Genesis 9. Genesis 9. We're going to go directly into our next reading, which is our sermon text for this morning, Genesis 9, 1 through 7. And we ought to stand out of respect for the reading of God's word. And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hands they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is its blood. And for your lifeblood, I will require a reckoning. From every beast, I will require it, and from every man. From his fellow man, I will require a reckoning for the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image. And you, be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth, and multiply in it. Grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God abides forever. All men, you may be seated. Do you really love life? That's the question our text sets before us this morning. Do you really value it? Do you really honor it for all that it's worth? You see, Noah has just stepped out into a new world. And you remember the flood? You remember what it was like before the flood? You see that this world has just been cleansed from a wicked violence that brought that flood of God's judgment upon the world. When we look back, we see, we know exactly what led to the flood. It was the wickedness of man's heart, and it was a wickedness that demonstrated itself in the exact opposite of what God had intended. God wanted life being fruitful and multiplying and growing and filling the earth for His glory, but instead, a humanity that was inverted in on itself, selfish, prideful, and violent, to the point where the famous men were men like Lamech or the Nephilim who killed cold blood, murdered, and were celebrated for it. And it's that carelessness about life that brought the flood of God's judgment down upon man. But now, right after the flood, God says, let's do this right. And if you're gonna do this right, you need to love the life that I've given. Noah, this new world will only flourish if it respects life, protects life, and promotes life. And this isn't just for Noah, is it? The call to value life for all it's worth comes to us this morning. God calls his people, God calls you to an absolute commitment to the sanctity of life. We must respect life. God calls us to lead the world in respecting and valuing the gift of human life. That's what the sanctity of life means. It means it's valued, it's appreciated, it's given its weight. And nothing short of that. It means life is valued for all it's worth. Now, listen, we must take this position in the midst of a culture that in many ways celebrates death. We have to be honest about this reality this morning. How can we not when we come to a text like Genesis 9, one through seven? We live in a world that is full of abortion, murder, suicide, euthanasia. And that's only the start. 2,500 humans a day destroyed in the womb. And we live in a world that is numb to the realities of this Holocaust. Neither of our two major political parties take a stand for life. One party's enshrined abortion into its platform. The other removed it, removed any pro-life commitment from its platform just this past summer. Who will speak out for the little ones? And then there's the stain in our society of self-assisted suicide, which is very much legal north of us in Canada. And it's becoming increasingly legal in our own states. 10 of our states have embraced it. where a person for many, many different reasons can take their own life on their own time. I recently saw the interview of a Canadian woman who had personally assisted in the legal debts of 400 people on her living room couch. And what disturbed me most of all was not even the fact of these deaths as horrific as it was to hear about them. People, some of them even in the prime of their life who just had psychological concerns. They said, I don't want to deal with this anymore. Let me end it. And the government says, sure, you can go ahead and do that in a legal house in which that's allowed. And this woman was one of these houses that facilitated such suicides. What disturbed me even more than the fact that this is legal and it happens is the way she talked about it. This woman in the interview, she was calm, she was collected, she was drinking a coffee on the very couch in which these deaths had occurred, spoke of them as if it was just something that happened every day, talking about a movie you watched with your friend. It's twisted. Sinister. And that's the world that's around us. I could go on and on detailing the ways our culture does not hold up the value of life as it could. I could talk about the endless history of wars in which men have been used as pawns for mere political and financial gain, not wars of self-defense, Wars for political and financial gain and men who says palms on the battlefield. I could I could go on and on talking about how the poor have been discarded their their very lives seen as dispensable. And yet we see around us that life is not really valued for all it's worth, and we see it even amongst ourselves. The stains of these things touches us. There's rarely even one of us that can say that we haven't been touched by this. Some of us, and there is great forgiveness in the gospel, have personally participated in these things. Praise God for the graciousness of the gospel. because not one of us is really separated from the downplaying and the devaluing of life that just punctuates our history