Do You Really Believe All That?
Kent opened with a lunch he'd had a few months back — a friend of his, a very intelligent man, an attorney, and Jewish ("a Jewish attorney in Miami — what are the odds?"). The man believes in God, but he isn't so sure about everything he reads in the Bible, and over the meal he put the question plainly: you seem like a relatively intelligent guy; do you really believe a man named Noah built a big boat, took two of every kind of animal aboard, and was carried through a flood? Do you really believe all that? Kent's answer was simple. If you can believe there is a God who spoke the entire cosmos into existence by the word of His power, is it really such a stretch that He could have one man build a boat and preserve the world that way? To his friend's credit, he said, "Hmm — I'll think about that." He's open to the truth. And that, Kent said, is where Genesis 8 meets us: not with an argument to win, but with a God who saves.
God Remembered Noah
The whole chapter turns on three words. Noah and his family had been shut up on the water for the better part of a year — forty days and nights of rain, then another hundred and fifty days of the waters prevailing, then month after month of nothing to see but ocean from horizon to horizon, not a marker anywhere to tell them the flood was even going down. Imagine the friction aboard that boat. (Kent recalled the old line that the rules for marriage are the rules of a life raft: everybody stay in your corners, make no sudden moves, keep all thoughts of impending disaster to yourself.) And then, verse one: "But God remembered Noah." Are we meant to think God had misplaced him — off admiring some spiral galaxy before snapping, "What was the name of that fellow on the boat?" No. When the Old Testament says God remembers someone, it means He is moving to show that person grace and favor. The word is used seventy-three times, and every single time God is extending mercy to save a life. We all know how it feels when a person we met once remembers our name — Kent told of Holmes Braddock, the Miami-Dade legend who, months after a single handshake, greeted him by name. If that feels so good, how much more to be remembered by God Almighty. It is, Kent said, one of the most beautiful sentences in all of Scripture. And its opposite is the most terrifying: "Depart from Me, I never knew you."
God Repeats His Mandate
Then God caused a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters began to subside. The word for wind here is ruach — the same word we translate spirit. It is the ruach Elohim that hovered over the deep in Genesis 1, the same mighty wind that would later part the sea before Israel, the same rushing wind that filled the house at Pentecost. The Spirit of God, drying off a flooded world. Noah sent out a raven, then a dove, then the dove again, until at last she came back with a freshly plucked olive leaf — and then went out and did not return at all. These birds weren't sightseeing, Kent said. They were on a mission. (We're a faith family on a mission.) And when the ground was dry, God spoke the same words He had spoken seven chapters earlier to Adam and Eve: go out of the ark, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth. His plan for creation had not been thwarted by the flood or by the fall of mankind into sin. It had only been delayed. God will accomplish His purposes with us or without us — and while you have breath, you have something to say about whether He does it through you, or merely around you.
Noah Built an Altar
Noah steps off the ark onto dry ground, and his first impulse isn't to run around celebrating. It's to build an altar. He takes of every clean animal and every clean bird and offers burnt offerings to the Lord — the first reference to an altar anywhere in the Bible, the first time a sinful, fallen man builds a place to offer sacrifice. And notice what that worship cost. Even here, at the dawn of a washed-clean world, for a man to be made right with God something has to die. Something has to shed its blood. Noah's gratitude wasn't a warm feeling he worked up on the shore; it was laid on an altar at real cost, by a man who knew exactly what he'd been spared. Kent remembered a one-on-one tour of the U.S. Capitol, standing in the Rotunda where four of the eight great murals depict people kneeling to thank God — Columbus's men in the sand, the pilgrims embarking for the New World. For those who know they have been delivered, the first impulse is to kneel.
It Wasn't the Ark, It Was the Grace of God
Here is where the whole account lands. God told Noah to build that great big boat, and the boat carried him through — but it was never really the ark that covered them and saved them. It was the grace of God. A hull of wood never earned Noah his rescue; from first to last this is the story of a God who saves the people who cannot save themselves. Which is why Reformation Sunday and Genesis 8 belong side by side. We are not kept afloat by our works, by our sacrifice, or by how fervently we manage to worship — we are saved by the grace of God, made manifest in Christ. God has sent us His Son, and it is His blood that covers us now. So stop inspecting whether your ark is well-built enough to save you. It never was. That is what this table is about: we call it the Eucharist, from the Greek eucharisteo, to give thanks. He rescued Noah, and Noah worshiped. He has rescued us — so let's come to the table and give Him thanks for what He has done in Christ.