The Sin of Noah
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2019 · 16 June 2019
We've been studying Genesis carefully and slowly. Genesis 9:18-21, “Now the sons of Noah who went out of the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. And Ham was the father of Canaan. 19 These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth was populated. 20 And Noah began to be a farmer, and he planted a vineyard. 21 Then he drank of the wine and was drunk, and became uncovered in his tent.”
Verses 22-24, “And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside. 23 But Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and went backward and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father’s nakedness. 24 So Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done to him.”
With this passage the life of the humanity post-flood on the earth begins. The great flood which drowned the whole human race except eight souls is over. It drowned all air-breathing animals on the planet except those that were in the Ark. The water has subsided, the ground is dry, and all life has come out of the ark. All God-rejecting sinners had been swept into eternal judgment.
And now there is a new beginning; a new day dawns for the eight people who make up the entire human race. Fresh on their minds, and certainly visible around them, is the knowledge of the devastating impact of sin. The shape of the face of the earth is literally changed. It changed life physically and materially. And there was plenty of evidence of death. And so they come into a new world.
But one thing didn't drown in the flood, and that was sin. Sin was in the nature of Noah, his wife, Shem, Ham and Japheth and their three wives. It was a new earth, but it was the same old humanity. Noah, now 601 years in this following passage sins. Age is no guarantee against sin and here is an old man who still sins. And there is this ‘young’ man age 100 or so, who also sins.
And so we learn that what the Bible says is true: sin reigned from Adam. Once Adam sinned, sin became the sovereign influence on human life. It became the king of humanity, and carries its potent poison into all peoples and families all over the world. And it was judged by God when he drowned all of humanity on earth except those whom He showed mercy to.
Notice that the son of Ham named Canaan is mentioned four times. Now Ham had four sons, and you might wonder why Canaan all of a sudden is such a significant person. According to Genesis 10:6, Ham had four sons named Cush, Mizraim, Put and Canaan. But why is Canaan singled out? Why is there this cursing of Canaan? You know that the author of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, was Moses.
And Genesis was written after the exodus from Egypt, which occurred around 1445 B.C. It was after Israel came out of Egypt and went through the 40 years of wandering in the desert, and before Moses died in 1405. And the first time God was telling Israel that they were now to enter the Promised Land. And the land that had been promised to them was the land of Canaan.
This had been promised six hundred years before they were standing on the edge of the Jordan river ready to take the land. They had endured 400 years of captivity in Egypt and there were many other years intervening, after the promise was made to Abraham. But when Genesis was first read, authored by Moses under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, it was important that Israel get their spiritual act together.
They had reached a point of obedience to God where He was willing to lead them into the Promised Land which He had promised. And the Lord had told them, when you go in to take the land, I want you to destroy the Canaanites. Natural human nature would cause revulsion against such a command. Here were the people of God who had been taught obedience to God, to live according to the Law of God.
This must have been a severe challenge to their thinking, to go into the Promised Land and massacre the Canaanites. It would be natural to ask the question “is this right?” But here we read that Canaan and his offspring were cursed. So Canaan was an object of God's wrath, and that Israel was chosen to carry out this judgment. It was water that drowned the world of sinners; and it was Israel that destroyed the wicked Canaanites.
You also see an incident that on the surface is not so severe as to produce the curse that ends up in a genocide on a nation. A son walks in, sees his father naked, and walks out to tell his brothers, and is cursed. However consistently, in Genesis, the fate of people and of nations is determined by occurrences that seem trivial. But when we dig a deeper, it isn't trivial, and we see the connection to the son of Ham.
The sin of Noah wasn't minor and the sin of Ham wasn't minor because no sin is minor. Here God in demonstrating that sin had survived the flood. God could have picked any number of sins to illustrate their fallenness. But He picks what appears to us to be somewhat of a minor sin, to show us that even a minor sin is sin. Even the smallest iniquity can have disastrous repercussions.
God shows us those “little” sins that devastated families and devastated nations. He chose this one to make teach us that even the lack of self-control and disrespect are sins. In this section three things pop up as inevitable realities. Propagation, pollution and polarization. And you will understand how those words sum up life in the new world, and then the death that is identified for us in verses 28 and 29.
Let's start with propagation. When God made Adam he said be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. And essentially, that is exactly what he told Noah's family to do back in Genesis 9:7, "As for you be fruitful and multiply, populate the earth abundantly and multiply in it". This is the new Adam, and this is the new humanity and this is the new opportunity to multiply, to populate the world.
So because of that emphasis, there's a strong repetition of the role of Shem, Ham, Japheth and their lives. Those three couples are responsible to repopulate the earth. In Genesis 5:32 Noah’s three sons were born when he was 500 years old. This makes the sons about 100 years old when the flood came, and they were married but childless. And now, Noah is 601 and they're 100, the flood is over, and it is time to have children.
And only one child of those sons is named, and that is Canaan. The rest of their propagation unfolds in Genesis 10, where you have the sons of Japheth, the sons of Ham, and the sons of Shem all listed there. But only Ham is introduced to us here as having a child named Canaan. And that Promised Land, called the Land of Canaan, is referred to 35 times in Genesis.
The act of taking the Land of Canaan was a just judgment of God on a cursed and wicked people. This is the first nation that is cursed by God. And so when Israel read this, they knew they had a cursed ancestry. And they were acting on the basis of divine judgment, which had already been determined, giving them historical justification for being the instrument of judgment on Canaan.
