September’s fun. This is a good time of year. We’re um it’s a fresh time of year. We cook a breakfast together and thanks to everyone who helped this morning and uh we welcome any new people that God brings our way. And we have various small groups and Bible studies and initiatives just to help us grow and help us serve one another because none of us want to be here this time next year without being having been affected and moved by the spirit of God. You know, God gives us gifts. Each one of us has a spiritual gift at least to minister to one another to help us move forward to greater maturity in Christ. And uh and we don’t want to be quite the same next year as we are this year. So, we all have work to do and ministry to do and September is a fun time to get that going. So, as we begin, we don’t know what this year is going to bring. It’ll bring some great joy. I’m I’m sure we’ll have wonderful worship experiences and and probably great sorrows and some times where we really need to support one another as well. We just want to follow God wherever he leads. And we don’t know what’s around the next bend, but we trust that God goes before us and he’s looking after us and his spirit will go with us. You know, before our evangelical free church congregation bought this building in 1972, it was a United Church. And in 1967, that congregation prepared a retrospective of Knox Church commemorating the first 60 years of its existence from 1907 when this building was built to the Canadian centennial year of 1967. And their booklet kind of goes through the history of the church and various leaders and and uh pastors and ministers they had. And near the end of the book, it offers their peak into an uncertain future. They write this. Crises have always been part of our tradition. They bring one’s metal out, don’t they? Well, we believe that as never before, the world about us is trying to force us into its own mold. In fact, the breath of the old kirk is literally being squeezed out of us. We’ve lost all our parking space. The city wants our sight. A proposed freeway on 104th Street will forcibly shove us aside. I don’t know what happened to the freeway. [snorts] It says high-rise apartment complexes are replacing the houses of our faithful. The call of new suburban churches is claiming more and more of our members. and the mobility of modern living, the relativity of moral standards, the increasing disrespect for sacred things, the lack of biblical roots, the era of the hippie and the pill of the DOG, death of God theology, and the perplexed profession called the Christian ministry. In short, the sociotechnological revolution with its counterpart inside the church is making us too shout, “Watchmen, what of the night?” Now, if any of you here are old hippies, you’re exactly part of the problem that they were worried about and we’re all looking at you, Ian. [laughter and snorts] Of course, their dim look into the future from 60 years ago, it sounds quaint to our ears. It’s kind of amusing to consider what they were worried about. But here we are in about 3 months time, we’ll usher in the 120th year of Knox Church. And if we did up our own retrospective of another 60 years, what would we list as the crisis we’re facing? As with them, I suppose parking can still be an issue, but we might add things like widespread disenchantment of our modern secular world and the threat of climate change, confusion with personal identities, an economy that’s drowning in tariffs, and a a restless province that’s debating leaving Canada, rapid upswing of medical assistance and dying, the anxiety and anger that’s produced by social media, and the fear that artificial intelligence is just about to take over our lives. And then another 60 years from now in 2087, if the future people of Knox Church look at our list, they might smile with amusement at the things that troubled and concerned us. Unless, of course, AI really does enslave and destroy humanity in the next few years, then we’ll have the last laugh on them. [snorts] But we’ve been looking at the early chapters of the Bible and the book of Genesis the last couple months and that was time tumultuous changes unlike anything we’ve ever known. You know, as outlined in the genealogy of Genesis 5, there were 1656 years of human history from uh Adam to Noah. And in that time, society degenerated from a paradise, garden paradise, to a place of unimaginable violence and wickedness. By the time of Noah, God’s view of the world saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become. That every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. Lord was grieved that he had made man, and his heart was filled with pain. World of Noah sounds like a world none of us would want to live in. wickedness, violence so widespread as to fill God’s heart with pain. And it prompted that radical reset of a devastating flood that left only eight humans representation from each animal species alive. What was life like after that reset? What was that brave new world going to look like that God called Noah and his family members to establish? I