During my quiet time with God today, I read Genesis 6. It details the pervasiveness of human evil. Human evil, I think, can be described simply as indifference to God and indifference to other human beings. This came about after the fall of the first humans into sin.
Genesis gives us God’s take on what had happened to the creatures He had made in His own image, indicating the sorrow God felt over their (our) lovelessness:
”The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.” (Genesis 6:5-6)
God resolved to blot out the evil human race and to rebuild it through one man’s family, that of Noah.
Genesis goes on to say: “Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God.” (Genesis 6:9)
This is an intriguing passage.
Why?
First, because it doesn’t exempt Noah from the indictment God has already made of the whole human race, of every human being, including you and me. No matter how we might try to delude God, others, or ourselves, “every intention of the thoughts of [our hearts are] only evil continually…”
Since the fall of human race into sin, that describes each of us conceived by human parents from the start. “I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me,” King David says in one of his psalms of repentance. (Psalm 51:5)
Noah, like you and me, was a sinner by birth and inclination. Even after the worldwide flood through which God saved Noah and his family while He did away with the rest of unrepentant human race, God says, “…the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth…” (Genesis 8:21)
So, Noah was a sinner like the rest of the human race. His righteousness wasn’t the result of his intrinsic goodness; no human being conceived by human parents is intrinsically good. And Noah wasn’t righteous because he did purely righteous things; our deeds are always tinged by self-interest and sin. Whatever righteousness Noah possessed did not come from himself, but from outside himself. Righteousness was conferred on him because he deserved it or earned it. That leads us to…
Second, because God’s Word has come to Noah and been received by Noah, he walked with God. In other words, Noah had, to paraphrase Luther’s Small Catechism, gladly heard and learned God’s Word, the Word that creates faith in those who receive it.
Noah believed in God.
He trusted in God.
Through the Word from God, Noah had received the gift of saving faith, a faith that trusted in God and His promises and, in those days, looked forward to the coming of the Savior God first mentions in Genesis 3:15, the Savior Who would crush Satan and evil out of existence.
Although a sinner then, by God-given faith in God and the promises of God, Noah was also a saint. Saint is the Bible’s word for sinners who trust God to save them from the sin and death into which we all are born.
God justifies sinners who trust in Him and His promises. That means that, despite all the evidence against us, He declares sinners innocent. This is how God has always transformed us from His enemies, intent on building our own kingdoms apart from God, intent on being gods ourselves, to His eternal friends.
Today, God speaks to us all, calling us to repentance away from sin and faith in Him, through Jesus Christ.
In the New Testament book of John, Jesus is described as the Word, the second person of the three-person God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Who existed eternally before anything was created. John says of Jesus, God the Son: “…to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (John 1:12-13)
Noah wasn’t a saint because he was sinless. Genesis underscores this by recounting an incident in which, after he’d received so many blessings from God, he got himself drunk to unconsciousness, falling asleep naked and shameless. Noah was a saint because he believed in the God Who has now given Himself to the whole cosmos in Jesus.
Saints aren’t saints because they’re perfect. They’re saints because, through the power of God’s Holy Spirit working in the Word from God, they trust the perfect God now revealed to us all in Jesus and because when they sin, they return in repentance and faith to the God Who makes all things new and Who loves us beyond all imagining.
You will be a sinner until you die. Just like Noah. But God-given faith in Jesus makes sinners saints. This is God’s promise to you.
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