The Faith of Noah (Part 3)

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The Faith of Noah (Part 4)

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If you would take out your Bibles, we're going to begin in the book of Hebrews.
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Then we're going to make our way back into the Old Testament, looking today at Genesis chapter seven, but we'll begin in Hebrews because we've been doing a long study of Hebrews now.
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We've looked at quite a few passages, verse by verse, and we're in chapter 11.
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And as I said, 2011 was going to be all about Hebrews 11.
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And we're going to just take each one of the characters and we're going to spend the whole year looking at the various individuals that are in this passage and their lives.
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Well, it is the month of May and we've got two of them down and we're on the third and there's like 30 of them.
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So hopefully we'll we'll see what happens.
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It doesn't matter.
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It doesn't matter how long it takes.
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We're we're reading the Bible.
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We're learning the Bible.
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We're doing what we're supposed to do.
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And there's nothing like looking at an Old Testament example of faith to remind us of what we ought to be doing as believers in Lord Jesus Christ.
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There's just nothing quite like seeing a living example of something in the words and pages of scripture.
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So we're looking today.
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We've already looked at Abel and we've looked at Enoch and we looked at the first part of the life of Noah.
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Well, we are going to continue looking at the life of Noah as such.
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We will begin our reading this morning in Hebrews chapter 11 and verse seven.
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If you would stand, we give honor and reverence to the word of God by standing and doing so remind us who it is that is speaking these words to us in Hebrews chapter 11 and verse seven.
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It says, by faith, Noah being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen in reverent fear, constructed an ark for the saving of his household.
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By this, he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.
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Our father and our God, as we examine the text of scripture this morning, I pray that you would first and foremost forgive us, Lord, of our iniquities.
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Make us ready to receive the word of truth.
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Keep me from error, O God, is my prayer, as it is always, and open the hearts of the people to the truth.
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That your word might be proclaimed and that your people might be edified by it.
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This is our prayer in Jesus name.
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Amen.
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Many of you know that I am somewhat of a movie buff.
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I oftentimes in teaching and joking around with people, I will quote movies because in my lifetime, I've seen probably more than my fair share.
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I enjoy going to the cinema and I enjoy taking the family out to go see a movie every once in a while.
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And recently, not too recently, I guess it's been a few years back now, but within the last couple of years, there was a film that came out about the end of civilization.
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It was based on the interpretation of an ancient Mayan prophecy that the world is going to end in 2012.
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That's the title of the film was 2012.
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Now, I didn't see the film.
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But I did go to the theater when the film was being advertised and when they were advertising the film 2012, I remember it very specifically because it's hard to forget something when you're sitting in a black, dark room and you're standing in front of a tremendous or sitting in front of a tremendous screen and there's this huge thing in front of you and you see it.
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There's nothing really else you can look at.
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And I remember seeing the advertisement for the movie, it was a man standing on a hillside ringing a bell of warning to his fellow citizens.
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He was just ringing a bell trying to warn them.
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And then the scene pans back and what you see is you see a tremendous wall of water encapsulating the mountains behind him and overflowing and heading his way.
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And of course, the scene was a picture of how the interpreters of the movie or the rather the makers of the movies interpreted what it would look like if the world underwent a cataclysmic and catastrophic flood.
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Now, I remember sitting and watching that in the theater and I remember seeing the thing and I remember feeling somewhat overwhelmed, even though I knew it was only light on a screen.
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I knew it was it was very fake and part of it looked very computer generated.
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But at the same time, just the overwhelming sense that hit my heart was that, you know, this isn't really a new idea.
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It isn't as if these these filmmakers are producing something that is somehow inherently new.
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All they are doing is making a visual representation of something that actually happened.
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You see, the thing that strikes me most when I talk to people about the Bible and particularly when I talk about the subject of the Noahic flood is how often it seems.
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That people forget the tremendous catastrophe that the flood was, if the flood happened.
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As the Bible describes the flood happening.
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Then the world as we know it.
