Noah was a man of faith who believed what God said concerning a coming judgment. Noah obeyed God’s command giving evidence of his faith. An exposition of Genesis 6 and Hebrews 11:7.
Sermon Transcript
The next hero of the faith that we find in Hebrews 11 is Noah. Now personally, Noah is probably one of my favorite Old Testament characters. In fact, of all of the people that are listed in Hebrews 11, I find Noah to be personally one of the most intriguing characters out of them all. If you were to ask a random garden-variety pagan that you encounter on the street to give you some detailed information about the lives of say Abraham and Moses and Noah, you would probably find that most people know more about Noah than they would any other Old Testament character simply because his life was so unique in so many ways and there are so many features of his life that stand out to us. He just captures our imagination.
I don’t know what people would say if you asked just a random person, “Give me some details about Abraham.” I don’t even know if most of them would even be able to know anything other than, yeah, he’s a character in the Bible I think. He was Jewish. That’s probably it. If you asked them about Moses, they would probably think, yeah, I think he was on the boat that Noah built, right? And he parted the waters and the two by two animals walked through on dry ground into the promised land. It was something like that. The Lord told him to cast your net out on the right-hand side and he brought in nets full of fish that were too much and the nets were breaking and then Noah got out and walked on the water to Jesus, right? Was that it? That’s sort of the confusion that exists in the minds of most people. But with Noah, most people understand who Noah was and they’re familiar at least with the story of the ark and the animals coming in two by two and a worldwide flood. They are probably most familiar with Noah. He has a way of capturing our imagination.
And honestly, if you are going to write vacation Bible school curriculum or youth group curriculum or Sunday school curriculum, don’t you have to include the story of Noah? Isn’t that just like—it’s default. You know you put Noah in your five-day curriculum for VBS. You’re not sure who else you’re going to put in there, but Noah has to get in there because it’s very easy to use Noah to capture the imagination and the attention of children. You have your Betty Lukens felt and you put the little people up on the board and the water sort of over top and you drag the people off the bottom. “Aaah”—screaming in the waters as the people drowned. And every kid in the class is going to sit there with rapt attention with their eyes wide open. And you’ve got their attention, and then you can give them the details that this is a judgment from God.
Most people know the story of Noah. And as widely known as he is, he is equally as widely mocked and scoffed at because unbelievers, though they would know many of the salient details of the story of Noah, they also mock all of the major features of Noah’s life and the episode as recorded in Scripture. They mock the idea that there could have ever been a time in the history of the world where the waters surpassed the mountaintops. Of course, what they fail to understand is that the mountains as they exist now didn’t exist in the days of Noah. The mountains that exist now are the result of tectonic plates crashing into one another at high speeds and pushing mountain ranges up out of the water. None of the mountains around us in this present world existed in Noah’s day. They fail to recognize that.
The idea that God would judge all people for their sin, they mock and they scoff at that. The fact that God would command Noah to build an ark and that this boat could fit all of the various kinds of animals that we have on the face of the planet, that’s something that they think is worthy of their scoffing. And then the idea that all of creation would be wiped out, all living creatures would be wiped out except just those ones on that boat, and that this was a worldwide flood and that everything would be wiped out and that stepping off that boat would just be Noah and his immediate family, those eight people, and that the whole world’s been populated from just those eight people, that sounds quite ridiculous, and mockers and scoffers scoff at that.
And these are all the things that make Noah unique, that God commanded him to build an ark, that Noah in faith and in reverence built that ark, that God brought animals of every kind to that boat and they went on to that ship and that God sent a worldwide flood that covered all of the globe and that everything was wiped out, all living creatures. All of those things make Noah’s story unique. And then that he stepped off that boat and that the only people on the face of the whole planet were him and his immediate family, Noah and his wife, his three sons and their wives, only eight people on the entire globe. Be honest with yourself. Haven’t there been times in your life when you thought, you know, that wouldn’t be such a bad gig? Just eight of us. Until you realize that you can’t have doctors and dentists and all the stuff that you rely upon, and then you think, OK, maybe more than just eight. Maybe fifty or sixty people.
Noah is a very singularly unique figure in all of the Old Testament. And do you know why scoffers mock at it? Because scoffers do not want to admit that there are judgements like that against sin. Because if there are judgements like that against sin, then that means that there was a judgment like that in the past. And if there was a judgment like that in the past and because there are judgments like that against sin, then there might be a judgment like that in the future. And because they desire to deny that there can be any judgment to come, they find it much easier to do that if they can deny that there has ever been a judgment like that in the past. And so really as 2 Peter 3 described that we read here a few moments ago, really they are seeking after their own lust and trying to satisfy their own lust, driven by their own lust and their sin. That is why scoffers scoff at the tale of Noah.
