Noah Builds an Altar
CLASS 4 ISSUES
Study Scripture: Genesis 8: 13 -22; 9:11 – 13
Background: Genesis 6:1 – 9: 7
Devotional: Psalm 77: 1 – 2, 7 – 19
Lesson 2 June 7, 2025
Key Verse
I have set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall serve as a sign of a covenant between Me and the earth. Genesis 9:13
INTRODUCTION
An altar is where you meet God. Noah was saved by God and he and his family survived an incredibly great catastrophe. He and his family were the only persons alive. All others had died in the Great Flood.
The Chapter we are looking at today tells us about the start of things after the great and destructive worldwide Flood. It teaches us important lessons, lessons which unfortunately most men have forgotten.
It first reveals to us what society is all about. It discusses the true divisions of mankind, while the succeeding Chapters immediately begin to show their roles, inheritance, and contributions, and shows how God organized and placed men in the world.
In the face of the widespread and uncontrollable spread of sin the judgment of the holy and righteous God came and all except one family was wiped out.
The worship of the Saviour now took place as the widespread destruction on earth called for praise and owing the knee.
These Chapters emphasize the theme of the Book of Genesis which is that men are inadequate without God. One writer describes Genesis’s role in our instruction and what Noah pictures as follows:
“It reveals that man can never be complete without God, that he can never discover or fulfill the true meaning of his life without a genuine personal relationship with an indwelling God…
Noah is a picture to us of regeneration. Noah is a man who went through death in a figure. He was on both sides of the flood. He was preserved in the ark through the waters of judgment, through the waters of death, to come out into a new world and a new life”.
Why what will happen after the creation, the disobedience and sin of Adam and Eve, the murder of Abel by his brother Cain, and the evils and continued disobedience of the line of Cain and the increasing demonic influence is summed up as follows:
“Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the Earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. The Lord was sorry that He had made man on the Earth, and He was grieved in his heart”.
We see God using language adjusted to human beings so that they would understand. God does not change in his essential being and the principles that guide Him are unchangeable principles, and they are carried out in different ways depending on the activities and the doings of men. The activities of the people on the earth had now brought the justice and righteousness of God’s character into play and so there was the necessity of divine judgment.
God’s eternal and unchangeable principles operates and when men respond in a certain way, God’s activity appears to be different from His activity when man responds another way.
The Lord therefore in the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24 is inviting us in this Lesson to compare the days of Noah with the days of His Second Coming. His disciples had asked what the signs of His coming would be and Jesus in Matthew 24:29-31 told them that the days of His coming would be just like what was happening in the days of Noah, for then in the days before Noah completed building the Ark and entered the Ark the people of the world chose not to listen to God and His prophet Noah and did what they wanted to do not understanding judgment was at hand. They remained in disobedience and ignorance until the Flood came and took them all away. So Jesus said shall the days of the Coming of the Son of Man be. It is most important that your people see what this Study Lesson is warning.
So if our Study Lesson is telling us about Noah’s day and the winding up of that age, we must pay attention to and analyze what happened then. This Study is therefore an extremely serious one with lessons to prevent us experiencing incalculable losses.
A Professor named Toynbee wrote an interesting study of human civilizations. He counted that there were 21 of them and when he wrote 14 of the 21 civilizations were dead. The remaining 7 showed all the signs of internal dissention, gross materialism, and other factors which had led to the collapse of the other previously dead civilizations
So this is the situation in our present world. The storms are gathering as they were then to take away the ancient world.Scripture tells us that the populationof the world was multiplying greatly but at the same time evil was multiplying greatly. So, they were swept away by the Great Flood.
But we are told our world will be swept away not by a flood but by fire.
Today’s Lesson focuses on events directly after the Flood wiped out all creation, except for all living creatures, human and otherwise in the Ark.
Interestingly, the Flood is one of the most well-attested accounts in history.
The Biblical account of the Great Flood is detailed in giving specifics for the beginning of the Flood, the length of time the rain fell, how long the floodwaters covered the earth, and how long it took for the waters to recede. The total amount of time adds up to more than a year (Genesis 7:11; 8:14).
Having made it safely through the Flood, creation and humankind had another chance. But even as that new chance began, God was fully aware of the still-present reality of man’s brokenness. Sadly, even before the end of Genesis 9, sin manifested itself again in the lives and actions of the surviving family of faith. Humanity’s brokenness becomes apparent to us. This is a sad state of affairs.
