Please remain standing for the word of God. Our text this morning comes from Genesis six and the evening we've been preaching. I've been preaching through Genesis, uh, and called upon to preach in the pastor's place this morning. I said, why should I not preach on Genesis? Genesis chapter six verses five through nine. Hear the word of God. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds, the birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them. Noah found favor, found grace in the eyes of the Lord. These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God, and Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Praise God for this reading of his word. Let's pray. Oh, Heavenly Father, We thank you for your word, your word which relates this from further long ago than we can imagine. But Father, made present through the inspiration and preservation of your word to us for our benefit. Father, we pray that you benefit us. Do good by us. Make us more like Christ. Conform our hearts to his heart and our steps to his steps. And we ask it in Jesus name. Amen. Please be seated. It is easy to feel isolated and inundated as a Christian today. Everything around us says secular, godless world. Everything around us says in this world, keep quiet, stand aside, you're done, you're past, the future is secular or worse. We see it in the entertainment media, in the news media, in much of government, of course, much but not all, in public schools, in public colleges and universities, or schools and colleges and universities in general. And they're not just secular. It would be one thing if these institutions were merely neutral. No, but they're openly anti-Christian as they normalize and celebrate pagan perversity, even at times explicit Satanism, the equivalent of Baal and Moloch worship in ancient Israel. And they seem to dominate the world. We can get encouragement from time and time, from time to time from a bumper fish. oh, look, another Christian, right? Or just from the presence of neighborhood churches, even recently built churches, much more common here than in New York, let me point out, but still. But also there's encouragement from our local church. We are free to gather in church together and encourage one another. It's encouraging Just being here, you don't even have to say anything, just being here is an encouragement. Radiating Christ is an encouragement to others. And the encouragement we draw from our sister churches in the area and from a robust distribution of Christian ministries and publishing houses and colleges and so forth. Nonetheless, so it could be a lot worse. Nonetheless, it can feel like the cultural walls are closing in. Elijah was so downcast in his day, the prophet Elijah. feeling himself alone in his faithfulness to God. In First Kings 19, of course, he said, I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the people of Israel have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, killed your prophets with the sword. And I even I only am left and they seek my life to take it away. And then the Lord showed him a thunderstorm and an earthquake, and he was not in these things, and then a still small voice, and this didn't encourage Elijah. So he goes somewhere else, and he says the same thing. I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the people of Israel, have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword, and I, even I only am left, and they seek to take my life, to take it away. He says the exact same thing. And then God told him, I will leave 7,000 in Israel, all whose knees have not bowed to Baal and whose mouths have not kissed him. He hasn't noticed these 7,000, but these 7,000 are there. So even Elijah, As Israel had thrown down the Lord's altars, killed the Lord's prophets, and so forth, even Elijah was not as alone as he felt himself to be. But Noah, alone in his generations, stood firm for God. God who had created Adam and Eve, walked in the garden with Adam and Eve, and then continued to, after the fall, continued to make himself known down through the narrowing generations to Noah's day. But when all the world was on the broad and easy path to sin and self, And only Noah, and even then most of his family, were faithful to the Lord. The whole world and Noah. for the Lord. You wonder if Noah was tempted to say, who am I? Who am I to contradict all these people? Who am I to go this way, saying it is the way of the Lord, thinking that I've heard from the Lord. I'm pretty sure I've heard from the Lord, but when all the world is going this way, who am I to go another way? Was he tempted that way? No, I think God gave Noah a spirit of holy defiance that emboldened him against his times. Do you know anything of a spirit of defiance? In high school, I had a defiant spirit. Before I knew Christ, it was just kind of defiant. I liked punk music and I was a punk, right? And the spirit of, this is the 1970s, 80s, right? The spirit of punk is the spirit of obnoxious defiance, right? While other kids were wearing t-shirts, I wore a collared shirt buttoned up to the top with no tie. And people thought that was kind of not cool. It is precisely because it was not cool that I wore it and I wore it in people's faces. When others wore sneakers, I made a point of wearing obnoxiously pointy-toed, hard-soled shoes. And when others wore their hair shaggy or long, I cut mine, I cropped mine closely. And people thought, that's weird. Good. That was the spirit. That was the spirit. Think of Marlon Brando. Not that I was Marlon Brando or ever confused with Marlon Brando, but Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Have you seen that movie? 