HEROES OF THE FAITH – NOAH
DR. JIM DIXON
HEBREWS 11:1-7, GENESIS 6:9-22
SEPTEMBER I8, 1983
It was called the Epic of Gilgamesh. It was inscribed on tablets of clay by Babylonians in Southern Mesopotamia 4,000 years ago. It is said to be one of the oldest written documents in human history. And 200 years ago, archeologists discovered a complete copy of the Gilgamesh Epic in the ancient library of Ashar Banapol who ruled Assyria 2600 years ago. And they were astounded to find that on the 11th clay tablet, there was the ancient story of a global flood. The hero of that flood story was one named Uda Naphasheen and the Babylonian god, Ia, told Uda Naphasheen to build a wooden ark, the gods were going to flood the world. They told him to bring animals of every kind into that ark and this he did. He also brought people of every trade to preserve those trades upon the earth. It rained for six days and six nights. There was a global flood, and the boat came to rest on Mt. Nasir. Uda Naphasheen got out. He built an altar and there he made a sacrifice to the gods. There is a similar story in the Greek mythologies of a global flood. The Greek hero is one named Deucalion. He was the son of Pandora and Prometheus and when Zeus, King of the Gods, decided to flood the earth, Pandora and Prometheus warned Deucalion to build a wooden boat for the saving of his household and this he did. And that wooden boat came to rest in Mt. Parnassia. It is a fascinating truth that virtually every major ancient civilization had a mythology describing a global flood. This was true of the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Romans, the Greeks and even the primitive Indian tribes of North America.
Some Christians are threatened by these ancient flood mythologies. They think that somehow these ancient flood mythologies bring into question or discredit the Biblical account of the Noahic flood, but it is really quite the opposite. These ancient mythologies prove that the concept of a global flood was very much within the mind and memory of ancient man, and it’s only when you look at those ancient mythologies that you see the lofty beauty and the supremacy of the revelation of God in the Holy Scriptures. Some of those ancient flood mythologies are ludicrous. They are even humorous. In the Gilgamesh Epic, we’re told that the gods flooded the earth because people were making too much noise, and the noise rose to the heavens and the gods got a headache. And so, they decided to flood the earth. A perfectly reasonable solution! And they let the water fall for six days and six nights. Then the gods repented because they were starving. Because people were dying, they were no longer making animal sacrifices, and the gods had nothing to eat. And the Greek mythology of Deucalion and his wife, a woman named Naseer, I believe that was her name. Anyway, they got out of the boat, and they noticed there were no other people alive on the earth, so they went to the Oracle at Delphi and said, “How do we repeople the earth?” The Oracle at Delphi said, “Cast the bones of your mother.” Seems like a reasonable suggestion. And so, Deucalion… they took this to mean the stones of Mother Earth. And so, Deucalion took a stone, and he threw it and where it hit the ground, it became a man. His wife took a stone, threw it and when it hit the ground, it became a woman. Their neighbors were literally only a stone’s throw away! And by throwing stones, they repeopled the earth.
Those ancient flood mythologies are ludicrous but you see, the Biblical story of Noah is not. The Biblical story of Noah and the global flood is scientifically, geologically and zoologically feasible. The ark was 500 feet long. It was 80 feet wide. It was 50 feet high. It had three decks. When you combine the decks, the length of those decks were almost 1500 feet and zoologists, and biologists tells us that there was ample space on that giant boat to accommodate all the known species of life that existed in Noah’s time. Ample space to accommodate the food that was needed to sustain them. The Bible tells us that it rained for 40 days, and 40 nights and God caused the subterranean waters to rise. Meteorologists tells us that this was ample time to cause the great deluge of water which encompassed the earth. The Bible tells us it took eleven months for that water to dissipate and for Noah and his family to get out of the ark and scientists says that that’s a reasonable period of time. Scientists also tell us that there is geological evidence of a global flood in the geological columns. And there is no doubt that the major land masses of this earth were once underwater as seashells can be found on high mountaintops even here in Colorado.
