Church: Reformed Baptist Church of Franconia | Text: Genesis 6 | Date: June 19, 2022 | Speaker: Fred Zaspel

Noah as a Savior Figure

All right, Genesis chapter 5. The flood story is sort of introduced for us back at the end of chapter 5, verses 28 and 29, where Noah is introduced. Genesis 5:28 and 29: “When Lamech had lived 182 years, he fathered a son and called his name Noah, saying, ‘Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands.'”

Now there’s a wordplay going on in the Hebrew here. It’s not evident in the English, except that you kind of get the sense of that, but the name Noah means rest or relief. And then it says at the end of the verse, “he shall bring relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands.” So Noah is named relief because he’s going to bring relief. And then you have in verse 29 the explicit reference to Genesis 3, verses 17 to 19, where God speaks in judgment to Adam because of his sin—judgment that falls on the created order as well because of Adam’s sin. And so this one, who’s named rest or relief, Noah, shall bring relief from the curse that God has imposed upon the earth because of human sin.

So the naming of Lamech’s son was something of an expression of hope on Lamech’s part that he will somehow reverse the curse. He’s going to bring relief from what God has imposed on us because of sin. So it becomes something of a prophecy. Initially it’s fulfilled in Noah in a sense, in that he brought rest and relief to seven others and to two of each kind of the animals and so on, but it’s fulfilled ultimately in Noah’s descendant, the Lord Jesus. Noah is the one then—he’s named rest or relief because he’s the one who will bring rest; he’ll reverse the curse. He’s presented then at the very beginning, Genesis 5:28 and 29, as something of a savior figure. We have a number of those throughout the Old Testament who are all prospective of the great Savior to come, and that’s the way Noah is presented here, and we’ll see more of that as we go along. At the very least, then, we’re set up in verses 28 and 29 of chapter five with a sense of anticipation regarding Noah.

A Story of Rescue

We’ve seen then that the flood story—we’ve gone through it a couple of times—the flood story is both a story of grace and a story of judgment. It is a story of grace in that God remembered Noah. Remember, that’s a center statement of the narrative. God remembered Noah, and he remembered the covenant that he promised to make with him, and so on. And then we saw it’s also a story of judgment as well, because that’s the reason for the flood. So it’s a story of judgment. And now we’re going to go back to the idea of the story of grace, but just a little sharper angle, and we’ll call this a story of rescue. So the flood: a story of rescue. It’s a story of judgment and rescue.

Look at chapter six, verses six through nine: “The Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth and it grieved him to his heart.” Now remember, we looked at that kind of language last time, about how this language of God’s regretting and relenting is, in a relative sense, used to adapt to our perspective of things. When we hear it again, we come across it: “the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I’m sorry that I have made them.’ But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.”

Now if we jump down to verse 13: “God said to Noah, ‘I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them. I will destroy them with the earth. Make yourself an ark of gopher wood, make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. For behold, I will bring a flood of waters on the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life under heaven. Everything that is on the earth shall die. But I will establish my covenant with you, you shall come into the ark, you and your sons and your wife and your sons’ wives with you.'”

So, in chapters six through nine now, we have Noah presented as the one in whom humanity survives. God made a covenant with Noah, God made a promise to Noah, and through Noah, humanity survives. Now, the curse that was mentioned back at the end of chapter five in the naming of Noah—the curse still remains, the toil still remains, and so the relief that comes through Noah ultimately is fulfilled in his great descendant. Again, we’ll probably see more of that as we go on. Let me check something here.

Noah as a Righteous Man

All right, now what we find, and I’ve mentioned this last time, what we find here is Noah is—and there’s much made of this in the narrative—Noah is presented as a righteous man. I want you to see a little bit more of that this time. Look at chapter six, verses nine to 12. They obviously introduce Noah as a man of righteousness: “These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God, and Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Now, the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence, and God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way in the earth.”

So you have this great contrast. On the one hand, you have Noah, who is a righteous man (verses nine and 10), and then you’ve got the world (verses 11 and 12), which is just full of corruption and violence and sin. So the point is the whole world in verses 9 to 12—the point is the whole world is corrupt except Noah. Noah is the righteous one. Verse 9: he’s righteous, he’s blameless, he walked with God. If you’d like to glance down to chapter 7 and verse one, you see that again. God says to Noah, “I have seen”—that is here he’s saying that I’m going to send the flood to judge everyone, but I’m going to spare you because—”I have seen that you are righteous before me in this generation.” And so he walked with God.