1950s. This is Brando in his leather jacket, and it's got rebels written on the back of it. And they're dancing somewhere, and this girl looks at him and says, hey Johnny, what you rebelling against? And Brando says, what you got? That's it, he's the wild one. But it was aimless, aimless rebellion, aimless defiance, what you got. But I came to know, in university, I came to trust Christ. I came to know the God who made all things and orders all things, in whom alone hope is found, and the mediator who gave rest to my soul. and he sanctified that defiance into zeal for the Lord. Noah is defiant, but not aimlessly defiant as I was. He is zealous for God and defiant toward an ungodly world. Like the Levites at the foot of Sinai, remember all the Israelites are are chasing after golden calves and bowing themselves to it and all sorts of unmentionable carrying on. And Moses comes down and sees this, having just received the law. And he throws down the tablets and he says, who is for the Lord? And it says all the Levites rallied to him. Right. zeal for the Lord, defiance of their times. Noah stood firm in the spiritual defiance that the Apostle Paul urged on the Church of Rome, Christians in Rome, when he said, let God be true and every man a liar. God must agree with us because we are many. No, God has said, and you're all wrong. Let God be true. And even if every man in the world, everyone in the world disagrees with God, if God has spoken this, he is right, and you're all wrong. If you agree with God, you are in the only majority that matters. But Noah was not a spiritual superman. If he were, he would be of little interest to us. We are not superheroes from another planet, nor can we be. God himself, in that case, would have to stand in awe of us, which, of course, is absurd. Noah, like any believer, is a work of grace. He was rare in his day, obviously, but that grace is now common in Christ. As he was, so you can be. Noah is, first of all, he is who he is because verse eight, he found grace in the eyes of the Lord. This goes with what's said before in verses five, six, and seven. This is why we read it, where God remarks on the deep and universal wickedness of the world. But it's not that God looked upon Noah and saw that he was spiritually beautiful. Noah is not a nugget of gold that God happened to stumble upon and said, that's nice. I can use that. Not at all. He is what he is by grace. He found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Grace is God's unmerited favor. If it were not for God's grace, Noah would be like all the others. In Ephesians 2, 8 and 9, we all know it well. Paul says, what is universally true of all believers, for it is by grace you have been saved through faith and this not of yourselves, It's not of yourselves, it is a gift of God, not by works, he underscores it and underscores it, he double underlines it, not by works so that no man may boast. And then right after that, what logically follows? We are his workmanship, we are his craftsmanship, we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which he prepared beforehand that we may walk in them. Noah didn't save the world for God by his good works. God saved the world by his, saved Noah from the world by his grace. People must have marveled at this arc that Noah made. It's not like a little, sometimes in children's toys, you have a little toy, right? It's a little toy boat and there's a couple of animals in it and it's cute. It's not impressive, it's cute. And it has to be that way so they can hold it in their little hands, I guess. But the arc that God, had Noah make was nothing like this. It was a massive structure with three decks unseen ever before in the history of the world such as it was up to that time. Given the proportions that were given in scripture and were given to Moses, sorry, Noah, 150 million cubic feet. one and a half football fields in length. That's how we measure things in America, right? Football fields. You tell somebody a distance and they go, what? And then you, oh, you put it in football fields. Oh, now I know what you're talking about. The arc was one and a half football fields in length. the largest wooden ship ever built in the world, even to this day. The USS Constitution, which is docked in Boston Harbor, still a commissioned American naval ship, though it's wooden, one quarter of the size of the Ark. Not something that an ordinary person builds in his backyard. So people must have marveled at this thing that Moas, if I say Moses and he means Noah, it means I mean Noah. That Noah is building. They must have marveled at it. And remember, he was building it for like 100 years. But what they should have marveled at was not the ark. What they should have marveled at was Noah, whom God had made. He is the greater vessel and the more marvelous work. And Noah was just and righteous because he received grace in the eyes of the Lord, received grace from God, he is just, he is righteous, he is blameless. