We're in Genesis chapter six and you might have thought, how is the flood? About Jesus? If you thought that, don't worry, you're going to know. You're going to find out. In Genesis chapter six.

There's a whole lot of stuff that is difficult, like as a pastor, it's difficult on some of this stuff to talk about. And a lot of pastors will just be like, eh, I'm not going to talk about that part of it. We're just going to skip down a few verses. Not me. I love a theological challenge.

Genesis chapter six, the first eight verses. When humankind began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humankind were beautiful. Thus they took wives for themselves from any they chose. So the Lord said, my spirit will not remain in humankind indefinitely. Since they are mortal, they will remain for 120more years.

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also after this, when the sons of God were having relations with the daughters of mankind who gave birth to their children. They were the mighty heroes of old, the famous men. But the Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind had become great on the earth. Every inclination of the thoughts of their minds was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted or repented that he had made humankind on the earth, and he was highly offended.

So the Lord said, I will wipe humankind whom I have created from, from the face of the earth. Everything from humankind to animals, including creatures that move on the ground and birds of the air, for I regret that I have made them. But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.

I hope you've got your sermon companion book with you. If not, we've got copies if you've never received one. This goes through a year of, a year of messages. We're just a few weeks into it now, like three weeks, I believe. And we're, we're looking at, we're looking at the Old Testament and New Testament and looking at how the Old Testament is like one big arrow pointing to the coming of Jesus.

Then you have your Gospels, which is the story, not just the story, but the, the power of Christ we see displayed on those pages. And then you in the, in the, the books after the Gospels, in your New Testament, it tells what Jesus was doing through the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, through the lives of the believers, through the church and his mission and calling for believers. And then we close out at the end of the series, almost A year from now, looking at what God's like. God's future for us is beyond today, the eternal future that he has created for us. And so that's kind of where we're headed.

That's the brief road map of it, and that's what this book was designed for, and that's why we made it. But we're looking today at this story of the flood. Now, the flood is in, like, children's Bible story books, and it's nice and sweet. Anybody remember, like, Sunday school? Or maybe you were a Sunday school teacher and you were teaching it and you're like, God told Noah to build a boat and put all the animals on it because a flood was coming and he saved everyone.

They don't talk about people, like, grabbing rocks and banging on the outside of the boat. Let me in. Let me in. As they're drowning in their sins and the waters of the flood as the judgment on them. They don't talk about the Nephilim and the giants and, like, what's going on with that?

Let's talk about it today. Isn't it great? This is our opportunity. This is where we get to discuss Goddess, where we get to look at what was going on in this time. And if you look at the first, like, four verses in here, these are some of the weirdest verses in your Bible, right?

You have questions already, don't you? Did you write them down on the notes in your sermon guide? Good. Are you planning to stay for Sunday school? For those of you who are here, not online.

For those of you online, hello. But, like, are you planning on staying and talking about it? That's your opportunity to dig into it. You're missing out if you don't come to that. So that's, that's your call, though.

If you stay, great. If not, not gonna hurt my feelings. You'll get wet on the way out. The rain will be done by the time Sunday school's over. Maybe stay, you know, you'll stay dry.

So the, the, the, the, we're gonna look at this stuff because let's just say it's really weird and really almost troubling. And I already had questions. Like, Elaine and I were talking earlier, and I was like, this is good. It's practice for me. You know, I already practiced this on another group earlier this week.

Not here. So it's like, I, I, I still don't feel ready for it. Here we go. You wonder. Nephilim.

And some of you might have read in verse four where it says, the Nephilim were on the Earth. Some of your Bible translations, like King James and others, say giants were on the earth in those days. Now, what it simply means is, yes, there were giants. They were called Nephilim. It's not like your translation is better or mine's better.

It's just they chose two different words. Probably because saying Nephilim gets a little weird. We're a little more comfortable. If it says, hey, there were giants on the Earth, you're like, oh, okay, giants. That's scary.

Like, yes, it is. The weird part is where, how did they get here? And if we read that, it says, sons of God, daughters of men. What does that mean? What do you think it means?