He is our third example in Hebrews and he follows along chronologically after the first two, Abel and Enoch. Abel was an example of one who worshipped God in faith, Enoch an example of one who walked with God in faith, and now Noah an example of one who works for God in faith. And it is his work of building that ark for the salvation of his family that is the focus of our writer here in Hebrews 11.
In contrast to Abel and Enoch, Scripture gives us a lot more detail about Noah. Abel gets most of a chapter, chapter 4 in the book of Genesis, a lot of details about him and his brother and being killed by Cain, and we get some details of that. Enoch is relatively briefly mentioned in Genesis 5, but then we get to Noah and we get to Genesis 6 and 7, 8 and 9, and he’s even mentioned in 10. And really the passage beginning in Genesis 5 all the way through Genesis 11 and 12 traces the lineage from Adam all the way through to Abraham. That’s the point of all those chapters. And so it’s really this godly lineage that’s being traced through the book of Genesis, particularly in Genesis 5. The next hero of our faith that we are introduced to later on in Hebrews 11 is Abraham. And more attention is given to him, more details given to him, in Hebrews 11 and consequently the rest of the book of Genesis after chapter 12. From 12 through the end is really about Abraham and his immediate descendants, his children and his grandchildren.
So before we jump back into Genesis to look at Noah, I want you to see in verse 7 of Hebrews 11—briefly notice the significance that the author makes of Noah there. Hebrews 11:7: “By faith Noah, being warned by God about things not yet seen, in reverence prepared an ark for the salvation of his household, by which he condemned the world, and became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith.” There are two significant things that are written concerning Noah there. Two phrases that really describe him. First, he was warned about things not yet seen, and later on when we come back to Hebrews 11 we’ll see what the author is describing there. He was warned about things not yet seen, and then his act of building the ark was done in reverence. This describes his attitude, his demeanor, the position of his heart. He did this act of obedience in reverence.
And then there are three things that his faith accomplished there. Number one, he prepared an ark for the salvation of his household, and that’s not spiritual salvation that is described there. It is the preservation from the judgment that was taking place at the flood. Second, he condemned the world. In other words, his act of faith and the building of the ark was itself a testimony of condemnation to the ungodly world around him. And then third, he became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith. So his faith moved him to prepare an ark, by which he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith. Those are the three things we’re going to keep in mind just today as we go back to Genesis 6.
So turn your Bibles back to the sixth chapter of Genesis, Genesis 6. And even though we could go through Genesis 6, 7, 8 and 9, that’s not the goal of this message. And I said to you several weeks ago when we started Hebrews 11 that one of the challenges in preaching through this list of the heroes of the faith is how deep do we dive back into their original context without losing sight of Hebrews 11. And I think the balance that I’m going to try and strike is to basically describe in brief detail some of that historical context as we encounter the details in Hebrews 11 without really taking sort of a mini-series on Noah from Genesis. So we’re just going to be looking today at Genesis 6, even though all of the details of Noah’s life would encapsulate Genesis 6–9.
Genesis 6—let me set a little bit of the historical context. Last time we were in Genesis was back in chapter 5 when we looked at Enoch, and that of course was just a genealogy that traces the lineage of Adam all the way through to the time of Noah. And we notice there that it is a chronological genealogy. In other words, he gives us names of people and how long they lived and when they bore a son and how long that son lived and then when that son bore a son, etc. The purpose of that seems to be that you and I would be able to date the events and the people’s lives prior to the flood. We can date the flood from Abraham. We know when Abraham lived. We can date the flood from Abraham. And then beginning in Genesis 5, we can go back and we can date creation. If we take Genesis seriously as history, we can date creation. Not precisely; I’m not talking day of the week or anything. But we are talking about a pretty precise date in terms of the years that creation has been around.
This puts Noah in a historical context among other historical figures, and he is in the line of Seth. Seth was the godly descendant of Adam and Eve. And not everybody in Seth’s lineage would have been a believer. We’re not to assume that, nor are we to assume that everybody who was born of Seth’s line was a believer or that every single person mentioned in Genesis 5 was necessarily a believer. But we can presume that most of them would have been believers and that this knowledge and understanding of who God is and the worship of the one true God, Yahweh, would have been passed down from generation to generation. And that would have been very easy to do because as we date the lifespans of these people, these patriarchs who lived in Genesis 5, we see life spans that overlapped one another.
I’ll just give you a couple of significant things that I mentioned a few weeks ago when we were looking at Enoch. Enoch is Noah’s great-grandfather. Enoch, the one who was taken, is Noah’s great-grandfather. He was a prophet. Enoch begat Methuselah. Methuselah begat Lamech. And Lamech begat Noah. Methuselah lived to be 969 years old. That is the longest recorded lifespan in the Bible. That is not to say that nobody lived longer than 969 years. It is to say that the longest recorded lifespan in Scripture was 969 years. That’s verse 27 of chapter 5.
