The Truth About Jews, Muslims, and the Middle East - Genesis - June 7th, 2026 (Sermon Transcript)
This morning, we're back in the book of Genesis, and we're going to look at the fall of Noah, and the future of his family. Noah had the most amazing opportunity.
This is just after the flood, and he and his family are in this situation, where they get a completely fresh start. God had remade the world, and they had the opportunity to do things differently, to chart a new course for humanity, but they didn't.
What we learn in our passage is that Noah gets drunk, and then his youngest son totally dishonors him and disrespects him, and the world starts over with a new set of sins. And what happens in this passage is truly historic.
It has literally been shaping the course of world history ever since.
So we're gonna talk a lot of history today, and we're gonna unpack the implications of what happens in this passage, and see how they are still affecting the world to this very day. Please stand for the reading of God's word.
I'll read the text for us. We're in Genesis 9, verses 18 through 29. The sons of Noah who went forth from the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
Ham was the father of Canaan. These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the people of the whole earth were dispersed. Noah began to be a man of the soil, and he planted a vineyard.
He drank of the wine and became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside.
Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were turned backward, and they did not see their father's nakedness.
When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said, Cursed be Canaan! A servant of servants shall he be to his brothers. He also said, Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant.
May God enlarge Japheth and let him dwell in the tents of Shem and let Canaan be his servant. After the Flood, Noah lived 350 years. All the days of Noah were 950 years, and he died.
This is the word of the Lord. Please be seated and join me as I pray for us. Father, as we come to your word this morning, I pray that you would give us the ability to see and to hear and to understand.
We know that when it comes to your word, when it comes to truth and light, we're blind until you open our eyes. We are deaf until you open our ears. We are without understanding until your spirit illuminates it for us.
And so we pray for understanding this morning, God, and humility and willingness to accept the truth of your word to let it shape the way that we think. Lord, if we need to change how we think, help us to change.
If we need encouragement, help us to find encouragement in your word this morning. If we need correction, help us to find correction and to receive it humbly from you. We pray for you to do your supernatural work through your word this morning.
We pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.
4:17
Land of Canaan
Now, let me give you a little background for this passage, and I should warn you, if I were to say these things on a modern university campus, I might get physically assaulted.
There are a lot of places where if I were to say some of these things, I might be physically assaulted. The truth I'm about to share with you is, to say the least, very unpopular. But here's the truth.
Here's the real history. Genesis was written by Moses, that great leader of Israel. And it was probably read to the people of Israel shortly before they entered the promised land, the land that is now called Israel.
It's the same land that they are fighting over today. So here's what happened.
If you rewind a little bit from here, so the first reading of the Book of Genesis by Moses to the people of Israel, rewind a bit, God had delivered them from slavery in Egypt, but they had repeatedly sinned against God.
So right after God delivers them from slavery, they make these little idols out of gold and say, you are our gods. We're going to worship you. And so God punishes them and rebukes them.
And then things like that keep happening. Where God delivers them from slavery, showers them with his grace and kindness and provision, and they repeatedly sin against God.
So finally he consigns them to wander in the wilderness between Egypt and Israel for 40 years.
And finally, at the end of this 40 years of wandering, the people are ready to go in and take possession of the land that God had promised to Abraham, their ancestor. In the Bible, this land is usually called the land of Canaan.
Canaan, the same Canaan that we see in our passage today. It's the land that Abraham, that their ancestors originally came from before their time in Egypt, the land that God promised them.
And when you look at all the relevant Old Testament passages, you can put together a fairly precise map of this land. And here's where it gets really interesting.
God himself, in the Old Testament, promised the Jewish people that they would possess all of modern day Israel.
It wasn't the United Nations, it wasn't the United States, it wasn't some coalition of kings, or it was God himself who promised the Jewish people that they would possess all of modern day Israel.
But not just that, the promised land in the Old Testament is much bigger than just Israel. It includes all of modern day Lebanon, and most of Jordan and Syria, plus parts of Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.
All of that land was promised by God to the Jewish people, and he did that. He made those promises around 2000 BC. Think about that.
That's around 3,000 years before Islam even existed. The Jewish people owned all of that land thousands of years before Islam even existed.
