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.