Noah was alive for approximately 100 years during the lifespan of Adam’s grandson. So remember, you had Adam and then Seth and then Enosh. And Enosh’s life would have overlapped the life of Noah by 100 years. Enosh lived a long time, and so Noah would have been alive at the time of his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. Enoch, the one who was taken, would have been taken before Noah was born, so he never would have known Enoch, but he would have known his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, or we should say he could have known his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Enosh, because their lives would have overlapped.
Methuselah lived up to the year that the flood came. Methuselah lived up to the year of the flood. Methuselah’s son, Lamech, died four years prior to the flood, and Methuselah would have outlived his son Lamech by four years, and he would have died the year that the flood came. Though all of these patriarchs in Genesis 5 lived long lives, it is important to remember that none of them except Noah and his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, were alive at the time that the flood came. All in Genesis 5 had already died prior to the worldwide flood, which means Noah and Noah alone would have been a righteous and godly man amongst all those who lived at that time.
Now as you’re listening to me preach on all this and remind you of some of these things, you’re probably thinking to yourself, Jim, it sounds like you’re taking Genesis as literal history. And I am taking Genesis as literal history because it is literal history. There is nothing in Genesis from chapter 1, verse 1 all the way through the end of the book that would suggest that we should take it as another edition of Aesop’s fables or a myth or an allegory or just a story told with a moral point or anything like that. I take Genesis as literal history. There is no contextual reason to regard it otherwise.
And the New Testament affirms the account of Noah and the account of a worldwide flood and the account of the ark. Jesus Himself said in Luke 17,
26 Just as it happened in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man:
27 they [that is, those alive in the days of Noah] were eating, they were drinking, they were marrying, they were being given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. (Luke 17:26–27 NASB)
It’s also in Matthew 24:37–38.
Peter, who was trained by Jesus, also believed that Noah was a historical figure and that the flood was a worldwide flood and that it was a literal historical event just as recorded in Genesis. Peter in 1 Peter 3:20 refers to those “who once were disobedient, when the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah, during the construction of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through the water.”
Second Peter 2:5 says that God “did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a preacher of righteousness, with seven others, when He brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly.”
And then the passage that we read earlier, 2 Peter 3:6 describes the world that “at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water.”
So Peter three times mentions Noah and the construction of the ark and the worldwide flood. Jesus mentioned it and said that the days of His coming will be just like the days prior to the great worldwide flood. And this world, if you look at it, bears the marks of destruction. We take Genesis as history because you and I can look around and we see everywhere the evidence of a global catastrophe. The mountain ranges, the fossil beds, all of it is an evidence of a global catastrophe. If there had been a worldwide flood, do you know what we would expect to see everywhere we look? We would expect to see billions of dead things laid down in rock layers covered by water all over the earth. And you know what we find? Billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth. Fish fossils on top of mountain ranges. How do you get that? Only by a worldwide flood. How do you get massive oil deposits and natural gas deposits? A worldwide flood. How do you get coal beds? A worldwide flood. How do you get fossils? It’s a worldwide flood. So Jesus was right and Peter was right, Moses was right. Genesis is literal, actual history.
Now let’s look at the cause of the flood. All of that’s just an introduction to the introduction of Genesis 6. We’re going to go through Genesis 6 and see some of these things that the author of Hebrews highlights in Hebrews 11, where he draws them from out of the narrative here. Genesis 6:1–2: “Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose.” Now notice verse 1 talks about men beginning to multiply on the face of the land. We’re talking about a multiplication. He’s talking about people here and populations increasing.
And we have every reason to believe that the population increase prior to the time of the flood would have been substantial. Look, if your notion of the world before the flood is a few tribes sort of scattered around with a couple thousand people in each of these tribes that was covered by water by Noah’s time, you have a wrong idea of what life was like before the flood. We have every reason to believe that there were millions, possibly—probably—hundreds of millions of people who were wiped out by the worldwide flood. Not a couple of tribes of people, a few hundred at a time out in the plains of Shinar somewhere, but millions upon millions of people.
You know how there could have been millions upon millions of people from creation all the way through to the flood? A couple of different things. Number one, you had expanded lifespans, remember? You had people living to be 800, 900, 700 years old, 600 years old. That was relatively common prior to the flood. It was common prior to the flood. How many people do you think Methuselah could have fathered if you lived to be 969 years old? I mean, I fathered four, right? And it was intentional to stop at four. I fathered four and I’m 50 years old. It’s possible that Methuselah could have fathered fifty children. That’d be, I think, a conservative estimate.
