Blessings for Obedience

Genesis 6:22
Gregory Broderick | Sunday, January 30, 2022
Copyright © 2022, Gregory Broderick

The title is “Blessings for Obedience.”  We have been blessed recently to study the account of the massive flood that wiped out all mankind as well as every living thing on the earth, leaving only Noah and those with him in the ark alive.  This was God’s just judgment on mankind, and the creation, for we are told in Genesis 6:5 that man’s wickedness was great, and that “every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.”  So man deserved what he got.

This is all recorded in Genesis 6–8, and it really happened in human history.  God’s word declares it and so we believe it.  Also, as Dr. Wassermann demonstrated last week, many cultures—I think he said more than two hundred cultures—show similar flood accounts, which indicates that Noah’s descendants, which is all mankind, carried this traumatic story with them throughout the generations as they spread out and repopulated the earth.  You can imagine that if this was something that had happened to you, you would retell this story, and your children would retell this story, and their children would retell this story.  So you can imagine how Noah’s sons and daughters-in-law did that.  They talked about how the waters came and kept coming, and rose and kept rising, and all the destruction that they saw around them, all the waters that were surrounding them for days and weeks and months as they sat in the ark.  And all the uncertainty: When would it go down?  When would it end?  And how God took care of them and brought them out and brought them through while everything else on the earth perished.

So before we move on from this flood account, I want to make sure that we address an overarching theme that may not come through as we had preached through this in its parts:  Blessings for obedience.

In chapters 6–8, God gave Noah three basic commands:  Genesis 6:14, “Make yourself an ark”; Genesis 7:1, “Go into the ark”; and Genesis 8:15, “Come out of the ark.”  And there were a lot of subsidiary commands about the dimensions and bringing forth the animals and so on, but these are the basic commands God gave him:  “Make the ark”; “Go in the ark”; “Come out of the ark.”  And Noah obeyed every command.  We are explicitly told in Genesis 6:22, “Noah did everything just as God commanded him.”  That statement is proven true by the rest of the account.  Noah built the ark, and he built it the way God said.  Noah went into the ark when God said to go in.  Noah brought all the animals, and they all came, just as God said.  And Noah came out of the ark in God’s good time and at God’s command.  So Noah’s obedience was exact, and it was in God’s timing.

It is obvious that God blessed Noah for his obedience.  We are expressly told this in Genesis 9:1:  “God blessed Noah.”  And, of course, we see it also throughout the rest of the account.  Noah was blessed with life.  He was blessed with perseverance.  He was blessed to undertake and complete a huge project.  He was blessed with personal holiness.  He was blessed with great faith.  He was blessed with his family.  He was blessed to know and to worship the living God.  Noah’s whole story is one of election, obedience, and blessing.

Let us meditate on Noah’s obedience this morning, that we too may obey God and be blessed.

Noah’s Obedience

The first part I want to examine is Noah’s obedience, and I have several subpoints there.

1. A “Hear and Do” Man

Noah was a “hear and do” man.  At every step of the way, God gave a command and Noah obeyed the command.  He obeyed it immediately, he obeyed it exactly, and he obeyed it with the joy of faith.  This is the formula for blessing in this life, and it is the formula for blessing in eternity:  Hear and do and be blessed.

I want to point out that Noah had a habit of obeying God.  We tend to think of Noah’s obedience as beginning with the command to go and build the ark.  That is, after all, the central command of this account and it is our introduction to Noah.  But we see from Genesis 6, beginning with verse 9, that Noah had long obeyed God.  This was not his first encounter with God.  It was not his first obedience to God.  Genesis 6:9 says, “Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God.”  We know, of course, that Noah was not perfect.  But let us not conflate being imperfect with having a habit of living a sinful life.  It is not true.  Noah’s habit was to hear God’s word and to do it.

We all start out totally depraved.  But God moves to save some and to cause them to obey Him.  That is what happened to Noah.  Genesis 6:8 says, “Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.”  You see, God moved in him.  God gave him a new heart and a new spirit, capable of loving God and obeying God by faith.  So Noah did just that.  The man verse 9 describes—righteous, blameless, and walking with God—is a man who is not only saved by God but who also has a habit of obeying God.  That is what it means to “walk with God.”  It means to walk in obedience to Him.  It is practical righteousness.

We see this all over the Bible.  We see this with Enoch.  But we see it also in Deuteronomy 8:6, Micah 6:8, Deuteronomy 5:33, Ephesians 2:10, and so on.  Walking means obeying.  Walking with God means obeying God.

