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We begin this evening the study of the third creation story in the book of Genesis, so let us read some excerpts from the appropriate passages. It is Genesis beginning in chapter five and verse one. This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him.
Male and female created he them, and blessed them and called their name Adam in the day when they were created. And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years and begat a son in his own likeness after his image and called his name Seth. The days of Adam after he begat Seth were eight hundred years, and he begat sons and daughters. And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died. And Seth lived one hundred and m five years and begat Enosh.
And Seth lived after he begat Enosh uh eight hundred and seven years and begat sons and daughters. And all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died. And Enosh lived ninety years and begat Kenan, and Enosh lived after he begat Kenan eight hundred and fifteen years, and begat sons and daughters, and all the days that Enosh, all the days of Enosh were nine hundred and five years, and he died. Verse twenty one. And Enoch lived sixty and five years and begat Methuselah. And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years and begat sons and daughters.
And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years. And Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. Chapter six, and verse one. And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives of all that they chose. The Lord said, My spirit shall not always abide in man, for that he also is flesh. It shall his days be in hundred and twenty years.
The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bear children to them. Same were the mighty men which were of old, the men of renown. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. The Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the ground, both man and beast and creeping thing and fowl of the air, for it repents me that I have made them.
But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. The story goes on to tell how he was instructed of God and made an ark for the saving of his house and sundry animals. That when the ark was ready and the time had come, God told Noah to come into the ark. And that done, God shut the door, and the flood came. The result of which, I ask you to notice, is described in chapter seven verse 22. All in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life, of all that was in the dry land, expired.
And then we're told in chapter eight how that after the fixed time, the flood abated, and Noah became inquisitive to know whether it were appropriate for him or not, whether safe for him or not, to come out of the ark and begin life again on terra firma. And to help him decide, he adopted the following plan, Eight verse six: And it came to pass at the end of forty days that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made, and he sent forth a raven, and it went forth to and fro until the waters were dried up from off the earth. And he sent forth a dove from him to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground.
But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him to the ark. For the waters were on the face of the whole earth. He put forth his hand and took her and brought her in unto him into the ark. And he stayed yet other seven days, and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark. The dove came into him at eventide, lo, in her mouth an olive leaf plucked forth. So Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth. He stayed yet other seven days and sent forth the dove, and she returned not again unto him anymore. Sometime after that, Noah opened the door and set foot once more upon the earth.
His first act was to build an altar and sacrifice to God. God thereupon entered into certain promises and a covenant with Nir, guaranteeing him and his descendants regularity of seed time and harvest and of the seasons, guaranteeing to him also that God would not destroy the world with water anymore. In addition, sundry laws were now introduced, of which we have not thus far read in scripture. Let us read them from chapter nine, verse three: Every moving thing that liveth shall be food for you, as the green herb have I given you all.
But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat. And surely your blood, the blood of your lives, will I require. At the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of every man, even at the hand of every man's brother, will I require the life of man. Then verse twelve: And God said, this is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you, and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations. I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. It will come to pass when I sh- when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud, and I will remember my covenant which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh.
Water shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. The bow shall be in the cloud, and I will look upon it that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth. God said unto Noah, this is the token of the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth. God help us then in our study of his word. The major lesson that we are required to learn from this passage of Holy Scripture is clear for us all at once to see.
It is the lesson that the New Testament constantly repeats, a lesson which in particular Saint Peter reminds us of in his second letter, chapters two and three. The lesson is simply this, that in wi- within recorded history, Earth has suffered a major catastrophe. The lesson that Peter draws from that fact is that the law of uniformity, so-called, is wrong. There will come, says he, in the last days, scoffers walking according to their own lusts, saying, where is the sign and promise of his coming?
For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. In other words, what these mockers are appealing to is what is generally called the law of uniformity. That nature is so arranged and has so passed its time that always things have happened according to definite laws, and there have been no major irregularities in the course of nature and history. That theory, the law of uniformity, has in some quarters been elevated to a scientific theory, but it isn't true. Peter, uh, urges, uh, his critics and us today to observe the words of Holy Scripture, that within recorded history, there has been a major catastrophe.
