The Roots of the Kingdom # 15   ‘Antithesis Redivivus’

Genesis 8:18-29

We are at war. As we speak this evening the forces of our enemy are marshaled against us. They will stop at nothing in their desperate attempt to achieve our destruction.

Each one of us this evening is bound up in an environment of wartime hostility.

No I’m not talking about the situation in Iraq, nor am I thinking about the broader war on terror. I am talking about the far more subtle and insidious war raging in every generation between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, between the rule of God in the world and the power of the devil.

Already in our studies of the book of Genesis we have had cause to note the basic antithesis that exists between those who belong to the covenant people fog d and those who reject God and his rule in the world.

In Genesis 3 and the curse God pronounced over the Serpent and over our first parents we have the first declaration of war, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers, he will crush your head and you will bruise his heel”.

As the story develops in the very next chapter we watched Cain and Abel standing together before the altar to worship God. Abel and his worship was accepted before God while Cain and his offering was rejected. The war God had declared on Satan his seed bubbled to the surface. Cain murdered his brother Abel. 

In the remainder of the chapter we read about the developing civilization of the ancient world and here again the antithesis continues. This is a war on all fronts and across the generations. The Cainites embody the principles of their father, while the Sethites demonstrate themselves to be the covenant line, the seed of the woman the people of God.

By Chapter 6, however, everything seems to be going horribly wrong for the seed of woman. The covenant line has been debased and absorbed by the seed of the serpent, the Cainites, and only Noah and his household remain to uphold the antithesis and carry on the war.

But just when it looks as though the forces of the serpent will win the war for human souls, in chapters 7 and 8 God destroys the world with the great flood and only the righteous the family of Righteous Noah remains. As the waters receded and Noah and family are released form the ark, it is clear a great reversal has occurred. Instead of defeat for the seed of the woman, it looks as though the war is over, the battle is won, and the seed of the woman has no-one left to fight. The seed of the serpent has been wiped ought by the flood of divine wrath.

But the remainder of Chapter 9 lets us see that here too, even within the confines of the covenant household itself, even in Noah’s family only newly delivered from the wrath of God in the  flood, even here the antithesis remains and the line of covenant blessing emerges in contrast and opposition to the line of satanic rebellion.

Look at the chapter with me and notice that the text is divided fundamentally between two major sections. The first runs from verses 18-23 and it record the narrative of Ham’s sin and his brother’s godliness: here is a demonstration of the antithesis. The second division of the passage runs from verses 24-29 and records the reaction of Noah: here is the destiny of the antithesis.

So let’s look first of all at the demonstration of the antithesis here in vs. 18-23. And here we should begin with a word not about the sin of Ham and the ways in which it expresses his ungodliness and reprobation, but about the sin of Noah, that provides the context for his son’s sin.

Noah it seems has planted a vineyard and made some wine and has over indulged to the point of drunkenness. We come upon him snoring and sleeping off the effects of his drunken excess in verse 21. Noah cuts pathetic figure here and that is made all the more poignant after the previous three chapters of unimpeachable godliness.

Now the passage here majors not on Noah but on Ham’s actions towards Noah so we must be careful to preserve that balance ourselves, but I think his case presents us with a stark and alarming warning that we need to listen to.  Noah was 600 years old when he entered the ark. He was given the signal honour of being one of the only 2 people in all of scripture named as having walked with God, along with Enoch in chapter 5:22. He was the father of the new humanity. To Noah was given the creation mandates, now renewed, that were originally given before the fall to our first parents. To Noah the covenant of preservation and common grace came. Noah is like a new Adam, and he is a type of Christ. In short, Noah is a man of God with an impeccable track record of obedience, personal and corporate godliness, and great usefulness in God’s hand.

 And the first thing we read of him after the events related to the flood are over, and the last account we have of his doings in the world, is a record, not some great act of service to the Lord, but of a pathetic act of self indulgence and compromise.

We are not ever out of the reach of sin till we reach heaven’s glory. We are never so mature that we cannot be caught in sin and compromise. We never outgrow the urgent need to obey the command of Christ, given to the disciples in the garden of Gethsemane, “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”

Noah came to learn that truth the hard way. The flesh is so weak that even after years of diligent obedience and the mortification of sin the remnants of our native corruption can suddenly burst forth and overtake us in acts of rebellion.

Dr. John Gerstner reminds us that, “Peter was the first to sing the words of that hymn, so popular among certain Christians, ‘Lord we are able’. But after his fall he learned to sing it correctly: ‘Lord we are not able.’”(Gerstner, ‘The Language of the Battlefield’, in James Montgommery Boice ed. Our Saviour God, pp. 162, cited in Boice, Genesis, pp. 319). Doubtless Noah could join Peter in singing that song after his sin and shame were exposed. Lord we are not able.

We would do well to keep that song in our minds. We are in spiritual sinking sand if we ever find ourselves thinking “that particular sin and that failure will not overtake me. I’m above that. It may be a problem for that poor sister, that dear brother may be gripped with that temptation but not me.”