The imaginative writers of our day are always trying to write a book to depict what would happen after an atomic holocaust had completely wiped out life off the face of the earth and what it would be like for a new couple to start off in such a world. Yet none of them seem to realize that is exactly what happened in the story of Noah and the Flood. None of them seem ever to have caught the romance of Noah and his family starting afresh in a new world.
Nevertheless, Noah and his family are a picture of regeneration. The beginning of life as a Christian is the passing from death into life (in Christ). This passing into life is by grace, unmerited favour, just as Noah did in the Flood”. We are therefore looking at a man in a new world and a new beginning.
We cannot imagine the shock, relief or surprise of Noah and his family at their first site as they emerged from the Ark.
But we should note that this is a prototype of the spiritual history Christians experience in our pilgrimage. All the details in this story image the many smaller events in our lives and crises in judgments as we make the new beginning in our Christian experience. We will have many failures but note that God “remembered” Noah and He will in the same way “remember” us as we encounter the many crises in life and make many mistakes.
It is important that today we look around us and note what had happened and why it happened. The world and the human race had become corrupt and violent and so God because of their way of life and their sinning determined to destroy the corrupt race.
God found Noah different from his peers and Scripture described him as righteous and blameless. God told him to make a giant floating box which one writer tells us was about 450 feet high (1½ American Football fields), 75 feet wide (seventy standard parking spaces), and 45 feet high (a typical four storey building) with three decks and over 100,000 square feet of deck space with the capacity of 860 boxcars and 14,000 gross tons. We call this the Ark. This design of this rectangular box was stable, given its purpose of staying afloat.
Noah preached through an extended time period, warning the world, telling them for one hundred and twenty years to cease the corruption and rebellion against God, but there were no takers for his message.
Are you hearing the message from God or are you like those in the world on the “broad way” bent on living exactly as you have always lived. How much preaching do you need to hear for you to change?
God, finally, after this long time of extending mercy told Noah and his family to get into the Ark with the animals God had selected and sent to him. God Himself closed the door (7:1-9). Then the Flood began and continued for one hundred and fifty days until the waters covered the mountains. (7:17-24).
Then God remembered Noah and the animals and the entire situation changed. The floods stopped at God’s command and the fountains of the deep were plugged, the windows of heaven closed, and the rains from heaven were restrained. The waters receded. The waters had raged for one hundred and fifty days and now for another one hundred and fifty days (note the symmetry of time) the waters decreased. The mountain tops could be seen and the earth began to dry. God soon commanded Noah and his family to leave the Ark.
One might imagine that in this pristine world of new beginnings sin had been cleansed from the heart. But we would soon see in Chapter 9 that despite tremendous punishment, sin still resided in man, and that this infection would break out in unbelief in God and His word resulting in the sexual perversions, wars, injustice, abuse and violence from time to time.
We see that godly men, who had previously lived in a perverted world, and who witnessed the massive punishment of sin, and survived it, still were not immune from falling victim to the temptation to practice the perversions that God had shortly before roundly condemned and dealt with.
Note righteous Noah, he is so described in chapter 6:9, was soon to be found naked and hopelessly drunk in chapter 9:21. Then we immediately learn about his son’s terrible misbehaviour which has perverted sexual overtones.
We learn that we must never take lightly and underestimate the effect on us of that mysterious and powerful malady called sin.
Note the awful nature of our sin. The only persons on earth are those of the family of Noah. Every human being who has ever lived have descended from Noah and his family. Whether we like to believe and accept it or not, we are all from the same family. All have the same blood. Blood transfusions from blood taken from a race of people on a faraway continent can be transported to a faraway continent and used successfully. We are all equal in the sight of God. There is no essential difference. Differences are only superficial.
We cannot excuse our iniquity, our bad and evil behaviour toward other people on the basis of anything else but on the evil imaginations of the heart, from which we suffer from the time of youth. When we kill, hurt, and destroy, we are harming members of our own family. That’s pretty bad.
