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Mills River SDA Church

Noah

Cory Reeves

01 The Days of Noah

Noah was a just man, perfect in his generations.

And then our text for today that Austin just read, Matthew 24, 38 and 39, For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage until the day that Noah entered the ark, and they did not know until the flood came and took them all away.

So also will it be of the coming of the Son of Man." You know, it's interesting that some of those things you could take badly, but for the most part, most of that isn't even bad stuff, is it?

We're gonna talk a little bit about that later, but here we see that this is going to represent or be a type of last day events and I believe Jesus is coming soon amen there's others in this church by the Amens that do believe that as well and so this is an important story for us to look at and understand so if you'll turn with me in your Bibles I didn't give you all the answers or all the notes in the note thing.

You have to look in your Bibles to Genesis 6.

We're going to read the first part of the story for this first in the series.

The wickedness and the judgment of man is what it's entitled.

Now it came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth and the daughters were born to them that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were beautiful and took wise for themselves of all whom they chose and the Lord said my spirit shall not strive with man forever for he is indeed flesh yet his day shall be 120 years There were giants on the earth in those days and also afterwards when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them.

Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown." You know, I think it's important to note in that first whole section that this isn't, there's all sorts of weird theories out there of what this is.

This is really the descendants of Cain and the descendants of Abel starting to come together and intermarry.

And young people in this church or those who are not married in this church, I would caution you.

There isn't much more important in life than who you marry.

It's 1 of the most important decisions you're going to make in your life, and that's 1 reason we say we don't want unequally yoked, if you've ever heard that term.

Because when they started marrying, intermarrying, things became harder for those who believed in God.

Verse 5, then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intent of his of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth.

So the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them." But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

And Noah begot 3 sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.

So God looked upon the earth, and indeed it was corrupt, for all the flesh had corrupted their way on the earth.

And God said to Noah, the end of all flesh has come before me, for the earth is filled with violence through them.

And 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 outside with pitch So Noah was a messenger for God and a worker in his plan, not the end plan of salvation, but this plan of salvation, right?

So I want to take a moment here and talk about the time Noah was living in.

You know spirit prophecy adds a lot but I'm going to summarize some and I'll share some but sin had even already brought murder, as we know, to the face of earth.

But we also know that nature really hadn't even changed that much.

There was some decay on the earth, but it was still rich and beautiful in the gifts of God's providence.

So much so, we're told, that there was almost unlimited fruit available.

Can you imagine just walking out and getting a full meal?

No, Pollock would be a lot easier, wouldn't it?

There were thousands, they said the valleys were thousands and thousands of flowers.

And that the fragrance of those flowers would waft into their homes.

They said that the trees were of such fine grain that it was almost as hard as stone.

We often wonder why it took Noah 120 years to build an ark.

They said gold, silver, precious stones were just laying around.

You could just walk out and pick up gems.

The people were granted the opportunity of reaching a high standard of moral and intellectual attainment.

They possessed great physical and mental strength, and their advantages for acquiring both religious and scientific knowledge were unrivaled.

It is a mistake to suppose that because they lived to a great age, their minds matured late.

Their mental powers were early developed.

And those who cherished the fear of God and lived in harmony with His will continued to increase in knowledge and wisdom throughout their life.

Can you imagine living to a thousand years old and learning throughout that whole time?

Can you imagine having a great scientific mind, being able to remember things like never before and spending a thousand years studying science?

The science of creation, the science of how our body works.

I've often wondered to what point they got to.

And you know what makes me the most fearful is I think we're starting to use computers in place of our minds to get to the same places they did.

Now if you don't know and if you're young in here you don't know what antediluvian means I'm going to use antediluvian quite a bit in this sermon.

Antediluvian is the people who lived before the flood.

Now the people before the flood probably mostly would have been huge.

We think Adam was probably 12 to 15 feet tall.

And it wasn't just right away they shrunk straight down there would have been some kind of decrease so when you hear about the Giants in the Bible they were Giants to start with So we could probably assume Noah was probably at least 10 to 13 feet tall.

And you know there wasn't a lot of time between actually when Adam died and Noah lived.

It's a little bit hard to read on your screen.

You might need a magnifying glass on your papers.

I'll read some of it to you Adam lived a hundred and 30 years and begat Seth when Adam was 235 Seth begat Enos when Adam was 325 Enos begat Canaan when Adam was 395 Canaan begot Mithril.

When Adam was 687, Enoch begat Methuselah.

When Adam was 875, Methuselah begat Lamech.

It's really Interesting to think about, right?

There were 9 generations alive at that 0.9 generations lived together for 56 years.

Noah would have been the first antediluvian patriarch to not know Adam personally.

Of the 10 antediluvian patriarchs, Methuselah lived the longest.

Methuselah's son Lamech died 5 years before the flood.

02 Noah’s Sermon to You

We are starting part 2 on our series on Noah.

And I would like to start with a brief prayer.

Dearly Father Lord, I just wanna thank you for this church family.