and our time and place here and now. Proverbs 8, 36 says this, all who hate me love death. All who hate God love death. The reverse of this is, of course, what? That all who love God value life. Value life. And look where our text takes us. It actually starts in a place we wouldn't expect. It says, if you value life, you need to start by valuing animal life. That's interesting. But that's where God starts. He says, I want you to look at the beasts around you. Noah, look at the animals, the kangaroos jumping out of the ark, the birds flying through the sky, the elephant coming out of his holding place in this ship that's brought you to salvation. And says, look at all these animals. How should you think of them? Well, you are allowed to eat them. But you aren't allowed to devour these animals like beasts devour one another. You're not allowed to eat them while the creature still has life in it with blood pulsing in the flesh. I was talking with someone this week that there's an image of this from Lord of the Rings. I think it's Smeagol or Gollum, you know, eating a live animal and it's disgusting. Why? Because you know, that's a living being. You ought to respect life that God's created. These creatures, even if they're set beneath our feet, under us, they're not to be stomped upon and inflicted pain upon as if they're not, Living beings were supposed to be. Decent in the way. They are taken for food. Even the death of an animal must show respect for the giver of life, and this, of course, has implications for how we hunt. Not out of pure sport. But with the seriousness that a life is being taken. The kind of integrity and respect of life in our actions. And yes, there is a sort of sport to hunting. I'm not going to deny that, but that can't take over so much that we destroy entire populations of animal or desecrate living beings to endless degrees. We are to respect life even when we take animal life for food. So right away, right away in Genesis chapter nine, there's this pace being set for the respect of life and its integrity, even in its lower forms. And then you come and you see that this extends all the more when we're talking about human life. Now there's a little bit of confusion about that even in our culture, isn't it? I think it was in 2016 when a little boy fell into the zoo in Cincinnati where Harambe the gorilla was. And I remember that the gorilla's life was taken because of the threat that he posed to the boy. But that didn't stop hundreds of protesters showing up. at the zoo, how dare you take Harambe's life? And all of this really is just a reflection of what confusion as to which life is truly the most valuable as God would have it. It is okay to take an animal life to slay a beast in order to preserve a human life. We have things backwards if we don't get that. We value animal life, but we especially value human life. Why? We're going to see it in a moment. While we're allowed to slay an animal for food, we may not slay a fellow human being. The sixth commandment is very clear. What does it say? You shall not murder. Why not? Why can't you take the life of another human being in his or her innocence? Well, Genesis chapter 9 verse 5 lays it out nice and clear says. For your lifeblood, I will acquire a reckoning, it says, I will require it from his fellow man. And right there, that word fellow man in Hebrew, it really draws you to another text just a few chapters before the story of Cain and Abel. It's the same word when Cain says, am I my brother's keeper? And that question was kind of left lingering, wasn't it? But now God answers it. He says, you asked if you're your brother's keeper, Cain, guess what? You are. The answer is yes. All mankind descends from Adam. So we ought to stand in solidarity with one another side by side, recognizing our basic equality as human beings, regardless of whatever differences distinguish us from one another, regardless of race, regardless of creed and political persuasion. We may not slay our brother in cold blood. because we stand beside him. In fact, everything here is pushing us to see our brother and love him. It's called a brotherly love. I spent a good amount of time in Philadelphia. It's called the City of Brotherly Love. I like that city, but I will say that the way people would behave at a subway station is not a great emulation of brotherly love. You wonder whether they're about to slay you, to get in the train and to push you out of the way. We are actually called in this passage to a kind of love that looks and says, you are my brother, you are my sister, I will protect your life, I am answerable to it. I can't discard you. I can't I can't leave you to your own whim. I will protect you. I will stand with you. And so that solidarity of the human race is the first reason we may not we must not kill in cold blood. But there's another reason here, and it's like we're ramping it up. This reason is even greater. Your fellow man is made in God's. Image, image. Look at verse six. We even have this little poem that's given. God wants us to remember this so clearly that he embeds it into a poem. He says, whoever sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed for man made God in his own image. Basically, God is saying, I know that sin has stained my creation. I know that things are twisted, but you can't erase my image. You can't erase the picture that I placed of myself and my