If I had to rank the Bible passages that received the most ridicule from skeptics and cynics, I would definitely have to include Jonah and the whale. That one ranks right up there. But first on my list of the most disbelieved Bible passages would be Genesis 1 and 2 and the record of the creation of the universe in six literal days. But a close second on that list would be the entire account of Noah and the ark and the animals and the flood here in Genesis chapter 6 through 8. I put these first two on the list because they're rejected not only by atheists and agnostics, Some Bible-believing Christians refuse to accept what Scripture says in these chapters at face value. Some Christians who claim to believe the Bible give so much weight to the pronouncements of modern scientists steeped in evolutionary dogma that they're willing to interpret Genesis 6 through 8 in ways that they would never interpret the Gospel of John. or Paul's epistle to the Romans. Those who reject a face value reading of Genesis 6 through 8 are skeptical of the scope of the flood, whether it covered the entire earth or just a small region where Noah lived. And they reject just about everything about the Ark. Lord willing, We'll talk about the scope of the flood next Sunday. This morning, we'll focus on Noah and the ark. Let's read what Genesis 6 says about the ark, beginning in verse 13. Genesis 6, beginning in verse 13. And God said to Noah, the end of all flesh has come before me. For the earth is filled with violence through them. And behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Make yourself an ark of gopher wood." Any of you have a gopher wood tree in your backyard? Anybody? This verse is the only place in the Bible where this word is used. We don't really know what gopher wood is. We think it's probably something like cypress, some kind of a water-resistant wood. God told Noah, make yourself an ark of gopher wood. Make rooms in the ark and cover it inside and outside with pitch. The word there that's translated room is often in the Old Testament translated nest. There were a lot of birds on the ark, and maybe there were literally nests. Maybe this was more like stalls. So that word room is a very rough equivalent there. And this is how you shall make it. The length of the arc shall be 300 cubits, its width 50 cubits, its height 30 cubits. What's a cubit? How long is a cubit? A cubit was the length from the tip of your middle finger to your elbow. Now, I have to say, I think Caleb has a longer cubit than I do. But as someone mentioned, generally, Bible scholars believe that it worked out to about 18 inches, to about a foot and a half. And so that makes the ark 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, 45 feet high. You shall make a window for the ark, and you shall finish it to a cubit from above, and set the door of the ark in its side. You shall make it with lower, second, and third decks." So there was an 18-inch window around the top of the ark in some way under a roof for ventilation, for light, and so forth. And behold, I myself am bringing floodwaters on the earth to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breadth of life. Everything that is on the earth shall die. But I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall go into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons' wives with you. And of every living thing of all flesh you shall bring two of every sort into the ark to keep them alive with you. They shall be male and female. Of the birds after their kind, of animals after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after its kind, two of every kind will come to you to keep them alive. And you shall take for yourself all food that is eaten, and you shall gather it to yourself, and it shall be food for you and for them. Thus Noah did." That's a mouthful. Thus Noah did according to all that God commanded him, so he did. So to give you a taste of the the skepticism and unbelief regarding the ark and the flood. Let me read you sentences from that great theological authority Wikipedia. There we go. If you search Google with the question, did Noah really build the Ark? This is the paragraph from Wikipedia that Google will display to you. Unsuccessful searches for Noah's Ark have been made from at least the time of Eusebius. Eusebius lived in the third and fourth centuries AD. Believers in the Ark continue to search for it in modern times, that's true, but no scientific evidence that the Ark existed has ever been found, nor is there scientific evidence for a global flood. As I told you, skeptics of the Ark come in two varieties. Those who reject the entire flood narrative because they don't believe that any of scripture is true, Any of scripture is inspired, and so they regard this story as just one more fairy tale. And then, as I said, those who claim to believe the Bible but reject many of the details of this account, just as they reject many of the details of the creation account in Genesis 1 and 2. First of all, such skeptics point to the size of the ark. The size of the ark. Now, we'll get to the objection that these skeptics raise in a moment. But first, in order to even answer this objection, we need to get a handle on the meaning of the word ark. What is the meaning of the word ark? When we think of the word ark in Scripture, I don't know about you, but my mind immediately goes to the ark of the covenant. Okay? The Ark of the Covenant, that central piece of furniture that was put in the Holy of Holies and the Tabernacle and in the Temple. But that's a different Hebrew word. Okay? So the two don't have any parallel. The only other place in the Old Testament where this word is used is in Exodus chapter 2. You remember the story about Moses? Moses' mother put him in an ark of bulrushes, is what the old King