Morning, we are in our next to last sermon going through the first chapters of Genesis, chapters one through 11. And before we read that together, I have two comments for you.

One is, don't believe everything your associate pastor tells you. James loves a lot. Last time he got up to preach, he said, "You know, the senior pastor always gets the good ones. He gives me the hard ones." Well, a lot of y'all, this morning. So I'm just going to tell you how it goes: this is a good one, this is a tough one.

The second thing is that this sermon is PG, I don't know, thirteen or eleven. The Bible gets pretty explicit and I couldn't skip this one, but I just want to give fair warning. I did this on a Sunday when we're having our kids classes on purpose, and so fair heads up to you about that. This has some adult themes.

Let's read God's word together. The people of God read the word of God.

The sons of Noah who went forth from the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham was the father of Canaan. These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth were dispersed. Noah began to be a man of the soil, and he planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside. Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were turned backward, and they did not see their father's nakedness. When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said, "Cursed be Canaan; the servant of servants shall he be to his brothers." He also said, "Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant. May God enlarge Japheth and let him dwell in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant." After the flood, Noah lived three hundred fifty years. All the days of Noah were nine hundred fifty years, and he died. — Genesis 9:18-29

When the comic book innovator Stan Lee died in 2018 at the age of 95, a lot of people really mourned his death. He had provided this fresh voice and creative mind to the comic book genre. He's one of the brains behind the creation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has formed all those Marvel movies.

And he had two big contributions. One was that he created a world where these superheroes didn't just stay in their little spheres, but interacted with one another. And that created all kinds of opportunity for storylines. But the other is that he took away what had been the property of so many superhero comic books for years, which is creating these larger-than-life super virtuous superheroes. Instead, he created a whole cast of superheroes who had human foibles and all kinds of problems.

For example, the Amazing Spider-Man. Spider-Man thinks all the time about the problems with his love life. Or the Fantastic Four—the Fantastic Four spend as much time arguing with one another as they do battling enemies. And most notably, Tony Stark, who is the egotistical person in the Iron Man outfit. This was Stan Lee's great contribution to the genre.

And in doing so, he's actually very close to the Bible because, like Americans now, we sort of like our heroes a little flawed. That's what we also get in the Bible. The Bible doesn't traffic in hagiography.

Now, hagiography—you may not know that word, but you know what it means. It means when a story is told in such a way that someone seems perfect. And if you read through the scriptures, you don't get these hagiographic characters in the patriarchs of the Old Testament. You don't get perfection. You get people with a lot of foibles and sins and problems, including in this story.

And that's because the real hero of the Bible is not any person, is it? The real hero of the Bible is God himself and God come in flesh, Jesus Christ. And we're going to see that even today in this really hard, tragic story, that God is the hero.

Now, if you're just joining us today, I want to give you a little bit of rewind, a little bit of context for what we just read. We're going through the first 11 chapters of Genesis, which is called the prehistory. It sort of sets the stage, and all of the notes and all the themes for the rest of the Bible are in this section of scripture.

And this story just majors in what we've been reading these last couple of weeks—that there's this theme of recapitulation. There are all these themes that are sort of recycled over and over again. It feels like a retelling of the themes of Genesis one through three.

You may be familiar with the idea of recapitulation if you're a fan of the Star Wars saga. You get Ben Solo who's got all the same makings of his grandfather Anakin Skywalker. That's all in there.

The Pattern of Retelling

And that's the same thing that's going on here—there's a recapitulation. There's a retelling that all the themes show up again. So we've looked at Genesis one through three, how they're not a lab report of what happened. We looked at Genesis four through six, the genealogies, and how it's a very selective telling of what God wants us to hear. And again today, we're gonna look at this and we're gonna see how what we've been reading about the flood narrative and about Noah has been a retelling of the story of creation.

In fact, as James pointed out a couple weeks ago, we saw with the flood that the flood is just an undoing of the creation story. Creation is about three days of forming and filling. What happens in the flood? An unforming and an unfilling, and the world is flooded with waters of chaos. And then there's a new creation—sort of a reboot of Genesis one. There's a dove that's sent out over the waters, just like we read in Genesis chapter one where the spirit of God hovered over the waters. And then there's a retelling of the days of creation. You just see the separation of the water from the land just like in day two. You see the separation and ascending forth of the birds in day four, and the animals and the people coming out of the ark in day six. All of this is a retelling of Genesis one.