It sounds that way, doesn't it? It sounds like not quite human, right? Probably. And some of you are like, oh, Pastor Nick, you're one of those weird ones. Maybe that also means that hundreds of years of Jewish people were weird, too, because that was their understanding of it and their interpretation of it.

For those of you, Tom and I have been talking already about, like, the Book of Enoch, and I don't have time to get into all of that. I will say there's some interesting stuff in there. Nobody's been hiding it from you. It's not like a hidden knowledge thing. It's quite available and open to you.

You can find it online. I was reading some of it this morning. For those of you who don't know about the Book of Enoch, don't worry, you're probably okay. Like, you're not into, you know, the weird. Like, is this a conspiracy?

Or whatever? It's kind of stuff. So you're fine. You'll. You'll, you know, we won't need to worry about it.

But the Book of Enoch can tell you a lot of background, and it tells about a group of angelic beings called the Watchers. And as they end up watching, they end up being like, huh, those women are kind of. Kind of cute. I might like to the human. The men seem to enjoy them quite a bit.

Maybe I'll give that a try. This whole, like, being a servant of God, worshiping him in heaven, doesn't seem good. I'm going to go and be with these women. And then your next question to me should be, I thought angels didn't have human bodies. How does that work?

And my answer to you is, I have no idea. No idea. I'm not that weird. You know, Like, I'm weird. I'm just not into it that much.

I don't know. However it was now, it also could have been like they could have been humans. Then another explanation is that you have this line of people that came from Cain. Cain was the oldest son of Adam and Eve, the first child to be born, you could say. And he murdered the second child to be born, his brother Abel.

And so then later Eve and Adam have another son named Seth. And it could be is believed that perhaps the line of Seth were godly people and that the line of Cain was like the ungodly people and that they intermarried. I mean, there's one problem with that. If we're calling the line from Seth the sons of God, they seem to be the ones that stepped out of line to marry the daughters of man. So I don't really like that explanation, but it might exist.

Again, we got this Sunday school class. It's a little bit more of a dialogue and I don't have to say your objections and then, you know, talk about them. We can do it there. We can talk about it there. And the places that you think maybe the pastor's getting this wrong.

Hey, there's a section in your notes for that too. And you can write it down and talk about it. Right? This is the terms of our engagement then for this. All right, so you've got these beings, these race of people that are born or people, angel hybrids or whatever they are.

And they seem to be giants and they're. They're big. The Book of Enoch talks about it. It's a Jewish writing that was compiled over a period of years. And maybe its final form was written around the time of Christ or a little before or a little after.

We're really not too sure. It doesn't seem to be a totally trustworthy document. That's why it wasn't included in the Scriptures. But it does tell us at least what the Jewish people were believing had happened in some of their storytelling throughout the years. And they believe that it truly was some type of angelic beings called the watchers that came down and had sex with the women and had babies, and those babies grew up to be giants.

And some estimates were either 10ft tall or 4,200ft tall. I don't know, you know what I'm saying? Like, they measured it in the. And a length of measurement called Ls Ells. And I cannot find, like Google, you know, where you can put in like how many teaspoons to a cup or whatever.

It doesn't, like, it doesn't really, you know, translate L's to feet. So I couldn't really find a good answer. On it. But Some people said 4,200ft tall. That's close to a mile.

I don't think the giants were a mile high. I really don't. But I do believe there were some giants, and I do believe they might have had a supernatural or superhuman origin. And God looks at everything that's going on, and he sees whether they're superhuman or not. He sees that there are these, like, people with evil in their hearts, and they are having children with people who maybe didn't start out with evil in their hearts.

And then what ends up happening is there's this group or race of people that are born, whether they're physically giant or whether they're culturally giant. Like the. The. It says they were the men of renown. We might call that our A listers today in Hollywood, on radio, on tv, who knows?

The people that are the influencers, and they seem to be the ones influencing culture. So all the possible range of, like, from, like, sane and normal to, like, crazy and out of this world weird. Any range of explanation we have for who these people were and how these babies, creatures, whatever, were born, whatever they turn into, the. The point is this, somehow they were the ones driving forward the sinful culture of mankind. I don't care where you fall on that line.

