Introduction:
Studies in the Book of Genesis chapter-by-chapter that explain how the world was created and God’s original purpose for our relationship with him – and how it all went wrong when Adam and Eve decided they didn’t need His guidance – they’d manage their own lives in their own way. Sound familiar? But a loving God didn’t give up on them — and this narrative from the Old Testament has refreshing insights on how to walk by faith today.
Man’s Distrust of God – The Fall - GENESIS
The Life of Faith 4 Genesis 3 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Loved ones, you remember that statement of Jesus, “Look at the birds of the air. They don’t sow and they don’t gather in the barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And why do you take thought for you life. You cannot add one cubit to your stature. Look at the lilies of the field; they don’t toil or reap, and yet your Heavenly Father has clothed them. Will he not much more clothe you, oh ye of little faith? So, take no thought for tomorrow for what you shall eat or what you shall drink for your Heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. Seek first His kingdom and all these things will be added unto you.” [Matthew 6:25-33] That’s the way we’re meant to live Monday through Friday, Saturday, Sunday, year in year out: we’re meant to live a life of faith, a life of relief, of rest and peace. We’re not meant to be popping the valium, we’re not meant to be glaring at the TV set to try and hypnotize ourselves out of our problems. We’re not meant to be looking forward to the next vacation to escape from the pressure. We’re meant to live, brothers and sisters, day by day in peace and rest — that’s it. And, if you say to me “Brother even in this hectic world?” Yes loved ones, the plan is for this world. Jesus has so arranged that by his death and resurrection that it is possible for us to live like that in this hectic world, and that’s what we’re trying to talk about these Sunday evenings. I’m hoping that we go right through the Bible, chapter by chapter. If we keep going its only 25 years! But, I’m hoping that we’ll do that in order to see how you and I can live the life of faith — live in rest and peace in our Father. Not constantly worrying about what the boss is going to do. Not constantly worrying about what our friends our going to do. Not worrying about what the politicians are going to do or the economy is going to do, but resting in God, in peace and in faith, and in quiet, and in healing strength. That’s it. We’ve covered Genesis 1, which describes how God made the heavens and the earth, and then we covered Genesis 2, which talks about man and his creation and his relationship to God and what his response to God was. And now, in Genesis 3, we’ve been discussing the great catastrophe that destroyed the whole plan that God had made. Genesis 3, loved ones, is the historical record of the fall, we call it — or man’s rejection of trusting God and his decision to trust himself. So, maybe you’ll look at that in Genesis 3 then. You remember in the first seven verses, God outlines to us the nature of the fall. Delorian [the auto maker] probably exemplifies it well. God presented it to us as a tree of knowledge of good and evil and a tree of life. The tree of knowledge of good and evil is not just knowing what is good and knowing what is evil, God wants us to know that through trusting him and listening to him. But the tree of the knowledge of good and evil stands for us using our own know-how to make it the way we want to make it as opposed to trusting God for his life. Delorian gets into trouble and uses his knowledge of good and evil to deliver the old Delorian motor company out of trouble any way he could. So he gets in touch with the people who bring the heroin into the country or the drugs, and he determines, “I’ll lift myself out of this by my own boot strings and by my own knowledge of what is good and what is evil. Indeed, I’ll determine what is good and what is evil for myself.” Now that’s it, you see: whether you live that way or whether you live trusting God for the strength and the life and the direction that you need. So, let’s turn away from Delorian, he’s just such an obvious example. But what about all we saintly people here; what about the way we tackle the whole marriage thing? What about the way we tackle meeting the right girl or the right guy — we despise the computer systems, and we despise the old wives tales about getting yourself into the right place where you’ll meet some nice guys or you’ll meet some nice girls, but still we end up playing the game, instead of trusting God. Or, we trust him until 30, 35, 40 years old, and then you get desperate, then you begin to try the old knowledge of good and evil. Loved ones, there are thousands of us who have worked ourselves into marriages that we should never have been in because we decided, “forget it, God, you obviously have not got this part organized. I’m going to use my own knowledge of good and evil to get in here.” Same with jobs, isn’t it? See, it’s not that you don’t use your knowledge to do the job, you do. If you’re a computer expert you have to use your knowledge. But it’s this business of using our own knowledge of good and evil to get a certain job. We determine, “I want this kind of lifestyle, therefore, I need this kind of job, and the only way to do that is to get this kind of qualification, that’s what I’ll do,” and we end up with our own closed little universe that ends up in a perfect hell. Instead of trusting God, being ourselves, doing what he has given us the abilities to do with all our heart whether it pays well or not, and allowing him to lead us on from that. Those of us who have found our way in life know that we have to come back to that. I certainly know it in my own life. Those of us who have ever come to any reality in our lives eventually give up trying to maneuver ourselves into this spot that we thought was good. We said “Forget it, we’re never going to make anything but a mess of our lives if we do that. I’m going to do what you give me to do Lord, and it’s up to you. Leave me here in this corner, unknown and unsuccessful and a failure, financially and professionally if you want, but Lord I’m going to trust you. I’m going to trust your life.” So that, loved ones, that’s the nature of the fall. It’s not to do with sex — there’s no apple mentioned anyway, but it’s not you eat of the tree of knowledge and then all the business of the fig leaves means it must have been sexual intercourse — that’s silliness. Sexual intercourse is God’s good plan for those of us who are meant to be man and wife together in his will, but it’s not something evil that caused the fall. The fall was that independence of God — the thing that you and I deal with day by day. There are always two ways to go in every decision. Do I use my own knowledge of what is good and evil to get what I want? Or do I trust God and trust his life to come through me? One brings about an uptight life that you have to maintain by you own cleverness and shrewdness. The other brings a life of rest and peace, so they are very different. Now, maybe you’d look at the consequences of the fall and you find it there in verse 8 of Genesis 3. I’ve tried to title that “Man’s Own Guilty Response.” “And they heard the sound of the Lord, God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” So when there’s furtiveness in your own life about anything, or when you’re trying to evade God on some issue, or you’re trying to hide from something that comes through your conscious, or something that you read in a book or something that some speaker says to you or some friend says to you and you know that’s a touchy subject, that’s a sore point, and you start hiding behind the trees of the garden; wherever there’s furtiveness in your life, wherever you try to play a little clever with God on some issue, you know that you’re involved in what caused the fall of man in the beginning. So you’re involved in something that is going to take you out of the joy of the life of faith. That’s it — so you can know that — and most of us are pretty sharp that way; we know if there’s anything that causes you a little furtiveness and you find yourself skirting around a little tree and hiding behind it, or wherever you’re kind of playing fast and loose with the whole thing, or you’re playing cutesy with something and God has come right down the line and you’re saying “Oh I wonder does it mean this or this”, or things that have doubt in them; “I wonder if he means me to smoke or does he not, well, I’m not sure.” Well, if you’re not sure, that’s doubt, and whatever is doubt is not of faith and whatever is not of faith is a sin, so stop smoking. It’s pretty simple; whenever you find yourself playing around with something — with a Penthouse magazine or with a Playboy magazine or you find yourself watching some TV program and you don’t feel quite good about it and you know there’s a little furtiveness — get rid of it because it’s the very opposite of faith. Here is faith, it’s Hebrews 10:22 and this is the only way to go before God for something in your own life; “let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.” You see the combination there, “let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith.” Now, how can you have full assurance of faith? Oh, have your hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscious and your body washed with pure water — have your outward acts clean, have your inner conscious clean and clear from guilt, then faith rises in your heart, that’s it. Faith is a glorious, confident approach to God because you’re not hiding from him on any issue. That’s it. That’s why David would ask God to vindicate him according to the integrity of his heart. “God, look at my heart, is there anything that hasn’t integrity there? Answer me according to that, I have nothing to hide.” So it’s good; prayer is not a tricky little thing — am I praying the right prayers? Am I feeling the right way? Am I using the right words? Prayer is the faith of Jesus rising up within a clean conscious and blasting out to God in full confidence that God is going to answer. That’s it — so keep away from furtiveness. The problem is not faith, you know. Some of you sit there and think, “I wish I had George Mueller’s faith.” Even George Mueller hadn’t George Mueller’s faith; he lived that life by the faith of the Son of God. It was the faith of the Son of God rising up in George Mueller to believe for all that money for those orphanages. It’s the same with you — you don’t need George Mueller’s faith, but you do need the faith of the Son of God and that faith will come into you if everything’s clear between you and God. Loved ones, do you see the next verse [9] “But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?’” God had a fair idea where Adam was and he didn’t need his geographical position outlined on the map, but it was God saying “I’m losing touch with you — where are you? I used to know exactly where you were, exactly what you were thinking, but I sense there is something a little fuzzy around here. I feel I’m losing touch with you. You’re fading out on me. I’m losing you in the midst of all the interference in the atmosphere.” God usually indicates that to you – “I’m losing you.” And you know it fine well — you know it at that moment too. You sense “I’m losing you Lord” and you have a little more trouble getting through in prayer. That all comes from this not trusting God, this disobedience, this guilty consciousness, and this playing furtive with God instead of coming right out in the open and saying “you’re right, Lord, that’s wrong, I shouldn’t have anything to do with it, that’s wrong”. Then you see verse 10 “And he said ‘I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.’” Really, God wants us in complete faith to be willing to be naked and to be seen as we are, that’s it. Forget all the clothes stuff, that’s not where it’s at, but it’s this business of when you’re living in trust of God you don’t care who sees you as you really are. I know that changed in my life — when I was satisfied that I was accepted by God because of Jesus and because of his blood, then I didn’t really care what other people thought of me. And I confess now I never think much about what I’m like — I’m pretty dumb in a lot of ways, but I don’t really care what you think of me. I am what I am and I’m going to be that, and it might not be much but I’m going to be that. It seems that God brings you a great readiness, you know, when everything’s clear between you and him and you know you’re doing what he wants you to do, and you know you’re being what he wants you to be. Then you’re willing to be naked and willing for people to make fun of you if necessary, and to be what you are. But that’s, of course, the beginning of trust between other people as you begin to see here in verse 11. “He said, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I’ve commanded you not to eat?’” That is interesting, loved ones; God immediately knew that the reason Adam was kind of ashamed of himself was because he was beginning to try to establish his own reputation and his own confidence by his knowledge and his understanding of life. If you think of that, that’s the same with us; whenever we start trying to take our reputations upon our shoulders; whenever we get into that position where “We’re gonna show the boss; we’re gonna prove to these people; we’re gonna prove to these colleagues and our parents; we’re going to live this life successfully.” Then suddenly you become very vulnerable to other people telling you, “Well you know, you’re not so great.” So when you take on the task of running your own life and defending your reputation, you’d better look out for a lot of trouble because that’s quite a big task that you’re taking on and it won’t be long before you’ll begin to feel others are saying “Look, the emperor has no clothes. Look, you’re naked — you think you’re good but you’re not good”. Once you start living by your own cleverness or your own shrewdness or your own abilities, that’s quite a treadmill you’re stepping on to. You have to keep that baby turning until you die. That’s a long time — that can be 70 years for several of us and 80 years if God gives us strength. That’s a long treadmill to be on instead of, of course, the life that God has for us — be ourselves. Might not be great, might not be wonderful, but we’re what he made us and we’re doing what he gave us to do. God knew “Now who told you that you were naked?” He knew that the guy wouldn’t have felt naked at all if he had just been willing to trust God and be what he wanted him to be. But as soon as you begin to live by your own wits and your own cleverness you begin to compare yourself with other people. Do you realize that that’s not a life of trust? Do you realize that you’re all different? I know I keep saying this to all of us, but you’re all different. You’re not inferior to the person next to you; you’re different from the person next to you. You might be inferior in the way you sing, you might be inferior in the color of your hair, but that’s according to the way the world thinks. According to what God thinks, everything is beautiful in its own way and you’re beautiful. You’re an original; there’s nobody like you. So if you ever go to God and you say “What do you think of me?” “Think of you? You’re the only one of you that I ever created in the whole universe. I think you’re the bee’s knees. You’re the apple of my eye. I love you. There’s nobody else like you. I live in you in a way that I live in nobody else in the whole universe, nor will ever live.” It’s when you live by the knowledge of good and evil and you start getting into this game of a grade curve which we apply to everything, and we start accepting the opinions of mankind and societyit’s then that we begin to say “oh, compared with that one, I’m naked”. Maybe she’s the one that’s naked. Maybe it’s just the lies in our society that make her appear to be well clothed. Would you like to be Delorian today? No. But, would you like to have been him a year ago? Well, so you see it’s rather silly. There’s only one person you should be and that’s you and you are not naked: you are different from everybody else and God sees you as that. Verse 12, I joke about it, but I think we men are not the only ones that say it, but I know as a husband I have often said it; The man said, ‘The woman, whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate,’” In other words – “It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me, it was her.” And, that’s what happens when you don’t trust God, when you don’t have faith in him — you have to look around for somebody to blame, and that’s the attitude of the old self, isn’t it? The self that exists on its own has to justify itself. When you accept that you have been crucified in Christ, and that everything that needed to be done to you has been done, and you have been raised in him and it doesn’t matter what other people think of you it only matters what God thinks of you, then there’s great confidence. You have great confidence, and you feel that confidence. If God comes and says “You did that wrong,” you say “You’re right, I did”. Or if you come to me and say “You did that wrong” I say “That’s right”. Or if I come to you in that condition and say “Do you know — that isn’t a good thing that you have in your life”, you say “Yeah, you’re right.” There’s no self-justifying. There’s no self-defense. There’s just, “If that’s true, let me examine it” or “Yes, you seem to be right, I am wrong. I’m going to change.” That’s the mark of the sanctified life; the life that is filled with the Holy Spirit. Not so much a life that never makes an error, a life even that never, never sins, but a life that has a penitent, soft heart; that is free from sin within. Sin within is that independent attitude that wants to defend itself and assert itself and prove that it’s right. And the sanctified life is a life that is freed from that, because it no longer feels that it needs to prove that it’s right. It’s happy to say — oh I remember Stanley Jones used to say — “if God says you’re wrong, you have to say you’re right Lord, I’m wrong and when he says you’re wrong, never say you’re wrong Lord, I’m right.” Always agree with God. That’s the life of faith. It’s a quiet life, but the life that doesn’t trust God is always looking for somebody to blame. It’s quite interesting; John Shank shared something with me a week ago that he had read about this. I’m sure he doesn’t do this, of course, in his marriage at all! But in verse 12 he read in a book “You notice the man said ‘The woman who thou gavest to be with me. I mean, it’s the one you gave me; she gave me to eat of the tree, big baby that I am. It’s the one you gave me, she gave me.’” Loved ones, if you have that blaming attitude in your life, it is probably because you’re not filled with the Holy Spirit. It is probably because you haven’t really taken your place with Jesus on the cross and reckoned yourself to be dead indeed unto sin, alive to God in Christ Jesus — it is. If you find within you that tendency to want to find some reason for what you did other than your own sinfulness; if you find yourself saying to God, “Well Lord, if you had given me different circumstances I would be a different person. If you had given me a different nose or a different voice, or if I had been brought up differently, or if I had lived in a different place, or if I had that person’s education, or if I had that person’s money, or if I were only married like that person is.” All that is blame, blame, blame. You see saying, “Lord, the woman that thou gavest to be with me — the situation that you have given me, the set of circumstances that you have provided me with; they’re what causing me to sin and to fall down” God says “You are just excusing yourself and you’re not trusting me. You’re standing over there against me, trying to prove to me that you’re justified in living independently of me, that’s what you’re doing.” He sees right through us. So loved ones if you find yourself blaming, then see that there’s a spirit inside you that is not at rest. I’m not saying you’re terrible sinners, you are, but that’s not the big issue that you’re terrible sinners or you’re going to hell — though you are if you keep going that way — but that’s not the issue. The issue is you’re missing the rest of faith; you’re missing the peace of trusting God. If you’re still at that business of “The woman that thou gavest to be with me; she gave me of the fruit and I did eat” then you’re still saying, “Lord, if you had given me different circumstances, a different wife, different,” forget it — that’s not peace — no wonder you can’t sleep at night. That’s not rest. Rest is “Lord, thank you. I give thanks to you for all things and all circumstances for this is the will of God for me in Christ Jesus. Lord, thank you I am like I am. Thank you I have this nose with a bump on it. Thank you I have this hair. Thank you that I have this job. Thank you that I have this money. Thank you Lord. Thank you for that. And now, Lord, I’m going to live tomorrow happily and joyfully and trust in you.” That’s it, see, it’s a whole different attitude. The other attitude, “The woman that thou gavest to be with me”, causes the ulcers, the tightening of the muscles, the constricting of the blood vessels that bring all the sickness and the headaches. “In headaches and in worry, vaguely, life leaks away” — all that comes from blaming, blaming, blaming, instead of thanking, thanking, thanking. Do you know that tomorrow, Monday, will be absolutely different if you go to it thanking God; “Thank you for this Monday, Lord, and thank you that I’m me, and thank you that you’ve made me like this, and thank you that I have this job to do, and thank you I have this car to drive, and thank you I have this house to live in, and this apartment to live in, thank you, Lord. Thank you, and I look forward to this day Lord, and I know you’re going to work it to the counsel of your will.” Your day will go completely differently than if you get up in the morning wondering how it’s going to go. That isn’t just neutral; that’s unbelief. That’s unbelief. That’s believing that God is not going to work everything according to his will. So when you get up and you think “what kind of a day is this going to be” there’s a little guy that we always picture with horns who jumps right in there and tells you “I’ll tell you the kind of day it’s going to be.” So don’t get up like that, get up saying “This is the day the Lord has made, we will rejoice and be glad in it.” God answers faith — that’s not power of positive thinking. Power of positive thinking is “Zippidee do da, zippidee eh, my oh my what a wonderful day,” which is pretty good, but it isn’t faith. Faith is faith that the Father loves you, has made you especially for himself, and there’s a job for you to do that day and he is already planning that day to work according to the counsel of his will. You’ll find the day begins to go differently if you live in faith, that’s because you open the resources of Heaven into that day, do you see that? But he requires that you do that, he won’t do it automatically. Loved ones, that’s verse 12 and the woman was, dear love you ladies were at least better than we men, verse 13; “Then the Lord God said to the woman ‘What is this that you have done?’ The woman said, ‘The serpent beguiled me and I ate.’” At least she didn’t blame God for giving her the serpent. The man blamed him for giving him this woman, “The woman that thou gavest to be with me.” The woman at least was honest, “The serpent deceived me and I ate.” The serpent’s job is to deceive. Doesn’t let you ladies off the hook, but it is true that certainly the man blamed God for what gift he had given him as the cause of his fall, and the woman said “The serpent deceived me.” The serpent is about that business every hour of our lives; trying to deceive us. So we need to pray for each other that the Holy Spirit will give us light, because, loved ones, I don’t know, some of us may be great sinners here this evening, probably we aren’t. Probably we aren’t all jumping in and out of bed with all kinds of other people’s husbands or wives, and probably we aren’t all on heroin and doing all kinds of terrible things. But we still are living in a life of sin in that we’re not living a life of open restful faith in God as our Father so we’re not living joyfully. In that sense we’re sinners, you know. We’re just very respectable and noble sinners, but we’re still sinners. Of course the Holy Spirit’s task is to undeceive us; to show us where we’re hiding behind trees of the garden; to show us where we’re blaming other people; to show us where we’re not happy with what God has given us. I pray that he will give you light. Let us pray. Dear Father, we do see so plainly how we’re waking up in the morning thinking just that; “Well, what kind of a day is today going to be?” Oh Father, we see what a down right sin that is right there, because you have promised that you will work all things according to the counsel of your will. You have told us “rejoice in the Lord always and again I will say rejoice.” You have told us not to be anxious for tomorrow for tomorrow will take care of itself. You have told us to have faith in you and you have told us “this is the day that the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.” So Father, we repent and would turn from that unbelief and doubt and we intend to get up tomorrow morning saying, “Father, thank you for this day. Thank you for myself. Thank you for my life and my job. Thank you that they’re ideally suited for me at this time.” Lord, we’re going to receive everything by faith instead of receiving some of them and making judgments according to our knowledge of good and evil about the rest. Lord, forgive us. Forgive us for our reservations. Forgive us for our judging of you, our God. Forgive us for our desire to take some of what you have given us and resent some of the rest. Lord, if you’re not God of all, you’re not God at all. We ask forgiveness, Lord. We intend to take it all as from your hand, lovingly screened through your fingers, the very best that you can give us and Lord, we intend to stop the blaming and to stop finding scapegoats for our own sin. We intend to hide behind no more trees of the garden, but to live out there in open faith in you and trust — where you can see us and where the faith of Jesus rises up within us, to pray with prayers that are filled with faith and filled with confidence of an answer. Now, the grace of our Lord Jesus, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with each one of us, now and throughout this coming week. Amen.
God’s Saving Penalties - GENESIS
The Life of Faith 5 Genesis 3 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill There was a doctor talking on television about the problems we have with getting a good sleep at night. And because we were worn out and desperate for good sleep, many were reaching for the old sleeping pills. The experts were saying that too many of us took sleeping pills with very little thought or very little consideration. And it was interesting to hear the way he put it. He said that it was all right taking a sleeping pill for perhaps a few nights, up to maybe two weeks but once it got over two weeks, you ought to go to the doctor and find out why you are experiencing insomnia, otherwise you could be doing real damage to yourself, but he did put it that way. It’s all right — maybe you lose a job or maybe you experience the death of a loved one and so you take a sleeping pill so that you can get to sleep. And it was interesting to hear again the way the ordinary person, who doesn’t know about God at all, tackles things. Maybe some of us here tonight tackle it that way. But do you see that is not a faith way? That is really a way of knowledge of good and evil. That is, “Okay, I can’t get to sleep so I’ll take a sleeping pill, now I’ll get to sleep and that’ll get me to work next day and I’ll get through the day. And then if I can’t get to sleep tomorrow night, I’ll take another sleeping pill and I’ll get to sleep and I’ll get through the day.” That kind of attitude, “I’ll manage this some way or other by using men’s methods, I’ll get through my life” that’s eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And really, when a loved one dies God expects us to have released that loved one to him and to relax and to trust him with that dear one. It’s the same when we lose a job — God expects us not to continue to be all filled with knots in our tummies and with worry and strain in our hearts and our minds, he expects us to deal with the obvious trauma that you feel immediately when you lose the job. Then he expects us to come around; to commit our way unto the Lord and to trust in him, knowing that he will act, and then to go to bed and to sleep deeply and well. In other words, the Father expects us to live by faith in him, not by faith in our own ways of overcoming our difficulties. And so that’s why we’re studying the Old Testament, first of all, these Sunday evenings, and trying to cover it chapter by chapter; in order to see how faithful and how dependable God is for you and for me so that we’ll begin to relax into a life of faith. And loved ones, that’s the way the Father intends us to live. So if you use sleeping pills that way, don’t get all uptight and say, “Oh, I’m sinning, I’m sinning” that isn’t the issue. The issue is that that’s eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It’s using men’s strategies and men’s ways of overcoming some malfunction in our personalities instead of going to the Father and finding out why this malfunction is taking place and beginning to relax and rest in him. Maybe it would help some of you to nail it down even more in your own lives if I tell you of a loved one that came up here this morning. I won’t outline to you the particular medical and personal problem that she was facing, but she suddenly realized that her attitude up to now had been, “Let’s get the battery of tests. Let’s get the doctors at it. Let’s get everybody at it and let’s somehow overcome this thing.” And the error was not in using the doctors. The error was not, even, in having tests. But the error was in assuming that God can’t do much about this so I’d better take the best that man can offer me and somehow get this thing sorted out. And loved ones, that’s an attitude of non-faith, you see. And so many of us, I think, juxtapose faith and action — isn’t that right — we kind of say, “Ah, then you don’t expect me to act at all?” Yes! Yes! They had to walk around the walls of Jericho. They have to touch the leper. They have to do all kinds of things, but it was action as directed by the Father and by their trust and confidence in him. It was not action that resulted from the attitude, “This isn’t anything God can do anything about. It’s up to me to sort this one out myself.” So that’s the life of faith and the life of the knowledge of good and evil. And that, you remember, is what we saw in Genesis 1– how God made the earth and the heavens and then he gave us men and women the responsibility to be fruitful and to multiply and to fill the earth and subdue it. That was our task. We were to bring the whole earth into order under his will. Then in Genesis 2 we found out how we were to do that; we were to do that by eating of the tree of life. And as far as we can see it is by trusting him, by putting our faith in him and by believing that he would give us the life and the energy and the initial direction to bring the world into subjection to his will. And then in Genesis 3, we saw the great fall, as it’s called: the rebellion of us human beings against our God, not, strange enough, saying, “We’re not going to be fruitful! We’re not going to multiply! We’re not going to subdue the world! We’re not! We’re not!” That wasn’t their fall that wasn’t their rebellion. The fall and rebellion was, “Sure, we’ll multiply and we’ll fill the earth and we’ll subdue it, but not by your life and by faith in you, but by our own ability to work out what is a good way to do this and what is an evil way to do this; by our own knowledge of good and evil, by our own manipulating the facts of this world, by our own trial and error, which is really the scientific method; if you remember, the scientific method is really experiment — trial and error — by our own manipulation of the factors in this world we’ll bring it into subjection.” And that was the rebellion. So it’s maybe good to remember that we ourselves are trying to do what God wants us to do. That’s not the fall; the fall is doing what God wants us to do by our own knowledge of what is good and evil, and by our deciding what is the good way to do that and what is the evil way to do it, rather than in resting upon him. The result is, of course, we immediately get preoccupied with ourselves. We forget, actually, the original commission and I think that’s true of most of us. I wonder how many of us in our jobs, are thinking, “Oh, Lord how can my job bring the world into order? How is my job bringing your world into submission to your will? Indeed, Lord, that’s the very reason I’m doing my job — because I believe you have put me here with these abilities so that I can bring the world into subjection to your will.” Most of us aren’t saying that. Most of us are saying “When we saw that the tree was good for food and it was a delight for the eyes, and that it was to be desired to make you wise, we ate of it.” In other words isn’t it true that most of us, and certainly most of the world, looks upon jobs or work not as a way of bringing the world into subjection to God, but as a way of getting food for themselves, getting some delight to the eye, some happiness for themselves and making themselves appear wise, getting some sense of importance and significance for themselves. And so the rebellion is trying to do what God wants us to do by our own knowledge of good and evil and therefore ending up preoccupied with what we can get from the world rather than bringing it into subjection to his will. That’s the fall, loved ones, and you remember that last Sunday we talked about man’s guilty response to God when he took that action. Now one of the difficulties I’d point out with God’s own position, once we did that, was we would probably bring the world into some kind of order. We probably would. Knowledge of good and evil is something he has planted in the world and the fact is that we have enough of his image in us that we would probably bring it into some kind of order and so we do manage through irrigation skills to make the dessert blossom as a rose. We do, by cutting this part of the body and that part of the body, originally by bleeding, you remember, and really medicine today is just a slight advance on that — we cut out the bad part and hope that the good part will blossom. But we are able by our own methods, to bring some kind of order to the world. Even if you look at the most hideous example of it in the communist state; they do bring some kind of order into the world. Even if you look at China, at least the billion people have more food than they had before. And so you’re able to bring some appearance of order to the world and so God’s whole task was in the midst of the degree of the success that we would have, to point out to us, “You’re not doing it right. You’re not doing it right. This wasn’t the way I meant you do to it.” And that was one of God’s great tasks — to build in enough signs that we weren’t doing it the way he intended, that we didn’t trust him, that we weren’t living in faith in him, that he could expose Satan’s deception. Because you remember at the beginning, it was deception. The woman said, “Oh, the serpent deceived me and I ate and then I gave to my husband.” So God’s great task was to build enough signs into the fallen world that we would realize that there is something that isn’t right here. And that’s why, loved ones, I thought it would be reasonable this evening to talk about God’s saving penalties because that’s really what they were. And towards the end of the chapter, God’s saving precautions. I think the Father can show us some things about our own life of faith as we study this. So maybe you’d turn to Genesis, Chapter 3 verse 14 — the saving penalties go right down to verse 19 and then the saving precautions go from 20 to the end of the chapter, to [verse] 24. Loved ones, the first thing that God did in verse 14 was “The Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, cursed are you above all cattle and above all wild animals; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.’” God built into the life of the serpent and into the animal world a fall and a descent that was not in his original plan for them. So when you read about nature you read about the animal world that had shared the fall that we men and women experienced before God. The fact was that God put the world under our care and when we rebelled against God and we fell out of his fellowship, what was under our care fell out of his fellowship too, and he allowed a whole spiritual disintegration and dislocation to take place in the animal world and that’s why we often see so much cruelty in the world of the animals. Really the will of the God is for the lamb and the lion to lie down together that was God’s plan originally but when we rejected his will and rejected faith in him, the strain that began to operate in us spread to the animal world itself. You can see how it works even here in our own world. I remember the last little dog we had, a little Yorkshire; he knew when we were at peace with each other and when we were strained. He knew almost before we did and it would be funny, but to this old Irish joking that goes on, he could tell when it was a good joke and when it wasn’t a good joke; when it was just a funny joke and when it was a joke with a little bit of a prod in it. It’s amazing how the animals have an instinct that connects them in some deep, deep way with the way you and I operate and live. So even in that example you can see how we are connected with the animal world. Many great lion tamers would say, “Of course – an animal knows when you’re at peace; it knows when you’re a master over it and it knows when you’re not.” So we can see physic or psychological ways how we can connect up with the animal world, but the truth is loved ones, there was a deep spiritual dislocation that took place in the animal world at that time. And the reason of course it took place was, God wanted us to see that things are not the way they were meant to be: things are not perfect, things are not right. There is cruelty and savagery in the world of the animals. So that was one of the saving penalties that continue to remind us today that things are not right. Then you see in verse 15, “I will put enmity between you and the woman.” Here God was speaking to the serpent, as he stood for Satan, because it was Satan that took hold of the serpent and whispered to Eve. [God said] I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed.” In other words, Satan, you are going to have seed in this world and she will have seed. And eventually her seed, who will be born of the house of David and eventually of Mary and Joseph; her seed, a human being, a man born of human parents, shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. And so it’s interesting – “you, Satan yourself, will bruise his heel but it will be her seed that will bruise your head.” And obviously what God is promising even at that stage when he’s imposing a penalty upon mankind he’s saying “But there’s going to be a deliverance from this; right now, in the middle of the rebellion and fall, I’ve already planned deliverance. I’ve planned that you, Eve, will have a son that will have a daughter that will eventually have a little one that will be born in Bethlehem and that little one will grow into a man that will be able to stand against Satan and take back what Satan has deceived you into giving up.” And so even in that penalty there was the promise that Satan would be destroyed. Loved ones, we need to see that right back then God had condemned Satan to death. So all of us need to see that Satan does not have power – really! God through Jesus put Satan under his feet. He destroyed Satan and Satan only has deceiving and lying ability. So often you will see what looks like his power, but it’s really him deceiving others into manipulating powers that are of God. Every time you see lust it is really the power to propagate the race that is being exercised by man in his way without God’s control. Every time you see gluttony you see the legitimate desire for food being exercised beyond what God planned and by man’s own desire and by man’s own plans. But it’s always Satan’s manipulating powers that God alone has placed in the world. It’s good to see that — God can always prevent his powers from being used against you. He can always give you light and life to see that his powers cannot be used against you — there is no power that Satan has. His only ability is to deceive and to lie and to bluff and to manipulate or pervert the power that God has placed in you. So there is a sense in which it’s good to be afraid of Satan in the sense that you watch out for him, but it’s bad to be afraid of him in a sense because once you know, “Ah, that’s Satan” one little word will fell him because, in fact, God has destroyed him in Jesus. And so actually you fail to believe the victory of Jesus over Satan when you think you have to struggle with him. “I have to struggle! How will I overcome this?” So you face a certain attitude of your boss at work or you face a certain attitude of someone in the house or in the family and you think, “Oh, how am I going to destroy that? It’s such a mighty power.” No – it only appears to be a mighty power, but Satan has already been destroyed by Jesus and all you have to do is believe that and say, “Satan, get thee behind me.” And that’s, you remember, what the Bible says, if you just repel him, he will flee from you. That’s all you have to do, just resist him. Just resist him and he’ll flee from you. A lot of us see satanic situations and satanic atmospheres in the office or at work or in somebody else’s life and we think, “How are we ever going to overcome it?” Just resist it. That’s all. Just resist it and it will flee from you. And that’s God promise because God right back there settled Satan’s destiny; it was settled at Calvary in Jesus. Then you see in Verse 16, “To the woman he said, ‘I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing.” So presumably you mums were to bear children originally without any pain at all, and presumably the world was to be without pain, but God said “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children,” and presumably that was to continually bring before us that all was not as God had planned it. That’s it; God was trying to build in enough signs that we would know that this isn’t the way it was meant to be. And I think some of you ladies have had experience of natural childbirth and you’ve had experience of how when you’re relaxed in the Father and you’re resting in him, a great deal of the pain can be avoided. And it seems that as we come into a place of deeper and deeper peace in Jesus, then these saving penalties can be turned around and we can be freed from them. “Yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” And of course, that was the original penalty. You remember how it was transformed by Jesus’ victory on Calvary. It’s no longer “yet your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you” but in Ephesians 5:21, “be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” It’s a mutual subjection and a mutual submission and a mutual cooperation. It’s no longer just the woman desiring the husband, but the woman again uniting with the husband and fulfilling the commission that God has given. Then in Genesis 3 verse 17, “And to Adam he said, ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and eaten of the tree which I had commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you.’” And that’s why earthquakes began to take place. Some of us say, “Why did earthquakes take place? Why did natural disasters take place? Surly the only explanation for the fall of the natural world is that Satan fell and it was that fall of Satan who was originally in charge of the world.” No; God says clearly “cursed is the ground because of you.” So a great dislocation and strain and agony was brought into the world itself. It wasn’t the original plan of the Father that there would be floods and earthquakes and destructive storms — that was something that God brought in so that we would see, “Wait a minute — things aren’t right here; we’re not doing it right. We’re being deceived ; we’re living here by our own knowledge of good and evil and not by trust in God.” And so “cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you.” Presumably there were no thorns and thistles in the original plan. There were no things that did harm or did damage, so there is now that subtle balance of nature where certain scavengers are needed to keep the natural world in balance. Before the fall that wasn’t needed; the natural world would be in balance itself — in peace and freedom from strain. But it was then that God brought in all the kinds of scavengers that balanced the whole thing together. So it works and is permitted by God, but it is not his original plan. “And you shall eat the plants of the field.” Remember that ties up, loved ones, with that verse in Romans 8:20 where you read that God arranged this so that we would realize there was a deliverance possible from it, “for the creature was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now” and we do know that. Every time you read of the mudslides in California, every time you read of the forest fires, every time you read of the hideous earthquakes that destroy millions of people you see, yes, the whole creation is subject to futility and it is groaning and there is something that is rotten in this whole setup that was not God’s original plan when he said, “Behold, it is very good.” You can see the importance of seeing this and how this deals with a lot of the problems that we talk about when we discuss the problem of evil or the problem of suffering. Sure, all these things have come into the world since man rebelled against God and the world itself began to share the strain and dislocation of life that its original lord, mankind, experienced. Then in verse 19, “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread” and that is a saving penalty – “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread.” I don’t know what you think of work, but I think a lot of us think, “Ah, yeah, work — it’s a punishment for our rebellion against God.” But you can see in all of these saving penalties that there is something saving in them, so many of us who are naturally lazy and self-indulgent have, by work and by the necessity of work, been pulled out of ourselves. And who of us would question that it has been the need to get up in the morning and get out to work to earn our money that has delivered many of us from crippling indolence in our lives and laziness? Many of us probably would testify to the fact that the sheer demand of work each day has drawn us out of ourselves and has done a great deal to make us what we are today. So work itself and the regularity of work and the commitment to work is part of God’s saving penalty and its part of what he uses to deliver us and save us. It isn’t terribly important, in a way, the work which we do, as you look at Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3:10. It’s why many of us are silly — it’s understandable because our world puts such emphasis on what you do; do I teach or am I a doctor or do I clean floors? Our