And the next lesson Peter draws is, not only is the law of uniformity false, but that what God has done once, God will do again. He has promised he will never destroy the world with water anymore. But whereas in time past, God destroyed the world using the constituent parts of the world to destroy it with. So at the end of things, God will once more destroy the world using its constituent elements to affect that destruction. At the time of a flood, there was a world, says Saint Peter, standing in and out of the water, that is, more accurately translated, compounded of water.
And God used that very means, part of the constituents of earth, use the very means of its constituents to destroy it with. The present earth and heavens that are now, says Saint Peter, are stored with fire. We who have lived to see, uh, uh, the atomic bomb know exactly the dread significance of that fact, that our earth and our universe are indeed stored with time. And one day, when God's calendar says time, God will use the constituent atoms of this universe to affect its destruction.
The lesson which our Lord Jesus drew from the story of the flood is that we should constantly be on our watch and ever ready for his second coming. Because our Lord's second coming will come in certain respects like the flood came. When the flood came, all except Noah and his immediate family perished. It wasn't that they hadn't heard that the flood was coming. Noah had been preaching for many, many years.
It wasn't that they didn't know of the ark and of the possibility of salvation. Noah had been building the ark before them for a long time. It was that deep down in their hearts they thought it all nonsense, or at least something that need not be taken seriously. And so they gave themselves up to their daily occupations. They ate, they drank, they builded, they farmed, they married, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah enters into the ark. At the moment he did that, the flood came and took them all away. Our blessed Lord reminds us, therefore, that his second coming in power and great glory will be like the flood in that particular.
There will be no time for any last-minute preparation. His coming shall be like the lightning. It shall lighten from out of one corner of heaven to another. Men will be ready for that great event. They must be prepared well in advance. The writer to the Hebrews, whoever he was, he too draws on this ancient lesson of the flood to remind us that it was by faith that Noah built an ark for the saving of his house.
And a very good example it is of how faith joins with works. Noah, being warned of God, believed God. While as yet there was no evidence in particular that the flood would ever come, while still all he had by way of evidence was the naked word of God that the flood was coming. Noah believed God. And because he believed that judgment was coming, the good man did something about it. He said to himself, I have a wife and children here, and if I know that judgment is coming, and I really believe it, reason has it that I should do something for my wife and family and children.
And if taught by Christ and his apostles, we know too that judgment is coming. We show the reality of our faith by what we are doing about it. We cannot by ourselves, can we, construct salvation for ourselves? Salvation is a gift. But what about our wives and families and children? We really believe God's judgment is coming. We shall be active, doing something about the salvation of those we love and of men in general. And then the writer to the Hebrews observes another thing.
Says he that not only did Noah show his faith in God and his word by building the ark, but in building that ark, he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith. Now, other scriptures give us to understand that Noah was a preacher. And doubtless, in the course of his preaching, he had much to say about the terrible violence and corruption that filled the earth of his day and generation. But it isn't so much his preaching that the Epistle to the Hebrews is interested in. It remarks that just building the ark was a condemnation of the world.
Of course it was. What would you think of Noah, who, being applied to for a reason, Noah, old chap, why are you building this monstrous looking object here? Well, it's an ark, he says. An ark? What for? Well, God's going to flood the world. He's going to destroy the world with water, and here is his means for our salvation. I see now, and you're going to get into that ark, are you? And you're going to be saved. Oh, great stuff now. And what about the rest of us? Are we so wicked that we shall be judged and damned and doomed? Oh no, says Noah.
No, no, no. No, I don't mean to say that. I wouldn't like to say you're bad or that you'll be lost. What would you say to a Noah like that? I'd say, you stupid ass. You stand there building an ark because you say that judgment is coming on the world, and yet at the same time profess to believe that all the world will be saved. Your brain is more cracked than your scheme. So the fact was that in the very building of that ark, even had he never spoken a word, nor condemned the world. Now it is not our business to go around the world condemning people.