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Does not look anything like it did when it was created, because if there is one thing that water does really well is it rearranges everything.
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In fact, I remember I heard some guys talking about.
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They had some scientists said they had found Eden, I said, oh, yeah, we know where Eden is because we believe Eden is at the crossway of the Tigris and the Euphrates, and we found that we know right where that is.
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And that's where the Garden of Eden would have been.
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And I said, guys, guys, I didn't want to say this.
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They were on the television, but I'm thinking, yeah, let's let's huddle up because we need to have a discussion.
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If you believe that Eden existed, then there's an implicit there's an implicit acceptance that the Bible is true.
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If you even talk about Eden, then you're giving an implicit agreement that the Bible has something about truth in it, even if you don't believe it's all true.
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So if you believe Eden existed, then you believe in some way that Adam had descendants.
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One of those descendants name was Noah, and likely there was a flood.
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And guess what? If there was a total cataclysmic flood, then wherever the Tigris and the Euphrates are now, ain't where they were before.
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If they even existed before in the same way, in the same place, in the same idea, we don't know because we don't know what the face of the world even looked like, we don't know what the atmosphere was like prior to the flood.
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Karl Baugh, some things that are kind of interesting, but one of the things that he talks about is the potential that prior to the flood, that there was an entirely different atmosphere.
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One that we wouldn't even understand, but that would have been more nutritious and nutrient rich and how it allowed plants to grow larger and allowed animals to grow larger and people to live longer.
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And if you read the history of the Bible and you read prior to the flood, you see these people with these tremendously long lifespans.
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And when they do archaeological digs, they find these animals that are tremendously large.
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So we say, well, perhaps there is something to Baugh's argument after all.
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The point of the matter is, however, when you think about the flood, we rarely think about the reality of the flood, as I said, and I've said it every week that I've been talking about this.
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We relegate Noah to a kid's story and we make it this.
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We make it.
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There's a guy who put a zoo on a boat and kids just freak out.
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That's the way we do it.
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We say there's a guy who put a zoo on a boat.
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Kids love it.
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You know, he had penguins and giraffes in the same place.
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We don't know how it worked, but we're real impressed with the zoo on the boat.
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And that really is not the key to the story, because what was happening in that boat was salvation.
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But what was happening outside of that boat was judgment.
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And you see, that's what we're going to see today is the difference.
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Whether or not we see it, what we see in Noah's story is the story of judgment and the story of God's protection of his people through judgment.
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We forget.
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We remember eight people lived and a bunch of furry animals, but we forget everybody else, everybody else.
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Including all the other animals, it's a story of judgment.
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So let's begin.
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We'll go back to Genesis seven.
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Genesis chapter seven.
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I don't know if we'll do the whole chapter today.
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It's going to depend on time.
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I'm just going to go verse by verse and we'll if we ended a certain point, we'll just start again next week.
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I like having the freedom to do that.
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To just be able to preach the word as it comes and deal with it as it's there, not feel like we have to get through any particular amount of passages.
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Genesis chapter seven and verse one says, Then the Lord said to Noah.
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Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you are a righteous excuse me, I have seen that you are righteous before me.
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And last week we talked about what it meant that Noah was righteous.
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It meant that he was a man of faith.
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And the Bible says it is by faith that God imputes righteousness unto us.
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And we spent some time with that.
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So I just wanted to remind you of that key.
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He says, for I have seen that you are a righteous that you are righteous before me in this generation.
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The key to this first verse is when it says the Noah said or shooting, then the Lord said to Noah, go into the ark.
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You see, the ark was God's providential place of protection.
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It was going to be the shield between Noah and his family and the judgment of God.
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In this way, we could rightfully say that the ark was a type of Christ.
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Now, we haven't spent a terrible amount of time on what is called typology.
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But it's important that you remember when we talk about a type, there's a difference between an Old Testament type and an Old Testament, what's called a messianic prophecy.
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A messianic prophecy specifically says something about Jesus Christ who is to come.
