Focal Point

Dave Drewy: Today on Focal Point with Pastor Mike Fabarez.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: When it came to Noah, he never would have built the ark had he only believed in a God who just had good news for him. You and I, if we're going to be like Noah, we have to accept or embrace both the good news and the bad. There's two parts to this. As a matter of fact, the good news isn't really all that good if there's no bad news that this good news saves us from. That's the message of salvation.

Dave Drewy: During the 1950 Monaco Grand Prix, a racer was approaching a dangerous bend in the track when he noticed the spectators were turned away. "If they're not looking at me," he thought, "they must be looking at something around the corner." He braked hard, rounded the bend, and saw the massive pileup he could have joined. It pays to heed warnings, especially when they come from God.

Today on Focal Point, Pastor Mike Fabarez looks to Noah as an example of listening to God's warnings. He's a model of ambitious faith.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: I doubt you'd disagree that we live in a society that bombards us with warning labels, cautionary notices, and security alerts. We see them all the time, whether it's not leaving a bag unattended or avoiding trans fats and cholesterol. It's everywhere. You add to that all the warning labels that are brought on by the endless parade of lawsuits. We are surrounded by people even telling us that your coffee is hot or that a toasted Pop-Tart might burn your mouth. Maybe I revealed too much with that example there.

There's an organization in Michigan that gives awards every year to the wackiest warning labels. I thought you might want to hear some of this year's winners. One of them was on a five-inch fishing lure with three steel hooks. You got that pictured in your mind? It comes with a warning label: "Warning: Harmful if swallowed." That's the point, I think.

But compact disc holders—you buy those things, put them next to your TV, they got all those little plastic slats you put your CD cases in them, right? "Caution: Do not use as a ladder." These are real, I'm not making these up. A child scooter has a real label that says: "Caution: This product moves when used."

This year's top winner, you can look it up on the internet, this won the award this year. This is an actual warning label on a bottle of drain cleaner, and it reads: "If you do not understand or cannot read these directions, cautions, and warnings, do not use this product."

With all these silly warning labels that really are ubiquitous—they surround us now today—it's easy for us to kind of sluff these off and we just don't take them as seriously as we used to take a warning label. That's understandable but not always a good thing. Sometimes warnings are important, and they should be heeded because we want to, at the end of our life, not look back and say, "Wow, that was a really big mistake that I didn't heed that warning."

Now, I know you don't like to look at it this way—several people don't—but if you really read the Bible from beginning to end, what you'll discover, if you really give it an appraisal, is that it starts to read like one big warning label. Have you noticed that? I mean, it really is about giving us the instructions to take precautions so that we can avoid an impending danger. That's really what the Bible is all about.

The Bible's trying to tell us there's danger ahead, there's a problem, and you need to take precautions so that you don't incur the damage and danger that is spelled out in the pages of scripture. If the gospel is a call to take precautions, then I think it makes sense that if we're going to do that, it's going to require this virtue that the Bible talks so much about. It's going to involve the virtue of faith.

We're going to need to trust or have confidence in the one that is giving us the warning. We're going to have to believe that the warning is true. We're going to have to think that the impending danger is worth avoiding, and we're going to have to trust them enough to take the precautions that the one who's giving us the warning is instructing us to take. Now, that's really what the Bible's all about and a very big part of what it means to put our trust in God.

So as we study faith, and the writer of Hebrews in Hebrews 11 tries to illustrate it for us, it is absolutely no surprise at all that this man that we encounter in verse number seven is on the list. As a matter of fact, if you know anything about this man, he really is the prototypical. He is the foundational example of what it means to heed the warning of God. His name is Noah, and if you have your Bible, I want you to look at it in Hebrews chapter 11 in verse number seven.

This is a critical example for us, if for nothing else, to learn from Noah that it's a good idea when God gives us a warning to heed the warning and respond to it. And because Noah did, he not only saved himself but all of mankind as we know it.

