Noah #3 Worship

Two Lord’s Day evenings ago we began to look together at the response of Noah to the acts of God in judgement on the world and grace to his own household in sending the flood and rescuing himself and his family.

We noticed that in Genesis 6-8 Noah’s responses were twofold First, Noah believes God and secondly Noah obeys God; faith and obedience. God speaks and Noah believes and obeys, he trusts, and he acts on that trust. Faith in the life of this man of God is not dead faith, it works by love; it is shown by the things he did.

But we also noted a third response, and it is to that third response of Noah that I want to turn this evening as we look together at chapter 8: 20-22. Noah believed God. Noah obeyed God. And now this evening Noah worshipped God.

And I want us to see three things about Noah’s worship in this passage:

1. The Fact of Worship

2. The Rhythm of Worship

3. The Heart of Worship

So first of all the Fact of Worship

“One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” The famous words of Neil Armstrong as he became the first man ever to set foot on the moon.  All the world watched him. The media carried his words around the globe. It was an epoch making moment.

And here in Genesis 8:18-19  we are at another, far more epochal moment, as another pioneer sets foot for the first time in a brave new world. And I imagine that, in the absence of the world press and media men to carry his words, at least the angels were watching, with bated breath, rather like those groups of families huddled together around tiny black and white television screens to watch and listen to Armstrong’s famous line. What is he going to say? What words might Noah compose that could possibly be fitting for this world shaping event? He has had months to anticipate this moment, he has perhaps planned and thought and finely honed his speech. It will surely be a well crafted oration setting out his platform for the new world order he will go on to build.

And so we watch Noah lead his family down the gangplank from the ark, like a newly appointed prime minister or president going to face the assembled media and deliver the opening speech of his new career. We watch with eager anticipation as he takes his place. We jockey for position to hear his words...

Only Noah says nothing. Instead he stoops down and begins to pile one grubby stone on top of another and builds a small rough hewn cube of stone at the landing site of the ark. Not much of a monument as such things go, but at least we understand monuments. We are perhaps disappointed there is no speech and it hardly compares with the monuments of Trafalgar Square or the Champs Elysees, but at least there will be a commemorative mound to remember Noah by. Tastefully engraved perhaps with a few choice words…’here began the new world’, or ‘Noah waz ere’ or something ….

But wait, what is he doing? He lights a fire on top of the mound of stone and with cries to God for mercy he hauls a bleating goat forward and slaughters it and places its body into the flames. And he does it again and again and again with clean animal after clean animal, until the altar is red with blood and the sky is chocked with the smoke of burning flesh.

What barbarism is this? What on earth is he thinking? All those months locked away amidst the storms of destruction have clearly addled poor Noah’s brain. The whole point of the ark, Noah, was to rescue these creatures, not cook them. You didn’t save all these beasts and birds just to roast them on a BBQ the first chance you get Noah! You’re not a South African!

But Noah has had a long time to think about this moment and there is, he knows, only one thing fitting for the occasion. Before the demonstration of the wrath of God, and with the certain knowledge that he remains a fallen son of Adam, and having been delivered by sheer grace, Noah bows down and worships. He offers sacrifice and seeks the mercy of God. This is not a monumental memorial to the greatness of the man. This is an altar for worship before the greatness of God.

In the early 1990s President George Bush Sr. had a man named John Sununu, former governor of New Hampshire, as his White House chief of staff, and a reporter asked Sununu if his job was difficult, to which he quickly answered, "No." The reporter, a bit taken aback, assumed that Sununu must have misunderstood the question, so he asked again, and got the same reply. Then Sununu explained why he felt his job was easy: "I have only one constituent." He knew his job was to please the President.

Noah did not make a speech. He did not build a monument to commemorate his bravery. He worshipped. And he worshipped because he knew that, in the last analysis, all human beings have a constituency of one. We exist for the pleasure and glory of God. It is God with whom we all have to do. And having seen, and passed through the midst of, the greatest display of Divine wrath on human sin apart from the Cross of Christ, Noah knew that humble, contrite, repentant, and believing worship was the only thing that fits before such a God.