Now, you can imagine Muslims around the world putting that in their email signatures as a land acknowledgement. Anybody ever seen those email signatures? I know Ben has because he works at a university.
But if you haven't seen them, it's kind of a trend in university cultures and some corporate cultures where people in their email signatures will put a land acknowledgement.
Like, I want to formally acknowledge that this land was owned by the Navajo people or the Cuyamaca tribe or something like that.
And it's a way for them to say, this land isn't ours, we came here as conquerors, as wicked white people, and now we're living here on land that we stole from some native people group. Well, imagine if Muslims did that.
If Muslims all around the world acknowledged this land or all around the Middle East, acknowledged this land belongs to the Jewish people. Obviously, that would never happen. But the point I'm trying to make is that's the truth.
That's the truth. Thousands of years before Islam even existed, God promised that land to them. And we see the beginnings of all this stuff in our passage today.
9:05
Canaanʼs Curse
Looking again at verse 21. Look at the story, look at how this unfolds. Noah gets drunk and he passes out in his tent, and his son Ham, who is the father of Canaan, finds him there.
But instead of finding his father in this compromised and shameful position and realizing, oh my gosh, poor guy, he drank too much wine, I'm going to cover him with a blanket and we'll never talk about this ever again.
Instead of doing that, what does he do? He goes out to tell his brothers to make it worse, to increase the embarrassment and the shame. And his brothers say, absolutely not.
They don't want to see that. That would be disrespectful. So they back up with a blanket to cover him up without even seeing him.
But Ham, on the other hand, does the opposite, does the most disrespectful thing that you could possibly do, possibly revealing his true feelings towards his father. So when Noah wakes up and learns what happened, the penalty is severe.
He curses Canaan, the son of Ham, and all of his descendants. He declares that Canaan shall be a servant to his brothers. Verse 24, cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be to his brothers.
And so it was. That's exactly what happened. When you start reading the rest of the Old Testament, you can see how all of this unfolds.
When we get to a passage like 1 Kings, Chapter 9, verses 20 and 21, it says this.
All the people who were left of the Amorites, so this is centuries later, after the Israelites have gone into the land of Canaan and conquered the land of Canaan, it says this about the Amorites, the Hittites, the Parizites, Parizites, Parizites?
I forget how to say that one. It says this, and these are Canaanites. These are different kinds of Canaanites.
All the people who were left of the Amorites, the Hittites, the Parizites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, who were not of the people of Israel, their descendants who were left after them in the land, whom the people of Israel were unable to devote
to destruction. These Solomon drafted to be slaves, and so they are to this day. So Israel had gone into the promised land in an obedience to God, and wiped out virtually all of the Canaanites. They were utterly wicked people.
These were people who were totally devoted to all kinds of perversion and evil. Based on historical records and the biblical records, we know that they worshiped demons, and they sacrificed their children to them.
So God, in his justice and wisdom, commanded Israel to wipe them out. He commanded Israel to wipe them out, and whoever survived became a slave or servant, just like God prophesied through Noah.
And one really interesting aspect of this is we can trace, using modern technology, we can trace the DNA of various people groups all the way back to the Canaanites. All the way back to the Canaanites.
So who are the descendants of the Canaanites in the Middle East today? They are the Muslims of the Middle East. They are the Palestinians, the Jordanians, the Syrians, and so on.
But according to God, through Noah, these people are consigned to be the servants of Shem. The Canaanites are forever consigned to be the servants of Shem.
I know this is a lot to digest, but like I said at the beginning, what happens in this passage has been shaping the course of history ever since. This is still in force today. These prophecies of God through Noah still apply to people today.
So to kind of rewind and look at the big picture for a second, Ham sins against Noah. So God curses him and his son Canaan and all of their descendants. The modern day descendants of Canaan are the Muslims occupying the Middle East.
And the prophecy says that they are to be the servants. They are cursed to forever be the servants of Shem. In Shem, one of Noah's sons, Shem's people become known as the Shemites, which was later shortened to the Semites.
The Semites, in other words, the Jews. And this is what God prophesied over them. Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant.
May God enlarge Japheth and let him dwell in the tents of Shem and let Canaan be his servant.