world is always after significance and security so it makes a big thing out of those. God’s word doesn’t; Ecclesiastes 3:10-15 “I have seen the business that God has given to the sons of men to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time; also he has put eternity into man’s mind, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; also that it is God’s gift to man that every one should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil. I know that whatever God does endures for ever; nothing can be added to it, or anything can be taken from it; God has made it so, in order that men should fear before him. That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already has been; and God seeks what has been driven away.” So many of us have worked our way through, “Oh I want to be a train driver or I want to be a fireman,” and so many of us have worked even through our more serious ambitions and begin to see that it doesn’t matter too much what you do. What matters is that you enjoy it and you do it with all your heart; if you’re laying bricks that you’re doing it with all your heart, and if you’re brushing floors, that you’re doing it with all your heart. It really isn’t very important what you do; that’s part of mankind’s fall that emphasizes that it’s vital. It’s vital that you’re a politician! It’s vital that you’re a doctor! It’s vital that you’re a scientist! It isn’t. What’s vital is “I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live.” Also that it’s God’s gift to man that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil. I would imagine those who are older than me and certainly those who are as old as me, would echo that: enjoy what you’re doing. Enjoy it. I don’t think I have any regrets, but if I think I was stupid in any way, I think I was stupid if I ever spent one half hour wondering would I be a teacher or a minister or would I be a garbage collector or would I be a custodian or would I be a builder. Wasting one minute wondering about that is wasting too much time. So don’t get caught up over “What am I dong? What am I doing?” Be happy in what God has given you to do — that’s it. There’s no great difference between being this and being that; it’s enjoying what the Father has given you. There can be, too, loved ones, a real lack of faith and real rebellion against God in our preoccupation with what we’re doing. There can be a discontentment and an unwillingness to be responsible in what he has given you. After all, he works all things according to the council of his will so doesn’t he know what you’re doing at present? Well, wouldn’t he change it if he wasn’t happy? Wouldn’t he? Hasn’t he the power to do that? Hasn’t he the power to bring a job up tomorrow that he would prefer you to be in? Well if he hasn’t done that, then what you’re in at the moment is God’s will for you. Now why not relax and enjoy that and thank him. Really why [you complain] is because there’s a little worm inside your head that keeps saying, “Yeah, but I like to do this.” Well, that’s beside the point — it doesn’t matter what you like to do; God knows you better than you know yourself and he knows exactly what you need to be doing and what you need to be doing is what you’re doing today, at this moment. There is nothing, loved ones that brings such joy and such delight in your life as giving up the business of being your own employment counselor. Really! There’s nothing that gives you so much joy as realizing, “Wait a minute — I’m not an employment counselor so let me not counsel myself about further employment. I’m this or I’m that, so let me do it with all my heart.” And that’s how work is part of God’s saving penalty to us. In verse 19 “In the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread until you return to the ground. For out of it you are taken, you are dust and to dust you shall return.” J.B. Phillips, C.S. Lewis, they all think the same: that probably God’s will was for us to live forever so that there would be no death. There wouldn’t be sleeping which is all death is. Remember — none of us will die, not even those who reject God will die. They will live on and on forever, burning in their own selfishness. But all of us will live forever; we are made eternal beings and we will live forever, but God allowed death to come in to show us there is an interruption of what is perfect and good in this world. So death probably came in as a saving penalty that God imposed on us. And then the ones, if you would look for a few minutes at God’s saving precautions, because he had to make some. Verse 20: “The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.” Eve is the Hebrew word for life, for living and it shows that right in the midst of the fall; God was beginning to enable life to go on. He was making plans for the human race would continue to propagate. And so that was a precaution: he allowed man to continue to propagate even though it was the woman in pain, and then in verse 21, “And the Lord God made for Adam and his wife garments of skins, and clothed them.” It’s interesting that in order to produce the skins of course you had to kill, and that’s the first mention of killing in the Bible. Those animals that were killed, that was the first blood that was shed and was really a sign of the blood that would have to be shed for all of this to be redeemed through Jesus. And so, in a way, that’s the first sacrifice that God had to make in connection with his own creation and the connection with his own son, when he provided the skins. But maybe equally important is that God made all kinds of concessions to us. We weren’t really meant to wear clothes. We didn’t really need to wear clothes if we trusted him and we trusted each other. But that is a sign of many of the concessions that God has made. There are all kinds of things in our world that God has allowed. Take watches — I don’t think we’re really meant to wear watches! There wasn’t really meant to be time and schedules but God, in order to enable us in our fallen state to exist in this finite world, allowed all kinds of things to happen that would make it possible for us to exist in this world, to live in it. And so really, presumably, we were able to fly or we were able to move through space at tremendous speed. Presumably the old time machine theory is true — we were able to move from century to century — presumably there were no centuries; it was one great eternal moment. But God allowed all kinds of concessions like that to be built into our life even as he gave us clothes to cover us to enable us to exist in this new state of self-consciousness and even in a state of distrust. This is amazing how good God has been to us and it is incredible when you think that he continues to give us a new life that we might curse him. It’s an amazing will of God that he continues to give us life that we might use his son’s name in vain. That is great love and it continues to support us and sustain us even as we use that life he gives us to destroy his own creation. And yet God has great forbearance towards us; he gives Israel a King even though he thinks a King is not best for them. And he often gives you and me things that are not best for us, but he allows them to come to us because they enable us to live a little longer so that we have a chance of coming back to him. And loves ones, if you look at verse 22, “Then the Lord God said, “Behold the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.” In other words, he no longer trusts us, he know longer submits to me, “and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and He can live forever. In other words, if I let him now receive the spirit of eternal life, and eat, he will live forever” and of course, destroy the universe. He will be able to exist anywhere in the universe because life forever is also omnipresence; it’s a triumph over time and space and it’s an ability to go through the universe and to spread this selfishness. So God said, “lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever — therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.” God withdrew the opportunity to be filled with his Holy Spirit; the tree of life is the Holy Spirit, in order to prevent the spread of our evil and our selfishness throughout the universe, and therefore, causing him to throw the whole thing over and destroy everything, he prevented us getting the Holy Spirit and he only gives the Holy Spirit actually, in Acts 5:32 as you remember “to those who obey him.” So it’s only when we come back into a place where we say, “Father, we’re happy to be what you want us to be” that we begin to sense the gentle current of the Holy Spirit begin to fill us with rest and peace and trust. You probably have experienced that yourself at tragic moments in your life; you often come back again to a deep submission to God so you try to make this friendship work that will lead to marriage; the thing falls apart and at that moment, late on at night, you relax in the Father’s arms and for that moment, you submit to him. And it’s interesting, isn’t it; you sense the Spirit of peace and quiet — the Holy Spirit, coming back into your life. Then you get up the next morning and begin to get uppity again and make new plans to bring about another marriage or to bring about another job or to bring about more money or to bring about what you want in life. And every time you back away from that and begin to trust the Father, there comes that sweet Spirit — peace and joy in the Holy Spirit — back into your life. So it is that God has a flaming sword that cuts you off from the Holy Spirit every time you are living for yourself and that flaming sword is cast away every time you sink into God’s arms. Any questions, loved ones since that’s the first three chapters. I had hoped to do that about two weeks ago. It’s necessary to spend, I think, more time because it is so complex, the understanding of the fall, or our understanding of it is so poor. Question from the audience: Clyde was asking is there is any significance in the two clauses, he, Jesus shall bruise your head Satan and you shall bruise his heel. Answer: It seems, Clyde that the commentators say you’re right; not only is it to please the Lord to bruise him — you remember in Isaiah 53, “it pleased the Lord to bruise him”, but the significant thing is that Jesus will bruise Satan’s head. Satan will simply bruise Jesus’ heel and he will wound Jesus, but not unto death, so Jesus rose from the dead in triumph. But if you like to look at the footnote for Revelation 12:9 you see that it was a bruising of Satan’s head that took place there, not simply bruising of his heel. “And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world — he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.” And then you remember there was further mention in Revelation in 20:2, “and he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed over him, that he should deceive nations no more till the thousand years were ended.” And a thousand years would end, and then finally he was cast into the lake of fire forever. So it seems that that’s part of the meaning of time. Question from the audience: inaudible. Answer: I don’t know the Hebrew word for bruised so I can’t help there. Any other questions? So getting back to the sleeping pills, we should ask the Holy Spirit “Holy Spirit is there any way in which Satan is deceiving me? Is there any way in which the strain in my life or the pain in it is caused by my not trusting the Father for everything? Will you show me that?” Loved ones, the truth is that probably in a thousand ways, we’re using our own clever knowledge to bring things about. That perfect peace and rest comes from a relaxing in your Father and believing that he has put you here, he has your life organized, he has it all planned. His Holy Spirit is specifically sent to reveal that to you so you don’t need to fret and you don’t need to worry and you don’t need to be anxious. You need to relax in the Father’s arms to say, “Father, thank you. Thank you that I have my job that I have at present. Thank you that I can do it with joy, day by day. And thank you that I can relax in you and begin to follow your guidance for my life.” And you see loved ones, that doesn’t result in passivity; that results in a life of great activity, but an activity that stems from peace. Remember there’s the last line of that poem by Rubert Brooke that “If I should die, think only this of me; that there’s some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England.” It was written by a young pilot during the first Word War. And then he says at the very end of life he will be absorbed into the eternal; “in hearts at peace under an English heaven.” And hearts at peace — that’s the way we’re meant to live; full of gentleness and hearts at peace. Let’s just ask the dear sprit of Jesus to reveal to us if there’s any way in which our hearts are not at peace. Let us pray. Dear Holy Spirit, we know that the Kingdom of God is peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. So will you kindly make us aware of why our hearts may not be at peace? Dear Holy Spirit, you know that strain and striving seems to be the very air we breathe. The whole world seems to be full of it. We’ve even been brought up to cherish those virtues. Dear Holy Spirit will you reveal to us if there’s any way in which we’re not resting in the Father’s arms, nestling into his heart, hearing the beat of his heart, and putting our ears close to his lips to hear what he wants us to do. Dear Lord, as you pass beside us now, each one of us, will you free us? Will you release us? And as we are relaxing, letting the frowns go from our foreheads and the worries and the anxieties and the fretting go from our hearts when you enable us to be content and to lie in our Father’s arms and begin to do what he wanted us to do. Dear Father, show us what you want us to do. Father, we don’t ask it now because so often if you give us the knowledge then we start going after that so we don’t even ask you to show us. We say to you Father, we trust you that you will show us the next step, and one step is enough for us. So we thank you. Thank you now. Thank you as we relax into you and commit our way unto the Lord and trust in him we know that you will act. Thank you, Lord. Thank you. We commit ourselves to you now for a good deep, sleep tonight, and peace and rest in the brightness and joy of your presence in the world. Now the grace of our Lord Jesus, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with each one of us, now and throughout this coming week. Amen.
Living By Our Own Strength - GENESIS
Faithless Living Genesis 4 by Rev. Ernest O’Neill We’re so used to strain in everyday life that it’s hard to get hold of the idea that we are meant to live in peace, we really are, we’re meant to live in peace. And it is possible to live in peace, loved ones; it is possible to live in peace and deep faith in God and that’s why we’re talking in these Sunday evenings about the life of faith. Because the truth is that when you are disappointed in something, if somebody let’s you down, or something doesn’t work the way you thought it should work, that’s really the time when God is trying to get you to stop using crutches and to lean on him. It’s really a good time — I’m with you — I feel just the same as you do; when those moments come, you think, “Ah, that person let me down or that thing didn’t turn out the way I thought it would” or some happiness that you had planned doesn’t come about. But it is a time when God is trying to wean you away from all the little happiness’s that we create. It is so hard for us to see it, but that’s what we’re doing; we’re trying to create a little world of little happiness’s and little good hopes that will keep us going without him and he’s just gently coming along and pulling these crutches out from under us and telling us, “Look, if you will lean on me, and I appear to be nothing — I know you can’t see me — but if you lean on me, I’ll strengthen your legs so that you won’t need a crutch.” And that’s what he’s doing so be patient as he works. We are going through the same thing, and it is his goodness that allows these things to come in. So that’s why we are talking about the life of faith, and I thought it would be good to start at the beginning of the Old Testament and go right through it and allow God to speak to us about himself and encourage us to lean on him more in our own lives. So that’s how we reached Genesis 4. Genesis 4 has something very real to say to us; it’s the record, you remember, of Cain and Abel. So if you turn to it loved ones, I’ll share with you the way God showed me we should begin the study of this chapter. You’re lying in bed at night and you feel a sharp pain in your side and you spend a miserable night. You get to the doctor at his office the next morning and he diagnoses appendicitis. He arranges hospitalization and sets up the surgery and the operation for you for the next week and meanwhile he says, “Here are some pain pills, they’ll keep you going until you’re able to get into the surgery.” Well, you take the pain pills and you remember next week is vacation week, your annual vacation, and you’re feeling better. And three weeks later the poor old doc is still trying to get you to go for that operation. He’s still persuading you, “Look I know you feel better with the pain pills, but believe me, if you keep going this way, the appendix will burst and you could die.” And in a way you’re as good as a dead man or as good as a dead woman if you keep on going around like this; walking as if you’re not really sick. Now that’s exactly the situation at the end of Genesis 3. God started our hearts beating and then he said; “Now I want you to organize this world that I have given you, and I want you to organize it by faith in the supernatural life that I have given you to start your heart beating. I’ll give you more of that supernatural life if you acknowledge me and trust me. I’ll give it to you and I’ll keep giving it to you.” And we, of course, began to feel the old heart beating inside like that dear guy who’s struggling at the moment, with that artificial heart. And we began to think that these batteries were actually generators. We didn’t realize that it needed to be charged and we began to feel “Ah, good, this heart is so strong, I’ll be able to organize this world with the life that I have without receiving anymore new stuff and we’ll be able to be the gods of creation by the life that we possess.” And so that’s what we did. God kept warning us — he said “Listen, if you try to do this by your own knowledge of what is right or wrong, without receiving from me more of this supernatural life that I gave you to start your heart beating, you’re going to die, and you’re going to be cut off from me forever.” But we refused to believe that and very much like the guy who was warned he had appendicitis or the girl that was warned she would have to have an operation, once we got the pain pills and kept going for a while, we began to feel “Nah, we can do this on our own.” Now of course what happened was, as we began to live independent of God, and as we began to do without his Holy Spirit, so the lack of the Holy Spirit actually took the same toll on us as the lack of blood flowing to your brain. I don’t know if you realize it, but one of the things that concerned them about the guy who was on the artificial heart was that he wouldn’t get sufficient blood to his brain and the brain could be damaged permanently. That’s what happened as we began to live without the Holy Spirit; our personalities began to be affected and they began to deteriorate. And as we began to live trusting just in ourselves and our own resources, our minds began to be impaired. And actually your mind isn’t the mind that Adam had, you know. The mind that Adam had was way beyond even the mind that Einstein had; it was a mind that worked perfectly and could move by the intuition of the Father directly and was able to discern all kinds of things that our poor impaired minds cannot. And our emotions were not as unbalanced as they are now. Our emotions were once beautifully balanced in absolute peace all the time, but our emotions began to be unbalanced, and these old bodies were not as weak as they are now. I don’t know if you have read about that disease that seems to be passed on through homosexuals, but then through blood transfusions and is now attacking children? It breaks down all their immunity, all their ability to have immunity against germs. Now that’s just an extreme example of the way our bodies are much weaker than they were when God originally made us. And so our whole personalities began to be effected through lack of receiving the Spirit of God’s supernatural life into us. And of course our personalities themselves became utterly corrupted. They were meant to work from the inside — from a sense of God’s love of us and a sense of our spirit being fed with his Spirit. And then we were meant to feed that out through our minds and emotions, and not through our bodies, to other people, so that we actually would be absolutely self-contained in God. That is; we wouldn’t need anything from each other we would simply give to each other because we were full, as Jesus was, of love. We wouldn’t give to each other because each other needed it, but we would give something because we were filled with life and love. And of course all that was reversed, and we began to try to get from each other what love we ought to have got from God so the whole personality was reversed and corrupted, and we fell into increasing decay. God, of course, had foreseen all of that and he had received us into his office and said “I prescribe for you an operation and in fact I have arranged an operation in my son that will completely change your decaying personality and will completely reverse it and turn it around, so that you will no longer have to depend on each other. You will again be able to depend on me. But it’s an operation that you have to have done.” And that operation is the one that is mentioned, loves ones, if you look at it, in Revelation Chapter 13:8; “And all who dwell on earth will worship it, every one whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb that was slain.” Even if you read it that way, which is the wrong order as we know from the Greek, it still means that the names were written before the foundation of the world in the book of the life of the Lamb that was slain. But in actual fact the Greek reads “everyone whose name has not been written in the book of life of the Lamb that was slain before the foundation of the world.” In other words the adverbial phrase of time “before the foundation of the world” actually modifies the verb slain. So it reads: “the book of life of the Lamb that was slain before the foundation of the world.” And God foresaw what would happen to us and he put us all into his son. We were all crucified there and raised, actually, before the foundation of the world. That’s why you find that statement made in II Corinthians 5:14 — it may be new to some of you here who have not thought about it before and you may wonder, well really, is that in other bits of the Bible? It fits in with Einstein’s whole theory of relativity that time is one great eternal moment, but of course, it’s new to many of us. II Corinthians 5:14 repeats it: “For the love of Christ controls us because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died.” And then what God did was he enabled these batteries in here [in the heart] to run us for another 70 years and he said “I’ll give you 70 years to give you the opportunity to realize what I’ve done for you in Jesus and to have faith in that and to begin to live again in faith on the supernatural life that I originally intended you to live off.” And that was our situation. Of course, Satan has been intent ever from the beginning to persuade us, “You don’t need that. You don’t need that operation. You can do without it.” In fact, the first time he said it, you remember, was back in Genesis 3:4, “But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die.’” That has been Satan’s plan from the very beginning; to get us to believe that we wouldn’t die and there was no need to have this operation that was wrought in Jesus — there was no need for it. And so that’s really the explanation of the whole Cain and Abel story; it’s really the attempt of Satan to spread throughout the world the lie that this operation is not needed, that the lamb was not slain from before the foundation of the world, and that there is no need for this personality of ours to be changed radically by what God has done to us in Jesus. In fact his whole argument is, “There was never a fall. There was never a fall. Don’t believe it. You never did fall. Nothing has ever happened to your personalities that God did not make them to be. Don’t believe that. You’re okay. If you just try a little harder, a little more will power, you can live like God without anything being done inside by God himself.” And of course it’s a pernicious lie — it’s a cruel and pernicious lie. Because it’s saying to little ones — whom he knows he cannot possibly lift this weight — he’s saying: “Lift it, come on, lift it, you can lift it, try again, try again.” It’s known as healthy minded optimism. That’s it. It’s healthy minded optimism. It’s the power of positive thinking. It’s the whole lie that has been spread throughout our history that nothing happened to us when we fell out of God’s fellowship that cannot be rectified by our own will power and our own self effort. And of course, it’s cruel and you see what it does — it prevents anybody seeking the remedy. I mean If you don’t believe you’re sick, you won’t believe there’s a remedy and indeed you won’t feel a need to seek a remedy and you’ll say, “I’m not sick — I’m okay. There was no fall. There was nothing that happened to my personality that changed it radically. I’m not sick. I don’t need a remedy.” In other words, if you can keep the pain pills popping, and keep saying to the doc, “Hmm doc, I feel good, I feel good” then that appendicitis can continue to develop inside you and can eventually burst and destroy you and you will never know why you died. And that is Satan’s great lie, loved ones. It fills our present attitude in philosophy; you know that; Dr. Spock started back in Genesis 4. Dr. Spock and the whole belief that we are inherently good and that there is absolutely no reason on earth why, given good surroundings, good environment and a good dose of will power we cannot live as we were meant to live. It sounds so kind, it sounds so optimistic, and it sounds so upbeat. But really it’s the most cruel and pernicious lie you could tell to anyone. Well you can imagine what its like — it’s like that doctor diagnosing acute appendicitis in you and then saying “Go out, take these pain pills and if you keep going and keep exercising you’ll be okay; you’ll live to be a hundred.” Well, it’s not only a lie, but it’s a rotten and cruel lie because it persuades you that you do not need any surgery and that you can do it yourself. It is really the final self-righteousness. Now that’s, loved ones, the explanation of the Cain and Abel story. If you’d like to look at it, its Genesis 4:1, “Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, ‘I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord.’ And again, she bore his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a tiller of the ground. In the course of time, Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell.” Now why did God not accept Cain’s offering? Both the brothers came and offered something to God and God rejected Cain’s offering and accepted Abel’s. Why? It’s mentioned in Hebrews 11:4, “By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice then Cain, through which he received approval as righteous.” So you see, Abel offered it by faith through which he received approval as righteous; “God bearing witness by accepting his gifts; he died [Abel], but through his faith he is still speaking.” So the Bible says God accepted Abel’s offering because it was offered by faith and therefore, he received approval as righteous. By faith in what — what kind of faith causes God to declare you righteous? It’s Romans 4:22 if you look at it. “That is why his faith was ‘reckoned to him as righteousness.’ But the words, ‘it was reckoned to him,’ were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him that raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification.” Abel had that faith; that’s why he offered what he did. You see in Genesis 4 if you look at the two gifts in verse 3 of Genesis 4; “In the course of time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions” which he had to kill an animal to produce. Cain came with the fruit of the ground and said, “I thank you Lord that you are my Creator.” And Abel came and said, “Lord, I present this blood before you because I thank you that you are my redeemer. And I thank you that you have done a work, that I don’t fully understand, somewhere in eternity that has enabled you to change what I became when I was born of my mother and my father, but I thank you Lord that you have redeemed me. I don’t understand at all.” And yet we don’t really know how much he understood. “I don’t understand at all, but I know that there was a terrible death that took place in your heart and in that death, you changed me and you reversed all the effects of the fall of the Garden of Eden.” And loved ones, it falls right in with what we shared before; if you look at back at Genesis 3:21 that’s the first intimation that death took place; “And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins” of course animals had to be killed to produce those skins and so right from the fall, God was indicating the only way I can change this is by a death. I cannot explain to you, mankind in its childhood, how cosmic that death is, but it has to be by death; I have to destroy everything and start over again. Abel acknowledged what is mentioned there in Genesis 3:15, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” And you remember he, the seed of the woman, Jesus, shall bruise your head, Satan; shall actually trample your head under foot and eventually cast you into the Lake of Fire even though you should bruise his heel. You will bring wounds upon his body and God-forsakenness into his heart as he goes through hell for all of us, but still, he will be the Savior that will come and die — and Abel acknowledged that. So he offered his gift by faith in what God had done to change him. And loved ones that’s the first essential step for us living in faith; that’s how we differ so strongly from the power of positive thinking people and the healthy minded optimistic people, and the whole tendency of our present society in the past especially to have said, “There’s no need for any change — you can do it, you can do it.” And Satan is still at that and you know that — the idea of being crucified with Christ is attacked more strongly by Satan than any other because it’s the heart of victory; it’s the secret to a victorious life, so you know that Satan does all kinds of things to wipe it out. He tries to create in us the feeling that it’s a purely emotional experience that we can never achieve and so he creates a sense that you have to start a feeling inside you that this has happened. And on the other side, in evangelical Christendom, he creates the sense that it’s just an assent– it’s just an intellectual assent to what Christ has done for you on the cross. He’ll do anything to keep us from entering into that operation and into that surgery and being delivered from within. And of course, as long as we refuse that, we’ll find we enter into the same kind of life as Cain, a life of hopelessness — because that was the beginning of the faithless generation, loved ones. Cain was the faithless generation and he begat a whole civilization that lived like that. Let’s look at verse 5, “but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell.” Still, God is always involved and trying to call us back to what has happened in Calvary. He’s always trying to say, “Look, its real. It’s real” so he’s even then holding onto Cain. Verse 6, “The Lord said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted?’” So God was saying, “Look, if things are right inside you, I’ll accept you, you know that. Now if I’ve rejected you, it’s because something is wrong inside you, don’t you see that?” So even after the incident that had happened, God was saying, “There’s something wrong inside you” and it’s still with us, loved ones — really. If you find that something is wriggling and twisting and turning inside you that will not obey, then that’s God lovingly and kindly saying, “There’s an answer for that, don’t pretend that it isn’t there. Don’t get angry with it and don’t get sad and depressed. There is an answer for this — I have delivered you in Jesus. There is closeness to my son that you can enter into that will deliver you from that.” Loved ones — see it that way — grab for him with all your heart. Grab for Jesus; don’t grab for theories, don’t grab for me, don’t grab for this guy or that girl, don’t grab for principles or doctrines — grab for Jesus! Say, “Lord, I’m dying inside. I’m still having trouble with these things that overcome me. Lord Jesus, I know I was cleared of that in you. Lord, take me. Take me in. I want to pull you into myself.” That’s it, loved ones; that’s what accepting Jesus is. Accepting Jesus is not “I accept the idea that Jesus died for my sins.” Accepting Jesus is “Lord, I have to get into you someway or another, let me come into you.” And that’s what God is saying, you see, when we have difficulties. He’s saying, “Why are you troubled — if you do well, you’ll be accepted. If you don’t do well, it’s because there’s something inside that I have delivered you from in my son and if you grab for my son desperately enough, I can show you that. If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is couching at the door.” God was saying, “The greatest sin of all is to reject the provision that I have made for your deliverance.” Do you remember that verse in John 16:8 “And when he [the Holy Spirit] comes, he will convince the world concerning sin [verse 9] because they do not believe in me.” The greatest sin is not believing in Jesus — that’s sin. The greatest sin is rejecting your death with Christ. That’s the greatest sin of all and that’s what God was saying, “Sin is ready to eat you up. If you’re not doing well it’s because you are not receiving the position that I’ve given you in my son; you’re not accepting the change I’ve wrought in him and sin is right there ready to take over.” And of course, sin is “I don’t need that! I don’t need that kind of deliverance! I can do it on my own! Sin is S-I-N; Sin – I –not — I am not sinning! I am not unrighteous! I can do this on my own by my own power!” That’s sin. It’s standing up on your own and saying, “Whatever happened to me in the fall, I can overcome myself” and God is saying “This thing is greater than you; you cannot overcome it, only I can deliver you” and that was the situation with Abel. Of course, this is so hostile to the carnal heart that either the carnal heart must die or the carnal heart must kill that and you can see that. That’s what happened in AIDS: you either have to enter into that or destroy it. You might have wondered why people are so antagonistic against this thing. Why do they want to destroy it? Because it’s either them or it; it’s either — you have to go or this truth has to go. And that’s what happened, you see; it kills. The carnal self that will not allow itself to be changed goes out and aggressively kills, and that’s in verse 8. “Cain said to Abel his brother, ‘Let us go out into the field. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.” And even then “Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is Abel your brother? He said, ‘I do not know’” a lie. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” When you don’t enter into what God has for you, then you begin to alienate yourself from other people and you begin to feel that it’s me alone that counts. [Verse 10] “And the Lord said, ‘What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.’” And loved ones if we don’t enter into the death and the resurrection that God has for us, our lives get filled with death. That’s right — your life fills with death. It’s interesting; if you don’t enter into your death with Jesus, you see death everywhere. And if you enter into your death with Jesus, you see life everywhere. But if you don’t come into what God has for us, then blood is all around you, and death. [Verse 11] “And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength; you shall be a fugitive and a wonderer on the earth.” You see what happened; “When you till the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength.” And that’s why many of us feel life isn’t going right; it isn’t working right: “I do what I’m supposed to do and it’s not working. I do what others do and it works for them and it doesn’t work for me. I till this ground and you’ll see at harvest that it’s not yielding for me.” It’s because the earth yields according to the faith of a man or a woman in God’s power and God’s life. It does not yield according to the actual things that you do, though you have to do them, but it yields to your faith in God, and your faith in his life, and your faith in the fact that he completely renewed you and made you like himself. So that’s why when you find that life isn’t working right, it’s usually because, in fact, you’re not living by faith in the Father. Or you’re involved in trying to do some things that he doesn’t want you do to at all; usually when you’re putting your faith in him, the thing works. There are some obstacles, some difficulties to strengthen your faith, but the thing has a flow to it and there’s some kind of flow of the Spirit in it. [verse 12] “When you till the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength; you shall be a fugitive and a wonderer on the earth. Cain said to the Lord, ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, thou hast driven me this day away from the ground; and from they face I shall be hidden; and I shall be a fugitive and a wonderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will slay me.’” And, of course, we’re already a generation of fugitives and wonderers; we know that. What all the psychologists talk about is the alienation that we all feel and that we’re a rootless generation; that we have no roots, we have no basis. The reason the program “Roots” was so important to all of us was we thought “Oh roots — that’s what we need — if we can find our way back from where we came from then we’ll have some stability and some balance.” But of course the reason [we feel rootless] is that we’re fugitives and wonderers because we do not rest in the Father who is willing to give us everything we need in this life. Had God left us to ourselves, you realize we would have chewed each other up — that’s why Cain says, “Whoever finds me will slay me.” We would have chewed each other up. That’s it. In fact, you see it in these days, don’t you? You see it in situations like Iran and actually you see it even in our own situation, at times, don’t you, where people would almost consume each other and in actual fact if God had left us to ourselves after being born of Cain, we would have just killed each other outright — we’d have destroyed each other. And that’s why God did bring in these pain pills, as it were – as you see what he did in verse 15, “Then the Lord said to him, ‘Not so! If anyone slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.’ And the Lord put a mark on Cain lest anyone who came upon him should kill him. Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, east of Eden.” God actually, by strengthening our consciences which were almost dead after we had been cut off from the Holy Spirit in the Garden of Eden — by strengthening our conscience and by strengthening the rule of law, God prevented us from destroying each other. And he did that, of course, so we would still have a chance of entering into what he had wrought in Jesus on our behalf. We would have destroyed each other if God had not strengthened our consciences and brought the rule of law into the world. “Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, east of Eden.” It’s very interesting that “East of Eden”, you remember, brings to you Steinbeck’s novel and there is a book called “The Mark of Cain”, that some of you know, traces some of the truths of scripture right through the literature of the world. And he [the writer] says in relationship to this “East of Eden”, “Hamilton in John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden relates two stories that haunted us and followed us from our beginning; the story of original sin and the story of Cain and Abel and I don’t understand either of them. It is these stories” the editor says “which provide the pattern of Steinbeck’s exploration of the mystery of inherited guilt, of recurrent evil; first in the unhappy lives of Adam and his brother Charles and then in the lives of Adam’s twins Caleb and Aaron in the original “East of Eden” novel. Lee, the faithful Chinese servant, who has the instincts of a philosopher, insists that the curse of guilt can be lifted. He tells them that in the Biblical narrative when God speaks to Cain he uses the Hebrew word, “timshel”.” That’s the word that we translated “Sin is coaching at the door; its desire is for you but you must master it.” And the Chinese servant says, “The word is timshel, this word, Lee explains, carries with it if not the promise, at least the possibility of victory; thou mayest triumph over sin.” Actually that’s the right translation; not “you must master it”, but “you may triumph over it.” “The conclusion of the novel, negatively expressed is “Thou mayest, thou mayest, what glory.” And I don’t know if you’ve read East of Eden, but it’s amazing, you know, that that is the echo way in the back; “you may triumph over sin if you really want that.” And so despite that Cain went out of the garden and went East of Eden. And then in verse 17 you find that he generated a faithless civilization; “Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch; and he built a city, and called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch.” It’s not fair, I think, that cities therefore are the result of fallen man; it seems that God had left in us a good deal of his own image and we continue in some way to express that image and we built cities in the early days. It shows you too that the deterioration that has taken place in our minds has been a gradual one. The indication that the Incas and even the people before that created magnificent civilizations; the implication that the Chinese were able to measure the planets and the stars in amazing ways despite the fact that they hadn’t our computers, is an indication that you have here also, that in the early days of mankind our brains still had a great deal of the infinite capabilities that were given at the very beginning. It was a gradual deterioration that took place down through society so you get the mention, you remember, of these amazing manufacturing capabilities that they had. Verse 18, “To Enoch was born Irad; and Irad was the father of Mehujael, and Mehujael the father of Methushael, and Methushael the father of Lamech. And Lamech took two wives; the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah. Adah bore Jabal; he was the father of those who dwell in tents and have cattle. His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all those who played the lyre and pipe. Zillah bore Tubalcain; he was the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron.” Obviously way, way before we knew of our Iron Age, there was a very high degree of civilization and great capacities for manufacture in the early days. ‘The sister of Tubalcain was Naamah. Lamech said to his wives, ‘Adah and Zillah, hear my voice.” And of course, this was the tragedy; the early civilization had all these capacities but it had them with that arrogance that it was by our own strength, by the strength of our own life we are doing this and you see that in verse 23: “Lamech said to his wives: ‘Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; you wives of Lamech, hearken to what I say: I have slain a man for wounding me.’” Actually the Hebrew is “I will slay a man.” So Lamech was saying,” I will slay anyone that wounds me, a young man for striking me; anybody that hurts me in the least, I’ll take vengeance” [Lamech continues] “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” So it was a proud and arrogant generation and civilization that was proud in their own strength and their own power and knew nothing of the deliverance from self that was available from even the fall in the Garden of Eden. That’s why, of course, God had to start again and he did — you see that in Verse 25. “And Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and called his name Seth.” That means the appointed one. “For she said, “God has appointed for me another child instead of Abel, for Cain slew him. To Seth also a son was born, and he called his name Enosh. At that time men began to call upon the name of the Lord.” And God began again and created, through Seth, a new generation who could again have a chance of living by faith. Of course, we know that in our society the two civilizations are still represented. And you and I are one or the other. Let’s pray. Dear Father. We know that you want us to be of Seth’s generation, we know that Lord. You want us to be like Abel who brought a sacrifice that required the shedding of blood that symbolized the blood that was shed on Calvary in your dear heart for each one of us. And, oh, Father, if you see in us a self-righteousness such as Cain had that declared that we have no need of cleansing, we have no need of deliverance, we have no need of embracing the sacrificial lamb on Calvary, we have no need of being lifted up on that cross with Jesus, we have no need to be willing to face what he faced; Lord, if you see any of that in us, we ask you, Father, to speak directly to our consciences and show us the horror and the pride and the futility of trying to cleanse ourselves by our willpower and our self-effort, and enable us to see that there is only one way; and that is to believe that you destroyed us, as we are, back in Calvary, and back before that, in eternity. You have a completely new being to reveal to us, and in us, this very night. Dear Father, we want that tonight. Lord, we want to leave behind all that we have been even up to this present moment and we want to let that be taken to the tomb with Jesus. And, oh, Father, we want to receive that new person that you have made us. We want to receive that new being off the shelf in heaven and allow it to fill us here, now, and from this moment on to be that new person, to be that new creation. Christ Jesus, Holy Spirit, show us what has to go; show us what we have to leave behind; show us what we have to let go of. Lord, if you see any of the pride of Cain in us, any of that murderous desire, to destroy, Lord, will you show us that? Enable us now to see that that must die or it will kill us. Dear Father, Lord Jesus, we see you as a bride coming out of heaven. Oh Lord, we would receive you into ourselves now, and we would let you take away from us what you destroyed in Calvary. And from this moment on, live by faith that you have changed us and delivered us and that we can live above sin because you have made us new people who are victorious. Dear Lord, we thank you. Thank you for your goodness. Thank you for your dear word, in Jesus’ name. Now, the grace of our Lord Jesus, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with each one of us, now and throughout this coming week. Amen.
