CRAZY PEOPLE TRUST IN JESUS
Genesis 6:9-7:24
March 10, 2024
One of the things you have probably noticed if you have walked with Jesus for a little while, is that people look at us like we are a little bit different.
The Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:18,
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
We follow a God we have never seen.
We pray to a God we have never heard.
And on faith we put all the weight of this life in this God we have never seen that we know is real.
To the world that looks more than a little crazy.
Hebrews 11 is the Hall of Faith.
This chapter looks at the faith life of Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham and others.
These are people who stepped out in faith to follow God wherever He was leading them.
Imagine coming home from work one day and there in your neighbor’s backyard is him sweating away building this giant boat that is bigger than a football field.
And you go over and say, watcha doin?
And he says, God told me to build this boat, so I am building this boat.
What are you going to think about your neighbor, you’re going to think, “That guys crazy.”
All the people we would consider heroes in the Bible, the things they would do, the steps they would take, following a God they had never seen, the world sees that as CRAZY.
I believe we need more crazy people, don’t you?
We need some people to start loving people like crazy, serving like crazy, giving like crazy and being the people that God needs us to be to reach the people that God loves.
It’s going to take us stepping out of the ordinary and doing stuff somebody might just call crazy.
Maybe it’s time you get crazy!”
Crazy people trust in Jesus
Followin’ Him wherever He leads us
Crazy people are Kingdom seekers, and walk by faith believers
I hope and pray that describes the men and women of MACC, does this describe you?
To live by this kind of faith a person must be obedient.
The person we are going to study today, Noah, was that obedient servant.
Noah knew and teaches us that
OBEDIENCE TO GOD IS A MINDSET NOT A FLEETING FEELING.
Genesis 6:9-14, 22, 7:1-9,13-16
9This is the account of Noah and his family.
Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God. 10 Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth.
11 Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence. 12 God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. 13 So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. 14 So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out.
22 Noah did everything just as God commanded him.
7:1 The Lord then said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation. 2 Take with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and one pair of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, 3 and also seven pairs of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth. 4 Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made.”
5 And Noah did all that the Lord commanded him.
6 Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth. 7 And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood. 8 Pairs of clean and unclean animals, of birds and of all creatures that move along the ground, 9 male and female, came to Noah and entered the ark, as God had commanded Noah.
13 On that very day Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, together with his wife and the wives of his three sons, entered the ark… 16 The animals going in were male and female of every living thing, as God had commanded Noah. Then the Lord shut him in.
Noah’s neighbors didn’t take him seriously.
When the ark was built, the only people who boarded it were Noah, his wife, their three sons, and their son’s wives——eight people in all.
Nobody else wanted to be aboard that ark.
There was no water anywhere nearby.
There was no weather pattern that indicated that a flood was about to cover the earth.
So people ignored Noah and thought he was a religious fanatic or an outright lunatic and they just didn’t care about his message.
Quiz: Do you know the two biggest problems of our day?
The biggest problems in our world today are ignorance and indifference.
Now, I can only imagine how Noah must have felt at times.
I mean, when people are constantly saying all kinds of bad things against you, sometimes you just want to crawl in to a deep hole and stay there.
But Noah knew and teaches us that
OBEDIENCE TO GOD IS A MINDSET NOT A FLEETING FEELING.
WHEN EVIL SEEMS NORMAL, GOD’S COMMANDS SEEM CRAZY
Noah was not really crazy, but he must have seemed crazy to the people around him.
When the whole world is wicked, goodness looks odd.
When almost everybody ignores God, then someone who pays attention to God’s Word seems crazy.
Noah lived in a world where insanely sinful behavior had become so common that it seemed normal.
From the time of Adam to the time of Noah, the size of earth’s population shot upward, but the moral character of the people plummeted downward.
Listen to Genesis 6:1-4, When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. 3 Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.” 4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.
Here was a spiritual disaster so serious that God decided to take drastic measures.
But what exactly happened?
What does the Bible mean by “the sons of God“ marrying “the daughters of men?
There are two different ways to understand this.
One view is that fallen angels married humans and had children with them.
Elsewhere in the Old Testament, the phrase “sons of God“ clearly refers to angels (Job 1:6; 15:8; 38:7).
For this reason, many ancient Jewish and Christian teachers took “the sons of God“ in Genesis to be fallen angels.
These demons took physical form, mated with human women, and did some genetic engineering to produce the Nephilim, sometimes translated as “giants.”
They became known as heroes for their fierce courage and superhuman exploits.
In this view, the mating of humans with supernatural beings produced giant bodies, giant minds, giant actions, giant fame, and gigantic wickedness.
If demons found a way to mingle with humans, they were carrying rebellion against God to new extremes, and God made up his mind to stop it.