James says, an ark of reeds, an ark made of reeds with pitch on the bottom. She put him out in the Nile River in order to save him from the edict of Pharaoh to destroy all of the Hebrew male children. And of course, Pharaoh's daughter found him floating in the river and she ended up adopting Moses. It's one of the great Sunday school stories. But it doesn't tell us anything about what an ark is shaped like. It tells us that an ark is supposed to float, but it doesn't tell us anything about the shape of the ark. The word translated ark was not originally a Hebrew word. It is a loan word from the Egyptian. You know, there are a lot of loan words. We're going to have a little bit of fun in the second service today. We're going to talk about loan words. You know, like pajama. Pajama is not an English word. It comes from the Hindi. A lot of words like that. So this is a loan word from Egyptian into Hebrew. And in Egyptian, the word means a chest or a box. There we go. I hate to disagree with someone as famous as Ken Ham, but I don't think the Ark looked like this sleek ship, which Answers in Genesis constructed up in Kentucky. Based on the meaning of the word, it seems that God did not instruct Noah to build a ship, but rather something much more like a barge. its dimensions would actually correspond to the barges that are still used on the Mississippi River today. I pastored in Greenville, Mississippi, where the riverboat industry is centralized. And so I saw a lot of river barges. And so This would have been about the same size as the barge, the same dimensions, except it was about twice the size of a barge that you would see on the river today. And the barges that you see on rivers today are only about a half story high. This barge had three full stories, 45 foot high. What's interesting is I searched for a picture or a drawing of Noah's Ark that looked like a big box like a barge, and I couldn't find one. Everybody thinks that they look like this from the Ark Encounter, or actually most of them look like this. Most of them are cartoons, which I think is a really good indication of what most people believe about the Ark. They believe it's a cartoon. They believe it's a fairy tale. Well, now that we have a handle on what the Ark probably looked like, we're ready to take up the question of the skeptics. Could Noah have constructed the Ark? Now, obviously, Noah had three sons. who no doubt helped him with the construction. But there's nothing in this chapter or chapter 7 or chapter 8 that keeps us from understanding that Noah may have hired workmen to help him. In Exodus, God commanded Moses to construct the tabernacle and all of its furnishings, as well as garments for the priests. And we know from that record that many others worked under Moses' leadership to construct the tabernacle. I don't think we should expect that anything different happened in this case. Noah led the project. Noah oversaw it, made sure that it was executed, but perhaps many others were involved in the construction. And we also know that very early in history, mankind developed the knowledge to build ships. During the time of King David, we read of ships and shipping and shipbuilding in the Bible. Archaeologists have found evidence of a center of shipbuilding called Byblos that built heavy ships 170 feet long that could have been called the freighters of that day. They were built to take on a lot of cargo. But the barge that Noah built was two and a half times as large as those largest boats built at Byblos. And I did a bit of research this week, and a little bit more, and learned that the first wooden ship, 450 feet long, constructed in modern times, was not constructed until 1909. So you can understand why those who reject the authority of the Bible are so skeptical of Noah's Ark. I mean, the idea that a crew of even skilled human beings built a seaworthy vessel 450 feet by 75 feet by 45 feet in ancient times? You've got to be kidding! But let's step back and think about it for a minute. Nearly every educated American, we know that human beings have progressed over the years. Right? Right? I mean, most of us at some point in our education have seen a chart that looks like that. And even if we haven't seen a chart that looks like that, and even if we actually reject what that chart is communicating to us, we hear the Geico commercials that say, even a caveman can do it. And if we don't watch television, we at least know this, that man has advanced technologically in the last 100 years at an unbelievable rate. And so it just makes sense to us that human beings for centuries now, for millennia now, have been progressing, getting better. I mean, what chance did a bunch of human beings barely more than caveman way back at the beginning of human history, what chance did they have really of building a wooden ship 450 feet long? Here's what we really need to ask ourselves. Have the truths that we've been learning for the past few weeks from Genesis chapter 5, have they really wriggled their way into our brains? We haven't progressed since the days of Noah. We haven't evolved since the days of Noah. We have devolved. We have declined. We have degenerated. I mean, they lived to be a thousand years old. Gail and I and some of the others, we were talking about this last Sunday. They were teenagers at 150 years old. If their mental acuity was anything like their physical vigor and health, who knows what they were capable of? I mean, let me ask you. What could you learn and do in 500 years with unmitigated vigor and health? You see, what we really need to be asking ourselves is what could these advanced human beings have done? What tools and technologies could they have developed As a comparison, consider the pyramids of ancient Egypt, which were constructed hundreds of years after the flood, hundreds