Andrew Meher: Alright, I want to invite you to open up your Bibles to Genesis chapter six. Genesis chapter six. And we're going to ⁓ read ⁓ we're gonna read a little bit from chapter six, chapter seven, chapter eight, and chapter nine. Don't worry. It won't be that long. ⁓ And we're gonna look at a story that you might be very familiar with. Starting last week, we we entered our summer teaching series that we're calling the blessing. And what we're doing is we're looking through ⁓ the book of Genesis, the very first book of the Bible. Genesis just simply means beginning. Pretty good name for the title of a first book of something, right? At the beginning. We call it beginning. And in Genesis, there's a theme, one of many themes that emerges. Emerges in the very first pages of Genesis, and it continues all the way through to Genesis chapter 50 at the end of the book. And it's this word blessing. And so what we are doing during the summer is we're going through the book of Genesis and exploring the theme of blessing. Remember, last week we talked about how God created everything, said it was very good, and then he made humans, he made humans in God's image. Talked a little bit about what that means, and we said and we noticed that God blessed them. And that blessing isn't isn't just about ⁓ it's not about what we do, like you know, when someone goes like hashtag I'm blessed, and they and they and they put up you know their comfortable life or whatever God and we imagine this idea of a comfortable life and that is God's blessing. What God sees as blessing is is a function, a purpose, something we do in the world because we are made in God's image. And so we're We're gonna be just continuing to explore that theme of blessing and how God wants to act ⁓ in the world to help us be humans who are truly blessed and not what we see happen after the fall of humanity when sin enters the world, when we start to distort blessing. And so let's look at ⁓ Genesis chapter six together, and we're gonna get into our our text. We're gonna read, I'm gonna give you just a few things here. We're gonna read chapter six, starting in verse nine, all the way to the end of the chapter. And then just so you know, it'll be on the screen. I'm gonna jump all the way to verse seven, or chapter seven, verse twenty-four. And then I'm gonna go jump down to chapter 8, verse 14. And I'm gonna read all the way through chapter 9, verse 1. You can just follow on the screen, but I just wanted you to have some comfort that I'm not gonna read four straight chapters in their entirety of Genesis. You're with me? All right, let's let's read ⁓ the word of the Lord together. It says this, starting in verse 9 of chapter 6. This is the account of Noah and his family. Noah was a righteous man. The only blameless person living on earth at the time, and he walked in close fellowship with God. Noah was the father of three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Now God saw that the earth had become corrupt and was filled with violence. God observed all this corruption in the earth, for everyone on earth was corrupt. And so God said to Noah, I have decided to destroy all living creatures, for they have filled the earth with violence. Yes, I will wipe them all out along with the earth. So build a large boat from cypress wood, and waterproof it with tar inside and out. Then construct decks and stalls throughout its interior. Make the boat 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high. Leave an 18-inch opening below the roof all the way around the boat. Put the door on the side and build three decks inside the boat: lower, middle, and upper. Look, I am about to cover the earth with a flood that will destroy every living thing that breathes. Everything on earth will die. But I will confirm my covenant with you. So enter the boat, you and your wife and your sons and their wives, bring a pair of every kind of animal, a male and a female, into the boat with you to keep them alive during the floods. Pairs of every kind of bird and every kind of animal and every kind of small animal that scurries along the ground will come to you to be kept alive. And be sure to take on board enough food for your family and for all the animals. And so Noah did everything exactly as God had commanded him. Chapter seven verse twenty four. And the flood waters covered the earth for one hundred and fifty days. Starting in verse 14, it says, Two more months went by, and at last the earth was dry. And when God said to Noah, then God said to Noah, Leave the bow, all of you, you and your wife and your sons and their wives, release all the animals, and the birds, the livestock, and the small animals that scurry along the ground, so they can be fruitful and multiply throughout the earth. So Noah and his wife and his sons and their wives left the boat, and all of the large and small animals and birds came out of the boat pair by pair. Then Noah built an altar to the Lord, and there he sacrificed his burnt offerings the animals and birds that had been approved for that purpose. And the Lord was pleased with the aroma of the sacrifice, and said to himself, I will never again curse the ground because of the human race. Even though everything they think or imagine is bent toward evil from childhood, I will never again destroy all living things. As long as the earth remains, there will be planting and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night. And then God blessed Noah and his sons and told them Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Lord Jesus, as we ⁓ come before your word this morning, we pray that the