And remember, all the descendants of these men are also living long lifespans. So what if Methuselah’s fifty kids each had fifty kids? Methuselah would have how many grandchildren? Twenty-five hundred grandchildren. That’s just the next generation after him. If he lives to be 969 years old, it’s conceivable that some of these men that are mentioned in Genesis 5 would have lived to see hundreds of thousands of their descendants, more than they could probably name or remember. It’s an interesting Christmas celebration, Thanksgiving celebration, not that they had Christmas and Thanksgiving back then, but the family gatherings—eventually there comes a point where you just stop buying presents for your grandkids for anything. You don’t recognize them. You don’t remember when they were born. You’re not sure of their exact lineage. Right? I’m not sure whose great-great-great-great-grandson you are or how you come back to me, but if you say that I’m your grandpa, I guess.
And many people had multiple wives at that time. We know from Genesis 4 that Cain’s son Lamech had two wives. Sexual immorality and promiscuity were widespread back then. So it’s entirely conceivable that one man could live to see hundreds of thousands of his own descendants.
The worldwide flood would have wiped out hundreds of millions of people, which means that when Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord and only eight people were saved, what do you think life was like in Noah’s day when there were eight righteous persons? It’s a different world than you and I can possibly conceive of, isn’t it? You think it’s wicked today? I do. But I don’t think today is—how would I say this? Without mentioning anybody in particular, I think that the sin of our day is at some point going to parallel that of Noah’s day, but I think you and I, even in the wicked world in which we live, in which there is so much restraining influence, we have a hard time understanding just how wicked it would have been in Noah’s day and it goes on to mention that in the text here.
First of all, we have an increasing population, and then also there would have been established civilizations in Noah’s day. We know that Cain built a city, and there were cities, there was metallurgy, there was music, there was flock keeping, there were all these kinds of industry and commerce prior to the flood, millions of people engaging in commerce, building cities, establishing civilizations. You see remnants of that type of pre-flood technology in the world today, in the civilizations that sprung up right after the flood. That knowledge from Noah and his sons was preserved even in the Mayan Empire and in the Egyptian Empire and others that built these massive buildings. This is all pre-flood knowledge and technology that would have come through Noah and his sons and been preserved and then probably reestablished really quickly after the flood.
Now there is this comment in verse 2 that I want to address, and this is not the main point of the sermon, but we have to address this because it’s going to raise in people’s minds a question. Who are the sons of God and the daughters of men in verse 2? Who are these sons of God? There seems to be an intermarrying or a mingling here. And there are more than two views on this passage, but I’m only going to give you the two predominant ones, and I’m going to tell you which one it is that I hold to.
The first one is that this refers to angels cohabiting with women, that the sons of God were angelic beings who came down and in a physical manifestation had sexual relationships with the women of that day, and that this created some sort of, some people believe, a mongrel breed of half-human, half-angelic beings that were the Nephilim, the giants that were alive in those days, and that because of this intermingling between angelic beings and human beings, this polluted the entire line of Genesis 5 so that Noah was the only one by that time whose line, whose lineage, had not been polluted by this intermingling and intermarriage of angelic beings. They base this upon the fact that the book of Job, chapter 38 I think it is, talks about the sons of God, and it’s referring to angelic beings who shouted for joy and rejoiced at the creation of the world.
And it’s true that some angelic beings are described as sons of God in the Old Testament. It’s also true that human beings are described as the sons of God in the Old Testament. So it is not my view that this refers to angelic beings who had intermarrying relationships with human beings and created a mongrel race. I don’t believe that that’s what’s being described here. It doesn’t fit the context. It’s in the context where Moses is tracing the godly lineage of Seth from Adam all the way through to Abraham, and his point in Genesis 6 seems to be that prior to the flood, this godly lineage was being further and further diluted and polluted as these sons of God, believers, were marrying the daughters of men based only upon beauty. They saw that they were beautiful and took wives from whomever they wanted without giving any thought to the spiritual or moral or religious qualifications of these women, and there was this intermingling that was going on to the point where at the time of Noah there were only eight godly people on the face of the planet. Seth’s godly line had been so wiped out by the intermingling of these pagans with these believers that by the time you get to Noah there’s only eight of them.
And further, if you are a creationist and you believe that this refers to angelic beings intermingling and marrying with human beings, I want to challenge you with something. I think that this underlines your creationist dogma that everything in creation was created to reproduce after its own kind. Angels do not have physical bodies and they do not have DNA capable of reproducing with human DNA. There’s nothing in Scripture that suggests that they can. And over and over in Scripture we are told that everything was created to reproduce after its own kind. So even if angels could reproduce, and I have no reason to believe that they do—in fact, I believe that they don’t—even if they could reproduce, creation would tell us, the science of creation, the doctrine of creation, that angels cannot reproduce with human beings because they are an entirely different created order. There cannot be this cross speciation between these. So I don’t believe it’s talking about angels cohabiting with women, I think it is describing the intermarriage of the godly and the ungodly prior to the flood.
Verse 3:
3 Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.”
