Noah’s Constructive Faith

Sermon transcript

Let’s turn now to the reading of God’s word. If you would please stand for the reading. This evening we’re looking at a verse from the book of Hebrews chapter eleven resuming our series in the book of Hebrews and we’re just looking at verse seven this evening. Give your attention to God’s word, please. Hebrews 11 verse seven, By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith. Let’s pray. Father in heaven we thank you for your word. We thank you for the Holy Spirit who inspired the writing of this word so many years ago and the preservation of it throughout the centuries so that we might have it in our hands today.

But Lord we know that with our sinful hearts that alone is not enough to give us life. We need your spirit to come and give light to our hearts that we might hear and believe that we might find and see and experience and taste and receive the life that is within these words. So we ask that you would come and do that this evening for your glory and our good. We pray this in Jesus’ name, Amen. You may be seated. There’s a popular church in North Carolina near where we lived for many years that would sponsor a billboard on the interstate not far from our house. And for a long time, many months if not a year, it displayed the simple word faith with a line under and was the word fear. Faith over fear.

The meaning was to say that they were holding on to faith over fear. In this instance faith was pitted against fear. I believe that this display started during the tumultuous time of the COVID pandemic trying to encourage people to hold on to faith against fear. And I understand what they were trying to say in this billboard and there’s a very real sense in which faith is the opposite. It is in opposition to fear. Jesus repeatedly rebuked his disciples for having fear rather than faith. He viewed their fear to be evidence as a lack of their faith. And many in the broader Christian world are used to this pitting of fear against faith. But there is another sense in which true fear, true faith involves a sense of fear. And that is what is in view in our passage this evening.

In this instance Noah’s fear was not in opposition to his faith but it was actually evidence of his faith. Noah is an example of the way that fear and faith go rightly together. When God issues threats of judgment the response of faith is to rightly fear because it’s true. If God’s threat is really going to come to pass, really going to take place then a believing response is to be afraid. Disbelief would simply laugh it off but faith fears. So this evening we’ve come to the story of Noah as another example set forth by the author of Hebrews as an exemplar of certain aspects of faith. Noah’s example of faith brings out three aspects of faith which we’ll look at tonight. Number one, faith fearfully acts. Number two, faith condemns the world. And number three, faith inherits righteousness.

Number one, faith fearfully acts. Faith hears God’s warning, it believes that warning, and it heeds that warning. It acts in response to that belief. Callie and I just came back from Yamamoto, Japan which is a little seaside town which is devastated in 2011 by the enormous tsunami. Thousands of people up and down the coast lost their lives and many of them from Yamamoto. Part of what made the tsunami so deadly was that many people didn’t believe the warnings. The earthquake happened, alarms went off alerting people of the possibility of a tsunami. Now there were places in which the alarms didn’t go off and that caused other problems. But there were many places where the alarms did go off and the people still didn’t heed the warning. We heard the story of a missionary who was living there very close to the coast with his wife and child very close to the shore and the husband at that time was away north in Sendai helping Marie Uemoto on the day of the earthquake and the tsunami.

But he had sternly warned his wife that whenever an earthquake hit she must without hesitation seek high ground since their house was so close to the ocean. So when the earthquake hit she immediately packed up, got in her car with the baby to head for high ground. At that point there was no tsunami in sight but she was obeying her husband’s directions. She tried to persuade her neighbors to come and get in the car with her but they refused thinking there was nothing to worry about. Finally she had to leave without them. Within an hour their house was completely swept away and the neighbors who had stayed behind perished. There were no working cell phones and so the husband returned to the site looking for his wife. He could only find the barest traces of their house’s foundation but no sign of his wife.

It ended up being a couple of days before he was finally able to locate her as he frantically searched shelter after shelter. In fact he had begun to grieve her death when he found her after all. But the wife was saved because she had believed her husband’s warning about the earthquakes and had obeyed his instructions to flee regardless of what it looked like at the time. At the time the tsunami was unseen and so the neighbors stayed behind. They refused to take the precautions and they perished. In our passage we have something similar only Noah didn’t have the option of fleeing to higher ground. He had to build a boat. At the time the danger was many years perhaps even decades away. We don’t know how long it took for him to build the boat but Noah believed that that disaster was real.

The danger was real. God was speaking the truth and he could be trusted and thus he obeyed. I’ve called this evening’s message Noah’s Constructive Faith because his fearful conviction that disaster would come as God had predicted prompted him to construct a boat according to God’s direction. Noah’s faith produced actions. Actually it produced fear and then it produced action. Noah heard God’s voice, God’s declaration of judgment and rather than doubting it he believed. We often think of faith as positively believing that something good will happen. It’s almost synonymous with hope but we would hardly call it hope to expect the most devastating judgment the world has ever experienced. No, in this case Noah’s faith prompted him to fear and then to obey. Our Westminster Confession of Faith speaks of the multifaceted aspect of faith in chapter fourteen titled On Saving Faith in paragraph two.