And as we journey through this story of Noah, looking at part 2, the message of Noah, help it to impact our hearts.

Father, speak to each of us, and then thus speak through us.

So if you remember last time, we looked at how the flood and the last day events were similar.

I made a list that I asked you all to memorize last time.

It was, they tell you never to do more than 3 to 5 bullet points, and I did a lot more.

I tried to do some ABCs to kind of not really look like it was that much, but it was a lot.

So I try not to do that too much, but there were so many important things.

The world will be full of wickedness, corruption and violence, disobedience to God, scoffing at God's warning and judgments, mocking at God's messengers.

We also praise Him because we have a God who is long-suffering.

There are many people who it's easy to get distracted by the world.

God's message will go out to the world, and there will be deliverance, amen?

God's people will be covered by the blood of the Lamb.

There will be a wait after the door closes, and narrow is the way." Today, we're going to talk about some similar themes.

We're going to be looking at what was Noah's message for today.

You see, there are things that we are going to see repeated.

Do you remember last time we looked at this gentleman?

Does anybody remember what he did in World War I?

And this was probably 1 of the most dangerous jobs in all of World War I, because lines would be closing in and you'd be assigned to run, and who are they gonna try to pick off as they're running they don't want those messages to get through they're gonna try to pick off the runners is a message really worth that your life does the message even matter 2nd Peter 2 verse 4 through 5 for if God did not spare the ancient world, but saved Noah, 1 of 8 people, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood on the world of the ungodly.

You know, I would love, I wish YouTube went back to ancient days.

Wouldn't you love to go look up Noah's sermon and listen to a couple of those?

I've often wondered exactly what the message was.

But does the message of Noah matter to us today it was October 2 1918 the United States 77th division launched attack on Aragon into Aragon sorry under the belief that the French forces that supported on the left side and 2 American units on the right side were marching with them.

1 of those units in the middle was led by major Charles Whitley they were making significant headway but unknown to Major Charles the unit on the left and right didn't make the headway and before you know it they had stalled out completely on the right and left and they became completely surrounded They became known as the Lost Battalion.

They found themselves completely surrounded by German forces.

For the next 6 days, they suffered heavy losses.

The men of the lost battalion and the American units desperate to relieve themselves would fight an intense battle in the Aragon forest.

Water was only available if they army crawled to a little creek taking fire the whole way.

You see, communication was also a problem.

At times they were bombarded by shells from their own artillery.

Attempts to resupply them by airdrop a lot of times ended up in the enemy's hands.

Major Charles said, we're going to send runners, just like our last story.

But when you're completely surrounded, runners getting through don't happen very often.

They became lost or ran into German patrols.

So they pulled out another method of communication.

The homing pigeons were subject to fire as well though.

The first message on the first pigeon was, many wounded, we cannot evacuate.

A second bird was sent with the message, men are suffering, can support be sent?

I hear a lot of corrections of my pronunciation, so I'll just live with it.

The Germans saw him coming out of the bushes.

They opened fire and after several seconds he fell to the ground.

He arrived back at division headquarters 25 miles away in just 25 minutes, which is hard for me to believe, but that's what it says.

And 5 minutes after that, they had been shelling themselves, their army.

This poor bird had been shot through the breast, blinded in 1 lie, and he had his leg shot off.

He became the hero of the 77th Infantry Division.

Army medics worked on him to save his life.

And when he recovered enough to travel, the now one-legged bird was put on a boat back to the United States.

His body is actually now on display at the Smithsonian if you ever want to go.

But you know what his message was we are all on the road along the 7 6 I'm sorry 2 76 dot 4 parallel our till your art our artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us.

They held their ground and caused enough of a distraction for the Allied units to finally break through the German lines, which forced the Germans to retreat.

There were over 500 soldiers in the lost battalion who entered the forest, and only 194 walked away unscathed.

The rest were killed, captured, missing, or wounded.

Major Charles and 2 of the captains actually received medals of honor for their valiant actions.

But do you see how important a message can be?

A wrong message, they said 1 of the first messages that got sent was a location that they ended up moving to, and that's why the artillery was bombing there, because they thought that's where they wanted them to bomb.

I saw lots of disappointment when the pigeons kept dying.

03 The Super Power that Saved Noah

I entitled it, The Superpower That Saved Noah.

And clearly we know God saved Noah, right?

In the first of the series, we looked at a huge list that showed the things that were the same.

The similarities between Noah's time and the last days.

We also talked about different things that were happening in the earth today, in society today, that seemed like we are right at the door of the close of time.

It's scary in some ways, and we talked about those things.

And then the next message we looked at, which was last time, we reviewed what Noah's message was to the antediluvians of that time.

And then we talked about what our message would be and should be today.

And it was both are a final warning before judgment is completed.

Both call for a return to obedience and righteousness.

And we know most people are going to mock and reject this call.

And in the end, praise God, a remnant will be saved.

Okay, I'm gonna tell you who he is, and then I'm gonna look for a hand to see if you still might not know who he is.

Ernest Shackleton, does anybody know Ernest Shackleton?

