God's Rules

Read Genesis 6-9

Genesis 7:4 “Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from  the face of the earth every living creature I have made.”
 
FOR some reason, the Great Flood has been recreated to become a nice children’s story. There seems to be no dread in our hearts of God’s will to destroy every living thing—all the people, the large animals, the small animals that scurry along the ground, and even the birds of the sky. (Genesis 6:8)
   What do you say? Is this destroying God one you want to know, to love and to trust? Can he be the same God the apostle John defines in 1 John 4:16 We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.
   To know God through the Flood is to know God’s holy character includes love, law, judgment, grace, and salvation. He demonstrates each of these to Noah and his family, to the world then and to us today. Genesis tells us sons of God – righteous people – intermarried with women of the world- of sin – and all people became of the world. God’s creation followed Satan’s rule. In response, the righteous God judged their evil. Still we see his grace when he chose one righteous man to be the one to save mankind from total death. Noah became the way of mankind’s salvation into a new creation. With love God then empowered Noah to build the ark. He protected Noah’s family, the animals and the birds to come through the curse and be blessed to repopulate the new earth.
   Can you see, then, how Noah is a type – an image of the Christ? Noah was given knowledge to do everything exactly as God had commanded him. (Genesis 6:22) Noah obeyed God’s laws. He knew what we all must know: God is Creator, who commands his people to right living. It’s as if Noah was in the Father and the Father was in Noah. This was Jesus’ testimony to his life and ministry. John 14:11 Just believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. Or at least believe because of the work you have seen me do.
   This must be your testimony, too. God’s just law points us toward a true love and fellowship with him and one another. Think about it. Do you ever trust or love one who says, “No rules here!” Of course not. If God had no law, there would be no way to the true way.
   That’s why our Lord’s law of redemption is now “flooding” the world with the blood of his one and only Son. Covered in Jesus’ blood, we know we are free of sin’s death.
          This is God’s law. Thanks be to God