think three things jump out at us from our passage this morning. three aspects of life that are that are timeless, as relevant to us as they were to Noah. No matter how much our world changes, these three things offer stability to ground our lives. The reset of life on earth brought about a renewed relationship with creation. It brought about a restored relationship with fellow human beings and a fresh covenant relationship with God and his mercy. So creation, fellow human beings, the mercy of God. Let’s look at those three things. When Noah and his family walked off the ark, they were coming into a world of second chances and new beginnings. Our God is a God of new beginnings. And uh God, the loving heavenly father had given them a fresh start. God said to Noah in chapter 9:1, “Be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth.” sounds very familiar to us because God had said pretty much identical thing to Adam and his newly created wife Eve 16 centuries earlier in Genesis chapter 1. Genesis 9 is like God. He’s the director over all the earth. He’s calling for take two with a new set of actors but the same general script. There were a few revisions and alterations. In Genesis 1, God called the man and woman to be fruitful, increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it, rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, and over every living creature that moves on the ground. The revised script in Genesis 9 offers a new wrinkle. Don’t just rule over and administrate the creatures. Feel free to eat them, too, if you like. says, ‘The fear and dread of you will fall upon all the beasts of the earth and the birds of the air, upon every creature that moves along the ground and upon all the fish of the sea. They are given into your hands. Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you green plants, I now give you everything. So what’s new is that the animals are going to start feeling pretty skittish around humans for good reason because humans are going to start looking at animals and say you know I could make something out of that. Pigs were going to be not just regarded as pigs but bacon and cows could be sirloin steaks and hamburgers and chickens as buffalo wings and uh and uh you you know you think there must have been some hits and misses in figuring out what parts of the animals you could actually eat. Fish eggs. Let’s give it a try, but let’s charge a lot of money for it. Snails, why not? But let’s call them something fancy like escargo or something like that. And and uh you know, they must have tried some things that really didn’t remain on the menu. Sloth claws or snake fang soup or something like that. And I have no idea how liver made that cut, why it is still on the menu, cuz you think you take one one bite of it and it would go in with the snake fangs and everything else that’s being discarded. But after the flood, animals were going to have to look out for us. We were coming. The humans were coming. We were ravenously hungry. And if an animal, the same animal that felt petted and pampered for a year on the ark, suddenly they were going to have to watch their backs because the humans were after them. Their new fearlessness or fearfulness that they had for humans, that was so they could avoid being eaten, but also, I think, so we could avoid being eaten as well. We wouldn’t have to live in that Alfred Hitchcock world where flocks of fearless birds would suddenly swoop down on us and pick our bones clean or coyotes and bears without any fear of us would come stalking us at night. But that fresh relationship with animals, that’s not everything we need to know about our our new relationship with creation. There’s more to it than that. There’s a greater responsibility. Verse 10, some of this is fairly amazing. Verse 10 says that God was establishing his covenant with man and his descendants, but also establishing his covenant with every living creature that came off the ark, the birds, the livestock, and all the wild animals. This is a covenant by which God unilaterally commits to never again destroying the earth by the flood. Verse 12 again, God says, “This is the sign of the covenant I’m making between me and you and every living creature with you. A covenant for all generations to come. I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth, the rainbow appears in the clouds. I’ll remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I’ll see it. I’ll remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth. God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I’ve established between me and all life on earth.” So, every living creature, all life on earth comes under the covenant treaty, that concern of God. Meaning that animals as part of creation, they’re not just disposable. They’re they’re not to just be treated lightly or without consideration. They’re part of God’s good world, too. They’re not the same as humans. And humans are welcome to use them for food. But humans also have the responsibilities to rule over them wisely and to manage them and to manage ecology and to strive to maintain some