The Tragedy of Mixed Marriage - GENESIS
Respite From Tyrants Genesis 6 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Loved ones, that kind of harmony that we sensed a little this evening is the way God wants us to live day by day. Really; you either live in that harmony or you live in disharmony. Many of us live in disharmony from Monday through Friday because we still trust a lot in our own knowledge and our own ability and you either live trusting that or you live trusting God and his life. You either live depending on his plan that he has for you and his ability to work it out in detail, or you live in dependence on your own ability to manipulate the world to meet your needs. You either live by faith in him or you live by faith in yourself. You either live by faith in your own knowledge of what’s right and what’s wrong, or you live by faith in his life; that’s always been the choice before us. You remember how we shared it was the choice for our forefather: he could either live by trusting in God’s life meeting his needs, or he could trust in his own knowledge. Another way of putting it is; you and I are meant to live in close friendship with Jesus who has made the world. He will tell you how you ought to live, day by day and what you’re to do –we’re meant to live like that — you’re meant to know him personally. You’re meant to commune with him and spend time in his presence and then to live your life from that life. But you know how many of us live our lives by all kind of other information: the information we get from a newspaper on the state of the economy, the information we get from the ads on which car we should buy, the information we get from our professors or our guidance counselors on what we should do with our lives, information we get from our friends on what kind of vacation we should have. We’re living by information that comes from all kinds of discordant sources. So few of us, really, spend an hour everyday in Jesus’ presence, desiring him to tell us what he’s thinking and he is there, loved ones — he is really alive and he does love you and he can guide you. If you say tonight, “Brother, I have tried to get in touch with him” loved ones, we don’t wait long enough; we don’t wait long enough in our prayers — we don’t. We just say our prayers. But Jesus is there and if you will give him time each day, you will begin to hear his thoughts — you will — you will begin to sense some guidance; and one moment of his guidance is worth years of guidance that you get from other people and from books, because your life is unique. It is. Your life is unique, and he alone knows how to develop your life harmoniously. Not even your wife knows that, not even your dearest friend. You have a complex personality that can only be developed as he guides you through it. Loved ones, that’s how you come into health and wholeness and peace. I don’t know how many of you have felt discordant or unharmonious and felt, “Boy, life seems to be chugging and punching along. At times, I feel I’m going to break apart; I get headaches and my feelings are going in all directions.” That’s not the way we ought to live. Jesus, the Savior, lives within you, and he can bring wholeness and integration into every part of your life where none of the rest of us in this room, however much we love, can do. And that’s the choice; either you live by faith in him, by closeness to him, or you live by faith in your knowledge of good and evil. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought of this; but the proliferation of computers today exists because of the tremendous growth in knowledge, and if you’ve read some of the ads, they’re all emphasizing that this is a way to process knowledge. The President of one of the computer companies in Japan uses the old cliché with a little bit of a twist. He said, “Whoever controls the software controls the world.” This is interesting to think, isn’t it? We’ve gone mad on knowledge; we think that it’s the key to everything; we think if we can only understand it, then we’ll be able to live right, and that’s where eating of this old tree of knowledge of good and evil has got us. Here we are, in our world, and we have so much knowledge that we can’t manage it without these incredible machines that we’re inventing and we still believe that if we can only process the knowledge right, we’ll be able to live right. Isn’t it true with us in our own lives? So often it’s “if we can only understand this economy”, “if we could only work out where to put our money,” “if we could only work out what’s the best job for me,” “if we could only understand a certain person,” if we only had the knowledge that this book will give us we would be able to put our marriage right, or put our life right, or we would be able to live right in the future. It’s all the same lie that Satan said to Adam in the Garden of Eden: “If you will only eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, you will be like God, knowing the difference between good and evil. And that knowledge will give you everything you need. It will be food for you, it will be a delight for your life, and it will be something that will give you wisdom.” And God kept saying, “The day you eat of it, you’ll die. In the day you eat of it, you will die.” And you know that happens in our own lives — the more you live by trying to understand the world and manipulate it, the more you become its slave. And the more you become ruled by that world and dominated by its circumstances, the more you yourself seem to cease to exist and you seem to become a pawn of the world and the society in which you live. In fact, don’t you often feel, “I’m just the same as all the others — I process like all the others. I just fit into this category or that category.” You begin to feel that you cease to exist as an individual, and God said that. He said, “You’ll die if you depend on yourself and your own knowledge of what is right and wrong. If you don’t get to know me and get to know my son and live by the life that we give you day by day, you will die.” You remember that our forefather [Adam] determined that he would live by his own wits and immediately that happened; a great disharmony came into the world. It’s in the whole world of nature; thorns and weeds began to grow up where God had planned flowers and crops and fruit. The whole animal world came into disharmony and began to fight, animal against animal. Even man himself and his wife began to experience pain in childbirth, where childbirth was intended to be a beautiful experience. Man himself began to sweat in order to produce the work that was needed, instead of doing the work as a beautiful expression of the life of God flowing through him. And then you remember man himself instead of being able to live forever, which was God’s plan for him, came into temporality in his life; he found that he died. His hair grew grey and wrinkles came to his face and his body grew old and tired and he found that he died and that was what God said. And yet at the same time, you remember, God said, “But I give you a promise; there is in eternity a bruiser of Satan’s head. I foresaw that this would happen to you, and I foresaw the absolute mess that it would make of your personality, and I foresaw all this in eternity and I put all of you into someone who is a bruiser of Satan’s head. I put you into someone and changed you and destroyed all that, and remade you.” The difficulty was, of course, we men and women would not believe that that was necessary. Adam wouldn’t; he heard God saying that, but he still felt, “Ah, it’s not that bad; the remedy doesn’t need to be as bad as death.” Even in later years when God would say, “The wages of sin is death; the wages of living depending on yourself is death” we still wouldn’t believe it. We felt, “No, no — if we can read books and if we can turn our personalities around, if we can train them, if we can get into the right company, if we can study the right truths, we can somehow lift ourselves out of this.” That is the situation that many of us find ourselves in who cry “The good that I would, I cannot do.” Many of us have come into some knowledge of God, but we still will not admit that God’s answer is the only one. We will not admit that there has to be someone who bruises Satan’s head – that there has to be a death and destruction of all the old perverted personality that has come about through our trying to live by the knowledge of good and evil. And God’s task was to bring that home to us; to bring home to us that the only way was a death and if there wasn’t a death and a complete remaking of us all, then there would be a hell on earth. We studied how Adam’s first son, Cain, was allowed by God to prove that dirty truth because Cain would not believe that he had to be changed. He thought, “Well, a little repentance, a little thanksgiving to God for making me is enough, but I don’t really need to be changed. I don’t really need to be utterly destroyed and remade over again — I don’t need that.” He refused to believe that God could change him completely and remake him from the toes on his feet to the tip of his head. So you remember Cain was refused by God because he refused to believe that, and Cain himself grew proud in his knowledge of good and evil and he became a murderer of his brother Abel. Then he produced a line of men and women who retained the supernatural, almost infinite powers that God had given to Adam in the Garden of Eden; great powers to make bronze and to make musical instruments; great powers to build cities, supernatural powers, great powers of intellect beyond anything that we possess now, because the personality of man had not yet deteriorated and that whole generation produced a mighty civilization in primeval times. But it was a civilization that was independent of God; that refused to believe that they had to be changed; that refused to believe that there was anything wrong with them. And that race, which refused to be destroyed and remade, began to destroy itself, it came to its completion. It started with murder and it ended with murder. You remember that generation of men and women who refused the only remedy that God provided for their rebellion and for their perverted lives, that personality began in the murder of its brother in Genesis 4:5, “But for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry and his countenance fell. The Lord said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is couching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.’ Cain said to Abel his brother, ‘Let us go out to the field.’ And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.” And that generation continued, as it’s recorded down through Genesis 4, and ended with murder in verse 23. “Lamech said to his wives: ‘Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; you wives of Lamech, hearken to what I say: I have a slain a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-seven fold.’” It was God’s way of saying, “My Children, if you will not let me make you over again; absolutely destroy you and make you over again, this is the kind of world you people will produce.” Then you remember what God did because of this mighty event in eternity where he had destroyed us all and remade us; he began to allow expressions of that to come into the world and because of that, he was able, despite this dying generation, to let a living generation come forward. That is recorded at the end of Genesis 4, in verse 25: “And Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and called his name Seth, for she said, ‘God has appointed for me another child instead of Abel, for Cain slew him.’ To Seth also a son was born, and he called his name Enosh.” And then it seemed as if the human race was turning around; it seemed as if the generation that lived by the knowledge of good and evil was finished. “At that time, men began to call upon the name of the Lord.” Then you remember in Genesis 5:1 it’s as if God is starting all over again and it starts like that: “This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created. When Adam had lived a hundred and thirty years, he became the father of a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth. The days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were eight hundred years; and he had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years; and he died.” And then began a great generation that seemed to almost overcome death; it seemed that they expressed the resurrection that God had worked in eternity, and it seemed that God had managed to turn the race around and that we now were accepting “Alright; we did wrong when we lived by the knowledge of good and evil and we were overly perverted, and Lord I need to be completely remade from the bottom of the souls of my feet to the tip of my head. I need to be completely remade.” It seemed that that was the way men were going because, you remember, a great generation began to exist; most of them lived to 800 or 900 years old and they had children that lived to great ages also. In fact, so powerful did the resurrection life of Jesus begin to be in the world that one of them called Enoch actually never even died. It’s in Genesis 5:21; “When Enoch had lived sixty-five years, he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methuselah three hundred years and had other sons and daughters, thus all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years. Enoch walked with God and he was not for God took him.” He was one of the two men, you remember, that were translated by their own power right up to God without dying. It seemed that God had turned the world around and then the tragedy comes in this chapter that we’re studying this evening; chapter 6:1 “When men began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of them as they chose.” In other words, Genesis 4 married Genesis 5 and the Genesis 4 generation was still alive; Cain and his generation still continued to exist and had their cities in the world, and the sons of God, the sons of Seth’s generation who trusted God and depended on him in Genesis 5; those sons of God you see in Genesis 6:2, saw that the daughters of man, the daughters of Cain’s generation, were fair, and they took to wife such of them as they chose. The other possible interpretation is that the sons of God were angels and that they married the daughters of man. There are real difficulties with that interpretation. First of all, angels had not been mentioned so far in the record so it’s strange to introduce them suddenly in this place. Again, you never hear in the rest of scripture any mention of angels having any kind of union like that with human beings; Angels are spirit beings. You remember, too, a reason that Jesus gives himself in regard to the kind of life that angels live in Matthew 22:30, “For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.” It’s very difficult to interpret that as meaning angels, specially when as you take it to be the sons of Seth marrying the daughters of Cain; the sons of that faithful generation marrying the daughters of the unfaithful generation, it explains, of course, not only all that has gone before, but it explains the next verse in Genesis 6:3 because God obviously regards that as a tragedy; “Then the Lord said, ‘My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh, but his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.’” So God says, “My Spirit, that has given intellectual power to you men and women, my Spirit that has given emotional life to you and physical life and psychological life; my spirit that gives spiritual life to you is not going to remain in you forever. Obviously it is impossible for me to deliver you from the tragic predicament into which you have brought yourselves. It is impossible for me to deliver you without in some way bringing the death that occurred in eternity in my son here to earth.” And so he said “My Spirit will not strive with man forever, but his days will be 120 years” — not the length of his life but really “I will give you 120 years of respite before I destroy all of you, because this is the only way that there is any chance of saving this earth. Because even though I gave to you, through my sons’ resurrection life, a generation of men and women who trusted me, that generation could not keep themselves pure but have mixed themselves in with those who trust themselves. So I have to withdraw my Spirit; otherwise you would careen right through my universe and you would destroy it completely.” So the meaning there, loved ones, is not the age being 120 years, which some people have said and those who love to look for contradictions in the Bible say, “Ah, one time it’s three score and ten, or maybe 80 years and here it’s a 120 and then in the early years, it’s 900 years.” No, it’s 120 years of respite. You can see the sense of that if you look at Genesis 5:32; “After Noah was five hundred years old” so obviously Noah was around 500 years old, not before God said this, but around that time. Then if you go down to Genesis 7:6, “Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came upon the earth.” So it’s probable that Noah was around 480 years old when God said “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever for he is flesh but his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.” I’ll give you another 120 years before I bring the flood upon the earth. There is a little more about those days in Genesis 6:4, the Nephilim were on the earth in those days. The interpretation is that they were “gigantes” in the Septuagint and it would be good for us to learn a little, in these Sunday evenings, about the translation of the Bible. You remember that Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Old Testament and they translated this “gigantes” which when you see in English letters, you can guess that people took it to mean giants, but that was an inadequate translation of its Hebrew word. I think [Martin] Luther’s meaning is nearest to it; he says it means tyrants. And that’s reasonable to believe that in those days, the Nephilim that are talked about later in the Old Testament, they were on the earth in those days. Obviously representatives of that cruel murderous race of Cain’s — part of that race where Lamech said, “I have slain a man for wounding me. I’ll kill anybody that gets in my way.” So there were tyrants on the earth in those days and if God had allowed it to continue, this would be unbearable. As it is, it will eventually be unbearable. God’s plan was always to give us respite — he was so kind — he wanted to give us all a chance of making a choice, so he is always holding off the destruction of the world as long as he can. We know from New Testament prophecy we get back to the tyrant life and indeed when you think of the world’s population, the greater part of it lives under tyrants and dictators, even today. So God has only managed to hold some freedom of will in the earth by dint of great grace from him, but if he had allowed it to continue, of course, we would probably have never seen the light of day, those of us who are here this evening. “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them.” So Seth’s children bore children to Cain’s children. “These children were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown.” Some of them were renowned for their bravery and valor, as far as the infants of Seth had anything to do with it, some of them known as cruel murderers as far as the infants of Cain had anything to do with it. But they were probably the reason why we so often talk of giants in the earth in those early days because they were mighty men, probably with much greater physiques then we have today because they still retained some of the perfection that God had given to Adam, certainly with minds that were way beyond anything our mind is today. You can see that behind the kinds of buildings that the early people put up, which is beyond what we could have done had we had their lack of tools and their lack of technology. So in those days there were mighty heroes of all kinds in the earth, but still, of course, the tyrants prevailed. In verse 5, “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.” It’s very difficult to mix the knowledge of good and evil life with the life of Life; it’s very difficult to mix trust in yourself with trust in God. Always it ends up this way: if you, as a son of Seth, marry a daughter of Cain, the result is fairly well guaranteed; you will lose out. Now I would encourage all of us here who have begun to have some experience of trusting the Holy Spirit and of trusting God — trust him all the way — don’t mix. That’s why there were all the stringent injunctions of intermarriage throughout the Old Testament because God knew from the very beginning that as soon as you marry an unbeliever to a believer, as soon as you marry a self-trusting part of your life to a God trusting part of your life, the self-trusting will overwhelm the God-trusting. That’s why Smith Wigglesworth says, “Inactivity of faith steals blessing.” Be careful when God guides you to do something. Be very careful about bringing your mind in to check it out. Be careful about the mind beginning to analyze and think, “well, is this quite sensible?” It’s good for the mind to compare it against scripture, but it’s dangerous for the mind to tackle it the way it normally deals with things. Be careful of that. Keep moving forward in your life. Keep going on in faith. Every time you get an opportunity to exercise your faith, exercise your faith. Stand against killing and crushing your faith by what you think is shrewd or clever or knowledgeable or wise in the eyes of man, because once you start going that way, that knowledge life eats up the faith life, as happened here in the early days. “The Lord saw the wickedness of man was great in the earth” and so the old Cain life began to prevail “and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” I don’t know if you’ve ever come to that place in your own life, but that’s where you need to come to in order to bow down before Jesus and say, “Lord, the only thing that will change me is if I’m utterly destroyed with you.” I remember that coming home to me; “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.” While we think that there is something good in us, we’re not ready for death. While we think that there’s something good in our minds, we’re not really ready to be crucified with Christ; it’s only when we see that “the imagination of the thoughts of my heart is evil continually, I’m evil through and through and through, there is nothing good in me, I have to be wiped out and you have to start over again, Lord” that’s real repentance. There’s a tendency in our day to teach that repentance is being a little sorry for some of the wrong things that you have done and to try to do them better next time, but that’s not the meaning for repentance in the Bible. Repentance is an absolute turning against yourself and turning to God. It’s saying to God, “Lord, I need to be absolutely wiped out, every part of me, the good as well as the bad and to start it all over again.” It’s that kind of attitude that God answers with the fullness of his Holy Spirit and the baptism of the Holy Spirit. And then in Genesis 6:6 “And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth.” No, God does not repent: he is unchanging; he never needs to repent and it’s just caviling and verbal play to say, “There; it says God was sorry.” Well, no, it’s explained in the next clause. Why was he sorry? It grieved him to his heart when he saw the ravages of sin in the men and women he had made in his own image and he saw how they were destroying each other. His heart became grieved and he was filled with sorrow. It wasn’t that God suddenly said, “I made a mistake; I repent.” It wasn’t. God foresaw all of this from the very beginning but it still grieved him. That’s where some of us have real trouble with the idea of God’s foreknowledge. We think in our own selves “If we foreknew things we wouldn’t be sorry if they occurred.” And that’s because we lack soft, kindly hearts like God’s; even though God foresees things, it breaks his heart. Even though he knew [Charles] Manson was going to murder those people it grieved his heart when that happened. Even though he knows what you’re going to do tomorrow, when it occurs, it grieves his heart; it breaks his heart. For us the heartbreak lasts a couple of minutes, but for God it goes through all eternity, right throughout his life, all that grieving. Verse 7, “So the Lord said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things, and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” So it was a justification of what he had done in Christ in eternity — there’s only one way to cure mankind now that he had gone wrong. That’s absolute destruction; an expression of what had happened on Calvary in Jesus except that the other resurrection part of it was represented; “But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.” And you get that running right through the Old Testament; you get God having to exercise the destruction that occurred in Christ, and yet getting an expression of some who were resurrected in Christ and chose death and resurrection rather than death alone. It is probably good to see that it wasn’t enough to have the living race that came from Seth — did you see that? You actually had to destroy the Cain race. You might have thought the guys in the white hats are winning because all the Cain people have been forgotten. No, they were still on the earth and they lived to destroy the earth. It’s really an illustration of II Corinthians 5:17. “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” There are two sides to that; “the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.” Many of us have never allowed the old to pass away so we’ve allowed Cain to remain in our hearts; the new has come, but it’s fighting the old all the time. So very many of us here sense we want to do things for Jesus and we want to love like him, but there’s something evil inside of us that’s still there that has not passed away and that we have not allowed to be crucified with Christ. That’s the same situation here [in this verse]. God had to vindicate and show us “I have to destroy you in order that I can make you new.” And then in verse 9 that simply recounts the record of the commands to Noah in regard to the flood. “These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation” and a man like Abel who believed that God had done some miraculous work in eternity. He didn’t know what it was, but he thanked God for it. “Noah walked with God. And Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth. Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence.” And of course when you consider the power of their physiques and the power of their minds it must have been a wild scene in the earth in those days. “And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh” that is –humanity; their minds, their emotions, their bodies independent of God – “all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth.” And that’s why people like [St.] Augustine taught total depravity. It doesn’t mean that there is nothing good inside you because there is the seed of Jesus. The bruiser of Satan’s head is always inside you and your conscience urging you towards God, but its total depravity in the sense that there’s no part of your personality that is not touched by sin. That’s what [Francis] Schaeffer said, that even our minds are touched and impaired by sin, and that’s what happened; all flesh corrupted its way in the earth. And that’s what we do, you know it. Our minds were made to understand what God was telling us in our spirits and to govern our bodies to do that, but instead of that our minds rebelled and our minds became manipulators. So, many of us use our minds to manipulate other people and manipulate circumstances. Our emotions were made to express the joy that we have in Jesus; to express it to others. Now our emotions are perverted and they want joy. They want joy – “Make me happy. Make me happy” that’s what our emotions are always crying out. So our whole personalities became corrupted and we corrupted even the way we deal with each other. That’s the tragedy about the sensitivity group system and all of that kind of “help ourselves” kind of approach to our problems; it’s corrupt because it’s built on trying to build us up in ourselves, instead of putting us into Jesus and remaking us in God’s image. So that’s part of what it means, “all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth.” Verse 13, “And God said to Noah, ‘I have determined to make an end of all flesh; for the earth is filled with violence through them; behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Make yourself an ark of gopher wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you are to make it; the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. Make a roof for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above; and set the door of the ark in its side; and make it with lower, second, and third decks. For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from under heaven; everything that is on the earth shall die.” A lot of people have said the ark couldn’t have done what it was said to do. Well, there are several sides to it. First of all, no one knows how many species of animals there were at that time on the earth. But secondly, here’s what Eric Sauer said in the book “Dawn of World Redemption” that the measurements of the ark were gigantic. The Encyclopedia Britannica gives roughly 450 feet by 150 feet by 45 feet, would give a capacity of more than three million cubic feet; it is, therefore, comparable to our modern ocean vessels so there was tremendous space in the ark and tremendous space to do what God wanted Noah to do; that is to take, as you will see in the next chapter, some of every animal, and bird in the earth, and to save it in order to represent that even though the whole race was destroyed in Jesus, it was also raised up in him. And even though all would be destroyed but only some would choose to accept the resurrection, yet some would chose. So you get this great principle of the remnant, the holy remnant — like ourselves actually, because it’s true that over the ten or twelve years of our life together, great numbers have come through here and many have gone on and some have not gone on. But gradually God brings a remnant out of that number. And it’s so in your life, in your own personal life; there are many things in your life that are not right and that have to be destroyed. And there are many things in your life that you think are valuable, and God is in the process of destroying all but the tiny little remnant that he can use, but that’s what he will use. So in a way, you should not be concerned about that. Many are concerned that “Oh, I’m losing this talent” or “You’re losing this ability or this part of my life is not being used.” No; God will probably only be able to save a little part of it, but that part he will use like the loaves and fishes presented by the little guy who wanted Jesus. And so it was there that God, in verse 18 said, “But I will establish my covenant with you; and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your son’s wives with you. And of every living thing of all flesh you shall bring two of every sort into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds according to their kinds, and the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind, two of every sort shall come in to you, to keep them alive. Also take with you every sort of food that is eaten, and store it up; and it shall serve as food for you and for them.” Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him.” It was God’s way again of saying, “I’ve tried; I’ve tried to do it without death, but it is impossible. What I did in eternity in my son is the only way, and I express this to you by what I’m about to do through this flood. So, loved ones, it is with us. We should see that there is only one clean way to rise into God; and that is the death of everything that is evil in us — it’s absolute death and we should just not touch it because it’s either God or its evil. It’s either trusting God completely or trusting ourselves, but you can’t do both. I think so many of us in Christendom today are trying to get both and you can’t. If you try to get both, you’ll end up with only one, and that one will not be God, it will be self. So I would encourage you to see that even back in history, there’s clear teaching that it must be all for God or all for self. It must be nothing of God or nothing of self. It must be absolute faith in God for everything or absolute faith in self, but if you try to get both, you’re making your choice anyway. Let’s pray. Dear Father, we are astounded at the mightiness of the movements that took place so many years ago upon the earth. And Lord we are even terrified when we think of those mighty men of old and the incredible violence and battles and corruption that filled the world. Lord God, we see that we would have murdered each other in a matter of years if you had not brought judgment; a judgment upon the earth that you had already exercised in Jesus. No, Lord, we thank you that here we are today; able to look back in all of this and to see it clearly and here we are; still alive with an opportunity to be saved, an opportunity to have everything destroyed in Jesus and to be made completely new in our lives. Lord, thank you. Thank you. Father, we see that if we neglect so great a salvation, there will be no hope for us. So Lord we would this night deal with you about any mixture in our lives, any “intermarriage” that has taken place, any place where we are hedging our bets, any place where are trying to trust self a little. We would try to please you by trusting you, Lord, any place where there are grays instead of black and whites, Father, we would settle those issues tonight. If we are trying to get something for ourselves, we would allow that to be destroyed this night in Jesus, never to look at it again, and to ask you, dear God, to renew us and make us new and make us in your image. Lord, we will trust you from this day forward for your glory.
