In the Beginning: And the Lord Shut Him In

Well, this morning we have two chapters of scripture to read. I've been prayerfully meditating about this, and I've decided since you're so well rested and you're not gonna fall asleep, that I'm gonna give you the morning off and I'm gonna read the passage and we're not gonna read it together.

Part of the reason for that is this is a narrative and it's such a rich narrative, such a beautiful story. We read passages of scripture together because we wanna illustrate that, hey, this isn't just for you. It's not just me speaking on behalf of God. This is God's word speaking to all of us and I need it too. But with this story, I just think we would lose something in the monotone kind of tone that we would read this together. So I wanna read this this morning.

We're picking up in our sermon series through Genesis. We're up to Genesis seven. We're gonna read all of seven and most of eight. This is God's word.

Then the Lord said to Noah, "Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you are righteous before me in this generation. Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and his mate, and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and his mate, and seven pairs of the birds of the heavens also, male and female, to keep their offspring alive on the face of all the earth. For in seven days, I will send rain on the earth, forty days and forty nights, and every living thing that I have made, I will blot out from the face of the ground."

And Noah did all that the Lord had commanded him. Noah was 600 years old when the floodwaters came on the earth, and Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives went with him into the ark to escape the waters of the flood. Of clean animals and of animals that are not clean and of the birds and of everything that creeps on the ground, two and two, male and female went into the ark with Noah as God had commanded Noah.

And after seven days, the waters of the flood came upon the earth. In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth and the windows of the heavens were opened and rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights. On the very same day, Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth and Noah's wife and the three wives of his sons with them entered the ark. They and every beast according to its kind and all the livestock according to their kinds and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth according to its kind and every bird according to its kind, every winged creature, they went into the ark with Noah two and two of all flesh in which there was the breath of life. And those that entered, male and female of all flesh, went in as God had commanded him and the Lord shut him in.

The flood continued forty days on the earth. The waters increased and bore up the ark and it rose high above the earth. The waters prevailed and increased greatly on the earth and the ark floated on the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered. The waters prevailed above the mountains covering them 15 cubits deep and all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, livestock, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth and all mankind. Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens. They were all blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left and those who were with him in the ark and the waters prevailed on the earth a hundred and fifty days.

But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the livestock that were with him in the ark and God made a wind blow over the earth and the water subsided. The fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed. The rain from the heavens was restrained and the waters receded from the earth continually. At the end of a hundred and fifty days, the waters had abated and in the seventh month on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest on the Mountains of Ararat. And the waters continued to abate until the tenth month and in the tenth month on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen.

At the end of forty days, Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made and sent forth a raven. He went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth. Then he sent forth a dove from him to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground. But the dove found no place to set her foot and she returned to him to the ark. For the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. So he put out his hand and took her and brought her into the ark with him. — Genesis 7:1-8:19

He waited another seven days and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark and the dove came back to him in the evening and behold in her mouth was a freshly plucked olive leaf. So Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth. Then he waited another seven days and sent forth the dove and she did not return to him anymore.

In the six hundred and first year in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried from off the earth And Noah removed the covering of the ark and look and behold, the face of the ground was dry. In the second month, on the twenty seventh day of the month, the earth had dried out. Then God said to Noah, go out from the ark, you and your wife and your sons and your sons' wives with you. Bring out with you every living thing that is with you, all flesh, birds, and animals, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, that they may swarm on the earth and be fruitful and multiply on the earth. So Noah went out and his sons and his wives and his sons' wives with him. Every beast, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves on the earth went out by families from the ark. This is god's word. That was a mouthful. Let's pray.

Lord god, we pray that you would enliven the story into our hearts that lord, we would see you clearly in this passage and that we would be encouraged and challenged by it. Lord, work miraculously through our time with your word this morning. Lord, enrich our lives. Make us more like Christ. We pray this in his name. Amen.

