The Noah Perspective - Genesis - May 1oth, 2026 (Sermon Transcript)

This morning, we are back in the book of Genesis, and it's the part where the flood recedes and Noah and his family finally get off the ark. Moses gives us the simplest, most straightforward description in verse 18 of our text.

He writes plainly, Noah went out, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives with him. I mean, that's it. Just straightforward and simple, as we've seen throughout this account of the flood, they get off the boat.

But can you imagine what it must have been like to get off that boat? Think about that, the end of the flood, the entire world is destroyed. Can you imagine what it would have been like to get off that boat?

Well, today, I'm hoping I can help you imagine what it would have been like, and I'm going to show you that in many ways, all of us have had that same experience.

Symbolically, metaphorically, there is a real connection between us and Noah and what he experienced that day, a real life-changing connection. Please stand for the reading of God's word. I'll read the text for us, Genesis 8, verses one through 20.

God remembered Noah, and all the beasts and all the livestock that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided. The fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed.

The rain from the heavens was restrained, and the waters receded from the earth continually. At the end of 150 days, the waters had abated.

And in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. And the waters continued to abate until the tenth month.

In the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen. At the end of 40 days, Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made and sent forth a raven.

It went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth. Then he sent forth a dove from him to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground.

But the dove found no place to set her foot, and she returned to him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. So he put out his hand and took her and brought her into the ark with him.

He waited another seven days, and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark. And the dove came back to him in the evening, and behold, in her mouth was a freshly plucked olive leaf. So Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth.

Then he waited another seven days and sent forth the dove, and she did not return to him anymore. In the 601st year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried from off the earth.

And Noah removed the covering of the ark and looked, and behold, the face of the ground was dry. In the second month, on the 27th day of the month, the earth had dried out.

Then God said to Noah, Go out from the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your sons' wives with you.

Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh, birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, that they may swarm on the earth and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.

So Noah went out and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives with him. Every beast, every creeping thing and every bird, everything that moves on the earth went out by families from the ark.

Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. This is the word of the Lord. Please be seated and join me as I pray for us.

Father, as we digest your word this morning, as we think about it and talk about it, I pray that by your spirit, you would guide me into the truth, to speak truth about your word.

And as the truth is spoken and heard, I pray that it would just settle deeply into our hearts and really change who we are. There are so many lies in this world. There are so many religions in this world.

There are so many views that we can take, so many ways we can think about this world and life and you and ourselves. And so much of it is just misleading and unhelpful, but this is truth and this is reality.

And I pray that you would orient our minds and our hearts to it, and that we could live in accordance with it in a way that honors you and brings goodness into this world. We pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.

5:37

God Remembers Noah

Starting in verse 1, we see this interesting phrase, but God remembered Noah. I think it's always interesting when you see language like that about God, like God remembered or God repented or God was grieved.

Theologians would call these anthropomorphisms because God is not a man. God is not a human being like us and he doesn't forget things. It's not like he forgot that Noah was stuck in the ark.

And then he saw a note on his desk and he's like, oh my gosh, he's still in there. I better get him out. Of course, God doesn't forget things.

So why is that phrase there? Why does it say that? Well, that word remember is a covenant word, kind of like saying that somebody remembered their promise.

And covenants, we'll see, are hugely important in the Bible.

We're gonna talk a bit about God's covenant with Noah throughout today, throughout the sermon today, and then next week, we're gonna go kind of head first and dive deep into the covenant of Noah.

But let me show you how God goes about keeping his promise to Noah. So he made the promise to Noah, he's remembering his promise in the sense of like he's going to keep his promise, and then the text details for us exactly how that unfolded.

In verse one, it says that a wind started blowing on the earth. The whole earth is flooded, they're in the ark, and then a wind starts blowing.

The rain stops, the fountains of the deep, and the windows of heaven are closed, and the earth starts to dry out. Then in verse five, we see that land is finally starting to emerge as the waters recede.

Then Noah confirms, seeing that things are drying up, Noah decides he's going to go about confirming that it's safe to get off the ark. The way that he does this is by sending out two birds. First, he sends out a raven, and then a dove.

Apparently, ravens eat just about anything, so the raven does not come back.

The raven probably found some floating mats of debris, or maybe some soggy treetops, soggy vegetation, something that the raven could survive on, so the raven does not come back. But doves are not like ravens.

Doves are far more particular about what they eat. So the dove doesn't see anything that it's willing to eat and comes back to the ark. And eventually the dove gets sent out again because the dove is able to find fresh vegetation.

And at that point, Noah knows, okay, so there's fresh vegetation out there. It's about time to get off the ark. But he waits until God's final word in verse 16, and then they finally get off the ark, and he immediately builds an altar to the Lord.