kind of messy balance in nature. If God shows concern for creatures along with humans in his covenant of non-destruction, humans ought to take note and have some thoughtful ecological work to do of their own. Last week, a judge in California issued a ruling that Catalina Island, just off Los Angeles, could begin the first phase of killing off nearly all of the 2,000 deer on the island. It’s just an effort to restore the natural ecosystem and reduce fire danger. Catalina is one of those channel islands and those mu deer, they’re not native to the island. They got there somehow, but they graze on the fireresistant plants and that make the island makes the island particularly vulnerable to the kind of devastation that went through Maui a few years ago. There’s been a lot of backlash against the deer call. animal advocates and hunters and local residents who really value the deer population. But the culling of the deer, however regrettable, it seems necessary, seems unavoidable. And it’s a good thing, I think, that the killing of the deer, it’s not treated lightly. It requires some debate, some deliberation. There’s a sense of human responsibility in play. If God has covenantal concern for all creation, then humans, we can’t just take this world as our own and have a scorched earth policy toward all the other inhabitants on it. That fresh offthe-boat relationship of humans with animals with creation, it’s a relationship that’s described in Romans 8 as creation groaning right now. And you groan when you’re uncomfortable. Says creation groans because it’s frustrated. It’s uh not by its own choice but by the will of the one who subjected it. And one day it’ll be liberated from its bondage to decay. In other words, creation’s fortunes are tied to our fortunes. When man fell, creation fell along with us. But as people are redeemed by Jesus, we’re being restored to all we were meant to be. Our rising tide also lifts creation along with us. In our world of redemption, restoration, makes sense that we would become responsible ecologists. And I suppose if you don’t think you’re an ecologist, probably if you swatted a mosquito this summer, you were doing ecology of some kind. We’re we’re being renewed. Creations along with us for the ride. Psalm 19 says, “Knight after night, day after day, the skies are proclaiming uh the works of God’s hands.” And Romans 1 talks about how God’s divine attributes are clearly on display through what he has made. And if nature, if creation is the mirror by which God reveals so much of himself to people, and we want other people to enjoy salvation in Jesus as well, we don’t want to be the ones who smudge that mirror with our dirty fingers because we’re not looking after creation as we should. God has a covenantal relationship with us, with all living creatures. We want to be people who celebrate and guard the beauty of our planet. It’s the beauty through which people can see God. So let’s move on. That’s our timeless relationship with creation. But now we go to our timeless relationship with fellow human beings. As we saw last week, the reason that God said he was bringing the flood was God saw a corrupt world that had become hyperviolent. Was a world that greatly devalued the lives of human beings. And although we can and we should demonstrate wise concern for animals, we know that humans are immensely different and vastly more significant than the animals are. We’re told to freely eat the animals, but we don’t consider eating one another. And although we might see the necessity of culling the deer population on Catalina Island, none of us would ever consider culling the human population on islands like Singapore or Hong Kong or Manhattan or Montreal. Sounds a little weird to us in our passage, but God says he will demand justice even against animals if they take the life of a human being. Speaking of the value of human lives, God says, “And for your lifeblood, I will surely demand an accounting. I’ll demand an accounting from every animal.” I don’t know how that works, but somehow in the justice of the universe, animals that should be afraid of people, if they strike out against them, there’s some kind of an accounting demanded. A lot easier for us to wrap our minds around God’s prohibition against humans taking fellow humans lives. And from each man too, I will demand an accounting for the life of his fellow man. Reason God gives for that is clear. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed. For in the image of God has God made man. And the fact that the image of God resides in every human on the planet, that’s meant to be the ultimate deterrent against violence and murder. You know, this past Friday, the uh parade passed by our church uh in the reign of firemen and other first responders, and they were commemorating the great loss of life that happened on 911 25 years ago. That was a day when 3,000 people and more, all embodying the image of God, were just swept away in a few hours. And within two weeks of that fateful September morning, American Congress convened and they created a government compensation fund for the families of the victims. A government I think was motivated by two factors. One, they did want to do right by the victims and their families. But the other one, and maybe the main reason, was to stave off lawsuits against the airlines that had been hijacked. Lawsuits over issues like lacks airport security. uh if those lawsuits had been allowed to just spring forth, it could have bankrupted the airline industry and the government said, “Well, that’s not in our best interest to bankrupt our industry.” So, a lawyer named Kenneth Fineberg was given the massive task of meeting with the families of the victims, having them sign off liability, and receive government compensation in return. So, he wrote a book about the three years he spent doing that task. It’s entitled, “What is life worth?” Nearly impossible task he had was to determine compensation for the families of victims. And the the rough the rough uh uh graph they used was just to try to figure out what would these this person have earned over the course of their lifetime. You know, some in the Twin Towers, they were earning multi-million dollar salaries and others in the cafeteria were earning minimum wage. His task was really as much spiritual as it was financial in trying to gauge the fair worth of individual victims. So he writes, “The statute creating the fund was deceptively simple in its goals, hideously complex in its implementation. Every line of the new law raised difficult questions. Who was eligible to receive compensation? How much money should be awarded? What rationale should govern the awards? There were few guidelines spelled out in the law and history, he says, offered little help. I looked in vain for precedent. I even turned to the Bible and other books of religious learning, hoping to find a road map, possibly a pertinent biblical allegory that would paint the way. Not so. Rabbis and priests expressed sympathy and occasionally promised me guidance, but no definitive answers were forthcoming. So in the end, after 3 years of meeting with all of these families, he managed to get 97% of the victim families to sign off, but not without hours and hours of emotional agony and sometimes bitter family fights over who was going to get what, and story after story of the victims and how deeply their loss was being felt by their families. He listened to many final phone calls between victims and family members when the people who were going to die knew that they only had a few moments to live. So the median the middle award that ended up being given was about 1.7 million. But there were many people who questioned why are you valuing that person’s life over my over this person’s life. And Fineberg writes, “Claimment after claimment referred to the disconnect between a life lost and the inadequacy of mere compensation. One guy said, “Whatever award we receive will obviously never come close to the worth of our son. To be perfectly honest, this whole matter of victim’s compensation is ghoullish and repulsive. We’re in a no-win situation. What whatever we receive is not enough. The only way we win is if you had some magical power to bring him back. And most most haunting for Fineberg were the seven families that refused to apply for compensation. He says, “I met with mothers who had lost sons. I begged them to complete the necessary application forms. Mrs. Jones, I’ll help you. Just sign the form. My staff will fill out the rest of the application. Don’t compound the tragedy of 9/11 by missing this statutory deadline. You’ll be surrendering the right to receive $2 million. Take the money. Establish a foundation in your son’s name. Don’t let the terrorists win. [snorts] Mrs. Jones stared at me blankly and in a flat robotic tone, she responded, “Go away, Mr. Fineberg. Thank you for coming, but no amount of money can replace him. Leave the application on the kitchen table. I’ll look at it later.” He says, “I never heard from her, and her application was never filed.” You know, God says, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed. For in the image of God has God made man.” And that’s why it’s such an impossible task to try to ever value one life over another. Gives us a sense of the the massive weight of every human soul. His famous mere Christianity C. Lewis writes how the filthiest and feeblest person on earth, God can take them and make them dazzling. They’re already immortals, but God can make them radiant. He can make them a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God some of God’s own boundless power and delight and goodness. So, he’s saying that humans at our best, we can be like polished stainless steel mirrors that reflect God’s image back to him. As Tim Keller says, uh, the bi and the Bible affirms, we’ve all because of our sin turned away. And he asked, “What’s the difference between a rock and a mirror in a dark room?” It’s nothing. When we decide to be our own masters, we turn away. We’re like a mirror turning away from the sun, facing the darkness, and we’re not facing anything bright. We can’t reflect anything. Then phrase that stayed with me for a long