Some Christians want desperately to prove the story of Noah’s Ark and they try to find the ark on Mt. Ararat. The astronaut, Jim Irwin, who was part of the Apollo 15 Mission, just conducted an expedition up Mt. Ararat recently to try to find the ark and they were forced back because of inclement weather. Mr. Ararat is almost 12,000 feet high. It is encompassed in clouds. The top of it is covered with glacial ice. The Turkish government is not particularly excited about granting permits to hike that mountain. From the top, you can look down on Soviet defense installations and the Turkish government, being a Muslim government, has no interest in confirming the historicity of Judaism or Christianity, but occasionally they do grant permits and many of those who have been up that mountain claim that they have seen a large mass of wood like the hull of a ship protruding from the glacial ice. But you know we could spend all kinds of time seeking to defend the Biblical story of Noah giving an apologetic. You either believe the Biblical revelation or you don’t. I believe it. But God doesn’t want us to spend our time focusing simply on the story. He wants us to focus on the meaning of the story. The story is the carrier, but the message is the cargo, and He wants us to receive the message that he has for us from Noah’s Ark.
God has given me two message to share this morning. The first message is a message concerning God’s deliverance. God delivers His people. God said to Noah “I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from under heaven. Everything upon the earth shall die but I shall make a covenant with you. You shall come into the ark. You your sons, your wife and your sons’ wives with you God delivers His people.” If you are a Christian this morning, if you’ve asked Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior, then God wants you to know that He has delivered you and He will deliver you from the storms of life. He will keep you alive on this earth until your ministry is full, until your ministry is complete, until it’s time for you to go into His presence.
Paul Palay is a missionary to India. He is the Founder and Director of the India National Inland Mission. It is a very impressive ministry in India that Paul Palay has. That mission has an orphanage. It has a Biblical college. It has a Theological School which trains ministers to minister throughout India. It has 150 churches. Nine thousand Hindus have accepted Jesus Christ through that organization that Paul Palay founded. Paul Palay is an intelligent man. He speaks seven languages fluently. He has written many books. He was in our church last Sunday worshipping with us. I’ve known him for a couple of years, and he told me last week a story that’s probably difficult for many of us in our Western culture to believe. Paul told me that he and four other missionaries traveled from northern India, and they came to central India near a region called Eau de Pear and there they set up a large tent and Paul and the other four men began to preach the message of Jesus Christ to Hindus who had never heard it before. That first night there was a Hindu boy who came to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. That Hindu boy had an older brother who was very prominent in that community. He was a Hindu priest, and that Hindu priest was enraged, and he went, and he got other Hindus, and he incited them to riot and on the third night of their messages, a hundred armed Hindus came to kill Paul Palay and the other four men. They partially stripped them. They beat them and they began to shout as they stood over those five men. These armed Hindus began to shout, “Kill them! Kill them! Kill them!” Paul Palay had his face in the ground, and he said the 118th Psalm came to him, the 17th verse. For the Psalmist says, “I shall live to proclaim the message of the Lord.” And the spirit bore witness with his spirit that that message was for him, and he began to say, even as his face was in the dirt, he began to say, “I shall live” and the four men who were with him began to say that with him “I shall live” and the Hindus were shouting “Kill them! Kill them! Kill them!” And suddenly there was silence. Paul Palay and the other four men looked up and they were surrounded by the circle of large warriors and beyond those warriors they saw the armed Hindus fleeing into the community into the countryside. They turned and they looked at each other and then suddenly they looked up again and there was no one there. The circle of warriors was gone. There was only one large man, and he came up to them and he said, “You are safe now, but you must go. Come back in three months and you will reap a great harvest.”