So when we find favor with God and He saves us, we do not go on in the old way, walking in our own way.  No, we live differently.  We live in God’s way.  We walk in God’s way in order to please our God who gave us eternal life.  So Saul becomes Paul, a totally different way of living.  Crooked Jacob becomes Israel, a different way of living.  Zacchaeus, the thieving tax collector, pays back all the money he stole, and he gives on top of that.  Radical change.  He who stole steals no longer but works with his hands, doing something useful, that he may have something to give to those in need (Eph.  4:28).  It is a different way of living.  Ephesians 2:2 speaks of the sinful way “in which you used to live.”  We could say “in which you used to walk.”  But now God’s people walk in a different way.

It is a virtual certainty that Noah walked with God for a long, long time before God gave him this central command to build the ark.  Noah was five hundred years old at the time when his three sons were born (Gen. 5:32).  And he was six hundred years old when the floodwaters began (Gen. 7:6).  So somewhere in between, it seems that God gave Noah that command to build and to take his wife and his sons and their wives into the ark.  Some of the timing is not precise.  You could argue for different timings of when that at command came, when he started to build, and when he finished.  But what is clear is that Noah had walked in obedience to God for decades, probably for centuries, before this command came.

This observation has obvious application to us.  We tend to think that our disobedience in minor things is no big deal because we will step up when the chips are down, we will step up in the big moment.  But this is totally false.  If we do not obey in the small things, we will not obey in the big things.  Think of Judas, for example.  He disobeyed in small things, stealing a little bit of money from time to time from the money bag.  But he supposed himself to be a true believer.  Jesus knew that he was false, but I do not think that Judas knew that he was false.  And I am sure Judas thought, “At the big moment, I will step up.  These minor disobediences are not a big deal.”  But at the big moment, he would falter in the biggest way, abandoning Jesus, betraying Him, refusing to repent, and he was ultimately doomed to hell.

Don’t ever think that you will obey in the “big moments” when it matters if you don’t obey in what you consider to be the small things.  The truth is that all of our obedience matters, and it all matters because the commands come from God.  Big task or small task, the question is the same:  Will I obey God in what He is telling me to do today?

Certainly, God sees it this way.  In Matthew 25:21, in the parable of the tenants, God says, “Well done, My good and faithful servant.  You have been faithful with a few things,” with the small things, “and so I will put you in charge of many things,” the big things.  The issue is not the scale of the task that God assigns us, but whether we will obey our Master who gave it to us.

So Noah, saved by God’s grace and favor, proved himself faithful by obeying God for many years in small things.  We could see even from the account that this is true.  Noah is the husband of one wife, not committing adultery.  He is working his land, subduing the creation, supporting a family as God told him to do.  He is worshiping God in the prescribed way, and so on.  So through years and years and years of obedience in the seemingly mundane tasks of day-to-day life, Noah proved himself faithful, Noah proved himself worthy, Noah proved the faith that he claimed.  And so God prepared him in those small things to obey in the big moment.

The application for us is to do the same thing.  God has given all of us direction for how we must live in this life: Confess Christ as Lord by faith; being baptized as a public declaration of our faith; providing for our families or preparing to provide for our families, for those still in school; loving our wives, present or future, as Christ loved the church; submitting to our husbands, present or future, as to the Lord in everything; obeying all of God’s delegated authorities, whether those are bosses, parents, pastors, or police, because their authority comes from Christ, and so our obedience to them is our obedience to Christ, for the glory of God.  “Whether we eat or drink or whatever we do, do it all for the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31).  You see, God has commands for us in the small things today.  And those commands we are to obey today because God gave them to us.

So let us do it all and keep doing it by faith.  Whether we are doorkeepers in the house of the Lord or ark-builders, whether we are new Christians or old-time believers, whether we are dealing with a new and challenging project, a new and challenging call from God, or the “same old routine,” we must walk with God faithfully and righteously, always giving ourselves fully to the work of the Lord—the work that He has for us today—because He is the one who assigned it to us.  That is what makes our work significant:  God gave it to us.  And so our labor in the Lord is not in vain because we are laboring for the Lord.

The actual call to build an actual ark will probably never come.  But the call to build the ark in our lives, the extraordinary project, may come, or it may never come.  Noah probably did not expect to get a call to build a giant ark.  But the call to obey God today and to keep obeying God is with us and it is present for every one of us.

2. Noah Obeyed by Faith

The next observation is that Noah obeyed by faith.  We are explicitly told in Hebrews 11:7 that Noah built the ark in holy fear and became the heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.  Even if we did not have that explicit assurance from the book of Hebrews, we would already know that Noah built by faith from this account.

a. No apparent need for the ark.