Our blessed Lord, it is said of him that he came not to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved. But the fact is, by the very preaching of the gospel, that there is salvation in Christ, the very fact of preaching the necessity of salvation, you do in a sense, do you, Mark? Condemn the world. Cannot offer Christ to me as savior and at the same time hold that they'll be saved even if they refuse him. The words of scripture are quite clear.
He that has the Son has life. He that is not the Son of God has not life, shall not see life, the wrath of God abides on him. These then are solemn matters. I wish simply to add one general observation from the New Testament, and then come back to study our passage, uh, in its own context. It is an interesting question whether the flood here recorded in Genesis was a universal flood, or whether it was in some sense confined and a local flood.
Scientifically, there is a good deal of evidence on both sides. Mark that, on both sides. Sometimes you, uh, as you read certain books, you would think there was only evidence for one side. There's a great deal of evidence for both. But once more, Saint Peter comes to our aid here by his reference to that law of uniformity that I mentioned earlier. Saint Peter quotes the flood as a catastrophe that has broken nature's normal uniformity. From the beginning of the creation, since the fathers fell asleep, all things have not continued in the same way, says Saint Peter.
Now, it is common knowledge that local floods take place all over the world with frequent rapidity. Bangladesh and the Wash in England, and who knows bits of Belfast from time to time, have their little local floods. They don't break nature's great law of uniformity because it is part of the normal, uh, scheme of things that there come floods, little local floods, from time to time. So then, if Noah's flood had been nothing more than one of these local floods, it would not, as Peter asserts it does, have broken the law of uniformity.
We are left, therefore, with St. Peter's inspired testimony that the flood was certainly a major catastrophe of the kind that did break nature's normal uniformity. But with those, uh, sundry and scattered lessons from the New Testament, let's come back now to study Genesis in its own right, to try and read the story in of the flood in the context in which the writer of Genesis has put it. In the second creation story that we have been studying in past weeks, we found that the main topic was man, and in particular what man was made of.
He was made of the dust of the ground, and what he was made for, his raise on death. We had also explained to us in the second creation story what we mean by life, saying that man has life, and therefore what we mean also by death. Now, in the third creation story, we shall move on to consider man once more, but this time, not what he's made of so much, as his constitution. You say, what is the difference then between what a man's made of and his constitution?
Ooh. Well, let me try and, uh, illustrate it. A car, a motor car, is made for the most part of so much irony kind of stuff. I don't know what it is, steel or tin or something. I don't know what it is. They rattle generally, so I expect it's some kind of tinny stuff. Uh, and that's for the most part. And then it's got a bit of rubber on it here and there, and uh, uh, and sundry other stuff. It's made of. But now if you were to talk of its constitution, then it wouldn't be enough to talk of its merely the material it's made of. You would have to say something about its parts and its working parts.
Uh, here's the engine. It would have a nice glossy, uh, beautiful blue colored body and delightful upholstery and delightful mess in the passenger seat. If there's an engine that's worth anything under the borough. Yeah. So the two great constituent parts are engine and chassis and body. Man, what's he made of? What are his constituents? What's his constitution? This, I submit to you, is going to be the theme of this third creation story. We shall see man, what he was as originally made, then how he went wrong, and how that going wrong effe- uh, affected not merely what he did, but what he was, and left him a freak, a something quite other than God had originally created, and how God was obliged to destroy man because he had thus become a freak.
And then we shall consider how not only did God destroy the freak, he made provision for salvation and for restoration, so that this should be the story of the first man, Adam, and then of a second man, Noah. The story of a first one that grew so evil it had to be destroyed. The story of a second world. And of course, as we read it, we should be aware we are talking of historic events in the past.