Like, to me, it's all a possible interpretation of this scripture. And one of the neat things about scripture is sometimes God gives us a lot of clarity about it, and sometimes he gives us almost none. And this is one of those places where we can't be like, well, it says in this other part of the Bible about them. No, it really doesn't. Like, giants shows up one other time in the scripture.

As far as, like, not like Goliath and giants like that, but just when the Israelites are going into the promised land with 12 spies to scout it out. And they come back and they said the Anakim were there, the giants were there. And some places. Some translations says the Nephilim were there. And so it's like, I thought they were destroyed in the flood.

How did they come back? Sometimes nephilim simply is just a translation for giants. So they're saying there's giants in the land. We look like grasshoppers in their sight. And we felt like grasshoppers when we looked up at them.

In other words, like, you can get stomped. You know, that's how they felt. So Maybe they were 4200ft tall, I don't know. But anyway, they said, like, we're scared of these guys. So apparently there have Been giants.

There's a lot, like every culture has stories of giants. We're going to, you know, like, for me, that's not a leap of faith to say there were giants alive in the time of Noah. But what, what is important or imperative for us to notice isn't how tall they were or how big they were, but, but how influential they were. And what they were doing was they were leading astray the good and godly people, and they were leading them into sin that infiltrated their hearts perpetually like that. All their thoughts was only evil all the time.

Now, before digging into that part of it, I do want to say this. The, the, I want to ask a question. Where were the dads? Where were the fathers? Like, it says that these sons of God took wives for themselves from anywhere that they choose.

Now, unless they were just kidnapping women and forcing them to be their wives, some father somewhere along the line had to say, yeah, you can marry my daughter. It's literally how it worked. We don't do that so much today. I mean, it's typical a lot of times where a man will ask his girlfriend's father, can I marry your daughter? And you know he's going to do it either way.

Even if the guy says no, he just wants to know how he stands with him. You know, like, you're going to be like, well, I'm doing it anyway. We already decided. I just thought I'd ask you as a formality. That's kind of how it goes today.

I think a few decades ago there was probably some respect there. And if the man said no, then the answer was no. But now it's pretty much like you just, you want to marry someone, you marry him. That's how it kind of works. Not so back through most of human history.

These, these men, whoever they were, would have had to have approached a father and said, can I marry your daughter? Now it's obvious that these are wicked and evil men, and yet somehow they are given, the, the daughters are given to them in marriage. Where were the fathers? Where were the men who are supposed to be watching out for their daughter's well being and raising them up to find good godly men and, and marry them. And to, to, to find those men and say, you're going to marry this woman.

Where were the fathers? It seems as if that, that they were really enthralled with the idea of their daughters marrying a powerful man, maybe a giant, maybe not, but they're, they love this idea. And the closest example I can think of today would be like, like my daughter's young. I'm not thinking about, like, you know, marrying her off yet, but in a few years, if she starts dating this like, billionaire guy and he's got like a yacht, and I'd be like, well, I don't much care how he got his money. I don't care what his morality is.

I don't care what he does, any of that stuff. But maybe if I let her, like, if I give my blessing to them, you know, maybe he'll let me drive his yacht. That would be pretty cool. That's the only chance I have at yacht driving. You know, I don't think they even call it that.

I think they call it captaining, piloting. But I would love to drive a yacht. That's how I'm going to call it. Okay. And so that would be like me saying, you know what, It'd be pretty cool to be the father in law to a billionaire.

Seems like I could do pretty much anything I want at that point. That'd be cool. Men of Renown Amy says no. All right. She lives how we live, like on the verge, you know, like, no, you gotta.

Yeah.

Oh. And so that's the point is that it's like we, the men weren't giving any concern whether their new son in law was going to be a good man, a godly man. They just gave their daughters away to them. So the fathers had, had dropped their responsibility, much like many do today. But what ends up resulting is that sin is everywhere.

It says in our scripture that we read. I don't have to like, interpret this to you too much. Says that every inclination of the heart of humankind was only evil all the time. Or I think the version I read said only evil and that continually, like it was just continual evil. It's like, how can I do more wickedness?