Now we’ve been set up with that kind of language back in chapter five with Enoch, who also walked with God. And coincidentally, he was spared from death as well. And now we have Noah, who walked with God, was the single righteous man, it seems, in the whole earth, and God spares him from the judgment. So it’s not difficult, I think, to see the point that Noah was spared because of righteousness, his righteousness.

Now we have something of that in Hebrews chapter 11, if you’d like to turn there. Hebrews 11, verse seven, draws attention again to Noah’s righteousness, and it adds the observation that Noah was righteous by faith—that faith is a very practical thing. “By faith,” this is Hebrews 11:7, “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.” So he’s a righteous man, but here it’s specified that it’s a righteousness that comes by faith, and that’s the theme, of course, of Hebrews chapter 11: that trusting God is a practical thing, and it has practical ramifications in the way that we live. We trust his word, and we live accordingly.

Back in Genesis chapter six, we have a related kind of statement in verse 22. This is an interesting statement. It’s a brief statement, but the implications are just kind of brimming from it. Genesis 6:22: “Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him.” And then again, chapter seven, verse five: “Noah did all that the Lord had commanded him.” Now it’s just a brief statement, but it really entails quite a bit. What Noah did, it says, “Noah did all that the Lord commanded him.” What Noah did was devote 120 years of his life to a massive building project. He had a three-story ship for his family, for selected pairs of all the animals, the birds, and the bugs, creeping things, including the food for everyone—planning of it, the producing of it, the storing of it all. It’s quite a project. And 120 years it took him to do it.

Now, 2 Peter chapter two adds another statement about Noah’s righteousness, but here it takes it in a different angle. It says he was a preacher of righteousness. So not only was he a righteous man, but he was a preacher of righteousness. What does that entail? We really don’t know what all goes on behind that. We don’t have a narrative of Noah preaching and the world’s response. You can well imagine what it was like. No one joined him, no one repented. So there was probably sneering and mocking. There was probably a lot of people ignoring the old fool and that kind of thing. He’s a preacher of righteousness. He’s a faithful man. So, whatever the shape of that witness was, it wasn’t received well by the crowd.

Five Obstacles of Noah’s Task

Now, commenting on this statement of “Noah did all that the Lord had commanded,” Calvin makes some interesting observations. And he makes some comments on the difficulty of Noah’s task. And he lists five obstacles I think are worth mentioning. So five obstacles of Noah’s task in doing what God had commanded him:

One was the enormity of the task. It’s a huge ship. How many—can you imagine how many trees were cut to build that boat? The enormity of the task.

Number two, the mocking snickers and insults of his contemporaries to deter him from his work. He had to go through that.

Number three, the huge store of food required to put in reserve. Chapter six, verse 21 mentions that: “Take with you every sort of food that is eaten and store it up. It shall serve as food for you and for them.” I’ll just mention here, by the way, in Whitcomb and Morris, their book on the Genesis Flood, which is just a classic—it’s a wonderful book, groundbreaking, so much information in that, it’s really, really good—but they conjecture how did they survive the flood in the boat? And they conjecture that God imposed a kind of long sleep, a kind of hibernation on all the animals, and perhaps as well on Noah and his family. I don’t think so because of chapter six, verse 21: “Take with you every sort of food that is eaten and store it up. It shall serve as food for you and for them.” It sounds like everybody’s—it’s quite a zoo on that boat. All right, the enormity of the task, that’s one, Calvin’s five obstacles of obeying God. The enormity of the task, the mocking, snickers, and the insults, the huge store of food.

Number four, the difficulty involved in gathering all the wild animals together. And Calvin remarks, “as if indeed he had all the beasts of the forest at his command, or was able to tame them so that in his keeping, wolves might dwell with lambs, tigers with hares, and lions with oxen.” The difficulty in gathering the animals.

Number five, the natural apprehension of entering the ark once it was complete. I think that’s a good observation that we don’t normally think of. Can you imagine? All right, 120 years building this thing and finally I’m going in and the door is shut. What’s going to happen here? Calvin likens it to descending into a grave. He’s shut in, there’s no open space, crowded with animals, and he writes, “the smell of dung alone, pent up as it was in a closely filled space, might at the expiration of three days have stifled all the living creatures in the ark.” Perhaps so, and if not, then Noah and his sons had a lot of shoveling to do.

