Fleeing the City of Destruction

He had a reverent heart in a wicked world. And I want you to keep in mind that the staggering fact, the number of people who are following the standard of God, who are agreeing with the gospel by this prophet of God for relationships and marriage and morality and ethics and integrity has dwindled down to one family. Out of everybody, one family will get on the ark and the whole world is invited. Imagine a situation where on the entire earth only one family loved God. What would the world be like if there was absolutely no godly influence except for just one family? Imagine the wickedness. Now, put yourself in the shoes of that family.

What would life be like for them? To be the only voice for God in the whole earth. Well, that was the reality for Noah and his family. While building the ark, Noah also tried to proclaim the truth.

This is wisdom for the heart. And as Stephen continues through his series from Hebrews 11, we come today to the life of Noah. As we begin, I want to give you two principles that come directly from the life and testimony of Noah. First of all, Noah is going to demonstrate to us the principle that faith is personal profession in the midst of unbelief.

Now, so often we rush kind of to the dramatic part of the story, and oftentimes we think, yeah, we already knew it anyway. Well, let's slow it down a little bit and look at the setting here because that's exactly what the writer of Hebrews gives to us. Look at verse 7 of chapter 11. He records by faith Noah being warned by God about things not seen.

Stop for a moment. One of those unseen things is this coming cataclysm, this coming judgment upon an incredibly wicked world. You study the times of Noah and discover that demon possessed men have corrupted the godly line of Seth, I believe, with a cult-driven, sexually obsessed violence and wickedness. The heroes of Noah's generation are going to be admired because of their strength and their power and their viciousness and their wicked domination over others. In fact, the testimony of Noah's generation is given to us, and we'll turn there in a moment, but just by way of introduction, here's what it says. Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and look at how he covers every loophole, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually, as if to say they never had a pure thought ever.

Just how bad is it? Well, if you look at the analogy of Scripture and what it says about the days just before the next judgment, which will be fire, not water, Peter tells us, there are these similarities. There's a preoccupation with temporary matters, Luke 17.

There's a rapid advancement in technology, Genesis 4. Interests are bound up only in materialism, Luke 17. There's an inordinate devotion to pleasure and entertainment, Genesis 4.21. There's no concern for God in either belief or conduct, 2 Peter 2.5. There's a total disregard for the marriage covenant, Genesis 4.19.

There's a rejection of the authority of God's Word, 1 Peter 3.19. There's a population explosion, Genesis 6.1. There's widespread violence, and the value of human life plunges, Genesis 4.23. Evil runs rampant. In the days of Noah leading up to the flood, in the days leading up to that next cataclysm of fire, according to Old and New Testament analogies, Genesis 6.5, immorality, vice, corruption become the norm. They become the normal patterns of human relationships.

This is how life is. These are the days of Noah, more and more like our days all the time, when even the most distorted sense of human relationship is applauded. You probably noticed in the newspapers and magazines that a new show has broken new ground, they call that, broken new ground. It's a television series whose plot revolves around a homosexual couple who NBC advertises on his website—I went to see what they said about it—as, quote, a committed, loving partnership that has everything but one thing, a baby. So the plot revolves around using a single mom as a surrogate mother so they can have their baby. And the media world is all aflutter over this, all filled with approval and accolade and praise.

I read one reporter saying, you know, predicting Emmys in the future by the truckload. It's no secret that our world is eager and ready to applaud anybody who breaks new ground. And all that means, it's tantamount to saying, breaks up ground established by our Creator God, which makes it all the more remarkable when you think about the days of Noah, because right in the middle of this kind of evil, this kind of debauchery is this incredible testimony. Moses records in the middle of Genesis, chapter 6 and verse 9, Noah walked with God. Like Pilgrim in Pilgrim's Progress, later called Christian, he's the only man willing to believe that sin is going to encounter the coming judgment of God unless you escape through the wicker gate and by way of the cross, which is a picture of the ark. What you have in the middle of the darkness of this culture is one shining flickering candle.

It's a man who, so to speak, has his fingers in his ears. You see, faith is personal profession in the midst of unbelief. Noah's generation would have their list of heroes. Noah wouldn't be one of them. Men of renown, they're called in Genesis 6, verse 4.

Men that would win the Emmys of his day. So early on, you discover in Noah that living faith is more interested in the approval of God than in the applause of mankind. You want to talk about a man walking to the beat of a different drummer, it is this man. Noah is the man. Secondly, faith is personal piety in the midst of uncertainty. Now in verse 7 of Hebrews 11, you'll notice we're given Noah's response of faith. By faith, Noah being warned by God about things not yet seen. Now notice, in reverence prepared an ark for the salvation of his household. He had every reason to believe others would come too.

It ended up only being his own home. By or in reverence prepared an ark. The word for reverence can be translated holy fear. This isn't a word that means that Noah was afraid of God. It means as one author noted that he had, the Puritans would love this word, he had sweet reverence for God. This is a word that refers to devotional awe of God. He had a reverent heart in a wicked world. That's what he had. And I want you to keep in mind that the staggering fact, the number of people who are following the standard of God, who are agreeing with the gospel by this prophet of God for relationships and marriage and morality and ethics and integrity has dwindled down to one family.

