Clough Manhood Series Lesson 6

Mission Through the Family: Noah – Genesis 6-8

This is lesson 6 in the series on the doctrine Christian man. And again it would do us well to review some of the findings we’ve made from Scripture so far in the role of the Christian male to show what his role is, both before and after the fall. The first thing that we discovered is that man is not a passive helpless victim of chance, nor is he the great vaunted autonomous creature of the universe that he thinks he is. Rather, he is a dominion creature; he is the only creature assigned dominion by God over the earth. God did not invest apes with the role to dominate the world. He designated this particularly and decreed it for man, human beings made in God’s image. And man is to dominate the entire earth, under, however, the absolute authority, not of his own law but under God’s law. Man is dominion man and any view of man that is less than that is less than the Scriptural view of man.

And then we found how his dominion was exercised, that his dominion was to be exercised largely through the family. And in many societies we compared where the man is not dominate in the family, is not respected as the family leader, where there is matriarchal societies, or worse yet, no families. We have weak civilizations and weak cultures. In fact, many of the ghettos of our cities are degenerate, precisely because of the fact of the loss of the responsible male and the loss of his function in the home and in his family. Under that we showed how the wife and the job are not inherently competitive if viewed properly from the Scriptures, that each compliments the other. The job produces wealth for the family and the wife produces the family to use the wealth. We found that the single male, barring the gift of celibacy, is not the highest form of man and certain deductions can be made from that. Now every once in a while certain men who get married think it’s fun to go out with the boys four nights a week and then wonder why their wives are unhappy, when they are themselves acting the role of the adolescent. Evidently they didn’t get enough of the bar-hopping done while they were adolescents and so they have to retreat back to adolescence after they are married, with the result they fail to cope with what’s going on; they are not exercising dominion.

Since the fall we found various things carry over into the role of the man. We found that since the fall the man’s work is terribly frustrating; it’s the central frustration of every male, that the ground repels him, that every ounce of energy he puts into production and production of wealth is partially wasted; it goes down the drain. Things break down, things oppose him, deals don’t go through. All of that is the result of the fall. And yet out of it we came to a precious conclusion that the male’s self-image is directly proportional to the fruits of his hands, and if a man can’t see what he’s actually done in history, has accomplished something, either in someone’s life, either in some organization, either physically as a craftsman with his hands working with tools, if he can’t see the results of his handiwork he has a lousy self-image. And the Scriptures say that the male’s self-image is an effect, a result. A man doesn’t get a good self-image by taking a course on confidence or some other way of hopping up his self-image according to the world’s way of thinking. He gets it by being a dominion man, by a man who produces and then he will automatically gain a good self-image.

We found that the man, therefore, is to defend his wife and his children to a degree, as possible, from the harshness of the world system, and this we will see Noah doing tonight. And then we dealt with Cain, the picture of the autonomous male and we found how Cain’s great psychological depression, his psychological illnesses if we are to use the contemporary word, were not due to some Freudian sexual experience of his childhood. God’s analysis of Cain was the fact that Cain, [4:6] “if you do well, you will be uplifted, and if you do not do well, then sin crouches at the door,” ready to dominate your life; watch it Cain, the sin and the spiritual forces behind your sin nature, they seek to dominate you and you as a man must seek to dominate it. That’s the way of happiness.

Tonight we come to the second historical illustration of a male, this time Noah. We will begin by turning to Hebrews 11 for God’s evaluation of Noah. Noah was the greatest hero of the ancient world; he’s known in mythology under various names. Some of the flood epics from outside of the Scriptures call him Napishtim, other flood epics call him by other names, but his real historical name was Noah. The Bible has preserved that and we know that Noah was his real name because Noah is a type of his ministry; it comes from he word to rest. He is given the name by his father, prophetically, because of his role in history.

In Hebrews 11:7 this male receives the Holy Spirit’s evaluation and you’ll notice what the Holy Spirit looks to congratulate about this man. “By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house,” or to the saving of his family, “by which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.” Noah was a stubborn man; we can say that Noah was a stubborn faithful man. His faith was what gave him his stubbornness, a tremendous stubbornness which we want to examine tonight. Here faith is mentioned twice; in fact the only time it’s mentioned twice in the same verse, I believe, of Hebrews. It starts with faith and ends with faith; the emphasis of the Holy Spirit, then, on this particular man is his faithfulness, his reliance, his stubborn reliance upon God and His Word. We could say it, perhaps, more specifically by the fact that Noah had one central presupposition, a presupposition he never departed from, a presupposition through which he viewed all reality, and the presupposition was the God of the Scriptures was there and his word was inherently authoritative.