How can I do more evil? How can I make things like, worse and worse and worse? There is so much in the hearts of mankind that are constantly trying to break what was already fixed. They're trying to break what was going well. They're trying to say God's way was this, but I want to go off this way and do some evil thing.

And you name a corporation, you name a movie franchise, you name a music genre. They just want to take them all and make them all worse. They want to make them all terrible. And they're all designed to lead us into sin. These are today's giants and men of renown.

These are today's the, the, the, the example of what we saw with these Nephilim and their offspring, this is what we see going on in our world today. It still is here, which isn't in my notes, but it's kind of something that I have in my heart about this scripture is I always want to say, like with the whole flood story, we're not even talking about the whole flood, we're just talking about the build up to it. But, but, but if I could fast forward and say, what did the flood solve? That's a good Sunday school topic. You should stay and we'll talk about that one.

What did it actually fix? I don't know. I've got some ideas on that, but I'm not gonna share them with you right now. What I do wanna focus on is that a couple quick things. One God says in verse three, my, my heart won't contend with people forever.

Like the way this is going. I'm not just gonna continue, continue protecting them and blessing them and giving them good things. There's going to come an end to this. Now if you've been paying attention in some of your scriptures, especially the chapter just before this one in Genesis 5, it talks a lot about this person was born and had these kids and lived this many years and died. And it's like 8 and 900 years for most of them.

After the flood, it seems like nobody breaks 120 years. Like Moses hits it and dies. So is like, we're like, oh, okay. 120 years is the lifespan of what you get. Maybe that's what God meant.

But it seems like he was actually pronouncing a judgment, a sentence on humanity. You guys have 120 years from right now to cut it out or it's all going away. And that's when he calls Noah and says, build a boat. So Noah takes the next hundred or so years to do this. Like he's 500 years old or more.

So it takes a while to cut down a bunch of trees and turn him into a boat. You know, a giant boat. Don't worry though, he didn't have to hunt down all the animals. The scripture actually says that God brought them to him. So Noah's just like, right this way, right this way.

Tickets please. That's his job. But he spent 100 years building the boat. So he's tired and that's fair, you know, but he's got his little, they don't call it a conductor cap on a boat. What is a captain's hat?

I don't know. Anyway, you can tell I'm a land Guy mostly. And I fly on planes. Like that's pretty much it. Boats and stuff.

I don't know what they call other terms like port and starboard and stern and there's a poop deck and I wasn't sure what they use that for. But anyway, we've been reading Narnia and I just like, I giggle every time. I'm like, they go up to the poop and I'm like, why couldn't they just change that word? It doesn't make sense to me. I need to know what that deck is used for, you know, I still don't know.

It'd be weird if I had a thousand dollar device in my pocket that would help me figure these things out. You know, a smartphone. Never mind. Anyway, okay, back to the scripture. So God gives 120 year sentence to humanity.

He's saying because of the evil inclination of your heart that's been going on all this time, that's getting worse and worse and worse. You guys have 120 years and after 120 years is all going away, I'm going to wipe it away. And it seems like that was going to be the end of it. We know the rest of the story with Noah in the big boat. But what hadn't happened yet was God hadn't talked to Noah yet.

He says, you guys have 120 years. And then there's that verse at the end in verse eight that says, but Noah found favor or grace in the eyes of the Lord. And that's where the story starts about God reaching out to him and providing a plan of salvation for humankind and for Noah's family and for the animals. But the thing that gets me the most in this, if we get down to verse six, we see that God had a broken heart. God's heart was broken because of the wickedness of mankind.

And it says that he regretted making them.

Like another word to translate that to is that God repented of making humanity.

It also says he was sorry that he had done it. And really isn't that what repentance is? When we say God, I'm sorry I did it, I repent of doing that.

And it's so weird. To me that's not even the right word for it. It's so heavy to me to think that something that I could do or that you could do, that we could team up to do together this wicked and evil that would push God's heart. Like heart is the seed of the emotions. Right?

It would push God emotionally to an edge where he would Say, I'm sorry that I made them. I wish I had never done it. That's what repentance is, isn't it? I'm sorry I did that. I wish I'd never done that to you.

