Sermon

December 5, 2007
Midweek Advent #1
Genesis 9:8-17
Pastor Robert Raasch

God Keeps His Promise to Noah

Can you tell me, what does the season of Advent mean to you?  For me, Advent is a time of preparation.  It’s a time to prepare our hearts for some future events.  We prepare for the anniversary of Jesus’ first coming at Christmas, and more importantly, prepare for the reality of his second coming at the end of the world.  And what gives us a reason to believe in Jesus’ second coming?  Well, we believe it because God has promised that it would happen.  In fact, if you think about it, everything that a Christian believes about the future is ultimately based on a promise that God has made to us in his Word.  For example, you and I would have absolutely no reason to believe that Jesus is coming back to this world if he had not specifically said, “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me so that you also may be were I am” (John 14:3).  And you and I would have no reason to believe that our bodies will one day be raised from the dead if Jesus had not made the promise, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me will live even though he dies” (John 11:24).  Everything we believe about the future is based on a promise God has made us in his Word.  Our faith is built on God’s promises.
           
Well, you realize that that’s true not only for New Testament believers.  It’s also true of Old Testament believers—maybe even more so—because even more of God’s salvation history lay in front of them.  I mean, for you and me, much of God’s plan of salvation has already taken place.  Jesus’ life and death and resurrection are all historic events.  They’ve already been recorded in the pages of Scripture.  But for Old Testament believers, all those events were still in the future.  They were all promises that God had made to them.  That’s why for Old Testament believers, God’s promises were so important.  God’s promises were what the people had to hold on to.  Those promises revealed an awful lot about God and at the same time give to build their faith on, something to get them through the tough times in life.
           
In our midweek Advent services this year, we’re going to focus our attention on three such Old Testament promises.  We’ll see what these promises meant for the lives of those who lived before Christ, and what they mean for our lives today.  This morning/evening, we take up the theme:

God Keeps His Promises

We begin with: God’s Promise to Noah.  Our text picks up right after the flood waters have receded and Noah and his family are standing on dry ground.  We read, “Then God said to Noah and his sons with him, ‘I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendents.’” Now, maybe we’d better stop right there and ask, “Ok, what’s a covenant?”  Well, Webster’s dictionary defines a covenant with these words.  A covenant is “a binding and solemn agreement made by two or more individuals to do or keep from doing a specific thing.”  Or as someone else put it, a covenant is like a legal promise.  When you purchase your first car or make an offer on a house, you sign what amounts to a covenant.  You promise to pay such and such an amount and the other party promises to hand over the title to a certain piece of property.  You both sign the document, and maybe have a witness notarize it, validating that you both agree to the terms of the contract.

Well, back in Bible times, these kinds of covenants were very common.  Archeology has uncovered any number of different covenants.  And they all contain some basic characteristics.  Each covenant lists the parties involved, what was expected of each party and oftentimes, the sign to mark the ratification of the covenant, for example, maybe the parties would sit down to a meal together, or exchange gifts, or slaughter an animal (the implied message there being: if one or the other doesn’t keep his end of the bargain—that’s what’s going to happen to him!)

So now, let’s take that basic outline of a covenant and apply it to what God is saying to Noah here in our text.  First, who are the parties involved in this covenant?  Well, God says to Noah, “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you--the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you--every living creature on earth.”  In other words, this covenant is not just between God and Noah, or even between God and Noah’s descendants.  It’s between God and every living creature on the earth.  With those words, the Creator of the universe is not only making a promise to you and me, he’s making a promise to the little mouse that’s curled up in a ball out in your garage.  This covenant is between God and every living creature.

And what are the terms of this contract?  What is expected of each of the respective parties of this covenant?  Well, God comes right out and clearly says what he’s promising to do.  He says, “Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”  From those words, we learn two important things.  First, we learn that the flood that just ended was in fact, a global catastrophe.  It was not merely a larger-than-normal flood, as some Bible critics like to contend.  No, it was global.  It killed every land animal on the planet, except for those in the Ark.  And how do we know that?  Because God says, “Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood.”  In other words, God destroyed the world with a flood once—but he promising that he’ll never do it again.  And really, that’s the essence of this covenant, what’s sometimes called the Noaitic Covenant.  This is God’s promise that he will never destroy the whole earth by means of a flood.