Now, I know this is a hard message for us and it will be a hard message for us because it will, if we get past the veneer of Hebrews chapter 11 verse seven or the veneer of Genesis six, seven, and eight, we'll come to realize that Noah is not just a cute motif for our baby's nursery. It's not about a cute caricature of a man who likes animals and boats. That's not what it's about.

As a matter of fact, it is a very sobering account of what God is saying to a man who is one of the last in a long line in Genesis chapter five of people that were willing to be godly. From Seth on, men that walked with God like Enoch, and there weren't many of them left. You know the story. We read part of it as we studied the life of Enoch, that God was very grieved that he had made mankind. The place had gotten out of control, so he comes on the scene with some really bad news. And the bad news comes in the form of a warning.

Look at verse number seven of Hebrews chapter 11. You have it there in front of you. Follow along with me as I read it. Verse number seven says, "By faith," and that's what it's going to take if you're going to heed a warning. You better believe it, you better trust the one who's giving you the warning. "By faith, Noah, when warned about things not yet seen..." They'd never seen a flood, let alone the destruction of the world. They hadn't experienced that. Life had just gone on since creation.

But because he heeded the warning and trusted the one that gave him the warning and believed the warning was true, "in holy fear..." That's an important phrase. We've looked at the concept of fear in Hebrews already. It's an unpleasant feeling. It's not a good feeling. It's not a feeling you want to carry around at a party. It's an uncomfortable feeling. But "in holy fear," the Bible says, "he built an ark to save his family." "By faith, he condemned the world."

That wasn't what he set out to do. He wasn't out there trying to say, "I'm just going to condemn everybody." But in his building of the ark and, as the New Testament says, in preaching to them about the opportunity to get on the ark, unfortunately, as you know, not many people responded. They just sealed their own condemnation. And by that faith and by building the ark and preaching about what he was doing, the net result in their rebellion was he condemned the world.

But because of his faith, look at this, "he became the heir of the righteousness that comes by faith." That bridges for us the Old Testament account of Noah and the New Testament call of the gospel. Right there, because it's really not about biological salvation. This right here makes it clear that really what it's about from a New Testament perspective for all of us is not just being biologically spared from some impending disaster. It's all about this righteousness that we need to stand before a holy God.

Speaking of holiness, that is what prompted the warning from God in Genesis 6. Like we do every week when we look at these Old Testament examples, it'd be good for us to go to the source in Genesis chapter 6 and read a little bit about what was going on in his day. So turn back to the first book of the Bible with me and let's go to the historic context of the life of Noah and see what the warning was all about and why God's holiness played into this.

Genesis chapter 6, verse number 11. God restates the problem here. Genesis chapter 6, verse number 11: "Now the earth was," what's the word? "Corrupt." What does corrupt mean? It wasn't what it was supposed to be. It was offline, it was out of kilter, it wasn't how God designed it to go. The world was messed up. It was corrupt in God's sight. Now, that's important because to them, it wasn't messed up. They kind of liked the world the way it was.

But because God is holy, he looked at the world and said, "That's not what I planned. That's not what I said to do. That's not how I told you to live. That's not the way to do it." And because of God's holiness, he looks at it, he can't see anything but corruption here on earth. In his sight, the world was filled with violence. Because when you live a life without God's directives or his patterns or his template, you eventually get around to that, to where we can turn on the TV tonight, we can watch on whatever channel you choose at around 10 or 11 o'clock and see the world filled with violence.

Whether it's some nation fighting with another nation or whether it's some armed robbery on Wilshire Boulevard, whatever it is, we're going to see the world filled with violence because people aren't living according to God's standards. They're not holy. That's the net result. God saw, verse 12, how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people the earth had corrupted their ways. It starts in small ways, by the way. So God said to Noah—here comes the warning, underline it—"I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them," that is the people, "and the earth."

