Presented to Swift Current Corps of The Salvation Army, 29 Sept 2013
By Captain Michael Ramsay
By Captain Michael Ramsay
Today we are speaking about Noah so I found a few riddles about that to share here[1]:
- What did Noah say as he was loading the Ark?
Ø "Now I herd everything."
- Why did the people on the ark think the horses were pessimistic?
Ø They kept saying neigh.
- What animal could Noah not trust?
Ø The cheetah.
- Why couldn't they play cards on the ark?
Ø Noah was sitting on the deck.
- Who was the first canning factory run by?
Ø Noah, he had a boat full of preserved pairs.
- Was Noah the first one out of the Ark?
Ø No, he came fourth out of the ark.
Before we chat a little bit about Noah we should probably have a little bit of context. Noah is one story among many in the book of Genesis, so let’s recap what those of us who have been reading Genesis have read in the chapters leading up to the Noah episode.[2]
Remember in the beginning of Genesis? Remember the creation story?[3] By the third day God had finished making the earth and the sky and the sea and by the sixth day He had completed and rested from making birds and animals and people to live in their environments. God makes this beautiful world that He loves and it is good and He creates good people –Adam and Eve, whom we spoke about last week - to look after it, but sin creeps in and this breaks God’s heart; so He needs to remove people from the land He put us in. [4]
Not long after this time Cain, Adam and Eve’s firstborn son, also falls prey to sin, killing his brother and becoming further removed from the Lord and the land he is working (Genesis 4). God loves us so much that He even warns Cain before Cain succumbs to sin. He tells him, Genesis 4:7b, “But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.”[5] Humanity nonetheless defies God and falls prey to sin; so again humanity needs to be removed from the land that was entrusted to us. God still loves His creation. He gave us, His children, this responsibility to look after His creation for Him and twice now, with Adam and Eve and with Cain, He has had to give us a time-out and twice now He has felt the need to remove us from the very land that He had asked us to look after on His behalf. This makes God sad.[6]
Now, it is only a few chapters further along in the story. The years have gone on and God has many more children whom He loves and they are still being disobedient, even with the examples of those before them.[7] As a matter of fact, they are worse than ever. Genesis 6:5-6: “The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The Lord was grieved that He had made man on the earth, and His heart was filled with pain.” Again God seems to be left with little choice but to remove us from the land for which we are responsible. This time actually instead of taking us away from the land, He takes the land away from us drowning the world in His sorrows, and leaving his chosen property managers – Noah and Sons - floating until the property is ready for them.
Noah, of course, is in the direct lineage of Jesus Christ who is the Saviour of the whole world. On the family tree (or family vine, as the case may be) that we are reproducing of our Lord, Noah -generations before Christ- is the one God chooses as a vehicle to save us here as God re-creates the whole world. It is after God’s salvation of humanity via Noah and it is after God’s promise of further mercy for His creation; it is after God lovingly makes the rainbow to symbolize His promise to never destroy the earth by floodwaters again; it is after the people –Noah’s family – leave the boat, the Ark; it is at this point after we have had so much relief following a disaster of such magnitude that we experience a very strange part of Scripture.
God says, Genesis 9:15-29:
I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”
So God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.”
The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth. (Ham was the father of Canaan.) These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the whole earth.
Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father’s naked body. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father naked.
When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son [Ham] had done to him, he said, “Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers.” He also said, “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Shem! May Canaan be the slave of Shem. May God extend Japheth’s territory; may Japheth live in the tents of Shem, and may Canaan be the slave of Japheth.”
After the flood Noah lived 350 years. Noah lived a total of 950 years, and then he died.
This is the conclusion of the Noah story. The Noah story doesn’t end with rainbows and bunny rabbits.[8] The Noah story doesn’t end with a happy celebration after the flood. The Noah story doesn’t end in hugs and kisses and choirs of angels. The Noah story ends with Noah getting drunk and his youngest son doing something –we don’t really know what he does – his youngest son does something which results in Noah cursing, not the offender but the offender’s child who is Noah’s own grandson. Noah calls out a curse on Canaan, his own grandson; his descendants will be slaves of his uncle’s descendants. Have you ever wondered why God and the Bible conclude the Noah story this way? Does it strike anyone else as strange? And what did Ham do that causes Noah (Ham’s dad) to curse Canaan (Ham’s son)? What exactly was it that Ham did to provoke Noah into cursing Canaan, who is Noah’s own grandson?