You might say that that was God’s half of the covenant.  What was man’s half of the covenant?  In other words, what were Noah and his descendents expected to do to hold up their end of the bargain?  Well, that’s the peculiar thing about this covenant.  It’s not a two sided agreement.  It’s a one sided agreement.  It’s not bi-lateral;  it’s unilateral.  It’s simply God saying, “This is what I am going to do for you.  I’m not attaching any conditions to my promise.  I’m not saying, “if you do this, or when you do that, or if you don’t hold up your end of the bargain, then I’ll never send a flood.”  No rather, God says, in effect, “Purely out of my grace and mercy I will bind myself to this promise.”  And, as he says to Noah a little earlier, “Even though every inclination of man’s heart is evil all from childhood, still I will never destroy the world with a flood.” 

My friends, do you realize that of all the religions in the world, there is only one that features a God who makes that kind of open-ended, unconditional promise?  Only the God of the Bible, the God of free and faithful grace, the Great I AM, Jahweh—only the God of the Old and New Testaments says, “This is what I’m going to do for you.  In spite of what you’ve done to me, in spite of your wickedness, rebellion and sin, still I’m going to love you.  I’m going to care for you; I’m going to protect you.  And most importantly, I’m going to send a Savior for you.  Friends, think of all the one-sided promises, the gospel covenants that god has established throughout the Old Testament.  You have God making the promise in the Garden of Eden, “I’m going to send Somebody to crush the serpent’s head.”  Or God’s promise to Abram, “I will make your name great and from your descendents will come one who will be a blessing for all people.”  Or God’s promise to David, “One of your descendents will rule forever.”  All those are gospel promises.  They’re all promises that find their fulfillment in a Savior.  They are all promises that reveal God’s true nature as a gracious and compassionate God.

Now, I’ll grant you that God’s promise to Noah is not specifically a promise to send a Savior, but it certainly reveals God’s grace nevertheless.  I mean, think about it.  God had just destroyed the world because of mankind’s wickedness.  Do you think that after the flood everything was all better?  Do you think people stopped sinning after the flood?  Of course not.  The human race has always been and always will be sinful.  In fact, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that God has just as much right to destroy us as he did the generations in Noah’s day.  I mean, by nature every inclination of our hearts is still evil all the time.  Our hearts are still filled with jealousy and pride, lust and envy, bitterness and anger.  And yet, in spite of that, what has God promised?  He promised that he would never destroy us or our world by means of a flood. 

And what has kept God from wiping out the world as we know it?  The answer:  grace.  It is God’s undeserved love for sinners that has allowed this world to go on, uninterrupted so that God’s plan of salvation in Jesus Christ could be carried out, and so that all God’s elect would have time to come to know Jesus as Savior before the final day comes when God will destroy the entire world, not with water, but with fire.

And what will be the sign of God’s promise to graciously preserve the world until the end of time?  The promise is the rainbow.  How does God put it here in our text?  “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come:  I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the 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 between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life.”

Now, I should say that are a couple of ways to understand that rainbow.  There are some who believe that there were rainbows since the beginning of the world, and it’s only now that God was simply attaching a meaning to the rainbow.  Kind of like Jesus did with the signs of the end of the world.  Even though there have always been wars and rumors of wars, still in Matthew 24, Jesus tells his disciples that such events are now to be regarded as signs of the end.

There are others who believe that there actually was no such thing as a rainbow before the day of Noah.  If you remember that at the time of Adam and Eve, God used a mist to water the earth and that there had not yet been rain on the earth, if you remember that at the time of Noah, the flood gates of heaven were opened, it might well be that this was the first time that both rain water and sunlight reached the ground, so that there could be a rainbow visible to the human eye.

But now just for a minute, imagine the effect that that rainbow (and the accompanying promise) must have had on Noah and his children.  I mean they had just witnessed the absolute devastation caused by the floodwaters.  They had seen God’s fury unleashed on sinful man.  They realized that God had both the reason and the ability to do the same thing again.  In fact, every time it rained, done you think that a little shudder went down their spine?  Maybe they had a flashback of the destruction they saw.  And they were afraid—but there it was, in the sky, God’s sign, God’s pledge, a rainbow.

Actually, in the original language the word there is simply a “bow,” the same word that was used for an instrument of war, a battle bow.  It’s as if God has hung up his bow in the heaven, and he’s said, “No more destruction; the war is over; don’t be afraid.  Put your hearts at rest.  I’ve made you a promise—and I’ll never break it.”

Isn’t it something that the same sign that God had appear in the sky for Noah, he still has appear in the sky for us today?  And even though there are millions of people who probably see a rainbow only as something pretty or as an optical image created by the refraction of sunlight, you and I by the grace of God know that it’s far more than that.  It’s the sign of a promise that God has made to you and me.  A promise we don’t deserve, nor done anything to earn.  A promise like the promise of a Savior, the promise of God’s forgiveness, the promise that he had prepared a place in heaven for us.  All those promises are based 100% on God’s grace.

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