Now, remember the earth, as we said the antediluvian world before the flood, was a really great place to live. It was very conducive to biological life. That's why people were living 600, 700, 800, 900 years, because this was a great place to live. The world as we know it was destroyed. We live in a very different world than the antediluvian or pre-flood world. And it was going to be destroyed. It was going to be forever wrecked, and he was going to limit the lifespan because of that wrecked environment down to 100 or 120, the Bible says.

But the point was, it is not going to continue because I, as a holy God, a just God as the scripture says, the foundations of my throne are justice and faithfulness. If I'm faithful to myself, justice is the foundation of what I am. I cannot just wink at sin. I can't let it go. I've got to correct it. There's got to be an end to this. New Testament verbiage: "the wages of sin is death." And that's not just physical death. That's standing before a holy God and being accountable for our lives. We have to give an account. There will be a day of reckoning. The day of judgment for Noah here was the flood, and it's going to come.

So he says—and if you think he's just a mean God and he's all about destroying people, that's what verse 14 helps us to balance out our view of God—he says there's going to be a way out here. It's going to be a big floating barge. It's called an ark. "An ark of cypress wood. Make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out." It better be watertight. It's going to be a big boat. He gives the dimensions here. It's over 450 feet long, which is just about the max of building a wooden vessel if you study these things.

It's 75 feet wide and it's three stories, according to the biblical picture here, 45 feet tall. It is a gigantic barge. A lot of people go, "Well, I don't believe the story of the whole thing of Noah and the animals and how could he get all the animals on the ark?" If you really study how big this thing was—which, by the way, was an equivalent, just the dimensions I gave you, of about 522 railroad cars. That's a lot of cargo, okay? Not counting subspecies, but just species on earth, even with factoring in extinctions through the years.

You don't ask the question, "How did Noah have all the room for the animals?" What you should be asking is, "What did he do with all the excess room?" because there's all kinds of room for that. You can do the math; lots of people have. Look it up, sketch it out, you engineers. There's lots of space. Not only for the animals but for people, if they chose to come. You also had to feed them, so you had a lot of vegetation you had to bring on board this big boat.

God said, "Here's my grace. People don't have to die. You don't have to die. Your family doesn't have to die. You don't have to be judged. You can enter the ark and be saved." This is the good news of salvation in Noah's ears. The bad news is what made the good news good. Did you catch that? The bad news is what made the good news good. The problem today is we don't understand a God, we don't picture a God anymore who has any bad news for us. It's all about good news.

Because it's all about good news, we have to twist the good news and create a good news that kind of makes sense to us, because we've taken the God of the Bible and we've changed him to a God who has no bad news for mankind. Because we don't like that kind of God. We kind of like the fat, see-through God on his rocking chair in heaven, stroking his beard, looking at his creation, patting them on the head. "Oh, they're a little rebellious from time to time."

That's not the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible is: "I cannot strive with man any longer. He must come to a place of recompense, retribution, and judgment because the foundation of my throne is justice." Now, am I loving? God says, "Absolutely. Let me show you how loving I am. You don't have to go through my punishment. You can enter the place that I've provided for you, a safe spot, a spot for you to come and not incur the judgment of God."

Does that sound like New Testament theology? That's what it's all about. It's about the fact that God says about this world, "There's some bad news, guys. The wages of sin is still death. There will be a day of reckoning for all of you. Because of that, you've got to recognize that the good news of the gospel is the good news of being saved." Not from loneliness or brokenheartedness or purposelessness or "my inner child of my past is crying and he needs help" or "I need to get in touch with my feminine side" or "please heal my spirit." It's not about that. It's about being saved—here's what the Bible says—"from the wrath that is to come." Are you tracking with that? That's what the Bible says salvation is all about.

Now, that's not a message people are used to hearing because we like to take God and pull the bad news out of it. When it came to Noah, he never would have built the ark had he only believed in a God who just had good news for him. You and I, if we're going to be like Noah, we have to accept or embrace both the good news and the bad. We've got to accept the good and bad news. There's two parts to this. As a matter of fact, the good news isn't really all that good if there's no bad news that this good news saves us from.