First, there was no apparent need for this ark from a human or worldly perspective.  We don’t know exactly where Noah lived, but we know that no flood like this had ever occurred before nor has any flood like this ever occurred since.  So this is a singular event in world history.  Noah did not look to his past experience and say, “I think there is going to be a big flood and I had better build a big boat.”

Genesis 7:19 describes this flood as a singular event.  This flood covered all the high mountains under the entire heavens to a depth of more than twenty feet.  Genesis 8:4 says that the ark came to rest on Mount Ararat.  There is some debate about what that is, but most people agree this is a large mountain range running from Armenia into Turkey, which has peaks from 13,000 to 17,000 feet.  So the boat landed on a big, high mountain.  This is a flood no one expected.  It rained for forty days in a row.  That is outside of our experience.  The waters of the earth came up and flooded the earth for one hundred and fifty days in a row.  And the tops of the mountains only became visible eight months after the rain started.  It took eight months for those mountains to become visible again.

This was a massive flood.  There was no reasonable expectation of anything like this.  And whatever seasonal floods they had experienced before, there was nothing like this.  There was simply no reason to believe anything like this was going to happen, except that God said so.  And as the man of faith, Noah believed God’s word over against his own experience, and he set to work on building the ark.

Notice, we are not given any discourse of disbelief by Noah.  We are not even given any clarifying questions by Noah:  “Now, Lord, when you say the waters are going to cover the whole mountain, you don’t mean the whole 15,000-foot mountain range, do you?  That is not reasonable to expect.”  We are not told any of that.  Instead, we are told that God said it, and Noah went to work on it.

The application for us is obvious.  Let us believe God’s word without reservation or doubt.  It may be outside of our experience.  It may be beyond our understanding.  It may even be beyond our imagination.  But we must trust and obey God’s word because it is God’s word.  It is God who spoke it.

God’s word says there is a day of final judgment that is to come.  We have no experience with this.  But God’s word declares it.  God’s word says there is a glorious, eternal heaven where we will see Him face to face and worship with all the saints who went before us, without sin’s presence or power for all eternity in ecstasy.  We have no experience with this.  It is beyond our imagination.  And yet God’s word declares it.  God’s word says there is an eternal hell of such torment and agony that words cannot describe it, words cannot do it justice—that there is an eternal hell that goes on forever in torment and agony.  We have no such experience.  We have no capacity to imagine what it is like.  And yet God’s word declares it.

And, praise the Lord, God’s word says He can save the worst of sinners.  God’s word says that He can save a murderous Paul or an idolatrous lout like the wicked King Manasseh.  We do not understand how God does it.  We do not understand why God does it.  We cannot do it.  But let us believe that no one is beyond God’s mercy and God’s electing love while they still live, because God’s word declares it.

The point is this:  When we hear God’s word, we must believe it.  We do not need to agree with it.  We do not need to understand how or why God is going to use this for good.  We do not need to figure it all out for ourselves.  He is going to bring it to pass.  He is going to use it for good.  And the way that I know that is because He said so (Rom. 8:28).

We are to simply obey like Noah or like Abraham.  Imagine Abraham.  He got the command:  “Take your son, your only son, your son Isaac, the son you love, and kill him and burn him up.”  This is the command from God.  Abraham obeyed by faith without a clear understanding of how God was going to do this, of why God was going to do this.  In fact, Abraham even guessed an answer that was wrong.  He thought that God was maybe going to raise Isaac from the dead.  But none of that stopped Abraham from obeying.  His lack of understanding, his lack of imagination, did not stop him from obeying God.

We do not need to know how or why because we know who.  It is enough that God is speaking.  That is enough for us.  We can move ahead, and we can move ahead with great confidence in God even when we do not understand.

b. The task was huge, but Noah did it.

The second way that we know Noah’s obedience was by faith is that this task was huge, and yet Noah set about it and finished it.  The dimensions of the ark are given.  The ark was four hundred and fifty feet long, seventy-five feet wide, and four and a half stories tall.  This is half the size of the Titanic, and all made out of wood.  Just think of the amount of trees—thousands and thousands and thousands of trees had to be cut down for this.  Think of the incredible amount of labor that went into this.  The engineering alone is daunting.  I say that as a political science major, but even the engineers in the crowd would agree that the engineering alone would be a deterrent, much less the actual construction of the ark.  I would have been tempted to say, “This is not worth the effort.  Just let me perish in the flood instead.”