Rescue Through Substitute Righteousness

All right, well, the point is, here’s a righteous man. He trusted God, he trusted God’s word, he held fast to the promises, and he lived accordingly. He did what God had commanded him. Chapter six and verse eight ends the previous section with Noah as the exception. Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. Just why he found favor is explained in terms of Noah’s righteousness. Both we saw in chapter six, verses nine to 12, verse 13 and following, and then also in chapter seven, verse one, where it’s made explicit that Noah was a righteous man, and because he walked with God like Enoch before him, he was spared.

All right, so Noah was a righteous man, he’s spared. Now, I want to raise a question at this point. If Noah was spared because of his righteousness—and the text leads us to see that—why were the others spared? Were they righteous also? They may have been. I don’t really know the answer to that, but the text leads us to think that Noah was the exception. Maybe it means Noah and his family. That’s not stated. They did help him build the ark, and they did go in with him, so there’s a real possibility of that. The text leads us to think Noah was the exception. Perhaps it’s Noah and the family. But the answer that’s given is that they were spared just because they belonged to Noah.

And I don’t think I’m reading too much into the text to see that. If you look at chapter six, verses 18 and 19: “I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark, you and your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you. And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark to keep them alive with you. They shall be male and female of the birds according to their kinds and of the animals according to their kinds. Every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind, two of every sort shall come in to you to keep them alive.” It seems to be indicating that the reason all these others were saved was simply that they belonged to Noah.

And chapter seven, verses 20 and following sums that up: “The waters prevailed above the mountains, covering them 15 cubits deep, and all the flesh that died, that moved on the earth, birds, livestock, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth and all mankind, everything on the dry land 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.” Just an awful statement, isn’t it? Can you imagine? Every living thing that was on the face of the ground—man, animals, creeping things, 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 it’s over-reading the text to say that they were spared because of their association with Noah. Rescue, if I can look at it in whole Bible perspective then—you know where I’m going with this—rescue through substitute righteousness seems to be the pattern. I don’t think it’s being creative. I don’t think it’s trying to find Christ in the Old Testament where he’s not. I think that’s where the text is pointing us, at least in light of the rest of the Bible.

Baptism and the Ark

Now, look at 1 Peter. I want to spend a few minutes here. The apostle Peter takes the imagery of Noah and the flood a little bit differently. 1 Peter 3, verses 18 to 22: “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 formerly 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 persons, were brought safely through water. Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him.”

Now, there are denominations that are built on this statement in verse 21: “baptism now saves you.” One of those verses a Baptist or a Protestant wants to look at and say, “Why did you say it that way? What does he mean?” On context, here we have Peter dealing, of course, with the theme of Christian suffering. Christ is the ultimate example of suffering, in particular, the kind of suffering he suffered. Verse 18, we have a crisp statement of the significance of Christ’s suffering. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit. First of all, he was suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, so there’s substitution, that he might bring us to God. So his substitutionary work brought reconciliation, being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit.

Now there’s been tons of discussion around this verse and this clause in particular and what it means. I’m not going to take time to defend all of this, but I’ll give you what I think the sense of it clearly is. “Put to death in the flesh,” the idea is crucified with respect to his human existence—this flesh/spirit antithesis sometimes in Paul as well has to do with his earthly existence and his resurrection existence. I think that’s what’s going on here. So he’s crucified with respect to his human existence, raised to new existence that is in power, as Paul puts it in Romans chapter one, in the spirit. Paul deals with this as well in 1 Corinthians 15, Christ being the one who led the way into the eschatological resurrection and came to a new kind of life in that respect. I think that’s what’s going on here.

Verses 19 and 20, we have Christ’s message of triumph to the evil spirits in prison. Verse 19, “in which,” that is in which state, that is in his resurrection state, made alive in the spirit, in which state he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison—that is the demonic world in prison. In particular, verse 20 explains their character and their history and what particular ones he’s speaking of, and it relates it to the time of the flood. So in this resurrection state, Christ has proclaimed to the spirits in prison. Now again, there have been lots of discussion on this and all kinds of theories about what this means.

One theory was the harrowing of hell. Some offer that Christ went down to hell at this point and proclaimed victory to those in hell. Others have said that this is actually offering a second chance to the demonic world, to the fallen world in hell, things like that. I don’t think so. I think what we have here is simply a proclamation of his triumph. That’s how verse 22 defines it. He defines the message preached, and that is his ascension, his triumph. So in his resurrection and his ascension, Jesus proclaimed triumph over even the demonic world. So here we have a picture of Christ crucified, raised from the dead, and in his resurrection, proclaiming triumph to the demonic world, as he takes the throne in heaven, as Psalm 110 describes, at the right hand of God.