Faith Is Action - GENESIS
The Flood Genesis 7 by Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Let’s ask God to bless us. Shall we pray? Lord Jesus, you are the dearest person and we want you in our hearts. We want your reality, your personality in us. So we come this evening to grasp you and draw you into ourselves so that you may live freely in us this week for your glory. We’re studying Genesis 7, loved ones. If you have a car that won’t start in the cold weather, you send it in for repairs and if that doesn’t work, you just get rid of the thing and start all over again. If you have a dog that bites everybody in sight, it’s a little trickier; you can’t send him in for repairs and you think twice before you just shoot the little guy, so it’s more of a problem! If you have a son that is just wearing you out; he is just living a hideous life and not the life that you hoped for him at all, you have a real problem. You can’t send him in to be repaired because it’s his free will that’s the problem, and you can’t really retrain him like Pavlov’s dogs by reward and punishment, otherwise you destroy his free will also. So about all you can do as a human father or mother is continue to love him, and pray for him, and treat him with kindness; waiting for him to change his will and come back the other way. Now that’s what God faces with us, you see. God wanted real friends who would love him, and that’s why he had to give us free wills and he had to allow us to exercise those wills absolutely freely and he had to make it a real choice. He had to make it so that if we chose to act apart from him, we would really create something that would utterly wipe his creation out — it had to be real — it had to be a real choice. And yet how was he to allow us to make that choice and to have, necessarily, become the monsters that we would become and yet somehow give us the opportunity to see it and to choose a second time? That was the problem. And so you remember how God, in fact, did it; he foresaw what we would do. He foresaw what we would become if we chose to live by our own wits and then he miraculously, in a way that we may understand when we get to heaven or we may not, in a miraculous way, he put us all into his son and he destroyed us there: Christ died for all; therefore all died, in the lamb that was slain from before the foundation of the world; and then he began the world. And he put us into this world and gave us freedom of choice, gave us freedom to understand the choice; to make it and, if necessary, if we want it, to take advantage of the mighty recall that he had performed in his son, Jesus. And that’s it; there has been a great recall, just like car companies do, they have a recall and all the work is already guaranteed. It’s all virtually done in the factory, but you have to bring your car in. And that’s the situation the Creator is in with all of us down through the years; he has the recall already; he has the recall information out, but none of it can operate unless we come in to be remade. And that’s what the history of humanity is about really. The history of the Old Testament is the history of God trying to say to us, “Look, you have to have something fixed; there’s something wrong in you. Not only because of the way you have chosen to live, but because of the way your forefathers have chosen to live, and I have issued a recall. If you come in, I’ll make you right; from your feet to your head, I’ll make you right. Will you come in?” And that’s how it started, you remember. He gave Adam and Eve the choice and they chose, in Genesis 3, to live by their own wits. So he withdrew from them the Holy Spirit in order to say to them, “I had to kill you for this — I had to destroy you for this. Now this is a sign that I have to show you; I’m withdrawing the Holy Spirit and now you’ll begin to experience aging, which wasn’t my plan at all. Now, do you see your grey hairs? Do you see the way you’re weakening in your body? That’s because you’re on the way to death. Stop! Stop! Come back and be remade and receive the eternal life that will go on forever — please.” Then you remember in Genesis 4 he allowed that choice of independence to work itself out in Cain killing his brother, Abel and beginning a generation of children that lived by murder. It was God’s way of saying, “Do you see? If you go on living independently of me, choosing your own way, and living by your own wits and not trusting my life this is what you’ll make the world — you’ll make it like that.” Then you remember in Genesis 5 he said, “But if you’d come and experience the recall, if you’d come and be remade as I’ve remade you in my son Jesus and completely start again, this is the kind of life you’d live.” He allowed Seth, another son, to be born to Adam, who trusted God and whose generation of descendants lived to 800 or 900 years old, each of them. It was God’s way of saying, “You see — there’s death on one hand, but there’s life on the other.” And then in Genesis 6 he pointed out, “But really, some of you have chosen to live independent of me; the rest of you will join them and humanity is committed to be a mixed race that will actually reject me and will eventually destroy my world.” And that’s the point we’ve reached in Genesis 7, where God is about to show us that actually, there’s no hope for this world. The only thing he can do is to destroy it absolutely and utterly and that’s what he did in his son. Loved ones, that’s the explanation of all God’s dealings with us; all God’s dealings are God trying to say to us, “You’re on the way to destruction, but I have made a way for you — will you come? Will you come?” He’s always trying to persuade us to bring our automobiles in to get them repaired. And of course Satan’s job is to say, “You won’t die; there’s not a thing wrong with you. There’s not a thing wrong with you. Carry on the way you’re going, you’re okay.” God is saying that you’re not all right so all Satan’s servants are trying to say, “Use a little psychology, a little counseling, a little reading, a little education; you’ll be okay.” And God is always trying to say, “No. No. You need something more serious than that — you need a remedy that I have provided in my son.” Loved ones there was one dear guy that believed that, so if you would like to look at Genesis chapter 7, you can see him. His name really means rest; that’s the name of Noah — it really means “rest”; one who will bring rest to the world. You can see that Gensis 7:1, “Then the Lord said to Noah, ‘Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you are righteous before me in this generation.” Now why did God find it possible to get through to Noah? Because Noah was righteous; because he had never done anything wrong – no; because he was righteous the same way as Abel was righteous. It says in Hebrews that Abel’s gift was accepted because he offered it in faith and that’s why Noah was found to be righteous. Some of us might wonder, “Could we have the kind of faith and do the kind of things that Noah did? We are not as righteous as him.” No, but Noah was not faultless until he saw by faith that there was some work that God had done in eternity that could remake him completely, and it was his faith that made him righteous. That’s mentioned in Romans and its good to be clear about it yourself. Its Romans 4:22, he is speaking about Abraham here, but it just as well can be applied to Abel and to Noah who are also called righteous; “That is why his faith was ‘reckoned to him as righteousness.’ But the words ‘it was reckoned to him’ were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him that raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification.” Every one of us that believes that we’re so bad that we have to be completely remade, every that has that faith, can be made right with God. So it is important for you to see that people who believe that they have been crucified with Christ are not people who think they’re holier than the rest of us; they’re people who think they’re so wretchedly unholy that the only thing that can be done is for God to absolutely destroy them and remake them. And if any of you are not filled with the Holy Spirit, it’s because you don’t believe you’re bad enough. That’s it. Not because you don’t believe you’re good enough, but because you don’t believe you’re bad enough. You still think you can eek it out “with a little help with your friends; with a little help from the Holy Spirit and a good deal of will power you can do something about your life” and you don’t see that you have to be absolutely destroyed — removed and replaced with an absolute new creation that may be very different from you. That’s really what God is saying. Faith in him is the readiness to believe that you are so bad, so hopeless, so rotten, and so wretched that the only thing to do is let that lot be thrown in the garbage heap and start all over again with a new creation in Jesus. That’s why some of us seem to have an excitement about life, or a sense of newness, or a sense of freshness; because we are aware that God has made us absolutely new and that we’ve let everything old be destroyed in Jesus, and that was the situation with Noah. Now when that happens Jesus’ own spirit comes inside you, and that was very important for Noah, because the things that he was going to be asked to by God required a faith that was beyond his own. Now this is the key; some of you may think, “Ah, I couldn’t have that faith.” Well, no, you couldn’t — and Noah wasn’t able to have this faith. It wasn’t his faith at all; it was Jesus’ faith. You see that in Galatians 2:20, it’s a verse that we’ve referred to often, but it’s so basic that it’s good to see it again. “I have been crucified with Christ” and it’s the faith that that has taken place that makes you right with God; “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.” Except that the Greek is not “in the Son of God” it is “tou Theou”; this life I now live in the flesh, “I live by the faith of the son of God.” And that’s what happened to Noah. When you at last agree that you have to be wiped out and you have to be replaced, God replaces you with his Son, and Jesus stands up inside you and begins to exercise his own faith through you. That’s the only way you can have faith for the miracles that God wants each one of us to perform during our life here. Loved ones, you can’t do it with your own faith; you won’t have enough. It’s only if you say goodbye forever to your own abilities and your own holiness and your own ability to exercise faith, and hand it all over to Jesus, that you actually do experience displacing of yourself with a Jesus Spirit. That’s right — you actually experience a new Spirit of faith rising up inside you. You remember I shared with you before; faith isn’t the problem. Faith isn’t the problem. The problem is seeing that you’re so bad that you have to be utterly replaced by Jesus — that’s the problem. Once that happens, Jesus springs up inside you. You don’t have to kind of dial a prayer and say, “Lord, you realize that I have died. I’m waiting for you here.” No, you don’t — the moment you go like that, that moment he’s in and faith is springing up in your heart. And why that’s important, you’ll see if you look back to Genesis 7:1 “Then the Lord said to Noah, ‘Go into the ark, you and all your household.’” Now which ark? We’ll look back to Genesis 6 and 13 “And God said to Noah, ‘I have determined to make an end of all flesh for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold I will destroy them with the earth. Make yourself an ark with gopher wood. Make rooms in the ark and cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you are to make it.” Now first of all, you need to see how big the ark was. This is how you are to make it; the length of the ark 300 cubits. Now actually if you take our building here, our building, looking like that, I paced it out tonight. It’s roughly 150 feet long and it’s roughly 90 feet broad. And it’s roughly 40 feet high. Now this ark was the same height the same breadth, but it was three times the length. So Noah had to build something that was 450 feet long by 40 feet high by 90 feet broad — hard to get on a one acre lot, really. But what is important for us to see is; that didn’t come as a voice from heaven. See, we all tend to think, “That was easy — it’s the way that Negro spiritual says — it was God yelling down from Heaven and everybody was singing and dancing and happy and Noah was the chosen savior and he knew” … No. The dear guy was sitting at home and there was no voice. There was no voice. It was the same way you and I are told by God to do things — it was just that way. It was through the intuition of his spirit and that dear fellow sensed that God was saying to him to build a boat three times the size of this building. Now do you see why the faith of the Son of God has to rise to even to conceive that it’s possible that God is saying that to you? That’s why I shared what I did at the beginning about the singing, and about all of us with abilities here. I mean Mark is right; we have been given a lot, loved ones, but don’t you think with all that we have that God is probably giving a lot of directions and a lot of challenges to us and that he is saying a lot of things like this to us? And only if the Son of God’s faith is rising inside us will we be able to grasp that. It’s important for you to see that we can’t any longer get out of if by saying, “Well, that was Old Testament times. God obviously spoke with an amplifier right from Heaven, or wrote it in the sky, or he shouted it down to Noah in Hebrew or whatever language they spoke.” No. God does not change; God spoke to Noah in the quietness of his own heart and that’s the way he speaks to you and me. He speaks in the quietness of our hearts and he says, “Will you do this?” Do you see that the flood was going to come? It was going to come anyway. But it was only if Noah acted on this that he would be delivered from the flood. Now in our lives, the plagues are going to come anyway, the spiritual paralysis is going to come anyway and only if we act in response to what God is saying deep down in our hearts will we actually be delivered from it. You notice the details that God gives. Faith isn’t feeling; it’s detailed actions that God tells us to obey. And that’s why I wonder how many of us are sitting here paralyzed after years in God’s kingdom because we keep thinking faith is a feeling. “Oh, I know how it happened — Noah really worked up a tremendous feeling and he just felt, ‘Yes, this is possible! Yes it is! Yes, there’s a great flood coming all over the world, but I know this is possible. I can build this boat and I know this boat will save me!’” No, faith is not a feeling like that. Faith is not working yourself up into such a frenzy of confidence that there’s no risk involved at all. Faith is obeying detailed directions from God. That’s what faith is. Faith is action. Faith is God saying to you, “All right. I want to start training you. You can’t become a George Miller right off. You can’t become a Noah right off, but I want to train you in a few things. Will you go see that person in the hospital? I want you to go tonight.” That’s the beginning. When you respond, “Well, that’s a silly feeling I have there; I had a feeling a minute ago that I should go and visit that person in the hospital.” That’s it — God has to start all over again with you about a couple of months later. Many of us, I think, drain away the Holy Spirit because we keep regarding these little feelings that we have to do something for God as just our own natural desires. I think it’s William Law who says, “Anything that is connected with God’s service or that is connected in some way with God’s will, always be sure that it comes from Jesus inside you and if you ignore it, you’re ignoring Jesus inside you. Never think that it comes from your own natural self.” So maybe it’s good to see again that faith is obedience to detailed actions. Here you have it in Genesis 6:15. “This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. Make a roof for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above; and set the door of the ark in its side; make it with lower, second and third decks. For behold, I will bring flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from under heaven; everything that is on the earth shall die. And in verse 19, “And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind, two of every sort shall come into you, to keep them alive. Also take with you every sort of food that is eaten, and store it up; and it shall service food for you and for them. Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him.” That’s what faith is, so don’t let’s get it wrong; don’t let’s think faith is something that will be a revelation or a vision that will come to you sometime when you’re 45, 55, 60 and it will be some great action that the whole world will know about. No. God is already giving you all kinds of detailed directions — thousands of them that you don’t even give a second thought to. You yield to Satan’s deception: “Well that was a funny thought I had.” “Well, yeah, that would have been a nice thing to do if I had the time to do it.” So you ignore God, and that’s why we’re not Noah’s, because we forget that faith is action on the basis of the intuitive directions that God gives us in our spirits. And that is where it started, loved ones, with Noah. Now maybe it’s good to see that God often begins with you “Would you start going to the prayer fellowship on Wednesday night?” Maybe he’s not saying this, but he can be saying that kind of thing. Or he can be saying to you, “We will stay at work three hours longer tonight.” Or he can be saying to you, “Write a letter to your mother.” But he’ll be giving you directions; he won’t immediately be taking you out on what you think is some great faith enterprise, he’ll reduce the thing to very down to earth, detailed directives, about things that you are to do in your life which only makes sense if he comes through with his action. That’s what it is all about – and that’s why I said a couple of weeks ago that if you are a gambler, you really should be good at faith because faith is risking everything on the fact that God has actually said this to you. Could I suggest that some of our lives are dull and kind of boring because we don’t go out on any limbs of faith? And we don’t go out on any limbs of faith because we don’t really believe that the little intuitive impressions that we have inside us are from God. If you just move out on a little one of those, God will begin to show you what his voice is and what the voice of your own desires is. But so often we say, “Well, now Pastor, I would like to do that, but maybe it’s not me.” Well, loved ones, you’re not going to find out by examining and analyzing; you’re only going to find out by obeying and finding that you have egg on your face or that God has come through. That’s the only way you’re going to find out — but at least if you act God knows, “Ah! You do really listen and you are anxious to obey me.” It changes the whole relationship from a passive one into an action one. Now could we look a little, loved ones, at what God told Noah to do in Genesis 7:1, “Then the Lord said to Noah, go into the Ark you and all your household, for I have seen that you are righteous before me in this generation.” And that “you and all your household” it’s good to see that that’s important because Genesis 9:19 shows why Noah was to take all of his household in. Genesis 9:19, “These three were the sons of Noah; and from these the whole earth was peopled.” So it was from Noah’s own family that the earth was peopled again after the flood. Then you see in Genesis 7:2, “Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and his mate; and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and his mate; and seven pairs of birds of the air also, male and female, to keep their kind alive upon the face of all the earth.” Now you know the distinction between clean animals and unclean animals that is given in Leviticus 11. So God said “You are to take three pair of each animal and probably one more that you would sacrifice — probably a male” that’s why he says seven altogether, “a male that you would sacrifice as a reminder that this mighty act of salvation is due to the previous eternal active salvation and the lamb that was slain and the blood that was shed there.” Then you see their kind in verse 3, “and seven pairs of the birds of the air also, male and female, to keep their kind alive upon the face of all the earth.” Some people say, “Oh, he couldn’t have taken each species in.” Well, there’s no way in which you can say that “kind” means “species” in those days. Presumably God so arranged it that out of those “kinds” could develop all the species that we have today. Then in verse 4, “For in seven days I will send rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living thing that I have made, I will blot out from the face of the ground.” And Noah did all that the Lord had commanded him.” The same way that God said to Moses, “Step into the Red Sea.” Moses did it. The same way that God said to Moses, “Strike the rock with your staff.” And Moses did it. The same way that God said to Moses, “Throw this tree into the waters of Mara and I will sweeten them” and Moses did it. The same way that God said to Peter and John when the lame man at the Gate Beautiful of the temple asked them for alms, he said “Say to the man, ‘Rise up in the name of Jesus’” and Peter and John said that and the man was healed. God only acts when you act, loved ones, that’s the key to it. That’s what that plumber [Smith Wigglesworth] from England, did – he did it! He was so stupid he didn’t know any better; when God told him to do something, he did it and trusted that God would act. And if you examine all the miracles, right throughout the Old and New Testament, they all occurred after a man or a woman did something that put their lives and their reputation on the line, and that’s the same with us. I don’t know how many of you have found your finances sorting themselves out after you have tithed. but you seem to have to take that step. It’s no use even saying, “Lord, believe me, believe me, I’ll tithe, I will — believe me, cross my heart!” It doesn’t matter. God says, “No, I’ll believe it when your money’s in the plate or your money is in the mail. When you act, then I will act.” Then you see why God says that; because he still believes he has done all the acting necessary. He has in his Son destroyed all the things that need to be destroyed in our lives and he reckons he has already done the great act. Now it’s up to us to act to show that we believe. But loved ones, that’s why it’s important to see faith is action. Faith isn’t feeling. Faith isn’t a deep conviction in your heart. Faith is action. Do you see that’s why you’re saved when you turn from your sins? It’s when you stop doing the sin that God works the miracle in your heart. It’s when you actually change your way of life and your attitude in your heart that God fills you with the Holy Spirit. Faith is action. Its acting on the basis of what God says it’s true. Then, loved ones, will you look at verse 6, “Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came upon the earth. And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives with him went into the ark, to escape the waters of the flood. Of clean animals, and of animals that are not clean, and the birds, and of everything that creeps on the ground, two and two, male and female, went into the ark with Noah, as God had commanded Noah. And after seven days the waters of the flood came upon the earth.” It presumably took about seven days for Noah to get all the animals and the birds into the ark along with all the people. And at the end of seven days, then the waters came upon the earth. You notice that there is never any question in people’s minds about the flood. That’s why they go to such length to emphasize how all these animals and all these people were delivered from the flood. Because that’s the difficulty: the problem that there was a flood. There is no problem at all, because it is written in through all the sedimentary rocks strata that we have in our world; throughout the world there is evidence of a mighty catastrophic flood in just the rock strata alone. But then you remember some of the fossils that we find; we even find cows that have the cud still in their mouths or in their stomach. And obviously the only way they could have been fossilized in a moment like that, almost freeze dried it seems, is because some tremendous catastrophic thing took place in a moment. So there is evidence all over. There are about two hundred and sixty or seventy different accounts of the flood throughout the literature of ancient times, so there is no question in anybody’s mind that there was a great catastrophic flood. The question is always, “Well, how did anybody live through it?” And that is why, of course, God emphasizes again and again, “This is how it was done.” Verse 11, “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month,” probably the second month of the civil year, which would make it probably October or November, “on the seventeenth day of that month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth.” And you know the emphasis there is, it wasn’t just a little flood of rain; there seemed to be great stores of water in the earth that burst up through the earth and forced all the oceans and the rivers to flood their banks so that it was a tremendous rising up of water from beneath and then you see the fountains of the great deep burst forth and the windows of the heavens were opened. The Hebrew word here means sluices; the sluices of heaven — as if all the gates were just blown wide open and there were floods of rain that poured down upon the earth. “And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights.” So for over a month, almost a month and a half, it seems that that whole shield of water vapor and all the waters that were gathered in the stratosphere and the atmosphere fell upon the earth. “On the very same day Noah and his sons, Shem and Ham and Japheth and Noah’s wife and three wives of his sons with them entered the ark, they and every beast according to its kind, and all the cattle according to their kinds, every creeping thing that creeps on the earth according to its kind, every bird according to its kind, every bird of every sort.” To emphasize, “Yes it really happened.” And this is how God preserved the race: “They went into the ark with Noah, two and two of all flesh in which there was the breath of life. And they that entered, male and female of all flesh, went in as God had commanded him; and the Lord shut him in.” And loved ones, it’s probable that we will have to face some of the same kinds of things in our lives. If you think of that dear man with his family, and with the animals and the birds in that ark, and the sense of nothing but absolute chaos outside, he knew that there had to be a great trust in the Father, and a great readiness to die if necessary if the Father wanted them to. Now loved ones, there is no way in which we are going to get round that if we are going to be any use for God. Really, it is going require us, as a group, to be willing to go out on all kinds of limbs for the Father. Now, I agree with you; it has to be on the basis of what comes from within you. It can’t be me saying to John “Oh we should start a theatre” or me saying to Terry and Sherri “Oh, we should get on television.” It has to be something that comes from our hearts, but that is why I encourage you to see that, that’s what God wants. There are little souls in Bangkok who will be brought to Jesus through some little one here who doesn’t think she’s very talented, or some little guy who doesn’t think he’s very much of a saint. But God will get into one of your hearts and he will give you a little vision for something that you have to do and you will go out and do it and there will be people in heaven because you’ve done it. But that’s the way it works. It doesn’t work with guys like me up here rah-rahing. It doesn’t. It works through God, in the intuition with your spirit, giving you a little vision, a little vision of something to do. I remember calling an old friend of mine that was at the same seminary as me and he’s, in the pastorate in Georgia, I think. I remember him saying, “Yes, I think the Lord has a wee work for me to do here.” Well that’s it; the Lord has a wee work for you to do. That’s why you are here in the world. You’re not here just to grapple through and get your social security and your pension. You are here to do some wee work for the Lord — some work that only you can do. But it will mean, loved ones, beginning to follow up some of the directions that God is giving you. Maybe one of the worst emphasis of the media is you have to be an Oral Roberts or a Billy Graham or you have to be somebody else. That’s foolishness — they aren’t the men that bring in the kingdom of God — it’s the little ones among us that get something from God, and share it with the rest of us. So in four years time we announce here, so and so has gone to Italy, or someone is now living in Rome, or someone is now living in Melbourne, or someone is now living in some little town that none of us have ever heard of, but you have gone out as God has guided you and he has begun to answer your faith and do many mighty little miracles. And you find yourself, sooner or later, shut up in some old ark with a lot of animals and a lot of children and wives and husbands and you are the only one who seems to know why you are there. That’s the moment when the faith of Jesus rises within you and gives you confidence in the Father. But it will take that; it will take a few little steps at the beginning, and then bigger steps and bigger steps until eventually you end up in that position. But it is good to think of what Noah was in; not really sure of anything but that this seemed the best that God had said to him in his heart. I don’t know if you have ever heard me say that, I don’t think I’m an example but I know it has happened in my own life. You’ve said, “Well do you think we should go this way?” And I’ve said, “That’s the only direction I’ve got from God.” There’s a great confidence that comes in that. Not certain that it will work, no assurance that God has not something deep to teach you by letting you fall flat on your face, but a certainty that there is no other way to go. “I have no other direction from the Lord” and that’s a great place to be. When you go that way, not sure mathematically that all the other ways are wrong, not sure mathematically that this way is undoubtedly successful, but sure in your heart “This is the only news I have heard from the Lord recently, and I have to act on that.” That’s the excitement of faith — that’s the excitement of saying that your Father never lets you down. So loved one, look at verse 17, “The flood continued forty days upon the earth” so you see it fell forty days and forty nights and that is what it means there, “continued falling.” The flood continued coming “and the waters increased and bore up the ark and it rose high above the earth. The waters prevailed and increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark floated on the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed so mightily upon the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered.” And that is why we say that it was a universal flood; it wasn’t a local flood, because that’s the only explanation of, “all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered.” I think Ararat is about 26,000 feet high, so if all those mountains were covered, then it meant that the flood was universal. “The waters prevailed above the mountains covering them fifteen cubits deep. And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, birds, cattle, beasts, all swarming creatures that swam upon the earth, and every man; everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died.” It had to be, loved ones; that’s why you and I need to see there is no good in us. That’s what God was trying to bring home to us, “The reason I’m doing this is because this is the only answer for what you people have become; I have to destroy every bit of you. I have to flood it out absolutely. There is no bit of you that is really good.” That’s the key to being filled and baptized with the Holy Spirit; to see that there is no good in you, nothing good that can be used by God, everything has to be redone in Jesus and do you realize that’s the place for full consecration? Full consecration is not saying “I will give my car, Lord, I will give you my job, I will give you my wife, and I will give you my friends.” Full consecration is, “Holy Spirit, what will I give?” That’s it. Or saying, “Holy Spirit what did God put of mine into Jesus on the cross? What of me cost Jesus pain on the cross? Holy Spirit, you alone know, tell me and I will say yes.” It’s what I think Sue said “If you say “yes” to God then all the rest follows.” It’s just saying “yes”. And then we come to the very end in verse 23, “He blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the ground, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the air; they were blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark. And the waters prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days.” So for 150 days there was a great flood that destroyed all life on the earth except what was in the ark which was locked and had been crucified with Christ from before the foundation of the world, and which God was trying to bring home to us. Then maybe it would be good for you to look at the important verse that brings it all down to today in 1Peter 3:18. “For Christ also died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit; in which he went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formally did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons where saved through water.” And there the teaching is that the people who were destroyed in the flood were really the only ones that were not given that chance to see what God had done in his Son, so Jesus, in some way, presented the truth to them after his resurrection. And then in verse 21, “Baptism, which corresponds to this,” which corresponds to the flood, “now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a clear conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers subject to him.” Let’s pray. Dear Father, the thought of the massiveness of the flood is beyond our imagination, and the thought of that relatively little ark compared with the size of the flood waters, and the thought of that little ark with Noah and his family inside, and the animals and the birds, is beyond our ability to conceive. But, Lord, we do see that things were very serious when you had to destroy the whole creation. Then Lord, we see that baptism is the real meaning of that; we are baptized into Jesus’ death and as the waters go over our heads, so we once and for all are blotted out; absolutely destroyed by the power of the Holy Spirit making real the great flood that took place in Christ before the foundation of the world. All that is evil in us is destroyed and wiped out once and for all and we rise up as in an ark, as Jesus rose from the dead, and we are made new. Anyone who is in Christ is a new creation, the old has passed away and the new has come. Father, you are saying you have done that for all of us; we simply believe it and it will be real for us. Father, thank you, Lord, thank you; thank you that all that we are and all that we have become up to this very moment tonight has been wiped out. Lord, however nice we all may appear to each other, however attractive, whatever goodness we may seem to have, thank you, Lord, that tonight by faith, we can recognize that all of that has now been destroyed in Jesus and you have made us new and we are new. We are new creations tonight. Lord, now we will allow everything that is of the old nature to drain from us; all our attitudes, all our motives, all our hopes even for our own lives. Father, we come before you now and we lay all of those down at your feet and Lord Jesus, we allow you to trample them into the dirt. Lord we say, “Here we are at your disposal. Will you take our lives now?” And now that they are new and created anew in your own image, will you now direct us as we begin to move forward in a life of faith? Dear Father, we are available for whomever in South America, or in Africa or in India, you want to use us to contact for yourself. We are available. Here am I, Lord, send me. We give ourselves to you, our Father, ditching forever our own personal hopes for our lives and from now on enlisting in your service for your glory and for your purposes. Now, the grace of our Lord Jesus, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with each one of us, now and throughout this coming week. Amen.
Faith is Resting - GENESIS
The Ark Genesis 8 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill We are studying the Old Testament these Sunday evenings because many of us, I think, have begun to sense that what we have called “faith” and what we say we are living in is not really the faith that is outlined in this dear book. That is, many of us feel that faith is a bundle of notions about Jesus and about God, and then we kind of move tentatively through each day keeping a look out for something that may happen to reassure us that our faith is real, and I think lot of us move that way. A lot of us live through each day with certainly a feeling that God is real, and a belief that Jesus has died for us, and even in some sense that we’re risen with him, and we do have our telescope out looking for any incidents that may come about to reassure us that that’s the case. And then as soon as we see one of those popping up, like whalers looking for the whale to start spouting; as soon as we see it, we are going to get out our weapons and we are going to go for it. But that isn’t faith as this dear book outlines it. In the Old Testament, we begin to see that faith is not just an attitude of your thoughts or an attitude of your heart or your mind, but that it produces actions that are based on the absolute certainty that the whole world of heaven is at your back and ready to manifest itself the moment you act. So faith in the Old Testament and in the New Testament is action. It’s a whole life of attitudes and words and deeds that are based on the fact that God has destroyed everything evil in Jesus, has made it all new, and we are to go in and treat everything as if that is so, and as we do that, it will be so. So that’s why we are studying the Old Testament, loved ones; to begin to allow God’s Spirit to bring that faith into us and to build us up in that faith. And then, of course, I would pray that you would act that way through the week, otherwise what we do here just becomes knowledge again. So we’ve reached Genesis 18:1 and you will see that it is the account of the ending of the flood, “But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the ark.” Now that doesn’t mean that God was walking around heaven and he said, “Ah, that Noah and his three sons and all those animals; now where did I leave them?” It doesn’t mean that; God remembered, “Oh yeah, I left them out there near Ararat.” Yet I think often we kind of feel that; we often think of it like a cook in the restaurant with lots of different orders and she is kind of looking around and saying ‘Oh, that’s a cheese omelet; oh, that’s the steak, oh, I forgot that…that’s the fried egg.” And at times we think “Now, he has a lot to look out for; I wonder could I have slipped his mind?” It isn’t possible. It means God “remembered” in the sense that he remembered that we are dust. God kept Noah in his mind; he had him in his mind all time, and so he has us. There is no moment when he doesn’t know where you are exactly. There is no moment when he has to say “Oh, I forgot Jim. Oh, I forgot John — he’s looking for a wife — that’s it.” There is not a moment like that. God remembers all of us every moment, and he sees everything at all times. You get that you remember in some dear words of Jesus in Matthew 10:29, “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?” Jesus is saying “Sparrows are nothing — you get two of them for a penny today, and not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will.” So Jesus says not even a little sparrow falls to the ground without your Father’s will. That is; not one sparrow falls dead without God looking at it and saying “All right, that’s enough now, I’ll take it to myself.” Verse 30, “But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.” So, loved ones, God doesn’t forget us. He keeps us in his mind every moment. You remember that great verse in Corinthians, “There is no trial come upon you beyond what you are able to bear and with that trial God will make a way of deliverance.” So whatever you are involved in, it is good to realize that God is with you every moment and he knows exactly what you are in. Now I think that’s where we trip up because we kind of believe in Satan’s lie, “Maybe he has forgotten you” and that’s where we begin to worry. That’s when you cease to exercise faith and that’s when you cease to have your connection with heaven, and that’s when you cease to see the resources God has manifested. So loved ones it is very important not to get caught up in the shadows that are shuddering on the little room of the ark in which you are. That was the situation with Noah: he has been in this ark a long, long time. He had been in it, if you look back at Genesis 8, about five months. And it is vital when you are in the midst of a situation that is not exactly what you would like to project your eyes outside that, and to see what God had promised. That is what Noah did; he looked back to Genesis 6:17 and after five months, Noah’s eyes were not on those shadows that were projected by the candlelight on the walls of his little cabin in the ark; but Genesis 6:17, “For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from under the heaven; everything that is on the earth shall die. But I will establish my covenant with you; and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you. And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female.” That’s what Noah remembered. So when you are in a tough spot it is vital to look out to what God has said, “I’ll never leave nor forsake you. I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. There is no trial come upon you beyond what you are able to bear and with the trial I will make a way of deliverance.” And that’s why we need to fill our minds and fill our thoughts, not with the stuff that comes through the eye-gate and the ear-gate, not with the situation in the office, not with the situation that our parents have described to us, not with the situation that the newspapers and the TV is blazing in upon us, but to fill our minds with what God has said. “You who are dead in your trespasses, I’ve raised up and I’ve made you sit with me in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and dominion and power, that I may show forth the riches of my glory through you.” So loved ones, that’s it: to remember that God has us every moment in his mind. Now if you say, “Ah, brother, big deal — what’s the importance of that?” That’s faith, and it is going to be unto you according to your faith, you see. So you may say, ‘Oh well, couldn’t God bless me?” No. He’s a dear Father, but he will not take over our free wills. If you’re determined to fix your eyes on that miserable boss that you work for, if you’re determined to fix your eyes on the fact that you’re not married yet and look at the age you are, if you’re determined to fix your eyes on that car — it’s miserable — and the money is running out and the house is a mess; then that’s where you’ll get your life; straight from the pit of Satan. It will be according to your faith. So that’s the importance of actually exercising faith, of seeing it the way it really is and that’s what Noah did if you look at Genesis 8, “But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the water subsided.” So often we think of the powers of nature as inanimate powers that operate by a preset rule or law. But obviously, if you think of Elijah praying that it wouldn’t rain, and you think of all the other incidents when God moved the mighty waters of the Jordan, and then brought a wind here to dry up the sea; obviously God can use the powers of nature even in response to our faith through Jesus. Some of us have a tendency to say, “Oh, well, I know that, but it’s just this timing thing is a bit off at times.” Well, really, that’s the way he uses nature and the whole world of events; through timing. What was the changing of the water into wine but an acceleration of a process that took place anyway … fermentation? It’s simply that God accelerated the timing of it. That’s why it’s important to see in that chapter in Ecclesiastes; there’s a time to sow and a time to reap. There’s a time to rejoice and a time to weep. God’s answers to all our problems are completely involved with timing — that’s what he specializes in, and the moment he knows that we need a thing, his remembering us and his action are one in the same. So in a way, this was a natural wind that dried up the waters, but it was God that controlled it so that it blew strong enough and the work was done in a very short time; just the way the work was done in a very short time when the jars of water were turned into jars of wine. So really, there is no place for us saying, “But I just think his timing is off.” His timing is exactly right. His last moment is always a moment after our last moment — that’s true; his last moment is always a moment after our last moment, but it’s always exactly right. I remember that [Smith] Wigglesworth tells of a woman who was deaf who came up and he prayed for her. He said — it’s funny the way he tells it in his book because the whole certainty and solidity of faith and a real man of faith comes over, because he says “The woman came up and she was as deaf as anything. She couldn’t hear a thing; she couldn’t hear a hammer, she couldn’t hear a loud noise — she was just stone deaf. And after I prayed for her, she was still as stone deaf. She went home that night and she came back another night” and he doesn’t wink an eyelid, he just tells it straight on; “She came back the next night and I prayed for her and she can hear as well as any of us.” But there’s that confidence that the work has been done in Jesus and the timing is up to God and just because it doesn’t come on the second we demand it, it doesn’t mean that God has failed, but you know — we get caught that way. We believe God for something, but it doesn’t happen at our last moment so we cast away our faith and our confidence, cut ourselves off from the power of heaven and Satan whips right in and destroys us with depression and disappointment. So the timing of God is always right. We need to see that God has done the thing in Jesus and he will do the thing in his good time; our place is to accept his timing. That’s what he did with Noah in verse 2, “the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed.” Not all the fountains of the deep, you remember, all the fountains of the deep were opened, it says, that’s what produced the flood. Now some of the fountains of the deep remained open so that there would continue to be water and so that some of the water could drain away, so it doesn’t say “all the fountains of the deep” but “some of the fountains of the deep and some of the windows of heaven were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained, and the waters receded from the earth continually.” So it rained for about 40 days, and probably continued to rain for awhile after that during the next 150 days. So about five months later, this is the way God began to turn back the flood at the end of 150 days, the waters had abated. Then in Verse 4, “and in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest upon the mountains of Ararat.” Now if you look back at Genesis 7:11, you can see when the flood began; “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month.” And now you see in Verse 4 of this chapter, “and in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month,” roughly about five months later, about 150 days later, the Ark came to rest upon the mountains of Ararat. Ararat, loved ones, is on the borders of present day Turkey now Armenia. And I don’t know if you can see it on this map, but it is an amazing position that God designated for the coming to rest of the ark. Ararat is just a little west of the Caspian Sea and it’s just a little east of the Mediterranean Sea and it’s interesting to see that the then known world was in line with the main line of these inland waters, you see, so it’s in that line of communication. Some people pointed out that it is also almost directly in line with the longest land bridge of the then known world, right up from the Bering Straits up here (indicating on a map), right down to the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa. So in a real sense, Ararat was right in the middle of the ancient world of that day, it wasn’t chance that God brought the ark to rest there and that that is the cradle of civilization, as all the historians will attest to. It is interesting too, some of us know the account in Genesis of the landing of the ark on Mount Ararat, but we don’t realize that in all history books there are references to this miracle. This is an old commentary [holding up a book] by a man called John Gill and the beauty of these old commentaries is they quote the ancient authors outside the Bible and so he says this, “Berosis, the Chaldean” not a Biblical author at all “says, it is reported that in Armenia, on a mountain of the Cárdenas, there is a part of a ship, the pitch of which some take off and carry about with them and use it as an amulet to avert evils. And Nicholas of Damascus, another ancient writer, relates that ‘In Minyas, in Armenia, is an huge mountain called Baris to which is the report is many fled at the flood and were saved and that a certain person, carried in an ark or chest, struck upon the top of it and that the remains of the timber were preserved a long time after. And adds perhaps he indeed might be the man about whom Moses the legislator of the Jews wrote. Now this mountain seems plainly to have its name from the ark of Noah, for a boat or ship is with the Egyptians called Baris. So it’s interesting that it’s written into the history of the world that, in fact, the ark did come to rest on this Mount Ararat that is found on the borders of our present Turkey. And maybe it is good for us to see that; that this isn’t a myth or it isn’t something that we just sing about in gospel hymns, but that this is historical, that it actually took place. Now loved ones, then it would be good to look at verse 5, “And the waters continued to abate unto the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen.” That was about another seventy-three days. Now in verse 6, I can see there is a phrase that is good for you and me to see the implications of. “At the end of 40 days Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made.” Actually that was at the end of eight months. Do you see what happened? After five months the waters began to go down, but it wasn’t until eight months later that Noah opened the window of the ark long enough for the impatience of counterfeit faith to show itself — isn’t that right? I mean if you think of ourselves, we probably would have had a rope over the side at the end of the five months and we’d be kind of dangling our feet in the water or at least throwing something in to see how long it took to hit the bottom. But Noah knew that God was faithful, and he believed it and even though the thing seemed to be coming to an end, this trial, yet he stayed there and waited for God’s word and God’s command because he was settled in his mind, “Lord, if you want me in this ark forever, I’ll stay here.” Lord, if you want me single forever, I’ll stay here. Lord, if you want me in this job forever, I’ll stay here. Even though it looks, Lord, as if you’re opening another opportunity for me, I’m not going to get antsy. I’m not going to start heaving something over the side to see if the waters are abating or to see if I can get out of this tight spot I’ve been in for so many months. No Lord, I’m content; I’ll stay here as long as you want me to.” Loved ones, that’s pretty important with faith. That’s actually what distinguishes faith from a kind of impatience with God. It is. Do you remember Ananias and Saphira? Was that not what was wrong with them? They said, “Since everybody is giving everything to God, boy, we’ll give everything to God — but we’ll provide for ourselves as well. I mean we’ll trust him — we’ll trust him, we’ll put our faith in him, but we’ll provide for ourselves as well.” There was a lack of rest in their faith, a lack of readiness to accept what God had given them for as long as he should want. And loved ones, often it’s near the end of the little trials that God graciously allows us to undergo, that you and I blow it. I don’t know how many of you have been through trials where you’ve almost pulled it off; it’s almost been a wonderful trial — almost! It’s just that the end … it kind of didn’t go out with a bang, but kind of a whimper. So it was almost a mighty triumph and a mighty deliverance, but not quite because you began to see the glimmer at the end of the tunnel and you began to run a little instead of resting in faith. So God uses Satan in that way; to expose to us when we’re pretending to have faith, and when we really have faith. So if you think of the things that you’re believing God for, is it the kind of attitude that [Smith} Wigglesworth has: “This woman’s deafness has been healed in Jesus: she was destroyed utterly in Christ, and she was raised up with him and she has new eardrums in Christ; I know that. When you want to manifest that, Lord, that’s up to you, but I know that has happened, and my faith is solid; irrespective of your timing or when you want to do it.” Now that’s the faith that gets an answer, loved ones. It can’t be this kind of faith, “Yeah, I think … I think God’s … I think God’s gonna do it. Yeah, oh, it looks more like it.” No. Because you see, you’re changing the ground of your faith; you’re changing it from God’s promises and from what you know he has done in Jesus, to the human side; the appearance that you can see in the world’s circumstances, and that’s what Satan wants you do to. As soon as Satan can get you, Peter, to look down at the water and to see, “Boy, it looks pretty solid. Oh, I’m walking on it. It’s not frozen, but it does look kind of solid and here I am on top of it.” As soon as you begin to look at the waters under your feet, as soon as you begin to look at circumstances and think maybe this is going to pull off, you cease to exercise faith in God and what he has done in Jesus, and you begun to put it in what you see and touch. That leads you into counterfeit faith, into faith in appearances, into the things that are seen instead of the things that are unseen. Satan comes along and takes the legs from under you and you’re finished. So it’s good to see that Noah kept on keeping on with the faith. “Verse 6: “At the end of 40 days Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made” and then in verse 7, “and sent forth a raven; and it went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth.” A