He makes sacrifices to the Lord. So that's the story. That's what unfolds here.

And it's important for us to take note of the fact that this whole passage is filled with echoes of Genesis 1 and the creation account.

So if you really slow down and you really start paying attention to what's happening, paying attention to the words that are being used, cross-referencing this text with Genesis chapters 1 and 2, you start to see echoes of Genesis 1.

And as you see those echoes, it gives you more insight into the meaning of the flood.

You put these pieces of the puzzle together, and what you see is that God created the world, and then when the flood happened, he was essentially undoing his creation.

He was reversing the creative process, and now in our passage, he is redoing the creative process. So in the beginning, at the start of creation, God separates the waters. In the flood, he rejoins the waters, and now he's separating the waters again.

We even see that key phrase at the end of verse 17. It says, be fruitful and multiply on the earth. That's exactly what God said after he created the animals and in Genesis 1, and after he created human beings.

Be fruitful and multiply on the earth. So that is sort of the finishing of God's recreation. He gives that command to Noah and his family, and Noah builds an altar and makes sacrifices.

Now, why did Noah make sacrifices? Why did Noah make sacrifices? Well, because God remembered him.

God had kept his promise to spare him from judgment. God's promise is recorded for us in Genesis 6. This verse is on your notes.

If you want to follow along, Genesis 6 verses 17 and 18.

God said to Noah, everything that is on the earth shall die, but I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons' wives with you.

You see, these are covenant words, and the making of sacrifices is, those are covenant actions. And like I said earlier, we're gonna spend a lot of time next week looking at the details of God's covenant with Noah.

Now raise your hand if you've read through the entire Bible, if you've had occasion in your life to read through the entire Bible.

Quite a few of you have, and quite a few of you are reading through the Bible now, and many of you may understand this already, but I just wanna give you a pro tip for reading through the Bible.

When you're reading through the Bible, always, always, always pay attention to covenants. That is one of the huge themes of the scriptures, and it helps sort of categorize and make sense of so many things that happen throughout the Bible.

There's a covenant with Adam and Eve in the garden. There's a covenant with Noah. There's a covenant with Abraham.

There's a covenant with Noah. There's a covenant with David. There's a covenant with the people of Israel.

And then finally, there's a new covenant with those who put their faith in Jesus. As we take communion each week, the new covenant in his blood, that's what the Jews represents. It's us sort of ratifying our covenant with God.

God always interacts with people through covenants, through these agreements. And usually the agreements are, I'm going to do this, God says this is what I'm going to do, and this is what I expect you to do in response.

And there's some kind of ceremony that goes along with it, like a ceremony of sacrifices, or a ceremony of communion, or something like that. And I could go on and on and on.

We'll talk a little bit more about it next week, but I want everybody to understand, everybody, if we're going to understand the Bible, if when we read through the Bible, we're going to actually make sense of it and understand it rightly, we need to

understand the Bible through the lens of covenant. Each section of the Bible is related to some particular covenant. And so covenants here are huge. That's a big part of the story that we're seeing this morning.

13:33

Saved from Wrath

But there's another aspect of this story. I want you to imagine again how Noah would have felt getting off the ark. And the Bible doesn't spell this out.

So we do have to be careful. I don't want to go beyond the boundaries of what the scripture actually says. But if I had to guess, I would say that Noah probably felt pretty grateful and happy.

Can you imagine? Imagine the feelings? It's so easy to read the Bible without thinking about what it's actually describing.

This is why we need to meditate on the scriptures, why we need to go slow, why we need to study and think. This passage is describing getting off a ship after 378 days. 378 days.

You may have noticed as we went through the text how Moses provides all of these exact descriptions of the timeline.

And on this day of this month, and then on this month and this day, and over and over again, he's making these statements of precise chronology.

And when you look back through the account of the flood in the Book of Genesis, you can add it up and say, okay, in the first month, well, this is when the flood started, and this is when the flood ended, and then there was 150 days until this.

And you add it all up. These people were on this ship for 378 days. And when they got off that ship, the whole world had been destroyed.

When I was in high school, I got to go on a 10-day cruise with two of my best friends and their families. And we had a really, really good time. All of the food and swimming and goofing off, it was super fun.

But 10 days is still a long time to be on a boat. It felt like a long time and we were definitely ready to get off the boat after 10 days. But they were on the boat for 378 days.

And there were no swimming pools. There were no all-you-can-eat buffets. And again, when they finally got off the boat, the entire world had been destroyed.

They got off the boat and their homes were gone. Their friends were gone. Every single person they had ever known was dead.

Every single place they had ever been was essentially wiped off the face of the planet except for them. They survived. And why did they survive?

