40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 40 Minutes In The Old Testament: Episode 15

Episode Date: May 6, 2015

When Saints get drunk and naked.

you are listening to a podcast produced and distributed by christholdfast.com please visit christholdfast.com for additional resources this is 40 minutes in the old testament Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. This is episode 15. I am Daniel Emery Price, and I am joined by Brandon Hanson and Chad Bird. And I don't know, we might be making a habit out of doing this early, early in the morning. So me and Brandon are, it kind of, you've got like three stages of awakeness here. Chad's super awake I'm kind of awake

And Brandon I don't think is awake But he's here I don't know what's going on He's alive But I'm glad to be here Wherever we are Well I've heard that this show Puts people to sleep

So you might be back asleep By the end of this I was hoping to be woken up by this That's a bad assumption Maybe we got some we got some caffeine material here today so everybody's gonna be fully awake here in just a few minutes sweet we'll do it do it chad all right uh welcome back everybody glad that you're that you're joining us uh as as usual i've got a couple pots of coffee in me

seven o'clock we're uh we're ready to go we are uh in chapter nine of genesis and we're finishing up the story of noah today we've spent oh i don't know what three four sessions on the story of noah and the flood just because there's lots of great material here and we're gonna we're gonna wrap it up today with a one of the most uh interesting stories in in the book of genesis It opens all sorts of topics of discussion, and hopefully you will profit from these. Lots of different topics to cover in the last story that we have about Noah. We wrapped up last time talking about the end of the flood and Noah and his family coming out of the ark. They offered the sacrifices, and we have God establishing the covenant with Noah.

and with his descendants, put the rainbow, that weapon of war in the sky as the covenant sign that the warfare was ended, that God was at peace with his people. And it almost seems like the story should have ended there. Like that was a good conclusion to the story of Noah. but that's that's almost almost a setup if you will because if you remember early on when we were talking about noah we learned that when noah was born his dad thought that he might be he might be the promised seed in fact he probably was was convinced that he was because he thought that noah was the one who was going to give them rest from the ground which had been cursed so you have these high expectations of noah and he's described as uh you know blameless in his

generation. He was righteous. He found favor in the eyes of the Lord, and so we have Noah doing all of these things, building an ark for the salvation of his household. We have the flood. We have the flood receding. We have everybody coming out of the ark, and everything seems to be good, if not very good, almost as if you could get the impression that maybe Noah was this promised seed. He's like a new Adam. Here you have a new creation, everything purged by the waters of the flood. And that's why it's all almost deceptive in a sense, because we're reading along, we're thinking, yeah, everything's kind of falling into place. Maybe this Noah character is the promised seed and then you get this jolt at the very end of noah's life beginning in chapter

9 verse 18 and then through the rest of the chapter we find out for sure that uh not only is noah not the promised seed he is a sinner just like the rest of us there's absolutely no difference between Noah and anybody else, and that if we hold him up to be some great hero, someone that we look up to and seek to emulate in our lives of faith, then we're in for a shock, because it turns out that Noah, just like every single other quote-unquote quote, hero of the faith is a sinner, is somebody who makes the same kind of mistakes that we make, who falls into sin, and then there's repercussions around that, all sorts of problems with his family and whatnot. So let's dive in. Let's take a look at this story and see what

But the Spirit is teaching us through the story of Noah. If you're following along or if you're just listening, we're in verse 18, chapter 9. And here we have something that the Bible will do on occasion. It'll throw in a little tidbit, a little seemingly insignificant bit of information about one of the biblical characters that's going to be important later on. and in this case, it's important immediately in the story following. We've heard all along about the three sons of Noah. They've been mentioned several times, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

We know their names. They've been included in the story right up to the beginning, but here in verse 18, it mentions that Ham was the father of Canaan. Like I said, a seemingly insignificant parenthetical comment, But as the story unfolds, we see why it's mentioned here, why Canaan is mentioned as the son of Ham. So here's a situation where we're after the flood. And how long after the flood? We don't know. But it's long enough at least for Noah to start farming and to plant a vineyard.

and for those vines to grow and to produce fruit and for that fruit to be used to make wine. Because we read here in the first couple of verses of the story that Noah began farming and planted a vineyard and he drank of the wine and became drunk and uncovered himself inside his tent. So, here we have this scene in Noah's life which is seemingly at odds with what we've learned about Noah so far. But it's only seemingly at odds if we're reading the scriptures, as some people are prone to do, with blinders on.