The saintly Robert Murray McCheyne of Dundee was once confronted with a foul mouthed and profane Dock worker as he went about his pastoral duties and took great offence, until he came to realise that “the seeds of every conceivable sin reside in my own redeemed heart also”. He came to see that the sin he saw in others, had its roots in his heart too. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked wrote jeremiah (17:9) and we need to learn from Noah’s tragic discovery of that fact before we come to discover it for ourselves in the same way. “These things happened as examples”, wrote the apostle Paul1 Cor. 10, “So if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall!” 

But the key emphasis here is not on Godly Noah’s tragic compromise, but on his son Ham’s wilful sin. There is a terse brevity in the telling of the incident that underscores the immediacy of Ham’s actions and the wrongness of them. Look at verse 22.

 Ham wanders into his father’s tent while Noah was sleeping it off, and he “saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers outside”. Now the precise nature of Ham’s sin is not made all that explicit. We know from the sustained emphasis of scripture that nakedness, from the first sin of Adam onwards, became badge of moral failure and shame.  We see it in the immediate reaction of Adam and Eve upon eating the forbidden fruit. “I was afraid because I was naked so I hid”, Adam told the Lord. Nakedness signalled exposure to the censure of God. Noah’s nakedness here is certainly an evidence of his compromise but it is also a symbol of his guilt. Now Ham’s offence, it would appear, is bound up with his two actions. First he looks on his father’s nakedness, and second he tells his brothers about it.  Ham looked on his father’s shameful nakedness, and immediately he runs to tell his brothers.

 RS Candlish sums up what were no doubt Ham’s motives, “He not merely dishonoured him as a parent- he disliked him as a preacher of righteousness. Hence his satisfaction and irrepressible joy when he caught the patriarch in such a state of degradation. Ah! He has found (that) the godly man is no better than his neighbours; he has got behind the scenes; he has made a notable discovery; and now he cannot contain himself. Forth he rushes, all hot and impatient to publish the news, so welcome to himself! And if he can meet with any of his brethren who have more sympathy with this excessive sanctity than he has, what a relief- what a satisfaction- to cast this choice specimen in their teeth; and so make good his right to triumph over them and their faith ever after.” (Candlish, Studies in Genesis, pp 158-9)

Ham was gloating and relishing this choice opportunity to demonstrate Noah’s hypocrisy and immediately we see the true allegiance of Ham’s heart exposed. Ham cares nothing for the duty to honour father and mother. Ham sees Noah’s nakedness as a chance for smug dismissal of the hyper moral Noah and his religion, not as fall to mourn.

Ham is one of the seed of the serpent. And this I think is another solemn warning to us. Ham is a covenant child. He is one who was rescued by the ark, placed by the Lord himself within the sphere of redemption. Yet Ham demonstrates his antipathy and rejection of the Lord and his reign by his actions.

What care we must take to avoid giving any excuse by our failures for the rejections of another of the Lordship of Jesus Christ.  How many having been born and raised within the covenant people of God have taken the opportunity afforded them by the hypocrisy of the people of God to cast off all restraint and declare themselves well rid of the faith fo their fathers? Should Noah speak a word to recall Ham to faithfulness and obedience Ham need merely point to Noah’s failure to live up to his won standards. Oh, let us beware of giving anyone an excuse for their own sinful self indulgence by living lives of hypocrisy ourselves.

If we are to have hope that our children should grow to fully own the reality signified and sealed to them in their baptism they must be able to see no cause in our lives as parents that gives them grounds for rebellion.

Noah’s other two son’s Shem and Japheth, however, are of a very different character than their brother. These two honour their father. They don’t respond as we might to an accusation against a great and godly man of significance. They do not try to cover up the sin, nor do they try to excuse it. They simply act to remedy it. They walk into the tent backwards and cover Noah with a cloak

And that is the believing response to sin. There is no attempt at a justification, no attempt at excuses, just a simple determination to preserve the dignity of even the worst offender, and it acts to cover over a multitude of wrongs. This in other words is love in action.

So there is the sin of Ham and the love of Shem and Japheth, and the contrast demonstrates the reality that even here, after the flood, the basic antithesis between the dominion, and the people of God, and the dominion and people of the devil still persists. The war having begun continues. There has not been nor will there ever be till Christ comes again a moments respite from hostilities.

But then secondly look with me at what happens when Noah wakes up in verses 24-29. If verses 18-23 is the demonstration of the antithesis, here we see the destiny of the antithesis.

And when Noah learns what has happened, he speaks the word of God in a prophetic oracle that echoes the curses of Genesis 3:14-19 where the antithesis began between the Seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. And it foreshadows later oracles, like that of Isaac pronounced over Jacob and Esau in Genesis 27. The curse and blessings here are programmatic for the rest of the book of Genesis, and in many ways for the rest of the Bible. The passage describes the fate of the world. It outlines the destiny of the worked and the hope of the nations. The antithesis, the war will go on, but Noah tells us who will have the victory, and how.