Paul said that man disappeared from their midst. He says he knows that beyond a doubt he saw an angelic being for the first time in his life. Those five men journeyed back to northern India and three months later they returned to the region of Eau de Pear. They began to preach the gospel and indeed they reaped a great harvest. And many of those who had come to attack them and destroy them and kill them accepted Jesus Christ and Paul and his friends asked them, “What happened on that day three months ago when you came to kill us? What did you see?” They said, “We saw mighty warriors against whom we could never stand, and we were terrified, and we ran.”
It’s hard for us, living in this culture, in this scientific age, in this rationalistic age of reason, it’s hard for us to accept sometimes the reality of the supernatural. But you see the Bible tells us that God gives his angels charge over us to deliver us and to protect us on this earth. God delivers his people. The Bible says “God has given his angels charge over us to bear us up lest we dash our foot against a stone. He will not allow the sun to strike us by day nor the moon by night. Though 1,000 falls besides us and 10,000 at our right hands, no harm will come to us. He will deliver us from every storm of life.”
As Christians we are not simply delivered from the storms of life, but we are delivered from the final judgement that shall come. God warned this world that there will indeed come a final judgement. Jesus said “Behold I am coming soon, bringing my recompense to repay everyone for what they have done. I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.” Some of you may not live until the return of Christ but there will still come for you a judgement because the Bible says, “It is appointed unto men once to die and after that, the judgement.” But the Bible tells us that God has given us an ark. He has given us a means of escaping this judgement, a means of deliverance, and that means of deliverance is Jesus Christ.
In 1915, on March 7, the Lusitania was sunk off the coast of Ireland. There were 1,924 people on that ship, excuse me 1,198 people. One thousand one hundred and twenty-four died, 128 of which were Americans. They died but they had been warned. The Lusitania was a passenger ship of the Cunard Line and that shipping line, for a week prior to the ship’s journey had published articles in all the major newspapers warning the people that it was a volatile time, that they were taking their lives into their own hands, and yet those people did not heed that journey. They went ahead and many of them died. God has given a warning to the world today. Judgement is coming but there is an ark, and that ark is Jesus Christ. The Bible said, “God loved the world so much that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him will not perish but have everlasting life.” There’s one ship on this sea of life that will never sink and that ship’s called Christ. When you give your life to Christ as Lord and Savior, you find deliverance in this life as He will protect you until it’s time for you to go unto His presence. And deliverance from the final judgement.
But there’s a second and final message that I feel led to share this morning and this is a message concerning faithfulness. If you are a Christian, you have God’s deliverance, but you are still called to be faithful. God honors the faithful in every generation. The Bible said, “These are the generations of Noah.” Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. We are called to be faithful in our generation as Noah was in his. It was not easy to be faithful in Noah’s generation. Jesus tells us that the time of Noah was a time of gluttony. It was a time of drunkenness. It was a time of marital unfaithfulness. The Book of Genesis, the sixth chapter, we are told that the age of Noah had two great sins and for those sins, God brought judgement upon the world of the ungodly. The first of those two sins were the sin of violence. God says, “I shall put an end to all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them.” And their second great sin was the sin of sexual immorality as described in Genesis, Chapter 6, verses 1-6. Now it is more than a curious thing that we too, live in an age that is preoccupied with violence and sex as reflected in the television and movie media. We live in a violent world. We live in an increasingly violent nation.
Last year 10 million serious crimes were committed in the United States of America. Crime grows by 10 to 20 percent every year. In the past ten years, this country has had to build 524 new prisons just to accommodate the increasing problem of crime. And there’s a growing violence in our public schools. Last year 9,000 school students were raped. There were 11,000 cases of armed robbery, 20,000 burglaries, 200,000 cases of bodily assault. And we are told that only 1/5th of the school incidents is even reported so those statistics are probably low. It is said that in the major cities of this country, armed gang members outnumber police forces 10 to 1. If those gangs could ever get together we would have social, political, economic chaos in our land, and yet this country has not near the problem with violence that many other nations on this earth have. Certainly the Soviet Union is willing to use violence. They view violence simply as a tool to help them attain their goal of global domination. The Third World Nations, many of them leave violence and crime basically unchecked. We live in a violent world—a volatile world—with increasing nuclear weaponry and God looks down and He sees our violence.