meditations of my heart and the words of my mouth would be holy and pleasing to you, that your spirit would let what is of you go deep into our lives this morning, and what is not would fall away. And we ask, ⁓ Lord Jesus, that we would hear your voice as you call us into your life of blessing this summer. In Jesus' name we pray. And everyone said, Amen. Amen. ⁓ did you ever try out one of those things called an auto stereogram? Maybe when you were a kid, you have any idea what an auto stereogram is? You probably do, ⁓ but you probably know it better as one of those magic eye pictures. You know the fuzzy, kinda blurry things that just look like TV static and there's nothing there? You know what I'm talking about? You see that up on the screen there? Nope, back one. Where is it? That's not it. That one. The one that looks like I made a mistake on the screen is exactly what it was supposed to be. You ever seen these when you were a kid, maybe? They're called auto stereograms. It's a seemingly fuzzy, chaotic looking image with no rhyme or reason to it. That if it's viewed properly, you'll suddenly be able to notice that there's a 3D image that's hidden in it. Can you guys see what this image is? Might be a little hard to see on the screen. But there are there are a few different methods if you want to be able to see the actual there really is a picture in this. I checked. There's a few different methods that you can use to try and see the image that is in this magic eye picture. One method might be that you start really close, as close as you can get to the image, and you slowly start to move away from it. And eventually the three D image sort of appears. Did anyone ever use that method? With these? You did? Yeah. ⁓ so you could do it. That's one way. Another way to do it, I didn't know about this, is you can actually have the image in front of your fing your face here, and you kind of use your finger to just kind of move back and forth over it, and it affects the focus of your eyes, and you can start to see the the picture behind it and as you start to adjust. But my favorite way, I see all using your fingers trying to find it. Did any I'd never heard of this way. Did any of you do it this way? Moving your finger back and forth? Well, did Those didn't weren't my way. I found the most effective way to was just cross my eyes and look at it. That that to me was the most effective way. If you s cross your eyes and and you put it out in front of you, you'll be able to see the picture begin to emerge as your eyes adjust. Now, before you are all cross-eyed and dizzy. ⁓ there there the reason why all of these different methods work is because it helps your eyes decouple from looking at the exact same point out in front of you. When you're focusing on something and looking at something, your eyes converge on a single point. And when your eyes are converging on a single point on these auto stereograms, ⁓ you can't see the image clearly. In our text today, we actually have a similar sort of problem that we're facing. The story of the Great Flood, or you might know it as Noah and the Ark, can be a very fuzzy and chaotic story to understand for a number of reasons. One of the main reasons is the idea that God would destroy humanity. It doesn't really sit well with our modern sensibilities, does it? It's quite confusing to read, I'm going to destroy everyone. It's like God just decided one day to press control, alt, delete and start over. Nothing about that seems particularly helpful in our walk with God. Nothing about it seems to help us learn about blessing. It may even terrify some of us. What kind of God is this who would wipe out humans like that? Have you ever asked yourself that? That's a reasonable question to ask. A second thing that makes this text kind of blurry and confusing is as our modern ideas and modern questions about a worldwide flood. Did the entire globe really flood? Was it just a regional flood? Did the river just kind of overflow its banks a little? Is it all just a made-up myth and nothing really happened? These kinds of questions about the destruction of humanity and especially about how the flood actually Happened, work, believe it or not, to obscure rather than help bring clarity to our understanding of what this story is about. Are you with me so far? Let me put it this way: what this story about the flood does from our perspectives is it tends, as we look at it, to make our image more fuzzy instead of allowing the 3D image to emerge. What is always needed to see these kinds of magic eye pictures, as I said, is to get our eyes looking at two different places instead of at the same point. And when we do this, the picture emerges. And this actually helps us, believe it or not, in understanding the story of the flood in Genesis chapter 6 through 9. But it also It helps us because we don't just look at the ancient ⁓ Near East story of this flood, we also look at other similar stories that existed in the time that this flood story was written to its original audience. And so when we're looking at the ancient Near East's collection of flood stories, and we look at the biblical flood story, and we're looking with our eyes at these two different sources, a beautiful image begins to emerge about what's actually going on in this text. Does that make sense to you? There is kind of a cultural conversation going on for the original readers that we completely miss because we're just not in the conversation. Now, what do I mean when I say that? Cultures, every culture at every time in history around the world, we have ways of talking that just become so normal