Noah Faith

Hollywood can make a Bible story look epic while quietly rewriting what it means. We start by unpacking why the film Noah left us frustrated, and why a distorted retelling can shape people’s imagination more than the actual text of Scripture. From there we open Genesis 6:5–22 and Hebrews 11:7 and rebuild the story from the ground up, with Noah not as a fantasy hero but as a real man whose faith shows up in real choices.

We look closely at what the Bible says about Noah’s character: righteous, blameless among his generation, and marked by a steady walk with God. “Blameless” isn’t perfection, it’s being uncontaminated by the moral rot around him. That leads to one of the strongest themes of the conversation: authentic Christian faith is countercultural. If you’re trying to keep one foot in the world and one foot in God’s kingdom, it won’t hold. Noah’s life challenges young adults and long-time believers alike to stand alone when needed, even when it costs comfort, approval, or connection.

We also face the darker backdrop of Genesis 6: a world described as corrupt and full of violence, and a God who is grieved by what humanity has become. That grief sits behind judgement, and it raises hard questions people still ask today about the flood, God’s love, and human responsibility. We connect those themes to modern life with practical reflections on stewardship, obedience, and what it means to live as “stars” in a crooked generation.

If you want a clear Bible study on Noah, a thoughtful take on faith and obedience, and a challenge to walk with God day by day, press play. Subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review, what part of Noah’s faith do you find hardest to live out?

Good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are in the world - Welcome to Grapevine Ministries.

Transcript

Welcome Back And Passage Focus

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Okay, welcome back. Uh, this is um part two of our faith project, and now we're talking about the faith of Noah. Right, and I'm gonna speak a little bit about the movie. I don't want to um put people off because otherwise people are gonna get their wrong impression and get hips of emails and all that sort of stuff. Now, we are going to focus on Genesis 6, uh, 5 through to 22 and Hebrews 11, 7. Right now, about 10 years ago, I saw the first trailer for the movie Noah, and I was very excited. I mean, from the previews, I saw it looked like the film would honor the scriptures, plus, it had one of my favorite actors in the starring role, which was Russell Crowe. Now, as

Why The Noah Film Misses

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Noah, Russell would be plotting um and piloting the boat that he was to make, and I thoroughly enjoyed it when Russell did that in Master and the Commander was another movie that he actually did, and on top of that, it was a film about one of my favorite biblical heroes, obviously, Noah. And I love it when the Bible makes it to the widescreen, so when Noah hit the theaters and then onto Netflix, I made a plan to see it. And unfortunately, I was greatly disappointed. The film totally distorted the biblical account, it was very anti-Bible almost, and as such was a waste of my free time. In fact, in my opinion, it was the least biblical epic I have ever seen. And I guess I shouldn't have been surprised because Hollywood has a bad habit of distorting biblical truths into this weird tale because they want to have it be action-packed. And see, in this the tale of Noah filled with rock monsters, which were fallen angels, where mankind fell, its sin was destroyed, and the environment, and and it was all about eating meat, you know, and uh it was like a little bit of a tie-up between um, you know, being able to smuggle onto the boat and eat the serpent because the serpent was supposed to be the devil and all of this sort of stuff. So uh from my perspective, it was rubbish, okay? Uh, and that's only my personal opinion. You want to watch it? Come out uh when it came out uh 20 uh 2014, 2015, something like that. You have to look it up, and just look up uh movie Noah's Ark and Russell Crowe, and you should find it. Now, with that in mind, I felt led to do my best to set the record straight as to what really happened in the story of Noah. Because unfortunately, if you don't know the story of Noah and you see something like that on the big screen, you have a tendency to visualize that's exactly what took place uh in the Bible,

Setting The Biblical Record Straight

SPEAKER_01 4:06

and there have been a lot of Christian movies uh about certain different subjects, and some of them have been very, very well portrayed, and others uh horribly. I could give you some movie tips and that, but I don't want to sort of get off track. Now, where was I?

