Forty Messages From Genesis Chapters 1 to 11 (Part 4)

31. God will always have a witness for Himself on earth (5:22; 6:9). Enoch walked with God and Noah walked with God, and they were witnesses for God in their generation. Largely speaking, Christendom has failed to be a true witness for God on earth. But God has had a small group of people who walked with Him during all these 2000 years, who were faithful witnesses to Him. You can be a witness for God in your generation if you walk with God. Enoch is a type of those believers who walk with God today, who please Him and will be taken up when the Lord returns (Heb.11:5).

32. When you believe in God’s judgment you will walk with God (5:21,22).  Enoch walked with God only after he became the father of Methuselah.  The KJV margin says, “Methuselah” means, “When he dies it (the judgment) will come”. God warned Enoch about a coming judgment when his son was born. That made him take his life seriously and he began walking with God. Enoch also preached about that judgment and about Christ’s second coming (Jude 14). Noah also believed in the coming judgment and walked with God and preached righteousness (2 Pet.2:5).

33. You must use your own money to do God’s work (6:16). God gave many details to Noah about the ark but never told him who would pay for its construction. Noah knew he had to pay for it himself. So he never asked anyone for money to do God’s work - like many Christians do today. Noah must have sold some of his property and used that money to build the ark. One mark of a true servant of God is that he is willing to use his own personal money to serve the Lord. A person’s spirituality is easily tested by his attitude to money. Noah would have paid the carpenters well who helped him build the ark. This too is the mark of a godly man. The ungodly are miserly in the way they pay their servants (James 5:4).

34. Very few will be saved (7.13). When Noah preached that God would judge the world with rain, no one believed him, because it is probable that until then, no rain had ever fallen on the earth (as per Gen.2:5). The vast majority of people even today do not believe that God will burn up this earth in judgment. Because Noah was faithful, all his children were among the very few who were saved. And because he ensured that his sons married God-fearing women, they too were saved. The last days will be as evil as the days of Noah. We must all, therefore, follow Noah’s example in his family life.

35. God will never forget you, if you stand up for Him (8:1). Noah was a lonely man on earth, standing up for God. People may have considered him to be mentally unsound for preaching judgment. But he did not care for their opinions. He refused to compromise his message of judgment. We too must not be ashamed to proclaim the whole truth of God. That may make us lonely. But God will stand by us.

36. The raven and the dove symbolize the fleshly and the spiritual (8:7,.  When Noah sent out the raven (crow), it was delighted to feed off the carcasses that were floating on the waters and so it never returned to the ark. But the dove had no delight in those carcasses and refused to touch them with its feet - and returned to the ark. These birds are a picture of the fleshly person and the spiritual person. Those who love the world and its fashions and lusts enjoy themselves more with their worldly friends. They love worldly forms of entertainment more than Christian meetings – and end up in spiritual death. The godly, however, find no pleasure in the world but long to be with the people of God.

37. God is a covenant-keeping God (9:13). God gave the world the rainbow as a sign of His covenant with man.  Circumcision was the sign of the covenant God gave to Abraham.  Jesus has now established a new covenant with us where He wants us to be finished with sin totally. The breaking of bread is the sign He established of this new covenant (Lk.22:20).  God takes every covenant He makes seriously – and so must we.  But for many believers, the breaking of bread has become a ritual - and that is why their lives are so shallow.

38. Rebellion against authority will bring a curse upon us and our children (9:25). When Noah drank too much wine one day, he lay in his tent unclothed. Ham saw his father’s unclothedness and spoke about it. As a result, Noah cursed him and his descendants. Ham forgot so quickly that it was because of his father’s godliness that Ham himself was alive. It does not go well with children who despise their parents or who rebel against their authority. Children must be taught to appreciate and honour their parents.

39. Man never learns from past judgments (11:4). So soon after the flood, man rebelled against God once again, trying to build a tower that would reach heaven. Babel is the origin of Babylon – the corrupt church of Rev.17 - a place of rebellion against God’s standards.  It is because God does not judge evil deeds immediately that men keep on sinning (Eccl. 8:11). Sin is serious. For just one sin, God drove Adam and Eve out of Eden. For our sin, Jesus had to die on the cross and be forsaken by His Father. If we understand the true significance of these events, we will take sin seriously.

40. God will finally bring the plans of man to nothing (11:7-9). It is so easy for God to bring the plans of men to nothing. He just had to make them all speak different languages at Babel! That solved the problem because they could no longer understand one another. God will bring every plan of man to nothing, today as well.  One day in heaven, the confusion and division of Babel will be fully reversed, as the church stands there comprising of people from every language on earth - united in Christ (Rev.7:9). But that process has already begun today in the church, where God is uniting people of totally different languages.