THE TEXT
Chapter 8: 13 – 22
Verse 13. The biblical account of the Flood gives specific details regarding when the Flood began (Genesis 7:11), the length of time the rain fell on the earth (7:12, 17), how long the floodwaters covered the earth (7:24), and the length of time it took for the flood waters to recede (8:3). The total amount of time from when the Flood began to when the earth was dry adds up to a little more than a year (8:14). We know that Noah was 600 years old when the Flood began (7:6, 11). This verse states that one year had passed, and it was the first month of Noah’s six hundredth and first year.
For Noah to see the waters were dried up from off the earth suggests that he could see dry ground on “the mountains of Ararat,” where the ark came to rest (Genesis 8:4). The sight of which would have been significant to Noah and his family.
Although the face of the ground was dry, Noah, his family and the animals remained in the ark. They were all “shut … in” (Genesis 7:16) until the Lord revealed the time for them to leave the ark.
Verse 14. The phrase the second month, on the seven and twentieth day of the month reveals that about two months had passed between the events of this verse and the previous verse. The duration of the flood was one-hundred and fifty days (Genesis 7:24; 8:3), but the process to dry out the land took about sixty days.
Verses 15–16. As God had commanded Noah and his family to go into the ark (Genesis 7:1), so God also commanded them to go forth of the ark. One can only imagine how ready Noah and his family were to do so—they would not have had to be told twice!
Scripture gives us the names of Noah’s sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth (Genesis 7:13; 9:18–19; 10:1). However, we are not told the names of Noah’s wife or the wives of his sons. The New Testament informs us that a total of eight people were saved through the ark (1 Peter 3:20).
Verse 17. The four designations living thing (wild animals), fowl (birds), cattle (domesticated animals), and every creeping thing are intended to convey a message of totality. The four underlying Hebrew words also occur together in Genesis 1:26 and 7:14, although not always translated the same way. The passage from Genesis 1:26 is a bit more comprehensive in mentioning fish as well. This category is probably not mentioned in the verse before us due to the nature of the disaster being that of water
(1 Kings 4:33; Ezekiel 38:20; Hosea 4:3; Zephaniah 1:3).
We should not fail to consider the amount of labor that was necessary to care for all the animals on that Ark! And imagine the smell after even a day or two of being cooped up with them in the Ark.
The statement be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth repeats the command given to Adam and Eve in the Garden (Genesis 1:28). In this verse, however, the command is not issued to Noah and his family but to the creatures in the ark so that they would breed abundantly in the earth.
Noah and his family would receive such a command later: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” (Genesis 9:1). Noah would become something like a second Adam (not to be confused, of course, with “the last Adam,” who is Christ; 1 Corinthians 15:45).
Verse 18. As in Genesis 6:13–22 and 7:1–5, the verse before us shows the pattern of God’s command being followed by Noah’s obedience to that command. God spoke, Noah listened, Noah acted. It is a simple sequence on paper, but it is one that believers sometimes struggle to put into practice.
Verse 19. The animals, birds, and all creatures aboard the ark are in two categories: clean and unclean (Genesis 7:2). Regarding the natures of every beast, creeping thing, and fowl, (see vs.17).
Verse 20. Note carefully how the righteous Noah acted at God’s command to leave the Ark. The scene of thanksgiving and the scene of promise are striking.
The first thing Noah did when he left the Ark was not to build a fire to cook a hot meal which would understandably be welcomed after his long stay in the Ark. He put first things first, and the first thing was to give thanks to God.
1 Thessalonians 518 tells us we should do as Noah did, first, this is priority.
When we thank God we are telling Him we recognize He is the one keeping and saving us, and our lives depend on Him. He is in control.
So Noah built an altar and thanked God for delivering him from certain death. Noah took from the clean animals and clean birds he had on the Ark, and sacrificed them as a burnt offering to the Lord. This is the first time we are told of sacrificial worship since the story of Cain and Abel.
Note that “altar” in the Bible comes from a Hebrew word which means “a place of slaughter or sacrifice”. It was generally made of earth or of unwrought or uncut stone.
Some regard it as “God’s Table” a sacred place for sacrifice and gifts offered to God. The significance of the way God regards the ‘altar’ is shown in Exodus 20:24-26:
“Wherever I cause my name to be honoured, I will come to you and bless you.25. If you make an altar of stone for me, do not build it with dressed stones, for you will defile it if you use a tool on it. 26. And do not go up to my altar on steps, or your private parts may be exposed”.
