In 1989 the successful businessman Robert Fulghum wrote a book about management called “All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” It was a global phenomenon. In fact, it was at the top of the New York Times Bestseller List for 21 months, becoming the second longest number one bestseller in 23 years. The most important things anyone needs to know in life are relatively simple to understand.
One day somebody is going to make a lot of money writing a book called: “All I Need to Know I Learned from Noah.” Here are the top ten lessons from the ark.
1. Stay alert; when God is doing a new thing, don’t miss the boat.
2. Plan ahead; it hadn’t rained a drop when Noah started building the ark.
3. Keep fit; when you get to 600, God may ask you to build an ocean liner.
4. Always travel in pairs; it could save your life.
5. Slow down; the snails got on the boat eventually, as well as the cheetahs.
6. Learn to laugh; if you ever spend 40 weeks with your extended family in a crowded boat, you’ll need a sense of humour.
7. Watch your heart. A couple of woodpeckers inside can be just as bad as a rainstorm outside.
8. Do it yourself; the ark was built by amateurs; the Titanic was built by professionals.
9. Remember, when catastrophe strikes, we’re all in the same boat.
10. Cheer up. With God, there’s always a rainbow after every storm.
Is It True?
In 1929 the archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley excavated a layer of silt, about five metres thick, under a site he was working on near the shores of the Persian Gulf. He announced that he had uncovered indisputable evidence of the Biblical flood. Interestingly, the layers below and above this flood deposit both showed signs of human occupation, while the layer itself showed no evidence of human life other than a few burials that intruded into it from later times. Later research has shown that the silt was indeed dumped by a huge mass of water, about 3,500 years before Christ.
But later digs have shown that this particular flood, though vast and devastating, was not universal because in more distant sites, that are known to have been inhabited at the same time, no silt layer was found. Later still, archaeologists uncovered other flood sediments that date back to different times. So there is certainly some geological evidence of an ancient flood - or floods. But it is sketchy and inconclusive at the present time.
I think it is an open question whether this disaster literally covered the face of the whole earth or whether it was limited to the surface of the then-known world. When you first read Genesis it looks like it means the whole planet, the complete animal kingdom (except two from each species) and the entire human race (bar 8 people). But many Bible scholars have suggested it can mean the entire world described in the Bible up to that point, in other words what we call Mesopotamia. Not all Christians agree here but I think a vast, if not global, flood probably fits best with the scientific data we have. And I think that view is consistent with the belief that the Bible is God’s inspired word.
The Big Picture
Anyway, the Bible’s message in Genesis 6-8 is not so much material as moral, so our interest in this story should focus primarily on God’s agenda; God is reminding us here about the seriousness of sin, the certainty of judgement and the opportunity of salvation.
Billy Graham used to say that there are three things that happen to everybody. Firstly, everybody has to be born. Nobody just arrives on the earth out of nowhere. Secondly, everybody has to die. Unless Jesus comes back beforehand you and I will all one day pass away. The comedian George Burns once said, “If you live to be one hundred, you’ve got it made. Very few people die past that age.” Never mind the devastating logic, enjoy the irony; George Burns lived to be a hundred, and then died! Everybody has to be born. Everybody dies in the end. And thirdly, everybody will have to stand before God to face the music.
Every now and then we lift our eyes up from the furious detail of existence to think about the ultimate meaning of it all: Why was I born? What is my destiny? Where is my life going? When, and if, I have to give an account to God for my life what will I have to say? If you’re famous enough you’ll get a brief obituary in the paper and a short report on the news. For most of us, not even that. Whoever we are, people will say a few lines about us at our funerals, mostly emphasising the good bits – this sermon is designed to depress everybody! - but the reality is that the final verdict on your life will be God’s and he will assess all of it; achievements as well as failures.
Saved!
Last week were thinking about life before the flood. But our reading this morning from Genesis tells the story of what happened during and after it. 7.17 talks about five and a half weeks of constant, heavy rain. Rivers burst their banks, valleys and then hills were slowly submerged. There was massive loss of life and untold environmental damage. If you add up the days in chapter 8, you realise that those who were safe in the ark spent a total time of 280 days - about 40 weeks - at sea before it was safe to disembark on dry land.