It’s in the back of our Trinity Salter hymnals on page 927. And it says this in chapter fourteen point two paragraph two By this faith, speaking of saving faith, a Christian believeth to be true whatsoever is revealed in the word for the authority of God himself speaking therein and acteth differently upon each particular passage thereof containeth yielding obedience to the commands trembling like Noah at the threatenings and embracing the promises of God for this life and that which is to come. Faith is not simply a confidence that things will go well it is also the conviction that God is serious in his determination to judge sin. Faith recognizes the certainty the danger of God’s coming judgment and just as Noah believed God would really send a flood and so obediently made extensive provision by constructing a massive boat when very possibly no big body of water was even in sight the eyes of faith today observe that no matter how distant in time God’s ultimate judgment appears his judgment is certain certain against sin no matter how it may look like the wicked are prospering and getting away with wickedness faith believes God’s judgment is certain and it fears and this fear prompts action no one else was building boats no one else even joined Noah besides his own family in the end no one else on earth believed that God was serious so no one else took action until it was too late faith doesn’t wait and see if God’s judgment will come it takes the threat of God’s judgment against sin seriously and makes provision now to ensure safety of course in our circumstances this doesn’t mean building boats it means repenting of sin calling on the name of the Lord for the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to be applied to your account and your life by the Holy Spirit but this faith will put you at odds with the world just as it did with Noah which brings us to our second point number two faith condemns the world the story of Noah and the boat that he built is often recounted to children of young ages church nurseries are often decorated with murals of the boat filled with animals and a rainbow but the actual story is quite dark a floating zoo and a rainbow are nice things to paint on nursery walls but the backdrop for these things was worldwide carnage during our visit to Japan we heard many stories and saw pictures and videos of the immense destruction and devastating power of a very small flood from the tsunami we met one man who went out for groceries before he got back his wife and child were swept away never to be seen again he never saw them again the Bible doesn’t give us a population count of the earth at the time of Noah but people have made rough estimates based on the information we do have in Genesis concerning the length of life of those individuals recorded and there could easily have been many more than the eight plus billion people estimated to be living on earth alive today some put it in the hundreds of billions of people possible to be alive but even if it was extraordinarily as small as the population that we currently have only eight plus billion that’s a lot of death old men young women children even babies were drowned in a matter of hours Genesis chapter seven verses twenty one and twenty three recounts and all flesh died that moved on the earth birds livestock beasts all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth and all mankind everything on the dry ground in whose nostrils was the breath of life died he blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens they were blotted out from the earth only Noah was left and those who were with him in the ark I don’t think we often think as much about this grim reality we are living in a massive graveyard animal fossils can be found everywhere preserving the images of the sudden and overwhelming destruction of God’s judgment against sin there has never been anything that comes close to the devastation of this event of course thanks to the rainbow we know there never will the author of Hebrews doesn’t elaborate specifically on what it means that Noah’s faith condemned the world but very likely he is thinking of something along the lines of what Jesus says in Matthew chapter twelve Matthew chapter twelve verses forty one through forty two in Matthew chapter twelve Jesus is speaking to the Pharisees an adulterous generation and he says the men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it for they repented at the preaching of Jonah and behold something greater than Jonah is here the queen of the south will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon and behold something greater than Solomon is here well it’s possible in this passage in Matthew twelve that Jesus means that the believing Ninevites will actively condemn the generation which saw and heard and rejected Jesus Christ himself even if they did not say a word the example of the people of Nineveh would cast shame and condemnation on those who had heard Jesus himself preach and yet disbelieved similarly if Noah never said a word to his generation his faith would have stood in contrast would have stood as shame to his generation one of the reasons is it also took away the excuse that some might have offered for disbelief in Noah’s day because once Noah believed God’s warning of a worldwide flood it was impossible for the wicked doubting generation to claim that they could be excused for not believing since no one believed God Noah’s belief ripped away that excuse from anyone trying to claim that the problem was in God’s unbelievably and not their own stubbornness and hardness of heart that would have been if Noah had been silent his faith would have condemned his generation but I don’t think that we’re meant to think that Noah was silent all those years that he was building the ark the apostle Peter makes mention of Noah in both of his epistles to his churches in second Peter chapter two verse five Peter calls Noah a herald of righteousness the word herald is translated as preacher in other places and the verb is the main one translated for preaching so Noah was a preacher according to second Peter and then we see this more in first Peter chapter three verses eighteen through twenty you may want to turn to this passage since this sentence is a little long and complicated that’s first Peter chapter three verses eighteen through twenty Peter says this for Christ also suffered once for sins the righteous for the unrighteous that he might bring us to God being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison because they formally did not obey when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah