Genesis chapter 9 and this evening we are going to start at verse number 21 and read down through the rest of the chapter. If you would stand with me for the reading of God's Word. Genesis 9 and verse number 21. And he drank of the wine and was drunken and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his nakedness of his father and told his two brethren without. And Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it upon both their shoulders and went backward and covered the nakedness of their father. And their faces were backward and they saw not their father's nakedness. And Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant. And God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant. And Noah lived after the flood 350 years, and all the days of Noah were 950 years, and he died. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the blessing that we can gather together this evening. We thank you for the health that you've given to us, Lord, to be able to be here tonight. Some of our members can't be here tonight due to health issues, and I pray that you would bless them. I pray that you'd be up at the Pelicone this evening and the various issues that he's dealing with this evening and throughout the day. I pray that you would just give him relief and comfort from those. I pray that he would be back on Just feeling well again and without any pain very quickly. And Lord, we do thank You for Your Word. I pray that You would bless it to our hearts tonight. I pray You would teach us from Your Word and would help us to apply the things that we study tonight to the world around us and be able to see the world as You do and not as the world would have us to view it. And Lord, we'll thank You for what You do. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. You may be seated. Tonight we're going to look at the curse on Ham, spoken of in this passage of Scripture. We'll go verse by verse through here and see some different things. Hopefully we'll learn some things this evening from God's Word. We already dealt with verse number 21 last week on the subject of alcohol. But we'll start there this evening with Noah drinking the wine, was drunken, was uncovered in his tent, and passed out because of the alcohol. And just a few points on this, what a disgrace drunkenness brings on people. Like what Matthew Henry said about this, that men say and do that when drunk, which when they are sober, they would blush at the thoughts of. And it certainly is the case, the things that people will do and say, getting themselves involved in, when they're under the influence of alcohol or under the influence of drugs, under the influence, really just when you're not sober-minded. And we're told to be sober, and that doesn't just apply to not being drunk with wine. That can, you can be, you can not be sober because of YouTube, because of Facebook, because of Instagram, or food. Other things can make you so that you're not thinking right, so your mind is not in the right place. But we see the effects of the drunkenness here in Noah's life. This was some time after the flood. This wasn't immediately after the flood, because we're told about Canaan. Canaan was Ham's youngest son. If you look just in the next chapter, chapter 10, verse number 6, This is in the sons of Ham, Cush and Mizraim and Futh and Canaan. So Ham has had four children so this is not immediately after the flood and it's not, you know, Canaan is not a baby here because the things that Noah says would make us consider that Canaan must be of age. So some time has passed since they disembarked from the ark and Noah probably thought, I mean he was alone while he was enjoying his wine, probably wasn't expecting to get in the position that he did. But when you get involved with things that alter your mind, you never know what you're going to wake up to. And there are people in prison today that are there because of the stupid things they did that they would never have done but for the alcohol or but for the drugs. So important, never to even walk down that path to keep yourself from finding yourself in a position of regret and shame that won't be lived down. Here's been thousands of years and we're still reading about this event in his life. Something that I'm sure that he wished he could have forgot about in the 350 years after this point before he died and something he probably wished wasn't written in scripture so that every other generation after him is going to be reading about what he did. but we're still rooting about it today. It would have never happened if he would have just stayed away from the wine. So let's stay away from those things that would put us in these positions that we will regret. So it says that Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brethren without. This is not indicated an accidental, involuntary sight here. The word saw intimates that he looked with pleasure and joy. And I don't think this was a homosexual type pleasure here, but more that he had Dad's been harping on me for years on living a righteous and moral life, and look at him now. Look at where he's at. Now, that kind of rejoicing to see that his godly father has finally experienced this great moral failure. Maybe something that in his own life, Noah dealt with him maybe over the years about, and now his father's failed in that area. Now he can rejoice because his father failed. I want to read what Matthew Henry said about this as well. Very good thought here. He says, Note, it is common for those who walk in false ways themselves to rejoice the false steps which they sometimes see others make. But charity rejoices not in iniquity, nor can true penitents that are sorry for their own sins rejoice in the sins of others. And we see a great, if you look over to Romans 1, Paul brings out this sin in a unique way. just his wording here. We're familiar with Romans 1 and the listings of the sins that are in that chapter. We could start back at verse number 21 even before and read down, but if we look just starting at verse number Romans 1 verse 28 