Welcome welcome – whether you are in our live congregation and are tuning in through live streaming or in the archives – thanks for joining with us.
If you haven’t been here before we take a deconstructed view of “doing church” and believe we are all individually responsible for our walk, faith and love for God and Man.
So let’s begin with a prayer, then we will sing the Word of God, sit for a minute in silent reflection then pick our study back up in Hebrews 11 at verse 7
Hebrews 11.7 Part II
August 3rd 2014
Meat
Okay, verse 7 again. Before we continue to discuss Noah, the ark, and the extent of the flood, let’s kick it off by talking about the verse itself.
Of course the writer of Hebrews began by illustrating the faith of Abel, and then Enoch and has now come to Noah and says:
Hebrews 11:7 By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.
There are a few common thread that run between and link those mentioned in the Hall of Fame of Faith.
One is the writer seems to preface each person mentioned by says:
By faith or through faith – the whole point of the chapter, right.
So “by faith Noah, being warned of God of things not yet seen”
There is another thread. In every case the characters that get an honorable mention in this chapter all are presented with information (promises, events, warnings, prophesies) that had not yet happened.
And they believed, the whole premise of faith – to be told or taught something from God and to believe.
Now, I add that line “from God” with the heaviest hand possible. I would suggest that it is bad faith, poor faith, to trust in the promises or prophesies of Man of which God has not authored.
In our day and age we have the Bible to test all things according to His word to see if what men are saying is legit. If it is, we are not believing what Men have said in God’s name but we are believing God. The men and women are just serving as the teachers of His Word.
In the case of Abraham and Abel and David and Samson and Rehab and all the rest they believed on God without seeing.
In our case, we believe on God without seeing as well. And in the case of Noah he was told by God that a deluge (a flood) coming and to build an ark.
This is a third thread that is shared in the stories of those mentioned. Action.
In the case of Noah this is what the writer says:
Hebrews 11:7 By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.
His faith (which came after the warning of God) moved Noah to prepare.
By faith Abel offered (moved, prepared sacrifice). Soon we will read that Abraham moved (without knowing where he was going) to a place of inheritance, and by faith he took his only son of the promise up and was willing to sacrifice him knowing that God would fulfill His promise to Him somehow.
We could (and will go on and on) but the point is faith moves those who have it to actions that stem off (shoot off) the promises or warnings that God has given us.
In Noah’s time, the writer says that he moved with fear.
The Greek word is eulabhyeiv — and it occurs only here and in Acts 23:10.
It really means to act with caution, to be circumspect, and then to fear, to be afraid.
So far as the word is concerned, it might mean here that Noah was influenced by the dread of what was coming, or it may mean that he was influenced by proper caution and reverence for God and from the way it is used in Acts this is probably the case.
In other words Noah’s reverence and respect for God moved him to act under the belief that what God had said was true and that calamity was certainly going to fall upon the world.
I think it’s important to note that Noah is being mentioned in the Hall of Fame of faith but that he had fear.
Sometimes fear is present in our lives over the things God want’s from us. It we were in a state of never fearing where would be the challenge to our faith – we’d just act – even foolishly at times, I suppose.
Now fear and love cannot co-exist, but that is a long discussion and one for a later time. But apparently, from this mention of Noah we can move and believe God and possess some type of fear in the process.
The writer goes on and says that Noah prepared the ark to the “saving of his house.” IOW, in order that his family might be saved. And then it says,
“By the which (By which faith) He condemned the world.”
I’m guessing that the meaning of this is that by his confidence in God, and his preparation for the flood, he showed the wisdom of his course and choice in following God and the foolishness of theirs – a foolishness that ultimately took their lives.
We might see this line in the way we might say “that one person’s good example condemns the rest of us.”
And the writer finishes up talking about Noah as becoming “heir of the righteousness which is by faith.”
It seems that the phrase, “heir of righteousness,” suggests that Noah acquired, gained, or ultimately possessed righteousness (in God’s eyes) as a result of his faith.
In the Old Covenant faith made Noah and heir of righteousness. But we have to note that it was faith in God not faith in Christ.
I would suggest that it was Christ that made such faith attributable to Noah in the end, but prior to His coming faith was measured by a person’s willingness to believe God.
Noah was made an heir of righteousness by believing God that there was going to be a deluge and then acting on that belief.
In every one of these examples the faith was shown by action, which dovetails right in with James and the points he makes about faith in James 2.
But the action is the result of faith it does not create the faith. That’s the difference between religion and true relationship.
So when scriptures say that it is “only by faith that man can be saved,” this was true from the very beginning of time.
Of course the specific mode of faith then is not what is required now under the gospel, which is in the finished work of Christ Jesus.
But I think that we could safely say or suggest that the very same faith that Noah and Abraham and the rest had in the promises of God would have certainly been the faith that would have led them to receive Jesus.
