Genesis 9:8-17
8Then God said to Noah and to his sons with
him, 9“As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants
after you, 10and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the
domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out
of the ark. 11I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all
flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a
flood to destroy the earth.”
12God said, “This is the sign of the
covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with
you, for all future generations: 13I have set my bow in the clouds, and it
shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14When I bring clouds
over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, 15I will remember my covenant
that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the
waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. 16When the bow is
in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God
and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” 17God said to
Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and
all flesh that is on the earth.”
The story of Noah and the ark is the capstone
of the first several chapters of the Bible and makes little sense without those
chapters as prologue. The chapters relate that over the generations after Adam
and Eve left the Garden of Eden the human race had become thoroughly corrupted
and sinful. So perverse did humanity
become that in the sixth chapter of Genesis we read that, “The LORD was grieved
that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was filled with
pain.”
So God decided to clean the earth of its
corruption by flood. There was a good man, Noah, whom God told to build an huge
ship. Noah was to put aboard a male and female of every species. All this Noah
and his family did, and God set loose flood waters which covered the whole
earth. “Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils
died” (Gen 7:22).
After a few months the waters subsided and the
ark was grounded. Noah and the animals went forth, Noah worshiped God and God
promised:
“Never again will I
curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is
evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I
have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat,
summer and winter, day and night will never cease” (Gen 8:21-22).
In other words, after the flood nothing about
humankind had changed and the world would continue on the same way it had
before.
There are some serious questions raised by the
Noah story that have no easy answers. Pastor Nathan Nettleton wrote that it
would be difficult to find a church person who had never heard of Noah's Ark.
Yet it would be almost as difficult to find anyone who can actually explain
what the story’s relevance is to us here and now. He wrote,
“Many could perhaps
tell you that God sent a flood to wipe out the world, and that a man named Noah
built a big lifeboat and took his own family and breeding pairs of every kind
of animal on board so that, after the flood, God could make a fresh start for
life on earth beginning with them. Beyond that, this story is usually reduced
to just an animal story for kids, or used as another battleground for those who
want to fight over whether every story in the Bible is factual historical
account of an actual event.”
For me, the story, taken at its face reading,
is not wholly favorable about God’s goodness. It seems to present God as a marauding
tyrant. He causes a flood that destroys all life except for one family safe
aboard the ark. Yes, Genesis says that humanity was entirely corrupt and Noah
alone was righteous. But even so, God’s destruction of all humankind seems,
shall we say, extreme, especially when he also killed all the animals, who
presumably could not have been corrupt. In this story, God often seems neither
good nor loving on the whole and hardly worthy of worship. This place is not
the only place in the Jewish scriptures where God's management of the world is
presented harshly. The entire book of Job, for example, bluntly questions both God's
competence and goodness.
I personally can spiritually function in a
universe governed by a God who might not know quite everything, or who might not
be able to control everything, but if God is not totally, wholly, purely good,
then there is no choice but despair. If God is not wholly good, we are in the
hands of a cosmic trickster no matter what creeds we recite or what claims we
make about Jesus or anything else.
In the Noah story, I am shocked at what seems
to be God’s murderousness. I am unwilling blithely to say that the people then
deserved drowning in the flood. I know my own sin and I know that the sins of
humanity in the last hundred years reduce the corruption of Noah’s generation
to that of amateurism.
However, despite the shock of God's violent
judgment, the story emphasizes God’s goodness over any other characteristic. There
is repeated attention to the boarding of the ark, to lists of people and
animals and birds that are saved, and to the chronology of the event. Attention
centers on salvation rather than on judgment, on what God does to preserve
creation.[1]
But so deeply embedded in human beings is sin
that at the end of the Noah story, humankind is not changed. The human race,
symbolized by (in fact, consisting
of) Noah and his family, get off the ark no different than when they went
aboard. Noah planted a vineyard, made wine and passed out drunk. When he woke
up he condemned one of his children and all that child’s descendants to
slavery. There is not the slightest indication in the Noah story that anything
about humankind will be different after the flood than before.
It is not human beings whom the flood changes, so
what then was the point of the whole drill? This question has vexed Christians
for centuries and given employment to legions of religion professors and their
doctoral candidates. Unless something has changed at the end of the flood
story, then we are left with God as an impulsive mass slaughterer. That is a God
whom we would fear, but not love, revere or worship.
So: what is different after the flood, what has
changed as a consequence of the flood?
God. God has changed, God is different. I do
not mean that God is different in power or character after the flood than
before. Indeed, God says plainly in Malachi 3.6, “I the Lord do not change.”
But there is a change nonetheless.
God makes promises to humanity after the flood,
but human beings make no promises to God in return. God vows never to allow
such a catastrophe to overtake the earth again but God neither solicits nor
expects any kind of vows from human beings.
Nonetheless, God describes limits on how he
will deal with human sin. Since destroying sinners, deserved though the destruction
is, didn't destroy sin, God declares he will not repeat it in the future. (The
Malachi verse in full supports this: “I
the Lord do
not change. So you, the descendants of Jacob, are not
destroyed.”)
Having grieved at the state of humankind before
the flood, God vows henceforth to endure human wickedness. God decides to bear
the human condition of sin and corruption in himself, for the human race is
incapable of escaping its sinfulness.
At the end of the Noah story, God has decided
to work within human sin and perversity. God promises to stick with the world,
come what may in the way of human wickedness. God makes this promise, not in
spite of human failure, but because of it. The way into the future cannot
depend on human ability; sinfulness so defines humanity that, if human beings
are to live, their very existence must be undergirded by the divine promise.
Hence, because of human sinfulness, God promises to do all that is necessary to
redeem creation.
Noah’s story asks, why does God stand for human
sin? It answers: because God promises to save the world, not destroy it. God
commits his holy self to enter into the human world of pain to absorb it into
God’s self. Hence we have the words of Paul in his letter to the Romans (chapter
3):
23 since all have
sinned and fall short of the glory of God; 24 they are now justified by his
grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God
put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.
He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had
passed over the sins previously committed; 26 it was to prove at the present
time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith
in Jesus.
So it turns out that the world is not governed
by a murderous God after all, but one who is indeed purely good and faithful,
even to the point of death on a cross, that the world would be saved by love
and not destroyed by violence.
Next week: The only way
out of a sinkhole
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