4 The Nephilim [that is, the giants] were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. (Gen 6:3–4 NASB)
Notice that it says that the Nephilim, the giants, were on the earth in those days. I think this just describes the fact that men back then were bigger than we are. We are not evolving and becoming bigger and better. We are devolving and becoming worse as time goes on because our genetic code is being more and more corrupted. So I don’t know how tall Adam was, but my guess would be if I were standing right now next to Adam, I would look like a dwarf in his presence. That would be my guess, that the people before the flood were bigger, stronger, smarter, mightier than we are. And that’s what’s being described here. These men of renown, these mighty men, were mighty in strength and ability, in intellect, and this probably resulted in the increasing violence that we read of in the following passage.
Verse 5: “Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” That is as clear of a statement of the doctrine of total depravity that you could hope to find in the Old Testament, that every thought of man’s heart was only evil continually. This is what it was before the flood.
Are you better than they, by the way? In your natural state, apart from the grace of God, is fallen man today morally superior to those before the flood? I would argue that we are not. Man is his natural state tends to invent ways of sinning. All of our technology today just makes sinning more convenient. It makes it easier. It makes it more readily available. It makes it more secret. That’s all that our technology has done. It has not done anything to change the human heart. And out of the human heart, Jesus said, flow “evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness” (Mark 7:22). And since that’s what comes out of the heart of man, and God says that the wickedness of man was great and that the thoughts of his heart is only evil continually, it’s not difficult to see why the violence that is described below was so rampant.
Genesis 6:6–7: “The Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. The Lord said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them.’” I believe that that is an anthropomorphism. It’s a way of describing a sentiment or a feeling, a sentiment in God in terms that a human being would understand them. It’s not describing that God had a change of plans or that He had a change of emotion or some wild mood swing. It’s not saying that God questioned His wisdom of making man or decreeing the fall and decreeing the redemption of man or anything like that. It’s simply describing how God viewed sin. God saw the sin of man and it was something that grieved Him. It doesn’t mean that He questioned His own wisdom, but it does mean that in the heart of God, in the Being of God, there was a lamenting, there was a sorrow and a mourning over this sin and the effects of it.
Verse 8: “But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.” That means that God graced Noah. The word favor there means grace or graciousness. Noah was saved by grace as grace was given to Noah. Was Noah saved by his works? Did he merit God’s grace or favor? Does it say that he earned God’s favor? No, it doesn’t. It says that he found God’s favor, meaning that God graced Noah, and as Hebrews 11:7 says, Noah “became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith.”
Noah was no less a sinner than you and I are. He wasn’t flawless. He wasn’t perfect. He didn’t merit God’s grace. He was saved, in fact, in the same way that you and I are saved. We find favor in the eyes of the Lord as well. We don’t deserve it. We don’t merit it. We don’t earn it. We can’t do anything to do those things. But instead, we find God’s favor in that God graces us. In the eyes of the Lord, He pours out His grace. He did it upon Noah and upon Noah’s family.
Verses 9–10: “These are the records of the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his time; Noah walked with God. Noah became the father of three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth.” Notice those three descriptions of Noah in verse 9. He was a righteous man, blameless in his time, and he walked with God. That’s our outline for this morning. So that was the introduction. Before was the introduction to the introduction. Now we come to our three-point outline. Noah was a righteous man, blameless, and he walked with God.
First, Noah was a righteous man. How was he righteous? Did he merit God’s righteousness? Did Noah have righteousness in himself? Since he came from such a godly lineage, did Noah have this righteous seed within him that came from Adam? How was he righteous? Doesn’t Scripture say that “there is none righteous, no, not one” (Rom. 3:10 NKJV)? And then we read that Noah was a righteous man and that Enoch was a righteous man and that Abraham was a righteous man and that Abel was a righteous man. Where does this righteousness come from if there are none righteous? In Romans when it says that there are none righteous, no, not one, it is describing the righteousness that you and I have in and of ourselves as we are before God in a fallen state. We have no righteousness, nothing to commend us before God if we were to stand before Him.
So when we read in Scripture that somebody was righteous or had righteousness—for instance, Noah, that he was a righteous man—the way that we are to understand that is that God gave to Noah a righteousness which he did not have, a righteousness which is on the basis of faith. That’s why Hebrews says he became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith. Not a righteousness that he inherited from his godly lineage, not a righteousness that he earned or merited, but a righteousness that is his on the basis of faith. Therefore we could conclude that Noah was a righteous man because God graced him and Noah believed God and just as we find with Abraham, it was credited to him as righteousness.
Noah’s righteousness is the same righteousness that you and I have before God. It describes our standing before God, that we are in the eyes of God not guilty of our sin or our transgressions. Even though we are sinners and we are deserving of God’s wrath, those sins are not imputed or credited to us and God does not deal with us according to our sins. Instead, for those of us who are in Jesus Christ, God deals with us according to the righteousness of His Son, which is credited to our account on the basis of faith.