In other words, Godly faith is Godly faith.
So, onto more about the flood.
When we look at scripture we have to realize that sometimes the writers resorted to Hebraisms in their description of things.
For example, just this morning in our verse by verse of John we were covering the Triumphal entry of the Lord into Jerusalem.
A large group of people went and obtained palm frons and began waving them at the arrival of Jesus as a means to honor Him and the Pharisees who were watching said (according to John):
“The whole world has gone after Him.” And the Greek word for world is Kosmos, which not only includes the earth but the heavens.
A little bit of Jewish exaggeration, wouldn’t you say? And there are other examples of this all through scripture.
For example, in Genesis 41:56 Moses wrote:
“And famine was over all the face of the earth” probably not over Hawaii and Alaska, right?
It can be so tempting to be dogmatic on points like this because there is almost a feeling of security when we allow ourselves to support such thinking but the problem is the stances don’t always hold up to scrutiny and therefore lead to disappointment and LOSS of faith for people instead of increasing it.
Later Moses wrote that God had said that he would put the “fear of Moses” upon “the Nations of the whole earth” but it is doubtful that the Japanese were fearful of Moses at the time the promise was made.
Samuel described all nations as “eating and drinking and dancing” for biblical reasons and purposes but it’s doubtful that the indigenous peoples of Newfoundland were following suit – at least not for biblical reasons.
Jeremiah wrote: “And all the earth sought Solomon.” But again, were the pagans of every land seeking Solomon? Probably not.
Even in the New Testament Paul used a Hebraism when he wrote:
“Your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world,” but it is highly unlikely that the aborigines in Austrailia were speaking of this faith he mentions.
I mention this because we are in an age where dogma must take a back seat to
faithful reason and sound contextual study of the Word. We have to seek God in truth because the faith cannot be sustained by foolish claims anymore – they only hurt us and the sacred Gospel placed in our hands to share.
Certainly, there are difficulties and circumstances that we as believers are required to take on faith, but we can eliminate many of them if we would just allow the Word of God to work reasonably in our lives and by the Spirit.
Such an approach is not acting faithlessly but instead is the heart of faithfilled seekers of God’s truths.
The reason this “whole world” deal is an issue is because if the flood was global there are some factors we have to consider (in addition to the animal issues that were raised last week.)
One of the solutions to the animal gatherings we discuss that was brought up was the idea that the world was one solid landmass (called Pangea today) and this would allow for the gathering of Kangaroos in from the Australia region and Kimono dragons from Japan.
But the problem we are left with then is that after the global flood Pangea was apparently (and according to Young earth scholars) broken up, so the question then becomes how did the pair of dragons make it back to Japan (etc. etc.)
But let’s talk about some other factors regarding a world wide flood.
And we’ll begin with the amount of water needed.
Fundamentalist Young Earth’ers claim that enough water was generated from day 7 to day 47 to cover Mount Everest, (which is 29,029 feet tall) by 20 feet.
So the world would have had to have been covered by 29,049 feet of water in a matter of forty days.
Again, God can do anything – that is not the question. But since he has used natural means to protect the animals and Noah and natural means to remove the water, I would suggest He used natural means to create the flood.
And if the flood was global it would have had to rise 726 feet plus per day to reach these heights – that’s 30 feet per hour.
This is a tremendous amount of water coming down and rising up awfully fast.
So fast that the friction of the water falling and rising against the air and land, not to mention the turbulence of the rising water against everything on earth, would have probably boiled Noah and the inhabitants of the ark (not to mention rip it to shreds).
For water to fall and rise at the rates necessary to meet the biblical description there would be NOTHING left in its wake.
Not a tree, blade of grass, river – anything. Everything would have been completely denuded and utterly covered in silt.
But from the Biblical description Noah appears to have exited the Ark without much of a surprise or change to his expectations.
He even planted a vineyard.
Additionally, the Bible says nothing of Noah collecting seedlings or strapplings for reforestation, so where he got the grape seeds is unknown.
Defenders of a global flood suggest that it just wasn’t recorded that God had Noah collect seeds too. But that is stepping outside the biblical account and assuming things that are not there.
We have to wonder, with the absolute natural destruction such a flood would cause how a dove was able to pluck a leaf off an Olive tree in such a short period of time and return it to Noah’s hand as evidence that land was resurfacing.
Then, for the water to retreat from off the face of the land (from day 47 to day 351) it would have had to fall 95 feet a day. How does the Bible say the Lord dissipated the water? By wind.
For wind to dissipate the water off the face of the earth at the rate of 95 feet per day it would have had to blown like mad (at speeds I couldn’t discover from other sources or compute myself by any means) which too would have rocked the heck out of the ark.
And any surfer knows that the source of huge ocean swells is wind.