says, being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity, whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful. Verse number 32, this is what we see Ham being involved in. seeing a sin in his father's life and rejoicing in that sin, rejoicing in the situation and expressing that in his actions that follow. It would seem possibly that there was a long hidden or maybe not hidden resentment here towards his father and the authority that his father held over him over the years. So we're told that he went out and told his two brethren without. The word told here indicates that he's announcing this with delight. He's exposing what he saw. The word there foretold speaks of being very conspicuous. And so you can kind of get the picture here. There are times when you see a brother or sister, maybe something's wrong with their clothes or wrong with something with them, and you go up to them and you're very quiet, maybe whisper, hey, brother, you got a big piece of lettuce in your teeth, or something like that. Or your shoes are untied. Whatever it might be, you're discreet about it. You don't yell across the auditorium. When you do that, you're purposely trying to embarrass someone. You're purposely trying to bring attention to a situation that the other person probably wished you wouldn't bring attention to. And that is exactly here what Ham is doing. He's being very conspicuous. He's being very loud. He's announcing it, exposing it, rehearsing what he saw to his brothers. Proverbs 14 verse 9 says that fools make a mock at sin. And that's what Ham was involved in here. He was making a mock. And what a sorry thing it is when people publish the sins of others, when they talk about the shortcomings of others, the things that others are dealing with, and they make special prayer requests. You know, pray for Brother So-and-so, pray for Sister So-and-so. Did you hear what he's involved in? And we like just to airing those sins out, not for the sake of true concern that we want to pray for them, but we want others to know just how rotten that person is, because the more rotten that person is, the better I look, and how wicked that is when we do not have the love and the charity to cover the sins of our brothers and sisters in Christ. And we're told that Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it upon both their shoulders and went backward and covered the nakedness of their father. They just rushed in to his room and reveling what was going on. They were very careful. They went in backwards. They covered their father up. And just that action alone would have been a pretty sharp rebuke to Ham. Just in how they did that, how they dealt with that situation would have been a rebuke to his, be very conspicuous in announcing what was going on, and then they're being very careful in how they dealt with it. And it's important when people come to us and airing out the sins of our brothers and sisters in Christ, it's important how you respond and how you react to that. It's important that you deal with things in a biblical way. Because that alone, you may not, maybe you don't feel right in rebuking that person that's coming to you verbally. Well, rebuke them in your actions and how you deal with a situation. It's very important how you respond. when people come to us in these situations telling about what someone else has done. I remember one time a family was visiting the church we were at in Oregon, and the first time there, I believe it was a Wednesday night, they had moved down from Alaska, moved into town, and right after the service, one of the old ladies in the church went right to them and said, I just want to let you know, a brother of so and so doesn't believe this, doesn't do this, and she was talking about me. And that lady says, oh, really? Let's go talk to him about it. And she came right to me. She said, I just want to let you know, this lady over here, she was saying these things about you. And I praise the Lord for that. Dealing with a situation right away, not just getting sucked into gossip, is important. Shem and Japheth, they set an example of charity that ought to be demonstrated towards others. In 1 Peter 4, verse 8, It says, and above all things have fervent charity among yourselves, for charity shall cover the multitude of sins. Charity shall cover the multitude of sins. And that was displayed here, this love, this charity that Shem and Japheth had for their father in trying to cover the shame of his nakedness. So Noah awoke from his wine and he knew what his younger son had done unto him. whether he started vaguely remembering what went on, whether someone told him we don't know, how he came to know, but it must have been a shameful thing for that moral failure, but realizing the sin that took place, that Ham did, brought anger into his heart. So in verse number 25, we have this curse, and there's a lot of, we're not given a lot of information here, on this curse. Cursed he became and a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, blessed be the Lord God of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant. And God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant. We're not told all what this curse is. Some people will say, well, this is the curse on the blacks. That's why they're slaves, and that's why it's okay. That's why slavery is fine, because it's just part of God's curse here. The blacks of the world. And there's a lot of people that believe that. That's what this is about. That's not what this is about. And we're gonna see that, I believe, as we consider some things in this passage of scripture. But see, he said, cursed be Canaan. Cursed be Canaan. Why Canaan? It was Ham that was the issue. Ham did this. So I think we see here that this curse that was being done, here this was Noah's youngest son, Ham. did this to Noah, proclaimed his sin to the world and now this curse is going on the youngest son of Ham. I don't think it was just on the youngest son, I think it was the curse on Ham and his posterity, what was going to take place as a result of them and their posterity. A