Now, in the Book of Hebrews, still, the
eleventh chapter, verse seven, 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.
Now this chapter, which we're a little way
into, this chapter might be analyzed.
I'm not much of an analyst.
I never like to have anybody tell me,
now here's the key to this book.
I don't believe there is any such thing
in the whole wide world under heaven as
the key to any book of the Bible,
particularly not one word or sentence.
Bible teachers find keys.
You got a love letter from your girlfriend
or a letter from your husband in Borneo,
and you said, Now let me find a
key to this.
Kind of silly, wouldn't it?
What you would do would be to sit
down and read that letter.
You wouldn't be looking for keys, looking for
what the man had to say.
So in this chapter here, if I analyzed
it properly, it would be divided into three
sections.
The description of faith.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for,
the evidence of things not seen.
And the importance of faith.
By it the elders obtained a good report,
but without faith it is impossible to please
him.
For he that cometh to God must believe
that he is, and that he is a
rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
And then the demonstration or application of faith,
all the way downward, says, By faith Noah,
by faith Enoch, by faith Abraham, by faith
Abel, by faith Jacob, by faith Joseph, and
so on down the line.
And I ask you to notice that always
doctrine appears best in incarnation.
I have always been afraid of theory in
religion.
And I had this confirmed the other day
in reading a message given by Dr. Martin
Lloyd-Jones of London called, Knowledge True and
False.
And he pointed out that it is now,
I'm not quoting him verbatim, but giving the
gist of it, that it is perilously near
to being sinful just to learn doctrine for
doctrine's sake.
I think he is right, and I believe
that mere doctrine that has no arms nor
legs nor teeth, no purpose nor intention, and
carries no moral imperative, I believe we might
just as well read Mother Goose.
The only difference being that if you read
only Mother Goose, you wouldn't have anything in
case you determined to do something about your
doctrine later on.
But I think that those who merely learn
doctrine theoretically, they don't do much about it
later on in life anyhow, because they are
laboring under the illusion that the learning of
doctrine is enough, that that makes them somehow
or other better for the having done it,
which it certainly does not.
Always, I say, doctrine appears best in incarnation.
God himself appeared at his very best in
the incarnation when he came to the world
and took mortal flesh.
And all that he had been trying to
say to mortal man about himself, he now
could say in the man.
He could say it in the flesh of
that man's eye, and in the smile of
that man's face, and in the hands with
which that man healed the sick, and in
the feet that carried that man around preaching
the word to people.
And in the friendly tone of that voice,
he could say it in incarnation in a
way that he could not say it in
mere theory.
And you will find in your Bible that
certain great doctrines appear best when they are
related to man.
For instance, trust and obedience, faith and obedience.
Abraham is a perfect example of the man
who had faith and obeyed God.
And you will find in reading the life
of Abraham that when you are through, you
will know more about faith and obedience than
if you had taken a course in it
from some Bible school.
And then take such a doctrine as courage,
or such a quality as courage, as found
in the scriptures.
You could talk about courage, I suppose, for
a lifetime, and when it was all over,
you wouldn't know much about courage.
But you put a man named Elijah up
on a mountaintop surrounded by 450 prophets of
Baal, dangerous prophets of Baal, with weapons at
their belts, and let him stand up there
and challenge those men in the name of
Jehovah.
There is courage in action, there is courage
incarnated.
You can read nice mottos about courage, and
I suppose it's better than nothing at all.
But if you want to see what courage
is, look at a man named Daniel quietly
going down into the den of lions.
Let's not get wrong about this.
Daniel was not put in the lion den.
Daniel was put in the den of lions.
That's something else altogether.
You can have a garage and have no
car in it, and you can have a
lion's den and have no lions in it.
But Daniel went down into the den of
lions.
They were there, brother, they were there.
And yet Daniel went down into that den
and courageously waited on his guard all night.
And if the artists are right, he went
to sleep with his head on one of
the manes of the big lions.
That's courage, and Daniel had it.
We learn more from Daniel sleeping on the
big paw of the lion there in the
den of lions than we could ever learn
by reading about it merely as a philosophy.
Then there is faithfulness which Moses had, and
forgiveness which Joseph had to his brethren, and
so on.
