NOAH WALKED WITH GOD

Genesis 6:9 (KJV)

These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.

When, last summer, I started thinking about doing a series of messages on those in the Bible that we could identify as “spiritual” I knew where the first few messages would have to take us.

The Bible starts us out, just after the fall, in the Patriarchal period where there are several notable persons.

Enoch, Noah and Abraham have to be among the very first people we could consider as spiritual.

I do have a thought or two about injecting some who are a different sort of spiritual, but we will see if that actually happens.

Until we get through the book of Exodus, our course is pretty clearly laid out for us.

Isn’t it interesting that

·   Enoch’s wife gave birth to Methuselah

·   Methusalah’s wife gave birth to Lamech and

·   Lamech’s wife gave birth to Noah

Enoch is a chief character

Noah is a chief character

But little is said about Lamech except that he knew that his son, Noah would somehow be used of God to address the curse.

Lamech died five years before his father, Methuselah.

·   Noah was 595 when his dad died

·   He was 600 when his grandfather, Methuselah died and, according to,

Genesis 7:6 (KJV)

And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth.

Shem would have been 100 years old when the flood happened.

God commanded him to build the Ark 120 years[1] before the Flood.

That means that

Methuselah and Lamech watched him build it, almost to completion.

And his kids grew up watching their father working on it – eventually, likely helping him to do.

For all we know, Methuselah and Lamech may have helped him too.

The Bible says that, “Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations…”

Noah was a spiritual man.

With that said, I have three points I would like to make about Noah.

I see firstly,

I. A FAMILIAR QUALITY

Genesis 6:9 (KJV)

These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.

I said that I began thinking about this series back in August.

I knew then that I would preach the first message from Galatians 6:1

And I knew that the earliest messages would include Enoch, Noah and Abraham.

Based on previous studies there were certain things that I could have guessed we would look at in these early messages.

What I did not know is that there would be such a close connection between being spiritual and walking with God.

Remember?

Our very first message tied spirituality with “walking in the Spirit.”

Then,

·   Enoch walked with God and here we find that

·   Noah walked with God too

I am not positive that Abraham will be the subject of the message next week, but when we do get to him we will find that his relationship with God also involved a walk.

I suggest to you that if you want to be spiritual in the eyes of the Lord, you walk with God, and that you learn to do it.

Noah teaches us something about walking with God in

Genesis 6:22 (KJV)

Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did he.

He did according to all that God commanded him.

Let’s read what God commanded him and note with me the fine details –

Genesis 6:13-21 (KJV)

And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.

And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.

A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.

And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.

But with thee will I establish my covenant; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons' wives with thee.

And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.

Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive.

And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them.

·   He did something he had never done before

·   At a time when it had never rained before

·   Around people who had never accepted God’s grace before

He did it mostly alone and he did it, “according to all that God commanded him.”

That’s walking with God.

I see secondly,

II. A DISTINCTIVE CHARACTERISTIC

Genesis 6:8 (KJV)

But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.

This is the first time the word grace is found in the Bible, though I do not believe it is the first time that God’s grace is found in the Bible.

Grace is the undeserved favor and blessing of God

·   It was the grace of God that made clothes for Adam and Eve after their fall in sin.

·   It was grace that gave them Seth after Cain and killed Abel.

·   It was grace that took Enoch to heaven without tasting death

Noah found grace.

·   He did not earn grace

·   He did not deserve grace

·   He did not work up God’s grace

Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

And because he found grace:

·   He was a just man

·   He perfect in his generations and

·   He did all that God commanded him

Does that mean that only people who have found this special grace can be spiritual?

By no means – here’s why,

John 1:14-16 (KJV)

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.

John bare witness of him, and cried, saying, This was he of whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me.

And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.

You see, we have all already received this grace.

When Christ became man, He came full of grace.

We need only accept it as our own.

A spiritual man or woman then, would be one who accepts God’s grace, and then acts accordingly.

Finally I see what I am going to call,

III. A TRAGIC INCONSISTENCY

Genesis 9:20-21 (KJV)

And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:

And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.

·   After the Flood,

·   After the incredible grace of God

·   After having lived for God so consistently before the Flood

·   After having done according to all that God commanded him

Noah let some details slip.

May I say that we almost always trip and fall over the little details.

There are two here:

A. In the area of sobriety

He drank wine and got drunk.

The error was not in growing a vineyard, or in eating the fruit or even in preserving it as a juice.

The error was that he wasn’t careful with his work, he let some juice go bad – turn into alcohol, and then he drank it instead of tossing it.

There is a way to preserve fruits and vegetables so that they keep longer than if they were fresh, it’s called fermentation.

·   Sauerkraut and kimchi are both fermented cabbage

·   Cheese is fermented dairy, so is yogurt

·   Pickles are fermented cucumbers

The process is accomplished by adding certain cultures – good bacteria to the fresh foods and allowing those cultures to grow in those foods.

If you do it properly, those foods will last unrefrigerated for a few weeks and not just a few days.

By the way, because our government wants to protect us from ourselves, they require all the food we buy to be pasteurized, a process that kills all those good cultures.

But since we need those cultures in our guts to make them work right, and we have killed all those cultures in our foods, now they say we need to take probiotics to prevent

·   Irritable bowel syndrome

·   Diverticulitis

·   Crohn’s disease

·   Colon polyps and

·   Colitis

Anyway, you can do the same process with fruit juices to preserve them longer.

Only the process is a little bit more touchy because the sugars in the fruit can easily grow too rapidly and turn your juice into alcohol, and after that, then vinegar.

Did you know that your yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, and even pickles, originally is contains a slight amount of alcohol?

You can stop the process of fermentation at any point by simply sealing the juice away from air.

Most wines until more recently were not highly alcoholic.

It’s been in my lifetime that beers and wines have increasingly been made with a higher alcohol content.

Noah just wasn’t careful with a batch of his wine and, when it turned bad, he didn’t throw it away.

If he had sealed the bottles just a day or two sooner, the wine would have been safe to drink without getting drunken.

Secondly he wasn’t careful

B. In the area of modesty

Which, of course, is a problem with drunkenness.

Being drunk, he wasn’t careful to keep his body covered and his son Ham, saw him naked.

There are about a million ways that our culture today tries to excuse Noah and Ham.

·   It’s his kid for goodness sakes

·   It’s a boy, not a girl –

·   We make kids shower together in PE these days

What is the big deal?

It's a big enough deal that Shem and Japheth, carefully walked backwards with a garment to cover their father without looking at him exposed like that.

And it tells me that our world today is just too free in it’s immodesty.

·   We ought to be closing our eyes in shame when someone enters our field of view and isn’t covered well.

·   Instead, some Christians happily show off just as much of themselves

Conclusion

Noah lived about 350 years after the Flood.

I imagine that many of them were after the incident in the vineyard and that they were lived for the Lord.

He was a just man and perfect in his generations.

Proverbs 24:16 (KJV)

For a just man falleth seven times, and riseth up again: but the wicked shall fall into mischief.

Someone said that what matters is not how many times you fall, but how many times you get up.

Have you fallen?

If you are spiritual, you will get back up.

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[1] Genesis 6:3