Verses 21-23, again reads: “When he [Noah] drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father’s naked body. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father naked.” Then Noah wakes up and curses his grandson, the son of his son who, Verse 22, “saw his father naked and told his two brothers”. What was so wrong with this?
First in understanding what is so wrong with this we need to understand a certain idiomatic euphemism; can anyone tell me what is an euphemism or an idiom? An euphemism is a vague or a gentler way to say something and an idiom is a phrase that we all know what it means but it means something other than what it literally says. It is an expression for something. I have some idiomatic euphemisms. Let’s see who can tell me what they mean?
- Turn a blind eye to something
- Caught red-handed
- He blew his fuse
- The apple doesn’t fall to far from the tree
- Dog’s breakfast
I used to be involved in the administration of international colleges. You can imagine how confusing idioms like this would be for our students who didn’t speak English as a first language. What would they think if they heard the following: “He had always turned a blind eye to it but today he really blew his fuse because the whole place was a dog’s breakfast.” If English isn’t your first language you’re not really going to know what is going on.
Today we have before us in our text, one of those idiomatic euphemisms from ancient Hebrew: “seeing his father’s nakedness”. This phrase – in the Bible, in the Old Testament, in the Pentateuch – has often been used as an expression for sexual activity.[9] For one example – and there are many examples - Leviticus records that you should not have sexual relations with – literally, ‘you should not uncover the nakedness’ of a close relative (Leviticus 18:16). Ezekiel sometimes also uses this idiomatic euphemism to refer specifically to violent or other illicit sexual encounters (Ezekiel 16:36-37; 22:10; 23:10, 18,29).
This has caused scholars to interpret Ham’s sin in various ways.
A few people simply see Ham’s sin here as literally looking at his naked father but that argument doesn’t seem to really – if you will excuse the idiomatic euphemism, that argument doesn’t seem to ‘hold any water.’ Some Jewish scholars see Ham’s sin as castrating his father in order to usurp his authority. I can’t find any Biblical support for that.[10]
Many scholars these days recognize that since the phrase, ‘uncover his father’s nakedness’ usually refers to sexual activity that there is some sort of sexual encounter here. Quite popular, these days, is the opinion that Ham lay with his drunken or passed out father. The problem with that theory is that it doesn’t explain why Noah cursed Ham’s son rather than Ham himself.
As a result of this and readings of other texts, scholars acknowledge that the phrase, ‘uncover his father’s nakedness’, can also refer to acting like Oedipus and having relations with his own mother. The phrase is used this way in Leviticus 18:7-8 as well (cf. Leviticus 18:14-16; 20:11, cf. also Deuteronomy 23:1, 27:20).[11] If that is true, that would certainly better explain why his child is cursed rather than just Ham himself, especially if his child is the product of this illicit relationship.
But none of this is 100% agreed upon. What is agreed upon is this: whatever it is that Ham did, it is serious. Whatever it is that Ham did, it caused his own son to be cursed. Whatever it is that Ham did, it caused Noah to curse his own grandchild. Whatever it is that Ham did, it caused his family to be cursed after they were already saved from the flood. Whatever this heinous sin here is, that Ham did, it is the note upon which the whole Noah story ends. The short version of the flood story in the context of Genesis is then as follows:
Ø God makes mankind (Adam and Eve) and He loves them
Ø They sin horribly in the garden and suffer the consequences
Ø God still loves them and makes provisions for their safety
Ø Man (Cane) sins horribly by killing his own brother and suffers the consequences
Ø God still loves him and makes provisions for his safety
Ø Mankind sins horribly – ‘doing only evil all the time’ – and suffers the consequences of the flood
Ø God still loves them and makes provisions for their safety
Ø Mankind then sins horribly with this story of Ham and Noah and suffers the consequences
And around and around we go…
Well, how about our own lives? Are we any better? How many times do our lives get so overwhelming that we cry out to the Lord, we see how miraculously God delivers us from our problems and then over time we drift further and further away from the Lord and holiness and instead we drift closer and closer to sin and death? How many people have said at some point, “God if you do such and such for me, I will do such and such in my life” only to have God help you and then you forget –maybe not right away but - over time you don’t uphold your part of the bargain? Or how about those of us who have known God for a long time? There was a time when we realized that we have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God. There was a time when we realized that we can’t make it without God. There was a time when we realized that we needed to board the Ark of eternal Salvation. There was a time when we asked Jesus to come into our hearts and there was a time when we turned our lives totally over to God. For many of us then, as time goes on, there is the temptation to either doubt or forget all that God has done for us; for many of us then, as time goes on, there is the temptation to either doubt or forget how important it is what God did for us; and then, some of us, as time goes on, are we tempted to proceed to do whatever is the equivalent in our life is of ‘uncovering our father’s nakedness’?