And that's where we pick up today. Noah and his family come off the ark, and as we read last week, he builds an altar and worships. And then Noah plants a vineyard. That word "plant" has appeared in one other place already in this book—Genesis chapter two, where the Lord God plants a garden. Noah works the land. He becomes a person of the soil just like Adam was, and the parallels continue.

So in God's garden, Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the vine and all the troubles begin. Here Noah plants a vineyard and he drinks from the fruit of the vine and a whole other set of troubles begin. So I'm pretty confident that this story doesn't appear in any of your children's story Bibles. This one about the drunk Noah—it doesn't appear in any of our stories. In fact, there's a lot of people who skip this over, and a lot of people this morning who may be like, "I wish that you were skipping this one over" because it's a bizarre story. And it again shows us this is not a glossing over with the characters in Genesis. It's not a telling of these people without their problems. This is not included to embarrass Noah, but rather there's something that God wants us to see and understand in this.

Now, this isn't a cautionary tale about drinking alcohol either. The focus here is on these children and generations of sin. So I'm going to look at this in just a couple of sections. We're going to go through the characters—I want to look at Ham, Noah's other sons, and then the hero, who's God. We're just going to walk through those characters.

Ham's Transgression

First, Ham. Notice the passage begins with Ham, one of Noah's three sons, and this problem. He sees his father's nakedness. Now, you should be up to speed on this by now. Where have we seen nakedness be a problem before? Right—it's in Genesis chapter three.

At the end of chapter two it says, "They were naked and not ashamed." And then when they take of the apple, they know that they're naked and they cover themselves. And then God comes and covers them.

And again, in the Bible, nakedness is a problem. Remember, this is a Middle Eastern culture. Both in ancient Middle Eastern culture and in modern Middle Eastern culture, nakedness is an undesirable state. That's a part of the world that really focuses on covering. It's a real focus—on covering.

And here, Ham goes into his dad's tent, and the text says he saw nakedness. But while in Genesis chapter three, Adam and Eve were naked and ashamed, here Ham is unashamedly looking at his father's nakedness. And this is the big thing—this is Moses being discreet, the writer of this. This story is gonna be read over and over again in worship services and around campfires and in synagogues for generations upon generations. And the writer is being discreet, but the early audiences would have understood exactly what he was talking about.

And I'm gonna be a little bit more clear because you don't know exactly what he's talking about. But all of the answers for what's going on in this passage—like what happened in that tent that night—all this is found in other parts of the Pentateuch, in Leviticus in particular. The focus here though is that there is something that happened that's really bad in this story.

You could tell there's something that happens. There's a curse that comes out of this. There's generations of pain will come from the act of whatever happened in this tent. This can't be this can't be Ham seeing his dad changing and giggling. What's really clear here is that there's something going on that's a sexual violation, a sexual sin, an actual sexual sin.

So in Hebrew, that phrase "seeing the nakedness"—Ruah Yehovah—is a signal of a sexual encounter. Seeing is active in the Bible. It's a very active thing. It's not a passive got a glimpse. There's an active nature to it, and so seeing your father's nakedness is a Hebrew idiom. Now, we have lots of idioms and if you are a non-native English speaker, bless your heart as we all say in the South because it is hard to figure out a lot of the southern idioms and a lot of our American idioms. You know, when we say something was a piece of cake, non-native English speakers will be like, we're having a birthday now? So this idiom, this seeing nakedness—it's a reference into Leviticus. Leviticus chapter 18 where it says this:

If a man takes his sister, a daughter of his father or a daughter of his mother and sees her nakedness and she sees his nakedness, it is a disgrace. And they shall be cut off in the side of the children of their people. He has uncovered his sister's nakedness and he shall bear iniquity. — Leviticus 18

See, it's a sign of an encounter—a sexual encounter. And it's helpful for us to understand what's going on in this tent. This isn't a glimpse. This is something far more sinister. There's some sexual violation that's also contained in the second idiom in this passage, "the nakedness of your father." That's also a reference to Leviticus 18, which says:

You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father, which is the nakedness of your mother. She is your mother, and you shall not uncover her nakedness. You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's wife. It is your father's nakedness. — Leviticus 18

But the author of Leviticus is the same of Genesis. And this is all being told and we can connect the dots. It's clear and I want to be clear where maybe Moses is being kind of discreet in this passage that there is a sexual violation in this passage of Noah's wife. Ham doesn't just see something. He comes into a tent where his father Noah and his father's wife—whether or not that's his own mother, we don't know—they're passed out drunk and he takes advantage of her sexually.