Notice in verse 7 it says Noah was “warned of things not seen as yet,” which that Noah received information in the Word of God that clashed with general revelation, that is the world of things, the world of physics, the world examined by the biologists, the world examined by the chemists, that natural world of his day did not correspond to what he was getting from the Word of God. There was a disjunction between the commandments of God and what we would now call natural law. It was like the disjunction that we face, that one day this earth’s geophysical system will culminate in fire with the return of Christ and subsequent events. And therefore, if that’s the case, we are in much the same position. Noah, we could say, is a stubborn faithful man at the end of the world. He’s an apocalyptic man, a man who holds on stubbornly to his faith against all odds. And here the pressure is increased upon him and therefore the Holy Spirit commemorates his trust. Here the pressure, not the trust, is doubled beyond that of a normal person, because Noah is asked to believe something that goes against the whole grain of the everyday world that he knows, the world that he studied, the world that he was a dominion man in somehow doesn’t fit the category that there’s going to be such a thing as water from heaven, precipitation, rain, he had never apparently ever seen rain before because the geophysical system of the earth was different in the pre-flood era; one climate and therefore there was a total shift from his world to our world.

Therefore we can learn a lesson from Hebrews 11:7, that Noah interpreted his world solely in terms of the Word of God, and that when circumstances and natural law, and general revelation, appeared to collide with God’s Word, Noah insisted it would be God’s Word that controls the situation. This would be a good exhortation for some who are involved in various other areas, where you are pressured either by your profession, or you are pressured by a particular professor, or a particular teacher, or a particular set of ideas that dominates whatever your field may be, and these ideas conspire against you and you feel like an odd wad because you and you alone appear to be the only person there who holds to the authoritative Word of God and not only that, you seem to have that arrogant characteristic that the Word of God is greater than any of your teachers, and that therefore no matter who they are and whatever evidence they may present it is not consequential against the case for the Word of God. That’s an arrogant attitude according to the world system; an attitude that men hate, that men despise because it presents the Word of God the way the Word of God is.

Now Noah was that kind of an individual, the stubbornly faithful man. So let’s go back to Genesis 6 and watch some of the characteristics of how this man lived his life, and as we look at that, thinking as we are in this topical series of drawing out principles of Scripture about how the man is to operate in history under God’s laws. In Genesis 6:1-8 we can sort of summarize these first 8 verses before we study them in detail; we can sort of summarize them by saying that these verses present the total war that Noah had with his culture; Noah was at odds with everything in his society. That’s how bad it had gotten in those last hours of the first world. And so in these final, the apocalyptic hours of that world, Noah faced total opposition on the part of his culture. We have some opposition; Noah had total opposition, opposition at every point.

Before we go any further in the text it would be good to remember the upcoming critique in the liberal arts that you see in the bulletin, some of our people struggling to take the Word of God into their own areas of study to provide a foundation. This is not just open to college students, it’s open to anyone; in fact, it’s open to the general public, non-Christian are free to come, because this represents an attempt by believers to live as though they really believe the Word of God. This is necessary. We have a lot of hot air passed around in Christian circles: well, I believe the Lord. You do, do you? What are you doing about it? What are you doing to reform the areas of English, music, art, science? Do you believe? Really? Really believe in the Word of God? Then where’s the action that shows that you believe in the Word of God. And so we have a seminar and those of you who are interested in the more deep issues I remind you of Dr. Schaeffer’s seminar in Fort Worth and Dallas.

Genesis 6:1, the first area of Noah’s world. What we’re trying to do in these eight verses is to use our imagination and put ourselves in back into this male’s world, to look at it from Noah’s eye, and to feel the pressures that Noah felt, and to realize that this man who is our hero, we’ve heard of him many, many times, faced rough going. In verse 1, “And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,” he goes on to describe something else but at least verse 1 shows you the population explosion. During days of high and longevity on earth we had a situation where a population could be phenomenally greater than in our own generation.

If one is to plot, for example, the biblical data on the longevity of man before the flood in Genesis 5, Genesis 10, Genesis 11, and get the whole picture on a piece of graph paper, and this is a simple experiment that anyone can do, you’ll quickly see something that Bible critics are very embarrassed about; they never seem to have a good explanation fort his because the kind of pattern that you get with this data is a pattern that defies explanation, apart from the Scriptural explanation. And that is, when you plot on a graph with the ordinance, the years that man lived, from zero to one thousand, for the Bible is insistent that men lived for many centuries before the flood; in fact averaging at 930 years before the flood, and then if you plot as the abscissa the sequence of generations you find a most interesting relationship; a relationship that cannot be explained as a lot of the critics like to tee-hee and haw-ha about by saying that well, they just changed calendars. I defy anyone to tell me what kind of a calendar change produces that kind of a curve. No known calendar change that I can conceive of would produce that sort of curve; that is the kind of curve that is known oftentimes in science as a exponential decay curve; it occurs when you move from one steady state to another; it’s a real curve and it confirms the authenticity of Scripture; the Scripture is screaming to us that something titanic happened back here. This isn’t just some little small happening; this was something of major proportions that affected man in a very, very serious way.

So during those times when man had his high longevity, during those times the population explosion could have been phenomenal; we’re saying, in fact, that Noah probably lived in a day when the world population could have easily numbered in the billions, certainly in the millions. You can try it just mathematically yourself, working out by pairs based on certain data in Genesis. Henry Morris does it in the book, The Genesis Flood. We have other books that show you the math of how to do this.