Whether you're talking about something you do to another person or something you do to God, repentance is saying, I wish, like, if I could go back, I'd take it back. I wouldn't do it again if I had it all over to do on that. That's what repentance is. So God's saying, I repent of making mankind. Now, I was teaching this earlier this week.

I used the guys at Loving Hands Ministry as a trial run for it. I don't always test run my sermons, but this one, I needed to. And I was teaching chapel there on Friday and I said, you know what? I want to go through this with these guys and see how they can pick it apart and help me out. And there's this one guy, he's one of the newest members and he's sitting right over here on my right.

And he was struggling with this idea that somehow that this like, almost like sprung up on God, the grief that he had. Because he said, but God knows everything. I said, oh, yeah, absolutely. I'm not arguing that. I'm not saying he doesn't.

What I am saying is that I don't know, even though God knows everything. And some of you are going to be like, pastor Nick, you're a heretic. Fine, like, whatever, maybe. But I'm learning, I'm growing. I think that even though God knew what we would do, he had never experienced that kind of pain, of betrayal before, and he didn't know how much it would hurt.

Now, you might disagree with me, and that's okay. That's why there's notes in the book where you can say, here's where. I think the pastor got it wrong. I'm tough. I can be wrong.

You know, Like, I can handle that. But go with me for a minute. What if I'm right? And that God was like, I knew. I knew when I created them and I knew when I gave them the chance of free will and to choose to eat from the tree.

I told them not to eat. I knew that they would disobey me. I'd call it sin, I'd call it trespassing against me, but I didn't know how much it would hurt my heart. Like, we open ourselves up to that with other relationships. You get married, you look at the stats and you think we might not make it.

We might not have 50 years, 70 years. It might not go that way. Many of you have had that experience in your lives and still giving it another shot or two after that. And I commend you for that because I think that's how God lives. He's like, you know what?

They broke my heart. I was going to wipe everyone out, but there was Noah. And Noah found favor in my sight. And through him and his family, I brought salvation to humanity. I saved them from the flood that I brought to this earth.

And he opened himself up again to the hurt and the pain that would be caused by us sinning. God's not immune to pain. He's not immune to us hurting him. He's not, like, somehow protected because he's God. And therefore what I do can't affect him.

What you and I do has an effect on the heart of God and the sin that we have in our hearts. The things that are going on in my life, the thoughts that I entertain, the things that I choose to listen to, to watch, to speak, to say, to read, the sins that I enjoin myself to because I enjoy them. The things, the times that I do that brings pain to the heart of God. It's not just me. You guys are in the same boat as me.

So let that kind of set down in your heart for a second.

And to think that it got so bad that it made God want to start all over. I don't even know if he planned on starting over or if he just planned on washing it all out and being done. I don't know what his intentions were. I don't know how hard set God was on this plan, because it doesn't say God saw the wickedness of humanity. But then he saw the goodness of Noah and he decided, I'll destroy everybody and just choose Noah.

It doesn't say that. He says, you guys have 120 years. I'm going to wipe you off the face of the earth. And then Noah, I believe, heard the call to righteousness. Noah heard that message that God said.

He heard the proclamation of God that went out over all the earth. And he says, I will respond to that. I will get rid of the sin in my life. I will push out the evil that I have allowed into my home. And I will live for God.

Noah, Peter tells us later, like in the New Testament, he calls Noah a preacher of righteousness. In his generation, Noah proclaimed the message of God. Like, as he's working on the boat, he's also, like, preaching to people. I Don't know if they came up to hear him preach or he just bugged them. You know, it's like, hey, I don't have any trees that have grown long enough to tall enough to build a boat out of.

I'm waiting for them to finish growing. So I got like 20 years before they're ready to turn into lumber. I'm going to go talk to you for a little while. And they're like, 20 years is a long time to hear about this God stuff. People get like that.

And Noah's like, I don't care. I'm gonna keep preaching no matter how much. Like, I know you're not supposed to talk about Bill Cosby because of all the terrible stuff that he did. But like, his jokes were funny, his comedy was good. And he had this hilarious thing about Noah and like, you know, Noah's dialogue with God and then his neighbors being like, hey, what's that?