Today, many of us are just like Noah’s family. Today, many of us have experienced (and are experiencing) the Salvation that was provided by the ‘Jesus Ark’ so many years ago. Today, many years after landing safely on the dry ground of our relationship with our Lord, the devil can tempt any of us, to forget what the Lord has done for us and commit whatever the equivalent in our life is of ‘uncovering our father’s nakedness’.
God loved Noah and Noah’s family. God saved Ham (and by extension Canaan) from the flood in which so many people perished. Yet Ham committed some heinous act that caused him to turn the blessing of salvation he received from the flood into a curse for generations to come. God saved Ham. Ham turned on God and his father and Ham and his family missed out on the full blessing of the salvation that his brothers and their families experienced.
Today, if there are any of us here who haven’t boarded the Salvation Ark, I would invite us to do so before we are engulfed in the eternal flood. To those of us who have indeed boarded the Ark of Salvation and have landed on dry land maybe many years ago, I encourage us to please keep strong. Let us remember how God saves us and let us turn not on our Father but instead let us turn to our Father (cf. TSA doc 9). For when we love God and when we love our neighbour in this way, all curses will be ultimately be erased and we will live out our Salvation for now and evermore with our Lord and Saviour.
Let us pray.
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[1] ‘The Riddles are from Noah’s Ark Riddles’ on The English Humour Wikki http://mirth.wikia.com/wiki/Noah's_Ark_RiddlesGod loves us.
[2] Cf Captain Michael Ramsay, 'Genesis 6:5-7: This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.' Presented to Swift Current Corps of The Salvation Army, (Sheepspeak.com: Swift Current:10 June 2012). On-line: http://sheepspeaks.blogspot.ca/2012/06/genesis-65-7-this-is-going-to-hurt-me.html
[3] Cf. Captain Michael Ramsay, Room for Creation (Sheepspeak: Swift Current: 2012) and Captain Michael Ramsay,The Appeal of Creation: Genesis 1, Romans 1. Presented to the Nipawin Corps, (Sheepspeak.com: Nipawin SK: 07 June 2009),On-line: http://sheepspeaks.blogspot.ca/2009/06/appeal-of-creation-genesis-1-romans-1.html
[4] Cf. Captain Michael Ramsay,Genesis 1-4: God: Creator, Governor, and Preserver of All Things. Presented to Swift Current Corps of The Salvation Army (Sheepspeak.com: Swift Current: 26 Feb 2012). Available on-line: http://sheepspeaks.blogspot.ca/2012/02/genesis-1-4-god-creator-governor-and.html
[5] Cf. Captain Michael Ramsay,'Genesis 4:7b: Sin is Crouching at Your Door'. Presented to Swift Current Corps of The Salvation Army, (Sheepspeak.com: Swift Current, SK: 03 June 2012). Available on-line: http://sheepspeaks.blogspot.ca/2012/05/genesis-47b-sin-is-crouching-at-your.html
[6] Cf. Derek Kidner: Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary. Downers Grove, IL : InterVarsity Press, 1967 (Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries 1), S. 91
[8] But cf. W. Sibley Towner, “Genesis 9:8-17.” Interpretation 63, no. 2 (April 1, 2009): 168-171.
[9] Scott Sietze Bergsma and Scott Walker Hahn, “Noah’s Nakedness and the Curse on Canaan (Genesis 9:20-27).” Journal of Biblical Literature 124, no. 1 (2005): 25-40.
[10] But cf. Graves and Patai, Hebrew Myths, 122 for non-Biblical examples. Cited from Scott Sietze Bergsma and Scott Walker Hahn, “Noah’s Nakedness and the Curse on Canaan (Genesis 9:20-27).” Journal of Biblical Literature 124, no. 1 (2005): 29.
[11] Scott Sietze Bergsma and Scott Walker Hahn, “Noah’s Nakedness and the Curse on Canaan (Genesis 9:20-27).” Journal of Biblical Literature 124, no. 1 (2005): 25-40.
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