SPEAKER_01: Hello, friends.
SPEAKER_01: This is Pastor Creighton.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for tuning in to Newsong Church's Sermon Podcast.
SPEAKER_01: At Newsong Church, we want to see Jesus lifted high in Port Perry, Ontario, as we worship, grow, and serve.
SPEAKER_01: You can learn more about us and find contact info at newsongportperry.ca.
SPEAKER_00: The first lesson taken from Genesis 6 and 7.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
SPEAKER_00: And the Lord regretted that he had made man on earth, and it grieved him to his heart.
SPEAKER_00: So the Lord said, I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things, and birds of the heaven, for I am sorry that I have made them.
SPEAKER_00: But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: And God said to Noah, I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them.
SPEAKER_00: Behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
SPEAKER_00: Make yourself an ark of gopher wood, make rooms in the ark, cover it inside and out with pitch.
SPEAKER_00: For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which the breath of life under heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Everything that is on the earth shall die.
SPEAKER_00: But I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, your sons' wives with you.
SPEAKER_00: And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark to keep them alive with you.
SPEAKER_00: They shall be male and female.
SPEAKER_00: Noah did this.
SPEAKER_00: He did all that God commanded him.
SPEAKER_00: In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened, and rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights.
SPEAKER_00: On the very same day, Noah and his sons, Shem and Ham, Jepheth, and Noah's wife, and the three wives of his sons with them entered the ark.
SPEAKER_00: They and every beast according to its kind, and all the livestock according to their kind, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth according to its kind, and every bird according to its kind, every winged creature.
SPEAKER_00: They went into the ark with Noah, two and two of all flesh, in which there was a breath of life.
SPEAKER_00: And those that entered, male and female of all flesh, went in as God had commanded him, and the Lord shut him in.
SPEAKER_00: The flood continued forty days on the earth.
SPEAKER_00: The waters increased and bore up the ark, it rose high above the earth.
SPEAKER_00: Everything on the dry land, in whose nostrils was the breath of life, died.
SPEAKER_00: He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground.
SPEAKER_00: Man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens.
SPEAKER_00: They were blotted out from the earth.
SPEAKER_00: Only Noah was left with those who were with him in the ark.
SPEAKER_00: And the waters prevailed on the earth a hundred and fifty days.
SPEAKER_00: The word of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh, and which is the breath of life under heaven.
SPEAKER_01: We better pray.
SPEAKER_01: Whatever, Lord, the flood waters look like in our own lives, in this week, in this month, in this season, we come to you because you are Lord.
SPEAKER_01: And you are gracious and merciful.
SPEAKER_01: And we come to you for refuge.
SPEAKER_01: So, Lord Jesus, would we be prepared?
SPEAKER_01: Would we be watchful?
SPEAKER_01: Would you illumine your word to us by your Holy Spirit and conform us to the image of Christ our Savior?
SPEAKER_01: It's in his name we pray.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Please receive it.
SPEAKER_01: While we continue our journey through the first eleven chapters of Genesis, we can recognize the first 11 chapters are something distinct.
SPEAKER_01: There's something like the blueprint for God's design for our flourishing.
SPEAKER_01: We certainly see that in the first two chapters of Genesis, where we see that God has created human beings, men and women, in his image, and he's designed them for flourishing.
SPEAKER_01: He intends them for good.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, he creates them and concludes this is very good.
SPEAKER_01: We've seen in Genesis chapter 3 that things have gone off the rails.
SPEAKER_01: That through self-interested, self-styled rebellion, our first parents decided to substitute their own self-determination for God's design for their flourishing.
SPEAKER_01: And we've seen creation and humanity start to spiral into disintegration ever since.
SPEAKER_01: In the last two weeks, we've been looking at Cain and Abel, and we saw between these two brothers an alienated and hostile and resentful relationship, certainly in Cain's own heart.
SPEAKER_01: And then last week we looked at Lamek and we saw that what was true between these two brothers is starting to expand and consume all of humanity, as it were.
SPEAKER_01: And all of this being the case, we arrive in Genesis chapter 6 to, like I said earlier, the subject of so many children's Bible covers and children's ministry murals.
SPEAKER_01: If you know what I'm talking about, you know what I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_01: Noah and the flood is a complicated story.