Now, Noah demonstrates faith of a particular kind
here.
I suppose Noah had all the kinds of
faith there were.
But Noah demonstrates here faith of a particular
kind.
He had faith in the soundness of a
warning.
God had said, I will destroy man whom
I have created from the face of the
earth, both man and beast and creeping thing.
This word came to Noah from God, and
Noah believed the warning and admitted the peril
and did something about it.
Now, I should say that all warnings are
to be taken seriously.
To get perturbed over a groundless alarm is
to exercise not faith but a kind of
timid credulity.
But when God blows the loud alarm and
says, I will destroy man whom I have
created from the face of the earth, build
thee an ark and take thee, thy family,
into that ark, that I may preserve a
seed on the earth, that's to be taken
seriously.
And when God warns a nation or a
city or a church or a man, to
ignore that warning is to commit a grievous
sin, to commit a kind of sacrilege against
our own soul.
And let me tell you this, that the
Christian message contains an element of alarm.
We have been taught to believe, I think
falsely taught to believe, that the gospel is
only good news.
That's all it is.
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou
shalt be saved.
Have you ever noticed this, that you cannot
state one thing without having its opposite in
the back of your mind?
I say, there is a large man, and
I would not say he is a large
man if I didn't have a little shrink
in my mind at the other end of
the spectrum.
If there wasn't such a thing as a
little man, I could not say there is
a big man.
If I said that is an expensive suit,
if I didn't know that you could get
a $7.50 suit in a second-hand
store down here somewhere, if I didn't know
you could get that kind, I'd never bother
mentioning it.
So when the Scripture says, Believe on the
Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved,
there is in the back of our minds
instantly the fact of lostness.
Why should I have to be saved?
Because I'm lost.
Why should I have to believe on Christ
unto salvation?
Because I have believed on the devil and
all of his works unto near damnation.
And in the book of John, in chapter
316, that most celebrated of all the verses
of the Bible probably in evangelical circles, God
so loved the world that he gave his
only begotten son.
It's amazing, isn't it, how much people know.
I'm just reading a book now called The
Elements of Style by a man named Strunk,
and it's got a lot of good things
in it.
But he says, Never use soul as an
intensifier.
I thought when I heard I read that.
Never use soul as an intensifier.
And then I read, For God so loved
the world that he gave his only begotten
son, that whosoever believeth in him should not
perish.
I wonder where John was.
Probably he hadn't read that book.
I bet he hadn't.
But here it is, God so loved.
Then it says, God so loved the world
that he gave his only begotten son, that
whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but
have everlasting life.
Right in John 316, that most beautiful and
rose-covered verse that is used everywhere has
an element of alarm in it, for the
word perish is there.
They say the church steeples stand to point
to God, but the church steeples also stand
to tell the people that pass by that
there are a few in the ark.
And the very fact that there was an
ark there at all indicated danger.
And the brave and unbelief of this generation
of people, this generation of men and women,
they're not afraid of God.
The scripture says there's no fear of God
before their eyes.
And we ignore the sound of the trumpet.
We've heard wolf, wolf, and we don't believe
it anymore.
But Noah demonstrated faith of this particular kind
that when God spoke to him and he
heard the note of the alarm in God's
voice, he immediately responded.
As a boy brought up on a farm,
I well remember the language of the farm
and the language of the chickens.
I spoke in chicken coops.
I mean the language of those creatures themselves.
Why, they're crows that used to fly about.
A few of them up at the sea
limits where I live, the good, nice fellows
will come around there cawing, and they roll
40 years off me when I hear them,
because it takes me back to the days
when I used to see them.
Well, you know, those who've gone to the
trouble of looking into it find out that
they have at least a half a dozen,
if not more, kinds of cries.
And one of them is the alarm cry.
And when they cry, a whole bunch of
crows will be on the tree somewhere, or
down on the ground picking on the corn.
And an old crow out here on the
stub pine, long though struck by lightning and
now standing there, a sentinel of crows on
there, and he just sounds one note and
they're off instantly.
It would be a very foolish crow indeed
that would say, I don't believe in being
stampeded.
I'm going to stay right here till I'm
full.
