This is the Sign!
Genesis 9:8 – 17
Today we start our Lenten journey, six Sundays until we get to Easter Sunday. During these six weeks we will be seeking to come to a better understanding of our relationship with our Father and the steps that He and Jesus take in order to reconcile and redeem a flawed and fallen mankind.
We start today with a story that we all believe that we know well, in fact we learned it as children in Sunday School and at Vacation Bible School because of the fanciful parade of animals that are brought on to a big, big boat and carried through a long and terrible storm to a changed world. The reason for the flood and the big boat is the willful disobedience and corruption of mankind and now God seeks to press “reset” on His creation.
That reset includes a nearly complete erasure of mankind, saving the only remaining righteous seed of mankind, along with two of every kind of beast to repopulate the world after the flood. But is it a perplexing and bewildering story about punishing mankind or is it a recommitment of the God of the universe to protect and redeem his creation? Well to understand that, we start with an unexpected source of theological wisdom.
Most of you are old enough to understand this scenario, so picture reading the comic strip in the newspaper and find Lucy and Linus from Peanuts looking out the window at a steady downpour. “Boy,” said Lucy, “look at it rain. What if it floods the whole world?” “It will never do that,” Linus replies confidently.
“In the ninth chapter of Genesis, God promised Noah that it would never happen again, and the sign of the promise is the rainbow.” “You’ve taken a great load off my mind,” says Lucy with a relieved smile. “Sound theology,” Linus affirms, “has a way of doing that!”. So in order to take a great load off of your mind and to give you a greater sense of hope in these days, I will endeavor to use some sound theology today.
We can certainly imagine that Noah and his family may have been the first people to fully understand what Lucy was feeling. Noah had just been the center character in this monumental event; the most devastating, widespread judgment God had ever inflicted on humans.
Steven Cole writes that: Everyone on earth, except Noah and his family, had been destroyed in the flood. All animal life, except those on the ark, died. We can’t imagine the feelings of horror and anxiety which must have swept over Noah and his family as they emerged from the ark as the sole survivors on an empty planet.
Imagine the terror they would have felt when they heard thunder and saw storm clouds forming. Like Lucy and Linus, every little rainstorm could make their stomachs turn. What if the rain doesn’t stop? What if God destroys us this time? These questions and others must have been haunted their minds. Anxious minds need reassurance, repeatedly.
Noah and his family needed to know if God was going to judge them and find them unholy as well and eventually destroy them like the others. But the truth of the story of Noah is not a vengeful and violent God who seeks to undo what He had created but rather that He was sorry for the way that things had turned out with mankind, and with the broken relationship with man.
Elizabeth Webb tells us: God has a myriad of ways of calling us back to the harmony that God intended for us and this event seems to be God’s way of reaching out to humanity through the only righteous people left. Anxious minds need reassurance, repeatedly.
The word “covenant” used here is an important word in the Bible. There are different covenants which God made with people, but the idea is always the same. A covenant is “a pledged and defined relationship”. In a covenant God pledges to do certain things in a defined relationship of responsibility toward certain people. There is the covenant with Abraham for example, to give him a child in his old age and to make him the father of great nations.
Steven Coles writes “Here is what we know about God’s covenant with Noah”:
It was unilateral. God took the sole initiative. God originated this covenant and announced its terms to Noah. All of God’s covenants are that way. He is sovereign, He is all powerful. He determines what He will do in accordance with the counsel of His own will.
It was eternal. God knows His plan from the beginning and carries it out exactly as He promises. While men may disobey and seemingly thwart God’s purposes, His promises will be fulfilled.
It was universal. Every person who has ever lived has had opportunity to observe God’s mercy and promises through the covenant with Noah.
It was unconditional. The covenant with Noah was not dependent on Noah’s or anyone else’s obedience. Unlike the covenants with Adam and Eve, and Abraham and the Israelites, where disobedience would void the promises, this one depended solely on God keeping God’s word to Noah and his descendants. By the way the Bible tells us that we are all descendants of Noah, a second Adam if you will. God’s covenant with Noah reveals His abundant grace.
It was confirmed by a sign. That rainbow in the clouds is the sign of God’s promise that whatever else God does to seek our restoration, destruction is off the table. God spread a beautiful rainbow across the sky, and while Noah was gasping in awe, God said, “This is the sign!”
Elizabeth Ebb writes that: The understanding of this promise is that God will try everything else to bring us back into relationship with us. God will seek us out, despite or perhaps because of God’s knowledge of every sin, every grief, and every shame that obscures our vision of God’s reality for His creatures. Whatever dwells in our hearts that keeps us from hearing the harmony of all life in God’s care, God will not give up on loving us into restoration.
In the Old Testament there was God’s judgement upon God’s disobedient people. We see that with the Assyrians coming and destroying Jerusalem and dispersing the people around the region. But God is faithful to His promises, believers can have assurance of deliverance from His judgment.
As I have said before; We are the fortunate ones, we came after the Christ event. The Easter Miracle! Romans 8:1 tells us “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”. We don’t have to live in anxiety about past sins. We can know with certainty that our deliverance from judgment is based on God’s faithfulness to the promises of His Word! UMC Discipleship writes: Jesus came as the rainbow personified. He was the sign that God is present, and that God is our advocate, not our adversary.
Hear the Good News my Friends………
Steven Cole tells us: God’s sign of the rainbow was gracious and merciful. God put the sign in the clouds, where once Noah and his family would have looked with fear when the storms came. But now the same water which destroyed the earth now causes the rainbow. Coming after the storm it shows that the storm of God’s wrath is past.
Even if man forgets the meaning of the rainbow, God says that He will see it and remember His covenant and His promises to us, to keep us safe from annihilation until the second coming of Jesus. God our Creator is now also God our Protector!
Just as the Lord graciously repeated Himself over and over to Noah to assure his trembling heart, so He reaffirms His grace and mercy to us in and through Christ over and over. Just as God gave Noah, and us, the repeated sign of the rainbow to tell us that the storm of His wrath is over, He wants you to know that if you have trusted in Christ, He has removed your sins from you as far as the east is from the west.
Will God destroy everything on the earth again, Revelations says that he will – but only after Jesus comes again and takes those that believe in his ministry, in his death and resurrection and we will live on a new Earth and in a new Heaven.
So why is the covenant story of Noah and the Ark a Lenten lesson? In our reading in 1 Peter today we heard this: “God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people were saved through water, and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at God’s right hand”.
When God says “This is The Sign”, the Rainbow is not a sign of remorse of a vengeful God for his actions but rather it is sign that he will do anything and everything to bring His righteous ones home to him just as he did with Noah and His family. It is a resurrection story, after the storm, after the flood mankind was renewed, restarted, you might even say mankind was resurrected!
So Dear Ones, no matter what storm you may have to weather, no matter what earthly loss you may encounter, no matter what challenges we must face, no matter what illnesses may threaten us, no matter what dark night we must endure; when the sun comes up in the morning, and it will come up in the morning as God awakes you, please know that somewhere there is a rainbow visible to man and seen by God.
This is the Sign of God’s love and dedication to you. Of the coming resurrection of Jesus, the resurrection of mankind. This rainbow in the sky, placed there by a loving and awesome Creator and Protector, This is the Sign of your Eternity! Amen.