Sermon for Pentecost 18, October 12, 2025
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. Amen.
Genesis 8:15-22 15God spoke to Noah. He said, 16“Go out of the ark—you, your wife, your sons, and your sons’ wives with you. 17Bring out with you every living thing of every sort that is with you, all flesh, including birds, livestock, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, so that they may swarm over the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.” 18Noah went out with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives along with him. 19Every animal, every creeping thing, every bird, and whatever swarms on the earth went out of the ship, species by species. 20Noah built an altar to the Lord and took from every clean animal and every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. 21The Lord smelled the pleasant aroma. The Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the soil anymore because of man, for the thoughts he forms in his heart are evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike every living thing, as I have done. 22While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” (EHV)
Give thanks for God’s faithfulness.
Dear fellow redeemed,
Imagine the difficult challenges Noah and his family faced both before the flood arrived while he built the ark and again during the tremendous downpour that drowned the whole world except for the people and creatures aboard the ark. While Noah was building the ark, he surely was abused with mockery for crafting such a great ship in a world that didn’t see rain or storms. During the flood, the strain of caring for such a vast array of animals had to be taxing beyond our imagining. We may well wonder how it was possible that so few people could build that large structure and then gather the supplies to care for the eight-person crew and all those many animals and birds. The answer is that the Lord always provides, which is why it was appropriate for Noah to Give thanks for God’s faithfulness.
God faithfully protected Noah and his family from destruction in the flood and provided for all those creatures. God faithfully carried out every last detail of the judgment He had told Noah was coming. Yet, while carrying out His judgment on that wicked world, God provided the means by which eight people and all kinds of animals, birds, and creeping things were preserved to repopulate the earth. Now, I would suppose that Noah was very thankful just to be off the ark and no longer burdened with the care of such a vast floating zoo. However, Noah was especially thankful that God was faithful in keeping His promise to provide a Savior for the world and the promises God made at that point in time. Noah’s offering of those sacrifices shows that he was still very much trusting God for everything. He had seen God’s faithful care. He had no doubt it would continue.
Today, we live in a world beset with what we might call alarmism. Every change in weather, market, or circumstance is often accompanied by dire warnings that this trouble will lead to a disastrous future, or perhaps even the end of life as we know it. That is especially true among those who don’t take seriously God’s warning concerning Judgment Day. While prophets of doom terrorize people with threats of looming Armageddon, they seldom are concerned that God will bring judgment upon the unbeliever. Noah was eyewitness to God’s faithfulness to His warnings and in faith, Noah offered up burnt offerings of thanksgiving for God’s faithfulness in keeping His promises.
As those sacrifices burned and the aroma of the smoke lifted up into the sky, God declared His promise to continue to provide for us all until that last day. The Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the soil anymore because of man, for the thoughts he forms in his heart are evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike every living thing, as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.”
Thus did God promise to care for mankind until the end of time, yet you and I might well confess our guilt in failing to trust God’s promise as we should. We too can be troubled with worries when the hardships of this world seem overwhelming. When the clouds pour out too much rain, how often we tremble in fear of the damaging floods. When the rain fails to fall in a timely manner, how often we worry about the fields producing enough for our daily bread. When Satan’s hoards surround us, how often we fear embarrassment for the faith we hold in Jesus. How often we remain silent when we could speak boldly of what Jesus has done to rescue us from sin, death, and the devil. Then, when the yawning mouth of the grave appears before us personally, how often even believers wonder about whether God’s promises really are true.
The Bible reports that already before the flood, “Noah was a righteous man, a man of integrity in that generation. Noah walked with God.” (Genesis 6:9) This doesn’t mean Noah was without sin because God’s Word is true that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23) What it does mean is that Noah was trusting the promise handed down through his forefathers from Adam and Eve, that “The Lord God said to the serpent: ‘Because you have done this, … I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He will crush your head, and you will crush his heel.’” (Genesis 3:14-15) Noah trusted that God would send a Savior to rescue him from the darkness and evil of this world. Because God was choosing to save Noah and his family from the destructive flood, Noah had to recognize that God would carry out that promise through his own descendants, and like Abram later, Noah believed, and it was counted to him as righteousness. Thus did Noah Give thanks for God’s faithfulness.