That's the message of salvation, and people don't get it today. I've quoted this before, but on a survey done by a mission-sending organization of evangelicals that want to go out and "save" people, they were asked the question on their application: "What are we saving people from?" And I think the stat was around 80% when they answered the question could not say anything about the judgment, accountability, or wrath of God. It's all about this new kind of evangelicalism that's a salvation from loneliness or a salvation from hurt or a salvation from some kind of purposelessness.

That's not the Christian life. The Christian life is all about getting in the spiritual ark called salvation so you don't have to face a holy God on judgment day. That's what it's about. It's about being saved from the wrath that we deserve as sinful people. Most people say, "Well, I believe in God. I believe in an afterlife. I just don't believe that God would ever have any bad things happening in the afterlife, certainly not to me, because God is so loving and so kind and so accepting."

I'm all into the fact that God is loving and kind and accepting. It's just that what he is saying to us is, if you want to experience his love, if you want to embrace his acceptance, if you want to be in a place where you experience his grace, what you need to do is to step onto the ark, so to speak, so that you don't incur the wrath of God. And if you want to take that out of it, you've just changed God. That's called idolatry. As the old adage says, "God made man in his own image, and man returned the favor."

We're doing it all the time. We think God is just like us. Let me show you one example of that. Turn to Psalm 50, the middle of the Bible, Psalm 50. Here's one example, and let me show you that even today we've got to get in touch with the reality that God will hold people accountable for their sin not according to my standard, but according to his standard. And my standard and God's standard are two different things. Because you know the people I'm willing to condemn? People that are worse than me, right? Because I'm not that bad.

Here's an example, just one example from scripture. Psalm 50, drop in the middle of this discussion in verse number 19. Because I think we can all qualify for these next two verses. Are you ready? "You use your mouth for evil and you harness your tongue to deceit." Who can't in this room say that I have at some time in my life, probably in the last month, maybe in the last hour, I don't know, I've used my mouth to say bad things or I've deceived someone with my tongue.

And who can't say this in verse 20: "That you haven't spoken against your brother"? And here's a group of people, they're doing it all the time. They're speaking against their brother, they're slandering their own mother's son. "These things you have done," God says, "and I kept silent." Here is this period where God creates mankind, he lets them live, and though they're living in sin, he doesn't immediately judge them or call them to account. And in that period of silence, men start to think, "Well, I guess it's not a big deal because God is not zapping us with some divine bug light. I'm still here, God seems to like me, I'm still getting a paycheck, my kids seem to be growing up okay, I must be okay with God."

And we think this—underline this in your Bibles, if you don't ever write in your Bibles, today's a good day to start. Take your pen and underline these next words: "You thought," this is God speaking, "that I was altogether like you." Underline that. God says to us, when we think we can get away with sin, he says, "You must have thought that I, the God of heaven, the holy one, was a lot like you. You thought I had the same values as you. You thought I was altogether like you." That's a rhetorical statement. Is God like you? No. Not even close.

The things that you and I wink at and say, "Well, it must not be a big deal," we now forecast, we throw that out, we project that image and we think God must be like that. God is not like that. God is deeply offended by sin. He's got to be; he's holy. And nothing that is unholy can ever be approved by God. Nothing that is deviant in any way can be embraced by God. That's the problem God has. He looks at the earth and he sees sinful people like you and like me, and he says there's got to be a day of reckoning for that.

There has to be punishment for sin. There must be retribution. And if God does not retribute sin, he's not a good God. Just like if in the county courts someone does not punish sin that's there on the books, if there's not some accountability for injustice or lawbreaking, we'd say that judge is not a good judge. Our judge is not a good judge if he does not punish sin. And he says even when you say things that are bad, when you slander your brother, that's sinful, it needs to be punished. That's the bad news.

