Noah
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2024 · 15 December 2024
Let’s turn to Hebrews 11 where we’re going to look at Noah and the work of faith. The Hebrews 11:7 says, “By faith Noah, after he was warned about what was not yet seen and motivated by godly fear, built an ark to deliver his family. By faith he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.” That condenses this cryptic verse from Genesis 6, 7, 8 and 9.
And Noah’s action of faith is more remarkable than anyone else. The Bible always teaches that men come to God by faith alone and then go on to live in faith. That simply means to take God at His Word and trust in that Word as true. Never by works or self-effort, or ceremony, moral achievement do you reach God. You always come to God by faith. It has never been different.
But when the gospel of grace and the gospel of faith came along, being preached by Christ and the apostles, it seemed to the Jews of that day like a new message. Judaism originally was a message of salvation by grace through faith had been corrupted into a system of works. Judaism taught that you attain salvation by your efforts, your moral efforts and your religious efforts.
The Jews had placed their hopes in nationality, circumcision, possession of the Law, conformity to the Law, observance of ritual, all the externals. And maybe the most well-known model of that would be the apostle Paul. He was circumcised the eighth day, of the tribe of Benjamin, a zealous Jew as measured against the Law, openly blameless, a traditionalist, which he thought was gain to him.
The theme of salvation has always been faith. And that’s the point of the chapter, to say to these Jews, “This is not new; this is old.” And the rest of Hebrews 11 makes the message crystal clear by giving us a list of all those who can be classified as men and women of faith. The means of righteousness, both in the New Covenant and the Old Covenant was faith.
And now we come to Noah and the work of faith. Noah’s story is really amazing. And in verse 7, you just get a very brief summary. But the story really needs to be told in its fullness, or you’re not going to know what this verse is talking about because there aren’t any details here. The only detail here is that he prepared an ark. We don’t even know for what. It refers to things not yet seen.
“By faith, Noah was being warned by God.” He had nothing to go on but the Word of God. And God told him something was going to happen that had never happened in the history of the world. Was Noah going to believe this? Let’s go to Genesis 6:13. It is, in some ways, the most remarkable Old Testament illustration of faith and one of the most remarkable in all of history because of what it involved.
Genesis 6:13 says, “Then God said to Noah, “I have decided to put an end to every creature, for the earth is filled with wickedness because of them; therefore I am going to destroy them along with the earth.” About 1500 or more years have passed since the creation. The story of man on earth had just gotten worse and worse since the Fall. Sin is frankly running rampant.
So God says that He’s going to destroy the whole earth by water. He is sparing only Noah and his family and no one else. And He judges every sinner one at a time. It is appointed to mankind once to die and after this, the judgment. For long periods of time, God leaves sinners to their own devices and their own desires, and then suddenly He intervenes in a cataclysmic fashion.
This, in human history, is the greatest of all cataclysmic judgments. It is the second most astounding event in the Old Testament, the first and most astounding event in the Old Testament is the creation of the entire universe in six days. But for us, for this time, we’re just going to look at what God said He was going to do, what He asked Noah to do and how Noah demonstrated his faith.
God saw that the iniquity, the wickedness of man was great on the earth. It was so sweeping that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. Every thought, every idea, every motive, every imagination and therefore, every deed, was an expression of the depravity of man. Verse 11 says, “The earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and the earth was filled with violence.”
So here God speaks in verse 13 for the first time personally to Noah. He will speak to him three more times, Genesis 7:1, Genesis 8:15 and Genesis 9:1. And the message that He gives to Noah is this message of massive judgment. There were millions of people in the world by this time. People lived for nine hundred plus years and you can produce a lot of children in that amount of time.
Genesis 6:14 says, “Make yourself an ark of gopher wood. Make rooms in the ark, and cover it with pitch inside and outside.” So God gives him a command without an explanation. The explanation doesn’t come until verse 17, “Understand that I am bringing a flood, and floodwaters on the earth to destroy every creature under heaven with the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish.”
God says to Noah, “Build a big box, ark in Hebrew. It really means box, or chest. It’s not shaped like a ship. It has no propeller, it has no pilot, it has no sails and it has no rudder. It has no captain. Now Noah was not a ship builder. And even with three sons helping him, he would have to hire multiple carpenters to build this thing and to move around the pieces of this giant box.
And God says, “Make rooms, likely numbering in the thousands and then cover it inside with pitch.” Then verse 15-16 says, “This is how you shall make it, “The ark will be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high. 16 You are to make a roof, finishing the sides of the ark to within eighteen inches of the roof. You are to put a door in the side of the ark. Make it with lower, middle, and upper decks.”
So when you go back thousands of years to the time of Noah, this is far larger than any ship anyone ever would have conceived of. When you come to modern ship building, the ratios are the same as the ratio for the ark. At a ratio of about six to one, length to width. The ark then is way ahead of its time. Nobody would have understood this design, an indication of the divine nature of Scripture.
The gross tonnage was 1415 thousand tons. The internal space, a hundred thousand square feet. The volume was 1.5 million cubic feet. So it could handle as many as 125 thousand animals. The Lord finally tells him it’s going to carry, two of every species of animal in the world. And then enough space for Noah and his family and some additional animals for sacrifice and food.
Now when God gives Noah the command to do this, it is 120 years until the flood. We don’t really know how long it took to build it but the assumption is that he started very early and began to put the design together and then to assemble the components and begin to build. Some people think that the flood story is fictional. No way, because of God’s specific dimensions of this ship.