Well, I am excited to be preaching this passage. I have to admit when Jeff first assigned this passage to me, I was kind of like, wow, he's got these smaller chunks of this story at the beginning and the end and I have two chapters. This feels a little bit like, hey, I want to cover these parts and you cover everything in between. And as I've looked at this passage though, I've gotten really excited about preaching it. I was really excited about preaching it last week. I was telling some people, man, I can't wait to be preaching the whole story of Noah in one sermon. Seems like a lot, but I'm really excited about it.

And somebody, maybe it was you, Brian—I still don't know, was it you? It was you, okay. Brian comes up to me and says, well, he said, Are you going to do one of those dramatic monologues? Is that why you've been growing out your beard? And since you said that, Brian, I've been thinking about this past week. My pastor growing up on Easter and Christmas used to always do that. He would pick a character and then he'd read the passage and then he'd walk in there and then he'd come back out with a costume and he'd begin the monologue. I'm not doing that today. I'm not. It was tempting. It could have been fun. This would be a perfect passage to do that with, actually. The drama of this story is very compelling and it's one of the reasons why it's in every children's Bible and every child knows this story because it's a very fascinating story. But I don't want to do the dramatic presentation this morning so much as I want you to see yourself, not me in this story and I want you to see Christ in this story and not me.

And so I have a very simple outline for us this morning. It's a very traditional Presbyterian sermon: three points, alliterative as is right and proper, no costumes and drama, sorry. The points are this: the remnant, the reckoning, and the reboot. Easy to remember. The remnant, the reckoning, and the reboot.

The Remnant

So first, the remnant. Before we talk about the remnant, we need to talk about the rest—the rest of humanity, the rest of creation. The situation. As we've been building through Genesis, God has made this glorious creation, of course. Sin has entered the world and that's marred it. And there have been these two groups that as you follow the story of Genesis kind of trace the lines of Cain and Seth, right? Like one commentator calls it the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman.

The seed of the woman refers to the promise made to Eve—the promise of God's restoring blessing of this child that's coming that's going to crush the head of the serpent. That's the seed of the promise and that's the line we've traced. We've also traced the line of Cain—the seed of the serpent, the murderers, the killers, the deceivers, the liars. We've traced both of those lines.

And the reality is at this point in Genesis, the line of the serpent has become so prolific and so dominant over the earth that it threatens the very fabric of creation.

The text makes a point of calling them violent and corrupt. They have destroyed creation both in their violence and their corruption. They are essentially attacking the goodness of creation. They are against life, right? We saw that very clearly in Cain. They're against life—for violence, for death, against the beauty of creation. They're totally corrupting it.

And not only are they corrupting it—we talked about the common grace that was afforded to them, they're allowed to kind of hang out and because God is being patient with them, hoping that they would repent and turn—but they're threatening the line of the promise, right? The line of the woman. The only one left is Noah, and there's this violent, corrupt generation. They are so prolific that Noah's the only one left.

One commentator makes a point. He says that essentially, once the line of the serpent eliminated the common place for the line of the promise, once common place was removed, common grace was removed. Because God will not allow the promise to be destroyed. In the same way that he will not allow his creation to be destroyed.

God's Wrath and God's Grace

Now, there's a point that I want to make here because oftentimes people come to this narrative and they see a wrathful and vengeful God who's pouring out his wrath on creation. That's in here. As a response to sin, God is wrathful, okay? But primarily, what I want you to see first is that humanity is the one destroying creation originally in this text. And there's a very real sense in which the dynamic that's going on here is spoken of in Romans chapter one.

God gave them over to the sinful desires of their heart. — Romans 1

You have a humanity that is totally bent on corruption, totally bent on destruction, and God gives them over to the desires of their heart. Destruction is what you want. You want a world apart from me, apart from my promises, apart from trusting in me, apart from dependence upon me—this is what it looks like. God is unleashing essentially the very thing that they have by their actions asked for. He's hurrying along their destructive tendencies.

But rather than seeing a wrathful God, I hope you can see a gracious and loving God. Because he doesn't just pour out his wrath—he also preserves a remnant. The primary remnant that is spoken of in this passage is primarily one person. He's dominant through the text. That's Noah. Noah is the primary remnant. There's a secondary remnant: his family and all of the animals. They're all preserved by God.