SPEAKER_01: It hits heavy, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_01: Certainly it does when we read it as adults and in the eyes of faith.
SPEAKER_01: Well, not even in the eyes of faith, because whether we're a believer or whether we're an unbeliever, this is a hard story, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: What do you do with a flood that takes out all of humanity except for this one chosen family?
SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of different avenues, I suppose, we could explore, but here's what I want to suggest.
SPEAKER_01: From Genesis 6 to 9, which is the story of Noah and the flood, I think we want to see two things in particular.
SPEAKER_01: I think this is what the author of Genesis has in mind for us to see.
SPEAKER_01: I think the author wants us to see and take seriously the fact that sin disintegrates humanity and creation.
SPEAKER_01: Sin disintegrates our humanity and the creation that we're intended to exercise dominion over.
SPEAKER_01: Things are coming apart as they oppose God's good purposes.
SPEAKER_01: But we should also catch that the fact that God is at work in creation and through creation to bring renewal and restoration.
SPEAKER_01: This is a serious story that asks to be read seriously.
SPEAKER_01: And what I want to do for this next week, these next two weeks, is to take apart Noah and the flood, divide it in half, as it were, so that we can take the time to see how it is that sin disintegrates and how it is that God's at work with renewal.
SPEAKER_01: So if this one lands heavy, come back next week, and I trust we'll see good news.
SPEAKER_01: Sin disintegrates humanity and creation.
SPEAKER_01: And I think what this story wants us to see, but the nature of sin is that it moves God.
SPEAKER_01: Sin moves God to grief, and sin moves God to judgment, but sin moves God to deliver us.
SPEAKER_01: God grieves, but God judges, but God delivers.
SPEAKER_01: And this is the story of Noah, and I think it's the story of us as well.
SPEAKER_01: One Bible scholar named Walter Brugemann says that the flood narrative faces a basic incongruity of human life.
SPEAKER_01: On the one hand, God has called the world into being to be his faithful covenant partner.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe we would use the word flourish.
SPEAKER_01: But on the other hand, creation, pardon me, it has not happened that way.
SPEAKER_01: God willed a creation ordered by Sabbath rest according to his word, but it is a recalcitrant creation, resistant to the purposes of the very one by whom and for whom the world exists.
SPEAKER_01: The creation, he concludes, has refused to be God's creation.
SPEAKER_01: So if we're going to understand God's design for our flourishing, we have to take seriously that which disintegrates God's design for our flourishing.
SPEAKER_01: And I think this is what we begin to glimpse in the story of Noah.
SPEAKER_01: If we can catch what the bad news is, maybe we'll catch the good news as well.
SPEAKER_01: So sin disintegrates humanity and creation.
SPEAKER_01: Pull out your Bibles, pull out your order of services.
SPEAKER_01: Let's have a look at a few key verses in these two chapters.
SPEAKER_01: First off, we see that sin, which disintegrates us, moves God first and foremost to grief.
SPEAKER_01: Verses 5 and 6 in chapter 6.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord saw that the wickedness of man, humankind, was great in the earth, and that every intention and thoughts of his heart were only evil continually.
SPEAKER_01: And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth.
SPEAKER_01: And it grieved him into his heart.
SPEAKER_01: So there's this kind of infamous episode of Star Trek The Next Generation, where the kind of child prodigy on board is named Wesley Crusher, and he's a bit of a polarizing character himself, but they beam down to some alien planet, and he's included in this team that goes.
SPEAKER_01: And he starts playing with these alien children that are his age, they're playing with a ball or something.
SPEAKER_01: And at one point the ball rolls onto a patch of grass or something innocuous like that.
SPEAKER_01: And without thinking, Wesley goes and grabs the ball, steps on the grass, grabs the ball, and kind of turns to go back to his friends, and they all sort of gasped.
SPEAKER_01: They can't believe what just happened.
SPEAKER_01: Well, as the episode sort of progresses, you learn that this alien culture has this strange system of laws where certain parts of the town or wherever it is they live are just arbitrarily selected day for day as being out of bounds.
SPEAKER_01: And it's unannounced.
SPEAKER_01: And so only by stepping on it do you kind of know where the out of bounds is.
SPEAKER_01: But this was completely unannounced, completely unbenounced to uh Wesley or this away team.
SPEAKER_01: And so the rest of the episode is this ongoing legal battle that I think is supposed to deal with what is justice.