Why did they live when everybody else died? My guess is, they probably felt kind of like people who witness horrific car accidents right next to them on the freeway, like a horrible accident.

And you see it happen, and you drive off thinking, that could have been me. That should have been me.

Or like people who were on their way to work at the World Trade Center on 9-11, and something really obscure, really random happens, and they get derailed, and they don't go to work that day, and they spend the next 10 days, or 10 months, or 10 years

thinking, that should have been me. Have you ever experienced anything like that? Have you ever felt that way before, seeing a car accident, or some sort of tragedy?

I think of my grandfather who was on a ship heading to Japan in World War II, and on the way there, they find out the bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, and that was it.

You know, they get rerouted, and of course, he would have thought, what would have happened had that not occurred? He might have lost his life there. I think many of us have had experiences like this, where we think, that should have been me.

I could be dead, or I should be dead. What does that feel like? Is that how Noah and his family would have felt that day?

I can imagine getting off that ark. They would have thought, we're here, they're not. That should have been us.

And here's the truth. We should all feel that way every time we take communion. Every time we think about the body of Jesus that was broken as a payment, paying the penalty for sin.

Every time we think of his blood that was shed for us, that should have been me. With Noah, the whole world was judged for their sin. They had destroyed God's good creation and God in his justice and holiness destroyed them in response.

Everybody died, but God spared Noah and his family. And so it's no wonder that he immediately builds an altar to God. It's no wonder that he immediately offers sacrifices to God.

I believe that was Noah's way and part of expressing his gratitude to the Lord. Here's what I want you to understand this morning. We are in a situation very similar to the situation that Noah was in.

We look back on this story and we see God's wrath executed upon the earth. We see God's judgment poured out upon the earth.

Well, the whole world right now, right here today, the whole world is currently living under the condemnation of God, but not you.

The vast, vast majority of people on this planet are currently destined for the judgment and wrath of God, but not you, not me, not those who put their trust in Jesus. As Christians, we are just like Noah.

As Christians, we are just like the people who survived the car accident or the terrorist attack. That should have been us. Do you get it?

That should have been us. We deserve the wrath of God. So why aren't we destined for the wrath of God?

What did we do to deserve this? Why do we live? Why is God preparing a place for us in heaven instead of a place for us in hell?

What's the difference between us and them? Are we any better than them? No, we're not any better than them.

There, but for the grace of God goes us. Those first four words in this passage are so dramatic and powerful. It begins with this.

It says, but God remembered Noah. But God remembered Noah. And there's another dramatic but God passage in your Bible.

It's Ephesians 2 verses 1 through 5. Let me read this for you. It says, you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked.

And let me just say that this is the Apostle Paul writing to a group of Christians, about 20, 20 to 30 years or so after the death and resurrection of Jesus.

And this is generally true for everybody in that church, that church in Ephesus, and every Christian before then and since then. This is the truth about us as Christians.

It says, you were dead in the sins and trespasses in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.

Among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

But God, but God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. By grace, you have been saved. And by grace, Noah and his family got off that boat.

Noah and his family were spared from the wrath of God, and so are we. Because of Christ, we too are saved from the wrath of God. Amen.

What a precious truth that is.

22:55

Salvation by Grace, Not Earned Works

I think it's tempting to read the story of Noah and to really focus in on how it says that Noah was a righteous man, and how Noah found favor in the eyes of God.

And the Bible is telling us that Noah was different from the rest of the people on the earth at that time. They all did only evil. It says like all the thoughts and intentions of man's heart was only evil continually.

And Noah, it seems, was not like that. And so we might take that and conclude, well, Noah was a good person. That's why God spared him.

But as you'll see soon in the Book of Genesis, Noah was not really a good person. Maybe Noah did righteous things. Maybe Noah was different from the people around him.

But Noah was not spared because he was a goody two-shoes. Noah was not spared because he earned his salvation. Noah was not spared because of his own righteousness.

It said Noah found favor in the eyes of God. He didn't earn favor in the eyes of God. He found it.

Noah was spared by the grace of God, just like you and I are spared by the grace of God. I was listening to a podcast the other day, and it's called the Sean Ryan Show or something like that.

Maybe some of you have listened to it or seen clips from it, and he has some really interesting guests and some really great conversations, and he is clearly fascinated by Jesus. I think he reads the Bible. I think he prays.

I think he's gone to church a number of times, but I don't think he's currently attending a church.

And so this is a man that's like interviewing all of these Christians and hearing the gospel left and right, and he's reading the Bible and he's praying and he's hanging out with Christians, and he's just, he's like immersed in it.