Be careful to understand therefore that when you make a sacrifice on the altar, you are establishing a covenant and this is an extraordinarily serious thing.
Your sacrifice on the altar can bless and promote you or it can destroy.
At an altar you are making a personal encounter with God.You therefore do not need a physical altar to have a meeting with God.
The Holy Spirit is in the heart of a believer and hence your altar is right there in your heart. You meet with him right there.
Verse 21. The sacrifices were pleasing to God for they showed the heart of devotion to Him. Scripture describe these as having a soothing aroma to God
God now purposed in His heart. He was not then speaking to Noah and making him any promise. God reaffirmed His purposes in His heart and He did this stating clearly that He knew that the intent of man’s heart was evil from his youth. Yet He purposed not to destroy living things with a flood as He had just done.
Clearly the eternal purposes of God was to save men..This purpose was made long before the time of Noah (Ephesians 1:4; 3:11; 2Thessalonians 2:13; 2 Timothy 1:9).God therefore was simply confirming His eternal purpose. The sins of many men would not thwart His intention and void His purposes. God knew the nature of man and so He confirmed His resolve;
Verse 22. This is our song of faith. We respond to His gracious words and His promise. With God’s words in mind, we commit ourselves to Him.
It is now very important we pay attention to the promise that God made to Himself, in His own mind, as recorded in Genesis 8:21-22, that He would never again destroy the earth and the creatures on it by a flood.
We must remember the reason for this resolve made by God Himself. Note that this resolve was not made to man, the words were not spoken to Noah.
Genesis 9 records one of the major covenants of the Bible, the first specific covenant, made with Noah and with all humanity. Note that this covenant is a long-term commitment made by an infinite, all-powerful and changeless God.
Note again that biblical covenants are not agreements that God made following a bargaining session with man. Man was in rebellion then, just as he is in rebellion now. God does not regard him as a threat to His control or to His government. Man does not understand much, if anything, and therefore we must not consider him as bargaining with God and then God making covenants with man.
These covenants are as it were, game rules, governing human life. God had first told Noah in
Genesis 6:18 that He would establish His covenant with him and so He would preserve him through the Flood. So, God acted in line with His word.
Given the wickedness of men’s heart, He set up the world on a sure basis by way of a covenant to preserve men on the earth. He made some rules and provisions. In this covenant He made a provision of making nature dependable, (Gen. 8:22), so that men could depend on the constant recurring of the seasons.
This gracious provision, made at the same time as the warning that man would always suffer from evil imaginations from the time of youth, should point out God’s wonderful love to us. So today we will look at God’s faithfulness and His provisions for all men living at all times and in all places.
Chapter 9: 8 – 13
The kind and always merciful God blessed Noah, now that he is about to start a new beginning and expectedly there is a new set of rules.
God had blessed mankind when He created them (Genesis 1:28) and told them to be fruitful and multiply, and now He does the same. This blessing told them that He had goodwill and gracious intentions towards them. He meant them no ill. But note that He did not, like in Genesis 1, say that this new situation was “good”.
There, at the very start, creation was pronounced “good”. Now it was a little different. Adam was then commanded to subdue the earth and to rule over the animals. Now there was no similar command. During Adam’s life in Eden, there had been no spilling of blood and taking of life, and so Adam was apparently vegetarian. The situation here is different.
Man clearly would have to understand that he was no longer what he once was. There would be no loving, obedient response from animals. Instead, there would be fear, a running and hiding from him.
One lesson here is that we should never think that there are no consequences for sin. When we sin there are consequences for us and consequences for our family and descendents.
All is not lost however, for God does forgive and does not punish us for all our sins, for He Himself said, that if He did, the sons of Jacob would all be consumed.
Now was signified a different relationship between animals and men, but even more importantly, it meant that every meal would remind a person that their meal was only possible by the death of another creature.
The message is clear, we are alive only because other creatures had died to sustain our life. Man was now feeding off another’s life. Man was living only by the death of another.
The need for man to learn this lesson, as well as the fact that he would spiritually live by feeding on another, was pointed out symbolically. This truth was illustrated by Jesus in John 6:53-54. There we are told that ‘unless we ate the flesh of the Son of Man and drank His blood, we have no life. But whosoever ate His flesh and drank His blood had eternal life’.