This was a massive project.  It took years and years—maybe even a hundred years—to build it.  And that is probably not Noah laboring by himself.  It is likely his sons, his wife, their wives, and probably even a household of workers also set to work on this.  Noah was a prominent man.  And they did all this while sustaining and feeding themselves and whoever else worked on this with their own farming and their own resources.  It would take millions and millions and millions of today’s dollars—maybe even more than that.  And it is not like the lumber and the fittings were commercially available.  There was no Amazon to go on and order all the boards.  There is no place to go get all these fittings from.

Yet none of this appeared to trouble Noah in the slightest, at least not as recorded.  We can ask him one day when we see him in heaven.  But he does not see the problems involved in this, or at least he does not get hung up on the problems involved in this.  The only response we get from Noah after God’s instruction: “Go and build this ark and make it so big and the animals will come”—the only thing we see from Noah is in Genesis 6:22: “Noah did everything just as God commanded him.”  That is all we are told about his response to this:  God said it, and he did it.

What is the application for us?  Do not focus on the enormity of the challenge but focus on God.  As John Calvin said, “What God commands us to do in his word he bestows upon us by his Spirit.”  He enables us to do the thing he commanded us to do.  God commands us, “Love your wife as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”  This is an impossible charge, harder than building an ark.  And yet we can do it; God will help us.  God says, “Submit to your husband as to the Lord in everything” and we could add “with joy.”  This is an impossible task, harder than building an ark.  But you can do it; God will help you.  God says, “Train up your children in the way that they should go,” day after day, week after week, year after year.  This is an impossible task, but God will enable you.  “Submit to God, resist the devil, and he will flee from you.”  This is a giant task, beyond our capacity, but God will help us.  He may also tell us, “Go through your chemotherapy.”  “Wait for the baby or the husband that you desire.”  “Live your days as a widow.”  “Resist the strong, strong temptation to sin.”  “Share the gospel others.”  “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  “Live in uncertainty without knowing what is coming next.”  “Preach the gospel.”  “Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.”  These jobs are all too big for us to do in our own strength.  But God will help us to obey him day by day, just like he did for Noah.  God will help us day by day, tree by tree, board by board, until we build that boat just as he commanded us.  His grace is sufficient for us.  In fact, his grace is super-abundant to us.

c. Noah persevered to completion.

The third indication that Noah obeyed by faith is his perseverance.  As I said before, we cannot say exactly for certain how long it took Noah to build the ark.  It may have been up to a hundred years.  We get that number by comparing Genesis 5:32 with Genesis 7:6.  We know that Noah started that job by faith, and we know that Noah kept doing that job by faith, and he did it all the way to completion.  He did not let anything get in his way.  Were there lots of trees to cut down?  He cut them down.  Was there lots of lumber to mill?  He milled it.  There were lots of fittings to make, construction to do, pitch to make, and then coating the whole thing with pitch, building the inner room, putting a twenty or thirty thousand-square-foot roof over the top of the boat when he was finished building it, gathering all the food and storing it in the ark, and perhaps even planting a garden on board.  Tons and tons and tons of work.

And likely he did this amidst a lot of opposition and a lot of mockery.  I say that because in imagining this great project, this boat must have been very conspicuous, wherever Noah built it.  It was four and a half stories high, so that is almost double the size of the school building.  It was seventy-five feet wide.  That is almost the width of the grass on our quad.  And four hundred and fifty feet long.  That is from here all the way to where the lunch tables are behind the school.  I walked it the other day—from the pulpit all the way out to where the lunch tables are behind the school.  This would have stood out certainly as the biggest building in that area, and maybe the biggest building in the world at the time.

It took forever, right?  Maybe fifty years, maybe a hundred years.  And people probably thought Noah was crazy, and probably they told him, “You are crazy.”  And then, for a long time, nothing happened.  However long it took him to build the ark, nothing happened during that time.  You can imagine at every rainstorm, the neighbors might say, “Oh, Noah, is this the big rainstorm that is going to come?”  And the rain would come, and the rain went back, and no flood came, for five years, ten years, fifty years, a hundred years.  I don’t know how long.  But for a long time.

Yet faithful Noah kept on with the great project, with the great expense, with the great effort, and probably in the face of great mockery.  He did not seem to know when the rain would come.  God did not tell him, “In x year,” at least not as recorded.  God just said it is going to come.  So Noah did not seem to know when it would come, but he knew that it would come because he knew the one who said it would come, and God always fulfills His promises.  In fact, we are not told that God came again during the building of the ark.  The first time we see God in this is when He commands Noah to build the ark.  The next time we see God, the ark is in done and God is telling Noah to go in.  So we are not told that God came to visit him again during this time.  But Noah does not seem to have wavered.  He just kept on building.