For you and me as well, God has remained ever faithful. Just as we were shown this year with a bountiful harvest even in the face of some challenging weather, God continues to provide seedtime and harvest, summer and winter, and He will do so until Jesus returns to judge the world. However, much more important that even that, God was and will be faithful to the promises He made throughout the Scriptures of a Savior from sin—a Savior born of the seed of a woman, a Savior who would be holy and gentle, righteous though despised by men, a Savior innocent as the most pure dove who would bear the sins of the world as “God made him, who did not know sin, to become sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)
The world in its unrighteousness has remained skeptical about Jesus, but in spite of the objection of sinners who refuse to believe, the Holy Spirit continues to send out messengers who deliver the Good News of Jesus’ life and death on our behalf so that the Spirit can work faith in those God chooses to believe. Because you are here, hearing the Word of God and putting your trust in it, you can be confident that God chose you to be His own dear child by faith. He chose you to believe in His Son, Jesus, and receive forgiveness and life. He chose to cover you with Christ’s righteousness so that you are counted worthy to stand in God’s presence and be welcome in His heavenly mansions for eternity.
In all this, you had no part in making it happen. Rather, God was faithful to His promises and to His election of you as one who would believe, just as St. Paul wrote to the Ephesian congregation, “He did this when he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, so that we would be holy and blameless in his sight. In love, he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ.” (Ephesians 1:4-5)
You might say that every time we gather in worship before the altar of our God, every time we confess our sins, and every time we partake of the Lord’s Supper, we Give thanks for God’s faithfulness. We give thanks primarily simply by believing His promises.
Concerning faith in Jesus, the writer to the Hebrews wrote, “By faith Noah, when he was warned about things that had not been seen before, built an ark, in reverent fear, in order to save his family. By it he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that is by faith.” (Hebrews 11:7) It was faith worked in Noah by the Holy Spirit that got him to commit himself to building an ark and then led him onto that boat that would protect him and his family from the deadly flood. Likewise, it is faith, worked in you by the power of the Holy Spirit in Word and Sacrament, that brought you into the saving vessel of God’s Church, so that you won’t have to face destruction in the judgment on Judgment Day.
In light of the momentary troubles this world continually throws against us, and even in the face of persecution and death, the same writer to the Hebrews encourages us:
Let us keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, who is the author of our faith and the one who brings it to its goal. In view of the joy set before him, he endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of God’s throne. Carefully consider him who endured such hostility against himself from sinful people, so that you do not grow weary and lose heart. (Hebrews 12:2-3)
When Noah came to faith, everything Jesus would do to carry out God’s saving plan remained a mystery ahead of him. Noah would never know all the good things that were to come until he entered heaven believing God’s promise. You and I have the history of all the prophets foretold and the fulfilment of those prophecies in Jesus. Everything God prophesied to rescue us from condemnation has been fulfilled in His beloved Son. God has been and continues to be ever faithful.
To the recalcitrant Israelites, God spoke through His prophet, Malachi, “Certainly I, the Lord, do not change. That is why you, sons of Jacob, have not come to an end.” (Malachi 3:6)
So that many more sinners may hear and believe, Judgment Day has not yet come. Still, to you and me who have been counted righteous through faith in Jesus as our Savior, the Lord declares, “Look, I am coming soon and my reward is with me, to repay each one according to what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the Tree of Life and so that they may enter through the gates into the city.” (Revelation 22:12-14) God has been faithful to His promise to deliver us from sin and death. He brought us into His kingdom through the cleansing water and Word of Baptism, and it is in that Sacrament that we were washed and dressed in the righteousness that makes us His dear ones by faith. That is among the many reasons why today and every day, we Give thanks for God’s faithfulness. Amen.
After you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who called you into his eternal glory in Christ Jesus, will himself restore, establish, strengthen, and support you. To him be the glory and the power forever and ever. Amen.