In Genesis 2-4 we have the second feature of the pressure. By the way, as the population expanded and exploded you’d have the same kind of thing you have on this kind of earth when the population expands and explodes, a competition for food resources, competition for prosperity, where the numbers of people exceed the spiritual capacity of the civilization to produce and you have violence and you have discord, and you have all sorts of problems. Noah faced that situation. In verses 2-4, “The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. [3] And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. [4] There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.”

These are the men that you hear mentioned in the great myths of the world, the Titans of the Greeks, the famous people who in the ancient world were the great heroes, strange people, for in the mythologies we always read about the gods copulating with human females and here in the Scriptures we have the same sort of thing, the beni ha Elohim, the sons of God emphasizes generically their nature, their deity in the sense in the fact their angelic and supra human. “…they took to them wives,” we have at least a major demonic assault upon the human race going on in Noah’s generation, a tremendous demonic assault. Demons and angel powers are beyond the domain of man presently; apart from the finished work of Christ and Christ hadn’t finished His work at this point in history, man has no control over the demonic powers in any direct way. These lie beyond him. The whole Bible’s teaching about angels is a reminder to man that God hasn’t spoken the last word about the nature of His creation yet, and yet we still don’t know about many of the things, the key things of nature. So these demon powers were beyond man’s dominion ability and Noah faced a very startling thing; he was confronted with spiritual powers in his age beyond not just his ability but beyond human ability. He faced what we call a humanly helpless situation.

Notice too that of the human side of this demonic invasion it is the female side that is cited as the side for particular demonic attack. Once again, the same theme of Scripture coming up again and again and again; it’s no accident. In spite of ERA the male and the female are not the same; they are not viewed similarly in Scripture. They both have God’s image and there is equal value; one is not less than the other but they are different from one another and this difference extends into the spiritual welfare. And so it was that the women in Noah’s day became the vessels of a demonic assault on the home, on the family and all sorts of ways.

The results in verse 4 were these mighty men, the men of old, men who were apparently violent by their nature. It could… it’s not demeaning the women, it’s just simply saying the men didn’t take the spiritual leadership that they should have, but in some way the women became vulnerable. The Eves became by the thousands consulting the serpent all over again. The results were these strange beings of verse 4, the giants, the giants that seem to defy our explanation, but if it’s true that the modern geneticist is talking about such things as cloning and other things, then it would be elementary for angelic powers to know very well the nature of the chromosomes and the genes and so on, to manipulate humanity. Some even think that verses 2-4 are an attempt by Satan to destroy true humanity and thus block the coming of the God-man Savior. But whatever it is we can at least summarize the verses by saying Noah felt, and saw, and experienced, spiritual powers that man had never seen before, such a vast array of evil, not just in the nature of man but out into the angelic realm. So he had a population explosion with all the discord that brings. In verses 2-4 he had a total demonic assault upon his culture. In verses 5-7

Genesis 6:5-7 describes the state of society. “And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Please notice verse 5 that that is not written by the apostle Paul; the doctrine of the sin nature is not new to the New Testament. It’s all the back in the Old Testament. [6] “And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. [7] And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repents Me that I have made them. [8] But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.”

Verses 5-7 show the total degeneracy of the culture. Not only was there over population and spiritual demonic weird things going on but it was just, frankly, totally discordant. Turn to Jude, a little book that occurs before the book of Revelation, and in that book, verse 15, you have another description of antediluvian society, showing how thoroughly and totally degenerate it was. You see men who lived for 930 years had 930 years to perfect their patterns of rebellion. People who are 70 years, who live to be 80 years have 80 years in which to destroy their conscience, to rebel against grace offered through Jesus Christ, to defy the Word of God, and they can harden their hearts in that short time. Can you imagine what it must have been only a few generations removed from creation; when man in all of his intellectual powers, in his physical powers and so on, was able to dominate the world.

Verse 15 of Jude, this happened before Noah’s day, Enoch preached a sermon. “To execute judgment upon all, and to convict…” he’s talking about the Lord coming to judge, “to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him,” “Him” being the Lord; [16] “These are murmurers,” and he goes on to describe a contemporary application of it. So at least Enoch’s speech gives a cross-section of God’s viewpoint of that society; that tells you what it was like.

Coming back, stopping at Luke 17:26, just to show here that the Lord Jesus Christ took the whole Noah story quite literally. Evidently Jesus did not have the benefits of some of the higher critics; He did not know enough to know that we should not take seriously such naïve fables of early Scripture. He didn’t have the Sunday School quarterly that show that these, in fact, were just fairy stories. So Jesus in His ignorance went on believing in the literalness of the Noahic account. In Luke 17:26 He uses the Noahic account as a profile of His return. “As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man.” Now isn’t it interesting that of all the stories in Scripture Jesus has to embarrass us by trotting out this ancient fable of Noah, and use it as the picture of the Second Advent. The obvious conclusion is that Noah is no fable at all; in fact it is literal history and we have the testimony of Christ to the literalness of Genesis. You remember that when you hear so-called evangelicals say we must loosen up our interpretation of Genesis.