SPEAKER_01: Can we truly be is this true justice if it's capricious and arbitrary?
SPEAKER_01: Like I say, it's not exactly an A-plus Star Trek episode, but it does raise some of those questions.
SPEAKER_01: I guess I share, you know, this moment where Wesley steps on the grass and turns back because sometimes I think when we read about how God deals with sin, we get this impression that God deals with relatively innocent people in a pretty capricious and arbitrary way.
SPEAKER_01: This can seem like God's really lost it.
SPEAKER_01: He's gone off the rails.
SPEAKER_01: But if we trust that God's word is good, then we need to trust its diagnosis.
SPEAKER_01: What God's word tells us about the human condition, apart from grace, is that every, that the Lord saw the wickedness of man was great in the earth, that every intention and the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
SPEAKER_01: We've seen in Genesis chapter 3 that evil is what occurs when we turn away from the good that God desires.
SPEAKER_01: And so here is humanity completely curved in on itself.
SPEAKER_01: God is not dealing with an innocent humanity.
SPEAKER_01: He's dealing with a wicked humanity, living in a Lamak kind of world of sort of get your own, push down whoever you have to, sort of world.
SPEAKER_01: God's made this world very good, but it's rebelled against the good intention that God has for it.
SPEAKER_01: In this way, sin is a lot less like dealing with arbitrary and constantly changing boundaries and transgressions.
SPEAKER_01: It's a lot more like a spiritual cancer.
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of the impression I get from these early chapters of Genesis.
SPEAKER_01: It's not something like, I mean, it is transgression, that's true.
SPEAKER_01: There are laws that we do break, but drill down deep enough, and you don't just get this sort of arbitrary, capricious God sort of randomly selecting things to be unbalanced.
SPEAKER_01: Instead, these are boundary lines, saying if we go past this, we are going to start seeing our humanity deteriorate and disintegrate.
SPEAKER_01: And that's the nature of sin.
SPEAKER_01: It's a spiritual cancer that is disintegrating our humanity and our personhood from the inside out to the point where we are so curved in on ourselves that there seems to be no thoughts in our heart or intentions that are truly benevolent, that truly love one's neighbor.
SPEAKER_01: So, what we see in verse 6 is something that's so key about God's character.
SPEAKER_01: Because the God who deals with a community that's completely curved in on himself is a God that is deeply moved by its plight.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to its heart.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord is grieved.
SPEAKER_01: The word that is translated here can also be repent, or it feels sorrowful or painful.
SPEAKER_01: It's the same word that shows up when the Lord says to the woman that hurts that it will increase the pain of children.
SPEAKER_01: That's the idea here.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord is pain to see humanity in such a condition as this.
SPEAKER_01: This is not arbitrary, this is not capricious.
SPEAKER_01: And it's really hot when we zoom the lens of, when we look at other flood narratives, because Israel's neighbors all had their own stories of the flood.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not one in my kid.
SPEAKER_01: There you go, you're the man.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, tell me if this doesn't work for you.
SPEAKER_01: We'll let involve this in the podcast after that.
SPEAKER_01: So, uh, where was that?
SPEAKER_01: God is moved to grief.
SPEAKER_01: When we look at other flood stories that surround Israel, we see capricious gods who are irritated with humanity who decide to deal with the noise that they're making by sending this flood to wipe them out.
SPEAKER_01: Not so this god.
SPEAKER_01: This flood is grieved by the condition of humanity.
SPEAKER_01: This god's heart is for them, and it grieves that their heart is so curved away from humanity.
SPEAKER_01: And so again, we'll deal the mind and say that what we find in these verses is not an angry tyrant to the God, but a troubles parent who grieves over the alienation.
SPEAKER_01: God is aware that something is deeply amiss in creation.
SPEAKER_01: God's world has begun to conjure its own future, apart from the future, willed by God.
SPEAKER_01: So sin moves God to grieve.
SPEAKER_01: God is not capricious, he's not arbitrary, he's not moving the boundary lines of announcing.
SPEAKER_01: He's dealing with a spiritual cancer that eats the good that God has intended for his image bearers.
SPEAKER_01: Sin grieves God, and eventually God declares no more.
SPEAKER_01: So sin moves God to judge.