So what was Noah’s righteousness? It was the righteousness of Christ. You and I can understand that all the way through the Old Testament, everyone who was said to have been righteous had imputed to them the perfect life and perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ. How is it credited to them? On the same basis that it is credited to us, on the basis of faith. Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. Noah believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. Enoch believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. He had the same righteousness that you and I enjoy because no sinner has any other kind of righteousness other than the righteousness of Jesus Christ. God sees us as righteous.
In the text when it says that Noah was righteous, it’s describing his standing before God. How did God deal with Noah? How did He view Noah and treat Noah? He treated him as righteous because in God’s sight, Noah was righteous on the basis of faith, and the righteousness that he had was not Noah’s righteousness, it was the righteousness of Christ. That’s his standing before God. He was righteous.
Second, he was blameless. See, these three points are going by quicker than you thought. He was blameless in his time. That’s what the passage says in Genesis 6:9. “Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his time.” The word blameless there would describe not his standing before God—that’s righteous. Blameless would be his standing before other men, how other men viewed him. He was blameless in his time. You look at the world around Noah and he stood out. He was blameless. Compared to all the people around him, there was something that marked Noah, that marked him as blameless.
Does this mean he was sinless? Does it mean he was perfect? Does it mean that in himself he was morally upright? What does it mean to be blameless? Blamelessness does not mean sinlessness, nor does it mean perfection. It could have that idea if that’s the meaning that you wanted to sort of pack into that word, but somebody can be blameless without being morally perfect or without being sinless. Job was described as a blameless man. “There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job; and that man was blameless, upright, fearing God and turning away from evil” (Job 1:1). That describes Job—upright, fearing God, and turning away from evil. That’s what blamelessness is. Is it moral and sinless perfection? No, it’s not. Is it being without sin and without guilt? No, it is not. It means that he was blameless.
In Deuteronomy 18:13 the Israelites were commanded to be blameless. “You shall be blameless before the Lord your God.”
Philippians 1:10 says we are to do all things so that we “may approve the things that are excellent, in order to be sincere and blameless until the day of Christ.”
Philippians 2:15: “You will prove yourselves to be blameless and innocent, children of God above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you appear as lights in the world.” That sounds almost like a description of Noah, doesn’t it? A blameless man in the midst of a wicked, crooked, and perverse generation among whom you appear as lights in the world. We’re commanded to be blameless.
Psalm 119:1: “How blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord.”
What does blamelessness mean? Sinlessness? No. It means that your life is not marked by scandal or reproach. That’s the idea. It doesn’t mean that you’re sinlessly perfect. But it means that in the eyes of people you’re not marked by glaring sin. Either privately or publicly what characterizes your life is not a blame-worthy quality or action that constantly marks you as an individual. You’re marked by a lack of scandal, a lack of reproach. You’re blameless in the eyes of people. Yes, they would look at you and say, yeah, he’s a sinner or she’s a sinner just like everybody else. But in terms of the world around us, this person is a very blameless person. There’s really nothing that I can point to in this person’s, this man or woman’s, life that marks them as being reproachful or scandalous. That’s what it is.
Perfection in this world is unattainable. Sinlessness in this world is unattainable. But blamelessness is not. In fact, it’s something we should strive for. It’s something we should all strive for, to have our lives marked by blamelessness.
And third, he walked with God. And this helps us understand how it is that he was blameless. He walked with God. We heard that description about someone else, didn’t we, in Genesis? Who was it? It was Enoch. He walked with God. Now, if you thought that the secret to being taken up out of this world was that you walked with God, Noah walked with God and he went through a judgment. So God’s purpose for Enoch in walking with him was that God took him. God had a different purpose for Noah. So walking with God is no guarantee that you will not suffer through or go through some sort of a judgment in this world. It does mean that your soul is preserved. It does mean that God is pleased with you. But you see God’s sovereign hand and His purposes for these two different men accomplished in two different ways.
Now you and I, I would contend, can have all of these things, all of these three things characterize us. We can be righteous—imputed righteousness by faith in Christ and Christ alone—we can be blameless in the times in which we live, and we can walk with God. We can follow Noah’s example.
In fact, the world in which Noah lived is described in verses 11–12: “Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and the earth was filled with violence. God looked on the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth.” There’s two things that stand out there, the word corrupt and the word violence. The earth was filled with violence. All flesh had corrupted itself. You can imagine living in Noah’s day and imagining everywhere you turn there was a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic on the corner. There was violence in the media. There was violence in commercials. There was violence in the entertainment. There was violence in the music. There was violence out in the streets. There was violence in the pub. There was violence in the home.
