9 This is the account of Noah and his family.
Noah was a righteous man, blameless among
the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God. 10 Noah
had three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth.
11 Now the earth
was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence. 12 God saw
how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their
ways. 13 So God said to Noah, ‘I am going to put an end to all
people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going
to destroy both them and the earth. 14 So make yourself an ark
of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. 15
This is how you are to build it: the ark is to be three hundred cubits
long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high. 16 Make a roof
for it, leaving below the roof an opening one cubit high all around. Put a door
in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks. 17 I
am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens,
every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish.
18 But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter
the ark – you and your sons and your wife and your sons’ wives with you. 19
You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female,
to keep them alive with you. 20 Two of every kind of bird, of
every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will
come to you to be kept alive. 21 You are to take every kind of
food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them.’
22 Noah did everything
just as God commanded him.
The Wages of Sin.
Can you say
this about yourself: ‘[Name] was a righteous person, blameless among the people
of the time, and he/she walked faithfully with God’? Maybe we wouldn’t say it
about ourselves, but it is something to aim for, that others would say about
us. Being righteous means being right with God – and ‘walking faithfully with
God’ is the way we live, so that we have an ongoing righteousness. To be
‘blameless among the people’ does not mean sinless, but it means that people
cannot point to us as hypocritical in our words and actions, or unkind or harsh
or cruel, or rude or crude in our speech or online posts… and so on. Noah was righteous,
blameless and faithful, and we too, as followers of Christ, should aim to be
people like that.
Noah was very
different from everyone else at that time – people who were corrupt and full of
violence. Today, some atheist humanists say that it does not require religion
to make people moral: humans have a natural understanding of right and wrong,
and of morality. I say that innate human moral values come from the fact that
we are made in God’s image, and that people can very easily lay aside that
morality if they ignore the creator. This description of what people were like
in Noah’s day is, I fear, a description of what any society could be like if it
turns its back on God.
“The Lord regretted
that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.”
(Gen. 6: 6). I wonder whether the word ‘regret’ is used as a human emotion to
help us as readers understand how God felt. I find it hard to imagine God
actually ‘regretted’ he had made human beings (in the way that you or I might
regret something); but there is no doubt that God’s heart was ‘deeply troubled’
by what he saw. So he decided to start again – to wipe out humanity with the
exception of Noah and his family. He decided to destroy his creation (v. 17).
He would flood the world, and only the people and animals in the ark would
survive. It’s a harsh picture, and something difficult to imagine God doing to
so many people and animals. In Romans 6: 23 it says, “For the wages of sin is death, but
the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” In this story
of the people in Noah’s day, we see it graphically played out – the wages of
sin is death. But… thankfully, that is not the end of the verse –
because it also says that ‘the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus
our Lord.’ It is a gift that you and I have received, and it is a gift that we
long to see other people receive. We have a responsibility to tell them!
Prayer
Lord, by the
power of the Holy Spirit in me, please help me to be righteous, blameless and
faithful to you in all I do and say. I thank you for the gift of eternal life
in Christ Jesus our Lord. Please help me to share that gift with others. Amen.
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