Welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the Book of Genesis. This is study #12 of Genesis, chapter 6 and we are going to read Genesis 6:8-9:

But Noah found grace in the eyes of JEHOVAH. These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.

I will stop reading there. In our last study we discussed how God’s salvation program was in effect at the time of the days of Noah in the time before the flood, just as it was from the beginning until the beginning of the Day of Judgment. There was no difference from the very beginning when God saved Abel, the first person saved, until God saved the last one before He shut the door of heaven on May 21, 2011. Every person God has saved was saved in the same way. There is different language used to describe it, like we are justified by the faith of Christ or by His righteousness or by the grace of God. God saves all sinners by grace because sinners do not deserve salvation. There has never been a sinner (anyone that has transgressed the Law of God) who has obtained salvation through any other way than of grace; that is, no sinner has ever earned God’s salvation. No one has ever sacrificed enough sacrificial animals to obtain God’s salvation, for example. God revealed in the Book of Hebrews that no man was ever justified by the Old Testament sacrifices.

No man has ever kept the Law of God perfectly and it would have to be perfect; if you were to go that route, you would have to keep the entire Law perfectly and there has never been a single individual that was justified by the Law. That is why God says in Galatians 2:16: “Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ.” No man has ever obtained righteousness through his own good works. A good work is defined as an act of obedience to the Law of God. It has never happened, so there are none that deserve salvation and there are none that have earned it by working for it. There is actually no possible way for a sinner to enter into the kingdom of heaven and to live forever through his own merit. It is an impossibility. That is why Jesus said, “With men it is impossible,” because this is where salvation enters in, as He added, “For with God all things are possible.” We are not born by the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. Salvation always points to God as the one that does the action. God will have mercy upon whom He will have mercy and He will have compassion upon whom He will have compassion. It is all related to His wonderful grace and “Noah found grace in the eyes of JEHOVAH.” It was necessary that Noah find grace in God’s eyes. Notice that it does not say, “Noah found grace with God,” but it says, “But Noah found grace in the eyes of JEHOVAH.” Why does it say it this way? What has JEHOVAH’s eyes witnessed concerning mankind? If we go to Hebrews, chapter 4 the Bible will tell us, in Hebrews 4:13:

Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do.

The all-seeing eyes of JEHOVAH have seen what man has done. He has seen the evil, the violence, the hatred, the lust and the evil desires. He has seen all the wicked acts man has been involved in and He has heard all the evil words men have spoken and, more than that, He has looked down with His penetrating gaze that can see into the hearts of men and He sees the desperately wicked nature of every human being conceived in sin and born speaking lies. And this applies to everyone that has ever lived. This is what the eyes of JEHOVAH see and that is why it was necessary that Noah find grace in the eyes of JEHOVAH. I know I am stressing this, but let me say it again. Noah was like the people that perished in the flood, in that he was also a sinner and the only reason that Noah did not die in the flood under the wrath of God was because of God’s granting His favor upon Noah due to His grace in His magnificent salvation program where He chose certain people before the foundation of the world. It was not due to anything in them, but it was because God had determined to make a people holy for Himself – He would make them holy. He would take away all their sins by paying for their sins. He would pay the wages of sin which is death. He would thereby justify them and make them righteous, as it says of Noah: “Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations.” Why was Noah just and perfect? It was because God made him just and perfect, unlike the rest of the world that was unjust and imperfect and without holiness. God saved Noah and bestowed His wonderful mercy upon them and bestowed this wonderful thing called “grace” upon him and now Noah was different. He would not die in the flood and he would have eternal life.

The word “just” in Genesis 6, verse 9 is Strong’s #6662 and it is also translated as “righteous.” In the next chapter it says in Genesis 7:1:

And JEHOVAH said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.

The word “righteous” is the same Hebrew word. Noah was a “just” or “righteous” man and God brought him into the ark because he saw Noah as righteous before Him. He had found grace in the eyes of JEHOVAH and God emphasizing what He sees when He looks upon Noah. Maybe it would be better to say that when God looked upon Noah, He sees no sin. As God looks upon a man that is not one of His elect, He only sees mountains of sin, but when God searches the heart of a man like Noah who has become saved by His grace, He performs a “scan.” It reminds me of when you get a virus on your computer, you run a “scan” and it searches your computer for the virus infection. It searches thousands of pieces of data that are unseen to us and the proper software will perform a scan of the system and find “corrupt” files to purge out. This is similar to what God has done. He has taken the whole ugly mass of sin that infects a man and He has purged it from the one He has saved. He has removed it completely and there is no more disease of sin. There is no more plague of leprosy. There is no more corruption in the inner man. After a person has received that new born again soul that is without sin, as it says in 1John, God can come at any point thereafter to perform a “scan” that will find him just and righteous in His sight. He will find no wickedness in him and, therefore, God can say of a man like Noah that he was “a just man and perfect in his generations.”

The same word translated as “just” is found in Genesis 18, where it is translated as “righteous.” It says in Genesis 18:23:

And Abraham drew near, and said, Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked?