How were they capable of such violence? Because these were mighty men of renown, strong men who could dominate others and force their will upon other people. The earth was filled with violence. Those were the times in which Noah lived. Does it sound like the times in which you live? Yeah. And you know what the story of Noah tells us? That we can never point to the world around us and use that as an excuse for not living righteous, blameless, and upright lives in which we walk with God. We can never point to the world around us and say, “It’s so difficult in today’s world. Jim, it was easier back in the 1980s for you to walk with God.” I don’t know if it was or wasn’t. I wasn’t walking with God in the 1980s. Life was different in the 1980s. It was. Those of you who were born in the 1990s and since, you have seen a rapid decay in the moral fabric of our nation. Yes, we’ve all seen that. We look at it and we lament it.
My kids have never known what it was like to grow up in the 1980s or prior to that. Some of you who are older than me know what the ’60s and the ’70s and the ’50s and the ’30s and the 1800s were like. You can appreciate all of that. The moral fabric of the nation was much different back then. But no matter how bad the world gets, no matter how corrupt the culture becomes in our day and in our lives, we can never look to the world around us and say because of that I cannot live a righteous and godly life.
Noah’s world was different than ours. I think it was worse than ours. I think it had fewer of the restraining influences that we have even in our own world. Even the worst governments in our world, though they are propagators and promoters of so much wickedness, so much violence, and so much sinfulness, those governments are better than no government, where the mighty rule everybody else.
It was a wicked world, and like in our world, there would have been to Noah a hostility against the knowledge of the one true God. Imagine that you were Noah and you were called to build a boat out in the middle of the plains. This boat is big. We’re going to get to that here in just a second. And people come up to you and say, “Hey, what are you building?” And you say, “It’s a boat. God’s going to destroy the entire world by water. And if you don’t repent, you’re going to perish in the flood.” And that’s your message to everybody. I mean, the building of the boat would have raised a lot of questions. It would have started quite a few conversations. And every time you answer people’s questions or get involved in those conversations, you have to tell them what? That God is a righteous and holy God and He’s going to judge sin. And if you don’t turn to Him, you’re going to perish. That would have been Noah’s message, which is why Peter describes him as a preacher of righteousness in 2 Peter 2:5. That’s why Noah would have been like Enoch, a prophet who prophesied in his own day of what was to come, telling people what God had revealed and calling them to repentance.
And I can promise you that the ungodly world of Noah’s day loved him as much as the ungodly world of today loves you if you stand for righteousness. I can promise you that they loved him as much. So we can never look to the world around us and say, “I can’t do this. I can’t be morally righteous. I can’t be upright. I can’t walk with God because the world and the allures of it and the temptations of it and the pull of it is just too strong.” It was worse in Noah’s day. There were only eight godly or righteous men.
Genesis 6:13:
13 Then God said to Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before Me; for the earth is filled with violence because of them; and behold, I am about to destroy them with the earth.
14 Make for yourself an ark of gopher wood; you shall make the ark with rooms, and shall cover it inside and out with pitch.
15 This is how you shall make it: the length of the ark three hundreds cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits.
16 You shall make a window for the ark, and finish it to a cubit from the top; and set the door of the ark in the side of it; you shall make it with lower, second, and third decks.
17 Behold, I, even I am bringing the flood of water upon the earth, to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life, from under heaven; everything that is on the earth shall perish. (Gen. 6:13–17 NASB)
I just want you to notice that the cause of the flood was God Himself. God Himself delights in justice. And there are times when God pours out His justice upon the wicked and that is His will, it is His doing, and we don’t have to apologize for God when He judges the wicked. We don’t have to try and appear nicer than God and somehow make apologies that yes, this destruction has happened, but God would never do a thing like that. God wiped out hundreds of millions of people in a worldwide flood. Sometimes God judges sin, and that is the lesson of the worldwide flood.
Verse 18:
18 But I will establish My covenant with you; and you shall enter the ark—you and your sons and your wife, and your sons’ wives with you.
19 And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female.
20 Of the birds after their kind, and of the animals after their kind, of every creeping thing of the ground after its kind, two of every kind will come to you to keep them alive.
21 As for you, take for yourself some of all food which is edible, and gather it to yourself; and it shall be food for you and for them. (Gen. 6:18–21 NASB)
Notice the size of the ark is mentioned in verse 15. It was 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits tall. A cubit was roughly 18 inches. There were different cultures that measured cubits in different ways, ranging between just under 18 inches to just over 20 inches. But basically we could say it was 18 inches long, which means that the ship that Noah built was 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet tall. That’s big. A football field, remember, is 360 feet long. This is one and a half football fields long. To put it in the context of this room, this room is 75 feet by 75 feet, so the ark would have been as wide as this room and roughly three and a half times as long as our building, which is 125 feet long. And it would have been roughly the same height as this building is from the peak outside all the way down to the ground. So that’s some room, isn’t it?