and commonplace to us that we don't even think about what we're saying. We understand what is being referenced because there is a large cultural conversation that we are all a part of. A cultural conversation, maybe that some of us are familiar with, I hope we're familiar with, has to do with the greatest movie ever made, which is Star Wars. You know, imagine you're headed to a job interview, and I just write you a little note, have a great time, and I jokingly add, may the force be with you. And I send you off with that note, right? Well, we have a cultural conversation that understands what that is. But imagine someone 2,000 years from now unearths that note. In a different time and place and culture. And and they might read that and think, what kind of religion did this people have? Where they talked about this force that helped them with job interviews. This is fascinating, this people. So we know, of course, that this reference to Star Wars ⁓ i i is just a cultural conversation. It has particular boundaries of how we use that phrase and how we don't use that phrase. We all understand what it means, but people in another time and place may not grasp that. And then they end up making really silly conclusions about what kind of people we are in our time and place and what's happening in the world. And so, too, this happens with the story of the flood. We start asking all of our questions and bring them to the text when the original authors, inspired by the Spirit, are answering completely different questions. And so to look at the flood story. In context with the cultural conversation of other ancient Near Eastern flood stories of this same time, we can very clearly to see the picture that God wants us to see in this story. ⁓ because there are a bunch of local flood stories in this culture, ⁓ we we can clearly see what is happening in this text. ⁓ there's there's two very famous ancient Near Eastern flood stories. The first one, ⁓ you may have heard of Gilgamesh. Has anyone heard of Gilgamesh? It's an ancient ⁓ Sumerian myth, ⁓ which is very southern Iraq, close to the Persian Gulf, modern-day Iraq. It was the land of Sumer. ⁓ their capital city was Ur. And and ⁓ They have this story of Gilgamesh, who was the ancient original ruler of the city of Ur, was a very powerful ⁓ empire in that region. And the story goes like this: ⁓ there was a flood that came very, very suddenly. And it came out of nowhere with no rhyme or reason to it. In fact, there was one character in the story that goes to the high god of the Sumerian people and complains to this high god, saying, Why did you, unreasoning, send this flood? There's no rationale in the story for why this is even happening. So Gilgamesh, being the epic hero that he is. Takes action and he builds a massive boat, it's literally translated the boat's name as the preserver of life. And so Gilgamesh is this human who can survive against all odds and is celebrated by later generations as their great savior and preserver of life. There's another story, a little bit further north, in in what would be modern-day northern Iraq. ⁓ and it's a story ⁓ that describes the the great ⁓ Atrahasis, as I believe how you pronounce his name. And he was this great man and figure in in what was called Akad. It was another region where Babylon is, and he was a great preserver of humanity against the high god Enlil. And this Enlil, this high god, who was in charge of all the other gods and all the humans, had become really annoyed about all the noise that humans were making. There were too many of them. They'd become too populated, too, too much, too many people, and so he decides he needs to destroy them all because it's just getting too noisy. I know some of you feel like this with your children. But you need to rein it in. And so here's what happens. He's about to destroy them all with this flood. He actually tries a few different methods to destroy humans and it doesn't work. And he's like, I'll drown them, that'll work. This is a great guy, this ⁓ Enlil. Anyway, a lesser god known as Enki was trying to build a power base for himself. And so he reaches out to Atrahasis and he gives him instructions for building a vessel that can survive the storm and the flood that's coming. In exchange for Atrahasis' loyalty later on, of course. And when Atrahasis emerges, though, from his vessel after the flood, he just Indiscriminately begins to make sacrifices to as many gods as he possibly can because he's really worried that they're all going to get mad at humans again, and he wants to make sure there's never a flood again. Interesting, right? As we think about these two alternative flood stories, I think a clear picture kind of begins to emerge about how. Drastically different the story of the flood is in Genesis. You might already be noticing it yourself. First, I think this is interesting. I just want to point out where the focus is placed on each of these stories. In the other ancient Near East accounts of the flood in Sumeria and in Akkadia, the human is the hero of the story. They act boldly. And decisively. They rail against the injustice of the God or the gods that are doing this act randomly and irrationally. Humans are the hero of the story. We we like to write ourselves into the story with ⁓ as the kids say, main character energy. And then I found out after I was gonna put this in my sermon, Lindsay, our worship director, said, kids don't say that anymore. That ended like three years ago. But this is still what we do, isn't it? Humans want to write ourselves into the story as the heroes with main character energy. We imagine humans