Like clearly he's learned a ton about Christianity, but then he said something that blew me away. He said to one of his guests, I forget which one, which episode, he said something along these lines.

I, I'm just trying to make it to heaven and I know you've got to, you've got to do good stuff so that you can go there.

In other words, despite all of his immersion into the Bible and into prayer and all of his time with Christians and all of his interviewing of Christians, he doesn't get it. He completely does not understand the Gospel.

He was describing it like it was some sort of transaction. Like I do good stuff and if I do enough good stuff, God rewards me by allowing me to go into heaven. That's not it.

And I can't tell you how many people I've encountered who have gone to church for two years or 20 years or 40 years and they still think that way.

By the grace of God, by his spirit though, he can open our eyes and open our ears and the truth will sink in.

The truth is Noah did not earn his way onto that boat by being a good man and we are not going to earn our way to heaven by being good people. Let me say it again.

Verse 5, Ephesians 2, even when we were dead in our trespasses, God made us alive together with Christ. By grace, you have been saved. By grace, you will be saved.

And what's the definition of grace? Unmerited favor. What's the definition of unmerited?

Unearned, as in you don't deserve it. Paul says in Romans 11, 6 that it's either by grace or it's by works. It's one or the other.

You can't have both. There are two options for you. You can earn your way to heaven by your own good behavior and religious performance.

That's one path. Or you can earn, not earn, but you can go to heaven by grace and grace alone. Simply because of what Jesus did for you in his life and death and resurrection.

Path one, the path of works. There's a lot of people who walk that path, but let me tell you, not a single one of them has ever gotten to heaven. Not a single one of them has ever made it.

Nobody gets to heaven by their good behavior. It's too hard. We're not good enough.

Nobody ever makes it. The only way to heaven is by grace, through faith in Jesus. By grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

Because of Christ, we, like Noah, can be saved from the wrath of God. And that should change us. That should change our perspective on life.

You can imagine the perspective that Noah might have had when he got off that boat. Like, okay, from now on, we got to do things different. Can you imagine that?

Getting off the boat, all of humanity has been wiped out, everybody's dead, you and your family get off the boat, and creation is beginning again. God says, be fruitful and multiply. We're starting over.

What's his perspective gonna be? Like, okay, we better do this right this time. Just a spoiler for you, Noah does not do it right.

He does not do it right. He immediately begins to sin, which just shows who we are as human beings and how much we need a savior like Jesus. But the point is Noah had a different perspective.

He was a different man. He was probably changed by this experience. When I was teaching philosophy, I used to do a class called Death and Dying.

And we would always spend part of our semester studying near-death experiences. NDEs, as they're called, are truly remarkable events.

I'm talking about cases where people die and later come back to life, whether it's an accident or an operation or a heart attack or whatever it might be, there are thousands of cases like this.

Thousands upon thousands of rigorously documented, verifiable cases where people die and they come back to life.

Some of these cases veer into all kinds of wild visions and dreams that aren't verifiable and aren't theologically accurate, so we have to be careful. I'm not saying believe every single near-death experience and take whatever they say is gospel.

We have to be careful navigating these, but there's a lot of evidential value here. There's a lot to learn from cases like this. So in many of these cases, people's hearts stop.

They stop breathing for minutes at a time, sometimes 10, 20, 30, 40 minutes. In some cases, they've been able to verify that the patient's brain activity has completely ceased. They are legally and scientifically and biologically dead.

Kind of like Ephesians 2 verse 1, they are not dead in their sins and trespasses. So they are completely dead, but then they come back to life.

And nobody really knows how, but they often report having very similar experiences, and they are almost always completely transformed by the experience.

You interview them and you hear them saying the same things over and over and over and over again. Their lives are changed forever, and they're filled with joy and peace and purpose.

What I'm trying to say is that in many ways, that's what God does for us in Christ. If Ephesians 2 is true, we've all had spiritual near death experiences. We've all been dead in our sins and trespasses.

Following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, that is Satan, children of wrath. But God has made us alive in Christ. And so we too ought to be filled with joy and peace and purpose.

In other words, becoming a Christian is like surviving a near death experience. And the result is supposed to be a changed life, a new life that is filled with joy and peace and purpose.

And I believe that's what Noah experienced when he got off the ark. And that's what God has for us, for those of us who repent from our sins and trust in Jesus as our one and only hope for salvation. So how do we show our gratitude to God?

How then should we live? I want to leave you with this from the book of Romans, Romans chapter 12, verse 1. Paul writes, I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God.

When he says therefore, he's saying like, since we've been saved by grace, since we were all lost in sin and God saved us by grace through faith in Jesus, I appeal to you, therefore, on the basis of that, brothers, by the mercies of God to present

your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.