Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Today John MacArthur is going to continue his study titled, The Power of Faith, with a look at the life of Noah. Now, you know the story. God tells Noah to build an ark, he sends a flood to judge mankind, and he saves Noah's family along with the animal kingdom. But what can that familiar story teach you about how to deepen your faith in Jesus Christ?
Stay here to find out. But before we get to the lesson, you know it might surprise you, but this series on the Hall of Fame of Faith is basically about some everyday people, people who in God's strength demonstrated extraordinary faith. John, you have a few words for some people who are also ordinary men and women, but they have really helped us accomplish something extraordinary. Yeah, how about this extraordinary that you could literally purchase friends for eternity?
Just imagine the fact that we as human beings, finite human beings, can purchase friends for eternity. In other words, the Lord is saying that my life and your life can matter to the degree that because of it, somebody is going to be my friend in heaven. Who has that kind of influence? Paul even said, thinking about that, who is adequate for such things? Whose life could matter that much?
That your life is a saver of life unto life. But that, in fact, is true. And what I'm driving at with this is there are many people that will not be known as radio personalities.
They'll not be known for any kind of public ministry. But behind the scenes, they are purchasing friends for eternity by their faithfulness to the Lord. And one category of such people are those who support the work of grace to you. You're our partners in every sense, because you make it possible for this teaching to spread across the globe essentially 24-7 across the entire earth non-stop. It could only happen because of the partnership that we have with those who love this ministry, who learn from it, and who support it. And of course, there's no greater joy or more compelling force in my life than to study and proclaim and uphold biblical truth. And God has blessed it and continues to bless it. He promised He would bless it.
It'll never return void. We've seen that for over half a century. And I understand that the Teacher plays a role in this, but I also understand that it's all the folks who make that teaching available who carry the huge, huge responsibility of reaching people across the face of the earth. This ministry is on a strong footing because of people like that, people like you.
And support is very strong. We're thankful for that. And in the face of claims that today's culture doesn't need or want teaching or doctrine or long sermons, we're seeing exactly the opposite to that. And I simply want to thank you for believing in what we do, for pulling with us as you benefit from the ministry and as you are able. Yes, friend, thank you for helping us take God's word that changes lives to people all over the globe.
To partner with us, stick around until after the lesson for more information on how to do that. But first, here's John with today's lesson. Now in Hebrews chapter 11, we have the great examples of faith. And in all of the cases of Hebrews 11, their genuine faith was made known by something that they did. Faith in itself is such a fragile, almost ethereal commodity that its only visibility comes in works and deeds that are done.
If I say that I believe, you cannot verify the genuineness of that unless you see something going on in my life that indicates that I, in fact, do trust God. And so, in the book of Hebrews in the 11th chapter, when all the heroes of faith are listed here in this most marvelous chapter, and there's just one after the other through the whole chapter, we find that all of them are tied together with something that they did in their life that showed that they really believed God. And he starts to remember with Abel in verse 4 with the life of faith and really talks about the entrance into the life of faith. Then he moves to Enoch in verse 5 and talks about the walk of faith. Abel began by faith.
Enoch did what? Continued by faith. Then thirdly, he comes to Noah in verse 7. And Noah illustrates the work of faith, the work of faith. Abel is the life of faith, the beginning. Enoch is the walk of faith, the continuance. Noah is the work of faith, the obedience. Noah illustrates faith that is obedient. He is a classic of all classics of believing God, of saying, I believe God and then doing something to prove it.
His faith was not dead because it had works. The record of Abel shows us the worship of God. The record of Enoch shows us the worship and the walk with God. And in Noah we see one who worshiped God, walked with God, and worked for God. So it just takes us another step, progressive steps in the relationship of faith. And it's kind of interesting that faith works that way. You've got to have worship before you can have walk and you've got to have walk before you can have work. And that's how God has established it.
That's the pattern that is divine. I think some people get number one, they come to God by faith. Some people get number two, for a while they walk with God. Then some people work for God.
That's Noah. Some people believe a lot but don't do anything. Other people really believe God and they're committed to it. And that's faith. It's not only the faith that says yeah, but it's the faith that says I'm going to get out there and attempt to do it.
He's going to get into the battle. That's the obedience of faith. Now Noah's faith is stupendous.
It is absolutely so far beyond the just human rationale that it doesn't even make sense to the normal mind. Unless a man knew God and had some kind of spiritual insights, he would be a blithering idiot to do what Noah did. I mean, he would be on the level of somebody who thinks he's a poached egg, like C.S.
Lewis said. He wouldn't have enough sense to come in out of the rain to do a dumb thing like this. To imagine what Noah did because God told him what was going to happen when he couldn't see anything past his own trust is absolutely stupendous. He not only believed God, it would have been easy for Noah to say, Lord, I really trust you and believe you, but I don't know, this is a little far out. He believed God to the point that he did what was totally irrational because God told him to do it. Now there are three things in verse 7 that tell us Noah's faith was legitimate. Three great proofs of Noah's faith. One, he responded to God's Word.