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However, a type means that there are things in the Old Testament that represented the work of Christ in their particular place in time.
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For instance, you'll read in the New Testament about the rock from which the people of Israel got water from.
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And the New Testament says that rock was Christ.
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That doesn't literally mean that that rock had bone flesh and gave the Sermon on the Mount.
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What it meant was that rock was a type of the Lord Jesus Christ, that rock and giving living water to the people was a representation of Christ who brought with himself in his words the water of life.
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Likewise here, when we look at the ark, what we are seeing is a type of Christ.
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It is a bulwark.
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What is a bulwark? A wall of defense.
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That's what the ark was.
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It kept Noah safe.
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It kept his family safe from what? You might say from the waters of the flood, I would venture to go further and say it kept him safe from the wrath of God.
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The water is simply.
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The mode of wrath, it's simply the vehicle of the wrath.
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But what is happening is the wrath of God is falling upon the earth.
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And that ark kept Noah safe from the wrath of God because he was inside the ark.
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Likewise, Christ protects us from the wrath of God and the word into if you write in your Bible, when you read that word in chapter seven, verse one, it says, and no one into the ark circle that word underline that word, because that word into is important because later in the New Testament, there are a lot more times when you will see that language.
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But the language becomes into Christ, for instance, in Romans chapter eight.
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We read this morning.
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It says, therefore, it is now there is therefore now no justification for those who are what in Christ Jesus.
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Second Corinthians 517 says, therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he's a new creation, creation, Galatians 328, for you are all one in Jesus Christ, Ephesians 2 and 10, it says, for we are his workmanship created where in Christ Jesus, first Thessalonians chapter four and verse 16, and the dead in Christ will rise first over and over and over again.
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We hear about being in Christ.
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And what does the Bible say? Those who are in Christ are protected from the wrath of God.
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Those who are not in Christ are going to experience the wrath of God.
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Thus, in a typological way, we look at the ark of Noah and we see Christ because those who were in the ark were saved from the wrath of God.
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Likewise, those of us who are in Christ.
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Are safe from the wrath of God, we mustn't miss the correlation of the ark.
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And Christ.
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This also reminds us of another important truth, if you read chapter seven and verse one, God is the one who says, come enter, read it again.
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Chapter seven and verse one, it says, when the Lord then the Lord said to Noah, go into the ark, go into the ark.
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And there are some other translations, I think, better.
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It actually says, come enter into the ark.
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The salvation that we receive in Christ is not initiated by us.
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It is initiated by God.
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It is God who, by his grace, who first calls us.
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The Bible declares that we love him because he first loved us.
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Jesus himself said he came to seek and say that which was lost.
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Revelation 13, eight says that Christ was the lamb slain from the foundation of the world, showing that God had in eternity past taken the divine initiative to plan a way of salvation before we had ever even sinned.
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You ever thought about that, that the plan of salvation was put in place before the act of transgression.
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It is God who has taken the initiative in our salvation, it is God who calls us to the cross, it is God who wakes our dead souls from their deadness and gives them new life.
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It is God who says to Noah, come into the ark and be safe from my wrath.
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It is God who says to us, come into my son, come to my son, believe in him, be immersed into him, be in Christ and as such, be safe from my wrath.
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That's so important.
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We forget.
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But it is so important.
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First to we see in verse two, sort of an expansion of what we saw in chapter one, it says, take with you seven pairs of all clean animals in chapter in chapter six.
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Rather, he mentioned only two of each.
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This is take with you seven pairs of all the 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 birds of the heavens, also male and female to keep their offspring alive on the face of all the earth.
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And some question now, why is it that the the clean animals that they were brought in sevens rather than brought simply in a pair? And the reason for that is simple, that the clean animals were used for two purposes.
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They were used for sacrificing.
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And if you're going to sacrifice an animal and you only got two left, well, it sort of leaves you in a burden there to have any more after that.
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And Noah sacrificed as soon as he came off the ark.
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So you have to imagine that those clean animals were for sacrificing, but also eating.
