Blameless
Playing the blame game – we all have done this at one time or another in our lives. Instead of accepting responsibility for something wrong that we have done and putting the blame squarely where it belongs, we find someone else to blame.
A good example of this in the scriptures was when Moses was in the mountain with God and the Hebrews began to have a party, apparently an unrestrained party, where they took their gold ornaments and had Aaron make a golden calf. When Moses came down from the mountain, he confronted Aaron about making the golden calf. Aaron in essence said, “The people made me do it”. He even said that he simply threw the gold in the fire and a molded calf came out.
When I was in my final semester of college, I had a part time job working in a prison. It was a prison for first time offenders. During my several months of working there, I talked to many of the guys about why they were there. What crime had they committed? I never spoke to one who did not blame someone else for his crime. He would invariably say that he had been framed, had been in the wrong place at the wrong time or had been imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. It was never his fault. He was not to blame!
The Old Testament
Obviously, these are opposite situations from which Noah was coming. The scriptures say that Noah was blameless before God. Noah was a just man perfect in his generations. Noah experienced God’s divine protection for himself and his family. In the NIV Genesis 6:9 reads, “Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time and he walked faithfully with God.” In other words, Noah’s life was in direct contrast to the lives of others around him who were described as wicked with their thoughts on evil continually (Genesis 6:5).
The word for perfect or blameless in Hebrew is tamiym, taw-meem. It means: perfect; blameless; sincere; entire; whole; complete; full. When one is described with this word in the Bible, there is nothing in his outward person or within his heart that conflicts with the purposes of God for his life. This word describes his entire relationship with God (Strongs 8549).
You and I rarely see ourselves that way. I wonder how Noah saw himself? Did he see himself as being righteous and blameless before God? Obviously, we do not know the answer to that question. We do know that he was being obedient to what the Lord had instructed him to do, and that was to build an ark and to gather his family and the animals into the ark before the onslaught of the flood that they might know God’s protection and provision.
Apparently, Noah had no shortcomings in the eyes of God. You and I are not that way. We have our shortcomings. As I write this, I am reminded of a time when I was a young boy. I grew up on a farm. We were not rich, but also we were not poor, yet one thing my mom did for my brother and I was to hand sew shirts for us to wear to school. She made our shirts from used feed sacks. The sacks were made of cotton and had floral patterns or designs. One day my mom had dressed my brother and I in our best shirts as we were going to a church or school function and she wanted us both to look nice. When we came home, we had not bothered to change back into our play clothes and proceeded to go outside and engage in a dirt clod fight in the freshly plowed garden. We were both as dirty as could be within a few minutes. When I went back in the house, my mother was lying on the bed crying her eyes out. I felt so bad! I tried to console her, but we were dirty and had messed up two nice clean shirts that she would now have to wash. That’s the only time I remember my mom crying (except when my dad died). I had disappointed my mom, and I felt very sorrowful that I had done so. I always wanted to make my mom proud of me, but I failed her on that occasion. That story from my childhood represents a microcosm of how we fail God. We sin and it grieves the heart of God.
In Noah’s day, the scriptures say that God was sorrowful that he had made man and God was grieved in His heart (Genesis 6:6).
The New Testament
Centuries later God would send His Son Jesus to die on a cross and pay the penalty for our sin. In his letter to the church at Rome, the apostle Paul wrote, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23), and that “The wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 6:23).
Philippians 2:15 states: “That you may become blameless and harmless children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world.” That last phrase “that you may shine as lights in the world” creates a powerful thought and picture of how our lives should shine forth in this day in which we live. That is what God expects of us. That is who we are to be, right where we are.
All we have to do to get a light to come on is flip a switch and presto – we have light. It is the same way in the realm of the Spirit. When we flip a switch of faith in our lives, then God’s light begins to shine forth from within. Jesus said in Matthew 5:16, “Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.” Through the forgiveness of sin that God offers us in Christ, you and I can also know even as Noah knew what it means to be blameless before God.