So Jesus went on and He described in verse 27, we don’t know where he got this, from extra-biblical tradition, from His omniscience, where we don’t know. But He describes the fact that “They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark,” blind, blind to their own degeneracy, and they went on like animals with blinders on, went right down to their own slaughter, never saw the big issues of their day that cried for their attention; just went on with a routine day, being blinded by the trivia of life. Many with unbelievers in their families know what an experience it is; you can see some great doctrine of Scripture, some great spiritual truth and of course you can’t share it with them because they are just so, ho-hum. And from the deity and hypostatic union of Christ they begin to discuss the nature of the weather for the last eight hours, or some other equally inviting topic, and this becomes a substitute for the profound issues of life. And it was, Jesus says that’s what it was like in Noah’s day. Noah preached the profound things; they were only 10 or 15 generations removed from the creation, they had an oral tradition from Adam. They knew Eve, Methuselah was walking around, he could have told them told them what happened earlier, they had all this living tradition in front of their face, they had the great evidences of Eden, all they had to do was go up on the mountain where Eden was, it was physically there. But no, they preferred to talk about the weather, or preferred to talk about the other trivia of life; Jesus says they just drown themselves slowly.

Let’s turn back to Genesis 6. So Noah had at least three things in his culture; the discord of over-population, the pressure of the demonic assault, the total degeneracy of his culture. And then 8, “But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.” The first time the word “grace” is used in Scripture. And it’s a lonesome grace, “Noah alone found grace in the eyes of the LORD,” and that was probably one of the worst pressures that Noah as a believer ever faced; he was all alone in the world without fellowship outside of his home. Noah had no preacher to teach him the Word, other than maybe his father, his father died years before the flood; Methuselah died the year of the flood, and so possibly with a few dozen exceptions Noah had no fellowship during most of his lifetime—the loneliness of the Christian male without any fellowship. Like some men who are asked to move by their company into neighborhoods where there is no spiritual fellowship, no other believers, and they have to almost start the whole church all over again in that particular area. That’s the pressure Noah felt.

All right, that’s the war that Noah felt in verses 1-8. That’s the situation that he had to trust the Word in, against all of that pressure. And now Genesis 6:9-7:10 we can say the second increment of Noah’s life is that the war with the culture increases; far from trying to compromise with his culture, trying to lower his tone, trying to lower the levels to communicate with the degenerate, he doesn’t do that. He is asked instead by God to improve his position spiritually. He is asked by God to do things that are even more weird in the eyes of his generation. He’s asked by God to build a bridge further so that the expanse between him and the degenerate culture around him widens and not narrows. Noah almost, as it were, separates himself by his oddities, by the difference between his central presupposition of divine viewpoint and the culture’s central presupposition of human viewpoint.

In Genesis 6:9, “These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.” Notice again what the Holy Spirit’s commemorating; the theme that we discovered earlier in Genesis 1, we’ve carried it through in Genesis 2, Genesis 3, Genesis 4, and now here with Noah we see it once again, Noah, as a dominion man, is exercising his dominion through his family; his family becomes a central instrument of his dominion. Noah walked “perfect in his generations,” that’s talking about his home, his family, his tribe. And right after it, verse 10, he begat three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth. And so the man exercises his dominion once again through the workings of the third divine institution of the home.

In Genesis 7:1, notice what the Holy Spirit points to in looking at Noah in his life. “And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.” Verse 7, “And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him, into the ark, [because of the waters of the flood.]” All those observations, what do they have in common? They link Noah solidly with his home. With his family; the godly man against his culture. And where’s his retreat, his castle, against it all? His home; his home becomes his base of operation. When God evaluates Noah he evaluates him in terms of his family. Noah, from what we can judge by the fact that the only believer saved in that day from the flood, with saved members of his home, we can draw certain conclusions. Noah must have taught the Word of God to his own; he must have led his own sons to Christ; he must have led those sons or those sons led the girls that they married to Christ. And so Noah had a godly home because Noah exercised his responsibility to teach the Word and to see that the Word dominated his family. It doesn’t say that Mrs. Noah went to Bible class faithfully while Mr. Noah sat home; it says that Noah did this. And so Noah took the spiritual lead and God blesses him for it.

Now in Genesis 6:11-17, his family becomes his base of operation; the base of operations, of course, being to even further increase the distance between him and his culture. In verse 11-17 now God asks him to go against everything that he knows. This is what Hebrews 11:7 is talking about. “The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. [12. And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. [13] And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.]”

And now in verse 14 God gives him instructions. “Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.” Those of you who saw when Mr. Crawford came through town that strange piece of wood taken from Mount Ararat, if you saw it you remember the black, and the black that permeates, not just the surface of the wood but strangely permeates the knots of that wood, an odd characteristic for a wood stain, a stain that permeated the entire piece of word until it almost changed the characteristic of the wood in front of you. That piece of wood may well be one of the pieces that it’s talking about being pitched here in verse 14. And he goes on to describe the design of the ark.

