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A NEW BEGINNING Genesis 8-11 Key Verse: 9:1 "Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth." Last week, we learned that God punished human with Great Flood. It rained on and on until all the world went under the water. Hurricane, Typhoon, and cyclone drove heavy rain from the water onto the land where people lived in complacence, believing and saying, "there is no flood judgement, that's nonsense." The family of Noah who believe the God of judgement were saved; the others who despised God's warning of Great Flood were swept away. Water is necessary for thirsty people. But too much water is a disaster, as you see during the rainy season here in Korea. If you see the water rush over the fields and the houses, you can easily understand how tremendous God's judgement of Great Flood was! God is a God of judgement. As God judged with water, he will surely judge all men with fire on the last day. The Bible tells us clearly about "Day of the Lord." Therefore, we must be alarmed by the word of God and live in the hope of Jesus' second coming. Today, we are going to study "A New Beginning After the Flood." God judged the world in his wrath against human evil thoughts and sinful lives, but he wanted to do the work of restoring. He began his work through Noah and his family who made the ark for salvation. In the flood, every living things that moved on the earth perished. Only Noah and his family were left. 1. God remembered Noah (Chapter 8) God didn't sweep away all living things whimsically or haphazardly or aimlessly. He wanted to begin a new work of salvation. He couldn't do anything with corrupt people of the corrupt world in the time of Noah. God began his new work through one person who obeyed. Before God destroyed the world by the flood, he made a covenant with Noah to preserve their lives. He made a covenant of salvation. Look at 8:1. God remembered Noah. God remembered the covenant he made with Noah. God sent a wind over the earth. Then the water receded. The land began to rise up gradually. The ark found a resting place on the top of Mount Ararat. Forty days after the peaks of mountains came up, Noah sent out a raven. But the raven was not faithful. As you know, a raven easily forget what it should do. When you eat raven's meat, you will be forgetful like a raven does. The raven was sent out, but it flew back and forth, forgetting his mission. So Noah chose a dove as a replacement. It was faithful. Noah gave it a commission to gather information about lands. The name of the operation was "Mission Impossible". The dove flew burning with a sense of mission. It could find no dry place to set its feet, so it came back. A week later, the dove was sent out again. It returned with a green olive leaf. It was a sign of a new beginning and a sign of hope. How amazing! Noah was so excited that he couldn't wait to get out. He couldn't wait to see a new world. His heart leapt up when he imagined landing on the dry land like Neil Armstrong on the Moon. He came up with many things to do when he got out of the ark. He imagined playing soccer with AFC members in a large grass field. He imagined going on a family picnic with delicious Kimbap lunch box to Ararat mountain. He must have wanted to get out of the ark immediately. But he waited. He waited until God gave him a direction. As he had always done, he prayed for God to give him a new promise. God wasn't in a hurry as Noah was. It took a year and ten days for Noah and his family to get out of the ark. God waited until he provided the best place for Noah's family to settle down. Sometimes God wants us to wait until he gives us best. Patience is important in our life of faith. When Noah got out of the ark, what did he do first? Did he play soccer? Did he go on a picnic to Ararat mountain? No. Look at verse 20. He built an altar to the Lord and worship him. He took some of all the clean animals and clean birds and sacrificed burnt offering on the altar. He offered an animal sacrifice, a blood offering. This showed his confession of being a sinful man before God and his desire to be forgiven by God's grace. Noah gave thanks to God who saved him from the horrible judgement of flood. He knew that he was not worthy of being saved. He knew well that only by his grace he was spared as a remnant for his redemptive history. He was thankful to God who remembered him and his family. Thanksgiving is very important. Feeling thankful is not enough. As you know well, man is forgetful. When they are in need, they cried for help. But when their problems are settled down, they stay in complacence. When a person is in need of money, he goes around everywhere for money. But when he gets money he needs, he doesn't try hard to pay back money. Rather, he may feel like running away. Therefore, thanksgiving must accompany our action. Let's give our thanks with songs, praises, prayer, dramas, dancing, joyful shouts, quick response of "Amen" and so on. Let's start a day with a prayer of thanks and finish with a prayer of thanks. Look at verse 21. The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma. He was pleased when Noah built an altar of thanksgiving. Then God said in his heart. "Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done." God decided to never again destroy all living creatures. Was it because Noah was righteous? Or was it because the world returned to God because of his formidable judgement of flood? Not at all. God realized that every inclination of man's heart is evil from childhood. God realized that man's fundamental sin problem had not been solved by the flood. Here, we can learn that sin problem cannot be solved by punishment. However hard his judgement is, man's sin is still in their heart. God knew this very well. So God made a decision. "Never again will I curse the ground because of man ...." God set a new plan of salvation. He chose to do a new beginning --the perfect sacrifice of redemption, the Lamb of God--our Lord Jesus Christ. Verse 22 continues, "As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease." God promised to preserve the order of the seasons and days as long as the earth remains. 2. The new beginning (9:1-17) Look at 9:1. ""Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, 'Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth." This command was repeated in 8:17 and 9:7 as well. God commanded Noah to bring out all the living creatures so that they might multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it. God is a God of new beginnings. This command is exactly the same words as in Genesis 1. Do you remember back to Genesis 1? "God created humans in his image, he blessed them and said to them ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’" How amazing God's promise is! He made the same promise to fallen people as to Adam. God is really a God of new beginnings! God is really a God of promise. God showed his mercy and grace again. For the sake of mankind, God established a new kind of creation order. There was no new command to "subdue and rule over the earth." Perhaps mankind was not able to do this in the chaotic world without creation order. Man couldn't live in the world where spiritual order was broken. Something had to be done. Look at 9:2. "The fear and dread of you will fall upon all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air, upon every creature that moves along the ground, and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hands." So