not going well out there.

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But I think it was God's grace that he had had a ministry of preaching to those out there that he could at least at some semblance say,

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I did what I could. I proclaimed it. I told people. They didn't respond, but I did what

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I was called to do and I proclaimed righteousness and I proclaimed the patience of God over those 120 years and I said, come, repent, turn from your ways and turn to God's ways.

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They didn't respond. Who do you know that needs to hear the message of salvation?

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Who do you see regularly that does not know that salvation is available to them through Jesus Christ? Who do you know that doesn't even know that judgment is coming?

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For every person, there's coming a day when it is too late. Scripture says everyone is appointed once to die and then comes the judgment.

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And so I would ask you, are you, are we, am I, like Noah accurately called, a preacher of righteousness?

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Could that be said of you? That you've done what you can to reach the people around you.

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God remembered Noah, praise God. He remembers Noah. It's not like he forgot about him and was like, oh yeah, that's right, there was that boat thing going on, floating, forgot about that.

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The theme of God remembering is most often used of his covenant and as a way of saying God honored his covenant.

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He made good on his promise to carry Noah and company through and so he sends a wind and we find that it was 150 days of rising floodwaters and chapter eight starts 150 days of receding floodwaters.

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And about half a year into the flood, the ark snagged on some land high up in the mountains of Ararat. Now there's a mountain called

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Ararat but the designation in Hebrew here is the mountains of Ararat, somewhere in the region that is known as Ararat is where, and some have proposed that they found the ark.

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I haven't seen that yet. I mean, I mean, you know, there's all different kinds of things out there but it's interesting and intriguing and you can watch documentaries about it or whatever.

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But high up in the mountains of Ararat, they snag. Even though they stopped moving, it's still going to be a couple of months before the land is visible that they've been caught on.

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So what we basically have is them like landing on something submerged, like, I mean, imagine a sandbar in a lake or something, you get hung up on it.

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That's what's going on here. Noah opens up the window and releases a raven. This was just crazy. When I got here this morning,

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Kyle and I were walking around praying and standing right out in the sidewalk, there's a raven sitting there watching us as we were praying.

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Did you see it? And I was like, maybe I, oh, while you're walking, that's why you're always running into stuff.

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I see, gotcha. Okay, I keep my eyes open so I can see where I'm going. But maybe it was just a mysterious raven sent from me.

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I don't know. But the raven actually does some stuff here. It seems like, how many of you, like you read the text and it says the raven, he sent out the raven and then it just kind of goes to and fro.

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The raven never comes back into the boat. It's in the text. The raven is out. It's free now. And it's showing that the raven is able to sustain itself by being outside of the boat.

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He doesn't need to feed it anymore, which I don't want to get too graphic, but the raven has plenty to eat. Yeah. But the raven goes back and forth out to do stuff and come back and probably lights on the top of the boat at night and things like that.

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And some undisclosed amount of time later, Noah sends out a dove, but it returns after seven days. He sends out the dove again.

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This is pretty crafty of him. Would you agree with me on this? He's got a plan here. He's got this figured out. So he sends out the dove again.

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This time it shows up with an olive branch. The olive branch is significant because of the nature of an olive tree. Olive trees only grow at lower elevation.

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They are one of the fastest growing plants in the Middle East. And so it's interesting to just note that the image here is a freshly plucked olive leaf that things are actually beginning to grow and not just grow, but even grow at lower elevations by this point.

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Seven days later, he releases a dove and it doesn't return. Three weeks shy of a year,

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Noah removes some type of awning or covering to get a better look. Again, just an illustration of how we don't know exactly what this boat looked like.

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There was some kind of an awning or a covering. He removes it and he sees dry land. How many of you think there was some celebration going on in that boat when they saw the dry land?

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But notice, it's not the raven and the dove thing that convinces Noah it's now safe to depart the ark, but God himself beckons them out.

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Noah waits to hear from God. He doesn't depend on his own wisdom, but he goes forward with the call of God and God says, go out in verse 16.

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And so in verse 18, Noah went out just showing his lockstep faith in God and obedience to him.

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The animals that were loaded two by two, and here in verse 19, they depart as families.

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Some stuff going on in the boat. Two by two, come out as families. The earth has a fresh start.

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Humanity has been saved, but at this point, think about the loneliness factor. How many of you love it when your family gets together for Christmas and then you love it when everybody leaves?

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Eight people alive on the planet. You want to socialize? That's it, okay?

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Eight people on the planet and some animals. God has started over and we have seen detailed account of the flood, the timing, the torrential rains, the floating ark, the covered mountains, and the death and destruction of the just judgment of God.

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But what does all of this mean to us here in 2013 in this little town of Matawan? I would suggest to you something very radical.

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What I'm going to say to you, I think you could accidentally interpret as overstatement, but I really believe this is true.

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I would suggest to you that the way we view this event betrays something fundamental about our relationship with our

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God. The way that you view this flood. Let me illustrate this by showing you a couple of different ways that you can observe the same event and think differently about it.

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How many of you have had that experience in life? You saw something happen, somebody else saw something happen, and you did not see it right.

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I mean, you didn't see it the same way. One of you is wrong, and those of you who are married know exactly what I'm talking about.

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But you saw, you had that conversation. One person reads this account and sees the tempest.

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They see the carnage, the wrath, the death, the destruction, and this person says, God is unfair.

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How could he do this to humanity? And therefore, this account breeds distrust and fuels a lack of faith that probably was already there to begin with.

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Do you see what I'm saying? How dare he do this? Another person reads this account and gets so hung up on the science of the thing that they close their minds to the main point.

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And I find it ironic that I truly believe that this could be a believer who does this. A person who actually believes that this is a true account and therefore sets it about for their whole life's goal to defend it, to use science to come in and undergird it.