It says in verse 19 that they populated the whole planet. There was no other source of human life. All life on this world came originally from Adam and Eve. Acts 17:26 says, "And God made from one every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth." People get confused about that. All came from Adam and Eve and were narrowed down to the three families of Noah, and then the rest of human life came out of them.
There are no spiritless, soulless hominids in the Bible. This is an evolutionist theory. By their uniformity principles, they extrapolate back and back and man has to be two to four million years old. And so in accommodating them, Hugh Ross comes up that some man-like creature that had no soul. Evolutionists tell us that Aborigines and American Indians date back to 40,000 to 60,000 years ago. They are totally wrong!
All human beings came from Adam, through Noah. Which means that there is in the genetic code for all human beings traces from Adam and Eve. All genetic coding that is in all the races that exist today was in the family of Noah. In the world you have so much diversity; dark-skinned people, light-skinned people, with various features that are identifiable as Caucasoid and Negroid, Mongoloid, etc.
And yet all these differences in skin color and facial looks and body designs all came from the genetic code that was in Adam and Eve. And the genetic code for all of the humanity in all of its diversity today was continued in the family of Noah. Everyone from dwarfs and aborigines to seven foot two Zulus, came from Noah and his wife who received all the necessary genetic coding from Adam and Eve.
Scientists estimated that just two human parents could produce more children than there are atoms in the universe, where no two would be exactly alike. All because of the staggering variability in our genes. As people mated, variations began to occur. There is an infinite number of variables possible within just two people which eventually produced the various shades of skin and features.
And in the end there is only one race - mankind. The difference in genetics between any two people in the world, no matter how diverse they are, even if they're from the same group, is 0.2. Racial characteristic differences such as; skin color, facial features, eye shape, is 0.012, almost no difference. We really are one blood, we have been all made of one father and one mother, Adam and Eve.
For a few centuries after the flood, everybody was one big family with one language and one culture. And everybody intermarried. Many believe that that tended to keep the skin color and the physical features generally away from extremes. Very light skin sometimes appears and very dark skin sometimes appear with varying features. But because the people intermarry, the average stays similar.
Then the Tower of Babel incident happened. People were isolated so they would begin to be dominated by the genetic features that are within that people group. It wasn't just the changing of languages, it stopped marriage outside your people group because you could not marry a girl you couldn't propose to. It's only after you marry them that you can't speak to them or won't.
So the Tower of Babel accomplished a lot. God separated the languages, scattered the people all over the world, and they were isolated and whatever the features were that God designed in his sovereignty in those genetic groups then became normalized. And so various characteristics began to appear. Each of the language groups had dominated and limited genetic features that became inbred and so became normalized.
It was God in Acts 17:26, who determined the boundaries of the nations. So God sorted the gene pool out exactly the way that He wanted it, so that He could produce exactly what He wanted to produce, and all of us have that unique identity, and our national identity is purposed and the designed by God from the beginning. But we all really are the same, with a 0.2% difference.
As these groups migrated away from Babel, they encountered new and different climate zones. This would also affect the balance of inherited factors in the population. But we all really are one family. There shouldn't be any racism, there shouldn't be any animosity. We've come from the same family. Any newly-discovered tribe is just a group of people that had the same beginnings that we had.
Romans 1 explains that mankind from the beginning not only had the knowledge of God, but they also had great brain power. But because they did not glorify God (verse 21) they became futile in their thoughts. And verse 19 says that from this family, the whole earth is populated. So the whole of humanity has declined. Sad to see how humanity instead of becoming smarter became less smart.
So, first thing we have after the flood is propagation. Well, second thing is pollution, sin in the new world. Verse 20, Noah began farming, he planted a vineyard, telling us that the earth is fruitful again. And there was a different kind of rain, connected with seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, etc. This was the cyclical rain of the seasons that causes the earth to produce.
And there was a rainbow, as a reminder that God had made a promise that he would never destroy the world by water again. Noah is like Adam; they were both farmers. They both sinned with the negative effects that were far-reaching. It started when Noah planted a vineyard. God gave us fruit to produce something we can drink that is healthy and enjoyable. But it also had the capacity to ferment and to cause danger.
Verse 21, "Noah drank of the wine and became drunk and uncovered himself inside his tent". What does that mean? All we know is that he lost his sense of shame, he lost his dignity. Drunkenness disgraced him. Clothes cover shame, and they protect purity. Nakedness leads to vice. Exhibitionists, pornographers, they all advocate nakedness as if it was a virtue. But everybody knows the value of the covering.
The embarrassed nudity of primitive tribes, or the flaunted nudity of naturalists or the perverted nudity of pornographers or rock singers or movie actors may be called freedom and a return to nature and innocence, but in reality, it cannot recover innocence. Rather, it parades the victory of the sinner over reasonable shame.” And God knows the intent of your heart.
Verse 22-23, "And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside. 23 But Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and went backward and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father’s nakedness. 24 So Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done to him.”
The effects of Adam's sin are still in operation, even in the new world. "In Adam", the Bible says, "the whole human race sinned and died." And "death passed to everyone", says the Book of Romans. Everyone who ever lived, then, bares the mark of Adam's sin in a fallen nature, and experiences death. But there is hope because God gave us a way to be saved through Christ. We will continue more next time. Let us pray.