In Genesis 7:2-6 he describes what goes into the ark; he’s to divide the animal kingdom, the clean beasts, the unclean beasts, to make all of these categorical separations, set biological, taxonomic separations, dictated him not by Darwin, but by the Word of God. In verses 8-10, again the emphasis upon a biblical taxonomy, a biblical description of the biological realm. Noah is the lord of creation in the sense under God’s law and he is to operate and use that creation according to the principles of the Word of God.

And Noah, therefore, doing all this, this separation, this analysis of the biological kingdom in terms of divine categories, this building of the strange ark, all of this against everything his generation stood for. The Holy Spirit takes note of that characteristic and if you turn to 2 Peter 2:5, [“And spared not the old world, but saved Noah, the eight person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly.”] the text gives Noah a title; Noah is called “a preacher of righteousness.” Now we don’t read in Genesis at any time that Noah preached; he well may have because Enoch preached, we know that from Jude because we have part of one of the sermons in Jude. So we’re not saying that Noah never verbally preached; we don’t know enough to say that. But I suggest that one way in which Noah preached was by his lifestyle. He preached in defiance of the entire culture of his day; he erected the ark and every nail or every piece of wood he put on that ark was one further act to defy his generation and everything it believed.

Every time that ark got bigger and bigger and bigger Noah’s presuppositions were coming out as a visible form so that men, women, who walked by could see presuppositions and they could see that he was going one way and they were going another. Noah, far from compromising, from lowering, from pleading with his generation in the bad sense of the word pleading, to dilute the message until it becomes palatable to people who are your opponents, Noah aggravated the opposition between himself, not in an unfriendly way, not to separate the people but indeed to bring them and show them the error of their ways. He had to set biblical faith over against the culture and he emphasized the difference, not the similarities.

He wasn’t like some evangelicals who come along and say are you depressed, are you having a rough time in your life, invite Jesus into your heart, He gives you a nice feeling. That’s a compromise of the gospel; that’s all true, Christ does, but that’s not the gospel. The gospel is that we are damned, morally depraved creatures in rebellion against God. And that Jesus Christ has died a bloody death to atone for our sins. That is the gospel. Jesus is not some sort of an aspirin psychologically, He is a blood-atoning Savior. That’s the gospel. And Noah insisted that the issue in his day be very clear. And so the Holy Spirit says Noah was a preacher not of compromise, he was a preacher of righteousness; he stood against his generation.

We can look at the ark and just visualize some of Noah’s problems. [shows slides] This is an artist’s conception of what it must have looked like; just to give some reality of the fountains of the deep opening up with water, the terrestrial effects, the geothermal effects of the breaking up of the earth’s surface. That must have been a sight for Noah and for all of the other men, all of a sudden the atmosphere doing strange things that they had never seen it do before, just as Noah’s presuppositions are working out in judgment. The ark, we don’t know exactly how it looked except from certain eye witnesses up on Mount Ararat; they report this kind of an object. The model is in the church library but this gives an idea of the shape, to get away from some of the cartoon versions we find in Sunday School literature. It sat low in the water, along the top of it was the famous long window and this long window was the windows through which Noah let out the birds at the end of the mission. A breakdown of the model to show you the size of a man next to that; Noah did not have a railroad box car, that’s just there to give size comparison but nevertheless, that is a man compared to the size of the ark. That’s what Noah had to build; for 120 years, he, his sons, and possibly unbelievers who they might have paid to build that, built it. And then they had to load it, two of each kind of the animals as the biological kingdom was biblically classified. So that’s Noah’s project; that’s what the Scriptures say.

The design of it was very interesting and studies have been done on this particular design from the standpoint of hydrodynamics and stability. Naval architects have examined the design of the ark and it’s very interesting; if you compare the design of Noah’s ark with the design of the ark as it appears in myths of the world, the arks of the myths will tip over in rough water, it’s just a naval architectural fact, the ark of Noah is stable at this point up to a maximum of 31 degrees tilt and that’s very, very stable for a ship of this sort. It was shaped as a barge, not having a sharp bow, apparently, because Noah wasn’t interested in going anywhere, he was just interested in surviving.

And so Noah built this, but notice that was the works of his hands. Noah built the ark, but from all the texts that we have of Genesis, the only people that were sympathetic with the mission were the people of his family. You see how the family, the wife and the job coalesce. Noah is a good illustration of it. We have no biblical notice whatsoever that Noah received any willing volunteer help outside of his home. His job was intimately tied to his home life.

Now let’s look at what else Noah did, see other facets of this functioning spiritual leader. In Genesis 7:11 on through to Genesis 8:14 we have how Noah survived. And in the way that Noah survived we know a lot more about Noah than if the Holy Spirit hadn’t told us this. Chapter 7 concludes the adventure of the horror of the flood, if you have a very vivid imagination maybe you can hear the screams of the people as they frantically knocked on the ark, hoping to gain entry once the flood had come, but God has shut the door and damnation comes upon the generation. They had their chance to believe when the door was open; now the door is shut and they die and they drown.