Why does all of this matter? The water turbulence, the waves, the wind?
It matters because in over the course of a year the ark only moved about 500 miles from where it launched.
That’s the rate of about 1.3 miles per day – the average Joe walks about 2.5 miles an hour. At half that rate, or one mile per hour, the ark would have landed half way around the world at the end of the year.
See, in the Mormon/Christian debate we mock the heck out of the Book of Mormon’s claims that the Brother of Jared’s submarines because of details like this. Have we applied the same reasoning to our historic takes on Noah and the Ark?
Another issue with the water is the admixture of apparently fresh water with salt.
A global flood arriving in such torrents, would have mixed everything up so much that the water would have plainly ended up as salt water.
How did all the freshwater fish survive?
Speaking of water, the pre-flood Bible descriptions of the earth include rivers named the Tigress and the Euphrates.
A flood of the magnitude required to cover the earth would have wiped rivers out like a crashing wave wipes out water channels made by children playing on the sea-shore.
And yet the Tigress and the Euphrates still exist – even till this day!
Taking all these things into account – torrential downpour and uprising of water, the denuding of everything in its path (including the ark) the salt water issue for freshwater fish (not to mention the debris and silt filled water for salt water fish) the lack of travel of the Ark over the entire year plus the wind velocities required to evaporate all the water back to some place unknown all provide us with a very simple and apparent solution that is based in a reasonable and faithful reading of the world – the flood was geographical and not global.
See, a geographical flood would eliminate so many issues we face when we push for global.
If the flood was assigned to the Mesopotamian basis, a giant vicinity where man had probably not established himself beyond, we have reason.
The flood would have still killed all of man on earth except those on the ark.
A geographical flood would solve the problem of animal numbers, animal gathering, and animal distribution once the waters abated.
(This means we would not have to explain how the Kangaroo – an animal for which no bones have ever been found anywhere except in Australia – remained safely in Australia while the flood in the Mesopotamian basin commenced).
It would solve the problem of very slow moving cockroaches indigenous to Texas making their way to the old world and Noah obtaining bamboo for panda bears (because that is all they eat) and Eucalyptus leaves for the Koala bear because that is the only thing they eat).
And then regarding the dissipation of water, Old Earther Hugh Ross wrote this:
Genesis 8:1 describes how God removed the floodwaters from the land. He sent a wind. This removal technique perfectly suits the requirements of water removal from a gigantic flat plain such as Mesopotamia. Water even tens of feet deep would flow very inefficiently toward the ocean, but a wind would significantly speed up its movement. Wind also speeds up evaporation. Thus wind would prove an effective means for removing water from an expansive, loy-lying plain. It would prove of little use, however, in removing waters of a global flood. Such a quantity of water could not possibly recede to any location on or around the planet by the means described in just eleven months.”
Some of the defenses for a global flood include the fact that most pagan cultures have some sort of record of a world flood, that the fossil records support a global flood (which I am not going to cover not because there are not great insights to the fundamentalist claims about the flood and fossils but because the topic is tedious and would take too long), that the Ark rested on top of Ararat (which is 16000 plus feet high), a thing called flood geology, and the fundamentalist claims that the Ark has actually been found.
Let’s tap on each of these, recognizing that there are arguments for and against that have merit before we wrap up this mention of Noah in Hebrews 11.
One claim many fundamentalists will present when discussing the flood is that there are an abundance of proofs which reveal that it was global. This is the same rhetoric the LDS present in defense of the Book of Mormon.
In the arena of proofs one is the idea that pagan cultures all write of a world wide flood.
Dr. D James Kennedy, in his book Solving Bible Mysteries, wrote:
“If there was never a great flood (meaning world wide) then why is the story of a world wide flood so indelibly impressed upon the memory of mankind all around the world. It is told in the most ancient documents in Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, India, China, Polynesia, Native America and many other cultures. Could such a universal belief have sprung up in culture after culture without any basis in historical fact? That would be inconceivable.”
We cannot disagree with Brother Kennedy – most pagan cultures have flood traditions. But first, such cultural traditions have to be considered that – a tradition because nobody from ANY culture survived the flood – only eight souls who then repopulated the earth.
By the time Noah’s progeny grew to the point where his offspring inhabited China (AS CHINESE PEOPLE) the flood would have been a distant memory and anyone who wrote of it from any pagan culture would be referring to something they had absolutely no clue about.
Here’s the deal – every country in the world experiences floods – some so big from their pagan eyes it would seem world wide. In my opinion, to borrow from pagan cultures to support our biblical view can be dangerous ground.
The next argument to support a world wide flood says that the water was obviously high because the Bible says the Ark rested on top of Mount Ararat (which again is 16000 plus feet high).
Now, let me stop for a minute and address the numerous claims that the Ark has been located.