Of course, all that would happen would be
the farmer would blow his poor little bird
brain out, and that'd be the end of
him.
But he has sense enough in his little
mind that when he hears a certain note,
he takes off immediately.
He doesn't stop to wait around.
He goes.
We used to see the hawks floating in
air overhead long, long before I'd see them
or notice them at all.
Some other chick would hear them.
A high-piercing cry.
I don't know why hawks.
I think that if I could talk to
a hawk, I could teach him something.
Because I would say to him, now, when
you want to get a chicken, don't whistle
and tell them you're coming.
Keep still.
They won't notice you.
But he whistles.
And up there he is circling and banking
and turning and gliding without a motor and
without a jet.
He just takes care, just takes advantage of
the air currents, floating about with a high
whistle that is too high.
But the old hen hears it, and she
makes a certain noise.
Here were the little chickles, little speckled ones
and brown ones and black ones and dappled
ones, all around pecking away.
And she makes one or two notes, and
instantly they're under her feathers.
And because the eye of a bird is
over on the side, and he can't see
straight ahead, the hen turns her head and
looks up with her one eye, trying to
get that hawk in focus.
But they're safe because they're under the hen.
Now, a chicken, a chick, a peep that
would not have sense enough to recognize the
cry of the mother, would be fair game
for any hawk that wanted him.
There is such a thing as a faith
that has biddies in the soundness of a
warning, of a note of alarm.
I know this isn't popular preaching.
I know it.
You're not supposed to talk about anything at
all like that.
This is Father's Day anyhow, and you're supposed
to talk about nice, pleasant things.
But there's another side to it.
The gospel is not only a gospel of
honey, it's a gospel of alarm.
And it warns, either believe in the Lord
Jesus Christ or thou shalt perish.
Believe not, and you shall be damned.
That's there.
Noah had faith in that kind of thing.
When he was told by God, he did
something about it.
Now, there's a difference between, of course, fear
and courage.
There's a fear that is a weak-willed
cowardice.
I have said that kind of fear finds
no approbation in the Bible.
The fearful shall have their part in the
lake that burns with fire and brings stone.
So the people that are too timid to
stand for God and too timid to testify
and too timid to give themselves to God's
work, that kind of fear is another matter
altogether.
But there is a courage also that is
brazen folly.
It's simply the empty courage of a moral
fool.
They tell me the Second World War brought
out a great many things that we didn't
know before, or if we knew them, at
least they pointed it up and accented it
for us so that it remained in our
memories.
One of the things that I remember was
learning that a soldier could be too brave.
You know, we're always talking about brave soldiers,
and this fearless champion of this country's liberty
did so-and-so, forgetting altogether that the
fellow did it, but probabilities are he was
scared stiff while he was doing it.
All of them admit they were scared while
they were doing it.
But there was such a thing as a
soldier who lacked a sense of alarm.
He couldn't understand danger, he had a blind
spot.
So he would go carelessly out and expose
himself to enemy fire, and he was bad
for the rest of the soldiers.
If they found a man like that, they
sent him back to the lines or gave
him a job pushing a pen or something
to get rid of him.
They didn't want a reckless man up among
the rest of the soldiers, because they said,
it's the business of a soldier to stay
alive.
He said, now you learn this to stay
alive, stay alive.
A dead soldier is no good to his
country, stay alive.
But this fellow, he wanted to stay alive.
He'd thought about it, I suppose, but he
just never thought about it.
He had an empty-headed, reckless courage that
was not courage at all, but carelessness, and
he infected everybody else.
So when he stuck his empty head up
for somebody to shoot at, a dozen other
fellows stuck theirs up.
So they said, get that fellow out of
here, because he's a trouble to our army.
He's making our men reckless.
The great soldier, the good soldier, is not
the one who has no sense of fear,
but he's the one who wisely knows how
to balance fear and courage against each other,
and take what they call a calculated risk.
And when the chips are down and when
it's necessary, then pour his own life out
if he need be.
Like Roger Young.
Was he a Canadian soldier?
I forgot.
Canadian or English?
Soldier who fell over the grenade, and of
course it killed him, but it saved everybody
in his bunker.