There's a few people out there, some historians.

I hopefully will fill in some pieces of the story that you didn't know.

But the story of Ernest Shackleton is a truly remarkable example of human endurance and the will to survive.

You see, Ernest was an explorer, and he had set his sights on Antarctica.

If I was gonna explore, I don't know if that would be the first place I would pick, but in 1914, there wasn't many places left, and that was 1 that Shackleton wanted to explore.

He planned to travel on the ship Endurance to 1 side of Antarctica, then in the ship they would have dogs, they would get on the dog sleds, go across the South Pole to the other side of the continent, have another ship waiting for him, he'd jump in that and his team would jump in that and they would make it all the way across.

On leaving British waters, Shackleton sent the message to the news.

We hope in our small way to add victories in science and discovery to the certain victory which our nation will achieve in the cause of honor and liberty.

You know, I paused this morning when I was reading through some of this, and I thought, what if there were more men like Shackleton except on the cause of Christ?

You're going to see what he endured here in a minute, and it's gonna—it had me thinking.

It was an extremely cold Antarctic summer.

That looks like a wonderful summer picture right there, doesn't it?

After arriving at their beginning port, which was a whaling port in South Georgia Island, they began their expedition.

The problem was the water was already beginning to freeze in the summer.

While Shackleton led the expedition, the captain of the ship was Frank Worsley.

Worsley wanted to make landfall at the closest point he could find in hopes of reaching mainland before the ocean completely froze.

But Shackleton said, we can make it a little bit further.

Soon the Endurance became locked in the ice and they had to prepare to wait the winter out.

The ship was trapped in the ice and it would have been discombobulating combination of dead silence, broken by the sharp whines of a ship slowly being crushed by the ice.

During this time the crew began to affectionately refer to their winter home as the Ritz.

They actually had a pool table and they had some other games they'd pull out onto the ice and play and do some other things around because 10 months sitting there, Despite their efforts to keep morale high, it would have been psychologically trying to make it through the whole winter.

If you Remember, at that point, there's no sunlight in winter there.

For months, they continued to keep the ship in optimal condition until the pressure of the ice became too much.

The endurance began to tilt and lean to its side.

You see the ship had finally given in and crushed and was taking in water.

It had almost been a year since they had entered the South Ocean.

There was no hope of sailing home on the Endurance.

You know, I don't know about you, that was their way out.

They leave it in the middle of the cold, frigid Arctic.

Their new home was on top of the ocean that at some point would melt.

They had to survive in temperatures reaching negative 58 degrees Fahrenheit.

I saw someone the other day, they have these new jackets, the vests with the heaters built in.

They didn't have heaters built in their jackets.

They had some reindeer hide sleeping bags, but the problem is the tops of the water would start melting because it was getting warmer, and those hides would get wet and then freeze.

Shackleton and the crew had to do something if they wanted to make it home.

It was Shackleton's plan to trek across the ice to Paulette Island in hopes that the movement and the goal would help his men survive.

The problem was Paulette Island was 346 miles away.

Across rolling, do you remember that picture I showed you of the ship?

They needed their lifeboats in case it melted or in case the water became ocean again.

The problem there is they didn't have those little pack ones that blow up when you push the button.

They dragged several one-ton lifeboats with them.

The ice on top of the ocean was also moving them away from their target.

So they would march along dragging these boats and the ice would float them backwards.

After 7 days, they had only gone 10 miles, and it was 7 grueling days.

Shackleton personally had to admit that it was hopeless.

So after 15 months of living on the ice pack, They finally got a glimpse of open water.

With their boats, the plan was now to aim for south some southern islands, but once they began, Worley realized they wouldn't make it and changed course for the glacial jut land called Elephant Island.

The conditions were so terrible that Shackleton, handing his gloves over to the cook, then putting them in his pocket, got frostbite on his hands in that brief moment.

Whirly was trying to guide the ships and sitting up front the crew actually had to physically help him bend after he'd been sitting there too long.

Finally, they got their first glimpse of Elephant Island.

A rainstorm arrived and almost threw them off course, but they reached the island.

You see, Elephant Island is hardly more than a steep, towering peaks of glaciers running down into the ocean.

It had a tiny little shoreline, that's the actual picture there, a tiny little shoreline where they could make camp.

They had no way of communicating where they were.

Shackleton and Worley picked 4 other men and planned to take 1 of the lifeboats.

They actually took a couple lifeboats off and reinforced the 1 and left them with 1 in case they didn't make it.

So there was 6 of them that set out to try to reach that whaling station in South George Island.

So Shackleton and the other 5 left 22 men behind.

Shackleton promised these men he would come back for them.

Can you imagine, though, the faith in Shackleton?

You're letting him go into the ocean of who knows what in a little bitty vessel and hoping he comes back for you.

And now you're on a frozen island to have your leader Promise you he would return for you Amazingly Shackleton Worley and the 4 other men sailed this little rescue boat and finally finally saw the southern South Georgia island only 15 miles away.

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01 The Days of Noah

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