of years after this point, by human beings who did not live 900 plus years. This week, I read. This week I read an article in Discovery Magazine about a team of archaeologists who recently made a discovery that may explain how the pyramids were constructed. I mean, how did people 4,000 years ago create some of the largest structures on Earth? The Great Pyramid of Giza is 481 feet tall. That's as tall as a 30-story building. It was constructed sometime around 2500 BC, made out of stones that each weighed two and a half tons. How did Egyptians lift those stones hundreds of feet in the air? They certainly didn't have the kind of cranes that we see every now and then in downtown Greenville building these skyscrapers. Well, this team of archaeologists discovered a steep ramp flanked by staircases on both sides. And built into those staircases were holes where they believed that posts were built. Now, obviously, the posts aren't there anymore. They've rotted away. But the pattern of those stairs and those post holes suggests that the Egyptians figured out a way to use some kind of a rope and pulley system to drag those huge stones up these ramps. Now, if the Egyptians could invent a way to get a two and a half ton stone to the top of a 481 foot pyramid 4,000 years ago, what could Noah and his sons and other workers have invented to build this huge barge? And remember, Noah had the best motivation possible in the world. His life depended on it. and the lives of his family. But the size of the Ark is secondary to another objection raised by skeptics, and that's the animals in the Ark. The animals in the Ark. How could the Ark possibly hold millions of species of animals? Now that sounds like a tough one, doesn't it? But it's actually based on a misunderstanding of Scripture and a misunderstanding of science. First of all, it's a misunderstanding of Scripture. Look with me in verses 19 and 20. In every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort. And you'll notice in your New King James Version, the word sort is in italics. It's not actually there. It just says, shall bring two of every. Into the ark to keep them alive with you, they shall be male and female. Of the birds, after their kind. Of animals, after their kind of every creeping thing on the earth after its kind. Two of every kind will come to you and you will keep them alive. Verse 20 uses the word kind rather than the word species. And that's very important. Kind is an ancient Hebrew word. Species is a modern scientific word. It's a word that comes from the scientific taxonomy that was developed in the 1700s. Kind does not equal species. And understanding this difference leads us to how this objection is a misunderstanding of science. Now, we talked about this a bit back when we discussed Genesis chapter 1. The system of taxonomy used by modern scientists was initially invented in the 1700s, and most of us were taught this system of taxonomy, this system of classification that starts with species and goes to kingdom or starts with kingdom and goes to species. This one's a little bit more detailed, plus it has a nice cat in it. Most creationists believe that the kinds that Noah was supposed to bring into the ark are at either the family or the subfamily level. In some cases, they would have been species, but most of them were at the family or subfamily level. According to Genesis 1, animals can interbreed at the level of kind. And that means that there can be a great deal of variation or what we call microevolution within biblical kinds. On the other hand, the Bible teaches that kinds are inviolable. One kind never evolves into a different kind. They've never proved that that happened. No one has ever seen that happen. That's called macroevolution. So back to the objection of the skeptics. Noah didn't have to have millions of species on the ark. He could have had one representative from each family or subfamily. The species that are on the earth today are variations that would have descended from the animals that were on the ark by microevolution. But macroevolution, one kind actually changing into another kind that can no longer interbreed with the original kind, that doesn't happen. No one has ever seen it. It can't be done in a laboratory. Never has it been observed. It's not science. Now, creationist scientists who have studied out this problem believe that as few as 7,000 to 8,000 pairs of animals had to be on the ark. I mean, think about it. To begin with, not all animals had to be on the ark. You didn't need to bring the fish onto the ark. So it would have been just land animals. And not very many land animals are actually that large, like the giraffe, and like the hippopotamus, and like the elephant. The average size of a land animal is actually smaller than a sheep. Now stick with me. I should have put this on a slide. 240 sheep can fit in a two-deck boxcar. and 569 two-deck boxcars could have fit in the Ark, which means that Noah and his family could have housed 7,000 to 8,000 animals comfortably in the Ark and still had over half of the capacity for their living quarters and for storage for food and water. Now, skeptics often raise a second objection regarding the animals on the ark. How could Noah have gathered animals from all over the earth? Skeptics like to caricature Noah traveling all over the world trying to capture two of every species. I mean, some even poke fun at the Bible by imagining that in certain places the animals got together and they had a council. I don't know about you, but I grew up reading about Br'er Fox and Br'er Rabbit, and so I can imagine this. And they held a council to figure out who they were going to send up to Noah so that those animals could get on the ark. But again, what does Scripture say? What does verse 20 say? God promises Noah, two of