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And they miss the point because all they're concerned with is trying to prove to the world out there that this is true.

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Do you understand what I'm saying? How you could lean in that direction and go, oh, the main point, what Don ought to be doing today is giving us scientific evidences for the flood.

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I don't think that's the point. And obviously the science can be used on the other side as somebody who goes, I'm gonna just set out to disprove this with science because I don't have faith and I don't believe it's true.

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But do you see how science isn't the main point? I believe Satan would love to keep all of us at the level of scientific questioning, of scientific argument about this.

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He would love for believers to set about arguments to prove this and never get down to the heart of the message. Because in this text, we see the mercy of our

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God. We see his holiness, his justice, his sorrow, and equally his love for us.

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I propose to you a dramatic statement. Until we truly understand the need for this flood and our rightful place in this account, we will not understand the significance of the cross of Jesus Christ.

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You see, a person who knows God, a person who walks with God, reads the account of the flood and acknowledges, you know what?

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I deserve that. I deserve the wind and the waves. I deserve to go under and not come back up.

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That's what I deserve for my sin and for my rebellion. If you understand the holiness of God and you understand the depravity of your own heart, you see yourself not skating through like you deserve that.

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I deserve a first class ticket on the ark. You realize that where you ought to be is outside.

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You hear what I'm saying? That's what I deserve in my rebellion and sin against a righteous

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God. In Don Filsic's rebellion and sin against a righteous and holy

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God, I deserve to be overwhelmed by the wind and the waves. And I fear that many of us consider humanity to be basically good.

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And we give ourselves quite a bit of slack in that. Say, yeah, people are pretty good. They're all right. And I'm better than most.

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So the flood therefore seems like overkill. Do you get it? Like that's overkill. Because we have a weak theology of our own depravity and an even weaker theology of the holiness of our great and awesome

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God. So we miss it. And you see the flood serves as a testimony of what you and I deserve.

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And so I read the account and I'm amazed by the ark. I love the ark. I'm enamored with the ark. I can't get the ark out of my mind when

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I read this account because it is so undeserving that he preserves us. If it were you or me, would you just can the whole thing?

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Noah is not perfect. Noah is not the guy who is gonna, we're gonna see him sin right away in the next text.

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Still there, still a sinner, still broken. How many of you would just like, just eight people just go the whole way and start over.

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You see what I'm saying? God is merciful. And he's setting about a plan to save us from within the broken system.

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And so I love the ark. It's a testimony of the grace of our glorious and merciful God who is committed to his creation and committed to mankind.

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He made a way. He is a God who extends salvation to any who would trust him. And in those days, he provided a boat for salvation.

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And now in our days, he's provided Jesus Christ as his chosen method of salvation from the coming judgment.

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And so my final question to all of us is simply this. Will you be saved when the wind and waves of judgment rise?

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Are you in Christ? Are you in the ark of God's protection?

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That is what Jesus Christ is to us in this new covenant. And then if you're here and you say,

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I put my faith in Christ, I've trusted him. I've asked him to save me. I've asked him to be the Lord and the

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King. I've recognized him as Lord and King and said, would you save me from myself because I recognize my own wickedness and sinfulness in my heart and I need your salvation.

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If you're in that boat, are you going to go into the boat alone?

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Are you satisfied to be saved alone? Well, we're gonna have a party in the ark because he saved us.

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And I fear that so many churches and so many people have that mentality that, well, he saved me because I'm awesome. And the rest of them just let it go.

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I think he's been patient with us now in this period of 120 years.

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I don't know how to use that metaphorically. He's been patient with us because the number isn't complete yet.

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And he desires to use you and me to reach out. And I don't believe that the number is full here either.

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I believe that God desires, he has families and people here in this community and in this area that he wants you to reach out to.

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He wants you to be the preacher of righteousness in their lives. Will you step up and be that preacher of righteousness?

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A preacher of the righteousness that comes by faith in Jesus Christ. As we take communion this morning, I want to remind you that this is a ceremony of remembrance.

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God didn't just ignore our sins. He didn't just brush them aside. But equally in his sorrow over our sins and through his justice, he meted out our punishment, the punishment that we deserved on Jesus Christ.

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And therefore the cross is just like the flood. It's an extreme measure that was required to deal with our human sinfulness.

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And just like entering the ark was an act of faith, asking Jesus to save us is an act of faith.

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So I'd encourage you to rejoice this morning as we remember together the sacrifice of Jesus Christ that has set us free from the divine judgment that we all deserve.

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But equally as you take the bread and remember his body broken for you and you take the juice and remember his blood that was shed for you, that you take a moment and pause and think, who can

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I declare this to? Who can I at least try to bring with me? God's gonna float the boat one day.

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And who's gonna be there with us? Let's pray. Father, I thank you even just for holding up my voice during this service.

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And Father, I pray that you would go forward in this next week that we might be challenged and convicted.

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Father, I thank you so much for your grace. And I don't even know if it makes sense. I mean, people look at me from the outside and I don't know what they see, but I know my own heart and I know the wickedness that's there and I know the evil that is there and I know what

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I am deserving of. And I pray that you would open everybody here's eyes to their own sinfulness and to their own need for a savior.

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Father, there would be nobody here who is acting, just acting the righteousness, just acting the blamelessness.

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But Father, that you would help us to deal with sin as we see it ultimately through faith in you. And Father, that you would give us boldness and proclamation of your glory to this culture that is in need of hearing this message that, yes, the road is narrow.

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Yes, the path of salvation is only through one and his name is Jesus Christ. But you have given us a way.

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It is your plan from beginning to end and you're finishing it through us. I ask that you would help us to be bold with that message in Jesus' name.