The Hanger # 3

I want to pick up with the flood today. It’s important to understand what has been going on since the fall. Like I said a couple of weeks ago the human race stopped being the children of God when they turned to rebellion. They were still his creation but as a result of their rebellion the human race came under the dominion and authority of Satan. If we had continued walking in love taking dominion over the planet for love would have been our job. We were created to be kings and queens ruling and reigning in love over this planet for our Father. That’s what love was supposed to look like.

Instead, because we chose death and God gave us what we wanted, the planet began to be ruled by the father of lies and death. In spite of the supremacy of death as a consequence of our rebellion, as I said last week, God provided the promise of the end of Satan’s reign even as it was just beginning.

Life is a funny thing; even in the darkest of places it finds a way to survive. And for the next three thousand years of history death will try with everything that it has to rule supremely and conquer love. It almost succeeded in the first thousand or so years. God raised up Abel and King Satan made sure he was killed. Hate and death then began to grow like crazy. Like I said last week given a conservative estimate by the time of Noah there were probably several hundred million people on the planet and all of them except for one walked in death and hatred of love.

Genesis 6: 6 says this: The LORD was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. The LORD said, "I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them." We broke God’s heart when we rebelled but he gave us around 1500 years to come back to him.

I want you to understand that just because God is unchanging doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have feelings and that his feeling can’t be hurt. He is love. He did nothing but pour out love upon us from the beginning and all we did was spit in his face. This is love: even though he knew we were going to cause him great pain, we were going to break his heart, he created us anyway. He knows that, after 1500 years of rebellion only increasing that he must, for the good of the rest of the creation, stop this surge of death but he is so long suffering that he gives his creation 120 years more to repent.
Verse 8 tells us that Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD. One man found grace. One man humbled himself and returned to the father. One man out of several hundred million people; that puts a new perspective on Jesus’ words: many are called but few are chosen. God called every single one of these people to repentance but only one of them humbled himself to receive grace.

In the receiving of grace Noah also received promises from God. God added to his promise of redemption and gave some more clarity because mankind had been walking in darkness and had turned their back on the law of love for so long that God had to remind them and encourage them.

So Love speaks to Noah and says: I will establish My covenant with you. In essence God says to Noah I promise to adopt you back into the family. I am beginning to see that one way that you can look at our relationship with God is as though it were an adoption contract. This is love personified. God offers to adopt any of the children of Satan that want to be loved. Anybody that wants to be taken out of their dysfunctional and abusive family relationship with their father Satan can be adopted back into the family of Love. It’s that simple.

I’d be willing to bet that every single one of us is familiar with somebody that refuses to give up their dysfunction, their addiction, their death wish. You see all of those things are simply examples of the kind of relationship we have with the father of lies. It’s all we know. We don’t trust the goodness of God; we don’t want to give up our imagined control. We may be sleeping in the gutter but it’s our gutter and that’s better than being love’s Slave. At least that’s what we tell ourselves. What we don’t see is that we are slaves to the gutter. Everybody else around us may see our condition but we refuse to accept it. We love darkness. We pant after death. We prefer hate over love.

But God says to Noah, who humbled himself before love: I will adopt you into my new covenant family. It’s not here yet but it’s coming and if you trust me and humble yourself before me I promise that you will be my child. And then he says: Here’s what you have to do if you want to be my child: enter the ark--you and your sons and your wife, and your sons' wives with you. 19"And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. 20"Of the birds after their kind, and of the animals after their kind, of every creeping thing of the ground after its kind, two of every kind will come to you to keep them alive. 21"As for you, take for yourself some of all food which is edible, and gather it to yourself; and it shall be for food for you and for them." 22Thus Noah did; according to all that God had commanded him, so he did.

I want you to understand that this is what salvation looks like in everybody’s life. First, you humble yourself before love. Then Love adopts you into the new family relationship and then he tells you what you need to do if you want to be in love. Grace calls you to obedience to the commands of love.

Noah could have said ‘I will enter into the adoption relationship with you’ and then sat on his lazy butt and done nothing but he would have drowned with all the other millions because his actions would have revealed who his father really was. It would have revealed that he didn’t love love and that he hadn’t been adopted. God laid it out clearly: ‘this is what love looks like it’ and the grace of the adoption relationship empowered Noah to pick up a saw and begin to cut wood though he had no clue what rain was or what a flood was. He humbled himself before God. He trusted that love knew what he was talking about. And he obeyed love so that he could live. He submitted to the commands of love; according to all that God had commanded him, so he did.

That is love in action, grace in action, mercy in action, justice in action. Yes, justice. Noah received the promise of salvation. He trusted in that which was promised. He died not receiving the promise. Sure God was faithful to him but he didn’t receive the promised salvation until a couple thousand years later when Christ Jesus our Lord descended into Hell as the apostle’s creed tells us or the Lower depths of the earth as the book of Ephesians tells us, and set the captives free.

Noah had to wait 2000 years for justice to be served before he could taste the fruits of his belief. Noah received grace and mercy but had to look forward to the promised justice that would make the new family a reality. While we were yet sinners; what a great statement. While we were yet sinners Love provided the necessary justice so that grace and mercy could be applied. Without justice there can be no mercy. That is why the scripture calls us to do justice and love mercy.