Keep that in mind. Out of everybody, one family. One family will get on the ark and the whole world is invited. I want you to start digging into the biography of Noah in the passages given to us. You discover that Noah was not only given the disclosure of God's judgment, he was given the details of God's judgment. And Genesis chapter 6 fills in the details.

So let me invite you there for the remainder of our time. Keep in mind that Genesis chapter 6 represents 120 years. That's how long we've got in this one chapter.

It won't take quite that long to get through it, but that's how long it represents. The reason I've entitled this principle of faith piety in the midst of uncertainty is simply because everything that God is about to command Noah to accomplish was entirely unknown to Noah. In other words, he's going to be asked to do things that he has absolutely no experience in doing. God is going to use a farmer to build the biggest boat known to mankind. More than likely, he has never built a boat before.

He has certainly not built one this large. It's going to weigh over 18,000 tons and sit in his back pasture. Now I want you to notice verse 13. Then God said to Noah, the end of all flesh has come before me.

That is the summary of lifestyle. The earth is filled with violence. Behold, I'm going to destroy them with the earth. Make for yourself an ark of gopher wood. You shall make the ark with rooms, but cover it inside and out with pitch.

Now God provides the dimensions. Let's just skip past that for a moment and look at verse 17. Behold, I am bringing the flood of water upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from under heaven. Everything that is on the earth shall perish. Now, based on a face value understanding of God's instructions to Noah here, the flood is going to recover the entire earth and kill everything that breathes, which of course, among other things, lets us know that marine life will survive outside the ark.

According to these dimensions, the ark is going to be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and four stories high. That's a big canoe. Now since this is football season, in fact, how many of you guys pulled yourself away from the television to come to church tonight? Let me see your hand. I think that is outstanding.

That's wonderful. So let me think in terms of a football game with you. Think in terms of this. This ark will be nearly two football fields long, nearly one football field wide, and it'll reach up to the nosebleed section. Four stories up. The total deck would be about 96,000 square feet, and the volume, total volume, there are actually three decks built in the inside of this ark, there would be 1.3 million cubic feet. Naval engineers have studied this design and believe it to be one of the most stable floating devices known to man. Now keep in mind, this doesn't look like the Queen Mary or some freighter or some Titanic-type boat. It's actually more a flat-bottomed barge. It was not designed to move through the water. It was simply designed to float on top of it.

And that gives you a good idea. This is a gigantic barge with thousands of built-in compartments, sufficient to carry two of every species of air-breathing animal in the world. In fact, based on measurements given in the number of land species cataloged, today half the deck space would not even have been needed, which means that there was room in the ark for thousands of people. People that I'm sure Noah fully expected to come on board and join him as they escape the city of destruction and the coming wrath of God. One more comment on the design specs of this barge, you find nowhere in Scripture a reference to oars, sails, an anchor, a captain's wheel, or even a rudder. God will be in charge of all of that. God will do the driving, so to speak. He will be the captain of the vessel, just as he captains the vessel of our salvation today. We're not, by our own ingenuity, steering our way in. We're in Christ, the ark. It is God's design, and we're safe.

God's going to be in charge of all of this. Now, there are a number of objections. I've cataloged a few of them. Some would suggest that since there are more than a million insect species, you know, what about them? Well, if they came on board, they would have plenty of room in these compartments given the small spaces they would have required. However, in chapter 7, we're told that the animals on board were land animals who breathed through nasal passages.

Several creationists have pointed out that insects do not breathe through nostrils but through tiny pores or trachea in their exterior skeleton. They would have been able to survive on mats of vegetation, trees, debris, just as they have been seen to do or survived during times of modern flooding. Suppose that you could get all 35,000 air-breathing animal species on board. In pairs, now you're talking about 70,000 animals.

How in the world do you take care of 70,000 animals for one year? Which is exactly how long Noah and his family are going to float in this barge. Well, the key word appears in Genesis 6 at verse 14, where he's told or were informed that each deck is going to be subdivided into rooms. In the Hebrew language, you could translate that compartment. You could even, as one Hebrew scholar translated it, you could translate it nests. In other words, Noah made nests throughout the ark for the animals.

Now, we're not told what happened during this year-long cruise. It isn't too hard to imagine that God, as one author suggested, supernaturally imposed on these animals a year-long hibernation. That would answer a lot of questions, wouldn't it? It seems more than likely that Noah and his family would not have been able to feed 70,000 animals once or twice a day, much less keep that elephant from stampeding at the sight of that mouse or whatever. It seems likely to me that God may very well have put them into a restful sleep so that they would not have been traumatized by the chaos and the upheaval that carried this ark as the earth opened and torrents of water surged upward.

By the way, is that a stretch of our imagination? You read the Bible and you discover that God has done a lot of different things with animals against their instincts, imposing upon them his purpose and divine will. He supernaturally shut the mouths of lions that would instinctively had a prophet for dinner, right?