raven is really a carrion bird, a kind of a vulture; it will land on carcasses of animals, and that’s why it was sent out first — because it will land on dead animals. Some people have said it’s like the law; it discovers what is dead and what is decaying and that’s why it was sent out first. And that’s what the law does; it discovers and exposes what is decaying, but not so with a dove. So after the raven ceased to come back Noah knew, “Ah, there is something on which that raven has landed” but he realized it can be something dead that the flood came to destroy. So really, it’s not the time yet, and then in verse 8, “Then he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground” because a dove won’t land on anything like a dead carcass or anything unclean or filled with decay, a dove will only land on something that is absolutely clean and living. So Noah knew that until the dove came back, things were not really clean, and there was still poison, and there was still disease. In verse 9, “but the dove found no place to set her foot, and she returned to him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. So he put forth his hand and took her and brought her into the ark with him.” You need to be willing to wait for the dove of the Holy Spirit to signify that all is clean in your heart. Some of us go too fast; some of us are trying to pray through to the fullness of the Holy Spirit, or to a clean heart, or sanctification, or crucifixion of Christ, or full surrender, and we won’t stay long enough. We’re kind of impatient; if we can get the raven out and it doesn’t come back, we feel that everything has been destroyed; “Everything has died, so I must be in; I must be filled with the Holy Spirit.” No, the Holy Spirit will witness when you are fully consecrated to God. The Holy Spirit will only land on a heart that is clean and pure, and we need to be willing to trust God for that, loved ones. I don’t know how many of you have tried to pray through to the fullness of the Holy Spirit or a clean heart or sanctification, but I think we can often be impatient about it or we can tackle it as if it’s a kind of technique or a form or a formula. You need to trust God. You need to trust God’s Holy Spirit. He’s going to let you know; the Spirit of God will witness with your spirit when you’re a child of God. The Holy Spirit will witness when you’re fully consecrated. The Holy Spirit will witness when your heart is clean. You don’t need to keep looking in and saying, “Is my heart clean? Is my heart clean?” The Holy Spirit will witness cleanliness and the victory of cleanliness when you’re there, and part of faith is trusting him to do that. I think many of us miss it, because we grow a little impatient, or a little antsy, or a little fearful, and we think to ourselves, “Oh, surely it’s over, it must be; these floods have been over me; I’ve been crucified with Christ, I’m ready to do anything Lord, you know I am. I must be filled with the Holy Spirit.” And we get up from our knees, and we go off and we “grab by faith” as we say, but really the Holy Spirit has not witnessed to us that all is clean and pure. So there is something here for us; to be content with that and content that the Holy Spirit will come. The raven is the law. The Holy Spirit is represented by the dove and to wait for the Holy Spirit to come. And you see that’s what Noah did in verse 10; he waited another seven days — very patient really. Having been in the Ark already for five, eight months and yet ”He waited another seven days, and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark; and the dove came back to him in the evening, and lo, in her mouth, a freshly plucked olive leaf; so Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth.” And he knew that there was life beginning to spring up. Now this dear man, Gill [holding up a book] gives us some of the illustrations of the old preachers I think he was 18th century. He says “For the waters were on the face of the whole earth, there was no place dry and so neither food nor footing for this creature and which was an emblem of a sensible sinner who finds no rest in anything short of Christ, not in worldly enjoyments nor in external duties, not in hearing, reading, praying, fasting, nor an external humiliation and tears, nor in the law and in the works of it, nor in the natural descent, nor in education principals, nor in a profession of religion and subjection to ordinances, only in Christ where it finds rest from the burden and guilt of sin and the tyrannical power of it; from the bondage, curse, and condemnation of the law and from a sense of divine wrath and fear of it and though not from afflictions, yet it finds rest in Christ amidst them.” Hold on for Jesus. Hold on through for Jesus Christ. Hold on in prayer until Christ comes and don’t be satisfied with anything less than him and in him, everything — life and peace come. Loved ones, let’s go just a little further in Genesis 8. “In the six hundredth and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried from off the earth; and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and behold, the face of the ground was dry.” If you compare that with Genesis 7:11, you see that Noah was in the ark, by that time, about 10 months. “In the six hundred and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried from off the earth.” The flood came back in 7:11 in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month. So Noah had been in that old ark about ten months, and yet still he was patient and waited for God. Verse 14, “In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dry.” And not before then; 57 days, actually, after what we’ve just read when Noah left the ark. So that’s God’s word to us: “Don’t go on your own judgment. Don’t go on your own guesstimate about this; wait for me, I’ll tell you. I think a lot of us here would get further in our own life with Jesus if we would stop looking at everybody else and saw what they’re doing with their ark. “Oh, so and so got out of his ark in the third month; ah, that guy has an outboard motor on his; I must get one on mine. If we stop looking at other people’s ark, loved ones, there’s a flood that you need that none of the rest of us need. There’s a flood that is exactly right for you. There’s a flooding out of all that is evil in you that took place in Jesus’ death that hast not taken place for the rest of us; it’s different. There’s a place in Jesus’ heart on Calvary that you filled that none of the rest of us filled. There’s a death that you have to die with Jesus that none of the rest of us have to die. There’s a special Calvary that you have with Christ that only you have. And why I encourage you to see that is, our society is so preoccupied with what the other fellow is doing, and we are so preoccupied with being saved enmass; we will not go into heaven together. It’s nice to be together here on earth, but we won’t go into heaven together. We go into heaven separately and alone, singly; then we’ll all meet inside in heaven. But, loved ones, it’s you and Jesus individually together and there’s a place you have to come into and a place you have to be patient for. So it’s good to read the books, I think, and it’s good to read other men and women’s experiences; but really it is vital to see that the Jesus in whom you were delivered from the flood is the Jesus that only you will know in the particular way that he has known you. One of the old saints said, “There’s a place in God’s heart that is made for you and there’s a place in God’s heart that only you can fill.” And that’s right; there’s a place in God’s heart that only you can fill and there’s a sense in which each of us have to come to Jesus and say, “Lord, what you did for him was great, but Lord Jesus, what did you do for me?” Will you show me? I want to come in, Lord. I want to see what you bore for me on Calvary. I want to see all that you allowed to be destroyed in your own heart on Calvary. Lord Jesus, I want that because I want to be free of it. I want the dove of the Holy Spirit to discover only cleanness and purity in me.” So there is something in coming, eventually, into God. Now, loved ones, if you look then at verse 15, “Then God said to Noah’ that’s the first we read of God’s voice speaking to Noah for just about a year. Thomas A`kempas said, “God graciously grants us, at times, the grace of devotion.” That is he, at times, grants us the grace of being able to feel devotion for God. Isn’t that interesting; whereas we kind of take it as our right – “I don’t feel any devotion to God; I should feel it. I’m going to work it out” and we get into the flesh and we work up a feeling of love for God. That’s not faith; that’s shakiness; that’s uncertainty. That’s basing our salvation on what we feel. Be content. If God keeps quiet and doesn’t speak in your heart for some time, even a year, go on with your worship and your duties and be obedient and faithful and trust God. That’s what Noah did; for a long year, he heard nothing from God but he kept on doing the things that God had directed him to do and to remain faithful. So, loved ones, that’s faith. Do you see what God is after; he’s after faith in us. He’s after a group of children who will walk after him whether he’s handing candy to them or not. But too often we’re not that; we’re saying, “Oh, dad, give me a sweet. Give me a piece of chocolate. Give me a candy. Give me something. Pat me on the head. Oh, do you love me? Tell me you love me. Oh, do something for me.” And it’s so wearisome. God sees, “Oh, my child, have you no faith in me? Do you not believe me? Will you never believe me, however much I do for you?” God is looking for men and women who will believe him; believe that he is what he said he is; and that’s what Noah did. You see it in Verse 15, “Then God said to Noah, ‘Go forth from the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your son’s wives, with you.” It was from them that the whole earth was peopled — from those eight people — and obviously because in those days there was no such thing as incest, in those days they were not in that close blood relationship. That has been bred into the race over the years. So there was no such thing as incest because they didn’t have that closeness of relationship with each other at that time even though they were related. So the whole earth was peopled from them and this is the renewal of the original commission when God said, “Fill the earth.” “Go forth from the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your son’s wives with you. Bring forth with you every living that is with you of all flesh — birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth — that they made breed abundantly on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply upon the earth. So Noah went forth, and his sons and his wife and his son’s wives with him.” And that’s how the whole earth was peopled; from that little mountaintop the whole earth was peopled. Nothing remarkable, in a way, in the light of things like the Kontiki expedition, nothing remarkable when you read of the way a little Tern can fly a hundred miles a day, for twenty days, or in the way animals can swim amazing distances who actually aren’t used to swimming. I don’t know if you read about some dear old cow that … oh, the guy was fed up with it; it loved citrus fruit and he couldn’t keep it out of his orchard, so he decided he’d get rid of it and so he sold it for $350 to a guy a hundred miles away. Two days later, the cow was back in its pasture. It had traveled a hundred miles and was back! So when you see the amazing things that animals and birds have done it’s not a mystery that the earth was populated both with animals and birds and with people from that one spot which is known, really, as the cradle of civilization. Verse 19, “And every beast, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves upon the earth, went forth by families out of the ark.” Of course, they had begun to breed in the ark. And then Verse 20, “Then Noah built an alter to the Lord.” Why? For the same reason as Able offered a sacrifice; they knew – did they know Jesus’ name; we won’t know until we get to heaven — but they knew God had done a mighty work that had cost him his own heart, had done a mighty work in eternity whereby somehow part of him had died and had destroyed all of us in him so that we were made new and whole. And Noah knew that; he knew that that’s why flood waters could be removed. He knew that’s why God was able to allow anybody to live; because he had actually destroyed us all in the lamb was slain from before the foundation of the world. That’s why Noah built an alter; he didn’t build an alter just in memory of the flood or all the things that had died in the flood, he built an alter in memory of the flood that took place in eternity from before the foundation of the world when Jesus was destroyed, and all of us were destroyed with him. “Then Noah built an alter to the Lord,” and made a sacrifice to express his belief in that, “and took of every clean animal and every clean bird,” because he had believed they had been made clean in Jesus, “and offered burnt offerings on the alter. And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odor,” actually it’s interesting, the Hebrew means not “pleasing odor”, but it means “rest”, a savor of rest. When God smelled a savor of rest, “the Lord said in his heart,” and that’s what happens; every time one person here senses, “I was crucified with Christ; I was changed in Jesus; these things that are getting me down — the habits, this bad temper that I have, this resentfulness, this self of mine that is intractable, this was crucified with Christ, this was destroyed by God in Jesus. I know it. I believe it.” There is a savor of rest that rises up to God. There’s kind of “Oh I’m glad.” There’s a coming home that takes place in God’s heart, a realization in us “You see what I’ve done, oh, good.” And he says “Come, my child.” There’s a savor of rest that comes when that takes place. Oh, that’s what you feel when you and I come into the fullness of the Holy Spirit, that’s what we feel. That’s why we feel at rest, you know. We feel, “Ah, I’m home, home at last.” That’s what it is; it’s God’s heart witnessing rest and peace to your heart. “And then the Lord said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.’” And that requires a little care in analyzing, loved ones, you see the way it runs; “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” Well that doesn’t make sense — that’s God kind of saying, “Well I’ll never curse the ground because of man, because man’s heart is evil from his youth, and it’s because his heart is evil from its youth, that I will never again curse the ground.” That’s not what it means. God is saying man has inherited tendencies that Adam begat; he has inherited, now an impaired mind, unbalanced emotions, and a weakened body. He has been born into a world that is infested with evil spirits and it is pro-self and anti-Christ. He has been born without the fullness of the Holy Spirit, so from his very youth, he is evil. And actually all I can do is destroy the earth and every generation because this man has an intimate mystical connection with the world. That’s why world fell along with us. That’s why the world began to bear weeds and thorns, and why earthquakes began to take place; because there was a mystical connection between you and me and the earth, itself and so when we fell out of God’s fellowship, the earth itself fell, so God was faced with that. He said, “Look, man is now evil from the moment he is born. He has evil tendencies, he has a desire to stand up for himself and to be independent of me, and if I’m going to face this, I’ll have to destroy the earth every generation. So he said, “Because of this, I’m not going to do that anymore. I am going to build into the world certain signs of the disharmony that is between me and humanity, but I am not any longer going to connect the state of the world with human beings; I’m going to cut those apart and separate them. Yet I’m going to leave some signs like earthquakes and some signs like thunderstorms and natural disasters that will continue to signify to men and women that there is something wrong. And yet in order to preserve the world, I am going to establish certain things, out of the grace that I have shown in Jesus’ death on Calvary that will enable it to continue. So on the one side, I will allow certain signs of disharmony to be there as a witness to man that all is not right, but at the other end, I’ll actually preserve the world by certain things that I will continue to do, irrespective of whether man obeys or not.” And that’s what it means, you see. “I will never again curse the ground because of man though the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth, though that is what I have to do, but I’m never going to do it. Neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done because I have destroyed them all in my son, Jesus. Verse 22, “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” And that’s part of the covenant with Noah, a covenant of common grace. [Gods says] “I will give certain things to men and women irrespective of whether they obey me or not. I have destroyed them in my son, Jesus, and that’s the only thing that will change them. And because I have done that, I am now in a position where I can allow the earth to continue, and I will allow it to continue by certain gifts of common grace that I will give, irrespective of man’s attitude to me. So I will allow summer and winter to continue, the seasons, I’ll let the harvest continue, I’ll let day and night; they will never cease from the earth. I’ll let the happiness of family life to continue. I’ll let the business laws continue, and the economic laws. I’ll let certain things continue in the earth that will enable it to exist, while men and women have the opportunity to discover the real deliverance that is in my son’s death.” And of course you know the great danger in our world is to misinterpret that and to say, “Everything is right; summer and winter continues, harvest continues, the rain rains on the righteous and the unrighteous; everything is right.” We can have happiness in our families. We can have a certain amount of satisfaction in this life, and Satan is always getting in and trying to take those gifts of common grace — they not gifts of redeeming grace; they don’t redeem you — but he’s always trying to get mankind in the world to think, “Everything is okay; there are lots of nice things in this world, lots of good things. You don’t need to be changed.” And of course God’s Holy Spirit is always coming and saying, “Look, this is only for a while; this is only part of God’s graciousness to us. He hasn’t flooded us out again because he has done this work in Christ, but you have only these seventy years or so to come into that deliverance in Christ, but after that, then comes the judgment. So loved ones, in a way we live on borrowed time, and in a way we live in a respite. We have been given respite and there will come a day when the world will not be flooded, but it will be burned up with fire. And we have until that day, or until the day of your death or mine, to come into the real flood that took place in Jesus; where everything dead and dying and decaying was destroyed in Christ, and the Holy Spirit is able to come down as the dove and make you whole and clean. So I pray that you will hold on right through for the complete baptism of the Holy Sprit and settle for nothing less, and see that there is no need to settle for anything less, and just pursue it until you come through. Be with Noah; patient until you’re absolutely sure that everything is new inside you. Let’s pray. Dear Father, we thank you for the reality and the fact of the flood and the ending of the flood. And we thank you, Lord, for the fact that it has power simply because it is an expression in nature of what you did to each one of us in Jesus, and that there is not one of here tonight who has not been completely remade in Christ. And Lord that all we have to do is believe that. All we have to do is accept that and live in accordance with that and suddenly the power and the victory of it is ours. Oh, Father, thank you for showing us that faith is not believing what we know not to be true, but faith is simply accepting reality, seeing reality, and living in accordance with it. So Lord we thank you that everything that is petty and selfishness, everything that is low and cunning, everything that is manipulating and resentful is crucified with Christ and we’re new people and we can live like that now. Lord, we would set our wills to that for your glory.
God’s Promise to Noah and Us - GENESIS
God’s Covenant With Noah Genesis 9 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill We’ll be studying, loved ones, tonight, Genesis 9 and it’s the covenant that God made with Noah and I’d like to start with a question; if you’d look at Genesis 2:17 I could put it to you very clearly: “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” So that’s it: “in the day you eat of it you shall die.” And then you see in Genesis 3:6 that’s exactly what Eve did; “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate.” So Adam ate; he did exactly what God said he shouldn’t do, and God said that in the day he did it he would die. But look at Genesis 4:1, “Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying ‘I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord.’” So Adam’s still alive. Why is Adam still alive when God said “in the day you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you will die?” I agree with you that in many ways he did die, if you’ll look at Genesis 3:7 where you can almost see all the signs of spiritual death, and psychological death, “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.” So undoubtedly they lost the sense of innocence and therefore of trust of each other, and that’s what happens when spiritual death begins to operate in us; we begin to suspect one another and to be distrusting of each other, and to loose the sense of innocence. Then in verse 10, “And he said, ‘I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.’” So he lost the sense of open, confident fellowship with God. That’s certainly what happens when you sin — death comes in upon you and the heavens seem like brass and you can’t get through to God. That certainly was a mark of spiritual death. And then back in Genesis 3:6, “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and it was a delight to the eyes, and the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.” And from then on they lived for food, and they lived for being happy – for finding something that was a delight to the eyes. And they lived to be the wisest in the world, and they became enslaved to those desires instead of being free, and so that’s a mark of spiritual death; where you’re a driven person. It’s good to listen for the footsteps of God, while we’re talking on a night like tonight. Do you find yourself a driven person – driven by desires for things that you know – or driven for no reason at all? That’s a mark of spiritual death, when you feel that. Then in verse 14, “The Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, cursed are you above all cattle, and above all wild animals; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.’” That was Satan, of course, in the serpent, and man lived from then on under the hostile attacks of Satan, so in that way he experienced spiritual death. It even affected the marriage as you see in verse 16, “To the woman he said, ‘I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.’” So the whole marriage relationship became unbalanced and became filled with strain, so that certainly became an indication of spiritual death. Verse 17, “And to Adam he said, ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, “You shall not eat of it”, cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.’” Adam lost the mystical rule over the earth that he possessed then. He was, because of his mystical fellowship with nature, to control nature – probably without even having to do anything physical; he could actually do it by faith. He lost that ability so he sensed hostility in his own environment. Then in verses 22-24, “Then the Lord God said, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever’ – therefore the Lord God sent him forth from he garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.” So Adam was prevented from approaching the tree of life; so he was restricted from receiving the Holy Spirit and certainly, that’s spiritual death. Then in Genesis 3:19 he began to weaken physically; “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Then in Genesis 5:5, his death; “Thus all the day that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years; and he died.” But I’d still ask you: why did God let him live 930 years after saying to him “In the day you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you will die.” Loved ones, that respite that God gave to Adam was possible because of just one fact and the fact is 2 Corinthians 5:14, “For the love of Christ controls us, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died.” And that’s it; Christ had died for Adam and therefore Adam had died in Christ and with him, and God considered that as the fulfillment for the punishment that he had pronounced on sin. He knew that he had taken the sting out of the sin in Adam, so Adam was no longer a threat to what God had planned. It was because Christ had died for Adam, and Adam had died in him, that God was able to give Adam respite of 930 years to have children in order to give them the chance of taking part in the great death that God had worked for them. Now you may say, “But wait a minute; Jesus did not die until thousands of years after Adam.” Loved ones, do you realize that that was only Jesus’ death in time and space, but that with God this is all one great, eternal moment. And as far as God is concerned, he put all of us into his son, and he destroyed us and remade us way before Calvary. Now you get that, among other verses, in 1 Peter 1. It’s a verse that many of us know, in connection with the term “the precious blood of Jesus by which we were ransomed.” 1 Peter 1: 18-20, “ You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your fathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. He was destined before the foundation of the world but was made manifest at the end of the times for your sake.” So Calvary was not a chance event that was forced upon God by the politicians, and it wasn’t an emergency reaction that God produced when he saw what had happened to all of us. Loved ones, the Father knew that you would be born and that I would be born. He knew your Granddad and your Grandma; he foresaw what would happen, and he put us into his son Jesus in eternity; and he destroyed us all there. That’s why Adam was permitted to live for another 930 years so that he would have as much chance as possible of accepting that re-creation that God had worked in Jesus for him, and would receive the Holy Spirit. Now even though the lamb’s feast was spread before the world, and it was all ready, there were two events that were still untouched by Jesus’ death and they were working to prevent man ever having a chance to get to know what Jesus had done for them. You’ll find those mentioned in Genesis 3:17, “And to Adam he said, ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, “You shall not eat of it,” cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.’” In other words, when Adam rebelled against God he lost the mystical connection he had been given over the earth, and the earth plunged into chaos. If God permitted that to continue, the world of nature would utterly destroy us before we had any chance to ever learn what God had done for us in Jesus. So the chaos and anarchy of nature was one of the problems; man was living now – not in an environment that encouraged him to see that he was crucified with Christ and raised to God’s right hand, but he lived now in an environment that opposed him and worked to destroy him. I don’t know where the dinosaurs and the pterodactyls fit in, but it’s something to do with that – the world suddenly became an unutterable hostile place, and God saw that man would never survive if that were to continue. And yet it was something that he says, later in the Bible — he subjected the world to futility; he had to allow that to happen because in some sense he had connected the world with man, and the world in a sense had a free will of its own. He was able to use even that to indicate to man that there was something rotten in the world. But the world of nature was now working to destroy man before him having any chance of knowing what God had done for him in Jesus. There was something else working, in Genesis 4:8, “Cain said to Abel his brother, ‘Let us go out to the field.’ And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.” Society had fallen into absolute anarchy; men were now mowing each other down. There was absolute distrust of everybody and suspicion of everybody now that there was suspicion of God and distrust of him. So the world itself — the society of men — was now working to utterly murder and exterminate every man on the earth, and that’s what happened. A few years later God looked at the earth and it was filled with violence, and he saw that the whole work that he had done in his son Jesus for us men and women — to change us –was never going to be known by us and therefore was never going to be entered into or through faith in our lives because society itself would destroy us all in a few years, and the world of nature was utterly chaotic and anarchic and was beginning, also, to have it’s affect on our lives. Now those are the two things, loved ones that God had to deal with, and he was forced to deal with it in a rather radical way as you’ll see in Genesis 6:5, “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 the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.’” Except for one man; there was one man who glimpsed what God had done in Jesus. Loved ones, you need to see that that doesn’t necessarily mean that when Abel offered the blood sacrifice that Abel even knew Jesus’ name. It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knew John 3:16. It doesn’t necessarily mean that Noah, who found favor in the eyes of the Lord, necessarily knew the details that we have — all the facts of history that we have before us of what happened to Jesus, and therefore what happened to us. Because you remember [St.] Augustine says the New Testament is in the Old [Testament], concealed, but the Old Testament is in the New revealed. So the Old Testament, the old covenant, contains the new covenant, but it conceals it; it has it in primitive terms. But undoubtedly they sensed that some mighty sacrifice, that’s why they used the blood in their sacrifices, some mighty death had taken place that enabled God to utterly change them and remake them. It’s because of that that Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord so except for Noah, God determined to destroy the world of nature and the world of society, and you get that in Genesis 6:11-14, “Now the earth was corrupt in Gods’ sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth. And God said to Noah, ‘I have determined to make an end of all flesh; for the earth is filled with violence through them; behold, I will destroy them with the earth.’” Except for Noah, so it was like Adam’s 930 years of respite; God found one little man, and his sons, and his wife that would form a little thread that would carry on humanity. Verse 14, “Make yourself an ark of gopher wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch.” You remember what happened; the flood covered the earth for almost a year. It destroyed everything; destroyed all the living animals, all the creatures, everything; and destroyed all human beings. Then after a year, God found Noah, and in Genesis 8:20, “Then Noah built an altar to the Lord, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.” God looked down and saw another Abel building an altar and offering the death of an animal upon it, and he knew that, still, human beings want to be changed. “They have something of my image in them and they still want to be remade. They sense what happened in my heart before the foundation of the world, and I see that; they want to be changed.” And God saw that man still had that desire to be changed and to experience what God had done for them in Jesus. Then in verse 21, “ And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odor, the Lord said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.’” That sentence is so strange – really what it means is, God said “I see Noah, and there must be other men and woman like him who want what I have done for them in Jesus. And I see the poor souls now are inheriting the evil tendencies from Adam, and in a sense they have not created this sin; it’s part of them; they’re evil from their youth up, and really in a sense, its something they haven’t control over – that original sin – though they have control over the sin that they now perform. But because I see them so helpless, and even though I should destroy the whole earth every generation, I will never again do it. I will find another answer to the chaos in society and in nature besides destruction.” And that’s what Genesis 9 is about, loved ones; that is what the covenant with Noah is about; God’s alternative to destroying the chaotic society and nature that had now become filled with anarchy and would have destroyed us before we had any chance to hear of Jesus. You can see the beginnings of it in Genesis 8:22, “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” God separated the orbiting of the earth and its place in space from man’s spiritual state. Before that, in some way, man’s spiritual state was connected up with the world. You see, God made man the crown of creation; he put him in charge of the garden to keep it, and so he had an authority over the earth. When he rebelled against God that authority went, and the thing went spinning chaotically, so the first step as an alterative to destroying the earth, was that God separated the orbiting of the earth [from man’s spiritual state] and therefore the seasons; the summer and the winter, and the cold and the heat, and the night and the day — separated that from man’s chaotic spiritual condition. No longer would it be at the mercy of what man’s state was. God made that an expression of his common grace. And so, loved ones, that’s why we have such an ordered world today; by rights due to our chaotic and rebellious attitude to God, it should be a tale told by an idiot — it should be in chaos. I mean we should have a short night tonight and then a chaotic long day and then chaos as far as the seasons are concerned and the harvest would be chaotic and actually the whole world would be, really, in a way, it would be impossible to dwell in. But God, through his common grace, has separated that from man. You can sense that it is his desire to get that back eventually under redeemed man, but this is one of his marks of common grace. Now he ran a risk in doing that and you will see that risk back in 2 Peter 3:3, “First of all you must understand this, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own passions and saying, ‘Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation. They deliberately ignored this fact, that by the word of God heavens existed long ago, and an earth formed out of water and by means of water, through which the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished.’” But there are people who take the order of nature and say, “Look, there’s nothing wrong between us and God; everything is going surprisingly well.” And in fact the evolutionists would say, “All things are continuing as they were from the beginning.” Of course Peter is saying, “No, they haven’t — there was a tremendous catastrophe at one time that changed things utterly and absolutely and affected the way we measure our aging of all things on the earth. But Peter is here saying, “No, there will be people who will mistake God’s common grace for redeeming grace and will say, “It’s an ordered world — what’s wrong with it? There are some things wrong, but on the whole, it’s going right. Now surely that means that we are all right with our God.” They mistake common grace with the fact that they are alive today, and that they are able to make money, and they are able to be reasonably happy. They mistake that for the sense of redemption or being right with God. But still, that’s one thing God did; he separated the orbiting of the earth. Now if you look back then to Genesis 9, loved ones, he went on further and he renewed the commitment and the command to Noah that he had given Adam. Genesis 9:1, “And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.’” And that, of course, is our commitment: we’re to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and not only in regard to our natural children, but especially in regard to the children of the kingdom; we’re meant to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. It ties up a little with what we said this morning loved ones, there is no room for negativism in those of us who are here since Jesus died. Our commitment and commission is to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. That’s it. And as different ones of us die and go to heaven, that’s what we are to be concerned with; multiplying and filling the earth and subduing it; that’s what God wants for us. I was around the Lake of the Isles because Saturday was a magnificent day and of course the [ice] skaters are out like mad — everybody is out. Really — Minnesota has one day of spring — do you realize that? Or maybe half a day and then its summer! And it just struck me how we have so much opportunity to have that outdoor service at Lake Calhoun which we’ll begin in June, July and August — to have that opportunity to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. There are souls there who have been prayed for, and who are waiting for the songs we sing, and the testimonies that we will give, and the speaking that we’ll do at Calhoun, but that is what God has committed us to; “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” You noticed, actually, he did not include “subdue” because he then begins to elaborate — because the subduing is different from what it was when he gave it [the command] to Adam. In Adam’s day, it was subduing by faith; it was the kind of subduing that Mark was talking about in his prayers; the subduing that God wants to give back to us in Jesus; the subduing by the power of faith, by the mighty power of faith. Loved ones, once you are in Jesus, there is no mountain that you cannot safely remove and cast into the sea. There is not. God has given you the power and authority as a believer over every sickness and over every sin. So there is a renewal, then, of the faith subduing that Adam had, but here, of course, it was not present, so then there is this subduing in verse 2. Then God had brought the stars and the planets into order by fiat, and separated from man’s condition, now he had to do the same with the animals, otherwise they would destroy man. But every time you think of St. Francis think of this; it wasn’t St. Francis kind of subduing the animals — that’s really what we’re meant to have. We’re not meant to be antagonistic with our animals; we’re meant to have a loving, mystical connection with them that brings them into the order of God’s love, but that wasn’t what was brought here because they weren’t capable of it. Genesis 9:2, “The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every bird of the air, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered.” That was one of the second best steps that God had to take. He brought the orbiting of the earth into order and separated it from man’s state, and then he brought the animals into order under man, through fear. That’s why the fish go so fast when your shadow falls on the water. That’s why the deer want to run away; there is a fear built into them now that prevents them from destroying us men and women. It is not God’s best. God’s best is that loving faith-communion with animals that people like St. Francis obviously had. Verse 3, “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you;” Probably man ate other than the herbs and the plants in the field before this, but now God recognized that. “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.” Except, you see, in verse 4, “Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.” Because the blood in Hebrew was the sign of Jesus’ precious blood, you see; the outpouring of life. That’s what the significance of the blood was. The blood of Jesus is precious because it’s his life poured out, it’s his life given. It’s not because of the blood, but nevertheless, because the blood contains the life of animals, God told the man, “No, you’re not to eat of that blood because that signifies my son and that must be continued to be remembered until he is manifested and his blood is shed on earth. Then in verse 5 God had to deal with a society which was so chaotic that it would have destroyed man again; “For your lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning; of every beast I will require it and of man; of every man’s brother I will require the life of man.” So God, in order to preserve us alive to give us a chance to receive Jesus and the [Holy] Spirit, made that fiat; that if any animal killed a man, then that animal would be killed; and if any man killed a man, then that man would be killed. Then in verse 6, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed;” Why? Isn’t it interesting – “for God made man in his own image.” Many of us question a little Schweitzer’s liberal tendencies and his theology, and this tendency to make the chief tenant of his life the sacredness of life. Albert Schweitzer tended to say that, rather than to say Jesus, so sometimes we’re skeptical of that, but you can see where he was coming from; he had grasped the fact that man is made in the image of God, and even if it’s the most leprous creature, even if it’s the most beggarly poverty stricken creature, even if it’s the poorest creature in the whole earth, that is still part of God’s image and you must not destroy it. That’s, of course, why God initiated capital punishment. And I don’t want to fight you, but that’s why we should keep it; because once you allow men and women to dishonor the image of God, they will go on and consume each other completely. That was the beginning, [Martin] Luther says, of the sword; the power of the sword, or the civil authority. That was the first command and commitment that God gave to us human beings in connection with civil and political authority, and it was capital punishment. That unless you exercised that, men eventually will become so wild that they will utterly destroy you. Of course it comes home to your own heart, doesn’t it; when — I mean you have sympathy with the dear guy who was executed. There was a young lady up here this morning saying she knows him, and he was a Christian when he was executed. But the fact is that it is ridiculous the way the media talks about the cruel punishment — the cruel and unusual punishment that that dear guy receives — he gave cruel and unusual punishment to eight or ten others. When you become a child of God and you find yourself in that position, you rise up with the light. You do like Paul and Peter say, “Okay, I’m going to preach in your name and you can beat me because that’s your right, but I’m going to preach.” And so he’s to say, “All right. You ought to execute me because that’s what it says in the Bible, but I tell you now that I am going into Jesus’ presence.” So a child of God rises to what is in this dear book. And this dear book has ensured that we will live and continue to have a chance to receive Jesus as long as we observe these things. So loved ones, that’s verse 6. And then in verse 7, “And you, be fruitful and multiply, bring forth abundantly on the earth and multiply in it.” Then there is a great comfort here, loved ones, in verses 8 through 17, and I’ll explain it to you in a moment; the great comfort for our children in these days of fear about nuclear disaster. Now I think we need to rise into it. I don’t think we are, I think many of us are not rising into the comfort that is in these verses, because these verses are God’s guarantee, “I will not destroy the earth again.” Verse 8, “Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, ‘Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your descendants after you.’” That is you, Noah, and all the people who will live after you, and the people here in Minneapolis tonight, “and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the cattle and every beast of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark.” All the creatures that live in the world and depend on it for their sustenance, “I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” God promised that the earth would never be destroyed in that way, by a flood. “And God said, ‘This is the sign of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you for all future generations.” It comes to your heart and it’s amazing; God, back there, was saying it’s a sign for every living creature that is with you at this moment and for all future generations. Of course to God, we were not thousands of years down the line; we were standing right behind Noah, so he made this sign with us. In verse 13, “I set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.” The rainbow, and possibly there was never a rainbow until then because undoubtedly the atmosphere of the air, the earth, and the air surrounding the earth, was changed at the time of the flood. Great amounts of water vapor obviously cascaded down, and possibly there was some kind of shield of water vapor that collapsed at that time. So it is very possible that the rainbow, which is the combination of light on the water vapor and the air, was initiated at this time. But certainly it was at this time that God regarded it from then on as the sign of his promise. “I set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.” It’s interesting the way God regards the physical sign as important as himself in verse 14, “When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant” as God looks down and sees the rainbow. So it’s good to remember when you see a rainbow after a shower, that God looks down and sees that rainbow and that he is as real as that. And light gives us that. It says, “When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again come as a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will look upon it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.” That’s how much he wants us to know how secure we are in the present world. Every time you see a rainbow, God looks at that rainbow and he kind of remembers, “Ah, I remember.” But really it doesn’t mean that, you know — as if he forgot – it means that he remembers that we are grass — he calls it to his mind again, “Ah, yes, I’m glad that I have secured the earth for them as a stable environment in which they have 70 or 80 years perhaps, to know about what I have done for them in Jesus. “I will look upon it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that lives upon the earth. God said to Noah, ‘This is the sign of the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth.’” And loves ones, that’s something for us and our children, because you may say, “Ah, but he’ll destroy it by fire” no, look at 2 Peter 3:5-7, “They deliberately ignore this fact, that by the word of God heavens existed long ago, and an earth formed out of water and by means of water, through which the world then existed was deluged with water and perished. “But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist have been stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.” Not “until the day when a President or Prime Minister presses the wrong button” – but “being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.” That’s after Jesus has returned, after the rapture, after all the books are set; the day of judgment and the destruction of ungodly man. Then at that time, it will take place in verses 10-13, “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up.” But it will be an act of God, a mighty act of destruction and judgment which will be preceded by all the birth pangs Jesus has told us about: rumors of wars, and famines, then the anti-Christ, then him coming and destroying the anti-Christ; all that has to come before this will take place. Then you see that Peter exhorts us therefore [verse 11] “Since all these things have thus to be dissolved, what sort of persons ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness” not — how worried you ought to be lest somebody presses the wrong button or lest the missiles don’t do their job — not that, but what, “in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hasting the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be kindled and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire! But according to his promise we wait for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.” Because it will be a mighty act of God whereby he destroys the earth and renews it again and there’s a new heaven and a new earth. But loved ones, I think we should tell this to our children, and I think we, as God’s children, should stop this anxiety and this worry. I think we should do all possible to maintain strength internationally, and we should do all that God guides us to do in negotiating and with arms, because it’s all dependent on us fulfilling what God has given us to do; but there ought not to be fear in our hearts that human beings will blow the world up. It will not happen. God will come at a time that will be plain before all of us and at that time, he will dissolve the earth and heavens in fire, but it will be preceded by all the acts that we know in connection with the last days. So could I encourage your hearts; I don’t know if you’re afraid of the mushroom clouds, or your own dear life is nervous every time you hear about what the Russians are doing, or you hear about what the Americans are doing, or what the French are doing, but there is no place for fear in us. God has put his rainbow in the sky and he has said, “Never again will I destroy the earth with a flood; when I eventually destroy it with fire, it will be after the rapture; it will be after all things are consummated in my son’s coming. So I don’t know if you sleep uneasily at night in bed, you shouldn’t. You should sleep well; remember God’s rainbow in the clouds — remember that he has promised us our respite. Loved ones, maybe we can look at the end of Genesis 9, because it really does lead into genesis 10 which should be a very interesting chapter as you can see, but Genesis 9:18. It’s the beginning of anthropology when they did the scattering of people all over the world. “The sons of Noah who went forth from the ark were Shem,” who you remember headed up the Jewish race “Ham, and Japheth. Ham was the father of Canaan.” Who obviously were some of the people that peopled the land of Canaan, the Canaanites. “These three were the sons of Noah; and from these the whole earth was peopled. Noah was the first tiller of the soil. He planted a vineyard; and he drank of the wine, and became drunk,” he did not know the affect of fermented grapes, so he became drunk, “and lay uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside.” And obviously the implication is that he made fun of it and kind of jeered about Noah and that’s what it means, “he told his two brothers outside.” He didn’t immediately cover his dad, in a sense of honor, but Shem and Japheth, of course, regarded their father as really almost in the place of God to them, “Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father; their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father’s nakedness. When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said, ‘Cursed be Canaan; a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers.’” That was Canaan, the son of Ham, “He also said, ‘Blessed by the Lord, my God, be Shem;’” that is, the Jewish people “and let Canaan be his slave’” the people who lived in Canaan. “God enlarge Japheth” the Persians and the Greeks and the Romans, of course, who did prosper, “and let him dwell in the tents of Shem;” because eventually they did. They would come and they would end up living under the Jews and sharing some of their blessing, “and let Canaan be his slave.’” And that’s, in fact, what happened if you look at 1 Kings 9:20, “All the people who were left of the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites who were not of the people of Israel — their descendents who were left after them in the land” that’s the land of Canaan, whom the people of Israel were unable to destroy utterly — these Solomon made a forced levy of slaves, and so they are to this day. But of the people of Israel Solomon made no slaves; they were soldiers, they were his officials, his commanders, his captains, his chariot commanders and his horsemen.” And then let’s look at Joshua 9:22, “Joshua summoned them and he said to them, ‘Why did you deceive us, saying, “We are very far from you,” when you dwell among us? Now therefore you are cursed, and some of you shall always be slaves, hewers of wood and drawers of water for the house of my God.’” These things were fulfilled in later years, and next Sunday I would like to try to begin the Biblical outline of what happened to man as they separated throughout the world. Let’s pray. Dear Father, we thank you for peace and for reassurance. And we thank you, Lord, for bowing to us in our weakness and giving us such a beautiful thing as a rainbow. We thank you, Lord, it’s found in the backs of so many car windows and the little air fresheners are made in the shape of it and it’s so well known to us. Then we thank you, Father, for the sense of wonder we always feel and how we always point up to it and we tell our children, “Look, there’s a rainbow.” Father, we thank you. Thank you for being so kind, so gentle and so good, so concerned about reassuring us that we need not live in fear of some disastrous, accidental destruction. But Lord, you have given us that promise that the world will never again be destroyed by flood, and then you have given us the perfect promise, and you will eventually destroy it by fire and renew it. It will be an act of judgment after Jesus has come, after the anti-Christ has been destroyed; the time of the judgment. So Father, we thank you for your goodness to us. Thank you for your great patience. Most of all, we thank you that all of us are in Jesus; destroyed and crucified, raised up to heaven and you’re pleading with us, “Believe this, my children. Believe that I have changed you. Believe that and live that now, tonight. And no longer make excuses about your evil acts, and your parents, and your heredity, and your environment. Rise up into faith, my children — I have remade you in my sight, and there is nothing that you cannot overcome, because I have destroyed all that would ever overcome you.” Lord, we thank you for that. Thank you that we can sleep well tonight, in peace and rest, because of what you have done. Now, the grace of our Lord Jesus, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with each one of us, now and throughout this coming week. Amen.
