This is the transcript of the video by John Thatcher:
The first thing that we read about Noah, is that he has this most beautiful phrase attached to him, which was also attached to Enoch at the same time –
“They walked with God”
Enoch walked with God and then it goes on to say a little bit more
“Enoch walked with God and he was not for God took him”
Just that phrase. I’ve always looked at that phrase and thought I should love to have that on my tombstone –
“He walked with God”.
But I hope I won’t have a tombstone. Who knows? – It may be that the Lord will come in the next couple of years.
But Enoch walked with God and he was taken.
I personally believe that the flood was local. I think it was in Mesopotamia and I think that Enoch was taken so that he did not see the death that was caused by the flood, but that’s only a personal opinion.
But also then in Genesis 6 it says these are the generations of Noah.
“Noah was a just man and perfect in his generation and Noah walked with God.”
And what a beautiful phrase that is, Noah or Enoch walked with God.
It says everything about them. It says that these two men and I’m sure others like them, in amongst a world of evil, in amongst a world of violence, the Bible tells us that that world was filled with violence so that it tore at God’s heart. And I reckon it must be the same today. What an evil world we live in, and I have a little bit more to say about that later.
And then eventually after the flood subsided, on the seventh month, the ark came to rest on what the Bible calls Ararat.
The meaning of Ararat is ‘the curse is reversed’ or ‘the curse is ended’.
And that’s the meaning of that word. So whether it actually is the mountain range we know as Ararat today, or whether the Ark resided on another point that was simply called ‘the curse is now reversed’ – because God will never again bring a flood upon the earth to kill all mankind – I don’t know- it could have been another place simply given that name, as a symbolic name.
The 120‑Year Decree
“The Lord said my spirit will not strive with man for ever. For he is indeed flesh, yet his days shall be 120 years.” Genesis 6:3
When is that measured from?
Well, if we assume that it means that there was 120 more years left for mankind, and we know that Noah was 600 when the flood came, it would mean that Noah was told that there was going to be a flood and destruction when he was only 480 years old – a mere spring chicken!
He’s 480 years old and he’s been told that this flood would come, but he’s got no children at this stage. None of his children have been born. I don’t even know if he was married. Probably not, at this stage. Although God did tell him in the promise that you and your sons and their wives will go into the ark. So even before he had children, he knew that his family would be saved.
So, Noah has 120 years.
And I’ve often wondered what he did in those 120 years. Well, I guess he built a boat. But what else did he do in that 120 years? And there’s a clue in the second letter of Peter, which I sometimes think we miss. 2 Peter 2:2 –
“And spared not the old world, but saved Noah, the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly.”
Noah spent 120 years preaching righteousness. He had the best visual aid the world has ever seen! But obviously, no one was moved by it.
They must have thought he was mad because apparently it hadn’t rained on the earth in those days, until this event. And there’s this huge ship that he’s building. People must have just walked past and thought he was mad.
But he was a preacher of righteousness. And I’ve often used to friends of mine. that phrase – If you preach and you don’t get much result, if you talk to people or you have a blog or you have a YouTube channel or whatever you try, and you don’t get much result – well, we’re living in the days of Noah.
That doesn’t mean we don’t try. It doesn’t mean that we ought not to be out there everyday, preaching. But it does mean that the chances of success are probably fairly slim, because these days are the days of Noah.
And Jesus said that, “It’s the days of Noah, it’s the days of Lot”.
And so, I expect that we might take encouragement from that. Not encouragement in the sense that we’ll never have success in preaching, but encouragement in the sense that if we do spread the gospel to the best of our extent, and we don’t get much response, we’re simply like Noah.
Hebrews 11 tells us –
“By faith Noah being warned of God of things not yet seen moved with fear prepared an ark for the saving of his house by the which he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.”
After Elijah,everybody who came to God,came because of their faith. Andthen we go on, there’s anew creationafter Noah. In Genesis9were weread of the Ark settling on the land, and Noah coming out, and life starts again.And there isapparentlya new creationwith Noah as the new Adam,which I want to spend a little bit of time on.
The first thing you notice is that the water covered the whole earth. In the days of Noah the water covered the whole earth,I believe itwas the localized earth.The Hebrew word for the whole earth often just means the land in which they are living.But wherever it was,it was covered in water,what does that remind you of?
Genesis 1:1
“And the Spirit of the Lord moved over the waters.”
The whole earth was covered in water. And so, as we unfold, Noah inherits the same words that Adam inherited.
Exactly the same phrases are used
We read in Genesis 9:11 that God promises to never destroy the earth again.
But He says that His flood has covered the whole earth, and he gives promises to Noah that Noah should replenish, go on and breed and make sure the earth is sustained and full of people again.
And that was exactly the same promise that was given to Adam, the same instructions.
And then we’re told in Genesis 9:2
“And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every fowl of the air upon all that moves upon the earth and the fishes of the sea and into your hand they are delivered.“
That’s exactly the same promise given to Adam. Adam was told that every animal would be subject to him. And there’s Noah receiving exactly the same promise. So, the water recedes and life starts again. And we had come into a new life and everything that Noah sees is created by himself, well it’s brought to be by himself and by the Ark.
