His is one of the best love stories in the Bible. A story of righteousness and obedience in a world corrupted by sin. But today, on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah explains that that story of Noah is, at its heart, an illustration of rock solid faith. Get acquainted with Noah like you've never encountered him before.
as David introduces today's powerful message, the performance of faith.
So, if you're just joining us, I'm David Jeremiah, and we are studying Hebrews 11, which is often referred to as the hall of faith. Here in this incredible chapter, We find many of the Old Testament heroes and a synopsis of what God did through their lives because they believed in Him. And one of the stalwart characters on this list is the man Noah. And um The Bible tells us that we should understand Noah because the Bible says, as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be in the coming of the Son of Man.
So as we study Noah's life, And we find out more about the culture in which he lived, we will learn much about what's going on today. The Bible says we can make these comparisons. As it was then, so it will be when the Son of Man returns.
So open your heart and open your Bible and let's get started on this study on the performance of faith, the man Noah. We are featuring during the month of November. A wonderful resource that I'm very excited about because, you know, I know sometimes we send you books that you read, and this book will send to you, and you will just not read it, you will use it because it is filled with scriptures organized topically around many of the questions that people have asked us, many of the questions people have asked you, questions that reside in your own heart. And the scriptures will bring you the answers and you will know where they are.
Sometimes we know there's an answer in the Bible, we just don't know where it is. I can't promise you we'll help you find all of them, but here in this book, you will find many answers to questions that you face each day, and it's really put together in an easy-to-understand and easy-to-use way. You get your copy of this book by sending a gift of any size to Turning Point during the month of November. Please ask for your copy of the book, Where to Go in the Bible, and we'll have it on its way to you before you know it. Thank you for your faithfulness.
Thank you for your generosity. Thank you for your. Your investment in this ministry, which brings the Word of God around the world to people just like you. We'll get started now with our lesson for today. Here is part one on the man Noah, the performance of faith, Hebrews 11, verse 7.
The heroes of history have always been in the minority. There is not a social, political, or religious privilege that we enjoy today that was not purchased for us by the blood and tears and patient suffering. of the minority. Great men, especially great men for God. have always been lonely men.
Looking back through the pages of the Bible. we discover that Noah built the ark alone. Abraham wandered and worshipped alone. Isaac offered himself on the altar alone. David faced Goliath alone.
Elijah stood before the 400 prophets of Baal alone. Daniel dined and prayed alone. Jeremiah prophesied and wept for Jerusalem alone. And I could go on through the New Testament and all the pages of the scripture. Just about everywhere you turn, you see men and women.
who believed in what they believed in so much that if everyone else turned against them, they stood strong for their faith. And I'm convinced that if we will be faithful, especially in these days in which you and I live. There will be times when we will know what it means. Yeah. And that was true of the hero we're going to discuss.
Who's mentioned in the 11th chapter of the book of Hebrews, the hall of faith? In verse seven, we read these words: By faith, Noah. Being divinely warned of things not yet seen, moved with godly fear. prepared an ark for the saving of his household. by which he condemned the world.
And became heir of the righteousness. which is according to faith.
Now, as in the previous messages on Abel and Enoch. If we're to understand the words of Hebrews 11:7, we will have to go back to the book of Genesis where the story of Noah is told. And we learn a great deal about this man's faith and his courage when we remember the story that is given to us in Genesis chapter 6. Here we learn, first of all, that Noah had faith that was expressed during a very wicked time in history, during a wicked generation. Listen to what the word of God says in Genesis chapter 6 and verse 5.
Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth. And that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and he was grieved in his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and the birds of the air. For I am sorry.
that I have made them. Noah and his family lived in that generation. They were among the dwindling number of true believers who stood for the things they knew were true. And according to Peter, who wrote about this in the New Testament. They were among a very small number of believers.
For this is what Peter wrote. Who formerly were disobedient when once the divine long-suffering waited in the days of Noah while the ark was being prepared. in which a few That is eight souls. were saved through water. According to St.
Peter, in that generation there were only eight people. Who stood? For the things that were right. The next time you feel alone, The next time you feel like you're isolated in your workplace. Just thank God that you're not one of eight against the world.
Nowhere in the Bible is there anything described like the generation in which Noah was asked. to serve. First of all, it was a world of rampant iniquity. Notice what it says in verse 5: The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth. That every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
There may be a verse of scripture someplace in the Bible that describes. A culture and its wickedness in more detail than that verse, but if there is, I don't know where it is. For here we are introduced to what theologians speak of as total depravity. This was a depraved culture. Notice, it was.