But as we reminded ourselves in our first study, the stories and histories of Genesis are also, in their turn, prophecies. Simply because the God who designs history and stands behind it, so ordered things that even his earliest dealings with men in the infancy of our human race should begin to sketch in the basic principles at lowly levels that the grand and glorious, uh, scope of his salvation should follow when it should reach its highest level.
So here we have the history of man's going wrong, the history of God's great act of salvation. I repeat, it is valid in itself as a history. But that early history of salvation comes, as presently we shall see, comes to be a prototype of that greater salvation that God offers us at the higher level. But, uh, to help ourselves grasp what we mean by man's constitution, we better start by giving ourselves a little lesson in elementary Hebrew.
It's not so fearsome as you might think. So would you have a look at chapter five again and verse one, Where the writer tells us, with great courtesy, right at the very beginning, what this part of Genesis is going to be about. These are the generations, this is the book of the generations of... And now comes a Hebrew word. Hebrew word is Adan. And the problem is to know how to translate it, because the Hebrew word Adan means two things.
It is a noun, a common noun, a general noun. The noun that describes the whole human species. Adam means man. Man as distinct from monkey or angel or rhinoceros. Man. But as well as meaning men, Adam comes to be also the personal name of the first male in this species, Adam.
Adam as distinct from Eve, his wife. Adam as distinct from Cain and Abel, his sons. So that means two things. And you must weigh it up each time, which particular sense has the word as it is used. This is the book of the generations of Adam, of the first man, perhaps. And yet, uh, it's going to be the story of man, the species man. In the day that God created, here comes the word again, in the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him, male and female created he them, and blessed them and called their name.
Will you notice that? And called their name, not Adam and Eve, but called their name Adam. That is, he called their name man. So generically speaking, Eve was a man, wasn't he? As well as Adam was a man. He wasn't a monkey, he wasn't a she-bear or something of the kind. He called their name man. And I do wish, but it's impossible. I do wish we could put ourselves back to these early days, what excitement and fun it all must have been. We've seen nowadays so many thousands of men and women that we get bored with them sometimes, particularly in the mass.
But what excitement if we'd have been there when the first ones, ooh, what is this? Oh, goodness, walking on two legs. What is he? An angel? His spirit? Man. And I do wish, but it's impossible. I do wish we could put ourselves back to these early days, what excitement and fun it all must have been. We've seen nowadays so many thousands of men and women that we get bored with them sometimes, particularly in the mass. But what excitement if we'd have been there when the first ones.
Ooh, what is this? Oh, goodness, walking on two legs. What is it? It's an angel. It's spirit? Or is it animal? What fun it would have been to see this new creature, the likes of which had never been before. And so interesting in this, that yes, it it it was animal. It got flesh if you pinched it, he Adam went, oh, if you pinched him. And yet it wasn't just animal.
It was spirit. And you would have been all agog to see what, uh, and investigate this new kind of, uh, uh, existence. Man. He called their name man. And look at that. Made him in the image of God. That is never said about any animal, however intelligent or loquacious. Made in the image of God as originally made. And yet at the same time able to reproduce.
For Adam lived so long and he begat a son. And the son was of his own image and likeness. And Adam lived, oh, so many years. And then it happened. It had happened once before, but it had then happened violently. Now it happened in the course of nature, as we say. Adam died. Well, alas, in Belfast we've got so used to him. Could you imagine the puzzlement of people when they saw it happen for the first time?
What had happened? It was old Adam. He'd been speaking a moment ago, but he's still there. What is he still there? Well, his face and his legs there. And yet, what has happened to the thing? What kind of a creature is it? I say it would have been fun, wouldn't it? In those far off days when everything was so new. He hadn't been made to die, though made in such fashion as it was possible for him to die.
And after the fall, with regular monot- monotony, like the payroll of some great factory, we read of all the generations, and he died, and he died, and he died. Sad. To watch a man made in the very image of God, says Holy writ, lying there and presently going rotten. Stinking. How terrible. You'll remember that this was one of the few things that reduced our Lord himself to tears.