That is always a characteristic of true faith. He responded to God's Word. Number two, he rebuked the world.
He was such a man of God that his life was a contrast. Three, he received God's righteousness. He responded to God's Word.
He rebuked the world. He received God's righteousness. And those are three classic indications of true faith. If you find somebody whose faith is real, he will, one, respond to God's Word.
Two, live as a rebuke to the world. Three, he will receive God's righteousness which comes to those who believe. First of all, Noah's faith is valid because he responded to God's Word. Look at verse 7. 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.
Stop there. He believed God, so much so that he built an ark. Now it may have appeared on the surface to be somewhat foolhardy and we all can imagine what went on with his neighbors and the laughing and all of that that was going on as he was out there building that thing. But God said to Noah, Noah, judgment is coming. I am going to destroy the world by water. You better build a boat. And you know what Noah did?
He dropped everything and spent over a hundred years building a boat somewhere in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and the Euphrates River miles and miles from any ocean. But that's faith. Faith responds to God's Word. You see, true faith doesn't question.
It's obedient. Now the choice is the same for every man. You may live as if the message of God was of little value or else you may live as if the message of God was of absolute importance, the most important thing in the world. Now Noah was a man like we are. He had a lot of things to do, occupy his time. And for him to give up his great gap of life and just spend his time building a boat took some kind of commitment. And it's very likely that he never even understood much about boats because he didn't live in an area where there were ships that went in the sea. But he listened to God and he spent his life obeying what God said.
Isn't that amazing? It would have been one thing for him to run out and order the lumber, but it was something else to see him a hundred years later still putting the pitch on. I mean, I think some of us believe God and we run out and we start and then that's it.
It never gets much past that. Noah did it and he continued. Now you'll notice it says, by faith Noah being warned and the terms of God do not appear in some of the best manuscripts, but certainly should be included if not in the manuscript in italics because obviously it was God that spoke. He was warned of God of things not yet seen. That's the test of faith. What does verse 1 say faith is? The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things, what?
Not seen. He didn't see any water. The Lord didn't rain on him a little bit for an afternoon so he'd get the feeling. He had no idea what was going on, but it says he was moved with fear. You say, aha, that's why he did it. God held a big stick over him and said, you better do this or I'll let you have it.
Not that. The word fear may give you an erroneous impression that Noah acted under the influence of fright, but the Greek word means to reverence. He did it because he reverenced God's Word and God told him to do it. You know what the Bible says? God commands all men everywhere to do what?
Repent. Some people believe that and they repent. Some people don't believe it. Noah believed God's Word. Some of us as Christians hear the Word of God go into all the world and preach the gospel. Some of us hear Jesus say, lo, I am with you always. Do we believe it?
Do we believe we're adequate for every situation if we were obedient? Noah acted with pious care. That's what it means, pious care. He treated the message of God with great reverence and he prepared the ark and his faith was honored to the saving of his house. It wasn't only he, but his wife and his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and their three wives, eight souls were saved. Now let's look at this incident going back to Genesis 6 and see some of the fascinating things that took place. Genesis chapter 6, verse 14, we'll start.
Listen to this. Here's God's talk to Noah. He says, Noah, verse 14, make thee an ark or a ship or a boat of gopher wood.
Rooms shalt thou make in the ark and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch. Now there is a challenge to faith on an absolutely unprecedented scale. I mean, what would you do if God told you to build a 20,000 ton ship in the middle of the wilderness? One of the greatest acts of faith in the history of the world was when Noah stretched out his arms and chopped down the first tree. What faith?
Or better yet, when he picked up the tool to chop down the first tree. What faith? Look at verse 15. And this is the fashion God even gave him a verbal blueprint.
This is the fashion which thou shalt make of it. The length of the ark shall be 300 cubits. And there's quite a bit of variation as to how much a cubit is, whether you're talking about a Jewish common cubit or a little more sophisticated measurement, or whether you're talking about a Babylonian cubit, and it goes everywhere from about 17.5 inches to perhaps 22.
But let's stay at the lowest level so that we're being fair and assume that it probably was bigger. But anyway, it says it would be 300 cubits, the breadth 50 cubits, and the height 30 cubits. That would be 437.5 feet long, 72.93 feet wide, 43.75 feet high, or about four stories high. Since it had three decks, it had a total deck area of approximately 95,700 square feet.
