Noah did All that God Commanded Him
A Devotional Series from Genesis
Online Bible Audio/Readings Links (ESV)
6/11 Reading Portions: Deuteronomy 16; Psalm 103; Isaiah 43; Revelation 13
Genesis 6:22
Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him.
OBEDIENCE
Of YHVH God’s omniscient understanding of man, He reveals this to us from the Psalms: For He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust. Psalm 103:14It is by God’s grace that Noah constructed the ark, doing exactly as God had commanded him. The construction of the ark was successful. That you and I are here is evidence of that fact. Were the project a flop, none of us would be here today. But Noah was empowered by the Spirit of God to obey. It must be. The best of our obedience carries enough corruption in it from our mortal flesh that we should humbly thank God in Christ daily and praise Him spontaneously with every thought of Christ’s imputed righteousness and our salvation by His amazing grace. Because of the corruptions remaining in our mortal flesh, though we’ve been saved, we will have a tendency to pervert obedience—turning it into a legalistic act, or worse, turn our work into something thrown into God’s face, like Cain’s faithless sacrifice (Heb 11:4); essentially implying to YHVH God, “Look what I’ve done for You.”
True, faithful obedience comes from a loving response for who God is (Deut 6:4-5; Matt 22:37-38), and a holy reverence for all He commands (Prov 9:10; Heb 11:7). This is the “secret sauce” that reconciles Paul’s explanation of salvation of by grace alone through faith alone (Rom 4; Gal 3; Eph 2; et al) with James’ faith without works being dead, being the faith of devils (Jas 2:17, 19). We have this tendency toward legalism and this is why we need to see Christ exalted in Scripture; so we may fall in love with Him daily for who He is and what He has done. Then, empowered by God’s grace, obedience is a loving response. We’ll see this more clearly when we get to Genesis 22, the first place in the Bible where “love” is mentioned.
In today’s verse, again, Noah is a type of Christ. The only thoroughly obedient Man who ever walked upon the planet was the Lord Jesus Messiah. He was pleasing to the Father in all He thought, said, and did. Moreover, Christ’s love for the Father and the Father’s love for the Son was so intimate (John 1:18), that when Jesus suffered God’s holy wrath when He hung upon the tree, the disparity between the love of the Father that He knew more intimately than any man and the anger of the Father for sin, was a greater torment for Christ than any man or angel could ever know. When every rebel who has rejected Christ is judged and punished for his or her sins against God, their collective torment will not come close to what Jesus suffered when He hung upon Calvary’s tree. That’s powerful enough to be the propitiation for the whole world (1 Jn 2:1). Hallelujah! What a Savior!