Populating the Earth After the Flood - GENESIS
Populating the Earth Genesis 9 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill The really different thing about this book [the Bible] is the way it speaks about reality. The Bhagavad Gita or the Koran or the other scriptures of other religions speak primarily about the religion itself and call people to observe its ordinances, and to believe in its faith. They make some reference at times to reality, but usually it is poor, primitive, crude versions of the account of reality that is given in this book. For instance, if you look at the Babylonian account of creation and the flood, you find that it is really a deterioration of the real account that was given in this book. You can tell it’s a deterioration because always when this book speaks about reality, about how we got into our present predicament in the world and how the world was created and how the nations have moved in the world it speaks about it in an ennobled way; in a very high and dignified way, an enlightened way that is far above the very primitive, crude presentation which you get in other religions. So it is really, loved ones, a very different kind of scripture in this book. It presents not only the Christian religion plainly, but it shows us what reality is about and shows us how the world was created and how things came about as they are now; how we got into this predicament that we’re in and what is the Creator’s way out. And one of the things that we saw it told us was how the world was created and how there was a tremendous flood, a universal deluge. The evidence of that is still in the sedimentary rocks throughout our world, as any geologist will tell you. Then you remember it began to outline to us how the nations had begun to move as they move today. Many of us have a tendency to think, “The nations move as they move by chance; they move because Russia is pressuring us or they move because America is pressuring Russia. That’s what happens — it’s just the cycle of events — it’s a chance happening.” But you find that God foresaw the whole thing, and he in very real ways has directed the whole thing and is in control of it. And that you will begin to see as we begin to discuss how God peopled the earth again after the flood from just eight people. You remember there were Noah and his wife and his three sons and their wives. And God repopulated the whole earth from those eight people — this is what we’re going to look at today. So maybe you would look at it, loved ones, as you find it towards the end of Genesis Chapter 9, because in Genesis chapter 9 is the philosophy of history; it’s really a clear explanation of why nations have moved as they have moved. It is a Christian philosophy of history and it takes us back to the incident of Noah getting drunk. You remember, his son came in and found him there and you find it in Genesis 9:22, “And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside.” He told them in a kind of joking way and you gather from the subsequent account, he had kind of mocked his father; he’d seen him naked and in an undignified way. “Then Shem and Japheth” his two brothers, “took a garment, laid it upon both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father; their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father’s nakedness.” Because they wanted not to look upon that, they wanted to retain their father’s dignity for him. “When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said ‘Cursed be Canaan” because Canaan, you see in verse 22, was Ham’s son. ‘Cursed be Canaan, a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers.’ He also said, ‘Blessed by the Lord my God be Shem; and let Canaan be his slave. God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be a slave.’” And loved ones, it’s just incredible how that has come about, it really is; I think you’ll be as surprised as I was when you get to the details of it. First of all, maybe it’s good to look at verse 25. Noah said, “Cursed be Canaan, a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” And then he said in verse 26, “Blessed by the Lord my God be Shem; and let Canaan be his slave.” Now, broadly speaking, loved ones, to help you understand this it might be good to point out Shem and Japheth and Ham and to show you that their descendants, on the whole were spread out in this way [indicating on a map]. This is just an outline map of the world, pointing out Europe here and Asia and Africa. And loved ones, in actual fact, Shem comes to be Semitic and is the Jew; the Jewish nation. So Shem and all his descendents, you will find out as we follow through this genealogy, settled there in the East. And in northern Asia and Europe, Japheth and his descendants settled. And then in Africa, as a whole, Ham and his descendants settled. So it might be good to remember that, as we follow through this genealogy in Chapter 10 that we’re going to study, you’ll find that Japheth’s descendants spread over Europe and northern Asia; Shem’s descendants were confined primarily to what we call the Middle East; and Ham and his descendants settled in Africa. Now, if you keep that in mind and look back at this verse 25, “he said ‘Cursed be Canaan; a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” Now the Canaanites early on became the slaves of the Jewish people; the Jews moved into Canaan and actually made the Canaanites their slaves. I think we looked at that in Joshua 9:21-27. “And the leaders said to them, ‘Let them live.’ So they became hewers of wood and drawers of water for the entire congregation, as the leaders had said of them. Joshua summoned them, and he said to them, ‘Why did you deceive us, saying, ‘We are very far from you,’ this was the Canaanites, ‘when you dwell among us? Now therefore you are cursed, and some of you shall always be slaves, hewers of wood and drawers of water for the house of my God. They answered Joshua, ‘Because it was told to your servants for a certainty that the Lord your God had commanded his servant Moses to give you all the land, and to destroy all the inhabitants of the land from before you; so we feared greatly for our lives, because of you, and did this thing.’ These were the Canaanites speaking. ‘And now, behold, we are in your hand: do as it seems good and right in your sight to do to us.’ So he did to them, and delivered them out of the hand of the people of Israel; and they did not kill them. But Joshua made them that day hewers of wood and drawers of water for the congregation and for the altar of the Lord, to continue to this day, in the place in which he should choose.” So from the earliest days of the Jews moving into Canaan, the Canaanites did, in fact, become slaves. They actually continued to be slaves in Africa, they continued in Syria and North Africa as the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians came across there; they continued to be slaves to them there. And, of course, many of us know to our shame what happened in the States here in the early years in regard to people simply because the loved ones had a different color of skin; and how that has been such a battle for us all to live above and to forget. Now it is false, loved ones, to use this as a justification for race hatred. It is important to see that when Joshua said there will be slaves, there’ll be slaves; the Canaanites will be slaves to the Jews during that time. It does not mean at all that they will be slaves forever, nor is it God’s will that just because your skin is black, you should be a slave. If that were the case, then you’ll find in the genealogy that there are many others besides people with black skin who are actually sons and daughters of Ham. In fact, all of Egypt would have to be slaves and all of the Arabians would have to be slaves, but you will see that as we go on. But nevertheless, loved ones that did come true; in the early days when the Jews were in Canaan and in the latter days, under the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians in North Africa and, as we have seen today, even as far as our own country was concerned. Now you see what was said to the Semites in Genesis 9:26, “He also said, ‘Blessed by the Lord my God be Shem; and let Canaan be his slave.’” “Blessed by the Lord my God be Shem” and Shem was blessed by God. God gave to the Shemites or the Semites or the Jews, the revelation of themselves for the rest of the world, so right from the very beginning of the earth, they’ve been God’s chosen people in order to be almost the priest to the rest of the world. And you find that culminated in Jesus’ birth; because he was part of the descendants of Shem. You find it there in Luke 3:36; it’s the genealogy of Jesus, and you see it starts at Luke 3:23, “Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about thirty years of age, being the son (as was supposed)” because it was by the Holy Spirit, “of Joseph, the son of Hevi, the son of Matthat,” right on down to verse 36, “the son of Cainan, the son of Arphaxad, the son of Shem.” So Jesus was a descendent of Shem. And, of course, the blessing was carried out right down through the line to Jesus. That’s why that statement is made John 4:22. It’s really the fulfillment of the blessing that was given to the Semites back there at the beginning of the world, and it is Jesus speaking; “You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.” Actually salvation has come to the world through the Jewish people, and certainly through the greatest of all Jews, Jesus himself. So the prophecy over Canaan and Ham has come true, and the prophecy over Shem has come true. Then Genesis 9:27, “God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be his slave.” The Hebrew means “God enlarge Japheth.” Japheth actually means “wide” and it means “God make wide the wide one,” or “God spread out the spreader out.” And the “spreader out” are these people here. You will find as we go through the genealogy, the Germans, the Europeans, the French, Spanish, the Italians; all of the people we think of as being the inhabitants of Europe and Asia and, of course, it was the inhabitants of Europe and Asia, particularly Europe that peopled a new world. So it’s us that God is talking about and he’s saying, “Spread these people out; may God spread these people out and extend and expand their influence.” Now actually it was strange because at the beginning of the world, that didn’t happen; because man was in rebellion and against God, the very opposite happened at the start. You find that in Genesis 10:9-10. The first great imperial kingdom was not, in fact, started at all by a Japhethite but was started by a Hamite, by a man called Nimrod. Genesis 10:8 “Cush became the father of Nimrod; he was the first on earth to be a mighty man.” He was a particular mighty man, because Nimrod comes from “marad” in Hebrew, which means “rebellion” or “to rebel” or “we will rebel”. And Nimrod was actually a man who rebelled against God, but he was mighty and powerful and was a great general and a great ruler. “He was a mighty hunter before the Lord” is not really the best translation of the Hebrew, because the preposition is “against the Lord” – “he was a mighty hunter against the Lord.” He opposed God, and yet he was permitted because of the rebellion that mankind was in, to extend his influence. Therefore it is said “Like Nimrod a mighty hunter before the Lord.” And you will see the kingdom he established in the next verse. “The beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, and Accad, all of them in the land of Shinar. From that land, he went into Assyria, and built Nineveh, Rehoboth-Ir, Calah, and Resen between Nineveh and Calah; that is the great city.” So Nimrod, actually from very early days, established a great Babylonian kingdom in what are almost primeval days, and that rule of his was carried on. The Hamites continued to be uppermost and it looked as if God’s promise to the Japhethites was not coming true because, even when you get into the later years in the Nile Valley, the Egyptians were also sons of Ham; they actually ruled, and in Mesopotamia, the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians ruled. So in the earliest days there was no sign of the Japhethites coming out into the “spreading out” that God promised them. Actually I can show you very clearly if you look at one of the earliest kingdoms, the Egyptian kingdom; the Egyptian empire. Early on in the history of mankind, the Hamites were superior; the Egyptians ruled for years. Then after them, the great Assyrian empire, which was a carry over of Nimrod’s rule, the great Assyrian empire spread over what was most of the then known world. And after the Assyrians, the Babylonian empire ruled. So at the very beginning, the world seemed to not be bringing about the promise that God had made to the Japhethites; but actually that all ended around 612 B.C. At that time, after the Assyrians and the Babylonians had ruled the world, there came a man called Cyrus, who was a Japhethite, Cyrus who was a Persian. And he defeated — if you remember your history — he defeated the rule of the Babylonians and the Assyrians and he began to spread his own rule and then from then on, from 538 B.C., the amazing thing is, it was first the Persians who were Japhethites, all these were descendants of Japheth, loved ones. The Persians, then the Greeks, descendants of Japheth, then the Romans, then after the Barbarians eventually and it has never been anyone else but Japhethites that have ruled the world. It has either been we ourselves, or it has been the British Empire or there’s been the German Empire or the Europeans; but always from that time on, it’s been Japheth that has had the spreading out. So it is amazing to think of it, especially there was a time around 202 B.C. where the Carthaginians were lead by a man called Hannibal. Some of you may know it from classical history. The Carthaginians, of course, were of the descendants of Ham. And Hannibal was taking all before him and it looked as if he would take Rome itself and it looked, for a moment, as if the whole history would be turned back. And then, if you remember, he was defeated by a Roman general called Scipio, and that was the end of any hope of the Hamites ever establishing their rule in the world. And so all the time it has been Japhethites, and you can see it as so plain and obvious when you see the Greek empire. You can see that the empires of the Japhethites in the early days bear no relationship, of course, to the might of Alexander’s empire, and that was followed, then, by the Roman empire which was even larger; it took in part of Britain and Europe. From then on, loved ones, there’s never been anybody but the descendants of Japheth in control of the world; they’ve been given the leadership in industry and education, the leadership in culture, the leadership in military power. Japheth and his descendants have had that control. Now there is an interesting side to it if you look at Genesis 9:27, you can see another side to it, “God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem.” Now how would he ever come to dwell in the tents of Shem? It is interesting, isn’t it that at the very time when Buddhism was spreading into China from India, at the same time there was a man who had a vision of somebody in Macedonia calling to him to come over and help us, and that man was Paul. And at that time he answered the call and went to Macedonia and Japheth began to dwell in the tents of Shem because the great Roman empire, and Europe itself, heard the gospel for the first time from the lips of Paul, and began to dwell in the same faith as had been given through Shem. And, in fact, today it’s amazing, but when you think of Christianity, everybody, of course, thinks of us: they think of Americans. or they think of Britishers, or they think of Europeans, or they think of Australians. They think of the descendants of Japheth, because he stands for Christianity and that’s what happened on that night when an apparently unimportant dream took place. It’s Acts Chapter 10:9-17, “The next day, as they were on their journey and coming near the city, Peter went up on the housetop to pray, about the sixth hour. And he became hungry and desired something to eat; but while they were preparing it, he fell into a trance and saw the heaven opened, and something descending, like a great sheet, let down by four corners upon the earth. In it were all kinds of animals and reptiles and birds of the air. And there came a voice to him, ‘Rise, Peter; kill and eat.’ But Peter said, ‘No, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.’ And the voice came to him again a second time, ‘What God has cleansed, you must not call common.’ This happened three times, and the thing was taken up at once to heaven. Now while Peter was inwardly perplexed as to what the vision which he had seen might mean, behold, the men that were sent by Cornelius, having made inquiry for Simon’s house, stood before the gate.” Cornelius, of course, was the Roman centurion, and he was the unclean one in any Jew’s eyes; he was a Gentile and it was a result of God speaking through the vision that Peter went and preached at Cornelius’ house, and the Holy Spirit fell upon Cornelius, and his family, and the people gathered there. Then the apostle said, “We can’t avoid baptizing them even though they aren’t Jews. Even if they’re Gentiles, we can’t avoid baptizing them because the Holy Spirit has come upon them and cleansed their hearts even as he did ours.” And that was the breaking down of that wall of partition; that was the Japhethites coming to dwell in the tents of Shem. So it is amazing, loved ones, when you think how prophecies back there that seem so obscure have come into being exactly as God said they would. And we need to see that the things that have happened, therefore, in our world, are not chance events at all; that God has foreseen all of this. And yet he is so amazing that he allows us our free will, and he lets us work out our free wills. And yet you can see that it isn’t at all a world runaway mad; it’s a world very much on a leash, and that’s why what we shared last Sunday is so important. Loved ones, there’s no place for fear, in people like ourselves: there’s no place for fear about the mushroom cloud [from a nuclear bomb] and all that. We need to see that God has told us that the world will not be destroyed again by flood, and it will only be destroyed by fire by him on the day of judgment; but it will not be destroyed by us men with all our bombs and all our nuclear warfare. We need to see the same thing in regard to our own lives. If this dear God of ours can allow so many individuals and so many nations to do what they want, and yet can foresee what it going to happen and can work it all in accordance with his will, how much more readily our own lives? The truest thing probably, is it is never right to have anything but faith; it is never, never right to have anything but faith; even when you see things apparently going apart at the edges. Even when you see things certainly looking as if they were going to go the opposite direction that you had hoped, there’s never any place for anything but faith. When you see God making that prophecy about Japheth, and then years and hundreds of years of the Hamites having the upper hand in the world, and yet God brings it round. Or you see the gospel being given through Shem, and then how would it get to the rest of the world when Shem does not rule the world — in fact, Japheth rules the world — how will he ever come to dwell in the tents of Shem? And yet the Father brings it about. So when you see what God can do with the nations there’s no place for anything but absolute and total faith for each one of us in regard to our lives, and that applies to everybody here. Regarding the marriage thing, and the job thing, and the career, and how your money is working out, and how your future is looking, and how your house is going; there’s no place for anything but faith; anything other than faith is just an insult to this God, who has proven himself so plainly over these years. Now, I’ve tried to simplify the thing as much as I could, loved ones, and tried to outline it so that it would make sense and I’ll just guide you a little at the beginning, so maybe you’d like to look at Genesis 10:1-2, “These are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham and Japheth; sons were born to them after the flood. “The sons of Japheth: Gomer” and what the scholars do is trace these names; sometimes in place names, sometimes in people names, sometimes in nation names, and that’s how they track down where the descendants of Gomer were. Gomer is found in the people that ended up in Wales and those that ended up in Britain. Then the next son is Magog, and they were Scythians. Some of them were Tartars and some of them ended up in the Caucuses area. Nevertheless, I think you have to go gently and just say Magog is Russia; a lot of other things besides Russia, but certainly the descendants of Magog have something to do with that area. Madai is much easier because you can trace it right directly to the Medes. And Javan is not too difficult either, because the J often becomes an “I” in other languages and it ties up with Ionian which is the Greeks. And in fact the King of the Greeks, or leader of the Greeks at one time, was known as King Jabba. Tubal seemed to be the Iberians; Meshech, Cappadocians; an older race. Tiras, the Thracians. And then if you want to go on down — you see in part of this genealogy, sometimes it gives just the first generation, sometimes it gives the first and second; sometimes it gives the first, second and third. So if you look now at Verse 3, The sons of Gomer traces them. Ashkenas is found in the Germans; in fact, the Jewish race still applies that name to the German nation, Riphath is found in the Celts, who, you remember, were found in part of Europe and then in Britain. Then if you follow down; the sons of Javan: Elishah – those of you who know a little Greek mythology know we talk about the Elysian fields as heaven, and you can see some form of the word there, but Elishah’s descendants were Greeks. Togarmah were the Armenians and the Turks; Tarshish, Etruscans; Kittim; Cyprus and some of the Greeks. Alexander, I think, was traced back to that name Kittim, Dodanim, France. So that, loved ones, is some outline from two books; one is John Gill, one of the old theologians on Genesis and the other is Kiel Delitzsch, a German commentator on the Old Testament. Loved ones, if you would like to look at Ham, you’ll see the outline and I won’t take you through it as slowly; you can check on it in your own Bible, I’ve simply gone down those verses so I’ve tried to include everybody, but you do see they are Ethiopians, Egyptians, Libyans, Canaanites, Ethiopians, Oman, the Persian Gulf area, Babylon, Moors, Northern Egypt, Libyans, Middle Egyptians, Upper Egypt, Cappadocians, Sidon and then the nations, of course, in Canaan itself … Jebusites, Amorites, that are listed by their own names in that chapter. So, on the whole, that’s why we say that Ham was found in the area of Africa and Egypt and Libya. I don’t have much left because, in fact, I was not able to trace much on Shem, and probably we don’t need much on it because it is, in fact, the Jewish race. It would be good to make one more point, and that’s why I mentioned that this isn’t a bad diagram to remember when you think of the three sons: that on the whole Ham, including Egypt in the north and the Libyans, then the Ethiopians, Ham and his descendants were found in Africa. On the whole, Shem’s were found there in that Middle Eastern region and then Japheth, the rest. Now one of the interesting things that one of the old commentators makes that there are many indications in the world itself that we all did stem from one family, and I thought there were interesting ones; the numbering in tens; the cycle of seven days — it’s really hard to find a nation that doesn’t measure time by the cycle of seven days — the setting apart of the seventh day as a sacred day and a holy day for the religion and a day of rest. It’s interesting that even Russia thinks of the seventh day as something different. The use of sacrifices — you can’t find any nation, however primitive or however sophisticated, that has not at one time practiced sacrifices — some kind of feeling that they have that God has to be placated, that their guilt has to be dealt with. Also the habit of consecrating temples and churches and regarding them as places of refuge; every nation does that. You’d wonder how they all came to these practices from the very earliest times, because this is the outline of the nations of the tower of Babel after they were scattered, so these things occurred after they were scattered and there was no communication. And yet it must have come from an earlier time when there were things passed down to them like giving a tenth of their produce to the altar or to the church. There’s no nation that doesn’t have that in its tradition somewhere; giving a tenth. Worshiping the deity barefooted; there isn’t a nation that doesn’t think that when you come close to God its holy ground, as if there is a family memory that runs through every nation in the world. There is the idea of having priesthood; an order of priesthood that you support and that you provide for, for the worship of your God. Then the idea of legal pollution and defilement runs through every nation on the earth and why should it, unless they all came from the same family originally and had the same revelation of God. Then you know from the Babylonian accounts and from other accounts, the whole truth of a universal flood is found in every ancient literature. Many of them are primitive and crude compared with the account we have in the Old Testament, but there is some belief in the universal flood and always a belief in a rainbow and that the rainbow is a sign of God’s favor. So in all kinds of ways, God has left his footprints throughout history and there are plenty of clues throughout the world’s history that would encourage us to see that he is ordered and there is order in it, and there’s order in this world, and that God does know what’s going on now. It seems to me there’s no place for us to be fearful, and no place for us to be running to the hills or to be afraid that our God will not take care of us and especially no place for passing on to the little ones that fear and that neurotic apprehension. There’s every place for saying, “Son, God is in control; he has looked after us so far, he has looked after the movements of nations and he will continue to look after us.” The great privilege that we have is we’ve to go to these nations and tell them where they came from. I would pray Martha the mp3 stops here – I’m not sure where the rest of the words that follow came from. (Peg) that more and more of us in this room would do that. Dear Father, we thank you for all the clues you’ve left us throughout history, so plain and so obvious. We thank you, Father, that you gave this genealogy in such detail to early man who passed it on to Moses and who wrote it for us here. Father, we thank you that you have shown us that you knew what was going to happen; you saw it coming, you foresaw it and you have all the time overruled it by your providence and gracious love. Father, you were able to see what would happen to the Carthaginians or what would happen to the Africans, what would happen to the Japhethites hundreds of years, thousands of years hence. Then Father, we are confident — you know exactly where each one of us is today and you’ve foreseen the way our lives would go and you know what’s going to happen tomorrow and Lord, if you’re not worried, then we’re not worried. Father, if you’re still smiling upon us and your heart is at peace and you love us as much as you do, then there’s no reason for us to have any worry or any care. So, Lord, we thank you. We thank you that there is only one right thing to do and that’s rejoice in the Lord always, and let our forbearance be known unto all men; not to be anxious about anything, and in everything by prayer and supplication let our requests be known to God. And the peace of God that passes all understanding will keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Lord, we would give ourselves to you for a carefree life knowing that you have foreseen it all and are providing for it; allowing us our free will and yet in a loving, wise way, bringing everything into accordance with your purposes for us. We thank you, Lord. Now the grace of our Lord Jesus, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with each one of us, now and throughout this coming week. Amen.