Daniel 6. He commanded birds to go against their instinct and not swallow that bread but deliver it to Elijah, 1 Kings 17. He commissioned, literally he appointed a whale to go swallow another prophet and then three days later lose his appetite, spit him back out, right? He had one fish keep a coin in its mouth so that Peter could catch it and with that coin go pay his taxes, which makes me want to go fishing every time I read that story, Matthew 17. God even changed the mental and vocal capacities of a donkey, allowing it to carry on a conversation with a rather slow prophet.

Numbers 22. If God can cause animals to deliver food and carry on a conversation and swallow a prophet and not eat a prophet, could he cause animals to sleep? There's another piece of evidence that animals were acting somewhat differently during this year on board. It would be only after the animals that left the ark that God would command the animals to breed and multiply, chapter 8 and verse 17. We have every indication that they entered in pairs and they left, how?

In pairs. There weren't 300 rabbits coming down that gang playing at the end of a year. In other words, God at that point when they left removed that supernatural restriction over their normal instincts, which would have caused these animals to mate and multiply if they had been awake and normally functioning during this year long stay. One commentator pointed out that although Noah was told, you might notice in chapter 6 and verse 21, to bring in food for all the animals, that food may very well have been enough for one meal at the end of the journey to give these animals one good meal as they awakened and departed to find their way down the mountain.

Here's what we do know and we can observe. God definitely altered the normal patterns of thousands of animals so they did what? They left their natural habitat and they did something against their natural instincts and they come walking in pairs, eventually walking toward this huge imposing building with people around it and they walk up the gang plank in pairs and obey orders no doubt divinely directed to go to their nest among thousands of others.

How does that happen? I mean something had to happen to get these animals to cooperate. I can't get my one dog to sit and to stay. She does not listen to me and she knows me.

I think she knows me. In fact, the only way I can get her in the backyard sometimes back in the pen is to bribe her with a piece of cheese. That's the kind of control I've got over the dog I own. God is obviously doing some rather miraculous things here to not only make these animals arrive but to behave around people they don't know. Have you ever taken your dog or cat to the vet?

I mean how do they act? You're taking your dog there to get fixed and your cat to put to sleep and how do they act when they see these other animals? I don't know about you but my dog just gets all nervous.

The last thing I could ever do is put her down and expect her to cooperate with even the other animals. Are you kidding? You've got 70,000 animals arriving. We're not even to the miracle yet.

This is enough to cause us to take note. They're walking up this ramp two by two. It's funny I read an illustration of this very issue recently. A film producer in Italy was attempting to depict the story of the animals and the ark. A lot of time and effort was expended in training just a few zoo animals to walk two by two up a ramp into a model of the ark. When time came for filming, a water buffalo got spooked, charged up the gangway, crashed through the set and ran away.

They never caught him. That's what animals do. That's what they do. We have this field out in our backyard and they keep heifers and there's a bull and about 15 heifers and they calve. They have the cutest calves. There's one mother, one heifer with her calf newly born out by the fence yesterday. So I walked out there just talking and immediately as soon as I stepped up into the natural area, that mother, she began to walk away and she had her body between me and her little calf and I was nice and kind. She wasn't paying me any attention. I thought it was Sunday morning all over again. Just walked away.

How in the world am I going to control? How is Noah? Don't assume for instance that he's thinking as God gives him the details, this is no problem.

What experience does he have with elephants? God is asking Noah to believe and obey in spite of a thousand obstacles that he would have had. No doubt he is inundated with his own thoughts of inabilities and in experiences that must have flooded his mind. The remarkable principle of faith operated not only in his heart but it controlled his life.

He's going to do this. Faith is personal profession in the midst of unbelief. Faith is personal piety, reverential awe in the midst of uncertainty.

And so he's going to press on. God did not choose Noah because Noah knew how to build boats and handle elephants. The only qualification Noah possessed was that Noah walked with God. Noah walked with God. And God would prepare Noah for everything else. Noah's story is the same story lived out by every man or woman of faith.

Oh sure, the circumstances are different. But if you're willing to walk with God by faith, your abilities are not what's important. God delights in working through people who trust him completely. We're glad you joined us today here on Wisdom for the Heart with Stephen Davey. The lesson you just heard is called Fleeing the City of Destruction. This is lesson number five in Stephen's series through Hebrews 11 entitled Heroes. If you haven't seen it yet, I encourage you to install the Wisdom International app on your phone or tablet. This app is designed to make biblical teaching more accessible, allowing you to take Stephen Davey's in-depth Bible teaching wherever you go. Whether you're at home, commuting or traveling, you can stay connected to the wisdom journey and wisdom for the heart, ensuring that God's word is always at your fingertips. One of the greatest benefits of the app is that it gives you access to Stephen's entire teaching library, covering four decades of sermons all in one place. That means you can listen to verse by verse exposition through entire books of the Bible, gaining a deeper understanding of God's word from Genesis to Revelation. Whether you prefer listening to a sermon, reading a full manuscript or following along with daily devotionals, you'll find it all in the app.

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