Very often, and maybe this dates all the way back to our Sunday school days, if you were a Sunday school student. I remember when I was growing up in a very faithful Southern Baptist household, church three times a week, Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday evening. I remember from my earliest days hearing all about the story of Noah and the flood. I mean, I knew, you know, the animals and the ark and the flood and who was in it. I knew the whole story, but I never once was taught this last story of Noah, which is pretty typical. We're exposed to the good stories about the patriarchs and the prophets, but we're not exposed to the whole story, the rest of the story about them. So I never was told, and maybe growing up in a Southern Baptist household, that kind of made sense. In a Southern Baptist church, that made sense.

We're not going to talk about what happened after the flood of Noah. So Noah, he plants a vineyard, and he consumes of its fruit. And not only is he drunk, but he, I suppose, he just gets naked inside his tent. and collapses in his drunkenness. And that's where we find him in this story. So that's not a side of Noah that we're accustomed to talking about, is it? The drunk naked Noah? Yeah, I don't remember any of my children's books,

children's Bible stories books, having a section called Drunk Naked Noah. You didn't have like the felt board where you put the drunk naked Noah in the tent? like that's not that was not part of it no that was that was never in my sunday school room uh which is uh which tells us a lot doesn't it it tells us a lot about uh how we we like to edit these these stories which is which is fascinating to me because perhaps that reveals where we are theologically more than anything else if we're if really our our our approach to the biblical story is to find and to isolate and only to teach the stories in which the good people are depicted in a good light living very sanctified lives really all we're doing is projecting our own theology

onto our reading of the scriptures you're trying to make the bible pg i mean the bible is like an r-rated book it's like all there's all kinds of things in there that are uh are quite scandalous and um and and i think your felt boards like have to have like censorship bars and all of that sort of thing on them too but we don't want to deal with any of that yeah i haven't haven't forbid that uh we delve into some of the stories of the of the judges i mean if we once we get there and i don't know when that's going to be we're still in genesis but uh eventually we'll get there uh yeah we might have to uh put some sort of rating on these these podcasts uh certainly in our rating because there's some pretty uh pretty uh r-rated stories that you find scattered throughout the

book of judges but not just there you find them in in genesis as well we are we're looking for biblical stories which support our own very edited theology a theology that's that's very focused upon living the kind of life that we think is going to earn favor with god make us feel better about ourselves in relation to god because it's based upon our own righteousness based upon our our uh self-perceived high level of sanctification yeah we edit out edit out these these other stories yeah when we say that the bible is about sin and redemption or the fall and redemption this kind of thing it's like a nice it's like a nice way of saying saying what's really going on the bible is as a book or a collection of books full of stories of when we say the fall or we say

sin what's really there is a collection of adultery and prostitution and rape and infidelity and murder and then one innocent guy going and dying for all those things that's what's really going on there and it's not just you know it the bible is a book of white lies and a good teacher teaching us how to be better. That is not what's going on there. There's a large amount of prostitution and murder in the Bible and drunkenness. And drunkenness. A lot of nudity in the Bible.