Now he did that, that was not recklessness,
that was a noble act.
So there's such a thing as a courage,
it's ridiculous, because it's empty.
Then there's such a thing as a courage
that knows exactly why it's doing what it's
doing, and weighs the chances of staying alive
against the chances of certain death, and for
country's sake or for Christ's sake, decides to
put itself in peril.
Then there is a fear that has a
high moral wisdom.
It is a fear of moral consequences, and
a fear of irrecoverable spiritual loss, and a
fear of permanent separation from God, the source
of all good.
Noah's fear moved him to prepare.
Notice here, Noah's fear moved him.
You know what we have in our day?
We have developed the old Greek idea that
drama was a moral catharsis.
That was their idea.
They said, old Sophocles and the rest of
them who wrote Aeschylus, who wrote these famous
terrible dramas that's still alive, they said the
purpose of all this is to let the
onlooker, the one who sees the play, to
let him live through fear and terror and
anguish and disappointment and sorrow and all that.
Let him live through it in himself, looking
at somebody else.
We carried that thing to ridiculous extremes.
I never did believe it was sound reasoning.
But we've carried it to such ridiculous extremes
now that people who haven't shed a tear
for any known person, any known person, will
weep over characters on the TV.
There used to be a fellow out in
California who ran a kind of a religious
show, and he was supposed to ride in
on a horse.
He was an old country preacher.
Of course, he was sitting by a microphone
back of the desk with his shirt sleeved
and all this was going on.
But the people who were listening on the
radio visualized it, some of the dear Saints.
They thought he was a real man, and
he had a horse, I forgot what he
called, old Dobbin.
But he used to take two bathroom plungers,
plop, plop, plop, plop.
Then I think it was the horse got
sick, or maybe it was the man, I've
forgotten which.
But they rode in, and letters came flooding
in offering to pray for him.
Pray for two bathroom plungers, plop, plop, plop,
plop, plop.
And that is supposed to purify us.
That's a moral catharsis, the Greeks said.
That is, if I get so identified with
some imaginary character, I can live out all
the emotions, and it will purify me.
It will do nothing of the sort.
What it will do will be to make
an artificial zombie out of me, so that
I am interested in only that which is
unreal and artificial, and I can't get concerned
over anybody that's real.
I remember one time being at a church,
a great big church, must have cost a
million dollars.
And I was there one snowy day to
a full church to hear this man preach.
I'll try not to mention the denomination, even.
But this was in a United States city,
and this preacher told a story.
He said that there was an armless, or
legless, I think it was, a legless newsboy
selling paper just outside down on the street
beside their church.
He said one day he went out there,
and here was this legless newsboy, poor fellow
with very little at all of what he
could make selling papers.
He said it was raining a cold, ugly
rain, and there was slashing, dirty snow all
around, and everybody was going with their coats
turned up, their gloves and rubbers on.
Everybody was hurrying along, and he said he'd
had his service, and he was on his
way home.
And as he walked to his car, he
said, You know what?
This newsboy was singing, he said, singing in
the rain, singing.
And he told that as evidence of something.
I've never been able quite to figure out
what that was supposed to prove.
But what it proved to me was that
here stood a million-dollar church used two
or three times a week, and under its
shadow was a legless newsboy who hadn't had
a decent breakfast, and who managed nevertheless to
sing while he sold his papers.
But the preacher had legs, and he didn't
need them because he had a big car
and a chauffeur.
But the newsboy had no legs.
Don't you think it would have been acting
more in the spirit of the New Testament
if that fellow had taken off his overcoat
and given it to the legless boy, or
reached in his well-filled wallet and taken
out a ten-dollar bill and given it
to the boy?
But he was more concerned about his million
-dollar church than he was about a legless
newsboy who managed to sing in the rain.
You see, Noah was moved with fear, and
he prepared.
Noah's faith led him to do something about
this.
I have no faith in the pastoral prayer
that says, Bless all the poor and the
needy and those for whom we should pray.
All right, reverend, how about making a gift
to them?
Our Father, bless the homeless children of Europe
and Asia.
Why not write to the Canadian Federation for
the Care of Homeless Children and send them
a couple of hundred dollars to look after
some kids over there?