Again, the application for us is clear: Keep working on the project that God has assigned to you.  Despite hardship, despite opposition from the world, the flesh, and the devil, keep on building.  Sooner or later, God will do what he said he would do at just the right time.  So let us trust him and work with perseverance, however long our current assignment goes on.

3. Noah Obeyed in God’s Timeframe

Another observation about Noah’s obedience is that Noah obeyed on God’s timeframe.  We are told in Genesis 6 that God gave the instruction to build, and that Noah did so.  The implication is that he set to the work right away.  This would make sense, of course.  When Noah got the dimensions, he would have realized that this was a massive project and, of course, he would be worried about finishing it in time before this massive flood comes.

So we notice that he set about the work right away.  Even though Noah obeyed quickly, he was never in a rush.  He never ran ahead.  After building the great boat, Noah does nothing.  He waits on the Lord.

The next thing we are told is that God showed up and said, “Go into the boat.”  So Noah finished the boat, but then he did not run inside.  God says, “Go into the boat and take all the animals in.”  We do not know—perhaps those animals came in the week between when God said, “Go in the boat,” and when it rained.  Perhaps they came over the course of many years and he penned them up.  It is not specific.  But what is clear is that Noah obeyed God right away, but never ran ahead.  God said, “Build the boat.”  God said, “Go in and take the animals in,” and then Noah went in.  But he did not go in the boat until God said so.

What I am describing here is step-by-step obedience.  Sometimes it can be hardest to do the job that God has assigned us and then to wait there for God’s further direction.  But disciplined and faithful Noah seems to have done just that.  And, of course, this is nowhere clearer than when it came time to come out of the boat.  “Build the boat.”  Sure, since the big flood is coming.  “Go into the boat.”  Okay.  The big flood is coming.  But “Wait in the boat” is a rough command to follow.  The waters had flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.  Then the waters stopped.  Then Noah waited and sent out the birds in weeklong increments.  Dr. Wassermann described that last week.  Then the boat landed, and Noah removed the covering, and he sees that the ground is dry.  But he does not get out of the boat.  He does not run ahead.  He waits for God’s direction.

You see, the last direction Noah had from God was, “Go into the boat.”  So he knows he is in the place where God told him to be, and he is not leaving that place until God tells him to leave.  He stays there until he gets further instructions.  This must have been terribly, terribly difficult to do.  After weeks and months cooped up with the animals, cooped up with the same seven people, he waits in the boat.  And we see that the ark landed in the seventh month on the seventeenth day.  Yet they did not come out of the boat.  They stayed in the boat.

Notice that Noah saw that the ground was dry, but they stayed in the boat.  It says that six or seven weeks later that the earth was completely dry (Gen. 8:14).  But they still stayed in the boat.  They waited until Genesis 8:15, and what was the command?  God said, “Come out of the ark with your whole family.  Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you.”  They waited for God’s command.  They did not lean on their own understanding.  They did not give way to emotion.  They did not give way to exasperation.  They did not give way to impatience.  They did not twist the word, saying, “Well, God landed us on this mountain and dried out all the ground, so He must want us to go out of the boat.”  It does not say that.  It says they waited until God said, “Come out.”

The application for us is, do not run ahead.  Stand your post.  Do what God tells you to do, and keep doing it until He tells you to do something else.  Do not move on prematurely or be eager to run ahead, like Jacob, who moved on from Bethel without God’s warrant, after God told him to go there.  He got a bunch of needless suffering out of that.

Perhaps you don’t want to be in the place that God has assigned you.  Maybe you don’t want to be single, and long for the husband, or maybe you don’t want to be without children, and you long for those children.  So you are eager to run ahead and run ahead and run ahead.  Or maybe you have had those children in your house for a long time and you are eager for them to get out so that you can move on to what you think of as bigger and better things.  Maybe you think that you should be the lead teacher instead of an aide, or an elder instead of an usher, or the boss instead of a peon at work.  I say, stand your post until God calls you somewhere else.  Don’t run ahead.  Stay where God has assigned you until He assigns you to a new area of operations.

You do not know why God has assigned you there.  You do not know what work God has for you to do there.  Maybe He is preparing you for some big, new challenge.  Maybe He is using it for someone else’s good.  Maybe He will tell you to move on at a later time, or maybe He will never tell you to move on, and this is where you are to serve the Lord.  I don’t know what the answer is for you.  I know that God has a perfect will.  As Pastor Mathew says, God has a wonderful plan for your life.