Why Does God Choose Those Whom He Chooses? - GENESIS
God’s Covenant With Abraham Genesis 11 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Loved ones I did promise that I’d give an opportunity for any questions in the light of last Sunday evening’s sharing, so are there any questions? [Inaudible question from the audience] I don’t believe that that is right as far as God’s ideal will is concerned. If you look, loved ones, at Genesis 10:1, it is interesting to see “These are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham and Japheth; sons who were born to them after the flood.” Then the list is given of the descendants of the different sons of Noah right up to the very end of the chapter, you remember. Then in verse 32 of Genesis 10, you read, “These are the families of the sons of Noah according to their genealogies and their nations; and from these the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood.” It does seem that the nations were undoubtedly God’s ideal will and were not the result of the Tower of Babel They were created by God and with various differences in the calculations, people seem to feel there are about 70 original nations there. But it seems, Ted, [who asked the question] that the nations were not the problem but the next chapter, Chapter 11 was the problem. It was when the nations began to gather together in order to take over God’s universe. That’s when God said in Genesis 11:6, “And the Lord said, ‘Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’” So it seems that even those 70 nations had the same language back then, but when they began to determine to take over the universe itself and to do whatever they wanted, then in verse 8, “So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.” And it was that scattering that was God’s response to their pride that was in the nations. So it seems to me that the original plan of God was that there would be a diversity of nations but that there would be a great oneness and unity among us. But then as we began to turn that unity against him in our pride, he had to come down and scatter the nations. Then, Ted, it seems to me it’s the combination of the pride that we have developed inside ourselves with the result of God’s condemnation of us and the result of him…do you remember in Romans…giving us up to what we wanted to do, that that has brought about the war among nations. And that actually, that war is part of God’s vital sign to us; “this is not the way it was meant to be.” So it seems to me rather then that the wars between the nations were God’s original ideal plan for us, it’s rather the second best or the futility to which he has committed the creation in order to bring home to us “All this, whether it’s the United Nations or League of Nations, this is not the kind of unity that I planned for you.” Do you want to push me on that? [Question from Ted—inaudible] Answer: You can see what fun it is to be in one of Ted’s classes! Well loved ones, we’re coming tonight to the end of the beginning of the Old Testament. That’s really what it is if you look at Genesis 11:9 -10; it’s really the end of the beginning. See the way it runs, Genesis 11:09, “Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.” Then this historic statement, “These are the descendants of Shem. When Shem was a hundred years old, he became the father of Arpachshad two years after the flood.” Shem, of course, of the Shemites…the Semites, the Jews and they end up in that vital verse in verse 26, “When Terah had lived seventy years, he became the father of Abram.” That is a watershed in history; where God turns from the nations as a whole and turns to this little nation of Israel. Now it might be good to remind you where this all started. A good place to begin might be to point out the incredible pervasive presence of computers today. It is unbelievable, isn’t it? Even I who love gadgets have held back from what seems to be a frenetic frenzied rush to get a computer. You just have to have a computer. Even though the majority of them are used to play TV games, yet you must have a computer. I asked my wife, “What are we all going to compute?” Of course, it isn’t just computing. The idea is that it stores knowledge. It is amazing, isn’t it that we think if we can only, with these computers, control all the knowledge that we’re accumulating, we’ll be able — to what? Well, we’ll be able to search out the people whose tires are wearing out on their cars and we’ll be able to send them information that we have this deal on tires. We’ll be able to compute all the babies that are going to be born and will need Pampers and what areas of the country they’ll need those Pampers in. We’ll be able to calculate where the Russians will be in the Space Age, and above everything else, we’ll be able to control life. We’ll be able to make it work for us. We’ll be able to get ourselves into an invincible position, where we’ll be secure. It is amazing, isn’t it? I mean, way at the back of it all, that’s really what we’re all hoping. We believe and we say it even, that knowledge is power and if you can manipulate and manage that knowledge, you’ll be able to control the earth. That really was where it all started back in Genesis. God said, “Look, just walk with me day by day.” Loved ones, He says to us again this evening, “I know you, my son. I know you, my daughter. I know your name. I have actually even computed the hairs on your head. I have planted you here carefully. I have a life plan for you. Now, walk with me day by day. Pray to me, talk with me and I’ll guide you through your life. I’ll show you what to do and when to do it.” That’s what he said to our dear forefather, Adam. You remember, Adam said, “No, I think that I can manage this myself without your help. I can be independent of you if I only have enough knowledge of good and evil.” So you remember, Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Presumably what they really did, it’s presented to them and to us in the form of a tree, but presumably what they did was do more or less what you and I do; we try to master the world by our knowledge. And you know that brings perversions into your own life. I’m sure you’ve been like me where you felt, “If I could only manage this person and get them to do this, then this part of my life would turn out alright.” Or “I know this about this person and I know that about that person. If I can just tell that person this thing about this other person, and tell this person this little bit about the other person, then I can manipulate them and I can work it round.” We keep on thinking, as we get further on, “Well, if I only knew what was going to happen to that company, then I would know what to do with these stocks and shares.” And it’s amazing when you begin to depend on your knowledge, how you begin to become perverted even in your own personality. I don’t know how many of you think that you have one up on somebody else because you have just a subtler brain or a cleverer brain, and you think you can manage something that they can’t do. It’s amazing, the pressure it begins to bring upon you isn’t it? I don’t know how much pride you find yourselves with, but it’s easy to get proud, isn’t it? It’s easy to think, “Yes, yes, but I know a subtle little something that they don’t know. I have a subtle little insight into life that they don’t have.” We all have a temptation to think we’re just one little step up on somebody else or even on everybody else. It begins to pervert us and begins to make us like Jacob. You remember Jacob was such a manipulator; he was always manipulating circumstances. He was always manipulating people. He couldn’t look a person straight in the face because he was always thinking, “How am I going to use that person?” It’s very easy to find yourself doing that kind of thing in regard to knowledge. That’s of course what happened to Adam and Eve right back there; the moment they began to work that way, God knew they had immediately torn apart the personality that he had given them. Can you see it a wee bit, loved ones? If you compare a little 6-year-old child with a shrewd, cynical, old 50, 60-year-old who has bargained his way back and forward up the corporate ladder. You can tell the difference first by the wrinkles in the face. But then, isn’t it true, they’re two little minds? They’re both equally small, really, but they work differently. One little mind works like a little lamb, a little innocent, a little gentle thing, very trusting. The other mind wouldn’t trust his grandmother! It’s shrewd, clever and it’s working about half a dozen different angles. There is just a vast difference, isn’t there, between the two? You can see what began to happen back there in the Garden of Eden; they began to be twisted, they began to be deceptive, they began to be manipulating and managing, not the innocent, trusting, little people that God had made them at the beginning. God saw that something had to be done right there and then. Actually, he did it right there and then — that’s important for us maybe just to notice again because it happened immediately after Adam and Eve had made their choice. Back in Genesis 3: 12 if you look at it, “The man said, ‘The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.’ Then the Lord God said to the woman, ‘What is this that you have done?’ The woman said, ‘The serpent beguiled me, and I ate.’” Then immediately after that you see, “The Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, cursed are you above all cattle, and above all wild animals; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head’ the seed of the woman, ‘he shall bruise your head’ because the serpent was Satan — the seed of the woman shall bruise your head, Satan, ‘and you shall bruise his heel.’” Right there God planted the answer: Jesus, of course, was the seed of the woman that would bruise Satan’s head, even though Satan would bruise Jesus’ heel and Jesus would die in destroying Satan. But loved ones, it was back then that God immediately worked the change and we need to see that. We need to see that it was right back then that God saw the little child that he had made in Adam, the little trusting simple being that trusted God openly and saw the monster that he had become in Adam and Eve where they started to lie right back then. At that moment, God took that monster and put it into his son Jesus, right back then, and destroyed it, and made it new, and made it a little child again. It’s vital to see that because the Old Testament makes no sense if you don’t see that God did not require waiting to 29 AD to destroy us all in Jesus and raise us up new. He saw that way back then, that’s what that verse in Revelations means, loved ones. Those of you who haven’t seen it will be interested in it and those of you who have seen it; it’s so good to read the Good News again that you won’t be bored I think. It’s Revelation 13:8, “and all who dwell on earth will worship it, every one whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb that was slain.” Now, even in that format you can see that the implication is that the name was written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb that was slain. So even there the truth comes through. But the fact is that the adverbial phrase “before the foundation of the world” does not actually occur in that position in the Greek; it occurs after the verb “slain” so in the Greek the verse runs, “every one whose name has not been written in the book of life of the Lamb that was slain before the foundation of the world.” That’s when Jesus was slain, and that’s when you and I were placed in him. If you would like another verse because you don’t like, maybe, to lean on one verse, look at 1 Peter 1:20. It follows that famous verse that we were saved with the precious blood of Jesus like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. Starting at 1 Peter 1:19, “but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. He was destined before the foundation of the world but was made manifest at the end of the times for your sake” so that all was done in Jesus from before the foundation of the world. He was manifested at the ends of the times for our sake, but loved ones, that was all done back then. Then here’s what God did; he raised us all up, including Adam and all his descendants, to his right-hand in Jesus. He then began to give to men the things that they had there, in that position. Now, what are those things? Well, look at Ephesians and you’ll see some of the things that we were given immediately when we were raised up there. Ephesians 2:1, “And you he made alive, when you were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once walked.” Then you look down to verse 6, “and raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” Now, what had we up in that position? You can see it if you go back one chapter to Ephesians 1:20, “which he accomplished in Christ when he raised him from the dead and made him sit at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come; and he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.” God began to give some of that to the descendants of Adam. He gave them freedom. Immediately after the Garden of Eden experience he gave them the freedom that he had actually made available to them in Jesus. You remember what they did — they used the freedom to destroy each other. They took the freedom that God gave them and they destroyed each other to the point where the whole earth was filled with violence. All flesh became so corrupt that God had to destroy it with a flood. Then after the flood, you remember he gave to Noah’s descendants the other attribute that they had there at the right hand of God; authority, because Jesus was given authority; he [God] put all things under his feet, and God gave to Noah authority. You remember that he gave civil authority to him; the power of the sword. Of course Noah and his descendants, because they would have nothing of the rest of what was in Christ, they used that authority to oppress each other, to build the Tower of Babel and to raise themselves up and even against God, and to begin to take over the whole universe. You see what they were they doing? They were taking something of what God had given us in Christ, but they understood nothing of the change of their natures that had actually taken place in Jesus’ death, because only a few of them sensed what had actually occurred. So that was the situation that God was faced with. Here was a mass of people whom he had renewed completely in his son Jesus, but they knew nothing of the inside working that he had wrought in Christ in their own natures. So they were actually taking those precious pearls and they were using them to destroy themselves with it. So God turned finally from them and he decided he would turn to one little nation and he would painstakingly reveal to that little nation what he had given them in Christ. And that’s why this is such a crucial moment in history: he turns from the nations as a whole because they haven’t understood the salvation that he has worked for them in his son, and he turns to this little group of the Jews and he begins to educate them, he begins to show them what h e had done for them in Christ. Loved ones, the whole history of the Jewish nation is the history of God unfolding what he has done in Jesus. But if you don’t see it that way, the Old Testament becomes just meaningless to you. If you see it as the gradual unfolding of the New Testament covenant that had originally taken place in Christ, then it begins to make sense. For instance, it’s obvious that even though God turned to Abraham, yet Abraham was not the first one that had faith. If you look at Hebrews 11 you’ll see there were other men that had faith besides Abraham and before Abraham. If you say to me, “Do you mean they knew Jesus’ name?” There are some things that make you think they did, but you can’t tell. I suppose that isn’t important, whether they knew his name or not, but they obviously sensed that some mighty work had been done in someone that was in God’s own heart that enabled them to be changed. They knew that this power that they felt that overcame the selfishness in them came from some mighty act that God had done. So you get them there in Hebrews 11:4, “By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he received approval as righteous, God bearing witness by accepting his gifts; he died, but through his faith, he is still speaking.” You remember Abel actually offered blood sacrifice and obviously he believed there was some mighty sacrifice that had taken place from before the foundation of the world. So Abel was a man of faith. Then verse 5 “By faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death.” In other words, Enoch lived the resurrection life, just as Jesus resurrection life burst through him in the moment of transfiguration and transformed his physical body from a temporal one into, for a moment, an eternal one. So the same thing happened for Enoch because he didn’t die “and he was not found, because God had taken him. Now before he was taken, he was attested as having pleased God.” The only way a man could do that would be if he had accepted the change that God wrought in him in Jesus. “And without faith, it is impossible to please him. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. By faith, Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, took heed and constructed an ark for the saving of his household; by this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness which comes by faith.” So even Noah knew in some sense that he was made righteous and holy by what God had done to him by some mighty miracle. So then there was Abel, there was Noah, and there was Enoch — Abraham was not the only man who had faith and yet God chose Abraham. God chose Abraham not because he was the first one that had faith in what God had wrought in Jesus, but he chose him freely, just of his own freewill. Love ones, that’s the position with all of us in this life. I suppose it speaks especially to the men, because I think we men often want to achieve something in this life. But I think possibly to you ladies too, because I think many of you wonder, “What am I going to do with my life? Am I going to get married? Am I going to have children? Am I going to achieve something worthwhile in this life?” Loved ones, it’s actually an irrelevant question, it really is — our place is to have faith like Abraham. We’re to have faith in the fact that Jesus has transformed us completely and then God may choose us freely to do something like Abraham or he may actually choose us to do nothing — but that is the great freedom we are in — you need to grab hold of it. Especially those of us who have began to wear ourselves out trying to achieve something, trying to be something or trying to think, “Oh but my life has to account for something.” That’s for God to decide; all we have to do is to have faith, but it’s God that chooses the Abrahams. It’s God that chooses the Noah’s. It’s God that chooses what we are to do in this life. Abraham was not chosen because he had more faith than all the others. He was just one man who had faith and God decided he would use him to beget, among others, the Jewish nation, among whom Jesus, God’s son, would be born. Now, it’s the same with us. God may well choose you to die tomorrow. The world may look at you and say, “What had he achieved with his life — nothing.” But that’s what God had for you to do. In heaven he is utterly glorified, absolutely delighted and pleased with what has happened in your life, because our place is to have faith; its God’s place to choose what we will do. He chooses, actually, out of sheer grace. That’s why he chose the Jewish nation — he chose them out of sheer grace and you can see it there in Deuteronomy 7:7, “It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love upon you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples.” There is no place in the Old Testament where there is a suggestion that the Jews are chosen to be the nation that will dominate the world or that were chosen because they were a good people. Every indication in the Old Testament is that they were chosen just out of God’s sheer grace; he just chose them to be the people to whom he would explain and prepare the way for a son to come here to earth. It’s the same with you and me. I don’t know how many of you look at some great artist or some great singer; or some great speaker and think, “Oh, we hope that we will be like that.” Loved ones, it’s not our place to choose that. We are to use our freewill to either believe what God says is reality — that he has transformed us in his son Jesus and he has worked out all the selfishness and has created us completely new and able to live above sin — we choose to believe that or not to believe it. Then after that God decides, out of sheer grace and sheer freedom of will, what he will do with us, and it takes a great burden off us, it really does. So with all our striving and with all our training to be somebody great or to be somebody important or to be somebody successful, it will come to nothing, because God is the one that chooses what we do in this life. That’s why that verse in Ecclesiastes is so good. It says there is nothing more for us to do than enjoy with all our hearts the toil that God has given us to do under the sun. We’re to enjoy it. We’re to eat, to drink, to enjoy our food and to enjoy what God has given us with all our hearts. We’re to rejoice in him and not to burden ourselves with, “Am I going to be the father of the Jews or am I not?” Think how silly it would have been if Abraham had been all concerned about that. God just chose him — he could have chosen anybody. In fact he does it purposely; he chooses the things that have no right to be chosen at all, that have no value or worth in them at all. I don’t know how many of you are concerned about those things, but it came home to me so strongly in my own life because, for a number of years, I did try. I tried so hard to do it well, to be something and to achieve something. I tried far harder in those old days than I try today. Then, God just decides, that’s it, he just decides. It has nothing to do with our own worth or our own value — it’s nothing to do with your value or your worth. It’s just, God decides; he takes a guy or a girl and he does something with them. The world says, “Oh, wonderful…wonderful…wonderful,” and claps their hands and it’s not their doing at all. It’s just that God has decided, “I’m going to do a work here and I’m going to take them to myself.” At the end, it will be as if they had never been. It will just take place and it will be as if they’ve never been. But during the time, people will have come into the kingdom. But loved ones, that’s the way it is with our lives, so rest and relax in what God has made you. See that if you are nothing and if you are worthless, if people think of you as weak and hopeless, you’re somebody that God might be able to use because that’s the kind of person he chooses. Why does he do it? You can see in 1 Corinthians 1:27. This is really why he chose a people as poor as the Jewish people and a person as unremarkable as Abraham was. 1 Corinthians 1:27 “but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are.” Why – “so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption; therefore as it is written, ‘Let him who boasts, boast of the Lord.’” That’s why he does it; he chooses the things that are not, so that the glory will go only to him. We need to see that; to know in our own operation here, and in our own body [church]. It is good to be half sensible and it is good to be normal, but it is important to be willing to be thought a fool or to be thought nothing or to be thought worthless, because God has promised that he will use those kinds of people. Those of you who ever think of going abroad, never get into the syndrome of thinking that you have to be worthy to go abroad or you have to have some special talent or some special ability. If you have, God probably won’t be able to use you much. But if you have nothing, if you’re weak, poor, useless and hopeless and if you’re kind of a nothing, God may be able to use you abroad. So you need to think that way. Don’t think, “Am I talented enough for God to use me? Have I enough education for him to use me? Am I bright enough in my personality for him to use me?” No, but think “Am I poor enough? Am I worth so little? Have I such a low estimate of what I am able to do for God?” If you’re like that, maybe God will be able to use you because he’ll be able to use you and yet bring glory to himself. That’s why he chose the nation of Israel. It is true that the nation of Israel received certain privileges because of that and Paul outlines those in Romans 9:4-5, “They are Israelites, and to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ. God who is over all be blessed, forever. Amen.” So you might say, “Oh, well, they got extra things. I mean, he chose them, but he gave them extra things.” Yes, but then he gave them incredible responsibilities, loved ones and you see some of them in Hosea Chapter 8:1-3, “Set the trumpet to your lips, for a vulture is over the house of the Lord, because they have broken my covenant, and transgressed my law.” You see, some of the Israelites would have cried out and said, “Oh, but Lord, we’re your chosen people.” Verse 2 “To me they cry, ‘My God, we Israel know Thee.’” But God said, “Israel has burned the good; the enemy shall pursue him.” So even though Israel has special privileges, they had heavy judgments upon them because they rejected the privileges that God had given them. So in a way, God chooses Abraham and chooses the Israelites, not for salvation but simply as the people among whom his son would be born. Meanwhile, loved ones, he does not turn from the nations completely; he simply begins to concentrate on the nation of Israel. But you remember, to the nations generally he continues to give the testimony of nature — all the nations are able to see the world and to see God’s part displayed there. So whether they are Malachite’s or Moabites, whether they be Jebusites or whether they be Hittites, they still continue to hear from God. So it’s not fair to say God turned his back on everybody else and turned to Israel. No. He began to concentrate on Israel to prepare them, but he continues to give his revelation to the nations, to those other 69 or so nations. They continued to see the stars in the sky, and continued to see the sun rising each day. It’s mentioned in Romans 1:19 that they continued to have the natural revelation that God had planted in the universe, enough, really, for them to come to him if they wanted to. Romans 1:19, “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” They can see the design in the universe. They can see the size and magnitude of the universe. Then in verse 21, “for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened.” So even though they knew that, yet they turned against it. God also gave them the testimony of conscience in Romans 2:14-15, “When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.” So God continued to reveal himself in the consciences of the heathen nations. Then you remember he did give them people like Socrates and Plato and others; he did continue to give wisdom to them. If you read Plato’s Republic, you’ll realize how close, even a heathen philosopher was able to get. You remember he talked about the one true good, and the one true good that he described was certainly very close to the God that we know. So the Father did continue to give to the heathen nations revelations of himself in human government. He continued to give human government to them so that they would sense that there was a right and a wrong. He continued, in some way, to guide the history of the nations. You remember how he says he used Pharaoh or how he used Cyrus; so he continued to guide the history of the nations so that in some sense they continued to sense that there was a God. Then in way God turned from the nations and concentrated on Israel, but in a way he kept his revelation coming to all men. There’s no doubt when you turn to the covenant with Abraham that you get a great watershed in history and you get God turning to these little people to begin to concentrate on explaining to them what he had done to all the world in his son Jesus. Of course that’s the paradox of this; even though God tuned from all the nations to Abraham, he did that only for one reason; he said to Abraham, “In you will all the nations of the earth be blessed.” So he turned from everybody to one little group, so that he could again turn to everybody and bring everyone to himself who was willing to accept what he had done to them in Jesus. So, loved ones, this is a great moment in Genesis 11. As we go on next Sunday or the following Sundays we’ll begin to follow out the promises that God began to give to the Israelites and off course, we’ll begin to see ourselves as the new Israelites. I believe God will begin to teach us lessons of faith that we can use in our own lives. We have probably just one more Sunday together [before summer break] and I would like us to spend the last Sunday talking once more about the fullness of the Holy Spirit. Then the next Sunday after that we’ll have our very first graduation service, when two or three of us will be graduating from the Christian Core Training Program and we want to talk about what that means and certainly want to enable them to sense that this is the opening out of life for them. The sense that they have now the great commission to fulfill and they have these nations to go to and to spend their own lives among them. After that it will probably be the second Sunday in June and then we’ll begin our services outside. So let us pray, and think about some of the things that God has shown us. Dear Father, we thank you for the way you choose us. Lord, we thank you that you don’t choose some of us for salvation and some of us to be lost. We thank you Lord that that is in our keeping; that is for the use and the exercise of our freewill — we are free to choose whether we will accept what you have done for us in Jesus or not. But Lord, we thank you that once we have done that, then you decide where our place will be in this world. Father, we thank you for that. Thank you that you choose us freely, it’s not because we’re bright or are clever, not because we have a better grasp of things, not because we have talents, but Lord you choose us out of your own free grace. Father, we would, each one, just rest where we are. We want to thank you for where we are. Lord we may not appear very important in anybody’s eyes, but we thank you you’ve chosen this place for us. Thank you Lord, this is a good and a comfortable place, this is the place that is best for me. Lord we thank you for that. Thank you, Father that we don’t need to strain and strive, we don’t need to try to prove our worth or our value. You, our God, choose the place of our dwelling, you choose the job that we will do, you choose the person we will marry and the home we will have. Lord, the one thing you’ve promised us is we’ll not be without a place to lay our heads; you’ll always supply our needs. Father we thank you for that. Thank you that we can start resting, start relaxing in our Father’s arms. Lord, if you want us to be married, you’ll marry us and if you don’t want us to be married, we’ll waste our time. Lord if you want us to be rich, you’ll make us rich; if you don’t want us to be rich, we’ll frustrate ourselves. Lord, if you want us to be poor, we’ll be poor. Father, we thank you. Thank you Lord that the one great decision that is ours is Jesus or self; after that, you take our lives into your hands and you will make us an Abraham or a Noah if you so choose. Lord, how we thank you that when we get to heaven, we’ll find we were all Abrahams, we were all Noahs — what the world saw of us was false and you see us differently. You see us all as heroic princes and princesses of God. Lord, we thank you for that. Thank you for giving us to each other and enabling us to share the certainty and truth that we are all nobility, we are all born of God, and we are your own dear sons and daughters, the very apple of your eye. Thank you, Lord. Now may the grace of our Lord, Jesus and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with each one of us, now and throughout this coming week. Amen. .
Working Faith - GENESIS
Introduction to Working Faith Genesis 12 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Loved ones, will you take a Bible and turn to Hebrews 11:1. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the man of old received divine approval. By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear.” And then would you go to Verse 29. “By faith, the people crossed the Red Sea as if on dry land; but the Egyptians, when they attempted to do the same, were drowned. By faith the walls of Jericho fell down after they had been encircled for seven days. By faith Rehab the harlot did not perish with those who were disobedient, because she had given friendly welcome to the spies. And what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Sampson, Jepthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets — who through faith conquered kingdoms, and forced justice, received promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. Women received their dead by resurrection. Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, that they might rise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking and scourging and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with a sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, and ill treated — of whom the world was not worthy — wondering over deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.” During every evening of this coming year we’ll continue the studies in the Old Testament, which you know are concentrating on faith, so that’s one of the reasons I thought it would be good to at least have an introductory study on the life of faith, and particularly, loved ones, working faith. That’s what we’re concentrating on in the evenings during the fall and the winter; working faith, so that is what I would like us to think about tonight. Working faith is different from saving faith, for instance. Saving faith is that faith that you have when you realize that you have no hope of ever making yourself right with God. And then you at last realize that Jesus has died for you and that he has made things right with God and you turn from that independent life of God that you have been living and you turn to God and you know that he has accepted you. That is saving faith, but it’s not sanctifying faith. Sanctifying faith is that faith which we enter into after we begin to realize our lives are defeated and double and hypocritical and we realize that we need to have our hearts cleansed through the power of the Holy Spirit and then we are willing to be baptized into Jesus’ death. Then we are filled with the Holy Spirit and our hearts are cleansed so that we are able to do the things that we know we should do. So it’s neither of those. Its working faith: it’s the faith that every saved and sanctified child of God exercises in their everyday life, to enable God to manifest in this time space world all the things that he achieved for us on Calvary. In other words, it’s the faith whereby you are able to see strife in your family healed — stopped dead, by a miracle. It’s the faith by which you are able to see a job situation solved. It’s the faith by which you are able to see a wife returning to her husband. It’s the faith by which you are able to see your financial situation come into line through God’s miraculous work. It’s the faith by which you are able to see an incurable disease healed. That’s what we mean by working faith. And because so many of us have misconceptions about that, it might be good to say what working faith is not. Working faith is not the power of mind over matter — that’s not what we’re talking about — it’s not that power that the intellect seems to have. Now we don’t quite understand whether it has it or whether it’s a trick of a conman; but it’s not the power that the intellect seems to have over solid matter, to bend dinner knives or to heal broken arms — it’s not that. It’s not, in other words, the power of positive thinking. It is important for us to see that such a power does exist. It’s derived from the same basis as real working faith, and through God’s profound wisdom he allows it to exist in the world. It’s a psychic power and it depends on some very real links that exist between human beings and the world of nature that God has built into us — there are amazing connections between us and the world of nature. This psychic power uses those links to bring about works that seem like the works of God’s power himself, but they are really counterfeit works. They would be based even on the power of your smile to influence another person’s psychological mood. You know that that exists — I mean, you can smile and in fact that’s what enables a lot of sales to go through in stores — the power of a smile. So there is an amazing connection of just a physical smile with the psychological mood of a person right up to a level where some doctors certainly have been writing recently in the newspapers that happiness can even bring a protection against things like cancer. So there is a whole series of vaguely understood connections and links between us human beings and the world of nature that enables amazing things to be done. And that psychic power is used you remember in, not only sects like Christian Science, but in many of the eastern religions. It’s an actual fact that many Indian practitioners of this power are able to fight one another without touching each other. They stand at a great distance from each other and they have a whip that they don’t actually touch each other with, but by the power of the mind they inflict lashes on the other person’s body. So there are incredible psychic powers that enable things to be done that can’t normally be explained by our ordinary everyday experience. Now loved ones, that isn’t what we’re talking about — that power is used by Satan to bring about works that look like miracles. They aren’t. How do you distinguish that power from the power of working faith? It has one very great distinction; it’s all located on the earth. It depends on the manipulation of psychic, emotional and physical powers that exist on the earth here. It has no touch with heaven — it brings nothing from heaven to earth. It is located absolutely on the earth and it is simply the manipulation of powers that already exist and because of that, there are other characteristics that distinguish it from working faith which you recognize. One of the things, for instance, that you find about it is because it’s located just within human beings the emphasis is always put on the quality of the faith. So you find practitioners of this kind of faith, and why I tell you of this is they’re found not only in eastern religions or in Christian Science, but they are found in much of the prosperity teaching that is practiced in many of our Christian groups. And you can tell that it’s this psychic power because the emphasis is put on the quality of the faith and therefore the person concentrates on exercising as much faith as he possibly can. So there’s a great tendency to almost tense yourself up, to try to get more faith, “If I can only get enough faith, I could bring this thing about” so there’s a great emphasis on that. You’ll notice that in a thing like Christian Science where there tends to be a feeling that if you had enough faith, you would be healed — you just have to exercise more faith. And of course, some of you listening tonight can recognize that some of us get into that in our attempt to practice working faith, we actually get involved in the psychic emphasis where we think if we could emphasize the faith enough or tense ourselves enough or feel strongly enough about it, then we would be healed, and that leads to absolutism in healing. Absolutism in healing is “Why are you not healed? Not enough faith.” Of course, it’s a wearing, depressing, killing, discouraging thing, because it bears a person down to the ground as they try valiantly to exercise more faith. And the reason for that emphasis is that it is simply dependent on the manipulation of the power of a person’s mind and psychic being against a certain problem. So is the basis of most of the selling techniques and most of the power of positive thinking techniques. Another reason you will be able to distinguish it from working faith is that great emphasis is put on the person exercising the faith, so actually they can be exalted greatly because of their exercising faith. And on the other hand, as I mentioned, tremendous pressure can come on them if the desired result does not come about. So great emphasis is put on the human practitioner so that he is either exalted because he’s done well, or he almost feels a defeated man because he hasn’t pulled it off. So you’ll find that glory is not given to Jesus or given to God in this kind of psychic power, but it’s given to the practitioner. And you’ll find that whenever a person does manage to bring about a result, the emphasis will always be on the result. It will always be, “Oh, what a wonderful thing happened to that person through his faith” rather than “What a wonderful God this is that we have”, or “What a wonderful Christ.” The rationale for this whole practice of psychic power is that everything that is wrong in this world is just due to you believing a lie. Christian Science will tend to say sickness is not really real it’s just a lie you have believed, it’s all in your head, it’s all in your mind; sickness is only a lie, it isn’t really real. Common sense rebels against that because common sense feels the pain of the sickness and sees the reality of the withered body, so common sense reacts against that. But more importantly the danger of that half truth is that we will be lead to believe that “There is really no evil and evil is unreal and there is really no devil. It’s just when things are wrong, we are seeing them wrongly. We’re not seeing them as they really are.” And of course the end of that kind of thinking is the clause in Genesis uttered by the serpent, “You shall not surely die.” In other words death is not really real, sickness is not really real sin is not really real, evil is not really real. So that, loved ones, is what is termed often as psychic power, soulish power, and power of positive thinking, some of those things that are found in eastern religions and in some of the sects. That’s not what we’re talking about; we’re talking about working faith. Working faith is not hope. Hope is based on the future; it’s hoping that things will turn out all right. Working faith is not hope. It’s not emphasizing the future at all, in a strange way. Working faith is not wishful thinking. It’s not, “Oh, I wish this will happen. I just will it, if I think enough about it then it will happen. I know it will happen because that’s what God said.” Now working faith is not that. In fact, the interesting thing about working faith is its emphasis is not the future at all. Its emphasis, actually, is on the past. And I will show you, if you would like to see an instance of working faith, in Joshua chapter 6:1 – 3. “Now Jericho was shut up from within and without because of the people of Israel; none went out, and none came in. And the Lord said to Joshua, ‘See I have given into your hand Jericho, with its king and mighty men of valor. You shall march around the city, all the men of war going around the city once. Thus shall you do for six days.’” So working faith is behavior built on what God has already done. You see that in verse 2. Verse 1 is clear; Jericho is shut up from within and without so it was a tight city, protected completely and yet verse 2 runs, “And the Lord said to Joshua, ‘See.’” And if Joshua looked, he said, “Yeah, I see it’s tight against me; it’s barricaded — I can’t get into it.” But God says, “See, I have given into your hand Jericho, with its kings and mighty men of valor.” In other words God is saying “I have already done this — I have already done it. Now I’m going to tell you what I want you to do in the light of what I’ve already done. But be assured that I have already done it and what you are about to do is appropriate in view of the fact that I have already given you the city, but I want you to do it nevertheless. It won’t bring the city to you; I’ve already given you the city.” In other words, working faith is an absolute confidence that God has already done the thing. He has already worked the work. He has already worked the miracle. Now what great act has God already done? Well, the New Testament is full of statements of that great fact. The Old Testament is full of instances that result from that fact, instances like this, or if you like to look at Genesis 17:5, it’s another obvious one. The Old Testament really doesn’t tell us what the great act is that God did, but it gives us many instances like this that shows that he’s speaking of something that he has already done. Genesis 17:5, “No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations.” God says that to a man who didn’t even have a son of his own yet. God said, “I have made you the father of a multitude of nations.” So God was speaking about whole generations of people, children of faith like us, who would be born and he was saying, “I have already given you these. I have already made you the father of these people, even though these people hadn’t been born on the earth yet.” Now what is the mighty act that God is talking about when he keeps on saying to these people, “I have already done this” so that they exercise working faith and they go around this city, that you “have given into our hands.” Well the mighty act, loved ones, is Galatians 6:14. It’s stated in different places in the New Testament, but this is one of them. “But far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” That’s the act that, you remember, took place before the foundation of the world — the world has been crucified. When Jesus died, that was the death of the world. What world — because it’s obvious that it’s around about us so it’s not the visible, natural world. What world is it? It’s the great world system that has been set up by men and women to run their lives independent of God; the world system of pensions, stocks and shares, money in the bank, all right in themselves, nothing wrong with those things in themselves, except that men and women have used them to reassure themselves that they’re secure, even though they don’t trust or believe in God the Creator. And so that whole world system possesses a great power on every little child that is born into this world. In subtle ways, the elemental spirits of the universe bind that little child to all those things as its security. Those things themselves aren’t wrong, but in so many of our lives they become the only source of our security and the only reassurance we have of security. They bind our wills and our minds so that when the pension fund collapses we are collapsed inside ourselves; we don’t depend on anyone outside the pension fund. We have no dependence on the one who looks after the lilies of the field because our whole being has over the years become bound to the pension fund, bound to the stocks and shares, bound to the money in the bank so that we are often captives and prisoners. Not only our fathers and our mothers, but we ourselves are. The world system includes not only the whole system by which men and women assure themselves that they are secure, even though they don’t trust or believe in God the Father, but involves the whole system of rewards and punishments by which we try to make the world into our image and we try to make it do what we want it to do. The whole system of promotions, the whole system of commissions, to get people to sell goods, the whole system of firing people, of making them lose their jobs, that whole world system that motivates people. In a way, its necessary; the things themselves, except that most human beings in the earth become utterly imprisoned by them and utterly dominated by them. They are motivated not by love of God and not by desire to do what he wants them to, but by desire to please the boss or by fear of offending the boss or by fear of losing their jobs. And so that whole world system of pleasing people and of getting forward and of getting promoted and getting accepted is binding many human beings. And then, of course, there is the more complex public system of the world, because that’s a kind of a personal world system that binds us, ourselves, here, but there’s a public world system that connects up with the whole world of the media and the whole world of Wall Street panic. You know how that goes; interest rates up, interest rates down and they all seem to fall together. The whole public system of governments, the whole public system of fear which brings the Russians into a place where they are spending the bulk of their money on weapons and the Americans are spending the bulk of their money in weapons and I’m not a pacifist, but it is pretty mad the way we’re all ganging up against each other and we haven’t money to feed our starving people because we are warring against each other in our minds — having a fair idea inside that none of us are really going to risk pushing the button. But it’s amazing that its the world system of such deception and power in it, that it binds us into this wild world that actually governs so many of us. The newspapers that we read, the television that we watch moves us out of peace and into dis-peace constantly, almost daily. Now that whole world system God destroyed in Christ. He destroyed it. That’s what it means; the world was crucified in Christ — that’s what Paul says; “I glory in the cross of Jesus Christ by which the world was crucified to me.” God has severed the links that bind you to that world. He has severed the channels that connect that world up to your poor mind, that bind your emotions to that world so that you are yanked up and down like a puppet by what the television happens to bring out today or what the newspapers happen to bring out or what the boss happens to say to you or what the firing happens to result in your life or what the unemployment happens to bring about. He has severed that. He has destroyed the power of that world to bring about anything in your life that he does not want brought about. That’s it. He has enclosed you in Christ so that you cannot be affected in the way the world wants to affect you through those things, and you do not need to fear those things and you do not need to be anxious about them. So that even when you don’t have a job, even when the money is not working out, he expects you to look up to him and praise him and say, “Father, I thank you that you have crucified the world and its power to destroy me and there is nothing that will happen to me through this world that you are not allowing or permitting or sending, but it’s certainly not the world that is bringing it about.” And so when men and women say to us all, “What do you do if you don’t have a job or what do you do when you don’t have this money or if you don’t have this bank account or you don’t have this retirement plan, we answer, “The world has been crucified to us in Jesus and that whole world system has no power to affect us. The normal way we are meant to live in this world is by faith in our loving Father, by doing the jobs that he has given us to do and by trusting that he will enable us to continue to live in this world and have enough food as long as our years last.” Now loved ones, that’s the world system that has been crucified in Christ, now also in Christ, you can see the second part “by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world.” So the binding that takes place in so many of us has been destroyed also; we have been crucified to the world, so no longer do we ourselves need to fear the world, because we have already died. You can’t do anything more to a dead person except maybe throw them in a hole, but you can’t do anything to destroy their lives — you can’t harm them any further. Moreover the little subtle desires and yearnings that you and I have towards this world system, those have been severed in Christ. Because you may have been listening to me and saying, “Well, brother, I see that, but you know there’s a little thing inside me that has been trained for years — I’ve been told by my parents for years about good jobs and pensions and retirement funds and” do you understand I’m not saying those things are wrong, but it’s so hard for most of us to engage in them in a way that still leaves us really trusting the Father and not them. But many of you say, “Well I’ve been trained to depend on these things for years.” But that’s what God did in Christ; he destroyed you too. He crucified you to the world; he has destroyed those links that bind you to those things so that it is possible for you to walk free. It is. It is possible because of Jesus’ death and because of the involuntary grace of the Holy Spirit. It is possible for you to walk free from those things and to walk above them and walk a charmed life. It is possible to walk free of that pressure of the world system. It even affects, you know, those of us in the whole marriage market game because that’s part of the world system too, as sure as anything is. It just tells us, “You know you won’t be happy unless you are married” or “You won’t be happy unless you’re married to this person or that person.” That’s part of the world system, and God destroyed that on Calvary; it has no power in any way to affect or destroy your life. Now this is said in various places, loved ones. It said in Galatians 6:14, it said in Colossians 2:20, “If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the universe” those are the spirits that bind us to these things, that make us feel we’re dependent on the boss’ favor or dependent on our money that we get from our job, or we’re dependent on this pension fund, or we’re dependent on what Wall Street does, or we’re dependent on the government or what public opinion is. The elemental spirits of the universe are what bind you to that. “If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the universe, why do you live as if you still belong to the world? Paul is saying, “Just stop.” He’s implying, “No big deal, you can just stop now. In faith you can believe that that has been destroyed and just stop. Just do the right thing.” And then in Colossians 2:15, “He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him.” Jesus has disarmed those principalities and powers, those things that bring you under fear or under desire for favor; God has destroyed those powers and you can walk free from them, you can walk free this very moment, loved ones and that’s what working faith is. It’s acting in the light of what God has already done; it’s simply doing it. The trick of Satan is, of course, to persuade you that you can’t walk away; to persuade you you’re bound, you’ve been bound for years; you felt the binding for years. The amazing thing is the moment you exercise working faith in what God has done, and you act in accordance with that, the whole thing drops away. It’s like a house of cards that collapses; all those little strings that bind you, they fall away. I don’t know if you know it, but I happen to know through a friend of mine that the tooth is held in the gum by all kinds of little strands. You think is was the gum that held your tooth in it; but it’s all kinds of little strands and if you extract a tooth, you don’t actually pull it, you push it in and you twist to break the strands and then it just lifts out. So it’s all the little strands that hold your tooth — it’s that easy. That’s what God does: pushes and breaks them and you just walk away. That’s what God has done in Jesus on Calvary. He has destroyed the elemental spirits of the universe that bind you to it so you can, by exercising faith in that and thanking him for it and simply living appropriately, and then you can walk free, just like that. And, of course, Satan knows that and his attempt is constantly to bring up to you people who are bound by these things or people who seem to be happy because of these things and anything to get you from actually acting. If he can paralyze you by his deception, he will because he knows the moment you act in working faith, he’s finished. Because it is true; God has done these things and reality, absolutely reality is this, loved ones, Ephesians 2:6, 7. “and raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” And you see again that it’s something that God has done. You see it’s not “and will raise us up.” He’s not talking about the resurrection; he’s talking about what has already happened, “and raised us up.” And lest you’re in any doubt, Paul is writing this and he’s still alive and he’s saying, “and raised us up with him and made us sit” — this is what God has done – “and has made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” Why? “That in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” In other words, that is where we dwell. Working faith is a settled and steady confidence that we have been raised up and we are this very moment at the right hand of God, in Jesus, far above the power of the world. And we are there, where all health and all wholeness is ours. That’s why when it comes to a thing like sickness; we know that already in Christ our sicknesses were born and they were taken away. Already the power of them to destroy us has been taken away. The power of discouraging circumstances to overwhelm us has been taken away. The discouraging circumstances even may remain; the sickness actually may even seem to remain. A lot of people may say, “Look, you’re not healed, you’re still sick.” But the power of that sickness to hinder us has been destroyed. God has actually destroyed in Christ the power of the ordinary things of the world to hinder us from doing his will. So working faith is an absolute confidence that of course I have been healed insofar as the power of this sickness to hinder God’s plan for my life has been destroyed. So actually whether the sickness appears to disappear or appears still to be here, it doesn’t make much difference to us because we know we will die when God wants us to join him in heaven. That might mean that we live shot through with cancer that the Doctor would tell us would kill us — but we will not die until God has need for us in heaven. It’s the same with overwhelming circumstances; overwhelming circumstances would normally send you neurotic which normally would put you in the psyche word, would normally put you at the end of yourself, but because God has taken the sting out of the world, has destroyed the power of the world and the power of the overwhelming circumstances to have their usual affect on you, you know that “No, I am at the right hand of God in Christ.” And of course when you exercise that kind of faith, then the Holy Spirit is free, do you see that? The Holy Spirit is free to begin to make real in your life the benefits of Christ’s death and resurrection that God wants to make real. That’s it. But without faith, the Holy Spirit is as powerless as Jesus was in that village of unbelief, where he could do no great work because of their unbelief. But in a person who is exercising working faith, thanking God that “the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Lord I have been raised up with you and sit now in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. Lord, I thank you for it here in heaven with this sun shining and all help about me and the riches and power of your life around me.” In that kind of faith the Holy Spirit is then free in a quiet moment to whisper, “And God has done this for you.” And that’s how healing comes. That’s how money comes. That’s how miracles happen — the wife returns to her alienated husband, the child’s sickness is healed, and the blind eyes are made to see because the Holy Spirit is able to whisper to a person who is exercising working faith – “God has done that” and immediately that’s it. Now up to that moment, all those things are real anyway, whether the Holy Spirit has whispered that to you or not. All those things are yours; it’s simply that at certain times, he makes that visible to other people. Do you see that? You only think that so much money is needed to sustain your life — you only think that. It’s very difficult to analyze fully all of your past life, but if you were ever to analyze it, you’d see that there were a thousand timings, coincidences we call them, chance, luck, when a bill came in at the right time exactly after you had received a check. Thousands of other little things that had happened — cars that kept going that shouldn’t have kept going, other cars that go brilliantly collapsed, house openings that wouldn’t normally have come suddenly came. Job openings came that you didn’t think would come, other job openings didn’t come. In other words, our lives are a whole network of events that allow for all kinds of variations and we get our little minds set on a certain amount of money. The amazing thing is that when you dwell in working faith and dwell in the midst of working faith at God’s right hand in Jesus with the world crucified to you, the colorless, odorless life of the water of Jesus’ Spirit becomes to you whatever you need. Money is the way God normally, in this fallen world, enables people to get things, but God has a thousand other ways than money to give you things. Freedom from a debilitating cancerous disease is in this world normally God’s way of enabling a person to live a full and complete life. God has all kinds of other ways to enable you to live a full and complete life even with that disease apparently taking your body apart. So that’s what I mean when I say if you dwell in working faith, you’re going to be living off the Rock of Ages anyway, and not off these intermediate little gifts. But as you dwell in working faith, the Holy Spirit is then free to manifest some of those things so that the rest of the people will see them. But actually you don’t need to have a Cadillac to prove that you’re dwelling in working faith. Dwelling in working faith will ensure that you have enough money anyway, that somehow or other, the whole thing works together for good in your life, in other words, that you cannot be defeated. We were going through Piccadilly Circus; that’s one of the central famous squares in London — it just came to me, and I said to my wife, “You know, this whole square here is filled with all kinds of currents; spiritual currents, intellectual currents, mental currents, emotional currents, financial currents, there are all kinds of currents, masses of currents like radio waves, of all different kinds running through this whole square here with all these people.” And do you see that there are infinite permutations of combinations of those currents? There are massive numbers: the guy stepping off the curb, he’s influenced by 3 or 4 billion different currents. And God, in his great wisdom, in response to your working faith that the world has been crucified to you and you to the world, is able to combine those for your benefit without any trouble — no trouble at all — none. To our crude eyes, it may appear there’s nothing different, but he has already moved and squeezed together and combined two or three billion of those currents that utterly change the way things turn out in your mind and in your life. Loved ones, that’s it; we’re in the hands of our Father, we’re not in the hands of this world system. We’re not — that world system was destroyed in Jesus and it has no power to bring about its will in us or in our children. And God expects us to live confidentially and joyously in that faith and to build that faith up in each other and then to act in accordance with that faith. Then it is that you begin to be used by God to heal other people’s sicknesses, to solve other people’s problems and to make to changes in your own life and the life of nations. But working faith is something that is all our right, right at this very moment. So I would encourage you “Rejoice in the Lord always and I again will say rejoice. Let your forbearance” — people will wonder why you’re not worried – “let your forbearance be known to all men, the Lord is at hand” right here. The Lord is at hand. “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your request be known to God. And the peace of God that passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Loved ones, that’s it; that’s for us. Let us pray. Dear Father, we thank you for peace and for safety. Thank you for a strong rock around us that the power of the world system cannot pierce. And thank you, Lord for a place to dwell here when you, dear Holy Spirit, as we spend time waiting before our God in faith, can begin to whisper the things that he wants to manifest in order to glorify himself in this world or to enable us to be a blessing to others. But Lord thank you that we have all these blessings, whether they are manifested or not; they’re all ours in Christ Jesus. Lord God, we thank you that our lives are in your hands and in no one else’s. Lord, we would commit ourselves to praying for each other now and to exercising this faith continually. As we exercise it, Lord, we know that our brothers and sisters beside us will have an easier time as we, as a body, begin to exercise it, so this dear world that is so battered will begin to sense that there is a way of freedom in which we can walk. Oh, Lord, we thank you for that. Thank you that we can take arms against a sea of troubles and simply by opposing, end them. Not by our power, but by what you have already done in Christ. And, oh Lord, we ask forgiveness for the fact that so many Red Seas have not been crossed, in spite of the fact that in Christ, the water was split. Lord, we apologize that so many Jericho’s still stand, in spite of the fact that in Christ the Lamb of God was slain before the foundation of the world and the walls of Jericho were brought down as the protons and neutrons that made up those walls were rearranged by your miraculous power. Lord, we thank you and we would now commit ourselves to no more holding back as those who fall back through fear; but we would move forward in faith into all these situations and we would have no more time for despair or worry or anxiety or pessimism. Lord, we thank you that the world has been crucified to us and us to the world and we have been raised up with Jesus and made to sit with him in the heavenly places. And Lord, we thank you that you Lord Jesus overcame the world. That’s what you said: “I have overcome the world.” And then we thank you for your words in John, “What overcomes the world; faith is the victory that overcomes the world.” Lord, we thank you for our faith tonight; we thank you that there’s no reason why we can’t walk in that solid faith in what you have done throughout the rest of our lives and then that we will be permitted to see this manifested as needed by others. Thank you, Father. We thank you. Now may the grace of our Lord, Jesus and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with each one of us, now and throughout this coming week. Amen.
