The Long Obedience and the Final Amen Text: Genesis 9:28-29
Introduction: The Bookends of a World
We live in an age that is profoundly allergic to endings. Our culture is obsessed with extending youth, denying death, and pretending that the final curtain call will never come. We want the story to go on forever, but only on our terms, which means we want a story with no author and therefore no final chapter. But the Word of God is relentlessly realistic. It is a book of beginnings, to be sure, but it is also a book of endings. And every ending is a commentary on the beginning that preceded it.
We come this morning to the end of a monumental life. The story of Noah is not a quaint children's tale about a bathtub boat and smiling giraffes. It is a story of global cataclysm, of divine judgment on a world choked with violence and demonic perversion. It is the story of a world that was, a world that perished under the waters of God's wrath. And Noah is the hinge upon which human history turned. He was the last patriarch of the old world and the first father of the new.
These two short verses at the end of Genesis 9 are the quiet epilogue to a life of thunderous significance. They are the bookends on the life of the man who saw two different worlds. He saw the world before the flood, a world that had spiraled into such a state of corruption that God was grieved He had even made man. And he saw the world after the flood, a world washed clean, standing under the promise of a rainbow. And after seeing all of that, after 350 years of living in this new world, Noah died. This is not an anticlimax. It is a profoundly important statement. It is the final amen to a long obedience, and it is a stark reminder that even the greatest saints, even the men who walk with God, must still walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
The modern mind, which thinks in tweets and soundbites, might read this and say, "And? So what?" But in the grammar of Scripture, these biographical summations are packed with theological weight. They are here to teach us about God's faithfulness, about the nature of our pilgrimage, and about the wages of sin, which is always, in the end, death.
The Text
And Noah lived 350 years after the flood.
So all the days of Noah were 950 years, and he died.
(Genesis 9:28-29 LSB)
A Life in Two Worlds (v. 28)
We begin with the first part of this divine obituary:
"And Noah lived 350 years after the flood." (Genesis 9:28)
The Holy Spirit wants us to pause and consider this. Noah was 600 years old when the flood came. He then lives another three and a half centuries in the world that came after. This is not just a curious bit of trivia. It tells us something about the character of God and the nature of the covenant He made with Noah. Noah's life was a bridge. He was a living monument to God's judgment and His grace.
For 350 years, Noah was a walking, talking history lesson. Every time his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren looked at him, they were looking at a man who had seen the world destroyed. He was the ultimate primary source. When men began to build the tower of Babel, do you not think that Noah, the preacher of righteousness, warned them? He had seen firsthand what happens when man's pride swells up against the heavens. He knew the smell of the rain of God's wrath.
This long life was a gift of God's grace. It was a period of stability for the new world. God gave Noah this long season to establish his family, to teach them the ways of the Lord, and to be a constant, physical reminder of the covenant of the rainbow. God does not just save His people from judgment; He provides for them in the aftermath. He is not a God of chaotic interventions; He is a God of covenantal order. He gave the new world a patriarch, a father, who could testify for centuries about the one great event that defined their existence.
Think of it. For 350 years, if anyone doubted the story of the great flood, they could go and ask the man who built the boat. This long life was a bulwark against the inevitable historical revisionism that sinful men are always prone to. Men want to forget God's judgments. They want to pretend that God is a tame God, a manageable God. Noah's very existence was a 350-year-long sermon to the contrary.
The Unavoidable Conclusion (v. 29)
But despite the monumental nature of his life, the story ends where every human story, since the fall, must end.
"So all the days of Noah were 950 years, and he died." (Genesis 9:29 LSB)
This is the drumbeat of Genesis 5, that great genealogy of the patriarchs before the flood. "And he died... and he died... and he died." It is the solemn tolling of the bell, reminding us that the curse of Adam is still in effect. The wages of sin is death. Noah was a righteous man, a man who "found grace in the eyes of the Lord." He was blameless in his generation. He walked with God. And he died.
His righteousness, his faith, his incredible obedience in building the ark, none of it could exempt him from the sentence passed on all mankind in the garden. This is a crucial point. The flood was a baptism of the world. It was a picture of judgment and salvation. Noah and his family were saved through water, a type of our own baptism, as Peter tells us. But this salvation was a temporal salvation. It saved him from the flood, but it did not save him from the grave. The old creation was washed, but the seeds of sin and death remained, even in the heart of righteous Noah, as we saw in the incident with his drunkenness.
The 950 years is a staggering number to us, but we must see it in its biblical context. He is second only to Methuselah in recorded longevity. These long lifespans in the early chapters of Genesis are a testimony to the sheer vitality of God's original creation. Even after the fall, the creation was so robust that men lived for nearly a millennium. But the trajectory is downward. After the flood, the lifespans begin to shorten dramatically. The world after the flood was a different world, a harsher world, and the effects of the curse were accelerating.
And so, the final words are stark: "and he died." This is the great leveler. This is the final punctuation mark on every life lived east of Eden. It does not matter if you lived 950 years or 95 years or 95 days. The sentence stands. This is why the gospel is not a message of self-improvement or a program for a better society. It is a message of resurrection from the dead. It addresses the one problem that no man, not even Noah, can solve on his own.
The Second Noah and the True Ark
The story of Noah is a glorious story of God's faithfulness. But if we stop with Noah, we are left with a righteous man in a grave. The story is incomplete. The reason the Holy Spirit records the life and death of Noah is to make us long for a better Noah, a greater deliverer.
Noah's name means "rest." His father Lamech hoped he would bring rest from the curse. And in a sense, he did. He was the instrument through whom God gave the human race a new start. But it was a temporary rest. The weeds of sin grew back. The curse remained. The final enemy, death, still reigned.
But there came another Noah, a Second Noah, the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the one who gives true rest. "Come to me," He says, "all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28). This is not the rest of a new start in a fallen world. This is the rest of sins forgiven, of the curse removed, of death defeated.
Jesus also lived in a world drowning in wickedness, a world ripe for judgment. And He also built an ark of salvation. But this ark was not made of gopher wood. This ark was His own body, crucified on a cross. He entered the flood of God's wrath, not just for a year, but for three hours of cosmic darkness on Calvary. He took the full deluge of God's judgment against our sin upon Himself. He was plunged into the ultimate deep.
And just as Noah emerged from the ark into a new world, Jesus Christ emerged from the tomb on the third day into a new creation. He is the firstborn from the dead. And because He lives, we who are in Him, who have taken refuge in the ark of His salvation, will also live.
The obituary of Noah is, "he died." But the testimony of Christ is that He died, yes, but He is risen. "Death hath no more dominion over him." And that changes everything. For the Christian, the final line is not "and he died." It is "and he died, and now he lives." Our story does not end at the grave. Because of Christ, the grave is not a final destination; it is a doorway.
Noah lived a long and faithful life, and then he died, awaiting the promise of the resurrection. We too are called to a long obedience in the same direction. We live in a world that is passing away, a world under judgment. But we are citizens of a new creation. We have taken refuge in the true Ark, Jesus Christ. And though we too will face our final day, though our bodies will be laid in the ground, we do so with a sure and certain hope. The final word over us will not be death, but life. For the one who passed through the ultimate flood has secured for us an inheritance in a world where the rainbow is not just a sign of promise, but the very environment of the throne of God, a world where death is no more.