SPEAKER_00 4:29

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

Now, with no reference to Russell Crowe, you know, and we'll look at the actual events about Noah as told in Genesis, and I probably it is a much better story. The truth always is, but I don't want us to look at the biblical account to set the record straight. I want us to also see what it can teach us about authentic faith, and the best way to begin all this is by getting a really good picture in your mind and get your eyes setting on the historic events which is recorded in Genesis chapter five, verses nine. Now I don't have time to read all of these chapters, but keep your Bible open because we will refer to some of them throughout the study. And I attempted last week when I gave a recount of the faith of Abel when we're talking about Cain and Abel.

SPEAKER_00 5:50

Um and with that in mind, first let's examine Noah, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:01

Noah himself. Now his grandfather was Methuselah, who still holds the record when it comes to the longest lifespan in biblical history. Methuselah lived to be nine hundred and sixty-nine years young. Methuselah apparently died immediately

Noah’s Background And Character

SPEAKER_01 6:28

before the flood hit. Now, R. Kent Hughes says this about Genesis 7 to 10 refers to seven days of mourning that God allowed Noah and his family after Methuselah had died and before the flood waters came onto the earth. Now, Noah's name means comfort or rest. Scripture says that his father, Lemech, gave him his name because as a baby, Noah comforted him as he labored to work the ground that had been cursed due to the sin of Adam and Eve, right? So it's a little bit of a history lesson here, but not too much, right? And Noah himself was a father. He had three sons named Shem, Ham, and Japan. Not Japan, that's Jeffham. Scripture also says that Noah was a righteous man. Now if you look at Genesis 6, 9, where it says Noah was a righteous man, blameless amongst the people of his time. Now, the word blameless doesn't mean perfection, it literally means uncontaminated. As we shall see, Noah was not contaminated by the wickedness of the day. He was God's man through and through. Now Clarence McCarthy calls Noah the solidarity saint because Noah was the only one of his kind which tells us that solidarity and goodness is possible. I mean, with God's help, okay, it is possible to go against the flow, even if you're the only one doing so. Noah is proof of this because he lived in a culture that was unimaginably denigrated, horribly corrupt, and yet he was different. He was the only man of faith in an entire world that had turned its back on God. Now, if you study history, right, and I do this a little bit, so not too much so you get bored, all right? I want to make sure I get my message across. So if you study history or just even just biblical history, you may remember a guy by the name of Henry David Theo, who once said this if I seem to walk out of step with others, it is because I am listening to others' drumbeat. This is a picture of genuine faith. Christians who embar embrace a deep faith in God walk through life as though they were listening to another drumbeat, like Noah. They are out of step with the world.

Faith That Lives Countercultural

SPEAKER_01 10:04

And by the way, this is a good time for me to say that there is no such thing as a Christian life that is not countercultural. If you're a follower of the Lord, it means that you are going to have to make decisions and distinguish yourself from a sinful world which we all live in. You know, and I've said this a few times, but they get there and they say, uh, we live in this world, but we're not of this world. So in other words, we are meant to be different from everybody else. Philippians 2, 14 and 15 says that if we follow Jesus, if we live out our faith, we will shine as stars in the universe amidst a crooked and depraved generation. Wow, that's pretty that's pretty bold even for Jesus back then, right? The fact is that no one can go thoroughly throughout their life, and you can't participate in everything that's true of our culture today and follow Christ at the same time. It's not possible for you to, you know, another way of putting it is like you've got one foot in the world and one foot in the kingdom of God. You can't do that, it's all or nothing. You know, it's like when we to be absent from the body is be present for the Lord. So we we've only got two places. There's there's none of this way station or waiting area, or you know, a lot of other people make up these things. You either go to heaven or earth, there's there's no in-betweens, you don't get a choice, but you do have to choose the path that you want to be on while you're actually in this place. All right, does that make sense? Okay. Now we all need to follow the narrow path. Now, I know there's a lot of young people out there that uh hopefully will be listening to this and they'll be finishing up school, you know, like uh high school or um leaving or whatever they call it in other countries, but basically year 12, okay? And um you're gonna think about going on to university or to college sometime in the near future. You especially need to hear this. It can be very hard to be a young adult and stand alone for God. It's hard, but Noah's life proves that it is possible. God needs Noah's, he needs individuals who are willing to stand alone for him. If you need to be, just look at Ezekiel 2230. God says this I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land, so I wouldn't have to destroy it. But I found no one. Wow, that's that's again it's a pretty bold statement, you know. Found no one. See the question that comes to each of us day after day is will you be the one? Will you be like Noah and do the right thing even though everyone else around you says not to do it? Will you be the one to point people to Jesus even though you face ridicule? Or by doing so, you know, create yourself to be separated from everybody else. When I met Maria, who was he's now my wife of 42 years, right, she came from a very Catholic European family. So becoming a Christian was,