Noah Prefigures Christ

I want you to see something really clearly. I said at the beginning that I didn't want to do this dramatic thing where you saw me in the text pretending to be Noah. I wanted you to see Christ. So I want to be very clear: there are lots of different ways in which this passage Noah prefigures Christ.

Genesis is such an amazing book because it's like a seed of the story of redemption that God is going to work out throughout all of Scripture. All of the elements are there. It just hasn't fully grown. If you look at Genesis, you can see in kind of seed form all of the things that God is going to do in Christ Jesus. And that's the case absolutely in Noah. Noah prefigures Christ in several very important ways. I want to highlight four of them this morning.

There's a sense in which Noah is like Christ. He is not Christ, right? He is in Christ, and he reflects Christ. And as he reflects Christ, he's pointing to Christ. Because he's a child of the promise, he's in the line of the woman, the seed of the woman—he's a child of the promise. He's in Christ. He believes the promise, just like you and I believe. And so as a result, he's in Christ. His being preserved is directly linked to his link to Christ. And in so far as that's true, he also reflects Christ in the same way that you and I reflect Christ. We who are in him also reflect to a world. We're not Jesus, but we're like Jesus. It's the same way.

I want to point out four ways. First of all, the relationship. Notice the language and the very special relationship that Noah has with God. It mentions in chapter six, verse nine—that's a little bit before our section—that Noah walked with God. That is a phrase that has been reserved for only one other person in Genesis, and that's Enoch. One thing that you've got to remember is that with Enoch, the Jewish people in the intertestamental period were obsessed with Enoch because it says that he walked with God and then he was no more, and they wanted to know what happened to him.

Those books are not in your Bible, right? Because we don't understand them to have been inspired. But they're very important in that they highlight the very special relationship that the Jews saw Enoch had and therefore, the very special relationship that they saw Noah had. Right? And that gets back to him being in Christ. He is the inheritor of the promise, right? In the line of the seed of the woman. He walks with God.

Brothers and sisters, you walk with God. We walk with God because we are the inheritors of the promise just like Noah. But the ultimate inheritor of the promise, the ultimate fulfiller of the promise was the offspring of Noah, ultimately Jesus Christ. So he prefigured him even as he was in him. You see? The relationship.

Noah's Characteristics as a Prefigurement of Christ

Secondly, he's righteous and blameless. Genesis 6:9 and 7 talk about it too. God says to him, "I've seen that you're righteous, right?" So he's righteous. Now, we're gonna see as we read on in Genesis that there's something coming in the next chapter where you kinda go, maybe he's not so perfect. That's coming. That'll be next week. Right? He's not perfect but he is righteous and blameless.

So how does that work? Well, by comparison to the rest of the world that was violent and corrupt and totally debasing God's creation, he's righteous and blameless in that generation by comparison. Also, just like you, do you know that you are righteous and blameless? Why? Because you're in Christ. And in so far as you're in Christ, you also are righteous and blameless. When you do good works, you reflect Christ. That was true of Noah too. Right? So he's just like us but he's prefiguring Christ. He's pointing to Christ's righteousness and blamelessness because, of course, who is the ultimate righteous and blameless one? Jesus. Sunday school answer, right? So he points to him in a special relationship. Jesus had a very special relationship with the Father, ultimately walked with God in a way that we will never walk with God. He's part of the Trinity. He was righteous and blameless in a way that we will never be righteous and blameless, but we are righteous and blameless in that way because he's applied his righteousness and blamelessness to us. Right? Do you see? I'm going round and round, but I hope you get it.

Thirdly, he's ridiculously trusting. Noah is ridiculously trusting. God says, "Hey, the world's violent and corrupt, build a box because rain's coming." Okay. If I were doing the monologue, that's what it would be about. Right? God said to build a box. What a weird thing. That's such a strange request. But I guess I'll do it.

Jesus was told to become a person, walk in life, suffer, and die on the cross. What a ridiculous request and yet he followed his Father's will perfectly. He was ridiculously trusting of his Father. He didn't wanna go to the cross. "If possible, take this cup," he said, "but not your will, not my will but yours be done." He trusted his Father. And his Father honored that trust.