He's like, I can't tell you. And he's like, well, how long is it gonna be there? He's like, a while. Well, it's blocking me. I can't get out of my driveway to go to work.

You know, he's like, you at least give me a hint. He's like, how long can you tread water? And it's like, it's funny. It's not quite accurate. Noah wasn't just like tight lipped about it.

He's like, he's telling them why he's building it. He's telling them why. He was like on this mission. He's like, I didn't just have some crazy idea. Remember, it hasn't rained.

They didn't experience that. It says the ground would just. Water would spring up and it would just shoot up out of the ground. He's like, it's going to rain. And they're like, I don't know what that even is.

He's like, it's okay, it's going to happen. I don't know either, but I'm taking it on faith. God said it's going to happen. And he says, I'll need this boat and do you want to come on board with us? You got to believe in God and put the evil out of your lives.

And they're like, no thanks. I'm rather enjoying this wickedness and this evil. It hasn't hurt me yet. There's no consequences yet. He's like, remember that thing where God shouted it out to the whole earth?

120 years. That clock is still ticking and you better get on the Boat. Noah found favor, no, Found grace in the eyes of the Lord. I believe it's because he chose to respond to God's message and he decided to live a holy life. And.

And when I think about our sin today, yours and mine, and I think about how much it breaks God's heart. And I think about how many of us call ourselves a Christian, a believer in Christ, and yet we still want to, like, flirt with sin. We want to court it a little bit and say, well, I think I can still kind of toe the line over here. Or, you know, some preacher once said that this is a sin, but I don't know, like, I think it feels okay to do. And I don't hear God saying much.

Yeah, because your heart is hard and stubborn and calloused, and you've turned it off to listening to the Holy Spirit. You turn your ears off and you're like, I don't want to hear that. You know, like, la, la, la, la, la. I can't hear you telling me not to do that. That's how we've decided to live our lives.

He says, love your neighbor. And we're like, well, but I don't like this neighbor, so I really don't know how to love them. Well. He says, you know, like, I want you to be generous to others. And you're like, ah, I don't know.

I've got bills this month. I don't think I should be that generous. Like he tells you. He says, you know, I want you to leave your life of sin. I want you to flee idolatry and sexual immorality and greed and lust and all those things.

And you're like, well, I can just look at these few websites and I can just hoard my own money, and I can. I can choose to live life my way and still honor God, right? No. God calls you to holiness, and it breaks your heart, his heart, when you don't. It breaks the heart of God when you don't live a life of holiness.

Now, the beautiful thing in our scripture is that God responded to Noah's faith and gave him favor or grace. He gave him the plan for salvation, but he gave him this boat that would save Noah, his wife, his three sons, and their wives. So there's eight people on this boat and all these animals, and they're saved. But then God, that was salvation for the human population, the human race, and they would start over from there. But it didn't, like, fix the sin problem.

It didn't fix the problem with sin. It didn't Fix the issue that they had where they were sinning against God. See later, God had a plan of spiritual salvation for us. Remember, this series is all about Jesus. And in here we see that Jesus is God's plan, his vehicle for salvation.

The ark was the vehicle to save them from the flood waters that cleanse the earth. Now Jesus is the one. His blood cleanses us from sin through Christ, through His death on the cross, we have forgiveness for our sins. And you see, when we sin against God, it's like we're setting ourselves up at war with Him. We're opposing our lives to him and we're saying, here's how you called us to live, but I want to live life my way.

But now, through Christ, we can be forgiven of those sins. He took in his death. He took the death that we had earned and he took our death for us. He suffered in our place on our behalf. And if you have received Jesus Christ and allowed him to be your Savior, you, you're cleansed of all sins.

You're cleansed of those sins. And just like in the flood, though there's a chance that you might fall back into some of those sins. You might continue doing some of them. Just like they did after the flood. They kept sinning.

But the Scriptures tell us that we have an advocate with the Holy Spirit. He dwells within us. He speaks to us, he ministers to us. And if you're paying attention to him and allowing him in your life, he will, he will take up residence in you and he will call you to a life of holiness and righteousness before God. Baptism is part of this process.