And I know, gross, ew. And at the same time, I have to say, how dare we have that attitude toward this passage? We who live in one of the most sexualized places on the planet. We who live in a culture that uses sex to sell everything from tiger tires to mortgages. We who have a billion dollar, multibillion dollar pornography industry. So like we can be like, oh, the Bible—but we're adults here, most of us. And we know this is the world that we live in too. And there's a lot of problems that we'll see that come out of this.

The Nature of Sexual Power

This is a serious, serious violation, and this is also hard for us. But the text makes the point about the violation against Noah. Now that doesn't mean that there's not injustice and wrong against Noah's wife, but it's helping us understand what actually Ham was up to. Because in our world, we think of sexuality as desire and attraction. That's not how ancient Near Eastern people thought about sexuality. They thought about sexuality in terms of power. They thought about sexuality in terms of lineage. They thought about sexuality in terms of legacy. And that's actually what's going on in this passage.

Ham's motive is not something like, man, I'm really attracted to my mother or my dad's wife. This is about a power play in this family. It's a power grab. Jacob's son Reuben—we'll read it later on in Genesis—will do the same thing with his father's concubines. He will sleep with his father's concubines. Absalom, King David's son, will pitch a tent on top of the palace so the entire kingdom can watch him be with his father's concubines. This is an ancient power grab. And this is a dark story. And this is a way that Ham is trying to get the ace of spades over his brothers. He is—this is a power grab. I am number one. I am the big thing in the family from this point forward. And it actually it's a huge deal. It's a huge violation against his father for that reason. That's why the text makes that point that this is a violation against Noah.

So can I stop here for a second? And I just want to say something. I know that this story probably stirs up in us a lot of hard things. If you have been the victim of some sexual wrong by another person, I just want to stop and acknowledge the wrongness and the destructive nature of that. You know, a lot of times, people who have things in their past—and statistics say it's a huge portion of us, men and women—that have been wronged in some way sexually by another person.

It is human nature to stuff things down and to hide it and pretend. We sometimes think we shouldn't talk about those things because we don't want to be mean or vindictive. But the Bible invites us to be people who are honest about the things that we have suffered at the hands of other people. What's in the dark has power. Secrets in our lives, when brought out into the light, can be healed—especially in appropriate context.

Noah Discovers the Sin

Let me move to our second character: Noah. At some point, Noah discovers what's happened. We don't know how that happens. We don't know if it's immediate. Did he wake up the next morning? We don't know if his wife became pregnant and he was like, "I thought we couldn't have kids." We don't know if she remembered at some point and told her husband what happened that night, or if when the baby was born, Canaan looked just like Ham. We don't know how much time passes.

The passage is compressed. It's kind of squished, right? Nobody plants a vineyard and the next day has wine from it. That takes a while—a couple of years. So this passage is shrunk down for us and simplified.

I want to focus our attention on the curse of Canaan. Now notice I didn't say the curse of Ham. I just want to nod at this: This text has been ripped out of context over and over to make justification for the enslavement of people of color in this country and Jim Crow laws in this country. And the reality is there's actually no curse of Ham. There's not even one in the text. Canaan, his son, is cursed. Ham is not cursed.

There's absolutely zero connection between the name Ham and being dark skinned. That's an exegetical fallacy that some Southern preachers came up with in the eighteen hundreds. This predates our country. It comes out of ancient Judaism and early Christian reading of the text that sort of made this about dark-skinned people. But to do that, you have to do violence to the text. You have to twist what it actually says. There is absolutely zero warrant for any kind of "curse of Ham" talk that has been propagated over and over and perpetuated in the church—even to this day.

Satan is a master of twisting the scriptures. We saw that in the temptation with Jesus. We saw that in the garden. Over and over again, Satan, the father of lies, twists. And what's really sad is that this passage has a lot to say about sexual sin and generations and generations of the church have missed it because of some misreading that was purposeful to subjugate other people.

Noah's Prophecy

Noah doesn't curse his son. It's odd, isn't it? He doesn't curse Ham. Ham's the one who's the sinner. Why doesn't he curse his son? Well, a lot of people think it's because at the beginning of this chapter, he'd already blessed Ham—the blessing from God.

And God blessed Noah and his sons — Genesis 9:1

So why curse Canaan? And Canaan is just a baby. Why curse him? It's because Canaan is the product of what happened in the tent that night. Canaan is the outcome of that. This is what a lot of commentators think.