At the end of the flood, in Genesis 8:6, Noah does an interesting thing. We all know what he did, we’re going to talk a little bit about why he did what he did. He sent out the bird to find out if, in fact, the flood waters had ended, and we always accept that, that’s a nice little interesting funny story, added on to the whole thing. Well, now the Holy Spirit doesn’t waste verses in Scripture, and there’s a lot about these birds that were sent out. But one of the things about them, a more obvious thing as far as the manhood series is concerned, is that it tells us how Noah discerned the will of God and the problem of every male is how do I discern God’s will. What man, what Christian man hasn’t some time struggled with that problem. What do I do? What career do I choose? What criteria do I use to decide this choice from this choice or some other choice? Every Christian man knows that, and knows the problems of going through it. Well, Noah tells us something about how he did it.

Noah had direct revelation that the flood was coming. He might have had some assurance that God would cause survival. But the rest of the survival tactics was left to him and his wisdom. Noah went out and sent the doves because God didn’t tell him when the flood was finished; He let Noah find out using general revelation. You see, there are two parts to God’s revelation, His general revelation and the special revelation. And the special revelation is God’s instructions. For example, in the garden of Eden there was a lot of general revelation; the whole garden was general revelation. Adam and Eve could look out at the trees and see there’s God’s handiwork; they could look at the animals, there’s God’s handiwork, and they could infer certain things, but they could only do so because in special revelation they knew the Lord personally. Special is when God speaks and He commands and He tells us things, and we utilize His commands and His words, then to turn around as a system by which we interpret general revelation and then having interpreted general revelation we come back to special revelation because now we are enriched in our understanding of what God in fact meant when He said what He said.

But God here didn’t give Noah any instructions so it was up to Noah; Noah is to take the spiritual lead. He’s a dominion man, he has wisdom, he has common sense, and so God says let Noah figure out for himself when the flood is over, just like God said to Adam, let Adam name the animals himself. So let’s summarize some of the biblical principles that men can use in a divine guidance type situation.

Let’s look at divine guidance from the standpoint of three areas. These are general perspectives; how to look at the problem. Let’s look at the problem from one way, and let’s look at the problem from the standpoint of the divine norms, that is, what God’s Word says; the Word’s norms, what the Word says about the universe around us and our linkage with it. That’s one way to approach divine guidance, Genesis 1:28-30 is the general sense. We’re to subdue it out there, we’re not to let it subdue us. If that’s happening there’s something wrong, we’re not exercising all our spiritual assets if we’re smashed, bloody, beaten victims of life rather than mastering our situation, that is under the grace principle in Christ. Genesis 2:28-30 is one description of the biblical norms, it’s a summary description.

Matthew 28:18-20 [“And Jesus came and spoke unto them, saying, All authority is given unto Me in heaven and in earth. [19] Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, [20] Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age. Amen.”] is the New Testament counterpart to Genesis 1:28-30, when Jesus Christ says teach them all things that I have commanded. That includes the Old Testament because Christ used the Old Testament in the New and therefore we are to master those principles. And so looking at the universe from this point of view we have vast areas of doctrine; vast areas that the male must understand if he’s to make principled decisions. But then we have to add a feature here and be very careful about this added feature; a warning. In Genesis 2:19 the principle of God stepping back and letting Adam name what he wanted to. So we have the areas of the silence of God. Why is it God doesn’t answer a prayer, for example: what job would You like me in God? The silence of God is there to further the creativity of man. God would say to you if he was speaking back to you, that’s your decision, I’m not going to tell you that, you’re not a robot, you’re not a computer that I’m going to jam an IBM card into and program you to do something; you decide that. That’s your piece of creativity in history, and when you go into eternity you can look back in time and say that was my piece, there’s my significance, I made that choice.

And so this looking at divine guidance from the standpoint of biblical norms, the biblical norms extend so far and then they stop and we can’t expect them to extend more than when God stopped them. This situation in context here, God said when the flood would happen and that’s all; it’s up to Noah to fill in the rest, just like it’s up to us Christian men to fill in the rest by our life and our decision.

Now we can look at divine guidance from another standpoint. Forgetting looking first at the norms and standards of the outside world and what we’re to do out there, let’s look at divine guidance from the standpoint of ourselves, where we are, right now, in this situation, with our own personal history that we bring into the situation.

Turn to 1 Corinthians 7:19, this is the same question, what does God want me to do in my life but it starts out from a little bit different perspective. And often in a very practical application of these principles you’re going to find first you have to look at it from one way, then you have to come along and look at it from another way and then you have to come along and look at it from a third way, and you don’t really get all the answers by just looking at it, just say from the standpoint of the biblical norm.

In 1 Corinthians 7:19 Paul’s discussing the problem of what the Christians should do now they’re Christians, are they going to be slaves, are they going to stay circumcised and so on, this kind of thing, what’s the situation going to be as far as these people that have just become Christians. At the end of verse 19 he says this, “Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of God,” that’s something. Then he adds, [20] “Let every man abide in the same calling in which he was called.” That’s what I call the principle of conservatism in divine guidance, and what God is saying here to us is that here we are as a man trying to make a decision. Looked at from the standpoint of ourselves, our previous trajectory through life has been like that; what God is saying is assume that your future trajectory will be like that, except, “keep my commandments.” And if you begin to drive the same way of your past trajectory and you diligently apply the commandments, you will find that necessary corrections in that trajectory will be automatically made, because you’ll find that going this why, which has been perhaps the past direction, now you begin to apply the Scriptures and you get tension, and so the Scriptural application begins to change the trajectory over, perhaps, into another area. But the principle being stay in the calling wherein you are called, and only divert as have to to keep the commandments of God. So that’s the principle of conservatism, looking at divine guidance from the standpoint of ourselves.