Christ and Noah both rested in the promises of God. Did you notice in the story that Noah gets into the ark and who shuts the door? God. God shuts the door to protect Noah from the elements. There's a sense in which God is very active in honoring the trust that Noah puts in him to protect him. Noah rests in the promises of God just as Jesus rested in the promises of his Father. And also, just as we do as believers. We could do that circle again but I won't. You get it.

Finally, the last way in which Noah prefigures Christ is he's the savior of others. He's the savior of others. Note that his family is saved through him and all of the animals are saved through him. If there's a way that's easy to see yourself in the story, the easiest way to see yourself in the story is through Noah's family because we are saved through our great brother Christ, right? It's not through our great faith that we are saved although our faith is a part of that. It's ultimately his work and his faith and his relationship. It's through all of that that we are saved. We get into salvation through Christ. We are in him just as Noah and his family and the animals were in the ark. You see? Right?

All of them are put together because of the relationship. And we're saved through our relationship with Christ. So do you see the four ways that Noah prefigures Christ? And in some ways us.

Here's my application for why I spent the time doing that. First of all, I think when you're reading the Old Testament, you have to see the ways in which all of these narratives prefigure Christ because all of them are meant to be this beautiful, poetic way in which God is reflecting the character of Christ to you as a way of encouraging you and growing you in your faith.

So often people read the Old Testament and think, "Well, there's just nice moral stories that are kind of leading up to the real story," or "There are different ways that God tried to save people that didn't work out before God did the real thing." No. All of them are part of the grand plan of salvation that Christ is ultimately going to fulfill. God was pointing to that all along. There was no trial and error on God's part. There was just a very long and deliberate and slow and direct revelation about the truth about Christ so that people can put their faith in him and be saved.

But also, there's a sense in which Noah, as he reflected Christ, there's a challenge to us that we ought to also reflect Christ in how we live our lives.

Halloween was recent. Speaking of dressing up as characters, I was not Noah for Halloween. I should have been, then I would have had a costume. We like Halloween, our kids dressed up as scary things. We had vampires and skeletons, a couple of witches, an ice witch named Elsa. Lots of scary things. And we went door to door trick or treating and we went to one neighbor's house and she called out and said, "Hey, what are you?" and the kids all said what they were. And then she looked at me and said, "What are you?" I said, "Well, they're all scary things and I'm the scariest thing ever." She said, "Oh yeah, what's that?" I said, "I'm an evangelical pastor."

I'm aware that the term evangelical is going through a transformation. But what she said back to me was really striking. She said, "No, you're not. Why? Because I know this neighbor and you're normal." That was real convicting. And here's why: because if we reflect Christ, we shouldn't be normal. We shouldn't be normal. If we are dressing up as him, if we're reflecting him to a watching world, we should be the most crazy, weirdest thing that people have ever seen. And in fact, we should be a little scary.

Noah and his testimony was a little scary to the world around him. He's building this box, right? And this impending flood. Jesus picks up this in Matthew's gospel:

Just as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. — Matthew 24:37

It's striking to me the way that our culture views us as weird. I was talking with a friend who's a campus minister at Duke and he said, "The thing that people react so strongly to is our sexual ethics right now. We're viewed as really weird because of our sexual ethics which, by comparison to the world, I guess that is pretty weird." But he said, "I'm one conversation away from being written up in the student newspaper and being kicked off campus because of my sexual ethic as a pastor."

What's striking to me about that and what was striking to him? He says, "I believe in a coming judgment where God is going to judge all men according to their sins and those who aren't in Christ are going to receive his wrath." But everybody's like, "That's fine. That's cute and mythological. We're not really going to get upset about that. It's your sexual ethic that's really bothering us." Like, we ought to be going to people and telling them just how scary we are. It's a little scarier than they think because we're weird and the coming judgment is scary.