From this point forward in the story, we learn that Noah has four sons because this one is attributed to him—to his wife. This is why, coming off the ark, it says Noah had four sons. The next chapter, in chapter 10, you see four genealogies that are traced through history. But Canaan is the son of Ham.

I want you to see: Noah here is not just being mean. This is not a knee-jerk response when he curses his grandson. In fact, what he's doing here is the first prophecy in the Bible. You may say, "Wait, first prophecy? I thought Genesis 3:15 was the first prophecy"—that promise from God that the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent. That's a prophecy straight out of God's mouth. But this is the first prophecy from a person in the Bible. And it's filled both with curse and with blessing.

Because of what's happened, you are going to be a servant to your uncles and their families. Shem and Japheth. — Genesis 9:24-25

This is why over and over again we find out that Canaan's listed here because Canaan was the son of Ham and he's cursed in light of the sin of his father. Now, that may feel really unjust to us—that Canaan is cursed because his daddy sinned. But this tells you what you already know.

We've already covered in this book that sins in families run in families and they ruin families. Sins have consequences. God is in this curse. One writer says it this way: for the breach of his own family, his own family would falter. This is Ham's family. It's a consequence of the sin.

And if you look over in the next chapter, in the line of Ham, it lists all the ancient bad guys of the Old Testament. All the enemies of Israel—the Egyptians are in the line of Ham, the Kushites, the Amorites, the Chaldeans or the Babylonians, the Assyrians—they're all in this line. But the worst of the worst come from Canaan's line.

And their sin, the sin of Canaan that we see repeated over and over in the land of Canaan, are all things that just mirror what their great great great grandfather had done—what Ham had done. Child sacrifice, idolatry, ritual sexual prostitution, divination. It's a pattern of what comes after this.

But God's grace is also revealed in this curse. He doesn't curse the entire family of Ham. He focuses on this lineage. And I just want to point this out for you who are likewise victims of some sexual sin by another person. I want to say this to you: God sees. God knows. God is judge. I know it's hard to see that, but God is deeply grieved whenever one of his image bearers takes advantage sexually of another.

And it raises all kinds of questions. How many of us have asked: where was God? What was God up to? Did he not care on that day? Where was God that night? And I want to remind you, brothers and sisters, that God is the God, the judge of all the earth. And even what we see in this passage is God's kindness in his judgment. God does see. God does judge. He is not unmoved or uncaring or unseeing or unloving. And even though it doesn't happen on our timeframe and in the way that we want it to come, God will have the final word. Justice will be served.

The Brothers

Third characters in the story: the brothers. Look at verse 23. Noah's two other sons, Shem and Japheth, do this really intricate kind of walk backward. Do you notice they are pictures of this in art history? You can see where people have depicted the two brothers with a blanket stretched between them, walking backward, trying to make sure that they do not see their father's nakedness. They are doing the opposite of what we see with Ham. They're displaying the utmost of consideration and regard for their father.

Now, let me explain that word covering. In English, covering has connotations of covering up, pretending, sweeping something under the rug. That is not at all what's in the Hebrew connotation of that word. Instead, it means to redress—to cover in such a way as to restore honor and cover over shame. That's what that word means.

Whoever would foster love covers over an offense. — Proverbs 17

Now, we live in a time where the American church has sadly done the opposite. We have covered up and swept under the rug and diminished and pretended, even to greater harm to people who are victims. This has happened over and over. I was a pastor in Philadelphia—a heavily Catholic city—in February when all the Catholic scandals broke. And what did the Catholic church do? Protect, hide, pretend.

We've heard of the cover-up with C.J. Mahaney and the Sovereign Grace movement over and over in Southern Baptist churches. Churches have often sought to deal with such atrocities by saying, let's deal with this in house. We don't want to call the authorities. We don't want to get anybody outside involved. No. Those are crimes. And it's right to involve civil magistrates in things that are crimes.

The American churches needed voices. Maybe you've heard some of these people—Rachel Denhollander, Darby Strickland, Russell Moore, Beth Moore, J.D. Greear in our area—to stand up and say, this is wrong. To call a spade a spade. And in doing so, those leaders have acted like Shem and Japheth. They have redressed. They've said that's real. We need to deal with the shame of this, not protect the perpetrators of this.

I want to tell you, in our denomination and in our congregation, we're doing a lot of work on this. I was at General Assembly for the PCA this past June, and we gave a lot more funding again to a study committee that's made up of a lot of these people making recommendations to the church about how we handle sexual sin, sexual violence in our churches, abuse cases. The church really needs the help. I'm really grateful that our denomination is taking steps. As a congregation, Stephanie Massey has really piloted this for us and has done a lot of work. We have a lot of procedures and policy in place that we've worked really hard on over years.