in these narratives as the center of the story. Humans are the ones who overcome, who, against all odds, figure out a way forward. We're going to come up with designs to make this boat that can survive a flood. We're going to make sure that humans can survive against the gods. This is how much we think about our lives much of the time, isn't it? We are the ones who have to find a way through the challenges and trials of life and overcome them. On the other hand, If we were to read the entire account of Genesis and the flood, starting in chapter 6 all the way through chapter 9, you're welcome. We didn't read it all this morning. But if we did, there is something really surprising that we would find in this narrative. Do you know what it is? Noah never speaks. Noah does not utter a single word. God is the one who speaks to Noah. God is the one who acts in his world and is taking responsibility for his world that he created. Evil has corrupted everything. Did you notice that? Everything and everyone, the text says, was doing evil all the time. Humanity was meant for blessing, as we learned about last week, but we as humans have rejected the blessing for evil. While the other gods and the other stories are annoyed or they're irrational in their plans with the flood, God has moral responsibility to deal with the evil that has taken over his good creation. If God does not deal with evil, he is not a good God. Are you with me? But further, notice how one of the other gods, Enki, tries to get humans to be loyal to him. And that's his reason for helping out. God does not need to curry favor with humanity. In fact, the text says that it doesn't say that God found favor with Noah, it says Noah found favor with God. So God doesn't ⁓ sneakily go behind the back of some other divine being and hey Noah, let me let me hook you up with plans for getting out of trouble, as long as you stay loyal to me. No, instead God is intentionally going to Noah. Intentionally And giving a command to build the ark. You wonder why sometimes there's all these measurements in the scriptures. Why are all these measurements there about I want you to build the ark, make it this high, make it this long, make it hear God's intentionality with humanity. God's not just like, hey, I'm sending a flood, figure it out. Just a heads up for you. God's like, here is exactly what you want to do to survive. I love even at the end of Genesis 6, where he's like, make sure you have enough food. It's gonna be a while. You hear God's care for humanity in this. We see that God is committed to humanity intentionally. And even before the flood, God says, I am going to make a covenant with you, Noah. I am going to commit to you and commit to humanity. And Noah hasn't even done anything yet. This is how God's blessing is meant to work in our lives. It is received with grace, as we said last week. It's received with grace because God is the one who is making these things happen. It is not because we've done something or earned it or proved ourselves in some way. But we can only open ourselves up to this kind of blessing from God like Noah did when we cease to make the story about us. We have to give up, as I said, that main character energy. Think about your life for a minute. When the floodwaters rise in your life, when a crisis comes. When an unexpected situation occurs, when something beyond what you can handle within your current responsibilities, within your calendar or within your bank account emerges, who is the hero of your life? Who is the main character in your story? Do you see yourself as that main character? Do you see yourself as the one who will figure out a plan and come up with a solution? Do you agonize over what comes next? Do you drop, as I do sometimes, other commitments and responsibilities and start living reactionary lives? When crisis hits our lives, I I think many of us believe that we think we have permission to stop being a Christian for a season until we can figure things out. Here's what I mean when I say that. I just mean that when a crisis hits, I begin to believe I have permission to do things like stop caring for my neighbor. I start viewing these things as extras to add on to my life. And once I get this crisis figured out, God, then I'll help other people again. But in doing so, we're actually pushing aside something that is basic and fundamental to the commands that Jesus has given us for life. Or maybe for some of you. ⁓ we we believe that ⁓ man something big is going on. ⁓ I'll get back to church or I'll get back to community. I I end up isolating myself from br my brothers and sisters in Christ. ⁓ I'll get back to you after I figure out my life. Anyone ever have those kinds of seasons? It's as if when all of these flood waters come into our lives, we throw up our hands and we say things like, God, we didn't plan for this. God, this wasn't in our contract. God, how could you not see this coming and give us a heads up over here so we could plan better? God, thanks a lot. Now I've got to go figure this out. I will come back to you once I have some good ideas and I'll let you know, God, what I've decided. And by the way, God, when I come back to you with my plan, will you bless it? We say all this quite worryingly, as if we were the main characters of our stories, as if God didn't know what was already going on. As if God isn't already intimately involved in your life. As if God was not the main character of your story. Friends, God always acts decisively in history. Intentionally in history. And in your life. Intenally. In your day-to-day, because God is the main character of your