But Noah isn't a story of God's judgment. It's a story of his grace. And even as we are scary to the world, we ought to be representing the hope that is presented for us here. The beauty of the remnant, the salvation that is offered in Christ is the story. And as we dress up as Christ, as we represent that to the world, even as they are scared, the ultimate thing shouldn't be a fear of the coming judgment. It ought to be an amazement at the beauty of who Christ is and the salvation that is offered to us in the gospel. It's the most beautiful Halloween costume ever, even as it's scary.

But we've got to stop pretending we're normal. We are weird.

The Reckoning

I want to kind of move into talking about the reckoning, the second point. This is the scary part.

We need to talk about the scary part to get to the beautiful part. And to talk about the reckoning, I want to just start with Noah. Everybody always has the questions, you know? There's a lot of questions. I taught Bible in ancient world at a Christian school. So we've looked at the Bible as a historically accurate source. I believe it is historically accurate. I hope that goes without saying.

And you get to stories like this and people always want to ask the historically accurate questions. And here's what I want to do this morning. You remember the show Cheers? Those of you who are older, and those of you who are younger than me are like, "No, what is that?" I see some heads shaking now. Cheers. That's way back. Okay. So there was this show called Cheers. It was set in a bar. There were a cast of characters that were regulars in the bar and they used to kind of talk and it was all very funny. Okay. There's one character named Cliff, he was a mailman, he kind of knew everything, right? He was a know-it-all. He would always show up at the bar and kind of know everything.

Well, one episode, Cliff gets put on Jeopardy. It's my favorite episode. He gets put on Jeopardy and he crushes it. First two rounds, he has like $22,000. The other two contestants have like negative money and like a $100 or something like that. Right? And he gets to Final Jeopardy and his buddies are out in the audience and Norm is talking to Woody, he goes, "I just feel for him because he's gonna blow it." And Woody's like, "How's he gonna blow it?" Anyway, he blows it.

You get to Final Jeopardy and all he has to do is not bet all of the money, right? Well, he bets all of the money and the answer is Archibald Leach, Bernard Schwartz, and Lucille Lassour. Right? And you know how Jeopardy works? You don't give the answer, you give the question. Right? He doesn't know the right question. The right question that the authors of the game were looking for was, "What are the real names of Cary Grant, Tony Curtis, and Joan Crawford?" But what Cliff says, because he doesn't know the answer, is, "What are the names of three people who've never been in my kitchen?" Technically, he's right. Right? And he insists at the end of the episode, he's arguing with Alex Trebek. He's like, "I—that is correct. This is true. They've never been in my kitchen. Call him and ask them." Right?

I think sometimes we come to Genesis with the wrong questions. Right? We kind of want to ask the questions that we're comfortable with because we kind of want to think about things the way we want to think about things. This text wants you to think about things a little differently. So what I want to do is rather than diving into all the questions that we want to ask of the text as modern readers—there's lots of sermons about that by the way. If you have questions about that, I'd love to talk to you about it. I'm not trying to dodge them. I think they are good questions. We can talk about how all these people were not in your kitchen. But what I want to focus on is the questions that the text wants us to ask.

What Is the Flood?

So, first of all, when we're thinking about this reckoning, think about the flood. What we want to ask is where was it? Was it a local flood, a global flood? How big was it? What are the evidences of it? Where can we find some sort of archaeological or geological record of the flood? These are the questions that we want to ask. Right? Like, was this flood in our kitchen? Right? But those are the questions we want. But what the text wants us to ask is not where or when was the flood, but what is the flood? Okay?

What is the flood? And from a literary standpoint, the flood is so much more than just a flood and a bunch of water. And I really want you to see this—what is being communicated here is so much more terrible than a bunch of rain all over the earth or in a local geographic position. Whatever. It's so much more terrible than that.

The language here—first of all, you need to understand that in ancient Near Eastern culture and specifically in Hebrew culture, water represented chaos. Absolute chaos. You see that very clearly at the very beginning of Genesis. The spirit of God hovers over what? The waters. Before God brings order to creation, there's just water, chaos, right?