SPEAKER_01: Let's look at verses 7 and 17.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord said, I will block man whom I have created from the face of the land men and animals and created things and birds of the heavens.
SPEAKER_01: For behold, verse 17, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh, which is the breath of life under heaven.
SPEAKER_01: Everything that is on the earth shall die.
SPEAKER_01: Here we see two things being put on display.
SPEAKER_01: We see God's heart and we see the result of the needs and God's heart is one that is truly stored.
SPEAKER_01: I am story that I suffer in this ongoing condition of sin and disintegration.
SPEAKER_01: God is not surprised here.
SPEAKER_01: God is not changing his mind as if at any given moment his feelings or disposition toward us can just change on his mind.
SPEAKER_01: That's not the impression we should get.
SPEAKER_01: But rapture, the language being used here, is that the language of analogy.
SPEAKER_01: It's understanding that God's wrath is not something that's inherent to them, as if you drill down deep enough into the being of God, and all they're going to find is anger.
SPEAKER_01: No, anger and wrath are something that are provoked by God.
SPEAKER_01: The change hasn't happened in the life of God, the change has happened to humanity in the sort of basin.
SPEAKER_01: And now God responds with wrath and judgments is being provoked by the evil of humanity.
SPEAKER_01: And the result of this is that chaos envelops humanity once again develops creation.
SPEAKER_01: I will bring the flood of waters from the earth to destroy all flesh, and which is the breath of life under heaven.
SPEAKER_01: This image of a flood of waters we need to bear in mind how the Genesis chapter 1 begins.
SPEAKER_01: What we see is we see the Spirit of God hovering over these primordial waters of creation, don't we?
SPEAKER_01: And God in the first three days of creation begins to make meaningful separations to give creation its form, so that God can fill these things for their flourishing.
SPEAKER_01: It's almost as though God is removing his providential and sustaining hand from creation in rebellion and watching the primordial waters of chaos rush back in.
SPEAKER_01: That's what's happening here in the life.
SPEAKER_01: Creation is being given that over as it were to the chaos from which God is public.
SPEAKER_01: This is a reverse of God's coming breaks in creation work.
SPEAKER_01: And so often this is how God's particular judgment works, both in scripture and in real life.
SPEAKER_01: I can think of one example of a God whose marriage absolutely fell apart and spent years absolutely embittered by the fact of taking his visit to heaven and saying, God, how dare you let this happen?
SPEAKER_01: And the fact of the matter is, this man is desperately, desperately addicted to pornography and serial, serially unfaithful.
SPEAKER_01: The fact is that the consequence of his sin has resulted in this marriage disintegrating in its integrity, and we can start to see it, and it took him a while to get around to this point where he recognized, you know, there's a connection.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes in God's particular judgment, he hands us over to the consequences of chaos, which the disintegration of sin inclines us to.
SPEAKER_01: That's not to say that every hardship we face in life is a direct result of a simple choice that you made, is that you should just be able to connect A to B at any given moment.
SPEAKER_01: Life is more complicated than that.
SPEAKER_01: But there are times where God's particular judgment is to hand us over, as it were, to the chaos that we are inclining ourselves towards.
SPEAKER_01: This is what makes repentance such a crucial part of the Christian life, such an essential part of the Christian life, because repentance is far more than just any words on a story.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's not less than that.
SPEAKER_01: But repentance is a way of life that reorients an otherwise disintegrated humanity back towards the grace of its creator.
SPEAKER_01: So that we hurt ourselves, or we are hurt by grace of ourselves and back to the God who gives us life and sustains us and desires our nourishing repentance is turning around, turning away from ourselves and towards the God.
SPEAKER_01: His desire is that we reach repentance.
SPEAKER_01: So if it seems like God is delaying and fulfilling his promises, it's only because God desires for his elect to turn to him.
SPEAKER_01: This is essential for us.
SPEAKER_01: This is why we confess our sins as a church body each and every Sunday, every time we gather.
SPEAKER_01: We need to acknowledge that our lives need to be reordered and reordered.
SPEAKER_01: Oriented to the God of grace because otherwise we incline towards disintegration and chaos.
SPEAKER_01: This is why we as Christians need to be practicing self-examination and repentance each and every day.
SPEAKER_01: Not as though we're flogging ourselves, but because we recognize that we need God's grace to sustain us each and every day.
SPEAKER_01: Sin disintegrates our humanity, disintegrates creation.