God has the best plan, the plan that maximizes your good and His eternal glory.  Serve in your place in that plan and don’t be eager to run to something else.  Wherever He has assigned you and whatever job He has given you, big or small, it is the best place for you and the best place for all of God’s people.

So don’t move on quickly or prematurely, supposing that there is something better up ahead.  God will call you out of the boat in His good time, in His perfect time.  Until then, stand your post and wait on the Lord.  Do not lean on your own understanding, looking around at that dry ground and thinking this must be the signal that it is time to go out.  Don’t grow weary of the smelly beasts or the stale company.  Bloom where God has planted you until He transplants you somewhere else.  And the Holy Spirit will make clear to you when that time is.  God does not hide the ball from us.  He wants us to know His will and to do it.  He may speak to us through prayer.  He may speak to us through the word.  He may speak to us directly.  He may speak to us through counsel.  But whatever it is, stay where God sent you until you are certain that God wants you to be somewhere else.

4. Noah Obeyed Exactly

The next observation about Noah’s obedience is that Noah obeyed exactly (Gen. 6:22).  He not only worked on God’s timeframe, but he also worked to God’s specifications.  And those specifications were pretty exact.  Genesis 6:15–21 lays them out:  four hundred and fifty feet long, seventy-five feet wide, forty-five feet tall, such and so a roof, so many rooms, a door, all down to the cubit, all down to the inch, we could say.  And verse 22 assures us that Noah did it just as God commanded.

Certainly, this was the biggest boat in the world at the time, and likely the biggest building at the time.  I am sure that Noah did not know from his own experience whether it would even float.  But he did not adjust the word.  He did not say, “Let me build a smaller boat, the kind of boat that I am familiar with that I know will work.”  He did not adjust God’s word.  He did not wing it and say, “This looks good to me.”  He followed the divine blueprint, and you can bet that Noah went there and measured every cubit on that boat because he had a command from God.

What is the application for us?  Do things exactly God’s way.  Build according to the pattern.  Do not adjust the word to your way but adjust your way to the word.  God may speak to you directly, although more likely He will speak to you through delegated authorities: parents, husbands, elders, pastors, bosses, policemen, and so on.  Whatever vehicle God is using to tell you His word, it is God speaking.  Take His word seriously and do it exactly.

This is going to apply to all of us in different ways at different times of our lives.  I cannot tell you as I stand here now what God’s plan is for each one of you.  You should be under authority and get counsel:  Find out “What is the will of God for me,” and then do it.  But we know this much.  Children, you are to obey your parents in the Lord (Eph. 6:1–4).  Wives, you are to submit to your husbands as to the Lord in everything—not to adjust, not to manipulate, not to drip, drip, drip him into surrender.  Husbands, you are to love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, sacrificially and wholeheartedly.  Slaves, or we could say in our day, employees, are to obey our earthly masters, not to adjust it on basis of thinking, “I am smarter than the boss,” or, “The boss is wrong.”  No, the boss is God’s delegated authority for us, and we must obey him until he tells us to sin.  Obey your church leaders and submit to their authority, for it is God’s authority (Heb. 13:17).  That is God’s general will for all of us.  And we must bring careful and exact obedience because ultimately it is obedience to God who said all of these things.

Blessings for Obedience

So those are some observations about Noah’s obedience.  Let us look now at some blessings for obedience.

1. Noah Lived

The first blessing is the most obvious: Noah lived.  He did not die.  Everyone else died.  Genesis 7:22 says that all living things on the earth were wiped out except for those people who were in the ark.

Of course, this life is not all that there is, but this life is important.  We want to live! We do not want to die.  Noah obeyed God even when it sounded strange, and so he lived.  That is blessing number one.

2. Noah Knew God

Noah had personal relationship with God.  Our obedience results in blessings of every kind, but none is greater than knowing and fellowshipping with the living God, and enjoying personal relationship with Him.  Genesis 9:1 says that God blessed Noah and established a covenant with Noah and gave the rainbow as a sign of the covenant with Noah.  And we saw that God spoke to Noah.  In Genesis 8, it says that Noah built an altar and worshiped God with a sacrifice that was pleasing to God.  This is the good life.  This is joy unspeakable and full of glory.  This is fulfilling the very purpose of our life, to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.  It is the highest joy.  As I said, it is our purpose in life, to know God and to commune with God in worship, and to know that we are doing something that pleases God.  It doesn’t even make sense if we think about it.  How can I please God?  But God’s word says exactly that.  Noah gave a sacrifice, and it pleased God.  Our obedience pleases God.  When we please God, we are as happy as we can be.