Even after all those thousands of years. We read that when he came at last to Lazarus's grave, even after all those thousands of years, we read that when he came at last to Lazarus's grave, even though he were about in the next few moments to raise Lazarus from the dead, when he beheld the tomb and the revolting thing that death is. Stinking, as Martha observed, stinking. Jesus wept. Wet. Thus it went on until that normal, uh, event was, uh, found its exception.
Enoch, we are told, lived sixty and five years, and he begat Methuselah, and Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years and begat sons and daughters, and all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years, and Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. And what that means, the New Testament explains. By faith, Enoch was translated that he should not see death. And I, for one, believe the inspired apostle who said it. Enoch bodily trans- translated to God's heaven without dying.
You say, but is it possible for man to do that kind of thing? I mean, is it constitutionally possible? Was man so made that, uh, he could not only live on this planet, but live elsewhere too? Well, apparently so. And if you find it hard to believe in that ancient time, Enoch was an exception to the rule, and God interposed and broke once more that law of uniformity and translated Enoch without dying. Well, then please remember what the New Testament says. It affirms that what happened to Enoch shall one of these days happen on an infinitely larger scale.
At the second coming of Christ, at the last trump. For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and the living shall be changed. This I say, flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, says Saint Paul. And therefore, this mortality must put on immortality. This corruption must put on incorruption, and it shall happen indeed when the Lord comes. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first, then we which are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord shall be caught up together with them in the air, to meet the Lord, and so shall we ever be with the Lord.
So that the end we now observe was, uh, involved right in the very beginning. Man was so made that though he was, was suited to living in this world, on this earth, was so made that without ceasing to be human and without ceasing to have a body, he can be transformed and translated and made fit to dwell in that other world where God is pleased immediately to present, to presence himself.
It's the very glory of our salvation, isn't it? Wonderful thing. And Christianity here shows itself, as does Judaism, so very far different from the old Platonic philosophies and the Pythagoreans. They held that man's body was a bad thing, and that the real wise philosopher should practice a living death and keep himself as far away from the body as he possibly could. Regard the body as a prison house and long to escape from the body, and that the great goal was at last to get escape from the body and perhaps never return to it again.
The Hindu religion holds the same still, doesn't it? People feel that, alas, if their souls get too muddled up with their bodies in this life and they get stained with sin and so on, then they shall not immediately, uh, be released, uh, from transmigration, but shall have to come back into other bodies. They are bad and injurious notions. And the New Testament affirms this healthy doctrine that true man in his full constitution must have a body. Not a question merely of the salvation and the, uh, uh, the survival of the soul.
God's salvation shall involve the saving of the very body, for man is not a complete man unless body as well as spirit is saved. And as we think of it, we can't avoid saying, like the hymn says, can we, oh joy would you like, should we go without dying, no darkness, no sorrow, no pain, no crying, caught up in the clouds to the Lord in glory, when Jesus returns for his own.
But before we get on to that delectable topic, we must turn to consider how seriously man went astray and what a freak he became. I direct your mind to the first paragraph of chapter six. And here again, you will have to permit me to point out what the Hebrew exactly says. Many versions read chapter six verse one to this effect: It came to pass when men began to multiply on the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men. That is not what the Hebrew says.
The Hebrew says is this: It came to pass when man began to multiply upon the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto him, that the sons of God saw the daughters of man. In other words, chapter six is now going on with a detailed description of what happened to this new creature that you call man. What happened to the whole race, man. Well, it came to pass, says Genesis six, that when man began to multiply, man began to go exceedingly wrong.
There was violence, and there was lust, and there was wickedness, evil of thought as evil of deed. So much so that God decided to destroy man. Verse seven: and the Lord said, I will destroy man. Not I will destroy men or some men, but I will destroy man. I have finished with this new experiment, this thing called man. I'll wipe out the chaos and just be left as a fall with angels and animals. And God summed up his word in verse three.