SPEAKER_01: God's judgment hands creation back over, as it were, to the chaos from which it came.
SPEAKER_01: But if sin only moved God to judgment, if that was the only outcome here, then the Bible would be exactly six chapters long, and there would be no one around to read it.
SPEAKER_01: Sin moves God to grief and judgment.
SPEAKER_01: That's true.
SPEAKER_01: He says no more.
SPEAKER_01: But this same God who judges is the same God who is moved to deliver us.
SPEAKER_01: Let's look at a few verses here.
SPEAKER_01: Let's look at verse 8.
SPEAKER_01: Chapter 6, verse 8, we read, Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord is dealing with this one righteous man, Noah, in an otherwise corrupt and disintegrating generation.
SPEAKER_01: And we might want to ask the question, well, why did Noah find favor?
SPEAKER_01: And we get an answer in Hebrews chapter 11, verse 7.
SPEAKER_01: The author of Hebrews writes of Noah that by faith, Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear, constructed an earth for the saving of his household.
SPEAKER_01: By this he condemned the world and became an heir of righteousness that comes by faith.
SPEAKER_01: Noah trusts God, and he trusts God's intervention, and he trusts God's promises, and it's by trusting in God that Noah is rightly related to him in the context of grace.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, one Bible scholar suggests that we might do well to, one, translate this word favor as grace, but two, to reverse the order here.
SPEAKER_01: Noah found favor, found grace in the eyes of the Lord, more like the grace of the Lord found Noah.
SPEAKER_01: That's how God relates to us in the context of grace, being for us and not against us.
SPEAKER_01: And so Noah is related to God in the context of grace, and God calls Noah to build an ark, verse 14.
SPEAKER_01: Make for yourself an ark of gopherwood, whatever that is, if you know what it is, you know.
SPEAKER_01: Make rooms in this ark, cover it inside and out with pitch, and the rest of the chapter goes on for further instructions with this ark.
SPEAKER_01: The ark in this case is a big old boat.
SPEAKER_01: This word ark comes from the word to enclose.
SPEAKER_01: It's a sacred enclosure, a sacred space that's sealed and protected.
SPEAKER_01: This is how Noah's Ark relates to the Ark of the Covenant.
SPEAKER_01: These are both sacred and sealed spaces.
SPEAKER_01: But this Ark, Noah's Ark, is a big boat that is meant to house Noah, his family, and two of every kind of animal in the world.
SPEAKER_01: And we might sort of naturally ask, Noah really got two by two of every single animal in the world?
SPEAKER_01: And that is a fair question.
SPEAKER_01: And we start to wonder things like, what was feeding time like every single world?
SPEAKER_01: How could they deal with waste disposal of all of these things?
SPEAKER_01: All of those are fair questions, and I'd love to explore those.
SPEAKER_01: But just like I said at the beginning of our Genesis series, the point of the series is not to enter the text on our terms, but to enter the text on its terms.
SPEAKER_01: And the text doesn't seem too concerned about these questions.
SPEAKER_01: What the text wants us to see, what God's word wants us to see, is that this arc is something like a microcosm of creation.
SPEAKER_01: All the waters of the floods are.
SPEAKER_01: The flood is an undoing of creation.
SPEAKER_01: It's like the primordial oceans have been released and chaos is enveloping creation, except for this one sacred enclosed space in which two by two of every living creature that God has made is housed.
SPEAKER_01: The same God who judges is the God who delivers.
SPEAKER_01: And he's using an ark as the means of deliverance.
SPEAKER_01: And God makes a covenant with Noah, verse 18.
SPEAKER_01: I will establish my covenant with you.
SPEAKER_01: You shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons' wives with you, together with all the animals.
SPEAKER_01: We don't know anything about this covenant more than that at this point, but we do know that a covenant is a binding promise.
SPEAKER_01: So this God who is grieved over sin, this God who judges sin, is the same God who binds himself to his word.
SPEAKER_01: And he says, Noah, I'm not abandoning you.
SPEAKER_01: I am not abandoning my plan for humanity, I'm not abandoning my creation.
SPEAKER_01: I am going to work my salvation through your family.
SPEAKER_01: God binds himself to his saving word.
SPEAKER_01: And so sin, though it moves God to grief and judgment, we can see moves God to deliver us.
