1.
Grace,
mercy, and peace to you from God our Heavenly Father and our Lord and Savior
Jesus Christ. Amen. The message from God’s Word is taken from
Genesis 8:18-22 (read text), it’s entitled, “The
New Earth,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2.
Imagine being evacuated from your home due to
fire or flood. You return to find your whole house devastated. Familiar things are
either gone or ruined beyond recognition. If there were a video camera focused
in closely on you to catch the look on your face when you return, what might
that camera record? In the Bible’s great flood, it rained for forty days and
forty nights. The waters stayed for another almost 4 months, then it took
months for them to recede. Noah had gone into the ark when he was 600 years
old. He left it at age 601. What do you suppose he saw when he was finally able
to open the door? I’m not sure we can even begin to picture how this flood had
torn up the landscape. The world wouldn’t have looked the way it had looked
before. There was a mess awaiting Noah when he stepped out of the ark.
3.
By
God’s mercy, the account of Noah so far had been a wonderful survival story. But,
a whole new epic now stood ahead of Noah and his family as they had to eke out
an existence in the post-flood world. If you had been Noah, what would you have
done? The text says he built an altar. This
is all the more remarkable since it wasn’t simply Noah’s own particular house
that had been destroyed. Think about the worst scenes of cities bombed in times
of war, like cities in World War II: burned-out buildings, utilities
nonexistent, population decimated, hardly any food for the survivors. All this
was nothing compared to the circumstances in which Noah now found himself, for
the flood had covered the entire world.
4.
A
teacher who had told the story of the Flood to his pupils as colorfully and
graphically as possible . . . challenged the children not to hesitate to ask
any question they might have. One little girl raised her hand and said that the
part about Noah kneeling down to give thanks as soon as he stepped off the ark
couldn’t be right, because then he and his children must have had to kneel down
in the mud, and that would be “nasty”.
5.
Since
the fall into sin, the whole human situation had been nasty. Sin had brought
about spiritual death for Adam and Eve when they ate the forbidden fruit. Then
it brought about the physical death of their son Abel at the hands of his older
brother Cain, who was both the first man born in this world and the world’s
first murderer. Now sin had brought about the eternal death of almost the
entire population of the world, except Noah and his family. The world had
plenty of warning while Noah was building the ark. Still, it didn’t repent.
Spiritual deadness gave way to physical death in the floodwaters, which in turn
gave way to eternal death. The apostle Peter, writing about the people in hell
to whom Christ proclaimed his victory, singled out this generation as typifying
rebellion against the Lord (1 Peter 3:19–20). For his part, God had seen that
every imagination of the thoughts of men’s hearts was only evil continually,
and so he had sent the flood.
6.
The
flood came and the flood went. Even with the flood behind him, Noah seemed to
have ahead of him about as difficult a situation as could be conceived. Simple
basics like food and shelter would present massive challenges. But, before Noah turned to any of those
things, he built an altar, called upon the name of the Lord, and offered
sacrifice. The Lord later said through the psalmist, “Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall
glorify me” (Psalm 50:15). This was happening right here with Noah.
7.
Would
you have done what Noah did? Our priorities are far from straight and
well-ordered. Is it any wonder that we can start believing that everything is
dependent upon us, when we’re not calling upon the Lord first? In a way, the
whole month of December provides us an exercise in this kind of thing.
Christmas lies in view, less than three weeks away! But we can get so caught up
in making preparations that we can forget what, and who, we are preparing for.
We
forget to call upon the name of the Lord.
We forget him—at our peril. The devil perpetrates a terrible lie on
people: that there will always be time for God later. If the Advent season
tells us anything, though, it tells us that the Lord doesn’t work according to
our timetables. “God does not come when
it fits my schedule. There we have him down for the time after our second heart
attack.” Not too smart!
8.
Jesus
compared his second coming with the flood at Noah’s time. As with the flood, so
also with the second coming of Christ: plenty of advance warning. But, Jesus
noted that some people will be surprised when he comes again. It will be as
surprising as some people in Noah’s time were surprised when the rain started
one day and didn’t stop until long after they had drowned.
9.
Look
at what Noah did after the flood, and consider what he did not do. Noah didn’t
complain and say, “God, you kept me busy
for a hundred and twenty years before this flood building the ark, then you
kept me boxed up in there for almost a year with all the smelly animals. Don’t
I get a chance to do what I want to do, now that the flood is over?” Noah
wasn’t focusing on self-fulfillment. How about you and me?