All right, so that’s the overview of the passage. That’s really not my point, but I give you that so we have the setting. To our point: verse 20, the ark is presented as a means of salvation through judgment. “A few, that is eight persons, were brought safely through water.” And then verse 21, “Baptism corresponds to this.” That is, this whole experience of passing through judgment safely in the ark finds correspondence in baptism. In the ark, you pass through the judgment into safety. In baptism, in some sense, you pass through the judgment into safety, and in that sense, baptism saves you. So those—just as those eight souls emerge safely from judgment in the ark—so also, in some sense, and I’ll explain in a second, through our baptism, we emerge safely in Christ.

Now, he explains what he means by that in verse 21: “baptism which corresponds to this now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” So whatever baptism is here, it is explicitly said to be a profession of faith. It’s a confession of a good conscience. So here’s a person going in the waters of baptism, confessing his faith in Christ, and coming out of the waters of baptism, having professed faith, safe in Christ. In that sense, baptism saves you.

I’ve given you this illustration before. We came across it in Colossians chapter two; it has some similar kinds of language. This may not work on all fours—walk on all fours—but I think it’s a fair illustration. For the longest time in evangelicalism broadly, and still quite a bit in many circles, the practice at the end of the sermon is to give an altar call. During the revivalist times, Billy Sunday and the others, this was a huge thing. It started with Charles Finney. In Billy Sunday’s day, they would set up outdoor tents, and they’d call them tabernacle meetings, and they’d have the aisles lined with sawdust to prevent the mud from all of that and keep it a little bit cleaner. And at the end of the sermon, this altar call would be given, and if you want to come and receive Christ, come forward—and you’ve all seen that.

We don’t practice that, and there are lots of reasons not to. My point isn’t to argue against it here. In its best use—I was converted at an altar call—in its best use, it becomes associated in the minds of many people with the occasion of their salvation. Now, if you ask them how they were saved, they will tell you, it is by faith in Christ. I confessed my sins, I repented, I asked Christ to save me. I’ll explain it that way. But if you ask them, “When were you saved?” many people throughout that whole era might have responded, “Oh, I walked the sawdust trail in 19 whatever.” I walked—and they don’t mean, in their best use at least, they don’t mean that walking the sawdust trail saved them. What they mean is that’s the occasion in which I confessed faith in Christ and He saved me.

And I think that’s the way that baptism is used in the New Testament throughout. There was a great emphasis on baptism as part of the conversion experience in the New Testament because it was associated so closely with this confession of faith, that here is where I profess faith in Christ, in baptism, as He has commanded. And so in that broad sense, we can say, as Peter does, baptism saves you in that broad kind of way.

All right, well, all of that then to show that in several different ways then the flood story is a story of divine judgment, but it’s also a story of divine rescue. Christ is the ark, or if you look at it another way, we pass through the waters of judgment just like they did, and we pass through it in Christ, confessing Christ, and we are saved through it as well. So it’s a story of rescue; the Bible from the beginning, in various ways, points us to Christ as the only escape from divine wrath.

I mentioned to you a few weeks ago that back in the 50s, I think it was, or 60s, my dad had preached a sermon on—he was telling me about it—preached a sermon on the flood, and he focused on the statement, at least for a time in the sermon, he focused on the statement “God had shut Noah in.” God shut the door. That’s the statement in Genesis. God had shut the door and he shut Noah in. And he elaborated on it like dad can do and like many preachers are gifted to do with the gift of elaboration. He imagined in his sermon people coming and wanting to bang on the door: “Noah, let me in.” God had shut the door. It was too late. It was too late. It was too late. Judgment had come. And I told you then that some man stood up in the audience while dad was preaching and said, “I don’t want to be shut out, I need to be saved.” It was quite a dramatic moment.

Now the other side of that, the flip side of the same message, is not just that you will be shut out finally in the day of judgment, but the flip side of the message is you hide yourself in the ark. You hide yourself in Christ and be safe. And I think all of this illustrates that, and it’s intended to. Ultimately, it’s not Noah. Of course, it’s Noah’s descendant who gives the climactic rescue from judgment.

All right, we’re early. Any questions?