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If you read a review of a new
restaurant, what’s the most important part of the review? The part where they talk about the food,
right? While there may be a few
restaurants that you go to just for the setting or the scenery or the service,
most of the time you’re visiting a restaurant you’re going for the food.
In the same way, if you’re reading
a review of a concert, you want to know about the music, right? While the venue and the crowd are parts of a
concert, the most important thing is how the music sounds, right?
If you read an article about a
football game, you care most deeply about the score, right? You want to know who won, unless you’re a
Tennessee fan, in which case you may want to ignore the score more than
anything else. The weather and the crowd
and the plays are fine, but you want to know the score and who won.
Whenever we’re reading a history,
there is always a core issue that we’re seeking to learn more about. Right now, I’m reading a book on the history of
the Transcontinental Railroad. There are
all sorts of interesting things in there, but the heart of the story is about
how we managed to lay train tracks across the country. If the author talked about everything but
that, it’d be a pretty disappointing read.
If I don’t finish the book with a good idea of how this was done, I’ll
feel like I’ve wasted my time.
When we talk about the story of
Noah, it’s a story with a lot of different aspects in it, and it’s a story that
most of us have heard about for years and years and years. Caleb is not even two years old and he
already has a Noah’s Ark playset with animals of every shape and size. He also has all sorts of Noah’s Ark
books. It captures our imaginations in a
way that no other Bible story does—we wonder about the size of the boat and
what it was like for Noah building the Ark.
Remember—it had never rained upon the earth until the time of Noah. We wonder about how Noah got the animals on
board and how he fed them and why they didn’t eat each other and how Noah put
up with everything and what Noah’s wife thought and why Noah didn’t kill the
mosquitoes and so on. We have so many
questions because it’s an amazing story.
But if we spend all our time
focusing on those questions, we miss the heart of the story. If we focus on exactly how the tigers didn’t
eat everything else in the ship, we miss the main point. If we get ourselves so wrapped up in Noah and
the animals, we miss the fact that this is primarily a story about a God
desperate to deliver his people.
Let’s start with the scenario in
which Noah found himself. The author of Genesis doesn’t mince words—the wickedness of humankind was great in the
earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil
continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth.
The entire creation project has
gone wrong. Since the introduction of
sin into creation by Adam and Eve in the garden, things have just gone off the
rails. What was once beautiful and
declared good by God is now completely evil, and there is no good here, no light
that shines in the darkness. God is
sorry that he has created at all, and he is ready to destroy his creation.
I’ve cooked suppers like this. We all have.
At one point or another, you’ve made something that was absolutely,
utterly terrible. I’ve taken one bite of
dishes and declared them inedible, unfit for human consumption. Into the trash they’ve gone, and I’ve moved
on to something else. This is what God
is ready to do with creation.
Except there is one light that
shines. There is some good, something
worthwhile, something redeemable. There
is Noah.
We don’t know much about Noah. All we know is this—he walks with God. What a
way to be described! What a way to go
down in history! We’re told at the end
of chapter 6 that he does everything God commands him to do. It doesn’t matter how crazy the command—he
does everything! Gather up two of every
kind of animals and build a giant boat for them in the middle of the
desert? Noah does it.
Now, we struggle with the story of
Noah because it means that so much of God’s creation had to die. No matter how evil it is, we still have
questions about all the death that goes into this story.
But think about this for a moment—if
Noah and his family are the only ones left who walk with God, what chance do
they have in the midst of this evil society?
Who will their children marry?
Who will their grandchildren marry?
Surely, it is only a matter of time before this lawless society swallows
them up.
So God decides to save them from the
evil that surrounds them. God decides to
give them a new start, to reach down into their current situation and save them
from the madness that is threatening to engulf them. God uses a peculiar tactic, but the fact of
the matter is that the people of God, small in number though they were, needed
a new start, and God gave them that. God
used waters and brought them through to re-create them, to let them start over.
This is how God works. Time and time again, God reaches down into
the mess of the world and pulls his people out of the messes we’ve worked our
way into. When the evil of the world
seems to threaten our very existence, it is God that saves.
When the Hebrew people found
themselves engulfed in slavery in Egypt and threatened by Pharaoh’s army, what
did God do? He drew them through the
waters into the Promised Land. He
delivered them from the forces that threatened them, and they were given a
clean start.
This is how God works. We worship a God who is determined to save,
who loves his people and will fight passionately in their defense. God doesn’t give up on us. God pursues us. God wants us to walk with him, unencumbered
by sin. God will not let you go easily.
And so, when the people of God were
threatened by sin, when all was dark and it seemed as though the devil would
triumph, what does God do?
In the form of his own Son, Jesus
Christ, God reaches down and saves us, delivers us from the forces that would
dare to try and claim our lives. God
draws us through the waters of baptism, cleansing us of our sin and giving us
entrance into eternal life.
This is how God works. Our God is a God who saves. We worship a God who delivers us from the
powers of sin and darkness. We worship a
God of hope and life, and the forces of evil that threaten us will not overcome
us, because God saves.
Time and time again, God
saves. If we read the story of Noah and
miss that crucial point, we have missed the heart of the story.
If we live our lives without consistently
being reminded of that crucial point, we have missed the heart of the story.
Our God saves.
Thanks be to God.
Let us pray
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