There's a lot of nudity. Yeah, it's a it's a it's an account that is is checkered with all sorts of stories that really are a clear depiction of the fallen state of humanity that that we're exposed to every day because we're in it. were part of it. And people were no different back then. The same kinds of horrific stories that we see in the news or we see actually, you know, acted out on TV, they're all here in the scriptures. There's nothing different about humanity now than it was back then. Every intent of the thoughts of man's heart was only evil continually. We saw in Genesis a couple of chapters ago and the same continues same continues today so i i guess one question we should ask is is why why do the scriptures not edit out these kinds of stories you know why why would moses

include this story about noah getting drunk and fallen there naked in his tent why would he include the story of Jacob's family. He's married to two sisters. And it's like Norman Rockwell's nightmare, his family. You have him married to two sisters. You have all sorts of division amongst his sons, all kinds of jealousy going on. You've got incest within Jacob's family. and you've got uh one of his sons uh being deceived by his daughter-in-law into having sex with her she's dressed up as a prostitute and so he goes to her that's that's judah and then it continues you know you don't have to go very far in the rest of the scriptures to see story after story of the people of god we're not talking about gross atheistic unbelievers we're

talking about the people of God, people in the church of the Old Testament, doing some really bad things. The Bible definitively tells you that sex is the undefeated champion of the world. It's the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. You get in the ring with sex, you lose every time. It's never lost. You have to either—you know who knew this? Joseph knew this.

Joseph knew that sex was the undefeated heavyweight champion of the world. That's why he ran. Because if you get in the ring, you lose. Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, even in Genesis itself, we see over and over nudity and sex of various kinds connected with the downfalls of the people of God. now i think it's uh especially instructive for us to ask then why these stories were were included why are the failures of our fathers put down in black and white for generation

after generation to read and this continues in the new testament as well we have paul confronting Peter in the book of Galatians, because Peter was basically acting as if he had a better righteousness than the Gentiles. So this is not something that's just restricted to the Old Testament. And the reason is, it is quite clear as well as surprising. The reason these stories are included are that we who fall into the same kinds of sins, we who fall into sexual sins or sins of drunkenness or sins of lying or sins of whatever it might be, we can find extreme comfort in the stories that we find of other saints falling into these sins because we see, first of all, that we're part of a common fallen humanity, that there's not something

which is different about us than is different in Noah or in David or in Judah or in any other of the big names in the Old Testament. We're just like they are. But the comfort is that when they fall into sin, God doesn't abandon them. he doesn't cast them aside when they've when they've messed up and say i'm done with you instead he is there to call them back to himself to forgive them and to restore them over and over that's what we see he's not a god who gives up on people when they mess up he's a God who seeks them out, who calls them back to himself, who forgives them, and who restores them

as his beloved children. So when we see these stories, like Noah, drunk-naked Noah, or adulterous, murderous David, or the prostitute-seeking Judah, or any other biblical story in which a person who is part of the people of God, a person who is part of the church of God, falls, what we see is ourselves in that fall, and we see the God who sought out Adam and Eve, who sought out Noah, who sought out everyone else who had fallen, seeking us out and calling us back and restoring us as forgiven saints.

So we have in the story of Noah our story. It's a story of all of us, and it's a gift of God that it's included because it's in this particular story that we see that we have a gracious, compassionate God who calls us to himself. But this is only part of the story. We've barely gotten into it, so let's keep moving because there's another aspect to this that we need to talk about. um so here we are in the in the story we have noah in his tent uh drunk and naked so what happens next it says that ham the father of canaan saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside but sham and japheth took a garment and laid it upon both their shoulders and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father and their faces were turned away

so that they did not see their father's nakedness. So we got a couple of things going on here, a couple of different reactions to Noah's naked, drunken state. And I want to talk about those for for a few minutes. You've got the action of Ham, and then you have the action of his two brothers, Shem and Japheth. And these two reactions to their father's sin could not be more different. The way that they approach what happens to their father, the way they approach what their father did, reveals two different approaches to the way that we react to someone else's downfall. And in these reactions we have, and the results that follow, we have God illustrating for us how he wants us to react in love to the downfall of our father or our

brother, whoever it might be. Notice what Ham does. He sees the nakedness of his father, and he goes outside and he tells his two brothers about it. So what he didn't do is as important as what he did do. When he saw his father in his drunk-naked state, he should have kept his mouth shut to begin with. There was no reason for him to say anything about it, certainly no reason for him to go outside and to spread the word about what his father had done.