Noah had come to see the greatness of God on display in the flood and in his own preservation. He has watched what God’s transcendent holiness does when it is unleashed on rebel sinners. And so he understands that before this God worship is the only thing to do.

And that is a valuable lesson we need very much to be reminded of in our day. The worship of God is not peripheral or secondary. It is not something to get around to when all else is done and you can find the time. The fundamental reality that governs biblical worship is that we are not the reason for engaging in it. Worship is about adoring God because he is holy and he is gracious. It is about God from first to last; his will, his priorities, his demands, his grace, his holiness his worthiness to be adored. He deserves and requires your praise.

And that means that the way we worship and the attitudes we hold about worship are deeply revealing of what we think about the God we are worshipping. If worship is an on again off again, take it or leave it, casual thing, if singing God’s praise and praying for grace, if hearing the law, and confessing our sin, if these are merely ‘the preliminaries’ and the trimmings to the sermon, then I want to suggest to you that it is not just your view of worship that is faulty. It is your view of God as well. Your view of worship is fundamentally self-centered. ‘When will he get to the sermon? What am I going to get out of this today? That didn’t do much for me today. I was really spoken to today.’

But that is not primarily why you are here. Yes we need to be fed. Yes one aspect of worship is focused on the blessing of God’s people. But, no, that is not the main point of it all. God is the point. He is the primary focus of it all. And it may be that if he is not the primary focus in your worship, he may not be the primary focus in your life either. But come to worship focused on God and his gory and you will find that that is the path to personal satisfaction as well.

Noah had tasted both the wrath of God and the grace of God, and now he lives for the glory of God. That is why his first response on coming out of the ark was worship. Now let me ask you, when God deals with you, either in his wrath or in his grace, whether in some mighty trial or in some wonderful blessing, what is your first reaction? Do you find yourself bowing down and blessing the Lord who gives and who takes away? Do you adore the God whose actions reveal his sovereign prerogatives to do whatever he pleases? Do you adore the Judge of all the earth who will certainly do right? Or do you focus on your circumstances or even on yourself?

So there is the impressive fact that Noah worships. And then secondly there is the Rhythm of worship. There is a cycle of weekly worship that is basic to the design of God for creation, and that remains a basic part of the plan of God for the worship of his church.

There is, notice, a weekly pattern that is repeated throughout the flood story. Things seem to happen in groups of seven days. Look for example at 7:4 “Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth” and again in vs. 10 “and after the seven days the floodwaters came on the earth.” Look at 8:10, “He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark” and verse 12, “he waited seven more days and sent the dove out again”. Now that repetition of groups seven days, and the division of the whole flood narrative itself into seven major sections with themes that mirror and parallel each other has prompted scholars like RS Candlish (Studies in Genesis pp. 136) and Meredith G Kline (Kingdom Prologue pp 212, 229) to conclude that a weekly cycle is being indicated here.

Both Kline and Candlish point out that it was in all likelihood the Sabbath day when Noah entered the ark. It was on the Sabbath that the doves were sent out, and it was on the Sabbath that Noah emerged from the ark to dry land. 

And remember that Noah’s name means ‘rest’. He is the one who will bring a symbolic Sabbath rest to all creation after the waters of flood-wrath subside. And so it’s highly appropriate that it was on the Sabbath day that the doors of the ark were flung wide and a new humanity was set loose upon the remade earth. It was on the Sabbath day that the one called ‘rest-bringer’, Noah, set foot on a new world. It was on a Sabbath that Noah began his new life with the worship of God.

And all of that makes good sense when we remember that the flood narrative is a kind of undoing and redoing of the story of creation in Genesis One. It was over the chaotic waters of creation that the Spirit of God hovered, and in a cycle of seven days all things were made, climaxing on the Sabbath when the new world stood finished. And now here, in another narrative divided into seven sections, that same world is returned to watery chaos and then a renewed world is given back to a new father of humanity, Noah, on the Sabbath day, and he uses that day as it was designed, for the worship of God.