Noah obeys God’s commands and even though at this point in time we have no evidence that the rest of his family believes, God allows them to enter the ark for the sake of the promise of love. You see love has promised redemption; he has promised a redeemer. God is not going to let death stand in the way of love. So to ensure that the promised seed will come love allows Noah’s family a longer time of opportunity to repent. Noah’s faith doesn’t save them but gives them more of an opportunity to repent than others received while allowing the lineage of the seed to continue. It also gives them greater condemnation if they do not believe because they have heard the good word of God and have seen him work in their lives.

God gives the rest of the earth what they want most; death and so all that is left on dry ground dies, not because God is mean or full of wrath but because that is what they want. Any of them could have entered the ark by simply humbling themselves before God and walking in the ways of love but they refused. They did what they wanted and what they wanted was unprofitable: Their choice. God had told them for 1500 years that ideas had consequences and now it was being demonstrated as clearly as possible.

Up to now I haven’t mentioned the concept of atonement by sacrifice but it has been present in seed form from the time of the fall throughout these 1500 years. God instituted sacrifice after he pronounced the consequences for turning from love to death. The scripture says: The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them. He sacrificed an animal and covered their nakedness as a picture of the seed who would crush the serpent’s head by getting his heal bruised. We see sacrifice again in the story of Cain and Able. Able sacrificed an animal and demonstrated his faith in the promise of justice and atonement. Cain refused to bow his knee in obedient faith and killed his brother who reminded him of his own rebellion and his hatred of love. By the time of Noah there is no mention of sacrifice because by the time of Noah there is no one else who has humbled themself before God. They don’t believe in sacrifice, they don’t believe in love.
After Noah and his family left the ark Noah built an altar to the LORD, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. The LORD smelled the soothing aroma. What is this smell that is soothing to God? Is it the smell of barbeque? No. It is the smell of justice. We love to talk about atonement for sins but what we more often than not forget to mention is that justice – the demands of Love fulfilled - is the only basis for atonement.

You are able to find mercy and be forgiven because love poured out justice upon a willing and innocent volunteer. Justice alone is soothing to God. The smell of justice is the smell of love. It is the smell of adoption into God’s family. That is something that we forget too easily. More often than not we try to say that love and justice cancel each other out, that you can’t have both. That is not what the love manual says. It says that if love has been rejected; if the children of God have rejected their inheritance and God as their father and taken Satan as their father, then the only way to be adopted back into a family relationship with God is JUSTICE. Love demands justice as a foundation for grace and mercy. Justice is the bridge that allows the rebellious haters the opportunity to get back on the path of life and be adopted into the family of God.

God smelled the aroma of promied justice and because of the sureness of the promise of a future sacrifice he makes more promises to the human race. The Lord said to Himself, "I will never again curse the ground on account of man, for the intent of man's heart is evil from his childhood; and I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

Once again God pours out great love on people who have not humbled themselves before him. He continues to pour out grace in many forms. He allows the condemned to continue to live. He allows the world to continue on. He allows the seasons to continue. He promises that death will not be able to completely destroy the world or the way it functions. By exercising common grace upon both believers and unbelievers he gives the condemned haters more time to repent, more time to choose love. He gives the believers more time to mature and he ensures the coming of the lamb slain before the foundation of the world that will provide a new covenant relationship and a new creation.

God pours out blessing upon both believers and unbelievers. Now it is important that we understand that material blessings of God are not salvation they are ultimately a test of our hearts. The gracious gifts that God pours out upon all people will reveal the condition of our hearts. If we walk in love then the blessing will be a glorious exhibition of the goodness of God. If those who receive the blessings of God refuse to walk in love then those blessings of God will only serve to condemn the condemned even more. It will be one more proof that a haters gonna hate. It will reveal the fact that there is no love in an unrepentant heart. We should remember that when we think we see the condemned prosper: Love says that wicked will not prosper. Prosperity is not what you have now it is what you will have in the Kingdom of God. Riches and power don’t equal prosperity. Humbleness and obedience are the long term path to true prosperity.

So we see once again that love continues to love the haters of love by giving them time to repent. He also demonstrates his love for his non-human creation by removing those that are trying to destroy it through hate and death. To save the planet God will reward the condemned with that which they love the most –death and answer the cries of creation which continually lament the blood that has been spilled upon it.

We must remember that the story of the flood is a win win situation. EVERYBODY gets want they want. Life continues on and the linage of the seed is maintained. The one person who loved love gets to keep on loving with the hope of the promise of a future redemption more clearly defined. The majority of the haters receive the promise of death that they so long for. The rest of the haters get the opportunity to live in hopes that they will come to repentance. We can’t be certain that many of them ever did.

The promise of future justice has been placed upon the love hanger. Because of that the promise of redemption is securely on the Love hanger. The promise that anyone who wants to humble themselves before love and walk in its ways is also on the hanger along with the promise of death for all who choose to love death.

Contrary to popular opinion, love makes no demands upon us. It simply lays out for us the path of life clearly and surely and says if you want to live walk here. The choice is ours we can do what is profitable or we can do what is unprofitable. We can receive the wages of hate which is death or we can learn to love and walk in life. God gives us the freedom to choose which we want to do and then pays us accordingly. It is up to us to choose this day whom we will serve.

Let’s pray. Oh father, open our eyes to see the wages we are being paid. Please cause us to hunger and thirst after you. Teach us to love life and know the difference between life and death.