while the ark was being prepared in which a few that is eight people were brought safely through water granted this is a very complicated sentence this is actually exactly the kind of sentences I used to write in college and would go to the writing center and Callie would help me untangle them but Peter’s making two separate points in this long sentence but he connects them in a complicated way by the end of verse eighteen which references Christ doing something in the spirit he picks that up in the next verse in nineteen so we see that in the spirit Christ went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison what is Peter talking about what we see next these spirits were disobedient despite God’s patience in the days in Noah’s day while some people have offered very complex and elaborate interpretations of this passage the simplest explanation is that Peter is simply referencing the preaching of Noah to an unbelieving world God warned Noah of judgment that was not only Noah building a boat as an act of faith but Noah was also proclaiming God’s salvation at that time even though Christ had not been born was not bodily present Peter’s saying Noah’s preaching for people to heed God’s warning of judgment and to come to the ark to be saved was Christ in spirit proclaiming salvation to those who were present at the time so that Christ was preached in Noah’s day as well Peter’s two inspired letters seem to clearly indicate that Noah’s faith which prompted him to build an ark also prompted him to preach so on top of his existence as a believer being a condemning contrast to the world his message of warning against God’s coming judgment was also condemning unbelievers hate to hear about God’s salvation in Christ because before you even mention judgment it is already implied salvation offered implies a need for it which of course the backdrop is God’s judgment his holy wrath against sin if God hates sin then it matters how I live what I do what I say and what I think in Romans chapter one verse thirty two the apostle Paul describes the ungodly he says though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them you see the wicked are not content to do wickedness themselves but they must go further to seek approval and to approve of others of their wickedness despite the fact that many will claim they delight in wickedness in the end this is simply their own attempt to silence the voice of their own conscience and wish away the coming judgment of God that deep down they know is true you will quickly find if you spend much time with unbelievers that they become uncomfortable simply by the presence of believers throughout middle school and high school I participated in many theater productions with kids who were not always professing Christians without me even mentioning a word about their coarse and profane language they would begin apologizing to me for their use of certain words in my presence I found this to be the same case at work as well simply the fact that I failed to use more of those vulgar words made people around me feel uncomfortable I was friendly to them but I just refrain from using certain words and that made them feel condemnation they need to apologize to me of course I told them you don’t need to apologize to me it’s God if you think it’s wrong talk to him about it without speaking a word of judgment or condemnation my faithful speech made the world around me feel uncomfortable condemned and this is what faith does if you have true faith expect that it will inherently come across as condemnation to an unbelieving world Noah was building the instrument of salvation and surely was offering that salvation to those around him but they only viewed it his faith as condemnation of them so faith will be viewed by the world as condemnation but finally consider how faith is viewed by God and this is number three faith inherits righteousness now while I phrase this point as an action for parallelism with the other points faith inherits righteousness the phrasing in our passage is slightly different it says Noah became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith in the Greek the phrase the righteousness that comes by faith is placed at the front literally this phrase might read of the righteousness which comes by faith he became an heir the author of Hebrews does not want us to forget for a moment where true righteousness comes from why would he want to remind us of this well if we go back to Genesis chapter six verse nine we see this said about Noah these are the generations of Noah Noah was a righteous man blameless in his generation Noah walked with God the author of Genesis is not focused on specifying the source of Noah’s righteousness or his the means of his becoming righteous now this goes along with what the Old Testament generally by and large is less clear in this regard this doesn’t mean that the Old Testament contradicts the New Testament in any way or suggests that there is an alternative means of salvation simply that in the Old Testament the relationship between faith and righteousness is not as often or as clearly spelled out as in the new but the author of Hebrews looking back at Genesis six he doesn’t want his readers us to have the slightest bit of confusion Noah’s righteousness to the extent that it was true righteousness was a righteousness that comes by faith if we look back one verse previously in Genesis chapter six verse eight we find the justification for this it says Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord several weeks ago when we looked at Hebrews chapter eleven verse six we saw the author of Hebrews line of thinking verse six in Hebrews eleven and without faith it is impossible to please him for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him so it goes like this Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord which just means he pleased God if Noah pleased God it must be because he had faith since without faith it is impossible to please God so in Genesis six verse eight it says but Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord and then next in verse nine it says Noah was a righteous man blameless in his generation notice the order of the verses Noah pleased God which means he possesses faith and then he is described as righteous we might expect it to be come in the opposite order Noah was a righteous man blameless in his generation and as a result Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord I find myself often falling into this line of thinking in regards to myself as long as I keep God’s rules he’ll keep loving me