That would be more than 20 standard basketball courts of deck space with a volume the size of 1,396,000 cubic feet. That's a big ship. Its size puts it well within the category of large, steel, ocean-going vessels today in our modern world. And from the best we can tell, it was sort of like a covered raft shaped like a coffin, a rather square and flat-bottomed, apparently. But it's interesting to study these dimensions. There was a lecture at Annapolis given by a particular naval instructor and it was given to all of the admirals.
And in this lecture, these were some of the things that were brought out. For centuries, the man said, men built ships in various proportions. But since British naval machinists found the formula for the battleship Dreadnought, all naval construction follows the proportions of Dreadnought since they have been found to be scientifically perfect, so said the instructor. Then he said the proportions of Dreadnought were exactly the same as the ark. So God knew how to build ships.
Now this took a tremendous amount of faith. Verse 17, watch this. And behold, I, even I, God says, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life from under heaven and everything that is in the earth shall die.
Now, you know, even that's a little hard to understand. He says it's going to rain. I'm going to bring a flood of waters.
Now that isn't just an easy thing to believe. I mean, Noah hadn't even got any idea what rain is. It has never rained in the earth.
Go back to Genesis chapter 2 and verse 6. It says there...well, verse 5 first, every plant of the field before it was in the earth and every herb of the field before it grew, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth. It never did rain. Verse 6, but there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground.
There weren't even any deserts there. It was all watered from mist coming up from underneath the ground. It was perhaps covered by this mist and incidentally that's why people lived so long.
The sun's rays never got through the mist. It was much like Venus and so people lived for centuries and centuries because we die basically as a result of the deterioration process brought about by the sun's rays. And so without the sun's rays, people lived a long time. They lived over 900 years, some of them.
If you think you're bored with life, you haven't lived. And so people lived under this kind of a mist until finally the flood came and at that point the Bible says he broke up the fountains of the deep, you see. And the whole atmosphere of the earth was changed and man's life was immediately shortened because the penetrating rays of the sun hit directly on man.
Now who in the world is going to expect this to happen? He hasn't any concept of this in his brain. Rain doesn't even fit into any kind of category. And it also seemed very unlikely that God would destroy the whole human race. I mean, it would seem as if his mercy was all swallowed up by his justice. And also the judgment was a long way off. I mean, it was 120 years away. Verse 3 of chapter 6, his days shall be 120 years. So, I mean, that's a long way off and Noah could easily have rationalized and said, well, boy, that sure gives people a lot of time to repent and reform.
I mean, they'll probably shape up by that time. And you know what even makes it more unbelievable that Noah did this? Everywhere he went and preached, nobody ever believed. When that whole deal was over with, after 120 years and that flood came, who got in the ark except Noah and his family?
Nobody. Now I know from the standpoint of a preacher, to preach for 120 years and have nobody come is pretty rough. And yet he kept on building that thing. And nobody believed him. And you can imagine that you'd begin to think, I wonder if it's me.
I mean, I've gone over this deal a lot of times and nobody buys it. And can you imagine what he endured while he was out there building it? Well, there's crazy Noah again.
Everybody that went by would laugh at him. And then he probably thought even if the flood comes, how is a monster like this going to float, especially after I've got two of every kind of animal in it? It had no anchor, no mast, no steering, no rudder, no sail. And Noah didn't know anything about sailing anyway. And against all this, he just believed God. Verse 18. I'm not going to just destroy everybody, God says. Verse 18, But with thee will I establish My covenant. Don't you like that, My covenant? God says, You're going to be My man. I'm going to maintain My promise to you. My promise.
What was that based on? Oh, it goes back to verse 8. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.
He was a just man, perfect in his generations. He walked with God. And God says, You're My man, Noah. You and I are going to go through it together. The rest of the world is going to be drowned. Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.
You want to know something? Noah didn't have any grace in himself. The grace wasn't in Noah.
Where was it? It was in the eyes of the Lord. Grace is strictly God's to give to whom He will. Nothing in the sinner can appeal to God. Noah was no different than any other son of Adam.
He was just as bad as the rest. In fact, just after he got out of the ark, the terrible tragedy of chapter 9, verse 21, he drank of the wine, became drunk and was uncovered within his tent. Noah just really blew it badly.
But you know something? The grace of God was in his behalf because it was God's right to give His grace to whom He will. And so God spared Noah and made a covenant with him.
It pleased the Lord to be gracious to Noah. Now watch this, verse 19. And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort or every kind or every species shall thou bring into the ark to keep them alive with thee.
They shall be male and female. Of fowls after their kind, of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after its kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee to keep them alive and take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten and thou shalt gather it to thee and it shall be for food for thee and for them. So God says, now I want you after you've built this boat to get the animals into it. Now God, of course...can you imagine the scene? I mean, just Noah waiting at the door while these animals came from everywhere.