But now there’s a third way of looking at divine guidance, not just from the standpoint of the norms about the universe, about creation, not just about our personal history as we exist right now, with the baggage of the past coming into this present moment, looking on into the future. But we have a third way, and that is to look at the situational results of what we’re going to do. This is found in 1 Corinthians 7:35, the principle is, we’ll call this looking at the situational results, another test that the man can use to choose and plot the path of his life.

In verse 35 he’s talking about whether to get married or not. And he discusses that question, but the criteria at the end is: “And this I speak for your own profit; not that I may cast a snare upon you, but for that which is seemly, and that you may attend upon the Lord without distraction,” and so this criteria of divine guidance says you choose that option that results in a minimum distraction to your spiritual relationship with the Lord. And this becomes the situation result way of looking at it. So we have at least three approaches to divine guidance that we can use.

Noah was a man who faced a lot of pressure. He began to seek God’s wisdom. As he began to use many of these techniques of divine guidance I’m sure he must have prayed many, many, many prayers. Recently I came upon this particular prayer, what a great prayer; it’s kind of colorful because the man who prayed it is colorful. The man was General Patton and this was that famous weather prayer that was prayed in Luxemburg Chapel, December, 1944, during the ordinate of the census, the so-called Battle of the Bulge, when the Germans broke through and Patton was the man who sought a decision. And I read this prayer not only because it’s just colorful and kind of amusing as we read it but because it’s a good example of a man fighting and struggling to find God’s will in his life. This is the prayer:

“Sir, this is Patton talking. The last fourteen days have been straight hell; rain, snow, more rain, more snow - and I’m beginning to wonder what’s going on in Your headquarters. Whose side are You on, anyway? For three years, my chaplains have been explaining this as a religious war. This, they tell me, is the Crusades all over again, except that we’re riding tanks instead of chargers. They insist that we are here to annihilate the German Army and the godless Hitler so that religious freedom may return to Europe. Up until now, I have gone along with them, for You have given us Your unreserved cooperation. Clear skies and a calm sea in Africa made the landings highly successful and helped us to eliminate Rommel. Sicily was comparatively easy and You supplied excellent weather for our armored dash across France, the greatest military victory that You have thus far allowed me. You have often given me

excellent guidance in difficult command decisions and You have led German units into traps that made their elimination fairly simple. But now, You’ve changed horses in mid-stream. You seem to have given von Rundstedt every break in the book and frankly, he’s been beating the hell out of us. My army is neither trained or equipped for winter warfare. And as You know, this weather is more suitable for Eskimos than for Southern cavalrymen.”

“But now, Sir, I can’t help but feel that I have offended You in some way. That suddenly You have lost all sympathy with our cause. That You are throwing in with von Rundstedt and his paper hanging-god. You know without me telling You that our situation is desperate. Sure, I can tell my staff that everything is going according to plan, but there’ no use telling You that the 101st Airborne is holding out against tremendous odds in Bastogne, and that this continual storm is making it impossible to supply them even from the air. I’ve sent Hugh Gaffey, one of my ablest generals, with his 4th Armored Division, north toward that all-important road center to relieve the encircled garrison, and he’s finding Your weather much more difficult than he is the Krauts. I don’t like to complain unreasonably, but my soldiers from the Meuse to Echternach are suffering the tortures of the damned. Today I visited several hospitals, all full of frostbite cases, and the wounded are dying in the fields because they cannot be brought back for medical care. But this isn’t the worst of the situation. Lack of visibility, continued rains have completely grounded my air force. My technique of battle calls for close-in fighter-bomber support, and if my planes can’t fly, how can I use them as aerial artillery? Not only is this a deplorable situation, but, worse yet, my reconnaissance planes haven’t been in the air for fourteen days, and I haven’t the faintest idea of what’s going on behind the German lines.”

“Damn it, Sir, I can’t fight a shadow. Without Your cooperation from a weather standpoint I am deprived of an accurate disposition of the German armies, and how in hell can I be intelligent in my attack? All this probably sounds unreasonable to You, but I have lost all patience with Your Chaplains who insist that this is a typical Ardennes winter, and that I must have faith. Faith and patience be damned! You have just got to make up Your mind whose side You’re on. You must come to my assistance, so that I may dispatch the entire German Army as a birthday present to Your Prince of Peace.”