A time of great wickedness, which means it was intense. It was a time of Full-grown sin with no regard for right or for God. And we read that it affected every intent of man's heart, not just his heart, but every intent of his heart. And it was only evil. That means if man had a choice between right and wrong, he always chose the wrong.
It was not just sometimes evil, it was only evil. And it was continuously evil. It says, There was no lull in the steady storm of his sinning. He lived in sin all the time. His was a world of rampant iniquity, and the description of this wickedness in Genesis 6, 5 is very, very intense.
But notice secondly the divisions of this wickedness in the same verse. Before we look at the verse, let me explain something that most of us already know if we've had a course in psychology. You know that those who have studied humanity tell us that we're made up of three basic parts. We have our mental or intellectual part, we have our emotional part, and we have what they call the volitional part. Basically, it's your mind, your heart, and your will.
Those three things basically are the personality of a man. What is man? He is Intellect, emotion, and will. Look at the verse again and notice. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intent, that's his will, And thoughts, that's his mind, and heart, that's his emotion.
That all of man was corrupted in that day, that he was affected totally by the disease of sin.
Now, before we go any further, let me explain that total depravity is not what most people think it is.
Sometimes you hear people talk about somebody who's totally depraved. And what they mean by that is they're as bad as you can be. There's no way to be any badder than they are. But total depravity is not every man as evil as every other man. It is not every man being as evil as he can be.
It is not every man lacking any virtue. Total depravity simply says that man in his totality is affected by sin in every part of his life, in his mind, in his heart, and in his will. It would be foolish for us to say that every man is as evil as every other man. We have civil restraints and religious restraints that hold us back from what we might do.
So it is wrong to say that total depravity means everybody is as evil as they could possibly be. Thank God that's not true. But what it does teach is that none of us can escape the fact that through the sin of Adam and Eve in the garden, we have inherited an old nature, and that old nature affects us in every part of who we are. And we don't like to hear that. And it's not nice to say that.
And Pastor, I wish you wouldn't talk like that. But it's true, isn't it? And when we have moments of clarity in our own minds and experience, we know that to be true. Malcolm Muggridge, in one of his stories, illustrates this principle of our depravity in our mind, in our heart, and in our will. He said he was one time on assignment in India.
And he went to a river for a swim. And as he entered the water, his eyes fell on a woman who was bathing. And he had an impulse to go to her and seduce her, just as King David felt when he saw Bathsheba. Temptation was storming his mind. and he began swimming toward this woman.
The words of his wedding vows came to his mind. But he responded by going even faster. The voice of allurement called out, Stolen waters is sweet, and he swam more furiously still. But when he pulled up near the woman and she turned toward him, Muggridge saw that she was a leper. This creature grinned at me, he said, showing a toothless mask, and his first reaction was to despise her.
What a dirty, lecherous woman he thought. But then it crashed in on him that it was not the woman who was lecherous. but it was his own heart. This is precisely the teaching of the Bible about the moral and spiritual condition of men and women. Our hearts are not good by themselves.
Our hearts are depraved. The Bible says that we are sinful and deceitful above all things.
Now, there's two things we need to remember as we think about humanity and depravity. Number one, These are surprises to most people. Isn't it surprising how good some very bad men can be on occasion? But isn't it also surprising how bad some very good men can be on occasion? And the only difference is how we express this inward sickness that we have called sin.
The Bible says that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.
Now, I've discovered in reading the Bible that the Bible is full of illustrations. There are good sinners and bad sinners. The story of the prodigal son, the older brother is a good sinner, the younger brother is a bad sinner. The publican and the Pharisee, there's a good sinner and a bad sinner. The rich man and Lazarus, there's a good sinner and a bad sinner.
That's very interesting as you go through the New Testament and you read the New Testament, you discover that the New Testament is filled with illustrations of good sinners and bad sinners. But let me tell you something: when you get right down to it, there's only one kind of sinner, and that's a sinner-sinner, right? And we're all sinful, the Bible says. and we're capable of things that really surprise us on occasion. And the Bible says that in Noah's generation, in the time when he lived, The world was a world of rampant iniquity.
And it was also a world of riotous violence. Genesis 6 says, the earth was corrupt before God, the earth was filled with violence. Should we be surprised that when sin takes control in the lives of people, that violence is the result? Lust An unbridled desire. Causes people to do things you would never believe, and ultimately, it involves violence.