14:17
Prophecies Fulfilled
The future of Japheth is also very interesting because here it says that Japheth shall dwell in the tents of Shem. And this is a prophecy, right? These things are going to come true.
But when you look at the Old Testament, there's no indication of the descendants of Japheth ever dwelling in the tents of the descendants of Shem.
It's nowhere in the Old Testament you can't find any indication of that ever happening until the Book of Acts and the New Testament. When Gentiles started believing in Jesus, remember Jesus of course was the Jewish Messiah.
When Gentiles started getting saved and becoming followers of Jesus, well, many of those Gentiles in the New Testament era were descendants of Japheth and Jesus was a descendant of Shem.
So when Gentiles come to dwell in Christ, there's a very real sense in which it is a fulfillment of this ancient prophecy from Noah. So again, you can see how these prophecies are, are shaping the course of human history.
15:31
God Loves Israel
I think it's important to see the blessing here. Listen carefully, it's important to see the blessing here that God places on the descendants of Shem, that is the Jews.
It's also important to see the curse that is placed on the ancestors of the Muslims who are currently dwelling in the Middle East. I don't know if you guys have heard, but there's a war going on over there right now. Anybody here about that?
Israel's currently bombing Lebanon, which is where the many descendants of Canaan are living. If you pay attention to politics these days, you might have noticed a shift taking place.
Honestly, I haven't been this nervous to preach a sermon in a while because there's so much controversy about this stuff. And I know there are people even in this room who hold different views on these things.
And I don't want to offend people unnecessarily. I don't want to cause any unnecessary division. But I also don't want to shy away from the truth of what the scriptures say.
And I want to preach with honesty and sincerity based upon my conviction from the scriptures about these things. And what I've noticed is that people on the political left, and people on the political right cannot agree on anything, right?
Cannot agree on anything. But more and more, there is this strange unity developing. There's this one thing that people on the left and people on the right seem to agree upon now.
They hate Israel. They hate Jews. And why is that?
Historically, that's a very common view. For thousands of years, people have been hating Jews. And do you know why?
Well, because God loves the Jews.
And I don't think this is true for, I'm not saying this is true for every single person that struggles with hatred towards Jewish people or distrust of Jewish people or blames a whole bunch of different things on Jewish people.
I'm not saying that this is true for every single person, but I think for many, many people, even if they don't realize it, they hate the Jews because God loves the Jews. Because that's what the devil does.
The devil, in his deceptions, deceives people into hating the things that God loves and loving the things that God hates. We're in Pride Month after all, right? What is that?
That's loving the things that God hates and hating the things that God loves. And God, according to the Bible, according to this passage here, blesses the Jewish people, and according to the rest of the scriptures, he loves the Jewish people.
And I am not saying that all Jewish people are good. Definitely not saying that. Many Jews have done many bad things.
I'm not saying that the nation of Israel is especially good. I'm not saying that we should all move to Jerusalem and wait for the return of Jesus and be Zionists, whatever that means. I'm not saying any of that stuff.
But I want you to know what God says about the Jewish people, about the Shemites and their descendants. Listen to this. Hosea 2 verses 19 through 20 says, I will betroth you to me forever.
This is God saying to the Jewish people, I will betroth you to me, like I will make you my bride forever. I will betroth you in righteousness and justice in love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness and you will acknowledge the Lord.
Or Jeremiah 31 verses 3 and 9. The Lord appeared to us in the past saying, I have loved you with an everlasting love. Not a temporary love.
Not a love that is contingent upon their performance or their keeping of the laws. An ever lasting love. I have drawn you with unfailing kindness.
They will come with weeping. I will lead them with weeping because I am Israel's father. And Ephraim is my first born son.
Jeremiah 31, 10. He who scattered Israel will gather them and will watch over his flock like a shepherd. And from Deuteronomy 7, for you are a people holy to the Lord your God.
You Jewish people are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples. It was because the Lord loved you.
He will love you and bless you and increase your numbers. He will bless the fruit of your womb. You will be blessed more than any other people.
In Malachi 1-2, I have loved you, says the Lord. So why would anyone hate the people that God loves? I've often heard people that argue that God has rejected Israel.