every kind will come to you to keep them alive. Now, when you point this out to Christian skeptics, to skeptics who claim to be Christians, they say, they throw up their hands and they say, well, yeah. I mean, if you want to say that this is all just miracle after miracle after miracle, then we'll ensure it could have happened. Well, we're not saying it's miracle after miracle after miracle, but Scripture says that God directed the animals to come to Noah. All we're doing is believing what Scripture says here. But even conceding that God could have miraculously caused the animals to come to Noah, they raise the objection that certain animals could not have gotten to Noah. In particular, they point to the marsupials in Australia. I mean, how could all of those land animals, the kangaroo, the koala, the Tasmanian devil, the bandicoot, the wallaby, I just wanted to say those. Those are just really cool. How could they have gotten across the ocean from Australia to the Middle East? Sounds like an insuperable objection, doesn't it? But it's based on an unbiblical assumption. It's based on the assumption that the worldwide flood didn't happen. It's based on the assumption that Australia was where Australia was before the flood. The truth of the matter is we don't know what the continents looked like before the flood. Genesis chapter 7 and verse 11 says that when the flood began, the great deep was broken up. Now, I don't know what that sounds like to you, but that sounds like a tremendous amount of tectonic activity going on that would have reshaped the continents. And let me put this bug in your ear. If you think about it, what many animals did, what many of these kinds of animals did in order to get to the Ark was migrate. Migration is a fact of nature that has no sensible explanation from an evolutionary point of view. Let me quote from the Encyclopedia Britannica online under the heading of Origin and Evolution of Migration. Here's the first sentence. The first sentence in this article. The origins of migration remain in the realm of pure conjecture. Neither observation nor experiment has resolved the matter. I did a little bit of research and discovered that Arctic terns have the longest annual migration of any animal. They migrate from Greenland up near the Arctic Circle to Antarctica in the South Pole, but not in a straight line, but rather in a zigzag route covering 44,000 miles a year. Most of us are familiar with Monarch Butterfly. Their migration is the most unique. Certain species of monarchs begin a 3,000 mile round trip from Canada to Mexico and back. But here's the kicker. During that migration, the butterflies cycle through three to five generations. So it's not the same butterfly who returns back to Canada. It's the great, great, great grandchild of that original butterfly. How does evolution possibly explain that behavior? And I mean, how many of you have ever gone to the beach in Florida on vacation? OK, a lot of you. Just about every beach you go to in Florida on vacation, you're going to find some place where crossing a road or crossing a beach, there is a path where something migrates. And it's all staked out. And they tell you, you can't do this and you can't do that. Watch out for the turtles that are crossing the road. This is all over the place. And while evolution has no explanation for why animals migrate, Genesis chapter 6 through 8 suggests a biblical explanation. Is it possible that God built the ability to migrate into every animal kind? Are the migratory habits of many species today an echo of the first migration of animals to Noah and the ark. Now I'm not making a dogmatic assertion, but if animals have the ability to migrate thousands of miles and to return precisely to the same spot every year to reproduce, then why is it so hard to believe that animals migrated to the ark under the guiding hand of God? And then there's one more objection that skeptics raise about the animals in the ark. How could Noah have cared for all the animals in the ark? I mean, if we take the biblical account seriously, Noah and his family were in the ark for more than a year caring for 15,000, 16,000, 17,000 animals. How could they possibly have stored enough food for these animals? Where did they get enough water? One skeptic said they would have spent the entire time just cleaning the stalls of these animals. I mean, it would have been like living in the largest pet store ever. And the answer may lie in another ability that animals have. They hibernate. Did some or all of the animals on the ark hibernate during the flood? Now, I have to tell you, the Bible does not mention this ability like it does migration. The Bible tells us that the animals migrated to the ark, but it doesn't say anything about how Noah and the animals survived. In fact, God specifically directed Noah to take every kind of food on the ark. And verse 21 says specifically that it was to be food not just for Noah and his family, but also for the animals. So I'm not sure. Maybe Noah had to feed. You know, animals, before they hibernate, they have to feed up front. They have to build up some some fat stores and so forth. Maybe Noah fed them for part of the time and they hibernated for the rest of the time. Maybe Noah only had to feed certain of the animals that did not hibernate. I'm not sure, but I believe that hibernation is part of the equation that explains how Noah was able to care for these animals. Now I've presented a lot of evidences that make it easier to believe that Noah truly built the ark and used it to save his family and the animal ancestors of all wildlife on earth today, but our faith is not built on evidences. Our faith is in the word of God. And so before I conclude, I think we need to talk about Jesus and the ark. Jesus and the ark. Jesus believed the ark and