True Grace

Genesis 9:20 – “Noah began to be a man of the soil, and he planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent.”

In the above verse, we see this great man of God fall into sin. Many scholars liken this fall to the fall Adam and Eve experienced in previous chapters of Genesis. Noah was a righteous man, he was blameless in his generation and he walked with God (Gen 6:9). Yet, here he is a few chapters later and he is drunk and naked. What happens in a man’s life that could make the righteousness pendulum swing from one extreme to another? How does someone go from righteous and blameless to sinful and shameful?

There is one thing that we must understand if we are going to learn how to love people unconditionally. When God ransomed Noah and his family from His judgment of the earth, He did so knowing that sin would still continue in the world. God did not wipe out all sin on the earth; sin continued because Noah and his family were spared and they still had sin in their lives. When it comes to others, we must realize that we all have sin. No one is perfect and everyone deals with some sort of sin whether in secret or in public. The question then remains, “Are we willing to love that person despite of their sin?”

Noah’s first recorded act after exiting the ark is building an altar to The Lord (Gen 8:20). In this act of Noah’s worship to the Lord, God responds to the “pleasing aroma” with an acknowledgment that we all should acknowledge. God said, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done”. Because man is evil in every intention of his heart; God will never again curse the earth and will never again strike down every living creature? God’s statement seems backwards. It seems that God should have said, “I will continue to curse the ground and strike down every living creature, because every intention of man’s heart is evil.” We need to acknowledge that every intention of our hearts is evil. I John 1:8 – “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us”.

This is the beauty of God’s love. He sees man’s sin, he looks at man’s heart, He considers man’s intentions and He smells the “pleasing aroma” of THE SACRIFICE then He responds with GRACE. Col 2:18 – “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.”