And my hope is that the church, the American church can become a place that God has really called us to be, a place of hope and healing, not a place that revictimizes or re-traumatizes people.

Looking at the Hero of the Story

One last thing, I want to look at the hero of the story, God. As we close this, did you look at verses 28 and 29? It's Noah's obituary, and what's funny about reading Noah's obituary is it's the same kind of obituary we read about in Genesis chapter 5. He lived this long, he begot this many kids. After that, he lived this long and then he died. That's kind of how it runs.

And it's really fascinating to me because looking back over this story, we can again say, Noah wasn't the hero, was he? Noah's name means relief or rest in Hebrew. And yet, we could say he sort of did that in a provisional way. He brought some kind of relief and rest from all the buildup of wickedness in the world, then the flood, then the restart. But you can tell in this story, this is a failed reboot with old Noah. This is not a good fresh start like the Garden of Eden all over again. This story points us to something: this is all provisional. God is going to come and make all things right. And he did.

One of the fascinating aspects of what happened later in this story is if you read over in the Gospels, the genealogical history of Jesus tells us all the people who were in the line of Jesus. And who do we find in the line of Jesus? Somebody with Canaanite blood. Rahab the prostitute is singularly highlighted for us in the genealogy of Jesus, which tells us Jesus has Canaanite blood in his veins. Jesus has Canaanite blood.

Now why am I making such a big point of that? Because it's only in Jesus that we really find relief and rest for our sins. What Noah could only do in a provisional way, Jesus does in a full and complete way.

Hope for Perpetrators and Victims

And this is what I really want to focus your attention on this morning. If you are not the victim of sexual sin, but actually the perpetrator of sexual sin against someone else, there is hope and healing for you also in the cross of Jesus Christ. God is able to heal and forgive and restore. I want to encourage you not to allow this to live inside of you and eat you alive. There's grace for you. There's hope for you.

We all go to the same Jesus—oppressed and oppressor. Those who have been deeply wounded by the sins of others, and those who have done the wounding. Jesus is the one who brings healing and hope. He deals with our shame for those of us who have been sinned against, and also deals with our guilt for those of us who've done the sinning and done the harming. He became a curse to deliver us from the curse and rose again for our salvation. And this is where hope is found.

A Partnership for Healing

One outworking of this for our congregation is that we have recently developed a partnership with a ministry called Called to Peace Ministries. Called to Peace Ministries is a program here in the Triangle. My wife actually introduced me to it and then our church to it. We've subsequently had a conversation with them and developed a ministry partnership. They come alongside both those who are victims and those who are victimizers. They have tons of resources, and we have people who are actively already involved in their program. They address all kinds of abuse—emotional, sexual, physical—and they provide a place of hope and healing.

And I want to just invite you this morning. If this is part of your story, come talk to me. Come talk to our associate pastor James. Come talk to my wife Susan. We want our church to be a place of hope and healing. And if that's not part of your story, I'm glad that's not part of your story. But my hope is that every person here would become a Shem or become a Japheth. You're part of the healing of other people.

Whenever I do premarital counseling, I always sit down with a couple and explain that because we are in such a sexually destructive society—I think the sex industry is systemic evil in our country, in our world—I tell couples you're going to be part of the sexual healing of the other person. I think everybody has baggage and wounds and things that they're carrying. The stats are so high. I think I just assume that's everyone.

And my hope is that our church can be a place where when someone shares their past, we don't blink an eye. We're not shocked or surprised. We're like, yeah, this is a safe place. This is a place where we look to Jesus. We're about redressing harm. We're about dealing with shame in appropriate ways. We're about dealing with guilt in appropriate ways. And we're a place where God can work deep healing.

I pray that that's the case. Let's go to the word together.

Father, I confess—I know that this is a hard passage for us today. I pray, Father, Lord, for anyone among us for whom this has uncovered deep wounds and picked at its scabs and provided another level of pain. I pray, Father, this morning that our church would become more and more, Lord, a place of healing and hope and restoration for all those who have been injured and hurt—whether the oppressed or the oppressor, whether the victim or the victimizer.

Lord, we pray, Father, that you would work deeply within us. We pray that you would help us, Lord, to live out and be a community of hope that you've called us to be. We pray these things in Jesus's name. Amen.