These windows connect with sources of light and air. Below the overhanging roof there was an opening between the beams that held the roof up. An opening 18 inches between the roof and interrupted only by the posts, would provide ventilation and light. “Set the door in the side of it; you shall make it with lower and second and third decks.” Now in this box, Noah is going to spend a year.
This is a cruise without a porter in the most primitive conditions imaginable. This is a year in a stable. But there’s enough room here with three different floors and thousands of compartments for everything. This is not a local flood. We know that it was a worldwide flood because of the depth. Because it covered Mount Ararat and that is more than 17,000 feet high.
It’s a worldwide flood because its duration is 371 days. What are sea animal artifacts doing all over the Grand Canyon? And why do you find a buried mastodon in the tundra of the northern edge of Russia frozen. And when uncovered, dug up and the content of his stomach examined, his stomach is full of tropical plants? The Bible is clear that this is a universal flood because it compares it to the coming destruction.
In 2 Peter 3 it tells us that in the way that God destroyed the world by water, He will destroy the world by fire. And that is a universal destruction in both cases. So this is a worldwide flood. And that’s exactly what the Bible says, only eight people survived. Genesis 6:18 says, “But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark with your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives.”
This is a covenant with Noah and his family, to spare them. Verse 19-20, “You are also to bring into the ark two of all the living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. 20 Two of everything—from the birds according to their kinds, from the livestock according to their kinds, and from the animals that crawl on the ground according to their kinds—will come to you so that you can keep them alive.”
God is going to gather them. This is an astounding responsibility. Up to this point, a mist watered the earth, there was a canopy around the globe. It was one universal tropical climate under a common canopy of mist. And that’s why you find mastodons on the upper edges of the Arctic Circle with tropical vegetation in their stomachs. Noah was living in a desert. There’s no water there.
Verse 22 says, “And Noah did this. He did everything that God had commanded him.” Verse 9 says, “Noah was a righteous man, blameless among his contemporaries; Noah walked with God.” You think living the Christian life is tough when you’re surrounded by unbelievers? Imagine what it was like for Noah and his family to live in a world that was so corrupt that all other humans were drowned?
“By faith Noah, being warned by God about things not yet seen.” What are things not yet seen? Cataclysmic world judgment, by means of a flood, as a result of rain. Remember now, we’re 1500 years into human history and God has revealed Himself. And he knows his God and he walks with his God and he trusts his God. So being warned by God about things not yet seen, he acted.
He obeyed God’s Word when it was way beyond anything he could experience or conceive or comprehend. It says, “In reverence he prepared an ark for the salvation of his household, in reverence he prepared an ark for the salvation of his household, for 120 years. Over that period, he built a massive 15,000-ton ship in the middle of the desert because God told him to do it.
This is the essence of faith. Faith doesn’t have to understand, it doesn’t have to comprehend. Faith reaches out for something that is beyond experience, beyond human comprehension. We walk by faith and not by sight, right? We’re living in faith, trusting Christ for a heaven we’ve never seen, to escape a judgment we’ve never seen. The Bible says that all unbelieving sinners will go to hell.
His faith not only showed up in his obedience but it showed up in his preaching. And it says in verse 7 that by his obedience in building this massive box in the middle of the desert because it was going to rain and there was going to be a flood the likes of which no one had ever experienced. That very act of Noah was a constant statement for 120 years that judgment was coming.
In Genesis 5 we saw the patience of God. Enoch lived 65 years and became the father of Methuselah. A divine revelation was fixed in the name Methuselah. When that child was given that name, God was connecting that child with the time when His judgment. The year that Methuselah died is the year the flood came. So we see the grace of God, Methuselah lived longer than any man, 969 years.
Adam lived 930 years and told his tragic story of the fall probably every day of his life. And then there was the preaching of Enoch who was a preacher of righteousness, according to Jude 14 - 15. And then there was the ministry of the Holy Spirit, “My Spirit will not always strive with man,” which means the Spirit was striving with sinners, doing His work of conviction.
So the generation of Noah’s day had to spurn sacrifice and atonement, they had to reject repeated warnings and repeated messages of judgment and righteousness. And yet God waited 969 years in the case of Methuselah and 120 years in the case of Noah. But Noah’s faith is marked by his obedience in doing exactly what God told him to do and his willingness to be a preacher of righteousness.
Genesis 7:1, “Then the Lord said to Noah, “Enter the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you alone are righteous before me in this generation.” He is an Old Testament illustration of justification by faith. He believed God and God accepted his faith and granted him righteousness. Is he perfect? No. In Genesis 9 you find that he was guilty of a sin. He was caught naked and drunk.
Romans 3 says that by the works of the Law no flesh is justified. In Philippians 3, Paul says, “I went about to establish my own righteousness until I found the righteousness of God granted to me by faith in Jesus Christ.” In Noah’s case, he believed all that God had revealed. In our case, we believe all that God has revealed and that means that we believe totally in His Son Jesus Christ who is God.
And when you believe that message from the heart, God will grant righteousness and cover you with his own righteousness and view you as blameless. And having been captured into the ark of safety who is Christ, be delivered from all future judgment. Peter understands this well. He knows that Christ is the ark of safety. Christ is the one who protects us from judgment. Let us pray.