And in so doing, to bring shame upon his father, to dishonor his father. And in so doing, also to make himself appear as if he was more righteous than his father. It's as if he wants his two brothers to realize, first of all, how bad their dad is. Look what he did. Look how disgraceful this is. but any time that someone boasts about someone else's sin, they're at the same time boasting about their own righteousness. They're saying, look how bad he is, and by implication, they're saying, look how good I am. Look at this unrighteous act that our Father has done,

and thus look at the righteousness that I have in contrast. so you have ham talking about the unrighteousness of his father and bragging about his own righteousness and he does this publicly he's telling he he's he's telling his two his two brothers about it and in so doing he is trying to turn these brothers against their father so you can see it there's this ripple effect the the more that the more that ham talks the worse it gets he doesn't cover up the nakedness of his father he goes outside and he uncovers it he doesn't act in love he acts out of the opposite of love so he he uncovers the nakedness of his father publicly he reveals this sin for which there was no reason to reveal it he should have

concealed it but he reveals it and he tries to bring his two brothers into into the sin as well by revealing it to them what ham does is instead of acting out of love instead of acting out of concealment he does the exact opposite he acts out of self-love he acts out of self-righteousness in revealing the the sins of his father you know when it talks about whenever i read nakedness of of his father i i think i mean obviously you're talking about literal nakedness but that's this is just really a way of saying of saying his shame so it's kind of the whole thing they're drunk naked and then to to go and say look our father is naked and to reveal his nakedness is to reveal his shame and and he tries to get his brothers to come and take a look at the shame

and like this is one of the things that that we're we love this uh because we're we are addicted to scandal and so uh we can't stop talking about uh something scandalous and juicy and there's there's one family in the whole world and this is the most scandalous thing going on and this is why this is why gossip magazines and stuff sell it's why they're sitting there on the shelf is because um here's here's all these things um that you're not supposed to know about like that you didn't know about there are all these secret things and you can flip through the pages of this and find out about all these scandalous things that all these people have done and uh and this this is what he's he's doing and all of that is just an attempt i mean and gossip magazines you know

are mostly fabricated i would assume but uh but it's a way to feed that desire in you to read about other people's nakedness and and then uh i mean this is exactly what we do because we say can you believe blank the implication of that as you said is can you believe this when you gossip about someone you are looking for somebody to come in agreement with you that you are more righteous than whoever you're talking about that's what you're doing you're You're trying to find people to agree that you are better than whoever you're talking about. That's why you do it. You're not content to just see someone's shame.

Scandal is much like joy. So C.S. Lewis says that joy is not fully realized until it's shared. And so if I have joy in something, if my daughter does something that I'm very proud of, that joy is not complete until i tell you about it and so i tell you and that's why parents brag on their kids and they say you wouldn't believe my daughter did she did this this and this and then that joy is sort of complete because i've shared it well scandal is like is like the dark the dark side of that where you are not content just knowing something scandalous about someone you have to share it with someone else and then that is that with as many people as you can

And so it's sort of the twisted, depraved opposite of a good thing, which is joy. And then you have this. You have gossip or scandal or whatever it is. And you have to share that with other people. And so then you feel righteous. You find people to come in agreement with you that I would never, you would never. But look, isn't it terrible? Isn't it awful?

and inside you're just you're getting off on the whole thing yeah it really is a form of uh gossip it's a form of uh pornography it's uh it's this idea of rejoicing in the shaming of of someone else yeah i had i had another thing that i was going to say there but i don't think i should say it i'll say what i was going to say i think it's interesting that noah is undressed in this account um there's nothing necessarily wrong with him being naked otherwise i'm sending every time i take a shower because he's in his tent the the interesting thing i think connects back to the garden where adam and eve have sinned they realize they are naked for the first time they're ashamed and when god comes along on the scene he goes well like who told you that he doesn't seem to