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They didn't eat the unclean animals, but they would eat the clean animals.
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So we have here.
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Those two things, those two purposes for the reason for keeping the clean animals and verse four, God makes this now this is sort of an offshoot, I'm not going to go real long on this, but verse four was huge in Harold Camping's theology, by the way.
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Remember Harold Camping, the guy who said Jesus coming back on May 21st, verse four was his key verse.
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A lot of people don't know that he says that for in seven days I will send rain on the earth 40 days and 40 nights and every living thing that I have made, I will blot out from the face of the ground.
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You see, the seven days he interpreted seven thousand years.
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And because he believed that in four thousand nine ninety B.C., this is when this occurred in seven thousand years plus, you know, minus a year, 2011, it would be.
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The end of the world.
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But he said this this tells seven days to seven thousand years, because, hey, everybody knows with the day with the Lord, a day is as a thousand years.
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It's interesting if you want to hear more on that, I did a sermon on it a couple months ago, it's on Sermon on the Key, this I just every time I read this passage, I think about him because it's so clear it's seven days.
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It's not as if there's an ambiguous numerology going on here, he says, for yet in seven days and in seven days the water came.
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I think it was fulfilled, I don't think we have to look for a mystical numerological understanding, I think it's pretty much seven days, seven days, he says, for in seven days I'll send rain on the earth, 40 days and 40 nights and every living thing that I have made, I will blot out from the face of the ground.
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Here we see the promised wrath of God alongside the promised patience of God.
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One more week, one more week.
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Of patience, punishment was due right away, judgment was due at the moment.
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But God carried one more week, Dr.
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John MacArthur said in his comments on this passage that God allowed one more week for repentance to demonstrate his patience.
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Beloved, God's patience should never make anyone believe that there will never come a time when he will act as judge.
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If you are an unbeliever.
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Hear me now, or if you're on the fence or if you don't know where you are, you're living under the patience of God right now.
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That's where you are.
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As Jonathan Edwards said in his great sermon, sinners in the hands of an angry God, you are like a spider hanging over the pit of a fire and there's nothing holding you up but the mere mercy and grace of God.
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This is where those people were in the day of Noah.
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All of them stood outside the ark.
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And you know, the Bible never records for us anyone making fun of Noah.
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I've oftentimes you see movies about Noah and stuff and you see the people out there.
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Ha ha.
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Noah's a fool.
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He's making a boat.
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We don't know that that ever happened.
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We don't know that anything like that ever happened.
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He could have been out in the woods away from everybody.
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Nobody might even know he was making a ship, but the New Testament does tell us something about it.
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And we read the book of Hebrews earlier.
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It says in what he did, he condemned the world.
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I think his work was very public.
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Because I think in the public building of the ark, I think that was how he condemned the world.
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He demonstrated faith to a lost and dying world.
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And in his demonstration of faith, the world fell under the condemnation of the preaching of the gospel.
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Noah is saying to the world, a flood is coming in, the world is saying we don't care, beloved, how often does that happen for us today? We say to a lost and dying world.
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You will face God in judgment one day.
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And what does the world look back at us and say? We don't care.
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And as such, the preaching of the gospel is condemnation.
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To those who reject it, this is how the gospel, the gospel has a twofold purpose, the gospel saves the heart of some and it hardens the heart of others.
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The preaching of the gospel has a twofold purpose and the preaching of the gospel, the world is condemned and their rejection because they hear the gospel, they hear the message of redemption, they reject it.
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And as such, their hearts are hardened.
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Likewise, with Noah here, he has built a monument to faith.
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We talked about the size of the ark last week, I want to get into it again, but this is a huge monument to his belief that God has called him to faith and trust.
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And he says, go inside, come inside.
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And in seven days, I'll bring the foot.
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You got to imagine the type of faith it takes to go into a boat that really has not a strong system of as far as we read it, it didn't seem to have any type of real ventilation and things.
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I mean, it wasn't like it was air conditioning like we have today.
