"You've Got a Friend"

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June 1, 2008 Third Sunday after Pentecost

Series: Standing on God’s Promises

Sermon Title: “You’ve Got a Friend”

Text: Genesis 6:11-22;7:24; 8:14-19; Gen. 9:8-17; 2 Peter 3:18-22

Dr. Steve Jackson

NewSong Community Church

Delivered on June 1, 2008

“Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: ‘I will now establish my covenant with you and with your descendents after you and with every living creature that was with you…every living creature on earth.’” Genesis 9:8-10

You’ve Got a Friend

Welcome to the month of June! To usher in the new month and the summer we’re beginning a new series of messages today based on the book of Genesis called “Standing on God’s Promises.” The Bible is filled with hundreds of what the apostle Peter called “exceeding great and precious promises” (2 Peter 1:4). In fact, years ago someone read through the entire Bible and catalogued nearly 9,000 promises God has made there. My hope with this series is it will help us to better appreciate and understand God’s promises and to see how they apply to every aspect of our lives.

Today’s message is titled “You’ve Got a Friend” and is based upon the story of Noah and the Ark. I suppose everyone here is familiar with Noah’s story. Genesis 6-9 tells how God decided to flood the earth and destroy “all flesh” because of the wickedness and violence of mankind. All flesh, that is, except for one man and his family, Noah. God told Noah to build a great boat and to bring with him his wife, his sons, and their wives, eight people in all. He was told to bring pairs of every kind of animal and bird, male and female, along with food and additional animals for sacrifices. So Noah built the ark and took the animals and his family on board and then the flood came, destroying all life on earth. Then the rains stopped and the waters subsided and dry land reappeared. The story ends with God entering into a covenant with Noah and his repopulating the world with Noah’s family and the animals and birds that survived with him. God sets a rainbow in the sky as a perpetual reminder of this “everlasting covenant” between God and all flesh.

It occurred to me as I read over the story of Noah and the Ark that we often teach it to our children, and the way we generally teach them the story is to say “God got so angry with the whole human race that he decided to wipe them out and start over again.” The moral of the story then becomes how angry God gets when we don’t act like he wants us to. This morning I want to suggest first of all, while Noah’s story works well for children, we need to recognize it has something to say to us grown-ups too. And second, I want us to rethink what the story is actually about. I believe the story is about a whole lot more than just God getting angry and wiping everyone out. I want us to take a journey through this famous story to see that it does have something to say to us grown-ups, and it’s a whole lot more than simply, “Behave.” So let’s look at this first character and story from Genesis, and learn of a promise from God Noah stood on.

Floods Happen

The first thing to notice about Noah’s story is pretty straightforward, and that is that Floods Happen. In this life – in this world – people hurt one other, things go wrong, nature runs amuck, and things fall apart. There’s a famous poem by William Butler Yeats with the line “things fall apart” in it that epitomizes this truth:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand [i]

Yeats wrote that poem in 1919, right after WWI when the world was finally beginning to realize that the notion of progress – of us getting better and better all the time – simply was not so.

Closer to our own era there was an old sixties song that says the same thing: “Baby the rain must fall.”[ii] In other words, “Floods Happen.”

Even closer to home was a bumper sticker that came to prominence back in the eighties. The “cleaned up” version of that saying is “stuff happens” and it’s simply an acknowledgment that life is full of surprises and imperfections. In a 1991 case involving the uncensored form of that bumper sticker the Supreme Court of Georgia ruled that a state law prohibiting such stickers and decals on vehicles was unconstitutional. There’s no getting around it, even the highest court in our state agrees: floods happen.

I don’t think I’m being cynical or negative to point out that brokenness, isolation, loneliness, anger, meaninglessness and guilt are endemic to our world. And that’s just the “floods” that we wreak on each other. Add to that the environmental destruction and devastation that seems to be escalating these days: typhoons, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, and tsunamis – and the human cost is staggering. Our jails are stretched beyond capacity, our divorce courts are overflowing, and our reserves in terms of aid for victims of storms are nearing depletion.

The truth, of course, is that both the ‘human caused’ and the ‘environmentally caused’ floods have been a part of our world for thousands and thousands of years; we just hear more about them today than ever before. There’s nothing new about the floods of life – just new and more creative ways of coming up.

In old movies and artwork depicting the debauchery at the time of Noah you see people cavorting with bottles of wine and men chasing women, and lot’s of blood and anguished faces. A recent movie remake of the Noah story called Evan Almighty demonstrates that we humans are never at a loss for clever ways to cause floods. In that movie a corrupt politician cuts corners building a dam which floods a once pristine valley. No, like the Bible says, there is nothing new under the sun, just new ways of doing the same old things.

Does God judge our sin? Yes, of course he does. But that’s not the guiding moral of the story of Noah. We’re not there yet. Let’s just say, at this point, one of the truths contained in the account of Noah’s ark is very much a truth for adults to hear: floods happen.

God Will Not Forget You

The story of Noah isn’t all bad news for us grown-ups though. As we journey on through this famous story we learn a second truth and that is this: God will not forget you.

An old joke goes like this: One person asks another:

Will you forget me in an hour? No.

Will you forget me in a day? No.

Will you forget me in a month? No.

