24 So Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done to him. 25 Then he said: "Cursed be Canaan; A servant of servants he shall be to his brethren.” 26 And he said: "Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem, and may Canaan be his servant. 27 May God enlarge Japheth, and may he dwell in the tents of Shem; and may Canaan be his servant.” 28 And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years. 29 So all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years; and he died. ~ Genesis 9:24-29
Today, we close out our study of Genesis 9 where we have considered the survival of Noah in v.1-17 and the sin of Noah in v.18-23. Today, we will consider v.24-29 which highlights the sons of Noah in v.24-29.
Adam and Eve and Noah all sinned in the area of food and drink. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit while Noah got drunk on wine. The very thing God gave to bless became a curse. It was used in a way outside the definition that God had given for it. This is when we sin, when we go outside the boundaries God has given to a certain subject. And, as a result of Ham seeing his dad's nakedness and then telling his brothers about it, Ham's son was subsequently cursed by Noah. Ham did more than just speak in an irreverent way about his father. This caused Noah to be severely displeased with Ham because of his actions.
In v.24-27 of today's passage we read, "24 So Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done to him. 25 Then he said: "Cursed be Canaan; A servant of servants he shall be to his brethren.” 26 And he said: "Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem, and may Canaan be his servant. 27 May God enlarge Japheth, and may he dwell in the tents of Shem; and may Canaan be his servant."
Canaan was the father of the Canaanites. He settled in the very place that God told Abraham his descendants would posses forever. In Joshua 9 we learn that when Joshua entered the land of Canaan, there was a group of Canaanites called Gibeonites. They put on tattered clothes and they got old, moldy bread and stale wine and they went a couple miles over the hill to the encampment of Israel making the Israelites believe that they had been traveling for months. So Joshua makes a covenant with the Gibeonites, not knowing that the Gibeonites were Canaanites. God had told Israel to kill every Canaanite when they entered the land. Joshua subsequently made a covenant with the Gibeonites, and later found out that the Gibeonites lied to him. Then Joshua told the lying Gideonites that God had told him not to make a covenant with them but they had deceived him. It was at that point that Joshua pronounced a curse on the Gibeonites. They were now to be their slaves from generation to generation. Even into the New Testament the remnants of the Canaanite population became the servants of Israel.
The reason Canaan was cursed by Noah and Ham wasn’t goes back to Genesis 9:1 which reads, "So God blessed Noah and his sons." When God blessed Noah and his three sons, it included a blessing in their physical person and possibly even in a spiritual sense too. But that blessing didn’t transfer beyond them. God had blessed Ham and therefore Noah could not curse him. Since Ham had received God’s blessing, it would have been an act of defiance against God for Noah to turn and curse him. Instead he cursed Canaan. Ham was the youngest son of Noah and Canaan was the youngest son of Ham. And so in order to demonstrate justice in the matter and ensure he didn’t curse the one God had blessed, he turned his curse towards Canaan. This curse of Noah upon Canaan and the blessing of Shem and Japheth by Noah is the first explicit prophetic utterance by man in the Bible.
After the cursing of Canaan, Noah directed his first blessing to the second son Shem. In like manner, Abel had been put ahead of Cain. When Abel was killed, Seth replaced him as the chosen and adopted son of God. Now, for the second time we see a second son placed above the first. This pattern continues throughout the Old Testament and points us directly to the work of the Lord Jesus Christ who replaced fallen Adam. The second replacing the first. When we get to the story of Abraham, we’ll see him receive the blessing even though he was the second son of his father.
In his blessing, Noah mentions Japheth, his firstborn. He says, “May God enlarge Japheth.” In saying this, Noah made a pun on Japheth's name whose name means to enlarge or to widely extend. Noah blessed his son with the very name he gave him.
In all, the prophecy mentions the servanthood of Canaan 3 times and he was placed directly as a servant to both Shem and Japheth.
In v.28-29 of today's passage we read, "28 And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years. 29 So all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years; and he died."
Noah was 600 years old at the time of the flood and he lasted another 350 years after it. This means that Noah died in the year 2006 BC. In the Bible, there are blessings and curses that fall on various people and, yes, these transfer through to the descendants of those people. The problem many people have then is that if they are outside of the favored line, they may feel like they are still living under the curse of their fathers. However, through the Lord Jesus Christ, all are granted the same privileges and the same salvation. The account of Noah lists his sons in this order: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. In the book of Acts, this is the same order in which salvation through Christ came to the people of the world. The sons of Shem include Israel, and they received the Lord Jesus and the gift of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2.
The sons of Ham came next when the Ethiopian eunuch received Christ and was baptized in Acts 8. And finally, the sons of Japheth were represented in Acts 10 when Cornelius, an Italian, received Christ together with his family. In other words, God worked out His plan which would restore all of the people of the world, represented by these three men. In Christ, every curse is lifted and every heart is positioned to be made new. All who call on Him are elevated to the same level and none rises above another.
Abraham was of the favored line of Noah’s son Shem, but we are all included in the same spiritual blessing through the ultimate Seed of Abraham, the Lord Jesus Christ. No matter where we descend from and no matter what our past may have been like, in the Lord Jesus Christ there is a grand and glorious future for us as cherished and blessed children of God. Of course, this blessing is only accessed through our faith in the finished work of the Lord Jesus on the cross ensuring us eternal life.
