Hello, my “Walking with Jesus” friends,
All of us have probably entered into significant agreements which required careful thought and serious commitment. As God wrote the “Grand Narrative” of His story with our human race, on occasion God has entered into Covenants with certain people who in that moment represented all of humanity. Genesis 9 is one of those Covenants and Noah was the man with whom God made this forever Covenant. This Covenant is a complex one with several important facets and they all affect you and me, so let’s take a closer look.
First is the God given privilege of reproduction, procreation to continue the human race generation after generation.
Genesis 9:1 reports this very shortly after Noah and his family disembarked from the Ark: “Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, ‘be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth.” At that moment Noah had three sons, and they had faithfully helped their father construct the ark and manage the hundreds of animals with whom they survived the great flood. Now these four men and their wives are given by God the mandate to initiate the repopulation of the earth and do so responsibly. How so? We’ll look at that more closely over the next few days.
Secondly, God gave Noah and his family the assurance that God would supply all they, and all the people who came from them, would need for living!
God said: “Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it.” (Gen. 9:2-4) All living things that God created on our planet, both animals and plants, are available to humanity for sustaining our lives.
But God insists that we manage His creation with care! In the same way that God had first given Adam great freedom in the Garden of Eden, with accountability, so God does it again here with Noah. It’s a fundamental life principle for the human race. With God given freedom comes God given responsibility and accountability. In fact God next said to Noah: “For your lifeblood I will demand an accounting…” (Gen. 9:5,6) This fundamental principle of life would be significantly expanded by God as He continued to write His Grand Narrative story, giving to our humanity more and more understanding of God and God’s design for how human life is to be lived.
Third, God made a covenant with Noah to never again flood the earth to destroy life.
“God said to Noah and to his sons with him: I now establish My covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you…Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.“ (Gen. 9:8-11) God’s promise is clear and specific, isn’t it? While we know floods happen in many places in our world, and some are severe, they are limited in scope and duration. Humanity need not fear that God will ever again unleash a global flood that will destroy all life. Holy God is a God of life not death, a God committed to protecting life and providing for life.
The dark kingdom, conversely, is a kingdom of death and destruction. God’s people seek to honor God by protecting life; people living under the influence of the kingdom of darkness promote death, even for defenseless infants still in the womb!
In order that every generation through all time would be reminded of God’s covenant with Noah, God did something remarkable: “God said, This is the sign of this covenant I am making between Me and you and every living creature…a covenant for all generations to come: I have set My rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of this covenant between Me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember My covenant…Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life.” (Gen. 9:12-16)
Apparently there had never been a rainbow seen by any living human being BEFORE the great flood. It was only after the flood and while God was making this Covenant with Noah, that God created the unique atmospheric circumstances which produce the rainbow!
Do we now understand the God given significance of a God made rainbow in the sky? Do you see how God uses the rainbow to call all humanity, everywhere in the world, to consider God’s power as seen in the flood; and God’s love, grace and mercy as seen in His covenant to never again send a global flood?
But friends we must understand that just as the serpent in the garden distorted God’s promise to Adam and Eve about the fruit trees in the garden of Eden, so the dark kingdom has powerfully influenced many people to distort the sacred, God given significance of the rainbow to mean something entirely different from Noah’s Covenant, right? And that distorted ‘pride’ significance, as you know, makes a mockery of God and His design for human sexuality and procreation since humans are made in God’s image designed for holy reproduction.
Genesis chapter 10 gives to us a detail of the family tree which were the descendants of Noah and his three sons. Over the next centuries the human population grew and spread out all across the fertile earth. From one family of eight adults who had survived the great flood, soon hundreds of people and then thousands and millions were repopulating our planet.
Every person on earth has been born into the shadow cast by God’s destructive response to the wickedness of our world in Noah’s day. But look around your part of the world, my friends. How different is it from what it was like in Noah’s day?
Did you know there will be both a full accounting for every person standing before God (Heb. 4:13) and eventually a total destruction of our planet earth by God? 2 Peter 3:10 says: “the heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare. Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives, as you look forward to the day of God… We are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.” (2 Peter 3:8-13) Peter is describing the end of God’s Grand Narrative. Our generation is closer to that cataclysmic conclusion to God’s story than any generation before us!
Tomorrow we’ll look at the next remarkable event in God’s Grand Narrative, the Tower of Babel. For today, as we worship with this great song, what lessons do you sense God wants us to learn today about why, how and what the Great Flood was all about in Noah’s day?
Are you living in a fresh sense of God’s grace as Noah and his family were the day they stepped out of that Ark? Let’s worship together and I’ll meet you back here again tomorrow…
Today’s Scripture: Genesis 9, 10.
Choose below to read or listen.
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Genesis 10
Bible images provided with attribution to www.LumoProject.com.
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Pastor Doug Anderson
“Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, with our eyes fixed on Jesus…” (Heb. 12:1,2)
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