10.
And,
Noah didn’t resent God. He didn’t think of God as the enemy who had wiped out
the world and in effect left him and his little family in the mess after the
flood. Martin Luther once observed that it’s the highest degree of faith to
believe in the Lord who saves so few and condemns so many. In the aftermath of
the world-destroying flood, Noah’s faith was being tested in precisely this
regard. God is not the author of evil, nor is he the cause of sin. Still, God
could have kept sin from ever entering the world. Noah knew all these things,
yet he was in no way arguing with God. The Lord’s thoughts are higher than our
thoughts and his ways are greater than our ways. Noah did not dwell on the
things he did not know about the Lord. Instead, Noah was clinging to God’s
promise.
11.
Which
promise? In the text God declares that he wouldn’t destroy all living creatures
as he had just done. The cycles of nature would continue uninterrupted as long
as the Lord permits this world to remain (Genesis 8:21–22). Significant as this
declaration is, Noah got his hope and confidence from something still more
important. The question remains: what moved Noah to offer the sacrifice? What
was the promise that Noah believed even after the ravages of the flood?
12.
Another
way of saying this is: what could provide the basis for Noah’s belief—or for
ours? The world, to use the little girl’s word, remains “nasty.” After the
flood, human nature has not improved. In the Lord’s words, “the intention of man’s heart is evil from
his youth.” Which promise deals with that?
13.
The
promise Noah was holding onto in faith was nothing other than the promise that
sustained the generations of believers from them on down to the time of Noah:
the Genesis 3:15 promise. God was going to send the Seed of the woman who would
crush the devil’s head, even as his own heel got bruised in the process. This
promised One was going to put himself on the line to overthrow the works of the
devil. This Savior is the One in whom Noah continued to keep on hoping. Therefore,
Noah in faith kept clinging to the Lord’s promise, even amidst a messy world.
14.
This
is the promise for you to hold onto as well. The world is still messy in
various ways. Sinners still sin. Calamities and disasters still occur. We bring
some of them upon ourselves pretty much directly by our sin. Others are simply
the general lot of sinners living in a sinful world. Looking at the whole nasty
mess, we can find it so easy to forget about the Lord. He has not forgotten
about us, though.
15.
When
the Savior came, it turned out to be another nasty situation. Nailed to the
cross, Christ did not look at all pretty. Yet here we see God’s attitude toward
us. Clinging to God’s Genesis 3 promise, this was where Noah saw how God really
felt about him. God’s attitude toward Noah was not revealed in the yuck all
around. Noah saw beyond the mess. With the eyes of faith, Noah beheld the
promised One in whom his hope resided. With faith in the same Christ we apply
to ourselves the Lord’s words through Isaiah: “as I swore that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth,
so I have sworn that I will not be angry with you, and will not rebuke you”
(Isaiah 54:9).
16.
God’s
promised One would be laid low, yet he would win the big victory. In the
fullness of time, the crucified Jesus rose from the dead on the third day.
Having been “delivered up for our
trespasses,” he was “raised for our justification” (Romans 4:25).
17.
Noah
had this kind of confidence. You and I can have it too. Jesus’ victory over our
sins, has been brought into our lives through Baptism. In a passage I mentioned
earlier, St. Peter referred to the days of Noah in which eight people were
saved from the unbelieving world through water. Correspondingly, Baptism saves
us, the apostle wrote, “not as a removal
of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through
the resurrection of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 3:21). The new earth was not
when Noah stepped out of the ark, but when Christ stepped out of the tomb. The
Law could not accuse him. Death could not hold him. In Baptism he brings us
along with himself through it all. For we face a sort of new earth too.
18.
Every
day we wake up, we’re facing a new earth, so to speak, an unexplored country. It
may be a lot more familiar to us than the post-flood world was to Noah when he
opened the door of the ark. Still, none of us has ever been exactly this way before. Like Noah, God
has given us good sense to figure out what we need to do in our various walks
of life and the respective vocations he has given us. Above all, though, let us
start the way Noah did by calling upon the name of the Lord. Like Noah, we can only call on the Lord’s name in a
nasty world by faith in God’s promised Christ and the victory he gives us. Amen.
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