attributes upon every living, breathing human being. Male and female. You see, every human being is the spitting image of his creator. Every human being is a representative of his God. I've said this before. you're going to experience the glories of the creator, speaking with the homeless man on the streets, even more than you would going out for a walk in the wondrous woods. Because when you're talking to a fellow human being, you're talking to someone who's representing God and shining forth the glory of God in his very face. So here's the deal. Just as burning a nation's flag in public is an attack on the values of that nation, so an attack on the life of a man is an attack on the God whom every man represents. To slay a man in cold blood is to desecrate the image of God. And so, here's the call from our text, to respect life. When? From its earliest conception. It's beginning at conception to its natural end in death. We don't get to pick and choose at what point along the process we start to value life. We don't get to choose when we stop. We don't get to choose along its path which lives we value and don't. We value all of them, all of them. And that means to take a human life is a serious, serious thing. That's why God calls us not just to respect life, but in respecting it to protect it. You'll notice that this poem in verse six calls us to lead the world in protecting the gift of life. God says in verse five, I will require a reckoning. What is a reckoning? A reckoning is an answer, a serious answer. God is saying, If you are going to take someone's life in cold blood, you're going to have to answer to me. You're going to have to stand before me. You're going to have to you're going to have to answer for what you've done. Right. In the style of Cain. Because Abel's blood cried out from the ground, I was murdered in justice, save me, help me. Look at what my brother's done. And God says I will require a reckoning. for such a heinous act. And he says in verse six what that reckoning looks like. Whoever sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed. Now here's where I just, I have to go straight to scripture and affirm what I'm seeing right here on the text. And what I'm seeing right here on the text is the death penalty, capital punishment. Whoever sheds the blood of man, whoever is a cold-blooded murderer, By man shall his blood be shed. That's the reckoning. The death penalty is often portrayed as inhumane. I get it. It's a hard thing to reckon with. For certain minds, I get it. But God's word actually pushes us to see the opposite. to ignore the death penalty is to despise life. When our society goes on, it goes easy on the murderer, it lets him go, it ignores what he's done, it goes light on what he's done, it sends the message that the sixth commandment is not all that serious. That you actually don't have to reckon with what you've done. The death penalty is a restraint God has given to rein in our murderous tendencies right here in Genesis nine. I'm not making this up. It's not my political preference. It's right here. There's even more implied in this verse by man. So the murderers blood be shed, what does that mean? Well, means the seeds of human government. Society as a whole is supposed to protect and preserve the flourishing of human life. Romans 13 fills out this idea, doesn't it? When we heard it read by Mr. Jones, it says that the civil government is authorized by God to wield a sword. What is that sword? Well, the sword that punishes people who do wicked things. And is there anything more heinous and evil than murder? Romans 13 says that the government is a servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer. In other words, it is God's retribution, God's reckoning. That's what the civil government is supposed to be, a terror to those who do evil things. Judges, officers, and armies are a necessary part of this fallen world. Even when we're frustrated with the abuses of these institutions, We certainly see these abuses, don't we? They exist. When we see the abuses, it should it should make us so concerned to see them righted because they're supposed to be this blessed restraint upon all that all that man's wickedness could be. It's supposed to be a restraint that keeps us from going to Genesis chapter six, in which violence fills the land and tortures people and wrecks havoc on God's creation. You see, God cares about protecting life, do we? Do we care about it in our own homes? Do we care about it in our society? Are we leading the charge as Christians to call society to be all it can in protecting and preserving human flourishing? Respecting life, protecting life, and promoting life. Did you notice that twice in this passage, at the very beginning and at the very end, we hear this tagline, tagline might be a low way of putting it. It's this refrain and it says this, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth. Sound familiar? Where have we heard it before? Genesis chapter one. So fresh out of a world that's been destroyed because of its violence by the flood, God calls Noah to preserve life and he calls him to promote it in Genesis 1 style, filling the earth, multiplying. God just, he doesn't just want us to appreciate life from a distance. He doesn't just want us to protect life and self-defense when terror comes our way. No, he wants us to be proactive in propagating life. He wants us