be too concerned with it now we get to um noah and he's undressed his real sin is the uh the the uh the drunkenness which has led him to this lewd behavior and you might possibly say that allowing himself to be seen naked could you know whatever the thing that i think uh i could point forward to in the New Testament here is where Peter tells people to love one another earnestly and to cover a multitude of sins with that love. That love covers a multitude of sins. And this is what the Christian ought to be doing with fellow Christians within the church. This is our calling To live in fellowship with one another, realizing you're a sinner, you're a sinner, I'm a sinner, we're all a bunch of sinners. Let's bear with one another's burdens now and fulfill the law of Christ, like Paul says in Galatians 6.

Restoring one another in a spirit of gentleness, keeping watch on ourselves, lest we be tempted too. So realizing that we are just as able to be tempted and fall like our brother next to us may have. And so not to point at their now naked, shameful state, but to grab them, you know, cover them up, you know, bring them into the family and keep them safe and warm and protected. and and that's really the picture that i see noah's other two sons doing with him they are doing what the church is supposed to do and who was it ham i'm not at genesis anymore yeah ham ham and so ham does kind of the opposite there um he does what we all want to do what all of our sinful natures want to do hey look at that look at what they just did there you know regardless of what it is exposing other people's shame so um but no we're we're called to bear with one

one another's burdens and um we are doing exactly what christ did in that case well to the extent that we as sinful human beings who have been called and redeemed and sanctified can do um loving one another we view the the telling as uh as uh you as we we confuse ourselves with the instrument of god to say oh i'm going i must i must go and and say something about about this this thing uh to my brothers um out of holy outrage uh god like god must have give it like had me see this so i could bring others into into the loop here uh which is which is strange because yeah love covers a multitude of sins and gossip is masturbation so yeah we uh the question is the question is will i edit that out or no i don't know

we talked a few weeks ago about that uh sin never wants to be sin it always wants to be righteousness and here you have a great case of Ham trying to make his sin into righteousness. I can just imagine his conversation with his brothers. I'm really concerned about our father because I walked into his tent and he's drunk and he's lying there naked and I wanted you to know about it because I think it's important that we as a family are aware of the failings of our father so that we might act accordingly, because these things don't need to be covered up. Who knows? Our father might do this again, so we need to be aware of that, and that's the reason that I'm telling you, of course, is because I'm concerned about our father, and I'm concerned

about about you and so i i thought it incumbent upon me to reveal this this sin to you you can kind of see this this mental process at work because he doesn't want his sin to be sin he wants it to be righteousness and so he's going to put the cloak he won't cover up his father but he'll cover up his own sin with righteousness with a claim to righteousness as well i got this great quote I need to share with everybody. This is from Luther. It is from his commentary on this section of Genesis. He talks quite a bit actually about this story and about how instructive it is in our dealings with a brother who's fallen, a brother who has sinned. And I've got several here. Let me start with one that I think is really a summation of much of what Luther says here.

So this is a direct quote from Luther. When we see saints fall, let us not be offended, much less let us gloat over the weaknesses of other people, or rejoice as though we were stronger, wiser, and holier. Rather, let us bear with and cover and even extenuate and excuse such mistakes as much as we can, bearing in mind that what the other person has experienced today, we may perhaps experience tomorrow. We are all one mass, and we are all born of one flesh. Therefore, let us learn from St. Paul's rule that he who stands should take heed lest he fall. So rather than rejoicing or rather than gloating over the weaknesses of others, to bear with them and cover them up.

To begin with, because we love them, and that's what love does. Love keeps no record of wrongs. It doesn't expose the wrong. It doesn't publicly put out that record of wrongs. It doesn't even keep a record of wrongs. So that's the one reason. And the second reason is because who knows if we're going to find ourselves in the same situations one of these days. I know that when I was much younger, I'd hear about somebody doing this or somebody doing that.