“Sir, I have never been an unreasonable man. I’m not going to ask You for the impossible. I do not even insist upon a miracle, for all I request is four days of clear weather. Give me four clear days so that my planes can fly, so that my fighter-bombers can bomb and strafe, so that my reconnaissance may pick out targets for my magnificent artillery. Give me four days of sunshine to dry this blasted mud, so that my yanks may roll, so that ammunition and rations may be taken to my hungry, ill-equipped infantry. I need these four days to send von Rundstedt and his godless army to their Valhalla. I am sick of this unnecessary butchery of American youth, and in exchange for four days of fighting weather, I will deliver You enough Krauts to keep Your bookkeepers months behind in their work.” [A website adds: Patton bowed his head, waited a while, and then said “Amen.”’ The following day was Sunday, 24 December 1944, and on this day the skies cleared. On Christmas Day, the beautiful blue skies allowed the Army Air Force to resupply the surrounded 101st Airborne, at Bastogne. Had God listened? Not only did the skies remain clear for the four days that Patton requested but they remained clear for four weeks after his prayer.]

Now there’s a man who had to struggle with a situation. We can say ha-ha, you know, there were odd things to Patton too, but the point remains that that is a good masculine prayer, he didn’t read any “oh God, [can’t understand words]” kind of thing in that prayer; it was straight to the point and he gave reasons to God why God should answer the prayer. Now that’s the picture of a struggling man.

Noah was one, and unfortunately the end of Noah’s life wasn’t too good and so we’ll conclude by looking back on what happened in the end of Noah’s life. Genesis 9:18; the story of Noah ends in just a warning note to every Christian man. Noah was known for the solidarity of his family against all those things that we’ve talked about. It was his family that was his bastion against the outside world and Noah ruled his family well. And Noah ruled the family all during the most horrible crisis that any man could face. Again, if you want a sign of what it must have been like, imagine if you were the last person to exist on the planet earth; that’s Noah’s situation. That’s the kind of situation he was in and he kept his spiritual maturity all through it.

Now, in verse 18 a warning, “And the sons of Noah, that went forth out of the ark, were Shem, Ham and Japheth:” notice it begins with his family, the very strongest point in his life. “…and Ham is the father of Canaan. [19] These are the three sons of Noah, and of them was the whole earth overspread. [20] And Noah began to be a husbandman [farmer], and he planted a vineyard. [21] And he drank of the wine, and became drunk; and he was naked [uncovered] within his tent. [22] And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren outside. [23] And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness. [24] And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. [25] And he said, Cursed by Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. [26] And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem,” and he goes on to prophesy about his sons.

There’s a lot in this, we can’t do it honor at all tonight but just point to several points about Noah and his particular life. Noah, after all the pressure, let down his guard, and the minute he let his guard down there was disaster in his home. The disaster that finally got to Noah came from his strongest area. It was his home life, the very area the he used earlier to defy the whole world was the world that crumpled under him afterwards. Why? Because he relaxed his guard. Remember a few Sunday’s back we defined the role of a man, we said it’s an impossible role. You remember I read the prayers of Moses and David, frustrated men because God, you’ve called me to do something, I can’t do it this well. You’ve called me to an impossible task, and so they throw themselves down before God. Well Noah faces the same thing but this time he didn’t cast himself before God; this time he just let his guard down. That’s all that Satan needed and through this came rebellion. The whole point is not necessarily homosexuality, this is often the interpretation of verses 21-22, that Ham performed a homosexual act; that’s not in the text, that’s an inference. The whole point is that Ham delights in it, that’s verse 22. Ham delights in ridiculing his father, I saw the old man drunk and naked, ha-ha, you wanna come in? It’s that kind of an attitude. The very attitude that Noah strove so many years to keep out of his home is the very rebellious attitude that his son chose.

And then the last thing, after that occurs, one thing about all this cursing and the blessing in Genesis 9:25-27 is that is the man knows the nature of his sons; he’s a very astute observer. Yes, he may have had extra revelation about the nature of his sons, but it’s a principle that every man in his home ought to know the nature of his children. He ought to study their nature; he ought to know their sin nature like a book. Of course, every man knows at least some of this children’s sin nature because some of his children’s sin nature is his, and he should recognize his own in his child. That’s when it becomes very embarrassing, when you struggle with your own sin nature and then you have it mirrored for you with your children and they do the very same thing that you know you’ve been doing. Then it gets to you. And so it is that Noah knows very son’s natures, and the blessings and the cursings at the end of his life are in accordance with that.

So what have we seen about Noah? We’ve seen Noah, the stubbornly faithful man at the end of the world; we’ve seen Noah, true to the form of dominion man, exercise his dominion through his home, and even at the end it’s his family and his home that’s the center of the text. It’s not even the ark that he built, the job of carpentry that he did, the preaching job that he did. It’s the kind of civilization that he’s setting up through of his family. All of us are in the family of Noah; no matter who you are, and you can trace your genealogical tree all the way back; most of us come from Europe, trace all the way back through Europe, through European culture, down through to the fertile crescent and down into the area of Ararat. We all come from Noah; right tonight in all our bodies the genes of one or more of these three sons of Noah. So this is our nature; we come from our father Noah, and this is the man who is held up as a model of faith. We ought to then, at least the Christian men, have some model of a stubborn man a man who defied the presupposition of the generation and survived.