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation, verse nine. Notice verse eight. Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord comes before verse nine. Noah was a righteous man. First, the grace, then the righteousness. The grace is the basis of the righteousness, not the other way around. Noah was a just man. As Hebrews 11 says of all the great saints of the Old Testament, Noah was justified by faith. as under the new covenant, so too under the old covenant. It's all the same. So later we read of Abraham in Genesis 15, that Abraham believed the Lord. He trusted the Lord and God counted it to him as righteousness. That faith, his righteousness was by faith. Like Noah before him, Abraham, was righteous only by faith, by actively believing God. The Hebrew word for righteousness and justice are the same word. And in English, the words can be used interchangeably. To be righteous is to be just in relation to others and in relation to God. If you are justified by faith, you will be just. If you do not live justly, then your justification may be called into question. That's the whole point of church discipline, ultimately excommunication, you know, where there is as, as we say, open and scandalous, unconfessed sin. And this is biblical, 1 John 1, 6. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. We lie regarding having fellowship with him. If we walk in darkness, walk as the course of our life, as our ordinary way of living, right? And then 1 John 2, verse 4, whoever says, I know him, but does not keep his commandments is a liar. And the truth is not in him. Now, no one keeps God's commandments. No one, John, simply keeps, completely keeps, exhaustively keeps, perfectly keeps the law of God, of course. But there is a bold comfort in sin that belies one's faith. But the good news, the good news, brothers and sisters, from God is, again, chapter two of 1 John, if anyone does sin, We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins. He turns aside God's wrath, which we deserve. He takes away our sins. But Jesus says, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. You have a heart for God. If you love me, if you love God, you will have a heart for godliness. God has so changed your heart as to repent of sin and trust in Christ. That same changed heart will love the ways of God increasingly and abhor the ways of the world increasingly. That's called sanctification. And so after God told Noah what to put in the ark, we are told, Noah did this. He did all that God commanded him. Genesis 6, 22. Seven days before the flood, a whole week, God said, go into the ark. He didn't say go into the ark as the pitter patter of rain started to fall. A whole week before the flood, go into the ark. And Noah did as God said. And then God shot him into the ark. He shot him into the ark seven full days before the flood came. That was seven days for people to mock and marvel. And though there was no rain in the sky, no sign of rain in the sky. 7 verse 5, Noah did all that the Lord had commanded him. This was the obedience of faith. This isn't Noah reading the signs of the time, reading the signs of weather, Noah obeying God, despite what he saw, obeying God. The obedience of faith at the end of a long obedience, hundred years of obedience of building. Brothers and sisters, saving faith is active. It's not merely academic or theological. There may have been debate in Noah's day. Is this ark even seaworthy? Opinions for and against. Will there be an end of all things? Opinions for and against. There might even have been a conference or two. But Noah walked by faith, not by sight. But notice, brothers and sisters, he walked. He walked, he built, he walked by faith, he built by faith. He distinguished himself from the world by faith. He defied the world by faith and he obeyed by faith. Brothers and sisters, watch for your arc obedience. There is general obedience and there is arc obedience. What I mean by arc obedience is when the world looks at you in your obedience and says, what a fool you are. You're a fool, a fool for Christ. When the evil of the world, the noticeably evil of the world call you evil, When in your love for God and love for neighbor, they call you a hater in public, maybe on social media, and you're called to obey God. Even when Christian voices, church voices are joining in, and you have to obey God. That starts into the area of arc obedience. Will you do all that God has commanded you, going against them and going the distance? Noah, in this spirit, walked with God. He found grace in the eyes of God, so he was a righteous man, and as a righteous man, he walked with God. This walking with God, we had a Sunday school class on that this morning. I expanded on that much greatly, and we explored all kinds of scriptures. But this, in the Old Testament, this description of someone as walking with God is rare commendation. We are told twice that Enoch, the father of Methuselah, walked with God. This is said of Enoch, of