Just keen. No way to explain the fact that they came other than that God was just herding them into this big thing. Now someone has calculated that the ark from a spatial standpoint could handle easily 7,000 species of animals, which is quite a bit. Now this doesn't necessarily mean two of every animal in the world. There are animals and then there are species of animals.
And even the species of animals can grow and grow and grow and grow until you have all vast amounts that can all be taken back to one basic species. For example, take the pigeon. Darwin found in testing that if the almost endless varieties of pigeons were put together and allowed to breed together, they went back to the rock pigeon. Therefore, if there were only two rock pigeons, or seven likely because there were seven of the beasts that would be used for sacrifice, if there were only seven rock pigeons in the ark, then there were thousands of varieties potentially within those two rock pigeons.
That's true of the dog, for example. If you just had two dogs and took off from there, the endless amount of varieties of dogs could occur as well as a horse all coming from one horse and evolution as weak as it is will at least grant that. All horses, whether they're Shetland ponies, racing horses, or heavy draft horses can descend from one common ancestor. I mean, the entire human race came from Noah and his three kids.
And one of them wasn't with slanted eyes and the other one dark and the other one white. And two cattle could well have represented the whole bovine family for that matter. And so it is very likely that the species were limited and that it's within reason to assume that there was plenty of room for all the species and all the food and enough extra for the sacrificial animals. They were to take seven of each and there were ten of those according to Exodus, so that would make 70 extra animals. Now, it has been estimated, and this is fairly recent, that land mammals above the size of sheep at the present only number about 290 species. Those from sheep to rats, about 757. Those smaller than rats, about 1359. So there you've barely got 2500 species.
The average of all the animals, the average size is about the size of a cat, which would require less than two square feet. So it's no problem to get them in there. I mean, it's a problem to get them in, but it's no problem logistically.
And so here comes this strange, bizarre command. How are they going to get there? How are they going to get fed? Who's going to be there to clean the place? And so forth and so forth and so forth.
All the massive kind of problems. As you remember, they were in that thing for almost a year. So Noah had a command that staggers the imagination. But he was a man of faith.
So he began to build. Verse 22, I love this. Thus did Noah according to all that God commanded him, so did he. Amazing faith.
Amazing. You know, God comes to men today and He says, put your faith in Jesus Christ and I'll change your life. And some aren't even willing to take God at that simple promise.
There are Christians who know and love God, they say, and God says, I want you to take this ministry. I want you to reach that person over here and I'll bless your life for it. I want you to trust Me in the trial that you're going through.
I want you to believe Me in this situation that's creating stress and tension. I want you to lean on Me and they're not even willing to believe God in that situation, let alone build an ark. And we say we believe, but our faith is absolutely infinitesimal in the measure of that of Noah. So he was a man of faith, came by faith to God. He walked by faith with God and now he would obey God in faith even though it staggered his imagination to conceive of what God had asked of him. He believed God.
And he believed what God said would happen. Some of us run out of patience so fast. Some of us run out of patience with God in a week. God praying a week. Noah, 120 years. But you can imagine what a day it was when it started to fall. When the sun was shining, Noah's conduct must have looked like that of a fool when the daylight hours were on and everybody watched him.
Who in his right mind would build that thing on dry land? But you see, it's often been the case that men who take God at His word look like fools. You may have to adopt a course of action which looks like madness to the world, but if it's obedience, it behooves us. My dad always used to tell a story about the man who had a sandwich board sign on. In the front it said, I'm a fool for Christ. And everybody laughed. And then as he went by in the back it said, whose fool are you?
You're a fool for somebody. I'll be a fool for God and win in the end. So Noah exhibited fantastic faith. What was the ground of his faith? God's word. He believed that God meant what He said.
He believed it. You're listening to Grace to You with John MacArthur, pastor, author, chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary in the Los Angeles area. Today's lesson is from John's current study titled The Power of Faith.
A friend going back to something John mentioned before the lesson. We are able to broadcast lessons like the one you heard today because of the support of listeners like you. To partner with us in this far-reaching and life-changing ministry, contact us today. You can mail your tax-deductible donation to Grace to You, P.O.
Box 4000, Panorama City, California 91412, or you can call us at 800-55-GRACE. You can also donate online at GTY.org. Remember that supporting your local church comes first.
We always affirm that. But we're grateful for anything you can give after that. Again, to partner with us, call 800-55-GRACE or go to GTY.org. And while you're at the website, be sure to download the Study Bible app. It's a free app that gives you the full text of the Bible in English Standard, King James, and New American Standard versions. And it also links you to the sermons and blog articles and other resources that we have on the passages that you're studying. So it's a quick and convenient source of clear Bible teaching, and it's a great tool for your devotionals.
The app, again, it's simply called The Study Bible, is free to download from GTY.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for joining us today. Be back tomorrow as John continues his series, The Power of Faith, with another look at The Faith of Noah. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time, on Grace to You.