SPEAKER_01: This same God who is against sin is for the sinner.
SPEAKER_01: He is judged, but he graciously supplies undeserving sinners with the means of deliverance.
SPEAKER_01: In Noah's day, sin is disintegrating humanity and the creation that humanity exercises dominion over.
SPEAKER_01: But I suspect we'd say the same is true for our day today, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: We can recognize evidence of that disintegration, perhaps in our own lives.
SPEAKER_01: We can look around the world and scroll through the headlines, and we can recognize the deteriorating effect that sin seems to have.
SPEAKER_01: The world we desire, the flourishing we desire, always seems just beyond our reach.
SPEAKER_01: The floods always seem to gather.
SPEAKER_01: So God, in his judgment, sends a deluge of the flood in Noah's day.
SPEAKER_01: To say no more, to deal with sin, that points us towards God's final judgment, where sin will truly be made no more.
SPEAKER_01: But this judgment points us towards God's greater judgment, where his judgment is fully poured out, and that's on the cross.
SPEAKER_01: As Jesus is preparing to go to the cross, he says to his disciples, he asks them, Are you prepared to be baptized with a baptism that I'm baptized with?
SPEAKER_01: And he's not talking about his baptism with John and River Jordan.
SPEAKER_01: He's using the word baptism in its literal sense.
SPEAKER_01: It's an immersion.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus is saying, I'm about to be immersed in God's judgment.
SPEAKER_01: Are you prepared to walk with me through that?
SPEAKER_01: When we view the cross, we see ground zero for where God has fully poured out his deluge against the sin which disintegrates our humanity and creation.
SPEAKER_01: Christ has taken on the condition of our sin on the cross so that we can partake of his righteousness and new life.
SPEAKER_01: The cross is where God pours out his fullest, final judgment.
SPEAKER_01: But just as with Noah, who was delivered by means of the ark, and we read 7.16, was shut into the ark by God, we see that God supplies us with the means of deliverance as well.
SPEAKER_01: Just as Noah was shut into the ark, so too are we shut in, as it were, by the Lord, into the Lord Jesus Himself.
SPEAKER_01: The means of deliverance is our deliverer.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus says in John chapter 5, truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life.
SPEAKER_01: He does not come into judgment, but is passed from death to life.
SPEAKER_01: Friends, if you are in Christ today, you do not have to fear God's judgment.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord Jesus has taken that deluge upon himself on the cross.
SPEAKER_01: And now we can rest assured that we will not come into judgment on that final day.
SPEAKER_01: But we have passed, past, past tense, from death to new life through Christ.
SPEAKER_01: We are shut in by grace.
SPEAKER_01: So in Christ, sin moves God to deliver us.
SPEAKER_01: One scholar writes that the rescue of Noah demonstrates God's grace and judgment, which is a recurring theme in Genesis and throughout the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: Our sin deeply grieves God, and it also has consequences.
SPEAKER_01: But he has extended grace to us by placing the judgment on his son.
SPEAKER_01: Our flood is his cross, and his new life is our blood.
SPEAKER_01: So friends, the God who breathes, the God who judges, is the God who delivers.
SPEAKER_01: He is the God who shuts you in and we in by grace.
SPEAKER_01: He is the God who calls us to repentance.
SPEAKER_01: God is brotheling worms, but as those who so desperately need his grace to see our lives restored and renewed and brought back into alignment with his desire for our furish.
SPEAKER_01: And he is only so eager to supply us with that grace.
SPEAKER_01: That's the promise of the grace.
SPEAKER_01: So while sin disintegrates us, God restores us by grace.
SPEAKER_01: Behold, the Lord says, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth.
SPEAKER_01: But I will establish my covenant with you.
SPEAKER_01: And as new covenant believers, we can look to Christ and we can rest assured we do not come into judgment.
SPEAKER_01: But we have passed from them.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for listening today.
SPEAKER_01: We worship a generous God who calls us to follow Him and giving willfully, cheerfully, and sacrificially.
SPEAKER_01: Newsong Church's mission and ministry is one hundred percent funded by the generous gifts of those worshiping and journeying with us.
SPEAKER_01: If you'd like to offer a gift towards Newsong's ministry, please visit newsong period.ca slash giving for more information on how to do that.
SPEAKER_01: May God bless you and keep you today and every day.