servant of servants is the term used here. It's an interesting phrase. A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. A servant of servants. What kind of servant is this? Is he talking about being a slave here? Well, this word servant is used in many different ways in Scripture. Even in the text it says that Canaan shall be Shem's servant and he'll also be Japheth's servant. He's a servant of servants. Both servants is the same word. So he's a servant of servants. So Shem and Japheth are also servants. So whose servants are they? Whose servant is Shem? Whose servants are their descendants? Who ultimately are they to be serving? They're ultimately all to be serving the Lord and fulfilling His will in their life. And we see some interesting things with the posterity of these three sons, and this curse that extended to Ham's children, and beyond that, not just to the black people in the world. This is not the curse of black skin. Some people go back to Genesis 4, and they say, oh, there, the mark on Cain was black skin. And that just makes no sense. So where did it go? It just wiped out and somehow came back through Noah? It wasn't black skin. Black skin was the color of your skin. We all have the same color. It's just more or less of it in our skin. That's just part of the design that God's put in people. So this curse has nothing to do with skin color, but it has, I think, a lot to do with the nations following that came out of these sons and the role that they played in the world is very interesting as you look at historically what took place. So servant of servants does not mean just the lowest slave, a slave of the slaves. That's not what it's talking about because in the next verses again it's talking about Shem and Japheth are there. servants as well. So it would seem what the text is referring to is that Ham and his descendants would be servants to the other nations, generally throughout history. It doesn't necessarily mean a slave, as we'll see. A steward, the same term is used for a steward. It's used for someone that serves God, a servant of God. Abraham calls himself a servant in Genesis 18. He calls himself the same word, a servant. So we consider that man's responsibilities to God that we see in Genesis and beyond. We have the physical responsibilities that men are to have, providing for the physical needs, physical comforts, fulfilling the responsibilities. Genesis 9 verse 1 speaks about being fruitful and multiplied and replenish the earth. In Genesis 2 verse 19 it speaks about tilling the ground and bringing forth food. Those physical things that are to be done in the world. There's intellectual responsibilities when we consider the mandate in Genesis 1 to have dominion over the earth and take that dominion, well, that takes some thinking. How is that going to be done? How are we going to control these animals? How are we going to take dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth? It takes some intellect there to figure out how we're going to do this. How are we going to take dominion over the ground and be able to grow the food that we need. How are we going to take dominion over the earth? So there's some intellectual responsibilities of science and knowledge and learning some things. In Psalm 8 verse 6, David said, All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field, the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the sea. O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth. So we have dominion over all of these things. That's gonna take a lot of thinking and figuring out how does that happen. You don't just jump in a pen with some animal and take dominion over it. You've got to figure out how to do that and usually that comes with a lot of cuts and bruises or other things that take place before you actually take dominion. So there's that responsibility that God gave in that area. Then there's the responsibility, the spiritual responsibility that we have to know God and to follow Him. The Bible speaks of In Isaiah 11, verse 9, that the earth should be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. Habakkuk talks about the earth being filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord. And we have a responsibility to spiritually reproduce and share the knowledge of God with those around us. In Genesis 4, in verse number 26, It speaks of Seth who was born after Abel was killed by Cain. We're told in that verse that then began men to call upon the name of the Lord. So they were proclaiming the name of the Lord, learning about the Lord, that knowledge was spreading. And so we have these responsibilities of man and we consider the sons of Noah. very generally speaking about the sons of Noah and the nations that have come out from them. Japheth and his descendants, a lot of the Indo-European nations came out from him. We have Shem, the Middle Eastern and Middle Eastern nations, many of them coming out of Shem and Ham, most of them, a lot of them at least, coming out there in the African nations. In fact, Africa was called the land of Ham for millennia, the land of Ham. So we consider these men and what they accomplished in the world, these nations, the descendants of these men. Ham was motivated by the physical and the descendants of Ham gave us a lot of of the things that we enjoy today came from Ham. Japheth, we think about the Romans, the Greeks, a lot of the European nations, a lot of intellectual gains came from Japheth and those descendants. Shem, we see in our text about the God of Shem, Shem was motivated by the spiritual and many areas and were great influences in the spiritual realm of the world. Since Ham would have been more concerned with the physical things, just consider some of the interesting things here. I want to read to you about the descendants of Ham and just the different nations, some of the things that historically they were involved in. They were the original explorers and settlers of almost all parts of the world after Babel. They were the first cultivators of most of the basic food staples and the first to domesticate