A different view is that “the sons of God” were men from the godly line of Seth, and “the daughters of men“ were women from the wicked line of Cain.
Genesis 4 describes Cain and his evil offspring, and Genesis 5 describes the godly line from Adam through Seth to Noah, so Genesis 6 may be saying that these two separate lines began to intermingle.
God does not permit people from godly families to marry outside the family of faith, but these sons of godly families chose to do so anyway.
They saw some good—looking women from ungodly families and decided that a woman’s looks and a man’s desires matter more than God.
The children of such marriages were heroic, even gigantic in some ways and became famous, but morally they were monsters.
When the only line of people faithful to God intermarried with the wicked and became like them, God began a countdown to destruction.
Which view is correct?
Is Genesis describing the mingling of demons and humans, or the intermarriage of a once godly line with the ungodly?
I don’t know if I can answer that definitively, however, what I can say definitively is that sin was running rampant and God was disgusted with it.
Jesus says that the world before his Second Coming will be like the days of Noah (Matthew 24:37).
Are we living in such a time?
I read an interesting article by George Barna in the Christian Post and I want to share some of it with you today.
Millions of uncommitted Christians are causing a “catastrophic decline in biblical worldview in America” because they have been poorly discipled in their faith and often don’t know how to pass on biblical values to their children.
Just 2% of parents with children under 13 were found to have a biblical worldview, while 94% had embraced syncretism.
Syncretism is described as a “hodge-podge mixture of competing and often conflicting worldviews.”
22% of parents of preteens in America are born-again Christians, and only 8% of them hold a biblical worldview.
Barna’s research shows that just 36% of 13 and 14-year-olds believe that God exists and is the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the universe, while only 1% of preteen children possess a biblical worldview.
“A majority of the youngest teens (61%) either believe Jesus Christ sinned while He was on Earth or hold open the possibility He did.”
“Not even half (45%) believe that God created the universe.
And an overwhelming majority believe that there are no absolute, objective truths.”
Barna encouraged parents who want to develop a biblical worldview in their children to first “understand that this is their primary task in life — to raise their children to know, love, and serve God with all their heart, mind, and soul. No other life task is more important.”
But you know what, the world finds that crazy…
No doubt that’s what people said about Noah.
In a time when demons dominated more and more people, when even people with godly roots fell in love with wickedness, Noah didn’t fit.
But sometimes it’s better not to fit, it’s better to let the world think you are crazy and obey God.
Look at 6:22, 7:5, 7:9, and 7:16…it says, Noah did all the Lord commanded him.
Noah was obedient when evil seemed normal.
Crazy people trust in Jesus
Followin’ Him wherever He leads us
Crazy people are Kingdom seekers, and walk by faith believers
WHEN EVIL SEEMS NORMAL, GOD’S COMMANDS SEEM CRAZY
Next,
NOAH KNEW GOD WAS WITH HIM
It may feel more comfortable to fit in with everybody else.
But what if everybody else is on the wrong track?
What if everybody else is doomed?
When the Bible describes God’s pain and rage at human wickedness, it uses the language of human emotion.
But no words can fully express how God’s heart reacts to evil.
God does not wink at human evil or say, “That’s okay. I don’t mind.“
No, when God sees sin, he thunders, “That’s not what I created people for. If that’s what they’re going to be like, I’m going to wipe them out.”
God didn’t just “hate the sin and love the sinner.”
He decided to wash the earth clean.
Man, I know this isn’t popular, we want to think of God as a condoning grandpa, but he is not, yes he is fully love, and perfect love at that, but he is also 100 percent justified in his judgment.
And you know what, he doesn’t need our permission to carry out his judgment.
He doesn’t need our approval, though many Christians I believe, believe that.
Have you ever heard preachers or Christians apologize for God’s wrath, because it doesn’t fit into our cultural ideas that everybody deserves to win.
After Genesis gives a grim description of human sin and God’s wrath against it, the tone abruptly changes with two words: But Noah. Genesis says:
But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.
This is the account of Noah.
Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God. Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth (6:8—10).
What a contrast between Noah’s family and the rest of the world!
But Noah!
The world was under God’s wrath, but Noah was under God’s grace.
The world was rotten, but Noah was righteous.
The world was wicked, but Noah was blameless.
The world was godless, but Noah walked with God.
Noah didn’t do all of this because he was naturally so good.
Noah had a sinful nature like everyone else.
The Bible says that when God looked at humanity before the flood, he saw “that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time“ (6:5).
And even after the flood, when Noah and his offspring were the only humans left, God said that of humanity that “every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood“ (8:21).
Noah had a fallen nature that tended toward sin.
On his own Noah would have been as rotten as anyone else.
But Noah wasn’t on his own.
Noah had God.
The Bible says that Noah found favor, or grace, in the eyes of the Lord.