Murderous assaults were bathing the world of Noah's day in blood, and nowhere was there immunity from this. It was a world that had gone crazy and was functioning with wild violence.
Now, the Bible says that that generation in which Noah was placed, was the most evil generation of all time. Take everything that you're upset about in this world in which we live and multiply it a hundred times over, and you probably haven't approached what it was like for Noah. I mean, it was a bad time in the world when Noah came on the scene. The worst part of it wasn't the iniquity or even the violence. The worst part of it was the indifference these people had to anything Relating to good and to God.
Do you know the Lord Jesus made a comment about this story in the New Testament in the book of Matthew? Did you know that? He files a little report on Noah in Matthew chapter 24 and verses 37 through 39. And I want to read this report. These are the words of Jesus, and he mentions Noah in his words.
He says, But as the days of Noah were, So also will the coming of the Son of Man be. Four. As in the days of Noah before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage until the day Noah entered the ark and did not know until the flood came and took them all away.
So also will it be in the coming of the Son of Man. You've probably read that verse, and you more than likely have heard a pastor speak on it because it's a very famous portion of scripture. Usually, the message comes across something like this: Can you imagine how bad it was in Noah's Day?
Now, I'm going to be a little facetious here. Do you know what they were doing in the days before the flood? They were eating. And they were drinking. And they were marrying and they were giving in marriage.
How awful can you get? Has nothing to do with evil. We've already covered that. We know this was an evil generation. What Jesus was saying was that the people of Noah's generation were living like we've described, and they were just going on through life as business as usual.
They drank, they married, these are all things we routinely do in any culture. And they never paid any attention to anything that was happening in the world around them, especially the evil that was corrupting them and keeping them from hearing the message of hope that Noah was preaching. And isn't that kind of the way it is today? We've just become numb. To what's happening around us, we've become.
Uninvolved in the things of our culture. The slow drift downward from where we started when this nation was founded has just taken us in its culture drift, and we're just kind of floating downstream. And we seem to just go on doing what we do. We eat and we drink, we marry and we give in marriage. and we don't even seem to know what's happening.
That's the way it was when Noah came on the scene. No. Noah's faith was expressed in a wicked generation. Here's the second thing about Noah. Noah's faith was established on grace.
Notice what it says in Genesis 6:8. But Noah found grace. In the eyes of of the Lord. You know what it means to have the grace of God in your life. Grace is God's undeserved favor in your life.
Grace is totally undeserved. If you think you deserve grace, you haven't got it. Because grace is something God gives you, you don't deserve it at all. It is unmerited favor. Mercy is just the opposite.
Mercy is God withholding from you what you really do deserve. Grace is God giving you what you don't deserve. As Christians, we're the result of God's grace and His mercy, are we not? Hallelujah. For the grace of God.
Now, notice what it says about Noah living in this generation, this antediluvian generation of wickedness. The Bible says Noah. Found grace. I don't know how he found it. God gave it to him.
There's no explanation of how he found it, but if you want to know the secret to Noah, here it is: he found grace. The unmerited favor of God was extended to Noah, and Noah became the man that he was. He didn't deserve grace because of his good works. If that were true, he couldn't have had grace. For grace doesn't come to those who earn it.
Grace is the result of God's arbitrary bestowal upon his children of that which we don't deserve. Noah became a good man because of God's grace. He didn't become a good man and then receive God's grace. The Bible puts it this way for all of us. For by grace you are saved through faith.
What's the rest of it? That not of yourselves. It's a gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast.
So we all have something in common with Noah today. If we're Christians, we have found grace. God has given us His amazing grace.
Now We look at Noah in this generation as God's man. He's there not because he received anything from his parents. Remember, his grandfather was Methuselah, his father was Lamech. both of whom seem to have been somewhat godly people. But how many of you know God doesn't have any grandchildren?
He just has children. You don't get to go to heaven because you were born into the family of good people. You go to heaven only because you have a relationship with God. You can't become a Christian because your parents are Christians. And Noah wasn't a man of grace because he had godly parents and grandparents.
Grace is unmerited favor. There was nothing Noah could have done to earn it. Do you know, we talk about grace, we sing about it, some of our great hymns: amazing grace, marvelous grace of our loving Lord. But I wonder sometimes if we really do understand it. Because you know what we hear as we hang out with the people who don't know Christ?