But there is another era still to come, when a fresh deluge of Divine wrath shall return creation to chaos once more, and then and only then, the final true and ultimate Sabbath shall dawn, to which the Sabbath in Eden, and the Sabbath of Noah, and the Sabbath of the Ten Commandments all point. The new heavens and new earth shall emerge from the fire of God’s final judgment and everything that these ancient Sabbath’s spoke of shall find their fulfillment in an era of rest that shall never be disturbed.

And here is the amazing thing; that coming final Sabbath era has already dawned. The age to come has burst in upon the age that now is. The Judge of all the earth, the God of glory, has stepped into human history in Jesus Christ, and the final judgment to was executed upon him ahead of time, at the cross, in the place of all who believe. And with his resurrection from the dead the new creation has already begun, and the powers of the age to come dwell in the hearts of believers in Christ.

Now that Sabbath rest, of course, is still to reach its fullest and final manifestation at the last day, and until then there remains, as the writer to the Hebrews puts in 4:9 a Sabbath observance for the people of God, there remains a day set apart for us to gather and worship and anticipate the consummation of the glories of our salvation only glimpsed here and now.

Just as the Sabbath continued for Noah into the new world, after the judgment of the flood, so now it still continues, into the new era of redemption and new creation, after the judgment of the Cross, unleashed on Christ. Only, it continues now, not as the Old Covenant Saturday-Sabbath, with its Temple ritual and legal prescriptions, but as the New Covenant Lord’s Day, the Day of Resurrection, not the last day when creation was complete, but now the first day when a new creation in an ultimate and final sense has already begun. Gathering for worship on Sunday is a declaration that the ultimate new creation has already begun, in the resurrection of Christ from the dead. This day declares that everything that Noah’s Sabbath symbolized is a reality that has already begun to be realized in our believing hearts, now that Jesus has risen again.

We need to recognize, therefore, that not only is there a vital obligation for us to worship God, as Noah did, but there is also a rhythm, a regular time and place, for that worship, and there has always been, since creation. There will always be, until the final Sabbath rest of a new creation, and the completion of our salvation finally comes.

When we read in the Ten Commandments that we are to, ‘remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy’, that is a command that remains perfectly intelligible for us in the light of the New Testament. It’s a command that still binds us to obedience. It still calls us to set apart one day in seven to rest from all our own labours, interests, and concerns, and focus on the Lord. Jesus Christ risen to inaugurate the dawn of the final age of Sabbath rest is our Lord of the Sabbath.

And that presents us once again with a challenge, doesn’t it? What is your Sunday for? Is it a day of rest and worship for you, above all else? Is it a day for serving the Lord with a devotion that would be impossible on the other six days? Or is church an inconvenient imposition on what would otherwise be a splendid day of recreation for you? In your thinking and living Christina brothers and sisters, is your Sunday really the Lord’s Day or your own day?

“If your soul has no Sunday”, said Albert Schweitzer, “it becomes an orphan." And many of us have discovered how right he was to our great cost. When you treat the Lord’s Day lightly you will quickly come to treat the Lord’s worship lightly, and already you are treating the Lord lightly. You are making an orphan of your soul.

Some of you struggle with besetting sin, some of you feel far from God and estranged from his love, others find the trials of their daily routine difficult to bear, and for some of you the reason for your spiritual condition is your neglect of the Lord’s Day and the worship of God. There is no rhythm to your worship. Now I know that some of us are employed in jobs where your work is a necessary service, and a vital business. Some of you are employed in situations where necessity and mercy compel you to be away from time to time from the place of worship on the day of worship. But for others of us there is no such excuse and we are doing our souls terrible spiritual damage as a result.

So there is the fact of Noah’s worship. Then there is the weekly rhythm of his worship. Then thirdly notice the heart of the worship Noah offers. Look at verse 20 again, “The Noah built an altar to the LORD and taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it.”

What was the heart of Noah’s worship? It was sacrifice. Isn’t it striking that Noah, the man who walks with God, the man who is righteous in God’s sight and blameless before the eyes of a wicked generation, this paragon of godliness, who has been chosen out of the whole mass of humanity to be a new father of the race, this man unique in the plans of God, isn’t it remarkable that this man makes his first act after the flood an act not just of worship but of atonement?