And what I want you to see is that the flood essentially walks back the steps of creation. God is undoing creation. Literarily in this text. Okay? Notice that the flood ends with God sending a wind over the waters. Well, guess what? That's how creation begins. With God, the spirit—spirit and wind are the same word in Hebrew, ruach, right? The spirit hovering over the waters. That's how creation begins. That's how the flood ends. Do you see? At various different points, right? In creation, God separates.

Remember that is kind of weird language for us modern readers. He separates the waters in the heavens from the waters on the earth, right? Well, in the flood, he brings them back together. He separates the waters to produce dry land in creation. But in the flood, he brings the waters up over the highest mountains so that all the water covers everything. Okay, what is being described from a literary standpoint is God basically saying, you want a world without me? I will remove my protective presence and allow everything to descend back into chaos and violence and destruction. Just like you were acting like you wanted. Do you see? It's much more terrible. This is a terrible picture of God's wrath and that is a picture of how he deals with sin that rebels against him and says, I want nothing to do with you, God. He says, fine. Here's a world without me, okay?

That's the right question. Second thing, we love to ask this question, like, where's the ark? In my Bible in ancient world class ninth grade, Mr. Sutton, what archeological evidence do we have of the ark and where is it? Can we find it today? There's lots of people that think they found it. There's all kinds of stuff we could talk about this for hours. There are sermons about it. We're not gonna ask that question today. Instead of where is the ark or where can I find it or what historical evidence do we have of it, here's the question that I want you to ask: What is the ark?

What is the Flood and What is the Ark?

There is a couple of times in scripture where God gives exact dimensions to build something. One's the temple, one's the ark. There's a sense in which the temple and the ark are linked. There's a sense in which Noah being kind of put into this ark with all these animals is with God in the same way that the temple represented the dwelling place of God with man. So when Noah goes into the ark and is protected, he's surrounded by God. He's being protected. He's with God, okay?

But here's something else that I think is very important. The Egyptian root for the word coffin is very similar to the Hebrew word for ark. Arc doesn't mean boat. It just means chest. And if you think about it, the other place where an ark shows up in the Pentateuch in addition to in the temple, right? There's this ark, there's the one in the temple, and then there's one more. That's the one that Moses is thrown into as he's put into the water meant to be killed by the Nile. Both Augustine and John Calvin referred to the ark, this ark, Noah's ark as a coffin. There's a sense in which Noah was building a coffin with a window and he was getting into it with a bunch of animals.

I think we missed that. I think we think of it as like he's seeing this as like God's provision of safety but why would a box, right? There's nothing boat-like about the description of this. Why would a box with a bunch of animals, some of them deadly, feel like life? It's absolutely a picture of death.

Here's my application of these two things: God has promised to bring judgment for sin and he has promised deliverance for his people. He doesn't promise that he will not have them enter into suffering and death but he does promise that he will bring them through it. And the application for us this morning is that just as Noah had the ark, Christ had the cross. And Christ invites us into his ark by saying pick up your cross and follow me.

We as believers so often are so consumed with our own safety and well-being but in reality what we should be doing is we should be following after Christ. We should be entering into the ark and that is a walk into death. That's the application for us because if we pick up our cross and follow Christ, right? We are entering into death. Now here's the promise: Christ will bring us through that into new life. But it's not something that we avoid totally.

I want to grapple with a couple of biblical passages so you can kind of see where I'm going with this so you can understand in the New Testament where this comes from. You know, I mentioned that in Matthew 24, Jesus says his return will be like the flood. Sudden and catastrophic for those who aren't in him, right? So how do you get in him? Well, he says that in other places in the gospel. Mark chapter eight for example:

Pick up your cross and follow me. — Mark 8

That's how you become in me. You walk with me in my dying, in my suffering, and also in my rising, right? That's what it means to be in him. We become one with him, union with Christ. There's a lot that could be said about that but it's not just like I believe in Jesus and ask him into my heart so I become one with him through faith and walk with him, right? And this is so pictured for us in baptism.

I wish we were having an infant baptism today because we love to buck all the cutesy trends that are in churches. Jeff always picks the hardest sermons to preach on Mother's Day, right? Like some terrible sermon about God's judgment and he's like, "Happy Mother's Day." I wish there was a family baptizing a baby today because the New Testament doesn't just talk about baptism as this washing. It also talks about baptism as a dying and rising.

