Where He Leads I Will Follow: Was Noah Perfect?

 

This is the account of Noah and his family. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God.  Genesis 6:9

 Before whom do you long to be seen as great? Your friends? Your family? Your boss? Your pastor? I read this verse this morning and my first thought was, what an incredible eulogy! Oh, to be known this way, but I think the key to it comes in the verse before this, Genesis 6:8, “But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.” As we read and learn about Noah, he wasn’t well loved and liked among the people in his generation. At best, people probably thought he was a weirdo. At worst, a lunatic. Had he sought to be well liked and loved by his peers, this would be a very different story. Instead, Noah was well liked by God, and why? Because he was righteous, blameless and he walked faithfully with God.

 What does it mean that Noah was righteous? That he did not sin? Certainly not! But Noah sought to do right before God. He honored God above men and His good above popularity. I’m sure Noah messed up, lost his temper, even made bad choices at times. We get one such story later in Genesis, after the flood, for proof. He was certainly not sinless, but God saw him as righteous. Presumably, like David who also sinned greatly but was seen as a man after God’s own heart (Acts 13:22), when he did wrong, he owned it and sought forgiveness from God. He desired to do right. He chose to live his life according to God’s plan and not the world’s.

 Ok, so what about blameless. That sounds an awful lot like sinless, and we know that wasn’t true. The KJV says that Noah was perfect. Yikes! That’s a lot to live up to! But Matthew Henry, in his commentary, gave a perspective on this that resonates with me. He says that Noah, “was perfect, not with a sinless perfection, but a perfection of sincerity; and it is well for us that by virtue of the covenant of grace, upon the score of Christ's righteousness, sincerity is accepted as our gospel perfection.” Moving in tandem with being Noah having been righteous, his being blameless, or perfect, had to do not with a lack of sin in his life, but of his heart and its inclination towards the heart of God. Noah sought after God and lived to honor Him. How do we know this? Because of the last part of verse 9 where it says, “he walked faithfully with God.”

 In this lies the essence of all that came before it. How was Noah just? How was he blameless? Because he walked faithfully with God. When we live in relationship with our Heavenly Father, our hearts yearn to please Him, to follow Him, to do His will. This is the essence of living a just, righteous, blameless, perfect life. There is no other way to do it. We must live in love, because God is love (1 John 4:16). We cannot create for ourselves some legalistic, rule-driven code by which we try to live a perfect, sinless life. It just won’t come out well. Instead, we need to walk faithfully with God all the days of our lives, and in relationship with Him, we will find righteousness through Christ and our lives will be marked with goodness and grace as we exemplify that which we fill ourselves with.

Here’s the Thing: I don’t want my eulogy to say that I was sinless or without fault, there’s no way that would be true. I want people to remember me as being one who loved God desperately and sought to serve Him wholeheartedly, loving others as He does.

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