Then pray, and then you'll feel better.
When you work the way you pray and
you're moved to do something, but our trouble
is we're moved, but we're not moved to
do anything.
Some people aren't happy until they've had a
good cry.
Nearly killed me to cry.
I'm not a crying kind.
My tears are very far down in the
well, and if anything is powerful enough to
get them to the surface, they're really promptful.
Some people, their water in their well is
very near the surface and it slops over
just on the slightest provocation.
They can cry about anything.
They love stories.
A fellow went one time to a service
and he said, I deliberately worked on my
audience.
He said, I confess, I deliberately worked on
my audience.
He was a man of brilliant ability to
paint pictures and make an audience see what
he was talking about.
He said, first I deliberately told them a
story of a faithful old dog who went
out and brought in his sheep.
You've heard it.
The old shepherd went out and brought in
the lamb.
There were 11 lambs.
He went out looking up pitifully, but he
went anyhow, looking at his master wondering if
he could make it one time more, but
at last he went.
And the master said, Rover, or Shepherd or
whatever his name was, there's one more lamb
out there.
He said the poor old dog looked at
his little nest beside the fire, looked up
kind of pleasingly at his master, then shook
his wet coat and went out into the
storm.
Pretty soon he came back and man said
he opened the door and he heard the
sound of a plaintive sound of the bleating
of lamb.
He said the big old dog tenderly brought
him in, laying down by the fire.
Then he said he fell straight down.
He went to look at him later, he
was dead.
Poor old shepherd.
He'd brought in 11 lambs, but the last
one was too much for him.
He said the people wept all over the
building.
Said there wasn't a dry eye in the
house, nor a dry glove.
And he said, Then I deliberately and intentionally
changed the thing, and I told the story
of Christ on Calvary's cross, time for men.
And he said, I painted that picture as
vividly in word colors as I knew how,
and I let him hang there for men
to see.
And he said a look of stoning indifference
came over the minds of the people.
They'd heard it and done nothing about it
until it no longer meant anything at all
to them.
But they loved their dog back home.
And the idea of a dog would kill
himself to take care of a lamb is
just too much for them.
Was that a moral catharsis?
No, I think it was a ridiculous evidence
that we religious people tend to hear things
and do nothing about them.
But Noah was moved and prepared.
Not only his feelings were moved, but he
was moved.
You notice that passage in the New Testament
that says about Jesus, Jesus looked on the
multitude and was moved with compassion and said,
Give thee them to eat.
He saw them, they moved him, he instructed
them to be fed.
Always it works that way until we break
the continuity by hard conscience.
And Noah faced the consequences before men, knowing
people.
Do you suppose they let Noah build that
ark without a lot of funny cracks?
I can just hear Bob Hope working on
Noah.
I can just hear Bob Newhart working on
Noah.
I can just hear these fellows who know
how to pick up some local circumstance and
make a roaring laugh out of it.
Noah building an ark on a hillside?
Yes, sir.
He'd heard God say, I will destroy a
man whom I have created from off the
face of the earth.
But he went on and he faced the
consequences before men.
He followed his feelings to do something about
them.
He showed his faith by preparing and so
condemned the world.
The presence of a prepared man is always
a judgment.
And he became heir of the righteousness which
is by faith.
Now, that's about all I have to say
this morning.
I just conclude by saying that when you've
heard the truth, any truth anywhere, in a
song, in a sermon, or read it, and
you're moved by it, you will either go
in the direction you're moved, or the next
time it won't move you as much.
And the next time it won't move you
that much.
And pretty soon it can't move you at
all.
If Noah had refused 20 times to build
that ark, each time would have been easier.
And he'd never have gotten it built.
But he was moved with fear, and he
prepared the ark, and became heir of the
righteousness which was by faith.
Now, that's the story of Noah, condensed into
one verse by the Holy Ghost, through the
writer to the Hebrews, and commented on by
me this morning.
I trust it will do your heart good.
And when we think of the man Noah,
we think of a great, noble, bold man
who dared to believe God.
And when he felt something, he did something
about it immediately, instead of letting his feelings
die in inertia and un-use.
May God give us hearts to obey, as
well as ears to hear.
Amen.