And Peter says this was like a baptism –
“Which the world was sometimes disobedient which once with the long-suffering of God waited in the days of Noah while the Ark was preparing wherein a few that his eight souls were saved by water. The like figure wherein even baptism now also saves us not the putting away the filth of the flesh but answered for good conscience toward God by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” 1 Peter 3:20-21
And so the whole symbol of Noah coming out of the flood was of baptism for us, that we are saved from a dying world. We are saved from a world of unrighteousness, from a world of violence.
I think there are times when I look around this world and it must have been like that in days of Noah. It is a world given over to violence, and given over to evil.
Now I want to give consideration to something else, which I think isn’t obvious when we read through the story of Noah –
Named Sons from Adam to Noah
Notice the list of named sons from Adam to Noah –
I’m sure they didn’t all have boys first, but the firstborn son is the one that’s named. And after that, they had lots of sons and daughters.
It’s always the same until you get to Noah, and suddenly it changes!
“And Noah was 500 years old and begat Shem, Ham, and Japheth.”
The pattern changes. It doesn’t say which was the firstborn, and then go on after that to say he had sons and daughters.
It names the three boys straight away. And it’s apparent that they are the only three children that Noah had, because when he goes into the ark, those three with their wives are taken in with him.
Why is the pattern changed?
Why is it not the same?
I assume Shem, Ham and Japheth, that’s probably the order of birth, although I don’t think that’s true actually, because I think that Ham actually was the last one born. But the three of them are grouped together without any distinction about which one is the first born.
Next slide – I love AI. It’s so good! Back in the old days, I had to go through and count up how many years people had lived and then put them in a column, and then put them into an Excel spreadsheet and ask them to draw a column graph, and then put the labels in myself. Now you just say to AI, please read the first half of the chapter and draw me a graph – and out it comes!
And when you look at it, you’ll notice this is the age of each of the patriarchs, how old they were when their first child arrived. And I hope you’ll notice something odd.
The first thing is, the first four of these patriarchs, they gradually got younger and younger and younger as they were having children.
I reckon the first four there, you could probably draw a straight line through the top of those bars and that would pretty much be a straight line, declining downwards saying they were getting younger.
Then, well, something happens to Jared who’s a late starter, maybe a late bloomer, I don’t know. But whatever happens to him, he’s a bit late. And then there’s a couple of others. It seems Enoch was much the same as the first four. Then the next two.
But look at Noah. He’s 500 when he has his first child. Imagine getting up at night, with the baby crying when you’re 500.
But this is odd – This is an outlier.
This is telling us something. It’s telling us that something was going on in Noah’s life which was different to the rest of us. And he’s having children twenty years after he knows the flood is coming. Now I want to read another Genesis 5:28 – this is an important verse.
“Lamech lived one hundred and eighty two years and had a son. He called his name Noah, saying, “This one will comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord has cursed.”“
Nobody else gets that statement. Nobody else gets any reason for birth, only Noah.
And Lamech says, “This kid is going to grow up and do all the hard work” –
“This one will comfort us concerning our work and the toil of our hands because of the ground which the Lord has cursed.”
This child, this child who has not yet done anything deserving of being a slave, is going to be our slave for the next 500 years. He is going to inherit the curse. He is going to inherit the curse that passed on to Adam.
We are going to be saved by him taking our curse. Can you see where it’s going?
Jesus was a curse for us, as is written, “cursed be everyone who hangs on a tree.”
Jesus suffered death when he didn’t deserve to suffer death. Jesus was the only human being ever who did not deserve to die, and he died for us.
He inherited God’s curse of death for you and I.
And here’s Noah screaming this example. That he was going to inherit God’s curse on mankind.
He’s going to inherit it for his parents and for all mankind.
And so, he didn’t start his family until he was 500 years old, until he’d fulfilled the role, of taking that curse from his parents.
Another thing, you look around, Noah didn’t have grandchildren by the time he’d gone into the ark.
But he did have brothers and sisters. We’re told that Lamech had other children apart from Noah. They didn’t go into the ark.
Can you imagine what it must have been like for Noah in his heart to shut the door of the ark, knowing his family was still outside?
Not his immediate family, his children and their wives – they were taken in. But all the others were not taken. I imagine there was much grief in his heart.
And it gives me an understanding of why Enoch was removed so that he would not see the death that was coming.
But Noah did.
And even when Noah opened the door of the ark, he waited seven days. I wonder if that was in fear of what he’d see. Can you imagine if the whole world had been killed? A few months later, there might have been rotting people.
I don’t know. Maybe not.
But there was Noah – I think greatly anguished by what happened.
And it happened because of the wickedness and the sin of the people that I can imagine when Jesus comes it might be similar. I don’t know, but perhaps there will be great destruction of evil, and there will be great sadness.
And then we come to the end of the story.
I remember once I had a Sunday school class, about 10 years ago, I think.
And I said to them, There’s a new movie coming out. It’s called Noah, I think. It was called Noah. And Russell Crowe was the lead player – played Noah.
It was a funny movie, it had all these weird monsters running around. And I said to the kids, It’s pretty strange.
