And the Lord said, “I will destroy mankind, which I created, from the face of the earth.” But the Lord looked on Noah with favour. Noah, a righteous man, perfect in his generations, walked with God.
Genesis 6:5-8 reveals two things that displease God: wickedness & evil imaginations & thinking.
Because those things described the condition of peoples heats during Noah’s day. God decided to destroy all mankind that is everyone except Noah & His family because Noah found grace & favour in His eyes.
Noah had the right heart otherwise, he would have been destroyed with all the other people practiced wickedness, evil imaginations & evil thinking.
One of the lessons we can learn from Noah’s story is that many people today are being destroyed for the simple reason that their hearts are not right before God. In their hearts they regard wickedness, they allow imaginations & they think bad thoughts.
We cannot imagine how many areas of our lives would be straightened out if only we would just get our hearts right with God! Our hearts may not be filled with tar that is blatant evil we read about in Noah’s time. But bad attitudes & wrong thinking certainly qualify as evil imaginations & evil thinking. We need to have right attitudes toward everything we do, because our attitudes basically determine everything else about our situations. If our hearts are full of bad attitudes & our minds are full of “stinking thinking,” we will not make much progress in life.
We need to have, tender hearts. We need to hear & heed the voice of conscience so that the moment we realize we have a bad attitude about something or someone, we can make the necessary adjustments. That is why proverbs 4:23 instructs us to Guard your heart above all else for it determines the course of your life. This verse is teaching us to Value & protect our mind, emotions & will. Practically that means that we need to examine our attitudes & our thoughts on a regular basis & make adjustment as need.
Many people are deceived into believing they cannot help what they think, but we can choose our thoughts. We need to think what we have been thinking about, when we do that, it does not take to long discover the root cause of a bad attitude.
Satan will always try to fill our minds with wrong thinking, but we do not have to have to receive anything he tries to give us. For example if some tries to gives us a spoonful of poison we would not take it. If we are smart enough not to swallow the poison, we should be smart enough not to allow satan to poison our minds, attitudes &, ultimately our lives.
So often we fail to guard our hearts as diligently as we should, & we allow too much junk & too many negative thoughts into our minds. We need to remember the familiar phrase “garbage in, garbage out.” & realize that we cannot take in garbage & produce good things. We must be attentive not only to our actions, but also to our thoughts, imaginations, motives & attitudes. God
looks at these things because He is a God of hearts. Whatever you do, make sure you have a right heart before the Lord, & you will reap abundant life instead of destruction.
We see in Hebrew 11:7 Philips. It was through faith that Noah, on receiving God’s warning of impending disaster, reverently constructed an ark to save his household. This action of faith condemned the unbelief of the rest of the world, and won for Noah the righteousness before God which follows such a faith.
Noah’s obedience in building the ark so far inland was physical evidence of His trust in God.
When we look at Noah we can’t but help see how obedient he was, God told him to build an ark & went on to tell him how do this in Gen 6 :14-16 AMP Make yourself an ark of gopher or cypress wood; make in it rooms (stalls, pens, coops, nests, cages, and compartments) and cover it inside and out with pitch (bitumen).
15 And this is the way you are to make it: the length of the ark shall be 300 cubits, its breadth 50 cubits, and its height 30 cubits [that is, 450 ft. x 75 ft. x 45 ft.]. 16 You shall make a roof or [a]window [a place for light] for the ark and finish it to a cubit [at least 18 inches] above—and the [b]door of the ark you shall put in the side of it; and you shall make it with lower, second, and third stories.
The version you probably are more familiar with is the NKJV which reads: Make yourself an ark of gopherwood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and outside with pitch. 15 And this is how you shall make it: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, its width fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. 16 You shall make a window for the ark, and you shall finish it to a cubit from above; and set the door of the ark in its side. You shall make it with lower, second, and third decks. Every ancient culture has its memory of the worldwide flood.
God went on to tell him that He was going to course rain to come which would food the earth & destroy the earth so everything that is on the earth shall die. But He will establish His covenant with Noah to take his wife & his sons & their wives. God also told him to take two of every animal, birds, creeping things of the earth all of their own kind & that he was to keep them alive. & they would be male & female. He was to take food for them all to eat & he had to gather it altogether. Gen 6:17-22.
If the average animal was the size say of a sheep, the ark had a capacity for 125,000animals. Putting that into perspective, there are 4,000 animals from 350 different species at Taronga Park Zoo. That means you could fit 31 Taronga Zoos in Noahs ark. Now this was the first boat that was ever built. It is not like it came with an instruction manual. It was back breaking work that required blood, sweat & tears. Now this took an incredible amount of faith to build the ark. Let me ask you who in there right mind would build a boat in the desert? Who hammers away for over a thousand years on something that they might not even need. Who banks their entire future on something that has never happened before?