But we cannot please God if we are living in sin.  We cannot have fellowship with God if we are living in sin, in disobedience to him.  His eyes are too pure even to look upon evil (Hab. 1:13).  Our sin separates us from God as we know from Genesis 3.  We must live holy lives of holy obedience by God’s grace because without holiness, no one will see the Lord (Heb. 12:14).  Because Noah obeyed God with great joy, he enjoyed great relationship with God in worship, and he was pleasing God (Gen. 8:21).  Let us live a life of obedience, that we may have relationship with God and please Him.

3. Blessing for Others

Noah’s blessings for obedience were not just for him alone.  Everyone around Noah was blessed by Noah’s obedience.  Mrs. Noah was blessed.  She got to go in the ark with Noah, and so were his sons and his daughters-in-law.  You see, they too were objects of God’s favor.  We do not know almost anything about them.  But in Genesis 6:18, when God comes to Noah, he says, “You build an ark and you go into the ark and take your wife and your sons and their wives.”  They were blessed.  They were objects of God’s favor, but they were also people of faith, by God’s grace.  And they demonstrated that faith.  How?  They believed Noah’s word as he relayed it to them from God, and they exercised faith by getting in the boat at God’s command.  And as I said, they probably helped to build the boat, gather the animals, and so on.

Noah’s whole family was blessed by his obedience.  He led them in righteousness as the head of his house.  He led them in God’s way, and so not only he lived, but they too lived.  There were only eight people who lived.

Even the creation around Noah was blessed by his obedience.  Animals of every kind went on the ark and they lived too.  Seeds of every kind went on the ark and survived, so there was plant life.  Without Noah’s obedience in building the ark and collecting the animals, we know at least all animal life on earth would have been destroyed forever.  They would have all been wiped out, everything with breath in it.  Human history would have come to an end if Noah had not built the ark.  But Noah obeyed, and not only he survived and not only did his family survive, but the creation survived and flourished.

Indeed, even future generations not yet born were blessed by Noah’s obedience.  How do we know this?  First, we exist.  We would not exist had Noah not obeyed and built the ark.  We would not be here.  There would be no people, no future generations.  Second, a subset of those people were beneficiaries of God’s special covenant.  God’s elect would be specially blessed.  Noah became the heir of those who live by faith.  And so we as people who live by faith, as people who trust in God, are blessed as well.

God’s elect are specially blessed.  Even the people of Noah’s time were blessed by Noah’s obedience.  This one is a little harder to figure out.  But his faith was a years-long gospel message to the local people around him and to all who heard of it.  This boat, as I said, was very conspicuous.  So people probably heard about it and they probably talked about it.  “God’s judgment is coming in the form of a flood.  A man heard this and he is building a giant ship.  We should go over there and take a look.”  They built a replica of this in Kentucky, and people come from all over the world to see this replica.  Imagine if this had come on the heels of a warning that the whole world is going to be flooded.  Everyone would come and take a look at this ship.

Noah’s faith and their lack of a response to Noah’s faith condemned them, we are told in Hebrews 11:7.  Beyond that, we are told that Noah preached the gospel to them.  Second Peter 2:5 calls Noah “a preacher of righteousness.”  So this was a great blessing for those people.  It was a great opportunity for them.  They did not take advantage of it, but the opportunity was a blessing.  God owes us nothing.  I wrote down in my notes that God doesn’t owe us a second chance, but God doesn’t owe us a first chance either.  And yet God gives a second chance and a third chance and a thousand chances.  Every day that boat sat out there half-built was a chance for those people to repent.  Every time Noah testified to the judgment to come was an opportunity for those people to repent.  Every day for us is a chance to repent and to trust in God.  They rejected it, but the opportunity, God’s grace, was still a blessing to them.

Fourth, God blessed Noah’s posterity, his descendants.  Genesis 9:1 says, “Be fruitful and multiply.”  We find the same thing in Genesis 9:7.  And in Genesis 9:9 God said, “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you.”  That speaks of everyone who takes hold of God’s promise.  Hebrews 11:7 says Noah became the heir of righteousness that comes by faith.  This is the same righteousness that is offered to us, and it is by the same mechanism; that is, by faith.  It is the righteousness of Christ by faith in Christ.  It is an imputed righteousness to us, which results in a practical, outward righteousness that obeys God.  The same thing is available to us.  We have more information than Noah, but it is the same basic thing available to us.  So let us obey as Noah did—not to earn our righteousness, not to earn faith—but as proof that we have taken hold of the inheritance offered, the righteousness that comes by faith.