Having been buried with him in baptism in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God who raised him from the dead. — Colossians 2:12

Now here's what's important. Listen to this verse. First Peter 3 actually ties that dying and rising directly with Noah.

When God's patience waited in the days of Noah while the ark was being prepared in which a few, that is eight persons, were brought safely through water, baptism which corresponds to this, now saves you not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. — 1 Peter 3:20-21

Our baptism is meant to figure our death. When we bring our babies and we say, "Here, baptize them," we're kind of dipping them into death and prefiguring their rising in Christ. Happy baptism.

Here's the application: Have you entered the coffin with the window? Are you picking up your cross and following Christ? Because there is a destruction happening all around us. The world is absolutely terrible. It's a violent and corrupt world. And the only way to save yourself is to become in Christ. Rather than trying to preserve yourself, you ought to try to sacrifice yourself in Christ with him. We are removed from trial and suffering, but we are preserved through it.

The Reboot

And that brings me to my last point: the reboot. We've talked a lot about the poetic and literary structure of this passage. One of the first things they teach you in seminary when you're studying the Old Testament is the Hebrew tendency to write poems in chiasms. For those of you who aren't familiar, a chiasm is a pyramid structure that begins and ends exactly the same way and has mirrors that lead to a central point on either side of the story.

In this narrative, there's a period of seven days of waiting, followed by a period of seven days of waiting, followed by a period of forty days and forty nights, followed by a period of a hundred and fifty days, followed by another period of a hundred and fifty days, followed by another forty day period, and then a seven day period, and then a seven day period. You see the chiasm? The beginning and the end are the same. It all comes together in the middle. This whole story forms a chiasm and you know what the center point is?

God remembered Noah. — Genesis 8:1

That is the center point. That is the big point from the sermon that I want you to get. It's so weird that language: God remembered Noah. It's almost like God turned on the water and then he was off running the universe and he's like, "Oh, I forgot the water. But now I've remembered Noah. I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna save him." That's not what this means. That's how we read it, but that's not what this means.

When God remembers people—for example, in Exodus when his people are enslaved—it says that the Lord remembered his people and his promise. It's a way of saying he loves them, he cares for them, they matter. It's become common in our modern language to say that I see you. Some friends of mine—I was trying to really love them well this last week—and in a way to make me feel appreciated, they said, "James, you did all this, you did this, you did this, we see you." That's essentially what's happening here. God sees Noah.

Here's the thing: we who are children of the promise, it's easy for us as we are tossed to and fro in this world that is totally falling apart to feel unseen by God. But Sunday is a great time to come back together and to remember that God remembers us. God remembers you. God cares. God loves you. You may feel forgotten. You may feel like everything is gone totally sideways and that God is not aware, but he remembers. And what does he do for those he remembers?

God's Undoing of Undoing

Essentially, the next section of this passage from eight one until eight twenty and really beyond is God undoing his undoing of creation. The literary structure follows almost exactly Genesis one. It leaves out a couple of days—the creation of the sun, moon, and stars and the heavens—but everything else is recreated intentionally as it walks through this passage.

I already said it begins with the wind on the waters. God sends the wind to divide the waters. Again, they're redivided. The heavens and the waters below, right? To the early readers, this would have reminded them of what? Coming out of Egypt. God dividing waters—not this way, but this way, right? The Red Sea. It's a picture of salvation. God bringing order to the chaos, separating it out, and then bringing about dry land. That's the next step. The mountaintops kind of appear, right?

Then there's this whole section that's meant to represent day five of creation where he sends out the birds. Remember the birds and the fish were next, right? And they're flying around. You have the raven and the dove, and here's what I want to say about the dove. We could preach a whole sermon about this, but here's the thing: the dove comes back with what? An olive leaf, right? What's an olive branch represent? Peace. Peace.

