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Rest on Unfailing Promises
Despite the flood's total destruction, God never abandons creation or culture, but rather He renews it by preserving a faithful remnant.
Scripture: Genesis 8:1-22
Sermon Notes:
- In the cataclysmic flood of God’s judgment, only Noah’s family was saved to enter into God’s rest.
- Every judgment from God is also an occasion for deliverance and salvation.
- Inside the ark, safe from the floodwaters, for over a year Noah needed a firm personal knowledge of God’s nearness, not merely an abstract theology of God’s providence and sovereignty.
- Despite the flood’s total destruction, God never abandons creation or culture, but rather He renews it by preserving a faithful remnant.
- Man’s destiny is tied to the creation; the material world is not just a temporary, interim state.
- We stand in covenant relation to God as vice regents in the earth, which God created good.
- Christians have been influenced by neo-Platonism have come to think of the creation as evil, as something to be rescued from. But God in Christ is redeeming and restoring the sin-cursed earth.
- Noah, whose name means rest, was saved by grace through faith, and yet he demonstrated his faith by his works (cf. James 2:14-26).
- Noah’s obedience involved cultural, scientific and engineering endeavour: among other expertise, Noah demonstrated skills of shipbuilding and animal husbandry.
- Christian pietism sees every event as a personal lesson for “my private spiritual life,” reflecting a pietistic preoccupation with self.
- God brings the ark safely to rest. Like Noah, we’re called to serve God, but the salvation of the world doesn’t depend on Noah or upon us.
- Upon returning to dry land, Noah makes sacrifices which prefigure the atonement of Christ and signify an end to the curse upon the earth.
- In the cross the curse of sin was broken for God’s redeemed people and the creation.
- God promises never again to destroy the earth by a flood, and bestows His blessed rest.
- Noah stands in God’s holy temple as God’s priest-king, and he is commissioned to again fill the earth.
- Salvation is to enter God’s rest spiritually and to establish that rest materially on the earth.
- We as God’s people then enter the rest of God and extend that rest of God unto all things, universalizing the Sabbath victory of Christ.
Application Questions:
- Why did God choose a complex geophysical event (the flood) to judge the wicked and to save a faithful remnant?
- How can we cultivate a close personal knowledge of God and His providence to help us in times of difficulty?
- What has been the influence of Platonism upon the church?
- How does Noah prefigure Christ?
- What does it mean for us to enter and extend God’s rest?