One thing I got from it, it did give me a reason why Noah was naked and drunk.
And the whole class said, What?
I said, you know, Noah was naked and rolling around drunk. And they said, Where did you get that from? And I said, Actually, in the Bible.
So, we read the chapter and none of them knew it. And I can understand that. We had sanitized our Sunday school lessons. We just missed that bit. Like Lot and his daughters, we don’t talk about that. But somewhere we’ve got to, somewhere that’s got to come up.
And Noah, it looks like the last part of the record is that he fails.
He plants, I don’t know where he got the grape seeds from. Maybe he just snuck a few on board, I don’t know. But he plants grapes and he says he becomes a tiller of the soil.
And he gets these grapes and he makes wine out of them. He must have remembered a bit from the past.
So, he makes wine, gets drunk, and he’s naked. And his youngest son, Ham, makes fun of him.
He comes out and says to his brothers, “Look, dad’s drunk and naked”, and the other two boys put a blanket over their shoulders and they back in so that they don’t look at their father’s nakedness and they cover him.
And then a curse passes on to the son of Ham, to Canaan.
And I’ve heard it said that this is an illustration of how even though Noah was perfect in his ways and was, as we read, complete, and he walked in the steps of God he walked with God we can all still make mistakes and this is the end of the record. And the same thing goes with Lot, and Lot had an amazing righteousness but the last record is that he inseminates both his daughters and that seems to be a pretty ugly ending of the story. But I don’t believe that. I don’t believe either of those acts were the end of these two people
Noah lived another 350 years after the flood.
I don’t think it would have taken him 350 years to make a couple of bottles of wine.
I would suggest that this happened very close to when he came out of the ark, maybe four, five, six, ten years, and he was able to grow grapes and that’s when he did it.
It doesn’t tell us what happened the next 340 years. That wasn’t Noah’s last act.
And the same with Lot – that is not the last act of Lot.
I’m sure most of you know, if you’ve ever heard me give talks about Lot, I have a passionate love for Lot. Lot and his daughters saved my life. We would not be here now if it was not for Lot and his daughters.
Because what those girls did, out of absolute love for their father, that they would not let the name of their father die out.
They brought forth a little child called Moab. And Moab eventually brought forth a little girl called Ruth. And she eventually brought forth a little man called David. And he eventually gave me Jesus Christ.
I owe those two girls my life. And I don’t think that was the last act of Lot. I’m sure Lot lived a pretty reclusive life. He was a rich man remember, he was rich when he split from Abraham.
But now he’s a caveman.
He’s living in a cave with nothing, except just his daughters and his grandchildren.
And so, Noah and Lot become symbols of the righteous when Jesus comes back.
Both Peter and Jesus say the symbol of the righteous people will be Noah and Lot.
Jesus said as in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah so it would be the days of the coming of the Son of Man. And Peter says the same thing. The flood came upon the world, and it destroyed all those people that were evil. But Peter makes a beautiful point out of this. And might I… I’ve said this before so forgive me if you get a feeling of deja vu when I say this …but It says that God knows how to rescue the righteous.
That flood that came, was not just to destroy the wicked. I don’t think it was even primarily to destroy the wicked.
It was to save Noah.
The same waters that destroyed the wicked bore Noah up. It was an act of salvation, not of destruction.
And the fire and brimstone that came down on Sodom was not an act of destruction.
It was an act of salvation.
It saved Lot and his daughters.
And so these acts are used in symbol of the saints when Jesus comes.
Yes, I assume there will be a time of some destruction knocking the world into shape, but it’s an act of salvation because like Lot and like Noah, we will be taken out of the destruction that happens.
And it’s why I really love the thought that in those verses where Peter talks about Noah and of Lot, he says that those people, those people were saved.
God knows how to save the righteous and that’s been likened to us.
So when you talk about Jesus coming back, just think, is He coming back to set up a worldwide kingdom?
Yes, He is.
Is He coming back to turn the hearts of Israel back to Jesus Christ?
Yes, He is.
Is He coming back to make the whole world a place of no more tears?
Sounds like a shampoo.
A place of no more tears or sadness?
Yes, but that’s not what He’s talking about.
What He’s talking about is He’s coming back for you.
He’s coming back because He cannot stand to leave you suffering one moment longer.
He’s coming back like He came back for Noah and He came for Lot.
He’s coming back to save us, to bring us to Himself.
And so, we come to the end of this theme of looking at the presence of God, how we might have encounters of the Lord.
The greatest encounter of the Lord, of course, was with Jesus Christ.
When he said to Philip – “Have I been with you for so long and you haven’t seen the Father in me?”
That’s where we encounter God I don’t know about your life but I suspect you won’t see an earthquake wind and fire. And I suspect probably you won’t hear a voice thundering from a storm. But what all of us will see is in these symbols here.
The gift of God that in the quietness where Jesus knelt by the sea of Tiberius and He communed with His father. That was the greatest encounter with the Lord that we will ever see, and that encounter is open to us.
Through Jesus Christ we see the Lord.
Yes, no one can look upon God and live, but we can look upon His image and live forever.
Renewed 