And I can remember thinking to myself, oh, I would never do that. I mean, there's just no way that I would ever do that. And then years down the road, that's exactly what I did. I fell into the exact same sin that I had once condemned, that I'd once said that I would never do. Because, like Luther says, I am part of this mass of fallen humanity, and we're all sons of Adam and Eve. We're all born of the same flesh. And so one of the things that ought to make us shut up when it comes to the sins of other people is that we ourselves are susceptible to the same sins.

We certainly wouldn't want anyone else going around exposing our sins. And so we should act in love towards those that we are aware were or have sinned. We don't have—gossiping is not a vocation of God. Of all the vocations that are out there, gossiping is not one of them. Slander is not one of them. No one is called to that vocation. Instead, we are called to the vocation of love and of forgiveness and of concealing and bearing with the weaknesses of our brothers. So, lots of things to talk about here with Noah.

And Brandon brought up the actions of the two brothers. I think that's one of the most beautiful illustrations of love that we have in the Scriptures when it comes to dealing with the sins of someone else. Not only do they cover up their father, they walk backwards toward him. They don't even want to see. They don't want to know any more than what they've already known. So, you know, Ham told them about it. Well, they don't want to see it with their eyes.

You know, they don't want pictures. They don't want the full story. They didn't even want to know what he told them. But, you know, he told them. So there's no way you can unhear something. There's no way you can stop up your ears. He told them, and instead of reacting as he did, they get a blanket, they turn around backwards, they walk into the tent, and they cover up the sin of their father.

That's what it means to honor their father. That's what it means to love. That's what it means to act in a way that God would have us act toward someone who's fallen into sin. It's interesting that in the Lord's Prayer, we pray, forgive us our debts or forgive us our transgressions as we forgive those who transgress against us. And one of the things that we're saying is that we are asking for God to forgive us the same way that we forgive other people. I think that we should strive then, and what we're being told to do, instructed to do in the Lord's Prayer, is to strive to have the same kind of forgiveness. And this is the kind of forgiveness that doesn't keep a record, that covers up sin. This is the kind of forgiveness that God has for us, and it's the kind of forgiveness that we ought to strive to have for one another.

we don't god doesn't say well you're forgiven but i'll be i'll be thinking about this for from now on when i when you know i will i'm going to remember this you know i've never had god come to me and tell me about brandon sin just haven't had that happen i've had people come and tell me about brandon sin in the name of god but i don't i do not accept that as a as a direct word from god yeah they uh i i like to uh to view this whole discussion and maybe we could wrap it up here i think we're about at the end in in light of the way that god ultimately acts in reference to our sin the all the way that god ultimately acts in reference to our drunkenness or our nakedness or or even our exposure of other people.

He ultimately deals with that by exposing himself. He puts himself out there in the person of his son, publicly shamed, publicly crucified, publicly naked, because that's how criminals were crucified, in order that he might atone for the sins of Noah and our sins and the sins of the whole world. So the way that God ultimately expresses his love for us is in an act of atonement for all of our sins of lovelessness

and of drunkenness and of slander and of everything else. That's the way that God responds. He responds by placing himself in the position of the one who bears the shame, who is naked before the world and who is clothed with nothing but our transgressions, in order that in that act of love and self-sacrifice, we might have forgiveness. We might be covered with the righteousness of Christ.

We ought to be clothed in his mercy and in his love. So that's how God responds to all of this. That's how God finally is the one who, in mercy and in grace, is our substitute to cover us for all of the things that we do just like just like noah and just like all of the other centers throughout the the stories of the scriptures yeah i think i think the correct response to chad is naked in his tent is christ is naked on the tree that's the that's the end of it that's that's all i need that's that's all i need to know is that that uh that his substitute is bleeding, dying, naked in front of the world

as a public spectacle, the great scandal on. And so I have no need to hear about anything else. Great way to wrap it up. There you go. All you can say to all of that is amen, amen, amen. Well, thanks for joining us again for 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. And go over to the website, and you can listen to the back episode. Go over to iTunes, rate and review, subscribe, all of that stuff.

And we will see you guys next week. Thank you.