Like yes, God loved the Old Testament Jews, but when Jesus came, the Jewish people rejected their messiah, they killed him, all that's true. But the conclusion is therefore God has rejected them.
Well, if God rejected them because they killed Jesus, then it wasn't an everlasting love, was it? It was a temporary love. A love contingent upon their performance and upon their behavior.
But as we just read, God's love towards them is not contingent, it is everlasting. So has God rejected the Jewish people because they killed the Messiah?
If so, then that is direct, directly contradictory to the Old Testament, and it also contradicts the New Testament. Listen to Paul in Romans 11. This was written 30 years, 30 years after the Jews killed Jesus.
30 years of the Apostle Paul in working in concert with the other apostles to build Christ Church, 30 years of them reflecting upon the teachings of Jesus and all that meant, 30 years of the apostles by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit composing
the New Testament. The Apostle Paul writes this 30 years later, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he writes Romans 11, verse 1, I ask then, has God rejected his people? That is the Jewish people. Has God rejected the Jewish people?
By no means, for I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew.
And later, he says in verses 25 and 26, lest you be wise in your own sight, I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery, brothers. A partial hardening has come upon Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in.
And in this way, all Israel will be saved. God loves Israel. God loves the Jewish people.
There is a future for them. There's a lot of debate amongst theologians about exactly how this future is going to unfold, what exactly it means to say that all Israel will be saved. But the basics are very clear.
God loves Israel. He loves the Jewish people. He loves them with an everlasting love.
He has not rejected them.
23:56
Christ and Covenant
But again, there are many details and nuances to consider. We need to recognize also that many of the promises made to the Jewish people in the Old Testament are fulfilled symbolically and metaphorically in Christ and the church.
One example that comes to mind right now is the prophecies of Joel chapter two about the day of the Lord. On the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit comes down on the day of Pentecost, the Apostle Peter preaches a sermon in Acts chapter two.
And during that sermon, he tells everybody Joel two is being fulfilled today in your presence. So Joel two was fulfilled somewhat metaphorically, symbolically in the Holy Spirit coming down upon the apostles and starting the New Testament church.
There's one example, Old Testament prophecy, Old Testament promise given to the Jewish people, filled somewhat metaphorically and symbolically in the New Testament church. And there are a bunch of other examples like that.
Old Testament promises we can point to that are fulfilled symbolically in the New Testament church and in Christ. The book of Hebrews talks a lot about this. How ultimately the law, the prophets, Moses, like it's all pointing to Jesus.
It's all fulfilled in Jesus. But does that mean that we can look at all of God's promises of love and affection for the Israelites and say all of it is fulfilled in New Testament Christians and none of it applies to ethnic Jews?
I don't think we can make that leap. We can recognize some symbolic and metaphorical fulfillment, but that doesn't apply to every single word of the Old Testament and every single promise made to ethnic Jews in the Old Testament.
But we also need to recognize, this is an important part of the puzzle, Israel is not going to be saved like when Paul says all Israel will be saved.
When we say that God has a future plan for the Jewish people, that God still loves the Jewish people, none of them are ever going to be saved apart from Christ. They're not on their own track.
It's not like, oh, we're Christians and we follow Jesus, and then Jews are always going to be Jews doing their own thing with God. No, no, no, no. They must become a part of the New Testament people of God, the New Covenant people of God.
They must be saved by grace through faith in Jesus. There is no other way.
And for Jewish people now who aren't saved by grace through faith in Jesus, that's what they need more than anything, is somebody to tell them the Gospel and pray for them, so that they will be saved.
So we need to also recognize that and take account of things like that.
27:02
Love Your Enemies
But ultimately, should we as modern day Christians jump on the bandwagon with everybody else right now and hate Jewish people? Absolutely not. Look at what the Bible says.
He loves them. They are his sheep. They are his sons.
They are his bride, in a sense. He loves them with an everlasting love. So how dare we hate them?
And we shouldn't hate Muslims either. They are consigned to be the servants of the Jews. That's what our passage is telling us.
And personally, this is a struggle for me, because I can read the news and look at what's happening in Europe. And you see Muslims invading Europe and taking over.
Just this morning, I read about a police officer in England who was fired for raising questions about Islamic terrorism. He was in a training, and this is the kind of thing that happens all over Europe.