most animals. They developed most of the basic types of structural forms and building tools and materials. They were the first to develop most of the usual fabrics for clothing and the means of mass producing them, weaving and that sort of stuff. They discovered and invented a wide variety of medicines and medical practices, surgical practices. A lot of concepts of practical mathematics, surveying, navigation, those sort of things were from the descendants of Ham. A lot of machinery aspects of commerce and trade also from the descendants of Ham. Writing, paper, ink. those sort of things from the descendants of Ham. A lot of very practical, everyday, physical things that we enjoy today originated with the descendants of Ham. But the downside was that they usually didn't hold on to it very much because the descendants of Japheth took them over and grew them and used them in a way that the Hamites could not. So we consider, how are they servants of servants? How do they become the servants of men? Well, historically, there was a lot of slavery with them. So many of the things that we enjoy today was because of their labors. Some of the technologies that we enjoy today are almost things that they've created that they sometimes don't get the benefit of, because they've been taken away from them. And so they become that servant of servants. They become almost servants to mankind, providing many things but not necessarily enjoying all those things over time. And again, these are very broad characteristics. Obviously there are people in every one of these groups that aren't typical with the rest. There are many that are not religious when we consider the descendants of Shem, but Muslims, Muslim nations are descendants of Shem. Most of the monotheistic religions in the world come from the descendants of Shem. There's a lot of atheists as well. There's a lot of Jews that are atheists, though they're descendants of Shem. So we have this curse. related to the blessings on Shem and Japheth. He said, blessed be the Lord God of Shem. It was through Shem that the Messiah would come. Christ would come. Again, Jews and Muslims are descendants of Shem. It says, God shall enlarge Japheth. That word enlarge doesn't mean just growing in geographical area, but it would seem more of the mental enlargement. intellectual enlargement, being open-minded, intellectually minded, intellectually curious, intellectually explores in that area of thought. And so, God would enlarge Japheth and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem. And that phrase there speaks of not literally living in Shem's tents, but think about the reference about dwelling in the tents of wickedness. doesn't mean that we're literally dwelling in tents of wickedness, but we're having fellowship with those wicked people. And Japheth, the descendants of Japheth, more so than the descendants of Ham, have enjoyed the benefits, the fellowship of the religious spirituality of the descendants of Shem. So we have these blessings and these curses that aren't just for Shem, Ham, and Japheth. personally, but for the descendants as they go out around the world. Again, these are just general. There's a lot of individual exceptions in many of these things. In verse number 28, it says that Noah lived after the flood 350 years. And all the days of Noah were 950 years and he died. If you consider his age, just considering Noah's ancestors, there was only two others that lived longer than him, Methuselah and Jared. And so he lived a long time. He would have lived, if there aren't any gaps in the genealogies in Genesis 11, which I don't believe there are, he lived, Noah lived, he was alive when Abraham was alive. He would have died when Abraham was about 58 years old. and Shem even longer. Shem was around when Jacob, I believe, or Isaac, I can't remember the exact genealogy, but Noah was around for a long time, and to be able to spread that knowledge of what he knew pre-flood, to give that to his descendants, what a thing that would have been to be able to hear from Noah what took place before the flood, how the world was. That would have been an amazing history lesson. He lived up through the time of Abraham, the dispersion, what took place there in the next chapter with the Tower of Babel. He was there. He would have experienced that. He would have saw what God did and experienced that. I'm looking forward to this next chapter as we get into it. A lot of very interesting things in relation to us as well today. They're in Genesis 10 and Genesis 11, so very important chapters. I would encourage you to read chapter 10. Some of your Bibles may may have a note in there talking about the table of nations. There's an archaeologist, his name just went in my mind, very famous, probably the most famous archaeologist for Near East antiquities and history. His name is on the tip of my tongue, I can't remember it. Not a Bible believer and yet his description of Genesis 10, he said that's the most accurate description that we've ever had of what actually took place. And he's one that, he studies Babylonian and Assyrian histories and he said what we see there in Genesis 10 is the most accurate description of what took place. We obviously know that it is the most accurate because it's God's Word. but from a non-Bible believer looking at the evidence. You can look at the Bible and say that's exactly right, what is described there in Genesis chapter 10. So I encourage you to read that before next week, and we'll soon be out of, I'm only planning on preaching up through Genesis chapter 11. So about maybe three or four more messages. And when I'm finished, I've asked Brother Kirtland to prepare about a six week series and he'll be preaching on Wednesday nights as soon as I'm finished with these as I prepare another Seriously be praying for him as well as he prepares for that. We have about three or four more messages in Genesis before I finish up with chapter 11. So be praying for those messages. Be praying for Brother Kirtland as he prepares as well. Before we close this evening, I'd like to take