We also live in a sexually permissive world. We live in a sexually permissive country. Last year 600,000 teenage boys became unwed fathers in this country. One million unwed teenage girls became pregnant. There were 1.5 million legal abortions in this country last year. The number of illegal abortions we do not know. In Washington, D.C. there were more abortions than there were births last year. We are told that there are 20 million homosexuals in this country. We are told that every month in this country, 100,000 girls become prostitutes. I know that’s hard to believe. Venereal disease has increased by 300 percent over this past decade and pornography is rampant in our land. Last year, one billion sex magazines were sold in the United States of America. There is an increase in fornication and adultery. An increase in its acceptance and in its practice. But you see, God has a message for us in our time. He calls us to faithfulness. He says “Come out from among them and be ye separate. Do not love the world or the things that are in the world, for if anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in him, for all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life is not of the Father but is of the world and the world passes away and the desires of it but he who does the will of God abides forever.” God has called us to faithfulness in our generation.
Mark Twain said, “Such a mess is humanity. It’s a shame that Noah didn’t miss the boat.” Perhaps sometimes you feel that way about this generation, but we need to understand that every generation has had immorality. There have been generations with greater problems of prejudice. Four hundred years before Christ in the Greek city of Sparta, there were 25,000 citizens and 500,000 slaves. There have been generations with greater problems of brutality. One hundred eighty years after Christ, the Roman emperor Commodus ruled the Roman Empire and he demanded, he commanded every dwarf, every invalid, every cripple from throughout the city of Rome be brought into the Roman Coliseum and that they be forced to fight to the death with meat cleavers. He wanted every cripple removed from the face of the earth. He hated them.
There have been generations with more flagrant cases of homosexuality. The Roman emperor Nero actually married his male slave in a public ceremony before Roman citizenry. We live in an unfaithful generation, but we should understand every generation is immoral. We are simply called to be moral in this time. God takes sin seriously. The Bible says that if God did not spare the angels when they sinned but cast them into darkness and committed them to pits of nether gloom to be kept until the final judgement, if he did not spare the ancient world but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness with seven others when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly, if by condemning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes, he condemned them to eternal destruction and provided a warning to all those who, in subsequent generations, would be unholy, if he rescued riotous Lot, greatly disturbed at the licentiousness of the wicked, does God not know how to deliver the righteous from trial and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the final judgement, especially those who engage in the lust of defiling passion and despise godly authority.
This is not an easy message for a minister to preach because I know that most of you do not like to hear about judgement. You do not like to hear about sin. And I like you to hear things you like, but you see, God wants us to know that he takes sin seriously. Most of us would rather hear messages about God’s grace and God’s mercy, and indeed, as Christians, we have come into the realm of God’s grace. We’ve come into the realm of God’s mercy. We have received forgiveness of sin and newness of life and we have a destiny and an eternal inheritance laid up for us in the heavens. We have eternal life. But God has called us to faithfulness, and some Christians do not seem to understand the Biblical concept of grace. Some Christians just think, “I love to sin. God loves to forgive. What a beautiful arrangement!” But you see, God takes sin seriously. And the Bible warns us of those who would pervert grace to licentiousness. Paul said “Shall we sin the more that grace may abound? God forbid.” You see, if you’re a Christians, you are married to Christ. The Bible calls the great Church of Christ the Bride of Christ. We are married to Him and we are called to be faithful in our generation. We are called to be loyal to Him.
A man named Frederick Augustus was Rector of Saxony and he became King of Poland many years ago. We are told that he was married to one woman for 30 years and by that woman he had one child. But we also are told that there were times when his marital faithfulness slipped. He died in 1699 and records showed that he had fathered 345 illegitimate children. We look at a man like that and we marvel that he could call a woman his wife and his queen and yet be so unfaithful to her. As Christians, we call Jesus Christ Lord, King and God, and we are called to be faithful to him. We are called to be loyal.