And we don't like the bad news. We'd like to think God isn't like that. You can think that God is not like that, but this is the only God that we have that we know anything about based on the pages of his revelation. This is the God of the Bible. And as I share the gospel with people, I remember talking to my haircutter—not my current one, my old one. Some of you know my current one. My old one, I say to my haircutter, I say, "You know, this is the God of the Bible and you've got to repent and this is important." And he says, "If that's what God is like, I don't like that kind of God. I'm not into that kind of God." My response to him was that day, "That's the only kind of God that there is."

And I recognize that's not how people act, that's not how people think. As a matter of fact, keep reading in our passage. Do you still have it open? He says when you said you were altogether... I was altogether like you, that's not true. "I will rebuke you and accuse you to your face." That's what God says. For what? For sin. Verse 22: "Consider this, you who forget God." Now, that's what I was saying to my haircutter: "You've forgotten the real God." Problem is, in his mind, he thinks God is like him. Therefore, he's not forgetting God entirely. He still likes the concept of God. He's just forgotten the real God.

He says, "Consider this, you who forget God—the real God—or I will tear you to pieces and there will be none to rescue." Boy, that's harsh. Ethel, this must be a hellfire and brimstone church. I don't like this sermon. Number one, I didn't write it, okay? I'm just here talking about it. Number two, keep reading. The great news of God's grace is only realized when we understand that our sin deserves what we just read.

But the good news is, those who come to God, verse 23, and are willing to make the God connection and see God and thank him for the grace he does give us and the patience and the mercy that he gives us, the one who does that honors God. And he prepares the way, God says, so that I may show him the salvation of God. Because who's not guilty of verse 19 and 20? We all are, including the guy writing the Psalm. And he says this: "You know what? If I can just respond to God as he told me to, God will show me his salvation." Salvation from what? Verse number 21: a rebuke to the face. Verse 22: being torn into pieces by the holy justice of God. That's the truth of the Bible.

Dave Drewy: Pastor Mike Fabarez is talking about the godly example of Noah today on Focal Point, in a message called, "Believing All of God's Promises About the Future." Every message from this program is waiting for you anytime at focalpointradio.org or through the free Focal Point app.

And today, when you make a gift to keep this ministry going, we want to send you "The Journals of Jim Elliot," edited by Elisabeth Elliot. What you'll find inside are the unvarnished, searching thoughts of a young man who held nothing back with God. Written years before the world ever knew his name, before he gave his life trying to bring the gospel to the very people who would take it. A faith that wasn't crafted for an audience but worked out alone on the page, directed straight at God.

There's something about reading it that turns the lens back on your own heart. Make your gift today and ask for "The Journals of Jim Elliot" by calling 888-320-5885 or give online at focalpointradio.org. Well now, Pastor Mike has something important to share.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: Thanks, Dave. I'd like to invite you to join me September 19th through the 26th, 2026, on a Christian cruise through New England and Canada. We'll sail Holland America's Zaandam, known for its elegance and exceptional hospitality, to historic cities like Boston, Halifax, and Quebec City. We'll gather for devotional times in God's word, followed by thought-provoking Bible teaching throughout our journey.

Grammy-winning musicians Keith and Kristyn Getty will lead us in worship. You'll enjoy the stunning autumn landscapes as we explore charming coastal villages, all while building friendships with like-minded believers. It's a unique opportunity to deepen your faith and see some of the most beautiful scenery on the eastern seaboard. Space is limited, so don't wait to sign up. Secure your cabin today at focalpointradio.org.

Dave Drewy: I'm Dave Drewy, inviting you back again tomorrow for part two of our lesson, "Believing All of God's Promises About the Future." Wednesday on Focal Point with Mike Fabarez.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: Hi, Pastor Mike here. God's word promises it'll never return void. So I wonder, how is God's word moving in your heart right now? Drop us a line, let us know. We'd love to hear from you, we'd love to be praying for you here. Just go to focalpointradio.org. And then be sure to join us again tomorrow right here as we continue to explore the depths of scripture. We'll see you then.

Dave Drewy: Today's program was produced and sponsored by Focal Point Ministries.