Will you forget me in a year? No.

Knock knock. Who's there?

I thought you said you wouldn't forget me!

In Noah’s story we see numerous assurances that God will not forget us. For instance:

At the very beginning of Noah’s story when God sees the world has gotten so corrupt he needs to start over he “remembers” Noah and asks him to build the ark. Genesis 6:8 says Noah “found favor in the sight of God.” This unmerited favor is called grace.

Then, in the very middle of Noah’s story, Genesis 8:1 says, God, “Remembered Noah and all the …animals…that were with him in the ark.” Even when things were bleakest, even during the darkest hours of the flood, God didn’t forget Noah. The flood did not stand unopposed; instead the ark was there floating on top of it with Noah and his family safe inside. Can you think of times in your life when you were bobbing in an overwhelming flood of financial strain, or a marital flood, or a medical flood? You felt as though the flood was going to wash over you and consume you. You felt forgotten, or that perhaps that God doesn’t care? If so, remember Noah’s Ark bobbing on the waters of the flood and God “remembering” him and his family. What a great assurance that can provide for us in times like these.

Again at the end of Noah’s story we see that God didn’t forget Noah. We read of a special covenant God made with him. It’s a covenant where God promises that He will never forget us, or any of the creatures that he made. It is a covenant that promises that God will never again destroy the earth because of the sinfulness of man. And as a sign of this covenant – this promise – God sets a rainbow in the sky so that whenever it’s raining in your life or mine we can all know that someday the flood will end and we aren’t forgotten.

And speaking of the covenant, notice Note also it was unconditional. Did you notice that? It doesn’t have any “if” clauses like “if you love me” or “if you obey me” or “if you worship me” or “if you brush your teeth” then I’ll be good to you!

No - the covenant God made Noah is an unconditional covenant of love where God promises to remember us even if we forget him. Why? Because that’s what God's love is like. He remembers us even when we forget him. No matter what we’ve done or left undone; when we stand at the door and knock, God won't absentmindedly ask “who's there?” Instead he’ll open the door and welcome us in.

Yes, God can still be grieved by us. Yes, we can make God sad and we can make Him angry. But God swore to Noah and to you and me that he would never be so angry that he will destroy us. Despite our sinfulness, despite all that we do to hurt each other and to hurt ourselves, God has promised not to abandon us, to not to forget us and seek our destruction, but rather to remember us and his love for us.

And God does remember us; He does seek us out. He calls us to love him as he loves us. No matter what we have done, God calls to us like a parent calls to his child, God calls us to turn around and try once more to be the person that we were born to be, and God reaches out his hand to deliver us from our foolishness and pride.

God will not forget you. God remembered the promise he made to Noah, and even though we’ve probably done far worse than the people who lived before the flood,

God has always kept his promise.

You’ve Got a Friend

And that leads to the third and final leg in our journey through the “grown-up” study of Noah and his ark; one more thing I’d like you notice, and that is that you’ve got a friend.

How’s that, you say? You and I have a friend because this time when things got so bad here on earth instead of sending a flood to deal with our sin and saving only a few people God sent Jesus. This time instead of all the people dying for their sin, one man, Jesus, died for all the sins of all the people. That means he died for your sin and my sin too.

That covenant God made with Noah way back when, symbolized by a rainbow set in the sky, was fulfilled when Jesus came to earth to be our friend. You know, good friends are truly one of life's greatest treasures. To have a friend is to have someone to turn to, no matter what, someone to confide in, someone to trust and rely on. Real friends will do anything for you without regard to what they will get in return. They are not manipulative or two-faced, judgmental or conditional. Real friends are just about all you need in this life. And there isn’t a friend you could possibly have that’s better than Jesus.

Is it difficult for you to think of Jesus as your friend? On the last night of his earthly life Jesus shared a special meal with his disciples. As the meal was winding down He spoke to his disciples giving them some final instructions. As he did, for the first time ever he called them his friends. In doing so he broke down the barrier that had previously existed between God and man. He brought a new dimension to the relationship God wants to have with each one of us. No longer are they servants; instead they are friends, with all that entails.

In the book of Revelation, Jesus says he stands at the door of our hearts and knocks. He goes on to say, “…if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you and you with me” (Rev. 3:20).

What shall we say to this invitation from Christ? What shall we do about his insistent knocking at our door? What will we do about His offer of friendship?

Here’s what God wants us to say: He wants us to say “Yes.” Yes to his love. Yes to his invitation to dine. He wants us to open the door to our lives and let him come in. Floods happen – baby the rain must fall. But the good news – the Gospel – is that God isn’t going to let us drown. Noah’s story reminds us that God remembers us and extends his saving hand towards us to offer us His friendship. God loves us, God forgives us, and God calls us to his side and offers to us a new beginning in Jesus, a new life in Christ.

God has made many promises in His word to us – as I’ve already mentioned there are almost 9000 of them in the Bible. But the promise that we’ve got a friend in Jesus. A friend who we see in signs like the rainbow and in the wine and the bread we’re about to enjoy – this promise of unending friendship with God – will not be broken and it may be the most precious promise of all.

This morning as we come to receive Holy Communion I challenge you to accept this promise for yourself. Invite him in to dine with you. He will come and be your friend. Let’s pray.