Abraham was interceding on behalf of Sodom because his nephew Lot lived there and the Bible tells us that Lot was righteous. So the countdown begins and Abraham asks God if He will destroy the city if there were 50 righteous men or 40 righteous men, and so forth. The answer of God is that He will not destroy the righteous with the wicked and that is why God goes (in the form of two angels) to warn Lot. Lot, in turn, warned his family and God brought righteous Lot out of the city before He destroyed it. That is significant. God did not just go and destroy the city with Lot within it. That would not be something the Lord would do, as He will not destroy the righteous with the wicked – that is a Biblical principal.

And, so it was with Noah and his family. The righteous were put on board the ark and then God destroyed the wicked. Spiritually, that would mean that God would first have to save all those to be saved (all the righteous) before bringing Judgment Day to pass and that is what He did do and that is why we say that the entire company of the elect were found and the great multitude was saved, including the complete number of all those whose names were written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. The last one to become saved probably coincided with the end of the Great Tribulation and the shutting of the door to heaven and then God began to judge the wicked. The living elect remain on the earth and they are safe and secure in Christ, just as Noah and his family were safe and secure in the ark, which typified Christ. The elect of God are within the safe chamber, as the Lord tells us in Isaiah 26:20: “Come, my people, enter thou into thy chambers, and shut thy doors about thee: hide thyself as it were for a little moment, until the indignation be overpast.” So God’s people are safely hid. Their life is hid with Christ, as it says in Colossians, in salvation and we cannot be harmed in any real way as we go through this time of Judgment Day that has come upon the world, just as Noah and his family were not harmed as they remained on the earth and they went through the judgment of the flood. They were not raptured out of the world. They were lifted upon the waters and they remained on the earth in the ark, just as God’s people remain on the earth in Christ as we go through this prolonged period of Judgment Day.

Let us now take a look at Ecclesiastes, chapter 7 where it will reinforce what we have been saying about Noah. It says in Ecclesiastes 7:20:

For there is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not.

Noah was a just man, but God says in this verse that all men sin. Noah was a just man, but it is not possible for those that have been made just by the grace of God to do “good” and sin not; that is, they will still commit sins. From time to time, they will still fall into sin. David was a man after God’s own heart and, yet, we know the Bible tells us of sin he fell into and it is the same with Joseph, Daniel or Noah, these other men of great faith that God used mightily in their time. Each man was a just man and, yet, the Bible reveals in Ecclesiastes 7:20 that they were still sinners and they did commit sin while being a just man. There are no exceptions to this. It is not possible for a saved person that remains in their physical bodies not to sin. We know that the physical body is still unsaved and it has seen corruption, so it is impossible for a saved person not to sin in some form (word, deed or thought) even after salvation. It is not possible for a just man to do “good” and be free of sin. There is some sin that is still committed by just men and, yet, when he does commit sin, does God see the sin? No – because that sin, too, has been paid for and it has been forgiven and removed as far as the East from the West. Jesus died for that sin, also, and it is cast into the depths of the sea along with all the other ugly sins and it does not bring condemnation to the child of God.

After God saved Noah, he was a just man and perfect because he found grace in the eyes of the Lord, but, perhaps, the next day Noah said something sinful or he thought something sinful or he did something sinful. God would not have said that Noah was now unjust or no longer righteous in His sight. God would not say that Noah had “fallen from grace.” God no longer sees sin in Noah and he remains perfect in God’s sight. God may chastise Noah, just as he did to David to correct him and teach him not to do a particular sin and, yet, when God looks at Noah, he sees no sin. If God saw sin at any time it would place a man back under the wrath of God and he would be destroyed like every unsaved person, but that is not how God works.

You know, we really have a salvation that is too wonderful for words and which God has wrought for us. God’s mercy and grace in this salvation gift is “fool proof.” That is a good description, is it not? The natural-minded man is a “fool.” Even if someone that was truly saved were to go about to intentionally try to void salvation, he could not because it is impossible to thwart God’s salvation plan because He has paid for the past sins, present sins and future sins of all His elect. Remember, Christ paid for these sins from the foundation of the world before we were ever born, so He did not just pay for our sins for the first 20 years of our lives or up to the point of the application of salvation, but He paid for the entire number of sins we would ever do – even after we became saved. He paid it in full and, therefore, they are all washed away and removed from us.

You know, man is good at “gumming up the works” or messing things up, but no matter how someone might try, if they were truly one of God’s elect saved by His sceptre of grace, he cannot foul up God’s salvation. If God applied His mercy and grace through the hearing of His Word during the time He was still saving people, then you were washed by the Word and all iniquity is gone from you in the sight of God. You and I and all of God’s elect stand in “white, fine linen,” the robe of Christ’s righteousness. We have His breastplate of righteousness upon us. We have His holiness and His perfection. We might sin, but He can never sin, so even if we do sin, it has already been accounted for and justice has already been served for that sin. The Law demanded that He who sins must die and Jesus did die for each one of the sins of His elect. We do not continue to sin that grace might abound. We should not sin because we are “free to sin,” in a sense, but the love of Christ constrains us and the new spirit within us gives us an ongoing desire to do the will of God and to keep His commandments. We do so, not to obtain righteousness, but because God has graciously and kindly blessed us so richly that we want to do the will of God.