Like the LDS, inspite of Fundamentalist claims that the Ark has actually been found not one shred of physical evidence for it exists – as of today.
The purported photographs of it always seem to disappear, pieces of the Ark are always lost, and the men who have found it, are always this doctor friend of that team of people who are related to this uncle OR the military around Ararat knows the Ark is there but won’t let anyone have access to it.
I am not suggesting that the ark couldn’t exist in some degraded form. But I do want to be astute in the acceptance of facts and we cannot allow ourselves to embrace myth and hype when faith ought to sustain us.
Additionally, all the claims of the Ark being located situation the Ark on top of Ararat.
But the Bible does not say the Ark rested on the top of Ararat – it says (in Genesis 8:4) that it “rested upon the mountains of Ararat.”
You know as well as I do that when we refer to the Mountains of something that it could mean the top of them, the valley of them, the side of them, and in no way tells us the heights the ark reached due to water levels.
Then there is a theory pushed out that is known as “Flood Geology” and the idea is that the devastation of the flood caused the world to look old.
Ellen G White, founder of he Seventh Day Adventists is the founder of the theory but it was popularized by the God-Fathers of the teaching in Evangelical Circles by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb.
Fundamentalists are actually split over the argument about why the earth looks old.
Some say God built age into the creation (a premise I believe is utterly laughable and convenient) and the other is that the flood caused the earth to look old.
Those who embrace the latter suggest that all of the mountains, valleys, the continental drift, petrified wood, fossils, dinosaur skeletons, and the Grand Canyon were caused by the flood.
The problem is these solutions actually create far more unanswerable questions that they solve.
For example, if the flood caused the existence of the grand Canyon why aren’t there grand canyons of a similar ilk all over the world?
There’s a dry lake here in the state of Utah that has four million sedimentary layers. If all of those layers were created by the flood one would have to have been laid every eight seconds for a year to create that geological record.
But because evidences like the layers in this dry lake threaten the pet beliefs of the fundi’s they refuse to all reason to prevail – and cling to dogma . . . which is dangerous to faith.
Years ago Christians said the nothing of continental drift was “atheistic and supported evolutionary leanings.”
See, to the fundamentalist mind the continental drift would have taken billions of years for the America’s to drift as far away from Europe and Africa (as it is today) and that would mean the earth was older than we thought!
No go, said they.
So they came up with a new twist – the flood caused the continental drift to occur in one year.
This is a quote from Answers in Genesis:
“The continents today are the result of Noah’s flood.”
Remember, if that is the case we have several issues to contend with logically and reasonably.
First, for the flood to cause the continents to shift a distance that otherwise was thought to have taken a billion years in one year, we are talking about such turmoil on the water, such heat producing frictions that nothing could survive. That Ark would have been tossed and destroyed.
Secondly, we have the distribution of world animals once the ark opened – very problematic.
Finally, the Bible says nothing about the world being an utterly different place once the land dried – and it would have been.
But contrary to the days of old, Young Earth Fundamentalists now not only claim continental drift as a reality, they say they authored the premise and even gave a name to how the flood caused it – the very scientific title of “runaway subduction.”
There is no biblical evidence for this theory NOR scientific evidence.
Listen, in an effort to defend their dogma that the earth is 6-8 thousand years old, fundamentalists today claim that within a one year period of time
* eight people were on a wooden ark
* sharing space with all the animals ever created (including every insects, bird, reptiles and mammal – in multiples of two and seven! No less plus all of their food)
* while rain fell so hard the water levels rose 30 feet and hour
(and in the meanwhile)
all the mountains shot up – some as high as six miles high
that the continents traveled three to six thousand miles
That a wind blew to get rid of the water afterward
That all the animals made then traveled back to their new broken up and separated lands thousands of miles away and separated by new bodies of water.
And in no time Noah planted a vineyard by which he got drunk. If it happened that way can we blame him?
(beat)
I believe the biblical story of Noah. I believe there was a flood that took all human life but those on the ark I believe Noah built. I believe all the animals of the Mesopotamian basin (which was about the size of Iraq) gathered up in the ark and were saved. I believe the deluge rose twenty feet above the land, and I believe that afterward God used a wind to blow all the water to the sea.
I also believe we do a tremendous disservice to this and future generations when we insist on dogma.
I think we place our children in jeopardy when the secular world is able to prove the idiocy of some of our positions.
I think we can do better – as believers in things that are not seen and have to be taken on faith.
But let’s make our faith good faith. Faith that truly gives every man an answer for the hope that is in us.
Additionally, maybe we need to step off from our positions set in stone. I could be wrong – admittedly – on this flood issue. And anyone who embraces a world- wide flood as a Christian is just fine with me.
I just wish this grace would flow both ways and we could unitedly allow for a divergence of opinion among the body rather than demand it is our way . . . or the highway.
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