Did you notice it? The Lord said, my spirit shall not always abide in men, for that he also is flesh. That is a difficult verse, in part because the Hebrew is not particularly clear. And some versions therefore read, my spirit shall not always strive with man. That is un- most unlikely to be the correct meaning of the Hebrew. It would appear that the better reading is, my spirit shall not always abide in man.
Not always abide in him, yet his days shall be so long. My spirit shall not always abide in him forever. Why not? Now I ask you particularly to notice the reason why not. For that he is. That is, this verse is commenting upon what man is. It is commenting on his constitution. My spirit shall not always stay in him because he is flesh. Now, this is a verse that used to be much beloved of evangelists, and God bless them, every one of them.
And they used to read it somehow like this: My spirit shall not always strive with man. Why not? Well, because if he rejects the gospel and goes on rejecting the gospel, there will come a time when my spirit will no longer plead with him. I used to read it, I say, as though it read, my spirit shall not always strive with man if he carries on rejecting the gospel. Well, now that's perfectly true anyway, so carry on preaching it, but that isn't what this verse says. He is commenting upon man's constitution because he is flesh.
Well, yes, of course, what is man anyway if he isn't spirit and flesh. In what sense does God say my spirit? Oh, well, let me give you a, a another Old Testament, uh, example of that. Psalm one hundred and four verse thirty reads like this. Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created, and thou renewest the face of the ground. It is talking about the life that God gives to creation. Thou sendest forth thy spirit, says God, my spirit shall not always dwell in him because he's flesh.
As we read those simple words and ponder them, and then go across to the New Testament for the New Testament's comment, we shall find a very interesting thing. That the words have meaning at two levels, as so many of the basic simple Hebrew words. In the ancient world, in the man's infancy, man could observe, though he didn't know much, he could observe that if you get somebody and drown them, what he calls the breath of the spirit of life goes out. And what you are left with then is a dead corpse of flesh, which presently goes wrong.
When mankind corrupted its way upon the earth, God destroyed them. But notice how and with what method. On a later occasion, when men became enormously wicked, God destroyed them by fire, but not on this occasion. God used a judgment that in itself was an education and an object lesson. He drowned man. Why drown him? Well, for that reason. If you get a man and put him in water too long, there happens to something physical, what the the early scripture calls the the breath of the spirit of life goes out.
And that breath of the spirit of life is a vital constituent part in man, and if he loses that, the flesh can't survive by itself. It is to be noticed that if you drown somebody and then lay him out on the bank, he doesn't just suddenly disappear. The body lies there. The flesh survives the departure of that physical breath. But, uh, survive is scarcely a word for it, is it? It still continues to exist, but you scarce would call it life, would you? It's an a a death that leads rapidly to corruption. And God destroyed man that way.
Why? Because this was true of man at the deeper level. Man in his constitution had been a wonderful thing. There had been angels before, and they are spirit, in the deepest and biggest sense of that word, spirit. And there had been animals before, and they were flesh. But in mankind, you had a wonderful thing. You had a new kind of a creature that was both spirit and flesh. And because it was flesh, yes, it had a lot in in common with the animal.
But because it was spirit, it will have fellowship with the very father of spirits. In its unfallen state, man's spirit was sovereign in the castle of his body. And all those appetites and affections, his intellect, his aesthetics, his physical appetites that constitute his flesh, are in subjection to his spirit, and his spirit in subjection to the Father of spirits, in happy converse with him. Man was spiritually alive, and therefore alive by the ends of his toenails.
And then what? A man rebelled. And man fell. The ancient word was fulfilled, and fulfilled literally. In the day you eat it, you shall die. And die man did. Not die physically at once. Died spiritually. And he said of every single member of the human race that was born since, except Jesus Christ our Lord.
As born into this world, we are dead in chest pieces and sins. We are, what the Bible says, carnal men, fleshly men, not having the spirit. Our own spirits cut off the fellowship of the Father of spirits. What happens then? When a man dies spiritually because his fellowship with God's spirit is cut, then the flesh starts to dominate, and in the end he goes corrupt.