Standing Alone And Pointing To Jesus

SPEAKER_01 14:54

should we say, very challenging, and still she wanted to remain connected to her family and being true to her faith, which was very, very challenging. A little bit more about her later. She hates it when I talk about her. Now let's take a look at Genesis 6:9. I said we're gonna go there again. For it says something else about Noah, right? It tells us he walked with God. You may remember that Enoch, God's great grandfather, also worked with God. And in fact, throughout the history of the Bible, Noah and Enoch were the only two people about whom this is said. Walking with God means to move in the same direction in which God is going. It means keeping in step with God. You could say that Noah and Enoch didn't run ahead of God nor did they lag behind. They kept step by step with God. Think about it. When you're walking with somebody, you're not moving so fast that conversation is difficult. You can only enjoy your companionship if you're with each other. And this sharing makes everything else enjoyable. You can look together and you can look at the clouds and the formation and the turning of the leaves in autumn, or some call this fall, the flower beds in the neighbour's yards, the ducks in the rivers or the lakes that by that path or whatever where you're walking. Now, I know you're probably getting a bit mixed up by saying, Oh, well, hang on, Enoch and Noah are the only ones. Didn't Adam and Eve walk with God? He goes, Well, yes, but we're talking about after the fall, okay? Let's put things in the right perspective. Now, let's go on here. I give you an idea, I'll give you an analogy to go with this, right? In the early years of our married life, before we had kids, this was something that we enjoyed doing on a regular basis. Walking with someone is a great picture of intimacy. This kind of intimacy with God was a lifestyle for Noah. Year after year, for longer than longer periods of time during the day,

Walking With God As Intimacy

SPEAKER_01 17:55

he shared more and more of his life with God. Now, the reason I I'm not saying that we're in comparison to Noah and God, I'm just talking about uh giving you an analogy with me and Maria. But the thing is, I reckon, this is my own personal opinion, okay, that see, out of all of my brothers and sisters, out of all our Maria's brothers and sisters, all of them have been in and out of relationships all their life, and most of them are still on their own now. I honestly believe that that that early period in our life when me and Maria would go for walks together and looking at, and we we actually mentioned this a lot, uh, about you know looking around and seeing what God has created. I don't care what anybody says, what you see out there, if you open your eyes and really look when you're going out somewhere, see what God's created. All right, very important to see what God's created. Now, going on a little bit further, I want to notice another characteristic of Noah. Twice scripture speaks of his obedience, and that's in Genesis 6.22. If you want to write that down and have a look at it later, it says, Noah did everything just as God commanded him. See, obedience, and in Genesis 7.5, we are told, and Noah did all, not most of all, but he did all that the Lord commanded him. So he was obedient, and he followed every command that God gave him. Now, unlike many others, and even the disciples, today most people pick and choose which commands of God they'll apply to their lives. Noah embraced the kind of love that God had and that Jesus described in John 14 when he said, If you love me, you will obey what I command. Well, I hope we all see in Noah characteristics that we should emulate. A righteous life unpolluted by the world, a man who cherished and nourished an intimate daily walk with God, and an individual who showed his love for God with a lifestyle of obedience to his commands. Wow, what a dedication, especially when we uh examine what the world was like back then. But to really understand Noah, we also need to look at the culture in which he lived, and the scripture teaches that it was a culture of unprecedented wickedness. See, that's what I'm talking about. Where he lived in comparison, where we are now. Genesis 6 11 says this now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence. Throughout the biblical account of Noah, the combination of the words corrupt and violence. Violence is repeated