It was God’s amazing grace that accepted Noah and made him different.
Noah lived by faith in God’s grace.
This enabled him, in spite of his sinful nature, to be right with God and righteous in his conduct.
This made him “blameless,“ a man who served God with integrity and dealt with his own faults honestly and promptly.
Noah wasn’t perfect, but he was blameless in the sense that sin did not dominate him or keep the upper hand over him.
Nobody could deny the power of holiness in him.
By himself Noah was as weak and wicked as anyone, but “Noah walked with God.”
Noah may have seemed crazy for being so out of step with other people, but he was in step with God, and that was all that really mattered.
That’s all that really matters for you and me as well.
On our own, we’re as bad as anyone else.
Even the most devoted follower of Jesus Christ has to admit, as the apostle Paul did in Romans 7:18, For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.
Church Reformer Martin Luther said, “Without the Holy Spirit and without grace man can do nothing but sin and so goes on endlessly from sin to sin.” “This knowledge of our sin is the beginning of our salvation,” in that “we completely despair of ourselves and give to God alone the glory for our righteousness” in Christ.
If you think you don’t need God and are fine the way you are, you will keep getting worse, as the people in Noah’s time did.
But if you recognize your sin, give up on yourself, and seek God’s grace in Christ, you will find favor with God, as Noah did, we call this repentance.
You are weak, but God is strong and can keep you from living a life of sin.
Your greatest need is not to be like other people but to have a closer walk with God, to know God is with you.
The closer you walk with God, the more you will seem like a misfit to people who don’t know God.
But that’s okay.
Moses wrote in Exodus 23:2, “Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong.”
And David said, in Psalm 1:1, Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers,
Crazy people trust in Jesus
Followin’ Him wherever He leads us
Crazy people are Kingdom seekers, and walk by faith believers
NOAH KNEW GOD WAS WITH HIM WHEN IT SEEMED EVERYONE WAS AGAINST HIM
So, what does it look like to be a crazy person standing up for God in today’s world.
I believe it looks like, Adam Zajac, the father of an 11 year old son who was exposed to pornographic literature in the public school library.
Adam’s 11-year-old boy made a statement at a school board meeting in Maine by reading from an explicit book he said he took from his middle school library.
The excerpt he read recounted a sexual interaction between a 17-year-old boy and an 18-year-old man.
His father, Adam Zajac, also addressed the board during the Windham Raymond School District meeting on February 14, telling attendees that his son had also been asked by the librarian if he wanted a graphic novel version of the book.
The access of children to certain books has become a divisive issue in America, with some parents encouraging the exposure of children to increasingly modern sexual concepts, and others complaining they are being prematurely sexualized.
The book featured in the Maine meeting was Nick and Charlie by bestselling 28-year-old British author Alice Oseman, which tells the story of a high school relationship.
Her popular book, Heartstopper, which was recently turned into a Netflix series, tells the story of the same pair beginning their relationship aged 15 and 16.
After the boy delivered the passage, his father came to the lectern.
‘I’m that kid’s father. That’s my son, 11-years-old and went to his library and found it by the entry door of our library. This is the smut that he is finding, alright?’ said the boy’s father.
‘I don’t care whether it’s gay, straight, bisexual, or whatever the terms are for all of this stuff – it doesn’t need to be at our school. It doesn’t need to be at my 11-year-old’s library,’ he added.
Deemed crazy by a lot of people with secular worldviews, Mr. Zajac takes a stand.
I am not sure whether Mr. Zajac has a Biblical worldview or not, but at least he is taking a stand.
Which a lot of us aren’t even willing to take a stand.
Noah was not the last woodworking preacher whom people thought was crazy.
Jesus was a carpenter who preached the kingdom of God and called for people to repent.
Jesus said that he would judge the world and that he himself was the only way to be saved.
Jesus warned people to get ready.
But many rejected Jesus and his message.
Some religious experts said, “He…is raving mad. Why listen to him?” (John 10:20).
On at least one occasion, even Jesus’ own family said, “He is out of his mind” (Mark 3:21).
Jesus seemed crazier than Noah had seemed.
Maybe the gospel of Christ as Savior and Judge sounds crazy to you.
How could a poor, despised man be the Son of God?
How can this person getting nailed to a cross be the only way for people to be saved?
How can faith in the crucified Christ and in his blood poured out for your sins be the only way for you to survive on Judgment Day?
It may sound crazy, but it is the ultimate wisdom.
In a world gone crazy with sin, God may sound foolish, but his apparent foolishness is our only hope.
Jesus died to save all who trust him, and he is coming again to judge the world.
Don’t scoff at this, and don’t be intimidated by those who do scoff.
Believe the gospel.
Build your life on Christ.
He is the only ark of safety.