Baptism doesn't save you. It's a symbol of being washed clean. It's a symbol of being, of your sins being washed away, of being like when you're lowered in the water in baptism, that's like you're dead. You've died to your old self. And when you come up out of the water, it symbolizes that new life in Jesus Christ.

Many, maybe most of you have experienced that. You've been baptized in your life and maybe some of you haven't. And if God calls you to that, it's time to obey. You see, in the days of Noah, they had this 120 year timeline or sentence. And I think in our day we don't have a number on it.

People that have tried to predict how long until Jesus returns have gotten it wrong 100% of the time. What I do know, eternity is real. We're created as eternal beings. This body isn't going to Be my forever body. You see, Jesus has given us the promise that we will rise again and that we will go to be with him and that he will give us a new body.

Your soul goes on for eternity. Your body will be made new. Amen. We've got this idea of baptism. We were buried, we're raised again to new life.

And yet one day we will step from life on this earth and into eternity. That's why we talk about having eternal life right now. When Christ saves you, you receive what's called eternal life. That's the term we've given it. It might not quite be accurate, because eternal life, you already have one way or the other, heaven or hell, life goes on.

But you receive eternal life with Christ. And so baptism does not grant you that, but it is the symbol of that. And it's saying, like, I have died to that, and I've risen again to new life. You think, why did I bring up baptism with this? Well, Peter did.

Okay, in First Peter 3:20, he talked about this. He links the. The ark with. With baptism. They went through the waters, then they came out of it afterwards, and God had cleansed them.

One of the neat things that I think happens in the flood story at the end of it is that when it's all said and done, God hangs a rainbow in the clouds, in the sky. And we think, oh, it's a reminder that God isn't going to do this again. He's not going to destroy us with a flood. God didn't say that. He gave it to you as a reminder.

You see, he. He. There's this idea of a warrior, and I think I put it in our notes. A warrior. When they would come home from battle, they would take their bow and arrow, they would put their bow and they would hang it over the door of their home.

I think in the Old west, they probably had a shotgun up there, you know, but, like, he would put the. They would put the bow over the door. And that bow was saying, I'm at peace. I'm not at war anymore. I'm at home with my family.

God puts his rainbow over us. Sad how that symbol has been hijacked for some other agenda. I don't even care what the agenda is. God made the rainbow for him, and we shouldn't take it for any other reason than that. But he hung his bow in the clouds.

He said. He says, when I see it, I will remember my commitment to you. He didn't say, when you see it, you'll remember that. I promised I won't destroy the earth ever again. He said, when I see it, it's almost like you're still so bad, you're still so wicked that God has to remind himself, don't flood them again.

Like, I figure there's a storm somewhere around, you know, the planet every, every day, every hour, probably there's a storm somewhere. There's a. That means there's a rainbow somewhere. Right now it's kind of like that song. Like it's five o' clock somewhere, which is weird because it's like, what if it's 4:32?

You know, like, it's not. Anyway, so it's like there's a rainbow somewhere, though, you know? And it's like somewhere God is seeing that rainbow and saying, I'm not going to destroy him. I'm not going to destroy them. But what he did was he took our sin.

He took the very thing that broke his heart. And Jesus offered himself up and he says, put it all on me. Put it all on me. All of their sin, all of their wickedness. Everything that they do that breaks your heart, put it on me.

I'm gonna take it to the grave so that it can never come alive again. I'm gonna die with all of their sin on me. And the beautiful thing was it didn't just cover the people that lived before Jesus. You see, the beautiful thing about the death of the Son of God is it covered all the way for everybody that would ever live. It covers their sin, yours and mine, and it covers our sins.

And Jesus took it and he said, I will take your sin and I will take it to the grave so that God will remember your sin against you no more. He'll never remember it. It's like when. When God looks at your sin. You know, we look at our lives and we look at all this stuff and we're like, well, see, you did this and this and this and this.

But what happens is God looks at it all, and all that he sees is that just a blank page. He says, I don't see your sin anymore. I don't see anything that you've done. All I see is the holiness and righteousness of Jesus Christ imputed or imparted to you. Amen.