the flood to be true history. Let's read the words of Jesus in Luke chapter 17. This is what Jesus said, as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man. And when he's talking here about the days of the Son of Man, he's talking about the days when he will return. What we talked about this morning in our worship. They ate, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage until the day that Noah entered the ark and the flood came and destroyed them all. Jesus, in both Matthew and Luke, mentions both the ark and the flood that destroyed them all. And he uses this history to illustrate the truth about his second coming. As I said, there's a parallel between the two in the mind of Christ. So for a person to say that he puts his faith in Jesus Christ to save him from his sins and then reject what Jesus says about the opening chapters of Genesis, that's like somebody getting on an airliner and sitting down beside somebody and telling them, I don't really think that the pilot knows what he's doing. We have a place for people like that. It has padded walls. But more important, the Ark is an illustration of salvation through Jesus' atonement. The Ark is an illustration of what Jesus did for us on the cross. I don't think that the Ark is a type of Christ. For those of you that are theologically oriented, I don't think there's anything in the New Testament that indicates that. But there are a couple of details in scripture that make the Ark an amazing illustration of salvation through Jesus. Notice Genesis 6.14. And actually the best translation may be the Old King James Version where God told Noah when he built the ark that he should pitch it with in and without with pitch. I like the Old King James Version here because the verb pitch and the noun pitch come from the same root. And the Old King James Version reflects that. Now, our New King James Version isn't that bad. It says, and cover it inside and outside with pitch. And I'll tell you why it's not bad here in a minute. Now, we don't really know what pitch was. Because nowhere else in the Bible are these words used in this sense. Nowhere else in the Bible are they used in this physical sense. I mean, did Noah develop a process for making tar? Was pitch some kind of naturally occurring resin that he was able to find? We really don't know, because the Bible doesn't use this word in this way anywhere else. The normal translation of this verb, I can never remember how I'm supposed to do the, oh, there it is. this word. The normal translation of that verb, dozens of times elsewhere in the Old Testament, is make atonement. Wow! This is the first time this word is used in the Bible. And it's used of the ark. And yet, everywhere else in the Old Testament, it means make atonement. Now, how can that possibly be? Well, you understand it when you understand that in the Old Testament, to make atonement meant to cover. And that's why the translation of the New King James Version isn't really a bad translation. What God was telling Noah to do was to cover that wood inside and out. It may actually have been more like paint. What if Noah was the first Sherwin-Williams? More important for our discussion at this point, in the Old Testament, blood sacrifices, the lambs, the sheep, the goats, the bullocks that they brought to the tabernacle in the temple, those animal sacrifices covered sin. There's an old hymn that some of you have sung before called, Calvary Covers It All. Calvary covers it all. My past with its sin and stain, my guilt and despair, Jesus took on Him there. And Calvary covers it all. It makes it easy to see the arc as an illustration of the blood atonement made by Jesus that covers our sins and saves us from the flood of God's wrath. It's a beautiful picture. And I believe God intended that picture because this is the first use of that word. And that leads directly to a second detail from scripture that I think points to the ark. as an illustration of Jesus. The final climactic judgments in the book of Tribulation, and we've been talking about these recently on Wednesday night, those final climactic judgments in the book of Tribulation are the bowl judgments. And they're introduced in Revelation 16 in verse 1. Then I heard a loud voice from the temple saying to the seven angels, go and pour out the bowls of the wrath of God on the earth. And those of you that remember our study on Wednesday night, after these seven bowl judgments are poured out on the earth, the earth really is all but destroyed. They are the climax of God's judgment and they are pictured as a flood being poured out on the earth. But there is deliverance from the flood of God's wrath if we are in the ark. if we are in Jesus Christ. Those of you that are familiar with the New Testament, you know that often in the New Testament, it uses the phrase, in Christ. A person who puts his faith in Jesus Christ is said to be in Christ. And when we are in Christ, we are covered with His blood and the wrath of God does not reach us. What a beautiful picture of what Jesus did for us on the cross. And so the question today is, are you in the ark? Have you come to Jesus and said, I want to be part of what you did on the cross? I want to be covered with the covering of your blood. Have you made that decision? Would you say today you're inside the ark or you're outside the ark? It's a real simple question. Have you trusted in Jesus alone in his shed blood for the forgiveness of your sin? Are you in the ark? Are you outside of the ark? Because Jesus is coming again. And when he comes again, God will begin to pour out his wrath. And of course, the ultimate wrath of God is what we call hell. It's the lake of fire. an eternal punishment. But the ark protects us from all of that. Have you put your trust in Jesus Christ alone? Are you inside of the ark?