It is thus emphasized that we are dependent creatures, dependent on others for sustenance, and are not independent and masters of our own fate. Here the sacredness of human life is emphasized. In view of the new permission, man had to be taught now to reverence life.
The Nature the Noahic Covenant
Let us now list some features of the Covenant with Noah.
a). – The covenant was initiated and dictated by God.
b). – It was made with Noah and with all generations after him.
c). – It was a universal covenant, for it was specifically said to include “all flesh”, every living creature including man and animals.
d). – It was an unconditional covenant. Living creatures did not have to do anything for the Covenant to remain in effect.
e). – It was a promise never again to destroy the earth by a flood. Destruction would come but not by a flood.
f). – The sign given to confirm the Covenant, to give assurance, is a most beautiful one, that of a rainbow, a panoply of beautiful colors.
g). Seventh, this sign was not only for man’s benefit, but for God’s benefit, for He would remember His promise whenever the rainbow appeared.
Verse 8. God now spoke to Noah and his sons directly about establishing His Covenant and revealing the extent of the Covenant. Here we see God’s gracious condescension, indicating that He is pleased to deal with men by way of a Covenant.
Let us remember that originally a covenant was simply a contract or agreement between two people or two groups and involved promises made by each to the other. Normally, when men deal with each other they can enter compacts or agreements where each party binds themselves to fulfill certain conditions and promise certain advantages.
In that situation they often invoke God as a witness. Oaths are generally sworn, gifts can be exchanged as witnesses to the covenant, or as in Genesis 31: 52 a heap of stones would be set up. Some covenants or agreements such as marriage are however called covenants of God.
Breaking a covenant according to Ezekiel 17:12-20 is regarded as a heinous sin. One Dictionary points out, there are some shortcomings to using the word “covenant” without understanding the unique situation when God is involved. It says: “It is also improperly used of a covenant between God and man. As man is not in the position of an independent covenanting party, such a covenant is not strictly a mutual compact but a promise on the part of God to arrange His Providences for the welfare of those who should render Him obedience.”
When God is involved then one has to examine what God has promised, for generally in the biblical sense a covenant made by God is a permanent arrangement. There is no equality between God and man in the making of the Covenant, for God is the superior. He always takes the initiative.
In Scripture we see several covenants.
We are looking today at the Covenant with Noah.
But there are also
-The Abrahamic Covenant
-The Sinaitic (or Mosaic) Covenant with Israel
-The Davidic Covenant
-The Levitical Covenant (with the priestly tribe (Deut. 33:9; Jer 33:21; Mal 2:4)
– The Covenant with Phineas (Numbers 25:12-13).
-The New Covenant.
Some covenants made by God are conditional, or more precisely they have conditional elements or features, that is, they state that if certain conditions are not met certain unpleasant things will follow. But these covenants, such as the one with Israel, also contain unconditional features. Some of course like to skip over those unconditional elements.
The covenants that God made were all made with the people of God, the congregation of God and in no way are these people of God left out of His gracious actions.
One writer comment on the Noahic Covenant: “The Noahic covenant is closer to a ‘royal grant’ known from the ancient Near East where a deity bestowed a benefit or gift on a king. It has its closes parallels to the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants (Genesis 15,17; 2 Samuel 7), which are promissory charters made by God with the individuals and their offspring, characteristically forever. Unlike the Mosaic covenant, in the royal grant form of the covenant, God alone in under compulsion by oath to uphold his promise to the favored party”.
Many of the Covenants we hear about were first made with the people of Israel. In this regard we should read again Jeremiah 31:30-34, 35-37; 33:20-26; Psalm 89:30-37.
Gentiles were at the appointed time grafted into these Covenants in fulfillment of the promises of God. Gentiles should not boast against the people of Israel, says the Apostle Paul. Many disregard this apostolic warning to unduly elevate themselves.
Here we emphasize that God confirmed to Noah and his sons, that He wanted them to spend their energies on re-establishing the race.
Verses 9-10. God made it clear that He was now establishing His covenant, following His promise in chapter 8.
He called attention to this, “And I, Behold …” so that we might wonder at and praise Him for what He was doing. This is His Covenant!
These are firm matters and cannot be disannulled, for God is faithful. These promises are to Noah, his sons, to their children, and to every living creature.