time is that the image of God in sinful man, it’s not been erased, but it’s been defaced. The image is still there. It’s inside the most broken person on the planet. Maybe hidden. The mirror could be very cracked and broken, smudged. It can have graffiti all over it. But again, Tim Keller says, “When you look at a human being, it’s like looking at one of those old castles in Europe. Doesn’t even have a roof anymore. It was built a thousand years ago. And even though it’s a ruin, even though it can’t function anymore as what it was built to be, there’s still a grandeur about it. There’s still a nobility about it. and you want to treat it in a sacred way. Usually, it is treated sacredly. It’s landmarked. And that’s how God looks at us, that’s how we should look at one another. If you’re a Christian, you realize even when you see a wicked person, even when you see a really messed up person, it’s like the ruin of a castle and you say, “Oh, I’d love to see this thing restored. Imagine what it could look like then.” That’s that’s the weight and the value that we should ascribe to every human being. CS Lewis says that in in we’re living among people who carry the image of God. We must remember there’s no ordinary person on the planet. You’ve never talked to a mortal. Nations and cultures and arts and civilizations. Those are mortal. But their life compared to ours is like the life of a gnat. It’s immortals whom we joke with and work with and marry and snub and exploit. You know, one day our city of Edmonton, maybe it’ll be reduced to a rune and like all those great ancient cities, there might be a a column or two sticking out of the sand, a top couple floors of the Stantech Tower perhaps, and rest of the city will be buried under layers of sand and dirt and rock. But although Edmonton might be reduced to a ruin, every person who’s ever walked in it, from those who are struggling to live on the street right now to those sitting next to you in your pews, they’ll be unddeinished immortals. They’ll still be around. They’re not going anywhere because of the image, the image of God in them. It’s it may be really tagged with graffiti, but it’s still we we’re bound to give that person weight and gravity and honor in a sense. They’re a fine castle. Maybe they’re in disrepair. We’re all in some disrepair, but you have a sense of what it could look like if it was perfectly restored. You know, there’s a little throwaway incident at the end of our passage in chapter 9. We touched on it for a moment last week. Wasn’t Noah’s finest moment. Uh it must have happened a few years after the flood because Noah had planted a vineyard and he had harvested the grapes and he’d fermented some wine and and uh he had too much to drink and he wasn’t out in public. He was in his tent but he passed out without adequately covering himself up. Story isn’t really about Noah and his drinking. It’s really about his sons because one of them saw his dad exposed and I don’t know what his uh reaction was or what he said to his brothers, but it wasn’t positive and it wasn’t protective. The other two sons, their first reaction was to preserve the dignity of their father. They valued him. They walked backward into the tent making sure their eyes didn’t see and they carried a a robe or a garment of some kind and they covered up their father’s nakedness. That scene tracks with everything God says about his image in humans. Because even when a person stumbles around drunk and embarrasses themselves as Noah did, that’s still a person whose dignity is worth preserving, still an immortal, fully worthy of honor and protection. The image of God resides fully in them. So, our passage points to those two timeless relationships we have with creation, with our fellow imagebearers, our fellow human beings. Those relationships, they’re not going to change no matter how much our world changes. And the final relationship we focus on in our passage experienced by Noah and his family as they came off the ark and by us every day of our lives is our relationship with God’s mercy. To see this, we need to think a little bit about the rainbow as being more than just a little pretty bit of color in the sky. In the lexicon of the Hebrew language, which the Old Testament was written, they didn’t have a word for rainbow. They just had a word cachet, which just meant a normal bow. This is the kind of bow that you would go hunting with or you would take into battle with you. It’s a war bow. In Genesis 9:13, God saying he’s going to set his bow in the clouds as a sign of a covenant between him and the earth. Bible has God setting his bow, war bow in the clouds and then leaves its significance kind of hanging there for us to ponder and think about. And over the years a lot of scholars and preachers including Charles Spurgeon had a famous sermon on that in 1863 simply entitled the rainbow. And he speaks to the spatial orientation of the bow in the skies. If you look at a rainbow and you imagine it as a war bow, which direction would the arrow fly? It would fly toward the heavens. It would fly toward God, not toward the earth. It’s