God put fear and dread of mankind in all the animals. God protected mankind from animal's threats by making them afraid of people. God gave mankind another grace. That was the solution of food problem. God allowed man to eat delicious meat of animals. Wow! Imagine eating beef stake, Samgyeopsal, Sashimi, and double-burgers with thick double layers of meat between! God doesn't want us to be vegetarians. He wants us to eat enough meat to work hard for the glory of God. We say here in Korea as greetings like this: "Eat a lot." It is said that Missionary Samuel Lee taught American students to eat a lot and work hard. "Eat a lot and work hard" It is what God wants us to do. The world became like a jungle. Only the fittest have survived. Surviving in this extremely competitive society is not easy. This was the price of man's sin. But God made a way for mankind to survive in a hostile world by giving them animals as their food. But God warned people not to eat meat that has its lifeblood in it. God tells us how valuable human life is. We must respect for human life. The world is really competitive. They value pragmatism. Our life, our system, and even education and churches are going under the principals of competition and economy. Our kids are driven and tamed by pragmatism. Even President likes his government being called "Pragmatic government." What is pragmatism? It is pursuing money. Those who attach a pragmatic value to human life easily accept abortion, euthanasia, and eventually, genocide and murder. Look at 9:6. "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man." We must remember and teach our Bible students continually that man's life is valuable in itself－because man is created in the image of God. Look at 9:15. God made a covenant of life with mankind and with every living creature. He promised never again to destroy the earth by a flood, and he put his rainbow in the sky to remind himself and mankind of this promise. (15) God understood people's fear about the flood judgement. Every time it rained, they must have been in fear. Some people must have been afraid of dark clouds in the sky. So God gave them a rainbow as a sign. Now we aren't afraid of raining, because we look forward to a nice sunny day after the rain. The sunny day right after the rain stops is the most beautiful day. With the rainbow up in the sky, we are amazed at God's creation. When I visited the Niagara Falls in 2004, I saw a rainbow over the falls. Then we sang a praise to God. "O Lord my God! When I in awesome wonder Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made, I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed" The rainbow is a beautiful reminder of God's love for mankind, even sinful mankind. Rainbow symbolizes our Lord Jesus Christ. God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son Jesus for salvation. God gave his only son as a sign of his love. When we behold the cross－the sign of God's love, we are saved from eternal punishment. 3. Spiritual order in the family and community (18-28) Look at verse 20. Noah planted a vineyard and yielded a lot of grapes. He drank too much wine and got drunk. He must have been so joyful when he had first fruit from the soil. When he got drunk, his body became hot. While sleeping he took off his clothes. He slept naked in his tent. Here we can learn getting drunk is not good. It just makes people act ugly. Even though Noah was sincere and faithful, alcohol made him lose control. Then the youngest son Ham saw his father naked. He told his brother about it. He revealed his father's fault for fun. But the two older sons took a garment and walked in backward and covered his father's nakedness. They had respect for his father. When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him. He cursed Ham and his son Canaan, prophesying they would be the lowest of slaves to his brothers. Here we can learn that we must cover others' faults, especially God's servants' faults for spiritual order. We must restrain ourselves from finding fault with our seniors and Bible teachers. We must learn to show our respect to others even though we are in some situations we don't understand. Covering others' weak points is equivalent to Jesus' command, "Love one another." 4. Filling the earth － The Tower of Babel (10:1-11:32) Chapter 10 describes the spread of the descendants of Shem, Ham and Japheth. They spread out into their territories by clans and nations, each according to his own language. It looked like a simple fulfillment of God’s command, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” It looked like obedience. But Genesis 11 drops the bomb on us. It wasn't obedience. They weren't spreading. They were clustering. Look at 11:3. “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” Look at 11:4. “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” These two verses are summed up into four points. 1) They aim to build a city. 2) They aim to build a tower in the city that reaches to the heavens. 3) They aim to make a name for themselves. 4) They aim not to be dispersed over the whole earth. People tried to build a tower into the heavens to make a name for oneself. The city and tower are the outward expressions of the inward sins. The two sins are the love of praise. From this story, we can find people sinful nature: being praised. Sinful mankind find their joy being praised. But real joy is found when we know and praise our Lord God. Adam's sin has been replayed and replayed from generation to generation. Flood punishment couldn't solve man's sin problem. God wasn't pleased with human's arrogance. He could have swept them once again with another rush of great flood. But he didn't do that. Instead, God came down and shattered their arrogance and made their clustering impossible. He confused their language and split mankind into many peoples and languages. This was God's wisdom. God made it harder for man to communicate and thus to unite in an ungodly global community. Thousands of languages around the world and thousands of different peoples limit the global aspirations for arrogance and rebellion against God. We are in war with the ungodly world. The towers of human's arrogance are being built. The towers of human knowledge, science and technology are going up. Ungodly people are thinking of an utopia without God. They are thinking that they would reach to the heavens for their names to be known. They are challenging God's sovereignty. But they will fail, scatter, disperse, and finally they will be put to eternal destruction. God punished corrupt people with water. But the punishment was not the end. That was a new beginning of salvation. God had a great plan for world salvation. He would choose one person, Abraham, and make him a great nation－God's chosen people. God had a great vision of making the nation a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. God's redemptive history would be worked out through Abraham and his chosen people－down to Jesus Christ! Thus, from Jesus' cross and resurrection, through the work of the Holy Spirit, all people of all the world will be saved and blessed. I'd like you to anticipate a series of lectures about the ancestor of faith Abraham that will be released here in this service. May God bless us to continue Genesis study. May God help us to realize the God of new beginnings through us and be used in his eternal salvation work. |
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