First Noah speaks a word of curse. And it is interesting to note that it is a curse that is not spoken to Ham. This is a text that has been used by some racist groups to justify the subjugation and slavery of black people on the argument that the Hamites are the black peoples. Now there is no possibility of the text being read like that. Certainly we know from Ps 105:23,27 and 106:21-22 that the land of Ham was Africa. But the curse of God is pronounced not over the Hamites, but over the descendants of Canaan, Ham’s son. We know from chapter 10 vs 6-15 that Ham had 3 other sons. Canaan however is singled out. And he is to become in time the father of those peoples who would be the ancestral enemies of Israel, those whom the Israelites drove from the land of promise. The land of Israel was first the land of Canaan.

Now, at this point you may have a question. Why is Canaan cursed for something he didn’t do? Well, I think the heart of the answer lies in the nature of Ham’s sin.  Ham sinned as a son and the curse that befell him fitted his crime. We know that it is a principle of scripture that he sins of the fathers are visited on the children even to the third and forth generations (Ex. 20:5). And here too Ham’s sin percolates down. His son’s sons’ rebellion against God will be entirely their own, so that their final destruction at the hands of an invading Israelite army will be fully merited by their own wilful sin, but, nevertheless, the basic trajectory of the race of Canaan was set by the sin of their father. Canaan is cursed. The specific local manifestation of the seed of the serpent the people under Satan’s domain, the heirs of Canaan, are being dealt with.

And the second part of Noah’s oracle is a word of blessing. Now there is a great deal here and we have only time for the briefest glance at this wonderful text. But let me point out three things:

I. Shem’s line is the line of the covenant promise. We learned in Genesis 3:15 that the messiah would be the seed of the woman. Then later we discover that he will arise from among Eve’s sons from the descendants of godly Seth, not the ungodly Cain. Now we discover that from among the Sethites, he will descend from the Semitic peoples of whom Shem is the father.

The rest of Genesis is the story of the rise of one specific group among the Semites, the children of Abraham, the nation of Israel. It is from among the Semites that Messiah will come. And later still we learn that it is from among the family of the King of Israel, King David, that the Messiah will come, and from among them he will be born of Mary, a virgin in Bethlehem, David’s birthplace, and he will be called Jesus Christ.

Shem is the father of the covenant people from whom comes Jesus Christ the seed of the woman, the second Adam, the promised Messiah.

2. The Canaanites did in fact become the slaves of Shem when Israel took possession of the Promised Land. In the end the Canaanites are a picture of all those who refuse the rule and reign of Jesus Christ. They are crushed under his heel. Their power is broken and their war is lost, event though they fight him still. He was crucified under their rebellion, and yet it was in that rebellion that their doom was sealed. Christ will have dominion over you. He can do so now as the saviour of your soul through faith alone, or He will do so soon when he comes again as the conquering warrior King, to destroy his enemies.

3. The blessing on Japheth signals a note of grace. The blessing on Shem is the axis, and on one side hangs the curse on Canaan, on the line of satanic rebellion. And on the other hangs a blessing on Japheth, the other peoples of the world. And notice the nature of that blessing: Japheth in time will spread out throughout the world, and eventually be gathered into the tents of Shem. In other words they will come to live and function as one people. There will be an intimate union between the covenant people of God and believing outsiders.

Now scholars have searched the Old Testament in vain for any possible fulfilment of that prophecy, but nowhere is there a mass in-gathering of gentiles into the covenant people of Israel to be found. But step into the New Testament era and the long awaited blessing is immediately apparent. “In Christ” wrote Paul in Galatians 3:28 “there is neither Jew nor Greek”. All are one in Christ Jesus.  In Revelation 7:9 we are given a glimpse of the church triumphant in glory, where a “great multitude that no-one could count from every nation, tribe, people and language” are standing in front of the lamb, singing praises, “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne and to the Lamb”.

From the line of Shem shall come one who shall break down the walls of separation and graft people from every nation into the one people of God and will, at the same time, signal the doom of those who take the side of the enemy. That one is Jesus Christ.

The way to come dwell in the tents of Shem, is through faith in Shem’s son Jesus. The church, this church, is to be a place where the covenant people grow, by winning the sons of Japheth, strangers to the covenant promise. It is to be a place for all nations. Sinners of every nation and sort are welcome here, and called to come dwell with us in the tents of Shem through faith alone in Jesus Christ.

Jesus, the son of Shem, stands that the centre point, and on one side of the axis stands those condemned under his wrath, while on the other are the Japhethites, those who will be gathered in to make one covenant people with Israel. The antithesis remains. The war goes on. But Noah’s oracle tells us who the final victor will be. Japheth will live in the tents of Shem and Canaan will be their slave. “Blessed be the Lord the God of Shem”. “Praise be to God who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ”. Through faith in Jesus Christ “in all these things we are more than conquerors”      Amen