In so many words, they say, you know, Christians are some of the most graceless people we've ever met. That's a terrible testimony. If you claim to be a Christian and you don't treat people with grace, After you've received the grace of God and you've found God's grace. I read a story that struck a tone in my heart because I actually know the man about whom the story is told. He experienced what it was to find grace in the eyes of another person.
Actually, he lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where I started out many years ago. He was a young politician in the little town of Grable. I lost track of what happened to him until George W. Bush became President, and I discovered that he had worked his way all the way up until ultimately he became the deputy director of the Office of Public Liaison under President George W. Bush.
He resigned, as many of you will remember as I tell the story, in 2008. when it was found out that he was guilty of plagiarism. Plagiarism is taking somebody else's work and taking credit for it yourself. Here's what he said happened. In my time in the White House, I was becoming a very prideful person.
This pride and vanity extended to plagiarizing columns for my hometown newspaper. In other words, he was sending columns back to his hometown. Acting like these were his words, but they weren't his words. He had stolen these words from somebody else, and they found out what he was doing. He said, one morning I came to work at the White House, and when I opened my email, I found a reporter asking whether this was true, that I had plagiarized these columns.
And I literally fell to the side of my desk and I prayed, Oh God, oh God. I knew right away that the world as I had known it was over on that day. By return mail, he said, I told the reporter that it was entirely true, that I was guilty as charged. I had no one to blame but myself, so I resigned from the White House that day, and this was on a Friday. He said, on Monday, I came back to the White House to begin clearing out my desk and taking the pictures off the walls, and I received a call from Josh Bolton, the chief of staff, and he said he wanted to see me.
So I presume that would be the proverbial woodshed experience, which I thoroughly deserved. But the first thing he asked when I walked into his office was, How are your wife and boys doing? Then he extended to me his forgiveness, and I was genuinely shocked and deeply moved by this. And before I departed his office, he said, Oh, by the way, the boss wants to see you. And that could only have meant one person, the president.
He said, I expected other people to be in the President's office when I showed up there the next day, but when I got to the old office, the only other person there was the executive assistant. And I thought I must have come on the wrong day, but the president called me in. I thought, this is going to be really bad. I went in and I closed the door. I turned to him to apologize, but I barely got the words out before he looked me in the eyes and he said, Tim, I forgive you.
To say I was stunned would be an understatement. I tried again to apologize, but he wouldn't let me. He said, Tim, I've known grace and mercy in my life. I'm extending it to you. You're forgiven.
I said, you should have thrown me out into Pennsylvania Avenue, Mr. President. He said, My friend, you're forgiven. We can talk about all of this, or we can talk about the last eight years and what you've done for this administration. As I turned to head out, he said, I want you to bring your wife and your boys here so I can tell them what a great job.
You have done. Here's one man showing grace to another man.
Now, let me say something to you folks. I don't want you to miss this point. To be the recipient of grace. is one of the most defining moments in anyone's life. You know, we like to give grace.
But it's wonderful to receive it, too. And some of us are built in such a way that we'd be more comfortable distributing grace than receiving it. But the Bible speaks a lot about the reception of grace. And the Bible says Noah found grace. And uh wow.
That's a wonderful truth. We'll have more of his life tomorrow here on Turning Point. I hope you'll join us at the same time on this wonderful station as we open the Bible together. I have been taking some time in these last broadcasts to just say hello to our wonderful friends in Canada. You know, Canada can sometimes be forgotten.
They sort of ride along with us in what we do here in the United States. But there are many wonderful, wonderful, godly people who live in Canada that we have gotten to know.
Some of them serve on our board there. And when you are in Canada and you give money to Turning Point, it goes to Turning Point Canada. to help us. with the ministry we have there to you and we're so thankful for that. Have a great day.
We'll see you next time. For more information on Dr. Jeremiah's series, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Faith, visit our website where we also offer two free ways to help you stay connected, our monthly Turning Points magazine and our daily email devotional. Sign up today at davidjeremiah.org slash radio. That's davidjeremiah.org slash radio or call us at 800-947-1993.
Ask for your copy of David's newly updated scripture reference guide, Where to Go in the Bible When. It's packed with biblical answers and it's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also purchase the Jeremiah Study Bible in the English Standard New International and New King James Versions, available in a variety of handsome and resilient cover options. Get all the details when you visit our website davidjeremiah.org slash radio. This is David Michael Jeremiah.
Join us tomorrow as we continue the series Ordinary People: Extraordinary Faith on Turning Point.