According to Jewish tradition Noah did not start building the ark, First he planted trees, after they were fully grown, he then cut them down, sawed them into planks & built the boat. Here is an interesting piece of information: not until the nineteenth century did a
ship of that size get constructed again. Yet that design & ratio is still considered the golden means for stability during storms at sea. Noah’s act of obedience literally changed the worlds obedience & it will change your world too. Do whatever He tells you to do.
Noah built the ark because God commanded it. It was what he was called to do. Sawing planks & hammering nails for him was an act of obedience. & when everything was said & done, it was the longest act of obedience recorded in Scripture. From the start to finish, Noah’s one act of obedience took tens & thousands of days! & with each daily act of obedience, he glorified God. No matter what tool you use in your trade whether it be a hammer, a keyboard, a mop, a football a spreadsheet, a microphoneor an espresso machine is an act of obedience as you use them.
It is the mechanism whereby you worship God. It is the way you do what you are supposed to do. In Colossians 3:17 And whatever you do or say, do it as a representative of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father.
Be diligent in Bible Study & practice Scripture memorization & mediation. Let the Word in you produce praise to God & edification of others. Serve Jesus’ purposes in every thought, word & deed.
Always in the New Testament, the call to wholehearted discipleship is accompanied by the call to a life of devotion. To devote is to concentrate on a particular pursuit or purpose. A life of devotion to Christ pursues His purpose that is His being reproduced in us.
Stop putting yourself down & thinking what you do is not important. Remember the old proverb, “For want of a nail? It goes like this: For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the message was lost. For want of the message the battle was lost. & all for the want of a horseshoe nail.” In God’s eyes small acts of obedience are big things. When you joyfully do little things they are like big things, then God will do big things like they are little things. That is how His kingdom advances. Yet again do what God has told you.
What went through Noahs mind when God told him to build the ark in the middle of a dry, dry land? The Bible says in Genesis 6:22 So Noah did everything exactly as God had commanded him. Noah’s obedience is a patriarchal model of God working in tandem with man for establishing of His kingdom purposes on earth. Noah walked with God; walking takes place step by step. The trouble with us is that we want God to reveal the second step before we take the first step of faith. But until we take the first step He will not reveal the next step we have to be obedient to the measure of revelation He has given us, if we want more of it. That is why we spiritually get stuck; we only want to follow Christ to the point of precedence that is the place where we have been before, but no further. We are so afraid of doing what we have never done before because it is unfamiliar territory. So we leave unclaimed new gifts, new anointing & new dreams that God wants to give us. We must push past the fear of the unknown. We have to do something different.
The African impala can jump three feet high & ten metres long, yet it can be contained in a small enclosure with 1.2 metre high walls. Why? You may ask because it will not jump if it cannot see where it is going to land. We have just the same problem, don’t we? We want a money back guarantee before we take a leap of faith, but that eliminates faith from the equation we are called to walk by faith & not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7 NKJ). Again do what God has told you to do.
Genesis 6:7-8 And the LORD said, “I will wipe this human race I have created from the face of the earth. Yes, and I will destroy every living thing—all the people, the large animals, the small animals that scurry along the ground, and even the birds of the sky. I am sorry I ever made them.” 8 But Noah found favour with the LORD.
One of the dirtiest, most damaging lies that the devil ever told you was when he said, “You aren’t important.” Don’t you ever believe that.
You are important! Every born-again member in the Church of Jesus Christ has a part to play in God’s plan. God has something for you to do that no one else can do just like you can. If you don’t take your place and do your part, things won’t be quite right.
I can just hear you thinking, “Oh, I’m just one person. What could I possibly do that could be so significant?”
Look in Genesis six, and you’ll see the answer to that question. There you’ll see that the people on the earth were so wicked that God had regretted that He’d made them. He was ready to wipe the whole population out–but He didn’t. Why? Because of one man as we have just seen: Noah! One obedient man saved the human race.
Think about that. What if Noah had said, “Well, this is just too much pressure for me. I can’t live upright before God in the middle of this ungodly generation. I mean, everybody around me is living the other way. Every man around me imagines only evil in his heart. I can’t make any difference in this dark world anyway. I’m just one man.”
Praise God, Noah didn’t say that. He didn’t picture himself as an insignificant man whose life didn’t matter. According to Hebrews, he saw himself as a man to whom God had spoken and by faith he obeyed God. And because of that he ended up being the only thing that stood between mankind and total destruction.
Next time you’re tempted to shrug off the instructions of God and be disobedient, next time you catch yourself thinking, “It doesn’t matter what I do”–remember Noah. Consider the fact that, whether you understand it or not, God is counting on you to carry out your part of His plan. Live like you’re someone important in the kingdom of God. And sooner or later you’ll realize you are.
In Genesis 9:11 God said Yes, I am confirming my covenant with you. Never again will floodwaters kill all living creatures; never again will a flood destroy the earth.”
Genisis 9: 13-14 He would put His rainbow in the clouds as a token of His promise. Whenever He brings rain clouds over the earth, you will see the rainbow, and I too will see it, and honour My covenant
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