one of those children of Cain, slew Abel, and then God gave Seth in place of Abel to Adam and Eve, and then we have the descendants of Seth, and we're told this person lived this long time and and then died. This person lived a long time and then died. It does not say this person walked with God this long time and then died. This person walked with God and then died. This person walked with God for this long time and then died. It doesn't say that. It says that of Enoch. The others, they all lived a long time. They're prophets of God. They also had the favor of God, the grace of God, as distinguished from many in their generations. But of Enoch, it says, he walked with God for 300 years. He's different. Others in the Bible walked before God. God said to Abraham, walk before me and be thou perfect. Genesis 17, Jacob, the aged Jacob down in Egypt, blessing his children and his grandchildren. May the God before whom my fathers walked bless these boys. And then in the law, Deuteronomy 30, for I commanded you this day to love the Lord your God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commands, loving God, walking in his ways, keeping this command set in parallel with each other. It's all the same thing. But in Christ, we all do this, we all walk with God. We walk with God, we walk in Christ, we walk in the truth, we walk according to the spirit. It's a common thing. We live in Christ, and so we walk in Christ. Colossians 2.6, as you received Christ Jesus, the Lord, so walk in him. Romans 14 says we walk in love. 2 John and 3 John, those little epistles just before the book of Revelation, it describes us as walking in the truth. If we walk in Christ, we will walk in love. If we walk in, if we are in Christ, we will walk in Christ and we will walk according to the truth. Revelation 3 says we're talking about the seven churches of Asia. Revelation 3, 4 says that few people in the church in Sardis have not soiled their garments. And so they will walk with me in white. For they are worthy. Dr. Robert Cook was the president of the King's college. from 1962 to 1985, 62 when I was born, to 1985 when I graduated university. That's a long time. This is when the King's College was not in Manhattan, but it was north of the city, overlooking the Hudson River. And Robert Cook was also the president of the National Religious Broadcasters Association, and he had a well-known radio broadcast called Walk with the King. And people, a lot of older people, would remind me whenever I said, oh, I teach at the King's College. And they knew of the old college, and they have Dr. Cook, the beloved Dr. Cook. And they would smile, and they would warm, and they would remind me that every broadcast, he would ask the question, are you walking with the king today? Are you walking with the King? That is a good question. That is a good diagnostic question. As you look at your day, as you look at your walk and say, am I walking with the King? In all that I do, if the Lord Jesus himself were with me, walking with me step by step, would I be doing what I'm doing? That's a good question, because he is brothers and sisters, because he is. But this walking with God must have been more than faithful obedience, because all those other descendants of Seth that are named. We're also walking in faithful obedience, but of only Enoch, as it said, he walked with God. And then Noah, this is a sweet communion with God. Sweet communion. And Adam and Eve had this communion in the garden before the fall. They walked with God, right? It says, in Genesis chapter three, God was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, right? Adam and Eve were not with them because they had sinned and they were hiding. But normally they had this sweet communion, this sinlessly sweet communion with their creator. This is the sort of walk as two friends walk with each other, sharing a journey with each other, sharing time with each other and conversation and each other's souls, that kind of walk. When my brother and I were boys, my grandfather would visit from Scotland for up to six months at a time. And we were like eight, nine, 10 years old, 13, 14, 16. And he was a colorful man who lived a colorful life. He was a Sergeant Major ultimately in the 42nd Highland Regiment, the famous Black Watch. And he soldiered between the wars in India and then during the war in France and in North Africa and up through Italy during that time and in Greece and he was in the Middle East and Syria at one point. And that's exciting. And he would hike the hills of Scotland. And he would tell us all about his time as a soldier and his time hiking in the hills. And he just had a big personality. And he was a Scotsman, so that's a novelty in itself for anyone. So, as we know, we would walk along the road, and we'd go up to the cottage and spend the summer at the cottage up on Lake Huron, and we would walk the two miles into town on the county road, buy something, jam, whatever, and then walk back again, listening to him, talking with him. Or along the beach in Scotland, in Aberdeen, when we visited him there, and then later after dinner at Thanksgiving or Christmas or something and say, who's going for a walk? And oh yeah, and it's