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They didn't have Freon back then.
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Basically, he went into the boat and he sat there for seven days.
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We have a hard time sitting through a sermon for seven minutes.
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He sat there for seven days waiting on God.
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I love to preach about Noah because I can I just the faith astounds me.
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His ability, I mean, he sat there waiting on God and beloved.
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I want to make a point because it says in verse five and Noah did all that the Lord commanded when God said, go into the ark and you wait seven days, you take all these animals with you in seven days.
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I'm going to bring the flood.
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You got to remember, this is a time in which it is very possible.
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That there was not rain on the earth, he said, oh, man, there's always been rain there.
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Go with me very quickly before you before you think that way, go with me back to Genesis chapter two, I just want to show you something that's a potential thing.
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Genesis chapter two, verse five, Genesis chapter two, verse five, it says when no, I hear Bible pages, I'll give you a second there, Genesis two, verse five, it says when no bush of the field was yet in the land.
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No small plant of the field had yet sprung up for the Lord, God had not caused it to rain on the land and there was no man to work the ground and a mist was coming up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground.
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Then the Lord formed the man out of the dust of the ground, breathed into his nostrils breath of life and the man became a living creature.
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What you see there is you see that there was a time in the history of the world where there was not rain coming from the heavens, but there was a mist that came up out of the ground that watered the ground.
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Now, from there to the time of Noah, there is no mention of rain.
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Now, does that mean I can prove prove positive and stand up here and debate a scientist? There was a time when there was no rain.
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I can say there was a time when there wasn't rain because this text says there was a time when there was rain.
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And it doesn't say when it rained, except that when Noah got on the ark seven days later, it rained.
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And if that's the case, that's just one more testimony to the faith of Noah.
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They've never even seen it.
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You imagine water is going to fall out of the sky and you've never seen it, and yet you still get in the boat.
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A boat that's not sitting in water, a boat that's built in the field, and yet you have the faith to get on the boat and sit there for seven days.
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What did he do? I don't think he played Bunko for seven days or whatever you guys what do y'all play on your game days, ladies days, you know, I don't know what they did for seven days, but he sat there for seven days.
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In trust that the Lord will fulfill his word, beloved.
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Do we believe that the Lord will fulfill his word? You know, we say we do.
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But often we live like we don't.
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We say we trust in God.
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But we live like we trust in ourselves and we trust in our bank accounts and we trust in our elected officials or whatever else.
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Beloved Noah is a testimony to faith.
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He's a testimony to what faith looks like, he's a testimony in verse five, because verse five, again, is a reiteration of chapter six in the last verse in chapter six, because it just simply reiterates and Noah did all that the Lord had commanded him.
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Beloved, can that be said? About us, could it be said that Sovereign Grace Family Church has done all that the Lord has commanded her? Could it be said that I have done all that the Lord has commanded me? Or that you have done all that the Lord has commanded you? This is why Noah made the list.
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This is why his name is in Hebrews seven.
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Verses like verse five tell us what kind of man it is that has genuine faith.
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And I ask you today, are you that kind of man? Are you that kind of woman? Are you that kind of young person that you can say God has commanded? And I have responded, thy will be done.
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Father, as we come now to a conclusion in the message, I pray that it would not conclude in our heart, but that the message would ring out throughout our minds and hearts this week, that we would ask ourselves, have we done all that the Lord has commanded us? Lord, maybe there are those here that the that you have commanded.
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To seek after you in certain ways and Lord, yet we stand back unwilling.
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Maybe our church needs to go in a direction and yet we stand back unwilling.
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Lord, maybe maybe there are those who you are calling to yourself.
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And yet our hearts still.
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Are unwilling, Lord, make us willing that we might be as Noah was a man and a woman in a church that can be said of.
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That we do.
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What the Lord command us, we thank you, oh, God.
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We ask your mercy upon us to this day in Jesus name, Amen.
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Beloved, if you have a need for prayer.
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We invite you to come now as we have our song of benediction.