Obedience As Love In Action

SPEAKER_01 22:02

again and again and again. This is because the moral degeneration of the life of these people, the corruption of ethics, is always accompanied by violence, a warning that we should heed in our day and age. You may remember that the beginning of chapter six mentions sons of God marrying human women, and I think they're called Nephileniums having children with human women. Most of biblical scholars I I read about this believe that these sons of God and Nephilims were fallen angels, demons who had children with the women of the day. And Genesis 6 5 says that God saw this as a great wickedness. In fact, it's tragic to note that prior to this chapter in Genesis, anytime God grazed upon his creation, anytime he saw things, uh he phrased it with God saw is used, and it's followed by God commenting, and it was good, or it was very good. But now God looks at the world and is not good at all, it is totally corrupt. So much had changed, the human race had degraded almost

A World Marked By Corruption

SPEAKER_01 23:50

beyond recognition, and God was thoroughly disgusted with what he saw in mankind. Now listen to the last part of verse five, right? Every inclination of the thoughts of the hearts of men were evil all the time. That's how bad, how totally corrupt things had become. Now there's a writer by R. Kent Hughes writes this. No hesitations, lust was their medium, violence was their method, and this was total irreferable deprivation. It's a pretty bold statement. You see, corruption had uh become so thorough that there was nothing human left about these people, nothing nothing uh that even resembled uh having a relationship with God. Uh, they were totally corrupted from everything. In short, mankind had already destroyed themselves, so the deluge was the logical outcome of the way of these lies had chosen, and verse six is also significant that it records not the anger of God but the grief over the fallen state of humanity. It says the Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth and his heart was filled with pain, so God heart ate as if he had lost something extraordinarily precious to him. That says a lot about it. See, in verse thirteen and seventeen we read that God's sorrowful determination was to destroy not only human life but all other life as well. Every living creature was going to die in the flood, except for the few animals that would be protected in the ark. That might seem excessive until we remember that human beings were made regions of the earth to have dominion over all created things. The human corruption had apparently spread so that it ruined pretty well everything else. It's like we see today that scientists make mistakes and spread radioactive waste over large areas, make things like COVID-19

God’s Grief And Judgement

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and don't have a vaccine for it, but they created it and it gets out and creates a global pandemic. But with radioactive waste, you see that everything that it comes into contact with is contaminated and will pose a threat for up to millions of years in some aspects, and the earth polluting air and the water and all its life, something like that eventually had happened in the day before the flood, and so the second coming is coming closer. Human fools have ruined life everywhere, and there was very little left that was worth saving. Okay, that setting is pretty bad. So let's continue with our study while we focus on what it can teach us about authentic faith. I want to point out that there are three things that Noah did in relation to his faith. Because he's a hero of faith, and this has taught us when it comes to the subject. Now I need to set the foundation first to get a better understanding of Noah and why the flood was going to happen. Now, I'll continue with this next week because I think it's very important to put this into the right context because I know there's still a lot of people out there that when they they read parts of the Old Testament, they get there and they say, Well, God wasn't a loving God, He wasn't caring, you know, He flooded the world and killed everybody and and did so many other things, and you know, like told His His followers to wipe out whole generations of people and so forth and such as God has given us free will, but He's also given us this land, this world to look after, and even when you look at our own bodies, you know, this is the temple of the Holy Spirit. We've been given this body, a spirit, soul, and body, and it's our responsibility to look after what God's given us. He's given us our body, so we shouldn't eat stuff that's gonna make us fat or give us heart disease or anything like that. We shouldn't uh get there

Modern Parallels And Next Week

SPEAKER_01 30:02

and we shouldn't uh abuse ourselves with alcohol or drugs, you know, and the same goes for the world, you know. We we keep destroying forests, we keep polluting the air, you know, we're not doing our best at what God told us. And look, I'm not a green peace activist or anything like that, it's just a reality that if we look at the world on how it is going and what we are doing to the world ourselves, um, yeah, there's gonna come a time when we have to answer for our actions. But look, I'm not gonna get on my soapbox, I'm gonna end it here, but then next week I'm gonna go on with Noah part two, and uh we'll talk more about it in depth, and then hopefully you'll get a better understanding of where we should be in relation to our faith. All right, talk to you soon. God bless. Bye for now.