This is a young Christian man with a family who is a good police officer. And they did a diversity training in the police department, and all the officers were chanting Islam is a religion of peace.
Literally in the training, they are marching back and forth chanting Islam is a religion of peace. And he respectfully raised his hand and asked about acts of terrorism and violence in the Middle East about Hamas and Hezbollah and things like that.
And he was summarily fired and can no longer provide for his family. And that's the mildest thing that is happening.
That is the, like the, yeah, among the least worrisome things, there's all kinds of violence against Christians perpetrated by Muslims all over the world. All kinds of horrible things happening to Christians and non-Christians in Europe.
Muslims have declared that they are the sworn enemies of Israel and America. They say it all the time. They write it all the time.
Like Iran, as a nation, they have declared death to Israel, death to America. Their goal is to wipe Israel off the face of the planet. They want all Jews dead.
And they've been trying to do it for decades, for centuries. They literally say these things all the time. This is what Muslims have been doing since day one.
This is what Muhammad did. This is what his successors did. They try to destroy, to convert or die.
That's the motto, right? Either you become a Muslim or you die. That's what jihad is.
So Muslims have declared that they are our enemies, and they have often acted like our enemies. But what did Jesus say? To love your enemies and to pray for those who persecute you.
So the Shemites and their descendants, we have an obligation to love them in accordance with the scriptures. The Canaanites and their descendants, the Muslims, we have an obligation to love them and pray for them and share the gospel with them.
And all of this craziness starts right here in Genesis chapter 9. We all want peace in the Middle East, but peace in the Middle East was compromised when Noah woke up from his drunken stupor and realized what Ham had done.
And yet God promises that one day peace will be restored. According to Revelation chapter 21, there will be a new heavens. When Jesus comes back, he's going to remake the world.
There will be a new heavens and a new earth and a new Jerusalem, where God dwells forever.
31:10
Righteousness in Christ
Now, let's talk a little bit more about Noah and his drunkenness. I want to make just a couple points here and then we'll be done. First, what happened with Noah sets the pattern for the rest of the Bible.
When you look at the scriptures, it doesn't matter how respected a person is, how righteous and commendable and heroic a person is, we're all sinners. We're all sinners, whether it's Adam or Abraham or David or Noah, they all sin.
I don't think there's any human being in the whole Bible besides Jesus who is spoken of more highly than Noah. I mean, if you're going to find a hero in the Bible aside from Jesus, this is it. It's Noah.
Look at Genesis chapter 6, verse 9. These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation.
Noah walked with God. He wasn't just righteous, it says he was blameless. And he wasn't just blameless and righteous.
It says he walked with God. He was a friend of God. He had a close relationship with God.
And God picked him to chart a new course for humanity, to take the whole world in a new and better direction. And this righteous, blameless friend of God, what did he do? He got drunk and passed out in his tent.
He blew it. He blew it. And Abraham blew it.
And David blew it. They all sin, and many of them sin egregiously and repeatedly. So if you ever think that you're not good enough for God, and I know a lot of people feel this way.
They look at the people around them, and they think, man, all these people are so good, and they pray, and they're nice, and they don't have the past that I do. They haven't made the mistakes that I've made. People often feel that way.
They feel like they're not good enough in comparison to their friends at church, and certainly in comparison to the great heroes of the faith, like Abraham and David and Noah. But look at Noah.
If you ever think that you're not good enough for God, the truth is you're not. And neither was Noah. But God was his friend anyways.
Noah reminds us that you don't have to be perfect in order to be righteous. You don't have to be perfect in order to be righteous. Do you know why?
Because Jesus already did that. He checked that box for you. He met that requirement for you.
That's why we can walk with God. That's why God can speak of blame worthy people as if they're blameless. That's why God can call drunken failures righteous.
Because Jesus is our righteousness. Because Jesus lived the life of perfection that we could never live. Because Jesus never once disobeyed God, never once messed up.
He was always perfectly loving and perfectly good, and he has the perfect moral resume that God gives to us as a gift. Because, I'll close with this, 2nd Corinthians 521.
For our sake, God made him to be sinned who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Amen.