One of the things that scoffers bring up is it would have been impossible for Noah ever to get all those animals on board the ark. Well, it was that much room, three and a half times the length of our building—not the sanctuary but the entire building. Three and a half times that length and about as wide as this sanctuary and as tall as this building with three decks. So you’re talking about three times that square footage on board the ark. And in fact Noah would not have had to take two of every species or every different breed of animal on the ark, but only two of every created kind, which means that he would not have had to take Weimaraners and schnauzers and bulldogs and poodles—and who would want to preserve Poodles anyway? He wouldn’t have had to take all of that. He just had to take two of the dog kind and two of the cat kind and two of the horse kind.
In fact, Noah by modern estimates, would have been able to house less than seven thousand animals on board the ark, and that’s more than enough room for all the animals, which averaged in size from a sheep or smaller on board the ark. He could have done that. That’s not unfeasible. It wouldn’t have been impossible. And Noah wasn’t the one responsible to go out into the wilderness and capture these animals. God brought the animals to him and loaded them onto the ark because God was involved not just in the destruction of the world, but in the preservation of Noah and all those created kinds.
Another objection that people raise is that Noah could never have built a ship that big. It’s too big. He couldn’t have built that—one guy. It wasn’t one guy, it was four guys. Noah and his three sons and their wives. How do you know Noah wasn’t a shipbuilder by occupation? Do you know that? Now the scoffer would say, “You don’t know that he was a shipbuilder.” That’s right, but you don’t know that he wasn’t. In fact, he built this ship. How many ships do you have to build before you’re a shipbuilder? He built this ship. I have no reason to believe that God, having told Noah this instruction and given him this task, would not have provided all of the means, all of the skill, and all of the people necessary to build exactly what it is that God called him to build.
What Noah saw and what Noah did and what Noah lived through was absolutely unprecedented in the history of the world. And yet look at verse 22: “Thus Noah did; according to all that God commanded him, so he did.” I love that phrase. So he did. His obedience to the command of God was the evidence of his faith. This is what we saw with Abel, right? Abel came and brought the sacrifice, which was the evidence of his faith. Abel’s faith was evident in the sacrifice that he brought because he was obedient to God. That was the evidence of his faith.
Noah’s obedience to God itself was the evidence of his faith. His obedience is the proof of his faith. And if he had not believed what God had said, Noah would never have built that boat. If he had said, “You know, I don’t really think God’s that kind of a God. I think God’s a loving God. He’s not going to judge the whole world. I mean, after all, we’ve never seen the fountains of the deep break up and water cover the entire planet and a total wiping out of hundreds of millions of people. God wouldn’t do something like that. I’ve never seen that before. It seems highly unlikely that this would actually happen.” If Noah had reasoned in any of those ways and doubted what God said to him, he would have been destroyed. Noah believed God and he obeyed.
In reverence, he prepared an ark for the salvation of his household, Hebrews 11:7 says. He believed God regarding the salvation of his soul and he believed God regarding the condemnation and the damnation of the entire world. And since he believed God for the salvation of his own soul, then when God said, “I’m going to judge the world,” Noah would say what? “I believe what God has said He’s going to do and I will act accordingly.”
“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). Remember Noah, having been warned ahead of things not seen—he had not seen anything like what he was told was about to happen. He was warned of it. And this is what faith is, it is the conviction of things not seen. Noah was convinced that though he had never seen anything like this and nobody had ever seen anything like this that if God said it was going to be so, then it must be so. And so Noah in faith built an ark for the preserving of his family because he was convinced of what he had not yet seen. That’s what faith is; that’s what biblical faith is. We are convinced of things we have not yet seen.
I am convinced that Jesus Christ is coming back to judge this world and that the present world, being kept, reserved, by the word of God, is being kept for a fiery judgment. I am convinced of that. I am convinced likewise that by virtue of the bodily death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ that I can have righteousness imputed to me. This is something that I have never seen, but I am convinced that it is true. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things that we have never seen.
You and I live in times that are very similar to Noah’s times, a wicked world surrounded by unbelievers who mock and scoff the things of God. It is a sinful world. It is not getting better. It is getting worse morally in every way. That is not likely to change anytime soon. And you and I need to be prepared to live godly lives like Noah in the midst of a world that is very much increasing in just the same way that Noah’s world was increasing in wickedness, violence, and ungodliness.
We must believe and take God at His word when He says that He will judge the world and that everything around us is not going to perish in some natural flooding because of global warming and carbon footprints. I can tell you how all of this is going to wrap up. I know how it is going to end. Christ is going to return, and when it is time for Him to conclude His earthly kingdom and wrap up this entire creation, everything is going to be consumed and melted with a fervent heat. It is all going to burn. And you and I have to be convinced that that is true.
Have we ever seen anything like that happen before? Nope. We are just like Noah. But we can be utterly convinced of things that we have never seen, that these things will happen. And in the midst of that, in preparation for that—and I hope it is sooner rather than later—we can be preachers and representatives of righteousness. We can be righteous by faith, blameless in our time, and walk with God. That is what God calls us to do. Noah is a perfect example of that.