and looking out for me there can be a kind of comfort in that kind of thinking as long as we’re able to keep up as long as we’re able to exceed the expectations of ourselves and others maintain a good appearance before others but what about when you stumble then it’s devastating not only must you face up to your own failures but your eternal salvation God’s whole relationship with you is called into question if you’re acting on that assumption how will you ever recover frankly coming to this point is most often the way that we discover subconsciously our inverted understanding of salvation and this is why we must return to the scriptures again and again and be reminded of the proper logic of salvation Noah found favor in God’s eyes and then he became righteous then he was counted as righteous he received the righteousness of faith but before we finish with this verse I want to return to the idea of becoming an heir of righteousness because Hebrews 11 verse 7 doesn’t say that Noah became righteous but that he became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith why does he say it that way well we’ve already seen the author of Hebrews mention this idea of heir earlier all throughout the book in Hebrews 1 verse 2 Jesus is described as the heir of all things in chapter 1 verse 4 the name that he has inherited is more excellent than the angels verse 14 of chapter 1 the angels are described as servants of those who are to inherit salvation then in chapter 6 of Hebrews inheritance is explicitly mentioned again verse 11 speaks of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises and verse 17 describes believers as heirs of the promise Hebrews chapter 915 ties Christ’s sacrificial death to the release of eternal inheritance to the heirs the idea of heirs and inheritance continue to show up in chapters 11 and 12 as we’ll continue to see going forward but i think it is really the end of chapter 11 where we find the reason best spelled out Hebrews chapter 11 verses 39 and 40 it says and all these though commended for their faith did not receive what was promised since God had provided something better for us that apart from us they should not be made perfect by describing Noah as someone who becomes an heir of righteousness that comes by faith the writer of Hebrews is highlighting the tension of the salvific reality in which believers live an heir is someone who both possesses something and does not the nature of an heir is that he possesses the rights to a future reality which has not yet fully come into existence there are heirs to companies heirs to estates heirs to kingdoms they each possess the right to something that they do not yet fully take possession of they do not have full possession of because once an heir takes the throne he’s no longer an heir, he is king we speak of the distinction of living by faith versus living by sight and this is because faith is grasping, apprehending taking hold of realities that have not yet fully arrived on the one hand justification by faith God’s declaration of our complete innocence and righteousness based on the life, death and resurrection of Christ is immediately applied by the spirit to our souls and this happens apart from our existential existential righteousness it is based entirely upon Christ’s merits and it is counted to us yet on the other hand we are in sorry shape we fail to live up to our new identity in Christ and it is that it is this that the writer of Hebrews is focusing on I think in chapter eleven faith brings us into possession of the rights to something that we do not yet fully existentially possess God has designed for his maximum glory and our maximum good and satisfaction in him that our salvation happen in two separate stages that we should possess by faith a promise of a yet to be a not yet reality before possessing that reality in full that we should exist first as heirs destined to inherit the promise but not yet possessing it in its fullness we need to be reminded of this not only because we stand in a long line a large community of believers who have staked their lives on this hope but because also there are some even us who might get contentedly distracted by what we already do possess it is good to be content in God it is essential that we gratefully enjoy all that God has given us now and is for us now but it is a dreadful mistake to think that the extent to which we possess regeneration justification and sanctification are all there is or that they are an end in and of themselves in fact if we completely stop looking for something more than what we already have we come to lose faith faith says thank you Lord for justification for declaring me righteous on based on the work of Christ for sanctification for washing me clean and setting me apart but I’m looking forward to when I’m not just accounted righteous but truly am righteous I’m looking forward to when I’m not just empowered to fight sin I’m not even tempted by it fully glorified and not as an end in and of themselves but as a means to perfect fellowship with God in conclusion we’ve seen that Noah’s faith was manifested by his actions believing God’s warning that a flood was coming and building an ark meanwhile Noah’s faith made him an heir of righteousness which he could never merit by his works but came by faith Noah’s faithful action saved him and his family from temporary destruction and his faith in God saved him from eternal destruction but by its very nature Noah’s faith created a contrast between him and the wicked world and will do the same for you and I our faith the instrument by which we receive salvation also condemns the world so it is understandable that the world would hate us for our faith but it is at the same time their only hope to escape God’s judgment so like Noah we hold fast to God’s promises and predictions and faithfully proclaim his salvation to those around us who are otherwise condemned Father in heaven we thank you for the example and testimony of Noah and the glorious order of salvation logic then Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord and then Noah was declared righteous Lord we ask that you would give us that same faith you would help us to realize more deeply the way that your favor your choosing of us is not based on us or anything within us but that you love us and you then give us righteousness that comes by faith we thank you praise you in Jesus name well in response let’s turn to our hymnals and sing hymn four hundred and twenty and let’s stand as we sing in four twenty Christ for the world we sing

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