We've always kind of liked that. If you're having a fight with somebody and you want to end it, you bring them an olive branch and they know what that means, right? Well, we've undergone a kind of resurgence of understanding what peace is. Peace is more than just the end of a war. It's the representation of wholeness. Shalom. That's the concept, right? Shalom. Everything has been made whole. That's the picture. The dove comes back with an olive branch. It's like, guess what? Creation has been made whole again. It's safe.

When Jesus gets baptized, the dove descends on him, pointing to the reality that he is the shalom, the wholeness, the beginning of everything being made whole. It goes on, eight seventeen through nineteen, and eight sixteen through eighteen—animals and man appear and then it ends with this blessing mandate and this enormous worship service, which again, it's the same mandate that Adam and Eve were given: conquer and subdue the earth, right? This is very much the undoing of God undoing creation. It's him recreating, rebooting creation, and it's meant to point to something more than just a reboot.

The Problem Runs Deeper

If we read on and we will next week, you're gonna see this very clearly. The problem isn't solved by a reboot, is it? Noah gets off in his imperfections and the imperfections of his line become very apparent very quickly again, right? It wasn't enough to reboot creation. Very clearly illustrating that part of the problem isn't just out there; it's also in here.

I think oftentimes we think that's it, right? Like if I just got rid of all of you and all of pollution and was living in a really nice Earth, just me and my family, we'd be fine. No, that's not gonna work. Why? Because I'm part of the problem. My family is part of the problem. Noah and his family were part of the problem.

It's like cancer treatment, right? What do they do? They go in and they try and get all of the cancer out. But it's not the cure. Well, here's the thing: the reboot of Noah points to a greater recreation where God is gonna remake everything. He's gonna make everything new, including you and I, including the heavens, right? All of it is going to be recreated. That's what the story of Noah points to.

New Creation in Christ

And ultimately we see that in the New Testament so clearly.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. — 2 Corinthians 5:17

Aren't you ready for that? Are you tired of the way in which the violence and corruption of your own heart and soul impact others and yourself on a daily basis? Wouldn't it be nice if you could go through a process where God totally and completely recreate you to the point where you are totally unrecognizable in many ways, totally made new? Because that's what he's doing. That's what he did in Christ Jesus, who is the first fruits, and now he's doing it with us. But not just us.

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God, for the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves who are the first fruits of the spirit groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. — Romans 8:19 and following

You know, we worship a God who loves us so much. He remembers us so much that he's going to go so far as to recreate all of us perfectly and recreate this world perfectly, recreate the heavens perfectly for us. You are not just seen, you are loved, so loved, and he sent his son to die and rise to be the beginning—the first fruits of that glorious recreation that is happening. It is happening in all of us.

I've been very intentional about not addressing practical questions about the historicity of this passage. I'm sure you noticed, right? Some of you may be frustrated with that. Like, "I wanted you to talk about this, but all you're talking about is the literary structure and how this is a poetic kind of story." And maybe some of you are feeling like, "Well, if this is just poetry, is it really true? Isn't it just more appropriate to treat poetry like the epic poetry of the Greeks of old? It's like mythology."

You know, I think it can seem like Noah's story is mythological. But I want you to grapple with the fact that it should. It should seem mythological. Because here's the deal: your story is poetic and seems mythological. It's not mythological, but it seems mythological because we believe in a God who raises people from the dead and we believe that he is recreating each of us internally and weaving our story into the grand story of our savior who came, lived a perfect life, died a perfect death, and rose, and now sits in heaven. That's epic poetry and you're being woven into that in the same way that Noah did. I believe that God writes poetry on our lives.

And so if Noah's story seems poetic and that makes it seem mythological, good. Because the stuff that we believe is amazing and glorious and incredible to the world. And as we live it out, we ought to look like funky mythological creatures—best Halloween costume ever. Walking around, revealing the beauty of the salvation of our God. Because he's doing that with each of us. Each of us is being remade. I guess in a way we're all kind of doing dramatic monologues, right? So maybe it would have been appropriate for me to do that.

But here's what I would ask. Here's my prayer for us: May Christ shine clearly through our stories—our mythological almost stories of redemption—so that a watching world might see and believe in the glorious reality of who our savior is.

I pray that in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Amen.