Note that in Isaiah 54: 9-10 the prophet reminded Israel that God was faithful in keeping the Covenant to Noah. At that time the nation of Israel was in dire straits, and all the facts around them pointed to total collapse of the nation. Isaiah however used this to remind them that they had a living and a sure hope. God would keep His promises to them as the people of God, just as He kept His promises to Noah and his descendents. They could depend on the word of God.
The prophet Hosea in 2:18 also used this covenant with Noah to assure God’s people of their restoration.
In the famous Jeremiah prophecies in Chapters 31 through 33, Israel was reminded that God would bring salvation to pass. They should only look back to what God had promised (31:35-37) to understand that God’s Messiah would complete the fulfillment of His covenant which he had just before spoke about in verses 30-34.
Note that these verses are what we call the New Covenant. They were addressed to Israel, the people of God.
Verse 11. Note that God was not unjust in bringing the ‘Flood’ to destroy humanity. It is clear from His comments that God did not believe that He had done anything wrong or was too harsh. God is righteous in all His ways.
He made a promise to make these men understand that He was doing what was necessary, so that the evil conditions and practices of the world before the ‘Flood’ would never be exactly repeated on that scale. God did several things to prevent sinful man reaching the levels of wickedness pre-flood.
Note that He had also imprisoned the angels that had sinned (Jude 6) and had also shortened the lifespan of man.
Believers must remember that God has warned in Matthew 24:37 that when things become similar to the days of Noah, God will act to destroy the earth by fire, not by a flood. God has kept His promise. Many local floods have come but there has never been a repeat of a universal flood to destroy all humanity. 1 Peter3:1-7 reminds us that the coming judgment will be by fire.
Verse 12. And God said, This is the token … of the Covenant which I make between Me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations.
The word translated token is also translated as “sign” in Genesis 1:14 and Exodus 4:8, and that is the idea here.
Giving a sign of a covenant is a common idea even today. We exchange wedding rings to remind us of the covenant of marriage.
Circumcision was used as a sign or token of the Covenant between God and Abraham and his descendants (Genesis 17), and the Sabbath was also used as a sign between Israel and God (Exodus 31:16–17).
In reality, these three signs of a Covenant are all present in Genesis, with the Sabbath at creation (Genesis 2:4), the Rainbow here in 9:12, and Circumcision in Genesis 17. Signs appear at watershed moments in Salvation history.
The promise that this Covenant is for perpetual generations is also reflected in Genesis 9:16, where it is deemed “everlasting.” But neither the word everlasting nor the word perpetual should be taken to mean that the Covenant extends into eternity. The time limitation of Genesis 8:22 is that the Covenant is in force “while the earth remaineth.”
This verse sheds light on the meaning and significance of words such as perpetual, everlasting, and forever as they occur in other contexts regarding God’s Covenants (Genesis 17:13, 19; Exodus 31:17; Leviticus 24:8–9; 2 Samuel 23:5; 1 Chronicles 16:17).
Verse 13. I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.
When we see the word bow in this context, we naturally think of a rainbow (Ezekiel 1:28;
Revelation 4:3; 10:1) and rightly so, in light of the context. The word ‘bow’ might also refers to a bow as part of a bow-and-arrow combination. The image is further explained in Genesis 9:14 as meaning a rainbow and so translated in modern English translations.
CONCLUSION
Noah’s patience and obedience serves as a model for Christians. It appears no one in Noah’s day had seen rain including himself but Noah believed God!
God made a Covenant with all succeeding generations in our Text and we may be sure that He is as faithful to this Covenant as He is to all Covenants He has made!
By faith Noah, being warned by God about things not yet seen, in reverence prepared an ark for the salvation of his household, by which he condemned the world, and became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith. Hebrews 11:7
What can we say then? Our Lord and God reigns in Heaven and He reigns on earth.
Man has been made in the image of God and so he is a creature dear to his Creator.
People should be dear to us and we should love even our enemies. The image of God is in man and we should not treat men with contempt, for in doing so we are defacing the image of God and dishonouring God.
God has established the Rules of the Game, and they have been established for our benefit.
God knows our fears. He knows what is in us. Despite that He still loves us. He has helped us, and will continue to help us.
Let us learn to understand more and more of this great, good and faithful God, who has provided all the necessary things for our salvation and sanctification.
He has withheld nothing from us. Let us obey Him and never stray.