Working Faith is the Way of Promise - GENESIS
Practical, Working Faith – Way of Promise Genesis 13 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Loved ones through the Sunday evenings of the fall, winter and spring, we’re going to proceed with our studies of the book of Genesis and we’ll probably cover a chapter every Sunday evening, as God enables us to. What we’re studying is the life of faith and what was the center of man’s disagreement with God and man’s separation from God. I just remind you that Genesis 1 recounted how God made space and the planets and the stars and then made the earth and the ocean and then made the planets and the birds and the fish. Then you remember how he made man himself. And then in Genesis 2 there’s a record that is more detailed of God making man and saying to man “Now you have to complete the world that I have created. You have to complete it by developing it according to my will and by my power.” Then in Genesis 3 you get the real heart of the controversy, and the reason why we separated ourselves from God. You might want to look at that again to remind yourselves, since it was this time last year that we started at Genesis 3:1 “Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden?’’” Man hesitated in his trust of God — that’s the whole reason for the break between us and God; man just hesitated. I mean it was stupid because God had made the whole earth and all the planets and everything, and man knew that. There was no reason to do anything else but trust God completely, but he hesitated in his trust of God. And of course what was really more insulting to God was man is not dumb; he doesn’t withdraw his trust from God unless he has something else to trust and you see that in verse 6 “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband and he ate.” Man trusted the very gifts that God had given him. He looked at the world and said “By my own knowledge I can get along fine with this world; I can put my trust in it.” And that broke the mystic relationship between God and man. We know how it does even in our own relationships. While you trust a guy or a girl there is closeness between you. But once you feel the other person can’t be trusted, it’s like a concrete wall — you have no relationship. And that’s what happened: the whole mystic relationship between us and our God split apart, and all the consequences of the fall took place as we lost contact with his Spirit. Our minds became impaired and our emotions became unbalanced and our bodies became weakened. And we entered into a world that got more and more pro-self, more and more anti-Christ, more and more filled with the evil sprits and the whole thing fell apart. Then you remember in chapter 4 how Adam’s children continued in this chaotic way; as they refused to trust God, they began to distrust each other. You remember how Cain murdered his brother Abel. And then they begot a whole generation of mighty dictators who oppressed other human beings. And that’s the way the world began to develop until, really in chapter 6 it got so bad and so filled with the violence that God determined he had to show us what he had done in his son, Jesus, before the foundation of the world. And of course what he had done was to destroy us all. He had foreseen it all so he destroyed the whole world in a flood, all the world except Noah, and then he started all over again in chapter 9; he started the world over again through Noah and his three sons. And this time, in order to hold back the evil that was bound to break out in the world because we didn’t trust God, and we hadn’t faith in him, he introduced moral government, and the political system, and the system of law that threatened the death penalty to anybody who murdered someone else. And yet even so, the world just got worse and worse. In fact it took that authority that God had given it and in chapter 11 it raised the Tower of Babel up even against God’s authority. And as God saw man making out towards space, because it was a huge and a high tower, he knew there was nothing that they would not be able to do, he came down and scattered us and divided us into different nations and different languages so that we would at least have some time in which he could begin to draw us back gently into the place that he had for us in faith. Then you remember in chapter 12 he turned from the human race as a whole and he turned to one particular man and that man was called Abram and he began to try to teach this man what he had done before the foundation of the world. He began to try to encourage this man to have faith in that because loved ones, it’s important for you to see the only way the world can be fixed is by bringing out of eternity the mighty act that God did in Jesus and having it manifested here on earth. And that actually is done by your faith and mine. It’s unbelievable you know; it’s unbelievable that it should be as simple as that. But the mighty work that God has done in Jesus can be manifested in time and space in your house, in my home, in your apartment, in your place in Australia, in your place in Africa, through your faith. That is how God has determined to draw people to himself; through different ones of us learning how to exercise complete faith in him and in what he has done in Christ. And you remember that he mentioned that he had done something as far back as Genesis chapter 3 and you might want to look at that. Remember in Genesis 3 there’s that strange verse in connection with the condemnation of man and the penalties for his rebellion, Genesis 3:15 “I will put enmity between you” he is speaking to the serpent who is Satan, “between you and the woman, and between your seed” between the demons that you will beget, “and her seed;” her sons and daughters, “he” that is, her seed “shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.” And it is right back there that God is saying there will be some one who is born of the seed of this woman; a man and yet not a man, more than a man, and he, Satan, will bruise your head. That is he will kill you and destroy you; he will put you under his feet because he will take the very things that you have brought into the earth and he will destroy them. He will destroy death and sickness in his death and resurrection on Calvary even though you shall bruise his heel. You will wound him and he will suffer, but he will kill you; you will only wound him. Even back then there’s that prophecy that God had already foreseen this, and that he had already done something about it. That’s brought out again in Revelation 13:8 and this is the great fact on which our faith is based. That’s why people say hope is hope that God will do something, but faith is confidence that he has done something and it’s based on this mighty act in Revelation 13:8. “And all who dwell on earth will worship it, everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the lamb that was slain.” Now even there, if you take that order of the words, it does mean that somehow our names were written before the foundation of the world. But in fact “before the foundation of the world” does not follow the word “written” in the Greek; it follows the words “slain”. In the Greek the verse reads “and all who dwell on earth will worship it, everyone whose name has not been written in the book of life of the lamb that was slain before the foundation of the world.” And that’s the amazing thing; that all of the forgiveness that was extended in the Old Testament was extended because God put us all into his son Jesus and destroyed us even before the foundation of the world. There’s another, I know its a new thought and its difficult for even those of us who are Einstein enthusiasts and believe that there is no such thing as time, its still a difficult thought for us. But you get it again in I Peter 1:19 and it’s like so many things that are given to us by the infinite God; we can’t understand it all intellectually, but we can believe it when he says it. I Peter 1:18 gives the continuity of the sentence, “You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your father’s, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. He was destined before the foundation of the world but was made manifest at the end of the times for your sake.” It was Peter saying again that Jesus was destined to be crucified before the foundation of the world, but he was made manifest in 29AD for your sake; God did it in 29AD so that you would see it. That’s why we are so much better off than the Old Testament people — they only sensed that there was something, but they didn’t really see it. Now what did that mean? There’s an amazing thing, you’ll see it in Ephesians 2, and it’s what that meant for us. Ephesians 2:4-8 — these are verses that I have memorized, and I think you’ll want to as you begin to see the meaning of them. “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead.” The Greek means “being dead”, being dead, he loved us, “even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ” at that very time you see, “made us alive together with Christ.” It’s the same as “God commended his love towards us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us” “made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” Why? “That in the coming ages” this age “he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” In others words, we have all been raised up with Christ. We have; it’s been done. All our sicknesses have been destroyed and all our sin, it’s been done and it’s manifested here on earth the moment we believe that, that’s what it means. And it’s interesting that even this man Abraham knew that — did you know that? Jesus said that in John 8; this was the basis of Abraham’s faith. My wife asked me “How did he know it.” Oh by the Holy Spirit revealing it to him directly out of shear grace, just the way even people like Plato seem to see something of God’s truth — something of it. The Holy Spirit reveals it even before Jesus. These are amazing verses; verses that transcend time. I wrote a little tract and it will be out next week on “Escape from Time” because you do escape from time this way: John 8:56 Jesus says “Your Father Abraham rejoiced that he was to see my day; he saw it and was glad. The Jews then said to him, ‘You are not fifty years old and have you seen Abraham?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.’” Jesus saw it all long before Einstein; confusing to an English teacher, but still “truly, truly I say to you before Abraham was I am.” That’s Jesus saying “Abraham knew that I had been raised from the dead; he knew that a mighty miracle had been done.” Now loved ones that was the basis of Abraham’s faith, so let’s learn what we can from his faith as we turn back to Genesis 12:1. Important to see that it’s only if you are living in that victorious faith that God is able to speak to you and give you his direct commands and promises; only if you are living in that complete faith. Abraham was living in that faith, and it’s in that faith that God then can speak to you and tell you what particular benefits of Jesus’ death he is going to apply to you. So that’s the situation with Abraham so of course, it happens. Genesis 12:1, “Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” There are some little things you can learn: go from – to; God tells you where to go, he doesn’t just tell you where to go from, do you see that? He says “Go from your kindred, from your country and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” So he doesn’t even tell him the land, but he does tell him to “go to the land that I will show you.” Rarely does God’s guidance come through defeat and failure in the sense of “Well I don’t like this job. I just don’t like it. I am not good at it. I think the Lord must be guiding me away from it.” Well rarely does God operate that way. The Father usually guides you to something. He doesn’t normally guide you away because you failed there or you have been defeated there. Normally he wants you to stay there as long as you are able to stay there and to come through to victory, and then he guides you to a place. So it’s good, maybe, to keep that in mind as you wonder about guidance. Normally God guides you to a thing, not just away from your present situation. So it’s really quite important to stay where you are until God guides you elsewhere. It’s very important not to go out wandering in the wilderness just because you aren’t satisfied with where you are. God at least knows where to find you now, and by the time you have made a couple of moves he will have to catch up on all your errors and mistakes and he’ll have to bring you back through them. So normally, listen for God to guide you to a place, rather than just away from it, and no where else. Its important to see that often walking out by faith in God means just that; leaving a country, your kindred and your father’s house. Often it does mean stepping out from the loved ones that are dear to you. It certainly meant that for me. We were a very close family and I had to get hold of the idea that “he who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” and so, very often it does mean stepping out from the close ties that you have, often actually because those have become idols for us and we’re putting them in place of God. Often he has to get us away from those so that we can begin to hear his voice clearly without interference. Then you see in verse 2 “And I will make of you a great nation.” So God said “I will replace all your relatives; I’ll give you more relatives than you have now. “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” And then I’ll align myself with you; “I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse; and by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves.” That was the promise that through Abraham’s seed, eventually, would be born Jesus, by whom all the families of the earth would be blessed; all the Gentiles as well as the Jews and the Hebrews. So that’s the promise that God gave and this is the beginning of the way of promise; this is where God begins to deal with men according to promises. He says “I promise you that” and if they believe him, the thing is done. And that’s the same situation with us; when God gives you a little assurance of something, you grasp that and you believe it with all you heart and you line up your life accordingly, and that’s very important as you see in verse 4, “So Abram went as the Lord had told him.” Jesus said to the man with the withered hand “stretch forth your hand.” The man didn’t say “Yeah, I really think you could heal me, I really do. I really think you could heal me. And I am thinking of stretching forth my hand. And I really may do it some day if I feel some bit of strength in my hand; I think if I feel a kind of a tingle in it I will stretch it forth.” Loved ones you will get nothing from God. I don’t know about you, but I spent a lot of my life doing that; spent a lot of my life until, maybe 16 years ago, which was a lot of my life, it was about 30 years of it I spent mentally thinking “Yeah, Jesus probably could do this; God probably could do this if I did that.” And I played all kinds of mental games and I’ll tell you what I was hoping; I was hoping that I would work up inside my self such a conviction and such an overwhelming certainty that God was going to do it, that I just wouldn’t be able to do anything else — it would just burst out from me. And that never happened — I never worked up with such an enthusiasm. I never managed to work up such a faith and I never got the idea that faith is not a feeling, it’s not a notion, and it’s not just a deep conviction. You remember Wesley saying it’s not a train of ideas in the head — it is action; it is the man stretching forth the withered hand and it’s healed. It is not Moses looking at the Red Sea crying up to God and saying “Will you help us, will you help us?” It’s God saying to Moses “Why don’t you do something? Stretch forth your rod over the water.” And it’s not Moses saying “Stretch forth my rod? Well I’m certainly going to pray about that. I’m going to think about it, and if I feel an overwhelming desire to do that I am going to stretch forth my rod.” It’s really what Scott mentioned — it’s calmly stretching forth your rod. Its acting — it’s acting, every time loved ones. You look at all the massive expressions of Jesus’ victory on Calvary that you see in the Old Testament and it doesn’t matter whether it’s them going across the Jordan — they all have to walk in the water; the water is still there and they have to walk into it. I don’t remember how far they got in, but sometimes I think God lets you get in up to there and he asks you to step into it. Brothers and sisters it changes your life when you begin to see that faith is action. When you begin to sense something in the quietness of your prayer times saying “If you say this to this person, I’ll work.” And you kill that and you say “Well that couldn’t have been God. I just won’t say it.” And more and more you grieve the Holy Spirit of God and his voice gets fainter and fainter and you sink into mental Christianity and absolute passivity. And then you wonder why no miracles ever happen in your life. Loved ones, faith is action — when God gives you a little sense in your heart that you should do something, do it, do it. That’s the excitement of it — get up and do it! You know it can be smiling because he said “I’ll take care of your finances.” He hasn’t told you to do anything, but smiling is appropriate if somebody is taking care of your finances! Because if somebody comes along and says here is a million dollars it will pay all your debts, then you smile. So its appropriate to do that. So faith is action. It is acting as if — I’m not silly you know — it’s acting as if the whole thing is already done; because the whole thing is already done. Faith is action. So Abram went as the Lord had told him and luck went with him. Abram was 75 years old when he departed from Haran, 75. Now he did live to 175, but still, he was 75. Moses you remember was what – 80– in the backside of that mountain and wasn’t very well known, so don’t get down about how your life’s going and don’t get impatient with God. Don’t think because you’re 30, 35, 40 and God hasn’t done wonderful things through you that the chances are passed. God has a lot more preparing of instruments to do than the world need’s done. So don’t. Be content. Maybe you’ll get to 70 and God will do miracles the last 2 years of your life. So be content with that; don’t look by sight look by faith. See yourself in Jesus at the right hand of God and that he has his time for you and that may be 75 years of age, but don’t feel bad about that. God can do in a moment through your life what it could take an ordinary life 50 years to achieve. So have faith in God; don’t walk by sight. “Abram was 75 years old when he departed from Haran. And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother’s son and all their possessions which they gathered, and the persons that they had gotten in Haran.” So he really didn’t prepare himself to go back thinking maybe he won’t like it out there. He took everybody with him and burned his bridges, and it’s important to do that; burn your bridges. “And they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram,” and this is one of the early appearances of God. For a long time God had been absent from the earth if you notice; he had really been absent. He had withdrawn himself and his spirit and his physical presence from the earth. And then he began to appear to Abram and the patriots again. “Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, ‘To your descendents I will give this land.’” He promised him “I will give this land to your descendents.” “So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him.” The precious times in your life are when you are dwelling in Jesus at the right hand of God, glorifying the Father and there comes an impression from God to you. That’s precious. You need treasure that, treasure it. I’ve started to write mine down in a book. Treasure that — that’s God’s speaking individually to you, you see, so treasure it. And build an altar to the Lord, that’s what Abraham did; he knew that was important. That was the vital guidance for his life. God may take a piece of scripture and bring it home to you. I have a door off my classroom and I have pieces of scripture that God has made imprinted in my heart at hard times of life. Treasure those things and you gradually build up your own Bible; you begin to build up the words of the Bible that God has made real and alive to you and that’s your particular life line, that’s your guidance system. God is going to make sense of those, so those are important, and that’s why Abram built an altar. “So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. Thence he removed to the mountain on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord.” So he spent time with the Father, as the Father had spoken to him, “And Abraham journeyed on, still going toward the Negeb.” Now loved ones it’s about a time like this that God lovingly allows Satan to come at you. In other words, usually you’ve moved out on something that God has told you to do and he’s kind of confirmed it by speaking to you and being alive and real in your own spiritual and prayer life, and you are very conscious of his presence. It’s usually about that time that there is a person who stalks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. You remember from the first chapter of Job that he doesn’t get at you because God can’t protect you; he gets at you because God lovingly allows that. God has strengthened you, you have obeyed him, you have moved out in faith and he has confirmed some things by being real to you in your prayer life and God recons, “Now I will draw you up a little more my child, in faith. I am going to give you a little more opportunity to keep believing me and having faith in me and trusting me and going on as I guide you.” That’s what happens in verse 10. “Now there was a famine in the land. So Abram went to down to Egypt to sojourn there,” that seemed very reasonable, “for the famine was severe in the land.” Usually the little deviations we make do seem very reasonable, that’s the amazing thing, “When he was about to enter Egypt” and so that wasn’t wrong in itself, but “when he was about to enter Egypt, he said to Sarai, his wife, ‘I know that you are a woman beautiful to behold; and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife’; then they will kill me, but they will let you live.’” Usually God allows you, then, to come into a little dangerous situation where you could be hurt because he is saying, “So, you are really dead in my son, are you? You are really crucified? Are you really settled on my son’s cross? Are you really on the rock? Are you really determined it’s him and his glory alone that counts and that’s the only thing that matters — are you?” And he allows us to come into a little dangerous position where self is threatened. And then here is the danger, you see; Abraham outlines the problem, “they will kill me and they will let you live, so I have an idea” — verse 13, “say you are my sister” and the dear guy steps back from having faith in God. He knows the might of his God, but he decides there is danger here, and he becomes preoccupied with it, and he thinks, “Well, she is kind of my half sister, so its kind of true so say ‘You are my sister that it may go well with me because of you and that my life may be spared on your account.’” Usually when you and I are going along in full faith and step back that’s the way we do it isn’t it? Doesn’t matter whether its money or a job or your loved one at home or a sickness or anything else that you have started to go out in faith for, when these moments come, we resort to human expedience so quickly, and it all sounds kind of rational doesn’t it. And in fact we could kind of justify it, “You are my sister and its kind of half true what I am saying” but it isn’t full honesty. It isn’t the whole hearted honesty; it’s giving the wrong impression, but we think we can kind of snake through it. You see its not faith loved ones; its not full faith in God; its not full faith that the Father who brought you into this situation will certainly bring you through it, and if he doesn’t, you don’t want to come through it. So God gives us all opportunities like that; when you can either go on in full faith or you can decide to “help God out” by a little bit of a half honesty, or a half lie, and you lose everything. There’s the famous line from the man for all seasons, “There times when you hold your life in your hand like water, and if you open it just a little, you lose everything.” There come those precious moments when you’ve gone out on a certain limb with God in faith and you are about to see him do mighty miracles, and he allows a little bit of the flame to come close to you and you get out of it fast by some lie or some expedience or some justification or some rationalization. Of course the result is always disaster and harm for others as well as for you. Verse 14 “When Abram entered Egypt the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful. And when the princes of Pharoah saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh. And the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house. “And for her sake he dealt well with Abram; and he had sheep, oxen, he-ass’s, menservants, maidservants, she-ass’s and camels.” What did it matter his wife was taken into the King’s home. But God is good, and wants, all the time, to make us aware of what’s happening. Verse 17 “But the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarah, Abraham’s wife.” And all through this life God will keep on working at you and me, trying to show us through some strain that we are experiencing or through some strain somebody else’s experiencing or something that is continually going wrong in our life, we’ll see that there is something not right here, there’s somewhere in which we are not having faith in God. That’s why the areas of strain in your life are important. Wherever you have strain in your life; physical, financial, emotional, relationships, family, your career, your profession, wherever there is strain, its God showing you that you are not dwelling in absolute faith, “Trust in me. You are not resting in me.” So God is always working that way to bring up those times of strain as he did here with Pharaoh. So verse 18 “Pharaoh called Abram and said ‘What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister’ so I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife, take her and be gone.’ And Pharaoh gave men orders concerning him; and they set him on the way, with his wife and all that he had.” God will be gracious to us. He has given us these 70 years to learn to have faith in him, but loved ones it’s vital that we start moving on this basis of faith. It’s vital that you get off the basis of faith in yourself and faith in your career and faith in the world’s system — societies way to give you a happy life. It’s vital you get off that and get off faith in the world and onto faith in your God, because that’s the dear one you are going to meet at the end of this life. It’s in faith that he has done everything all ready that is needed in your life; he has rectified all in his son Jesus. It’s that faith and existing on the basis of that faith that will enable God to change things. In other words God will begin to assure you that your mother is healed or that a certain financial situation has been rectified in Christ, and as you rise in faith and begin to act on the basis of that faith, you will see that thing cleared away from before you — that’s the way it works. Faith actually changes circumstances and changes things and applies the victory of Calvary to this time – space world. I’ll just read a little of this dear friend; he is the English plumber [Smith Wiggelsworth], “Did you believe before you were saved? So many people would be saved but they want to feel saved first. There was never a man who felt saved before he believed. God’s plan is always this; if you will believe you will see the glory of God. I believe God wants to bring us all to a definite place of unswerving faith and confidence in himself. Jesus uses the figure of a mountain. Why does he say a mountain — because if faith can remove a mountain, it can remove anything. The plan of God is so marvelous that if you will only believe, all things are possible. There is one special phrase to which I want to call your attention, ‘and shall not doubt in his heart.’ The man shall believe and shall not doubt in his heart. The heart is the main spring. See that young man and young woman. They fall in love at first sight and in a short while there is a deep affection and a strong heart love, the one toward the other. What is a heart of love? A heart of faith; faith and love are kin. In the measure that that young man and that young woman love one, another they are true. One may go to the north and the other to the south, but because of their love they will be true to each other. It is the same when there is a deep love in the heart towards the Lord Jesus Christ. In this new life into which God has brought us Paul tells us that we have become dead to the law by the body of Christ, that we should be married to another, even to him who was raised from the dead. God brings us into a place of perfect love and perfect faith. A man who is born of God is brought into an inward affection, a loyalty to the Lord Jesus that shrinks from anything impure. You see the purity of a man and woman when there is a deep natural affection between them; they distain the very thought of either of them being untrue. I say that in the measure that a man has faith in Jesus he is pure. He that believes that Jesus is the Christ overcomes the world. It is a faith that works by love.” Then he explains how this faith is created within you. “Just as we have heart fellowship with our Lord, our faith cannot be daunted. We cannot doubt in our hearts. There comes, as we go on with God, a wonderful association and impartation of his very life and nature within as we read his word and believe the promises that he has so graciously given to us, we are made partakers of his very essence in life. The Lord is made to us a bridegroom and we are his bride. His words to us are spirit and life transforming us and changing us, expelling that which is natural and bringing in that which is divine. It is impossible to comprehend the love of God as we think on natural lines. We must have the revelation from the Spirit of God. God giveth liberally.” And God does loved ones. Your Father wants to work miracles for you this week; that’s the only reason that he has allowed us to continue in this fallen world — so that he could show his love to us, that’s it. And why doesn’t he take us straight to heaven? Why leave us here? But it’s just so he can show his love to us by actually turning back the powers of the world that would destroy you and would prevent your life being what God wants it to be. And so you have really a great shield around you, the shield that was created in Jesus from before the foundation of the world and as you believe that in different situations, God is able to change those and manifest the victory. So maybe you’ll read the chapter again and begin to move by faith in God and act when he tells you to act. Break out of this cerebral stuff — break out of this mental Christianity. Start acting as he tells you to act, and start seeing his miracles. That’s his will for us. Let us pray. Dear Father, we thank you for this. We thank you Lord that’s why you said to the man with the withered hands “Stretch forth thy hand” because you knew that proved that he had faith. Father we thank you for the many things you have spoken in our hearts and we would apologize for the many impressions that have come from you that we have just tucked away in a store and we have done nothing about them. We have despised your word to us and we have grieved your Holy Spirit. Father forgive us; we would stop that and we would begin to act on the things that you have told us. We care not whether we look like fools or not. Father we intend to begin to move in faith in you, so that you may manifest the victory of Jesus in our day to day lives. We thank you for Abraham and thank you that all of us who are children of faith are his children and that we are in Jesus this very moment at your right hand our Father, where there is power for us, now, to receive healing at this very moment for any sickness that we have. Thank you Lord, we want to receive that healing now from you. Father, we thank you that Jesus bore our sicknesses and carried our pains. So now Lord, we let them go up to you, thank you. Lord we care not about the symptoms; it’s your healing life that we receive now by faith. Thank you Lord Jesus. Thank you that all that we used to be in this old body has been done away with in you. So we thank you Father. Lord we want to take some stands now for things in the coming week; certain situations that we’re facing that we are apprehensive about; certain situations in the job, certain relationships in our home, certain financial matters that we’re doubtful about and worried about it. Lord we see that the one who is worried is not having faith; the one who is apprehensive is filled with doubt. And whatever is not of faith is sin. So Lord we know that we can’t doubt, we can’t waver, and have faith, so Father, we haven’t got much other option. We either stay in this doubting, wavering apprehensive position where we can have no power to do anything for you, or we move out of this and reject it Lord. So Father we move out of the apprehension now. We step away from this worry and this anxiety about this thing. And Lord we are going to gulp and take a stand in faith. Lord we believe that you overcame the world and we believe you overcame this part of it that we were worried about. We believe Lord that you already rectified that relationship that we have in our home. You already put that financial situation right and solved it. Lord you already have dealt with that situation at work. Father thank you. We want to say we believe you — we believe you Lord. We believe that you have done this. And we believe your word, “What so ever you desire, when you pray, believe that you receive it and you shall have it.” Lord we believe you and receive this now. Thank you and we believe we have it now. So Father we want to thank you and we want to feel the relaxation in our muscles and our emotions and our heads as we now relax about the situation. We are going to look forward to this week instead of fearing, Father. Forgive us that we spoiled it before we came to it. Lord we want to take that back — you haven’t planned for us a miserable week. You planned for us a way where the valleys are filled in and the mountains are made low. So Father we thank you. We are going to look forward to this week. We are going to get up tomorrow and when Satan comes in like a lion we shall answer “The Lord has promised this. This the Lord has already done.” Father we thank you that we can be like Abraham, we can be like him; we can believe you and we can go and act in the assurance that you have already done the thing and we can avoid our own expedient attempts to get out of difficulties. So Father thank you. Thank you for this way of faith. We take our stands now, all of us, as an army, and look forward to this week, to walking it joyfully in the absolute assurance that you have resolved all these dilemmas and you have solved all these problems and you have untied all these knots and you have untangled all the entanglements in Jesus. Thank you Father. Thank you this night. Thank you for rest and peace in your faith. Now may the grace of our Lord Jesus, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with each one of us, now and throughout this coming week. Amen.
God’s Mercy Towards Our Failures - GENESIS
God’s Generosity Genesis 14 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill This has to be encouraging for us, to know that 4,000 years ago God spoke to another man the way he spoke to Jim and Judy. You’ll see it there in Genesis 12:1; “Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.'” That’s the same thing that he said to them, and it’s the only way to get us to have faith in him and in what Jesus has done. Because our kindred are dear, and our friends here in the body are dear, but, really, however good they are, we always have a tendency to put our faith in them, and God knows that. The only way to release us into faith, [Smith] Wigglesworth says, is to exercise faith. And the only way he can get us to exercise faith is to put us in places where we can depend on him alone. So he usually does this, loved ones, whether it’s me coming from Ireland, or you going somewhere else; he usually knows that he has to send us forth away from our kindred, away from the people that we can depend on so that we have faith in him and what he has done in Jesus’ resurrection. Then you see the compensations in verse two. And it’s the same promise that will go with Jim and Judy, “And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” He will beget children in God and in Christ to them in Australia; he will keep his promise, “I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse; and by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves.” So it’s much the same situation as they’re in, and God will be faithful to them as he was to Abraham. You’ll remember, he chose Abraham as the first man he decided to try to lead back to have faith in himself instead of the world. Because that’s what we had all done; we had determined we’ll have faith in the world and not in God and that’s how we all got into those troubles. You’ll remember that it culminated in the tower of Babel where we were going to take over the whole universe and the only way God could save it was to scatter us and split us into 70 different nations and into all kinds of languages. Then God took this man Abraham, and started to try to lead him back into having faith in God himself — in God alone. That’s why we’re studying Abraham’s life here in these Sunday evenings; so that we may see how to live by faith ourselves. So I’d ask you to turn to Genesis 13, loved ones, where I thought God was teaching us something about the generosity of faith and you see it in verse 1, “So Abram went up from Egypt, he and his wife, and all that he had, and Lot with him, into the Negeb. Now Abram was very rich in cattle, in silver and in gold” very rich — because he’d just finished obeying God and trusting God every inch of the way — that’s why he was so rich. No! He was just out of a scrape. Look at the previous chapter, 12:18, “So Pharaoh called Abram, and said, ‘What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife, take her and be gone.’ And Pharaoh gave men orders concerning him; and they sent him on his way, with his wife and all that he had.” That was it — and we have a tendency to think he was lucky to get out of that with his life. I mean, God had every right to crunch him — he lied! He had refused to trust God. God had every right to strip him bare — that’s what I would have done. And here it is; he’s rich in cattle and silver and in gold. I think that’s why we live such poverty-stricken lives, because there’s only one in the universe thinks that way and that’s Satan. Satan’s the only one that thinks, “You crud — you deserve to get what’s coming to you.” God doesn’t think that way at all. God knows he has put us all into his son and changed us, so he treats us as being his dear son. He wouldn’t for a moment turn around to Christ and crack him across the face, because it’s his beloved son. It’s his son whom he loves, who pleases him. He gives to him generously. That’s the way God is, loved ones. You’ll see it in Psalm 103:10. It’s just so strong and plain, “He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor requite us according to our iniquities. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.” It is incredible, but throughout this life, God will keep dealing with you that way. He’ll keep being generous to you and he’ll keep giving you things and enriching you, because as far as he’s concerned, the only thing that needed to be done to change you, he has done in his son, Jesus. He knows it’s done and he knows the moment you believe it and have faith in it, that moment it will be manifested in your life. So he continues to treat you in the light of what he’s done in Jesus, and he keeps giving you things. If you say, “Well, how come I think I’ve experienced scarcity in my life very often — I think I’ve experienced in my life very often that God is kind of condemning me or taking it out of me?” Really I hate to say it because you’ll laugh at it because it’s that American slang but — we’re dum-dums — we are — because we believe that God is going to deal with us in that way of scarcity, and there is only one in the universe that deals with us that way — that’s Satan. It is unto us according to our faith — that’s why. We do something wrong, and we believe the lie of Satan that it should be taken out on us because we’ve done something wrong. So for weeks, often months or years, we live under Satan’s thrawl because we believe, “We’re lucky we got out of that scrape with our lives. We should have ourselves beaten to death.” There is only one who wants to deal with us like that, and because we believe that, we link ourselves up with Satan and “behold it is unto us according to our faith.” That’s it. But actually what we read about Abram is what is normal; God continues his steadfast love – continues — whatever you do. And if you are able to believe that, it actually will be unto you according to your faith. He is generous, you must admit, generous beyond any understanding of ours, because who of us here do not know of many great religious leaders, and certainly we know of many ordinary people like ourselves, who have lived in all kinds of ways and have lead dreadful lives, and yet somehow God has continued to be generous to them. The fact is that he continues to be generous and he continues to be generous to us if we can only believe him. Now loved ones, it’s there again in Ephesians 2:4 and its put so bluntly that it’s impossible to miss it. They’re such dear verses that they are verses I’ve memorized. “But God who is rich in mercy, out of the great lov