In verse 21 we read that ‘every inclination of the heart of man is evil from childhood’. Wrath it seems cannot renovate the heart, it can only obliterate the sinner. And so the same description of Noah and his descendants is given after the flood as was given back in Genesis 6:5of the generation that lived before the flood.

And it really is I think a mark of the greatness of the man, that Noah understood something at least of the depravity of his own heart. He was not swayed into thinking that grace lavished upon him with such breathtaking extravagance was not really grace at all, that somehow he deserved it all. But sometimes we do that don’t we? We think that even when God is lavishing his covenant love upon us, even when he is not treating us as our sins deserve, that somehow what is happening is that we are just getting from God what we really deserve. But Noah was not like us. He knows that grace is grace because in our sin we are utterly helpless, lost, condemned. Apart from grace the most mature believer will still be a lost wretch condemned as a law breaker before the wrath of God.

And so as he sets foot on the new world of post flood grace, Noah bows down and seeks the forgiveness of his sins.

And I find that glorious, largely because it kills dead the idea that growing in maturity as a believer is somehow growing out of the cross, it is getting beyond the gospel. ‘OK OK I’ve got the cross down pat now, I know that Jesus died for me. I’m saved. I don’t need to hear the simple gospel ad nauseam any more. What I really want to know is how to be a good dad. How can I be an effective witness? What I really want to know is three easy steps to a powerful prayer life. Let’s get to the practical stuff that will help me live my life. The gospel is for pagans and new-borns in the faith. I have moved on.

But are you more mature than Noah who walked with God? For him the one thing he never grew out of was his need for atonement.

And that is the heartbeat of living vibrant Christianity. It is not a spiritualised pop-psychology that helps you get on in life a bit better than before. It deals with your sin. It is focussed on atonement. And that is why in our worship every Sabbath day, no less than in Noah’s worship on that first Sabbath after the flood, we focus on atonement, on sacrifice, on getting our sin dealt with, we focus on the once for all sacrifice of our saviour Jesus Christ.

You will never be so mature in the faith that the gospel will not need to be preached to you. You will never grow up in Christ so much that you will not need to come again every day, every hour, to the cross and forsake sin and self there, and cling once more to Jesus’ doing and dying for mercy and grace.

And notice in the story that the means of atonement were included in the preparations God made for Noah before he even entered the ark. In chapter 7:2 Noah was told to take seven of every clean animal and bird with him into the ark: three breeding pairs, plus one extra of each kind. Why was there one extra of every kind of clean animal and bird? There was extra as a provision for this sacrifice.

What a picture of the gospel! Believing sinner, God has made provision for our sin before we even knew we needed it. He knew your need of sacrifice, just as he knew Noah’s need, and he made provision for your soul in Christ Jesus. While we were still sinners, still ignorant, unable and unwilling to do anything for our own salvation, Christ died for us.

Here is the heart of our worship. Here is the heart of our faith. Here is the one thing we really do need to know; Jesus, crucified for my sin. We do not grow out of the simple gospel facts; we grow down more deeply into them.

Whatever your privileges, whatever you gifts, whatever God has done for you, you need Christ crucified still!

So we’ve seen that the fundamental response of the heart saved by grace to the character and nature of God is always one of worship. Not to worship is to fail to respond appropriately to the Lord. And we’ve seen that worship has a rhythm. It is a weekly pattern, a cycle of Sabbath observance that calls us together to celebrate grace, and anticipate heaven. And we’ve seen that the heart of worship, indeed the heart of the Christian life, is just Jesus, the cross, the atoning sacrifice. If we are growing tired of the cross, if we are out growing the simplicity of the gospel, we are being deceived by the self-help lies of a merit centred world.

The bottom line of the Christian faith is free grace, unconditional, unbounded, irresistible love that makes atonement for us, and takes our sin and guilt away. May God grant that we all grow more and more deeply down into the Cross, never grow up and away from it.

Amen.