I love the story of Grant Teff. He’s been coach at Baylor University in Texas. Sometimes Baylor University has had poor football teams. Sometimes they’ve had good teams. One year they had a particularly bad season. They only won one or two games and after the season, Coach Teff and his assistant coach, who were very good friends, decided to get away from it all and forget the season by going on a hunting trip. They had made arrangements with a farmer they’d never met to go hunting on that farmer’s land, and so they went to that farmer’s farm and Coach Teff said to the assistant, “You stay in the truck, and I’ll go talk to the farmer.” And Coach Teff went up to the farmer and he says, “Sir, it’s great to be here” and the farmer said, “Well I want you to know I just love Baylor University. I love you as a coach. I think you’re the best coach in America today and I just love that school. I know the football team had a hard season, but I just want you to know we’re with you and we support you.” Coach Teff said, “That’s great, and I’m looking forward to hunting on your land.” The farmer said, “Well you have a good time. There’s just one thing I would ask you to do.” The coach said, “What’s that?” The farmer said, “You see that mule over there?” He said “That mule is diseased and it’s sick and it’s in a lot of pain and I would like you to kill that mule for me. I love that old mule and I just can’t bring myself to do it. Would you kill that mule for me?” The coach said, “Oh, I can’t kill your mule.” The farmer said, “Please?” So, Coach Teff said, “Alright.” As he headed back to the pickup truck, he kind of had a little smirk come to his face. He decided to play a practical joke on the assistant coach, so he leaned into the pickup truck, and he says, “Oh am I angry!” The assistant coach said, “Angry?” Coach Teff said, “Yeah, I can’t believe it. You know that farmer said we can’t go hunting on his land. He said he hates Baylor University. He said he hates me. He hates all of our coaches. He hates our football team. He says we’re a disgrace to this country. He even hates our uniforms. I’m so mad. You know what I’m going to do?” And the assistant said, “What’s that?” He said “You see that mule over there? I’m going to shoot that farmer’s mule.” Well, the assistant coach was just stunned as Coach Teff took his rifle out and he aimed it at that mule, and he shot, and the mule fell to the ground. Coach Teff had kind of a smirk on his face as he got back into the pickup truck and suddenly he heard two other shots. The assistant coach came in the other side of the truck, and he said “Let’s get out of here. I just got two of his cows!”
That assistant coach was not tremendously smart, but he was very, very loyal. You see, God does not play practical jokes on us. He does not pretend like He is angry. There is one thing that makes Him angry and that is sin. His enemies should be our enemies. We should be loyal to Him through thick and thin. If His enemy is sin, we are called to fight that enemy. If you are a Christian, you have committed your life to sanctification and that’s a serious commitment. There are temptations in this world. We all experience them because we are flesh. Sometimes we sin. Sometimes we fall and that will happen, and God knows it. But you see, if you are truly a Christian, if you’ve come into His Kingdom, you want to war against sin. You long to be like the Lord you love. The Apostle Paul said If Jesus Christ didn’t rise from the dead, if the gospel is not true, then eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die.” But Paul said, “The glorious truth is Jesus Christ did rise from the dead.” As Christians, we’ve committed our lives to that truth. Paul says, “Train yourselves in godliness for it hold value not only in this life but also for the life to come.” The Bible says, “As obedient children do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance but as He who has called you as holy, be holy yourselves in all you conduct for it is written You shall be holy for I am holy.” If you invoke as Father him who judges each One impartially according to his deeds, conduct yourselves with respect throughout this time of our exile for we have been ransomed from the futile ways inherited by our fathers, not by perishable things such as silver and gold but by the precious blood of Jesus Christy.” God says to each and every one of us here today, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” Shall we pray?