to fill the world with Christ followers who love to live for Jesus. He wants us to have children and to be a blessing to creation this way as well. To celebrate the fruitfulness of life. Not just protect it when it exists, but be proactive in perpetuating it. And of course, we need this reminder in a world where children are seen as an inconvenience and interruptions into the comfortable realities of our own making. Now, this isn't just out there, this is in the church, because I've experienced this. I have to remind myself on an almost daily basis that my beloved little ones are not inconveniences, are not interruptions. If they are, they're good ones. The growing attitude since the 1950s has been this kind of me centered culture. And now world leaders are actually beginning to freak out because they've realized that birth rates have dropped below population replacement rates. Did you know this? Did you know that actually world leaders are very seriously concerned that people aren't having children? Are we prepared to lead in seeing life as a blessing? You know, I understand that there's all these approaches to how to fix this, right? Oh, we can give tax benefits to those who have more kids. You can do this, you can do that. We can have policies that promote families. I understand that those might somehow be part of a social correction, but listen, If this is actually going to be fixed, if we're actually going to see a world that is multiplying and filling with image bearers, then we actually have to love life. It starts with the heart and it starts with this attitude amongst believers. and kingdom builders that says, we actually love life. Even when it's hard, we actually love children. We don't see them as an interruption when they're crying in the service. We love them. We celebrate them. We're glad that they're here. We're glad that more are being born. in a fallen world where infertility is a reality. And it really is a reality. This love for life includes adoption and foster care and generosity from empty nesters toward those who are building their families. So this is a group thing. This is a community thing where we embrace this and say, yes, let's let life flourish. Let's help others. If I can't have children of my own, let's help others to do that and help them to succeed in it and help them to educate their children and fill the world for the glory of God. Not just respecting, not just preserving, but promoting life. Be fruitful and multiply. Do we care enough about life to promote it? You know, this position, This whole thing, respecting, preserving, promoting life, it really finds its source in the gospel. The gospel is the bedrock, the utter foundation for love of life, without which at some point or another, the love of life without the gospel is going to crumble. It's going to turn in on itself. But with the gospel, there is love for life. Why? Because the Bible tells the story of a wonderful God who loves life. He loves life even when that life he created turned against him. In our sinful rebellion, we gave ourselves over to violent hatred of both God and man. Our history, just look at the history of humanity. It tells the story of sinners who killed to get our own way. And that's not just the Hitlers and Stalins. In a very real way, it's deep embedded in each and every one of us. Given the opportunity, to kill to get our own way. Which one of us deep down wouldn't do it given the right circumstances? But God didn't leave us to our own selfish intentions. He sent his son to save us from our own murderous hearts, to save us from our wicked and violent ways. And that rescue mission went all the way to the cross where the sinless son of God allowed his fellow man to murder him. But the beauty of it all is that the cross was no ordinary capital punishment. No, the crucifixion was the sword of God's justice. You see, Jesus took the capital punishment that our murders hearts deserve. Christ delivers us from the sword of God's justice by the shedding of what? His innocent lifeblood. He was killed. while his lifeblood was still pulsing through his veins. He was murdered for us. And now we get the gift of life that we don't deserve. Life to the fullest. Eternal life life as it was meant to be not just humdrum make your way along go through the motions life But life that is full of enjoyment and love of life for Jesus That's what he says in John 10 10. I've come to give you life. I've come to give you life in abundance You want to love life Do you really want to love life? and go to Jesus, go to the Savior. For in his death and in his resurrection, we find life and the love of life. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, what gracious love you've shown for life. The life you created, you did not discard. but you pursued, you saved. We are living testimonies of that. And Lord, we pray that we would so appreciate what you've done for us in Christ, that we would love life for all of it, all it's worth, eking out of it every ounce of enjoyment. Lord, we pray that that would start in our own hearts and the love of our own lives. appreciating the gift of life that you've given us, but it would spill out into a world, spill out into families and societies, that it would look different, that we would look different as a culture and as a people because we love life. Thank you for teaching us these things in Christ's name, amen.