Are you are grumbler? I wonder if there was anyone in the ark who liked a good moan. After all, life inside the ark must have been beyond belief - conditions must have been very cramped. There was the overpowering stink of all the animals, and the attendant task of constantly mucking them out. The boat must have swayed to and fro on the seas, leading to seasickness, (to say nothing of the monotony; ten months with the same boring old view). “I spy with my little eye, something beginning with… w.” “Water?”
John Ortberg in his latest book called When The Game Is Over It All Goes Back In The Box talks about a client he had in his graduate days in psychology. “She complained frequently about how her husband’s drinking made her unhappy. ‘But you could take action,’ I suggested. ‘You could go to Alcoholics Anonymous. You could pursue an intervention. You could tell him he must pursue sobriety or you will separate. You can begin to pursue your true life without waiting for him to sober up. You could stop providing excuses for his boss or for his friends, and the painful consequences might provoke some change.’ She batted away each of these suggestions with ease... The truth is she preferred the status of victimhood that goes with complaining… She obligated her friends to give her sympathy rather than the hard truth.”
Are you are complainer? Do you enjoy having a good gripe? For the manifold inconveniences of life in the ark, read the day to day hassles of being me or you. O.K., being cooped up in a boat for ten months is no fun. Granted, the view isn’t great. Certainly, it’s cramped. Sure, 40 weeks of nausea is not a barrel of laughs. And yes, it stinks on board. But count your blessings! Thank God, for example, you weren’t outside when the ark door slammed shut and it started raining! When you think of the riches of God’s grace towards you; his love, his provision, his forgiveness, his gifts, his many answers to prayer, his fantastic blessings; count them - Christians ought to be the least grumpy people on earth. Thank God he showed mercy to me when I just didn’t deserve it. I still marvel at that. Thank God for the incomparable kindness of being in his will and not out of it; of being inside the ark, and not outside of it. 7.23 talks about the scale of the disaster, a vast extermination of life, and then says; “Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.” This is a story about salvation.
In October 2007, 54 men in Western Australia got trapped underground because of a flood in the mine where they were working. Thankfully, all were rescued several days later.
I want you to imagine for a minute that you are one of those guys. You are working 80 metres below ground. Suddenly the wall of an abandoned mine shaft collapses. A surge of water rushes towards you with great power. You run for safety with half a dozen fellow workers, but you see immediately that there’s no way you will make it to the mine entrance. You desperately scramble over rocks, searching for an air pocket as the water rises around you. After what seems to be hours, you find a small space with a little bit of air. You huddle together with your colleagues. It is cold and dark. As the water continues to rise, you wonder how long you can survive. It begins to dawn on you that there might not be enough air for all of you. Slowly the reality sinks in. You are 80 metres underground. There is no way out. You can do nothing to rescue yourself. You cannot swim to safety. You cannot dig your way to the surface. You are trapped in the gloom. If someone above does not come to your aid in time you will die where you are.
You don’t know it at all, but far above you rescue workers are drilling a hole to send in hot air to keep you warm and push back the rising water. Unknown to you, hundreds of people are working together without rest to dig rescue shafts. Millions are praying for you. Finally, the rescue team breaks through, a capsule is lowered, and they lift you to safety. When you were trapped, someone came for you. When you could do nothing to help yourself, someone rescued you. When your life was nearly gone, someone dug through and found you. Someone far above cared about you and you were saved.
That is what God’s mercy is like. Just when you were hopelessly trapped in the darkness of sin, someone far above came down from heaven to rescue you. He left the splendour of heaven to dig through layers of sin and guilt to set you free. Christ knew where you were. He reached out to you in your darkness and he released you from it and brought you into his marvellous light.
As for Noah, mercifully saved by God from terrifying judgment, so it is for all those who trust in Christ.
Judgment
Noah tells us that God saves. But Noah also tells us that he is a God of justice who will call all wrongdoing to account. There are two popular notions about God’s judgment in our culture, neither of which finds its origins in the Bible. The first is that God will weigh our good deeds against our bad deeds and decide our eternal destiny on the basis of which way the scales tip. If we have been rather more virtuous than wicked - all well and good. If not, oh dear. You go round any shopping centre in Britain today and ask people about the last judgement and you will hear a version of this time and time again. But there is nothing true about it at all. The reason is that entry into heaven has nothing whatsoever to do with our good deeds. Nothing. Isaiah called the sum total of our righteous acts “filthy rags” - that’s just the things we feel good about!