not aimed at us. In this symbol, we may have an illusion to the gospel. But even if the rainbow in the sky isn’t specifically intended as an illusion to the gospel, the story of an arrow of justice pointed at God rather than pointed at us. That’s the story of the Bible through and through. Who took the ultimate justice of God against our sin and our corruption, our violence, all the bloodshed over many centuries by humans against other human beings. humanity following the flood. Noah and his family, they weren’t any less sinful than before the flood. From Noah right through to us, we have many examples of what God saw on earth before the flood. How great wickedness has become and inclination of the thoughts of hearts evil all the time and the Lord’s hearts filled with pain. If we’re honest with ourselves, we all know that corruption isn’t someone else’s problem. It’s our problem. Our hearts are marred and scarred by sin. And the image of God in us, it hasn’t been erased, but it’s always been defaced. God’s a God of holiness and of justice and of vengeance against our sin. I have a friend who was once using a uh an airpowered um pin nailer in his basement and he somehow ended up holding it backwards. He moved his trigger the trigger away from himself and he drove the pin nail very deep into his own thumb. required a a trip to the hospital an hour and a half away where someone other than the local doctors could were able to put enough torque on a pair of pliers to extract this pin nail. Our sin is like is like pushing that trigger of God’s justice back at ourselves. The bow in the clouds, it should be turned the other way and the arrow really should fly at us. But no, when God hung his bow in the clouds, he wasn’t laying his justice aside. He was just aiming it at himself. Isaiah 53, the picture of Jesus. He’s bearing the chastisement that brings us peace. And on the cross, the arrow of God’s justice went straight into the heart of Jesus. Romans 3 describes Jesus as our sacrifice of atonement. We benefit through faith in his blood. Says Jesus demonstrates the justice of God. He’s both just and the justifier of those who have faith in Christ. Meaning Jesus on the cross, he got the full fury of the storm. He got all the wind and the thunder and the lightning just so we could get that calm rainbow of peace. In the flood, we discover how seriously God regards our sin. In the rainbow, we see how committed God is to giving us mercy. And in the cross, we discover how we he can do both at the same time. He can uphold his justice and he can show mercy to people like us. Those are the timeless truths in an in a in a changing world. We’re to to love seeing creation restored and redeemed and love preserving the dignity of our fellow human beings. Rely on God’s mercy for the forgiveness of our sin. And I think the brothers and sisters who were at Knox Church 60 years ago, they put their centennial book together. They had concerns that we laugh at today. But they also I think they had some main things figured out about God and about his people. And near the end of the book, they write this. In our fastch changing world, we seem to be at a crossroads, a place where readjustment becomes necessary in order to cope with modern man’s ideas. I would like to see Knox lead the way in reminding the people of God. Namely, that the world and people in it may change, but God does not. He’s the same God always. Progress and science can prove or disprove what it will, but our God does not change. Modern man, with his increased knowledge, is all too prone to believe that there’s nothing beyond what the human mind can comprehend. The church therefore needs to keep on showing that even with all this knowledge, modern man’s only a babe in his father’s arms when he compares himself with God. Knox church should continue to lead this way, urging its people to have faith in God, a faith strong enough to guide our thinking into matters that go beyond human understanding. Then there’s this prayer from 60 years ago. God, grant then to our ministry in this hallowed place the strength to lead and the faith to follow equal to the challenges of the crises in these exciting centennial hours. And whatever happens, may Knox, which to us will always be the church, may it be the church that God has built us to be. Amen. And as we start up just a fresh season of life in church together, I think that’s a great prayer for us to bear in mind as well. And let’s uh let’s turn to prayer now. And there’s a few things I think from God’s word to us this morning that we want might want to pray about. You might want to pray that your relationship with creation would encourage others to see beauty in the world. Pray for those who are made in God’s image, who have fallen into great disrepair, that God would bring restoration to their lives. Thank God that the arrow of his justice is not pointed at us. And then you might want to pray that 60-year-old prayer for our church. And you can just read it and you can pray it if you like. This is your time with God for the next few minutes and then I’ll close us off.