The Blessing of Noah and the Curse on Canaan

And when the LORD smelled the pleasing aroma, the LORD said in his heart, 

"I will never again curse the ground because of man, 

for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth.

Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. 

While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, 

summer and winter, day and night shall not cease. (Genesis 8:21-22 ESV)

Following the flood, the next part of the narrative of Genesis contains back to back accounts of blessing and curses. Genesis 8:20-9:17 records blessing. Noah offers a sacrifice to the LORD, and God says to himself that he will not destroy the earth with a flood again. God commands Noah's family with a re-institution of the same instruction that he gave to Adam and Eve--to be fruitful and multiply. God gave humanity the animals for food in the same way that green plants had been from the beginning. God reminds Noah that human beings are created in the image of God and of inestimable value. God makes a "covenant" with Noah--a promise never to destroy the earth by flood again, and he seals the covenant with a sign of the rainbow as an eternal reminder of God's faithfulness. However, Genesis 9:18-29 records a curse. It begins with Noah getting drunk and laying naked in his tent. In some mysterious way that is ambiguous in the text, Noah's son Ham dishonors him while his nakedness was uncovered in the tent. When Noah awoke, he cursed Canaan--Ham's son. The passage ends in an echo of chapter 5. "After the flood Noah lived 350 years. All the days of Noah were 950 years, and he died. 

God's word is revealed in a way that we often see patterns. What we see in this passage follows the same pattern of Genesis 1-3. Chapters 1-2 tell us an amazing story of God's blessing in creation. God has been good in providing all things good for Adam and Eve in the Garden, and he gives them a job to do. In the first part of our text, the same thing happens for Noah. God graciously gives Noah animals for food and he pledges his faithful sustaining power over the earth. He also commands Noah's family to be fruitful and multiply. Adam was a man who worked the soil--just like Noah. However, in Genesis 3 Adam partakes of a fruit, his nakedness is revealed, and he plunges the earth into a curse. Similarly, Noah partakes in a fruit, his nakedness is revealed, and a member of his own family is cursed. 

What does this teach us? On the other side of the flood, sin's consequences still hold sway. While Noah saved the human race in his obedience, he was not the seed of the woman promised in Genesis 3:15. The serpent was still at enmity with man, and death still reigned. While we can be thankful that man retains the image of God, we are reminded that we are still frail sinners, and prone to commit the worst of sins--even against our own family members. 

Yet in the same way that the curse of Genesis 3 contains a promise, so does Noah's curse. "He also said, 'Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem: and let Canaan be his servant.'" It was through the line of Shem, as we trace the genealogy, that Abraham was to come--and thus the messianic seed continued on. Canaan in the end was conquered by the generation of Israelites that Moses was writing to when he recorded this story. Moses's intention as the author must have been to show that God's giving them the land of Canaan was in continuation of the promises that he had made concerning the messianic seed.

What's the point here? How does this apply to us? Massively! This is at the core of our faith. Even though mankind is "evil from his youth," and even though the very people who God saved on the ark fell into sin again, God will be faithful to his covenant promises. So when we fall into sin, when we face the darkness of death, and when we find ourselves experiencing the discipline of a Father, we can know that God is faithful to us because he will keep his covenant promises. He will keep his promises to his people and to his Son.

How Am I Going to Preach a Genealogy? Part 2

In the last blog post on this I treated how to interpret the text. What is the theological message that we should get from this genealogy in Genesis 5? In this post, I'm going to try to answer the question, "so what?"

Let's review the theological concepts of Genesis 5:

1. Humanity after Adam is still created in the image of God. Seth was created after the image and likeness of Adam who was created in the image of God.
2. Humanity has been broken and experiences death and the painful toil of labor. Every person listed in the genealogy except for Enoch experienced death, and Lamech acknowledges the desire for relief from the pain.
3. There is hope for eternal life and communion with God. Enoch was the grand exception to the pattern of death because he walked with God.
4. There is a Messiah who would reverse the curse, crush the Serpent, and bring relief to our pain. Lamech expected Noah to give rest to humanity from the curse upon the ground.

 Now how does that affect us today? I'll name two ways that affect us at Woburn Baptist Church this week. First, Dorothy, our piano player is in the hospital right now after having knee surgery. Second, another member, Jerry, lost his house to a fire this week. The concepts we see in this text connect to our current experience in this way. Why do human bodies wear out and experience pain? Because of the curse. We can do many things to try to relieve our pain. We can go to doctors. We can take pain pills. We can have surgery, but ultimately the curse of death that we have all inherited in Adam will take its toll. We will all one day die and after that face the judgement. This is one of the fundamental universal experiences of all humanity. We all want relief from this problem. The other problem is the futility of work. Solomon wrote of this experience. You work for a lifetime acquiring stuff, and you come to the end of your life and you leave it all to someone who didn't work for it. Jesus told a story of a man who horded wealth and didn't know that in that very night his life would be required. In an instant, we can loose everything. This is another consequence of the curse on the ground. Our labor will be futile. We can work and work all our lives, and in the end what we have can all be gone in a moment. This is another fundamental problem of human existence.

Lamech expected an answer to this problem. He was hoping in the promise that a seed of the woman would crush the head of our enemy and reverse this curse. He was trusting that God's provision would set all the wrong things right again. In this hope, he named his son Rest (Noah). In a sense, Lamech was right. Noah would be a man who saved the world. Noah was a type of Christ. Just as all those who were in the ark were saved from the flood waters, 1 Peter 3 says that all who are in Christ will be saved from death in Christ.

Jesus is relevant to our problem with sin's curse both in the next life and this one. We will be saved from death when we are resurrected at his coming, but we have hope in the midst of our painful toil now as well. We know that our labor is not in vain, in the LORD. God is working all things together for our good, so when our house burns down or when we are sitting in a hospital bed, we will know that our greatest treasure is Jesus, and while our outer man is wasting away our inner man is being renewed in Christ every day.

The message of the genealogy in Genesis 5 is a message of hope in the Messiah to bring healing to a broken world.