There was a man who reached the gates of heaven and he saw Jesus standing there. He suddenly felt deeply ashamed of all the bad things he had done in his life. He said, “You can’t let me in here. I’ve lied, I’ve hurt others, I haven't loved people around me, I’ve been so selfish...” And Jesus looked at him and said, “Oh yeah, I know. I know everything you’ve done. And you know what? You're a lot worse than you think you are! But you asked me to be your Saviour and Lord, remember? And when they open up your dossier and take a look at the record of your life, to see whether you can come in here, all they’ll find is the record of my life. They’ll just see my faultless, perfect, textbook righteous. So come on in, my friend, there’s nothing to fear.”
You and I are more sinful than we could ever measure and we are more loved than we could ever hope for. The only way to find favour with God and have the gate of eternal life opened before us is to turn from all that we know is wrong and come to Christ, just as we are, with no bargaining chips except simple, childlike faith.
There’s a second popular idea about God’s judgment in our culture and here’s an example of it... (video)
Some people think that God will give us another chance to put everything right, post mortem. If we’re not quite ready for heaven when we die, no matter. They think God will say, “Ah, there’s a bit a problem; you’re just a tiny bit light on the old righteousness here, but - ha, ha, ha - nothing to worry about, there’s plenty of time to top up your account, would you like to go through the Purgatory door..?”
But this second idea doesn’t have any more biblical foundation than the first. God has spelt out very clearly, in Hebrews 9.27, that his timetable doesn’t leave any room for any kind of second chance. “People are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment” it says.
That means everyone has to be absolutely clear about their response to God in this life. It is urgent to think this through and make a clear commitment to Christ before it is too late. The opportunity for salvation ends permanently at death. Our eternal destiny will be determined by the spiritual choices we make in this life.
There is though, I believe, one - and only one - exception to this in Scripture; that is the unique, never-to-be-repeated opportunity given to the people who died in Noah’s flood. If you’ve ever read 1 Peter 3 you’ll have been puzzled, I’m sure by what it says there. This is what v18-20 actually say;
“Christ… was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit. In that state he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits - to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built…”
Then a few verses later it says, “The gospel was preached even to those who are now dead.”
That’s weird! What’s that about? Unsurprisingly, many suggestions have been offered. I once heard there are over 200 different interpretations for those verses. But the plain meaning of the passage is that Jesus, between his death and his bodily resurrection, descended to the place of the dead and preached the gospel to the spirits of all those that perished in Noah’s flood. Not to anyone else, just to them. Why would Jesus single them out? Why not anyone else?
I believe the answer lies in what God says in Genesis 8.21. “Never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.” Jesus gave a unique second chance to those who perished in the flood, because that generation alone was denied God’s promise of mercy that every generation, including ours, has enjoyed before and since. Now nobody can dispute God’s perfect impartiality from hell, shouting, “God wiped us out and promised never to do it again. He treated everyone afterwards better than he treated us. We have been denied justice! God is not fair!”
Ending
No, God is scrupulously fair. And for us, the picture is perfectly clear. God will never again send a flood like the one in Noah’s day. He has said so and he always keeps his word. He is full of mercy - meaning he doesn’t give us what we deserve. And he is full of grace - meaning he does give us what we don’t deserve.
Robert Fulghum was right. The most important lessons in life are simple. All I need to know I learned from Noah’s ark. The thing is, are those eternal questions settled in your mind? For most of us, I guess, the answer is “yes.” But we all know people for whom the answer is “No,” or “I’m not sure.” Well, we live in urgent times. Let’s pray with tears and persistence. Let’s give more of our lives to the end that more people in our generation come to a saving knowledge of Jesus. Let’s open our hearts and our mouths and commend the Gospel with great patience and all sincerity. Let’s live wholesome, joyful lives that attract others to the light of Christ. Let’s make the most of every opportunity. It is a privilege to suffer for righteousness’ sake, so let’s gladly accept the dishonour and insults that come with the proclamation of the Gospel until Christ comes again.
“The coming of the Son of Man” said Jesus, “will be just like in the days of Noah… Until the day that Noah entered the ark, they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away; so shall the coming of the Son of Man be.”
Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 29th March 2009
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