story and my story. God is the hero of the story. Because God always seeks to bless humanity, God is always the first one to have a plan. Have you ever thought about your life like that? God is way more committed to your life than you are. And God always has a plan for your life, just like He had a plan for Noah. Perhaps we could learn from Noah, who did not speak for most of his own story. God spoke instead. God instructed, and Noah obeyed. Do you think Noah was concerned about the corruption and the evil that was growing around him? Maybe a little bit? Do you think Noah was like. It's getting pretty bad out there. Are we gonna be okay? My my margin's a little bit tighter. I I I don't know. I don't know how we're gonna, you know, pay for all this. My my neighbor's getting a little crazy. I'm not really sure what's going on next door. Do you think Noah. Had questions about all of this evil and was starting to wonder: is this God even good? This is pretty ugly. Of course Noah did. But the text itself tells us that Noah was close with God. The very first verse we read in chapter six, verse nine says that Noah was a righteous man. The only blameless person living on earth at that time, and he walked in close fellowship with God. Now, in the original Hebrew, that sentence is only ten words. And that's particularly significant, and the author is trying to get our attention by saying that, because Noah is also the tenth generation from Adam and Eve in the story. This is all very significant with how Genesis is written. There's something very highly symbolic about Noah's life that the authors of this story did not want us to miss. And they wanted us to see something about who God was in this. Noah represents the fullness of time when God acts and when God works through a human to bring about God's purposes. Are with me on that? This is this is everything has culminated to this point, and God is now going to work in a significant way. When do we see this happening? All throughout the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, it describes the fullness or the fulfillment of Jesus fulfilling the words of the Old Testament scripture over and over and over again. In some way, Noah is like a small scale representation of ultimately what God would do in history through Jesus. In the fullness of time, Jesus came. In the fullness of time, in the fullness of history, when it was time to act, God came into the world in Jesus. Jesus shows us what it looks like to defer to the Father and not try to be the hero of our own lives and the main character of our own stories. We're reminded over and over again by our Lord Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew six, for example, he says, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, what you will drink, what you will wear. Don't worry about that chaos, what you're concerned about. Don't worry about tomorrow, he says elsewhere, for tomorrow has enough trouble of its own. Jesus says, your Father in heaven already knows what you need. Because God has created humanity to be blessed. And because God has already intended to bless you and I as his image-bearers, his representatives on this earth, God has already provided everything you need. Your Father knows what you need. Why are you trying to be the hero of this story when God has already acted? When God has already moved? We tend to seek and grasp things that we fear that we want or that we need. We're tempted every day to take more than our daily bread, are we not? We resist allowing God to be the main character of our stories. We demand of ourselves and of others that we meet the moment with decisiveness, that we meet the moment with unrelenting strength. That we have knowledge and That we have wisdom, that we meet the moment with some hustle. Can I ask a question of you all that my mentor would often ask of me? How's that working for you? Th the reality of grasping is it makes us do something that we were not created to do. And then it becomes exhausting as we try to be the main character, because it was a role that you and I were never meant to play. It's God's story. It's God's creation. It's God's blessing at work in our lives. And we must learn to pay attention quietly in the silence to God's leading as Noah did. Can you imagine going through something as chaotic as that, and you don't get a word in the story because it is God who's already like, This is what we're doing. Here's how I'm leading you. Here's how I'm taking you through it. In doing so, If we do this like Moses and quiet ourselves before the Lord, if we listen and receive what God has for us, we will find that we are brought through the chaotic waters of the flood with more than enough to continue walking in the blessing that God has put in our lives. Would you stand with me as we pray? We're going prepare to come to the Lord's table as well. But before we do so, I I want to give us a moment. As I said last week, I'm intentionally trying to make sure that I preach a little shorter this summer so we have space to listen to what the Holy Spirit is saying to us and what the Holy Spirit is doing. And so I want to give you a minute. If you're able to stand, stand, if you need to sit, that's okay. But I want to invite you to close your eyes. And to listen to the Spirit's voice for a moment. Where have you made yourself the main character of the story? With your money and possessions. your relationships, whether that be marriage, children, friendships, parents, With your work? With your dreams, ambitions? Who's the main character of this story that you are writing in your mind and in your life?