The final blessing is eternal life.  I said before that this life matters, but it is not all that matters.  It is not all that there is.  There is a life after our death, after our natural life ends.  Jesus Himself explained that there are only two paths: the broad way that leads to the eternal destruction of hell, and the narrow way—the way of faith, the way of obedience—that leads to life (Matt. 7:13).  Everyone is going to go on one path or the other, the broad way or the narrow way.  Everyone is going to end up at one destination or the other, eternal life or eternal destruction in eternal hell.  There is no third way.  There is only one way to be saved, one way to be on that narrow path—by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.  Jesus Himself said in John 14:6, “I am the way and the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except by Me.”

Like Noah, I stand before you testifying to God’s word that says a day of destruction is coming, a day of judgment is coming.  It will be no mere flood this time, no mere earthly death this time.  It will be the judgment of all things.  It will be the sealing of your eternal destiny and of everyone’s eternal destiny.

Also, like Noah, I do not know if it is going to happen today or in a year or in a thousand years.  But I know it is coming because God said so.  And, like Noah, I say there is a way out.  There is one way out.  Last time, it was an ark, a big boat.  This time it is Jesus Christ, the only way to be saved.  There is no other way to be saved (Acts 4:12).  You can try.  You can go up on a high mountain.  You can hide in the desert.  You can trust in your money.  You can try to build your own ark contraption if you want.  It is not going to work.  Nothing else will work.  Just as only those in the ark were saved, so only those who are in Christ will be saved on this day of judgment.  Everyone outside of Christ will perish, just like everyone outside of the ark perished.  There is no way out.  The difference is that this is forever.

This is my testimony, my counsel, and my plea:  Don’t die.  Get in the boat.  Put your faith in Jesus Christ.  Show your faith by your obedience.  Confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord.  Believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead.  Trust in Him alone to atone for your sins.  Confess your sins and renounce your sins.  Live in the new way of the Spirit.  This is the way to be saved.  And it is available not to eight people, not to one family, not to a certain part of the world—it is available to all.

So come to the boat and believe God’s gracious warning.  Accept God’s gracious offer of salvation.  Get into the ark of Christ by faith and live.  The day is coming, just like it came in that time, where God Himself will close the door of the ark and where the rain will begin to fall.  But that day has not come yet.  The door is still open.  So come to Christ, enter in, and be saved.

Finally, for those who have confessed Christ, get to work on the big project.  I told you that, in all likelihood, Noah’s family helped to build the ark.  And it was partially a demonstration of their faith in God’s word to Noah that the flood was coming, and the ark was the way to be saved.  So you too must show your faith by your actions.

We do not need to build a big boat, praise the Lord.  There are no floodwaters coming over the whole earth again.  God promised.  Our call is not to build the ark; it is to build God’s church.  Join in the work of building God’s church.  Join in by telling others about the coming judgment and the one way out by faith in Christ.  Get involved in the hard work, in the sweat and the strain and the labor with all urgency.  You can bet they did.  They knew they had to build this big boat and they did not know when the rain was coming.  I bet they worked hard and fast.  And we do not know the day either.  We do not know when the day is coming either.  Let us work hard and fast.

Like the ark, it is a big project.  In fact, our project is bigger than the ark.  The ark was built, the ark floated, and the ark likely is gone, lost to time.  But God’s church will last forever.  It will take all of us to do it—not just one of us or two of us or eight of us.  No, it will take all of us.  God has assigned all of us to do our job on this project.

Like building the ark, this will be hard work.  Cutting trees and nailing boards and tarring with pitch—that was their assignment.  But it will be hard work for us too.  Let us put our shoulders in and do the hard work.  Like the ark, it will be a countercultural work.  Like Noah, we are likely to face disdain and mockery and persecution.  And when that happens, keep working, because the day is still coming.  Other people’s unbelief, other people’s mockery does not change the fact that God decreed it and it is coming.

Like the ark, we must do it exactly God’s way, building according to the pattern.  And, praise the Lord, like Noah and those who went in the ark, we will be blessed if we take hold of this promise by faith and demonstrate our faith by obeying God.  We will be blessed.  Our whole family will be blessed.  The community around us will be blessed with the word going out.  All creation will be blessed.  Future generations will be blessed until He comes again in glory.  And the greatest blessing is that we will live, not merely for a few more years on the earth, but we will live forever in eternity with God and with God’s people, with joy unspeakable and full of glory.  Hallelujah!  Amen.