It’s Dangerous to Be Friends With Jesus— Noah, Part III.

The third thing we can embrace from the life of Crazy Noah in Genesis is: his faith, unshakable at its foundation, was a form of condemnation on the corruption of the world.  Which is one of the reasons it’s so dangerous to be a Friend and Follower of Jesus!

No one who lives in and from the Kingdom of Grace sets out with a spirit of condemnation, a self-righteous superiority complex, or an elitist attitude.  But it seems this way sometimes because your Light shines in the darkness, your confident Hope amidst swirling despair, your Love in exchange for hate.  This is a form of judgment {legitimate judgment}, and the kingdom of darkness despises it.  History tells the Story of a brilliant and reckless young Athenian commander by the name Alcibiades.  He was rumored to have said to Socrates the great philosopher: “I hate you, Socrates.  For every time we meet, you show me what I am!”  One of the greatest men in Greek History was Aristides, whom the Athenians called ‘the Just,’ meaning ‘the Righteous.’  You know what happened to him?  The Athenians voted to banish him from Greece.  When asked why, one man replied, “Because I’m sick of hearing Aristides called ‘the Righteous’!”  At least he was honest.

Holiness is dangerous.  So is being part of the Kingdom of Light in a world bound in darkness and death.  As Jesus so aptly pointed out, “Everyone who does evil hates the Light, and will not come into the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed” {Jn. 3:20}.  “Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil,” v. 19.

Our fourth and final lesson?  Noah’s righteousness came by grace through faith.  Sound familiar?  Moses tells us, “Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD” {Gen. 6:8}; the Hebrew cheyn means ‘grace’ in the eyes of God.

It just so happens he’s the first man in all of Scripture to be called dikaios, “righteous.”  “This is the account of Noah.  Noah was a righteous man [Tsadiyq is ‘justified,’ like dikaios in the New Testament: ‘acquitted of all his crimes, declared not guilty by the Judge of the Living and the Dead’], blameless among the people of his time [Tamiym means ‘wholesome, having integrity’], and he walked with God,” 6:9.

Noah’s righteousness began by taking Abba at His Word.  When God spoke, he listened; and once he heard, he believed, he embraced in faith what God set before him.  Looks like a pattern here, doesn’t it?  Maybe even one we could follow.  What do you think?  When the entire Earth had ravaged God’s righteousness and cast caution and restraint to the wind, Noah obeyed.  When the world went deaf to the warnings of God, Noah listened.  When the men and women of the Matrix laughed and scoffed and mocked the Almighty, Noah worshipped Him ...in reverence.  I thought this statement was amazing, the clarity of it.  One ancient writer said, Noah “threw the dark skepticism of the world into relief against his own shining faith in God.”  Hoooaahhh!

In the Antediluvian Age, the time before the Flood, when mankind so casually disregarded the King of All Creation, He remained for Noah the Ultimate Reality of Life— the Stronghold of his strength in a world of chaos, the Rock of his redemption in a Sea of utter madness!  And so He remains, for those who are willing to trust Him... trust Him with their lives and trust Him with their love.

HJC	Ric Webb  |  Shepherd Heart’s Journey Community 9621 Tall Timber Blvd. |  Little Rock, AR 72204 t +1.501.455.0296
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