It's not a pleasant object lesson to look at. Those floating bodies all bloated on the face of the waters. Neither, friend, is it a very happy prospect for God to behold a creature that he made magnificent. Flesh and spirit, made in the image of God, having gone astray, become a veritable freak. Something different from what God originally intended. My spirit shall not always abide in man because he also is flesh.
I mustn't leave you there. That is a gloomy story. We haven't now time to finish the whole of this third creation story, but we have time at least, haven't we, just to begin to consider God's salvation. What was it like? Well, first of all, it was a salvation from the judgment. But no, not so, that is wrong. When God saved Noah, it is not true to say he saved him from the judgment. Rather is it he saved him through the judgment.
Build an ark, said God to Noah. Get in it. When Noah got in that ark, the windows of heaven were opened and the fountains of the sea loosed, and from above and from below came the mighty floods of God's roar. The ark went through it. Had Noah gone through it, his own bare self, he must have perished. God provided him with a salvation that itself could go through the flood and come out the other side safe. And out the other side he came.
No wonder Saint Peter harks back to that story and sees in it a picture of our salvation in Jesus Christ our Lord, and in particular sees in it a certain similarity with our Christian baptism. Says Peter the Ark, you know, the like figure unto that nowadays, says Peter, is baptism. So then what is baptism? Well, as we know, when a Christian man or woman, when a person trusts Christ and they are baptized, a baptism, as Saint Paul says, is a burial.
We were buried by baptism, says Saint Paul, into Christ's death. Because the actual act of baptism couldn't possibly save him, could it? It is a symbol. And why such an elaborate symbol? And why a symbol that is a symbol of a burial? Why the need to go through that water? Why not just the cleansing? Now, because cleansing wouldn't do any good. Hm. Take those fallen men in Noah's day.
Carnal men, not having the spirit. Oh, there's no enough of few bits of water to cleanse them. No, says God, I'm not prepared to go on with a freak like that. The only answer to a freak of that order is to destroy it. Down them and bury them. The threshold of Christianity is baptism, which proclaims the same thing. As a result of the fall and our own personal sin, we are quite beyond the point of just being cleansed, having a little stain washed away, and we're all right.
Be nothing less, says God, than accepting my judgment. Death. Burial. Grace then does not perfect nature. I would be saved. I must come to that basic, radical repentance that owns that it's not merely that I do wrong, I am wrong. I'm a fallen creature. I am a freak. I deserve God's judgment. I deserve to be drowned, to be got rid of. So that is why Christ died.
Didn't come with merely some advice. Came to suffer the execution of God's wrath, the sentence of God on man as man, the end of all flesh. Just as the ark of Noah's time was able to go through the flood and come out the other side, which Noah never could have done, so our blessed Lord was able to go through the wrath of God and come out the other side. Therein is salvation for us.
If I have seen the gravity of my position as a man in Adam, then the way is open for me to enter the ark, to to receive. And when I receive Christ as Savior, Christ will ask me to confess my faith in being baptized by being buried, saying that is, I agree with God. There's God's judgment on me, I accept it. A wreck, a rival, finished. Having accepted God's judgment and sentence, I accept as a sheer undeserved gift the gift of resurrection life.
And now I came out of the ark to a new world, they who trust trials are thus saved from God's wrath, and they enter a new life. Now, that is not the whole of the salvation story. For God was not prepared merely to save Noah from the judgment and just leave him as he was before. Steps were taken with Noah that he might be a different kind of man when he came out of that ark from what he had been before. In our next session, we shall have to consider it. There is salvation for us. There is salvation in the sense of being delivered from the wrath of God, so that we can know and say and glory in it, there is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ even.
But in addition to that, there is salvation in the sense of making us anew, of making us into such men and women as God originally designed, as turning us from being carnal men and women into spiritual men and women. What our means to that glory is in, we shall have to consider on our next occasion. God write his word on our heart. It has been a solemn study, but unless we see the gravity of our ruin in Adam, we shall fail to enjoy the glory of our salvation in Christ.