not like we want to walk off our turkey. We wanted to be with grandpa and to spend time with him and listen to his stories and just drink him in. We were eager to do this. to be with our grandpa and hear his stories, as I said, drink in that character. And we got to know him well and love him deeply, not just from spending time with him, but because he was lovable. It's the same in walking with God, in communing with God, walking with him, living with him. in his word, in prayer, in engaging with the world, in life experience, always with him, and thinking of everything in light of what he has said, in light of our growth in Christ, in light of the providence of his love in all things, in small things, in great things, as we walk, as we look back upon our walk, as we anticipate our walk, communing with him, walking with him. Noah walked with God. In Christ, you walk with God, and we're called to walk with God. We have a hymn, Oh, for a closer walk with God. That's what it's about. This description of Noah begins with grace and ends with walking. Taken all together, it means peace. Noah's name means rest. It sounds like the Hebrew word for comfort or rest. It's not a frantic effort to please God. It's resting in that grace of verse eight. He walked, he worked, he witnessed, and he waited. But in all these things, he rested. Lamech, his father, the other Lamech, called him Noah, called him rest, because he thought this boy would be the Savior. Maybe this boy will be the Savior. For some reason, he thought this boy would be the Savior. The Savior promised to Eve who would remedy our sinful situation. 529, chapter 5, verse 29, when Lamech had lived 182 years, he fathered a son and called his name Noah, saying, called his Noah, named Noah, because out of the ground, out of the ground that the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us relief, rest from our work and from the painful toil of our hands. But it was not Noah who would bring this relief from the toil of a fallen world and from sin. The one Noah foreshadows will be our rest. Christ, who was promised from the start, promised from the very start in Genesis chapter three, who would crush Satan's head and deliver his people from the curse of sin, the curse of sin, the burden of sin, the condemnation of sin. Christian, God is pouring out his grace exceedingly more abundantly in our day than in the days of Noah. We stand, brothers and sisters, this side of the day of Pentecost, this side of our Lord's promise to build his kingdom internationally, who said, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Remember that. Remember it. God graced Noah. God graced in the Old Testament. He graced a few judges, prophets, priests, kings, and a small godly remnant while Israel got comfortable with filthy pagan gods over and over and over again. And he promised that in the new covenant, the new covenant to come, He would pour out His Spirit on all flesh. There is a pouring out of the Spirit in our day, in our day, for the last 2,000 years almost, that was not true under the Old Covenant. It's different. It's fuller. It's more abundant. You are living in that age of abundant grace. There are times of decline and times of revival. but it's a time of the growing, not the narrowing of the kingdom that we saw from Seth down to Noah, but an expanding of the kingdom, a growing and spreading of God's kingdom. Christ is risen and exalted and enthroned, brothers and sisters. And his spirit, his spirit indwells his church. His spirit emboldens his church. And his spirit extends his church to every nation, is extending his church to every nation. And he's not done with America. And he's not done with Arizona. And you, brothers and sisters, are not alone, no matter where you are and what you're doing. Assume that there are believers in your midst, not just here in church, but wherever you are. Assume that there are believers in your midst, and assume there are future believers in your midst. You got a job where people are blaspheming and people are talking about how they squandered their weekend in idleness or dissipation. Think, is this a future believer? If this is a future believer, I am a vessel of God's grace. How am I making God's grace available? How am I making the word of God, the saving word of God available to these people? Because as they are, I once was. And as I am, God can make of them. That is a Christian, a Christian expectation. That is an expectation of people living in an age of super abundant grace. This grace of God that brought you safely to Christ is dizzyingly more active than it was for Noah and is working through you and around you. Be sure of that. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you all for doling out your spirit, not in teaspoons, but in showers, in monsoons, in floods, Father. Not a flood of judgment, but a flood of mercy. And Father, we thank you that we have drunk in that mercy. We've been changed by that mercy and we are, we are vessels conduits of that mercy father in confidence of your your gospel kingdom plans and ways in this world may we live and Father we thank you for your encouragement and it's in Jesus name. We ask it. Amen Brothers and sisters we now