THE FLOOD
Genesis 6: 1-8, “What Happened?”
Lesson #1, 1/4/09

Today we begin a series of lessons on Noah and the Flood described in Genesis chapters six through nine. My sources are the NIV Study Bible (and notes); The Apocrypha; Genesis by Walter Brueggemann, from the Interpretation Bible Series; The Interpreter’s Bible Commentary; and the book, In the End the Beginning, by Jurgen Moltmann, just in case you want to check me out on any of this. The most important resource, though, is that you read this in your own Bibles and take the time to meditate on its meaning. Is it no more than a wonderfully interesting tale about a flood? It may be; similar flood stories have been found in almost all ancient civilizations. Did it really happen? It may have, but most current scholars doubt it and few even debate that anymore. Could it have happened? Of course, if you believe that, “with God all things are possible.” Is it about more than a flood, though? You bet it is! And that is where we are headed in the next few weeks.

READ THE TEXT

Have you ever had an itch that you just had to scratch? Well I have a recurring theological itch that I must scratch now, even before we get into the meat of the flood narrative. Actually, it is a part of the story that no one has yet been able to understand. And maybe that explains my fascination with the origin of evil. Here we have a creation so racked by sin that its own creator decides to destroy it. There is something very unsettling about this. If God created everything, did he create evil? Holy Scripture provides no definitive answer, but I continue to search anyway. There is this feeling I have that won’t away; God doesn’t want me to take someone else’s answer, but find it for myself, even if it turns out that there is no answer.
Walter Brueggemann suggests that the sin narratives which begin with 1) Adam and Eve in the Garden, 2) Cain and Abel, 3) and continue to the "Sons of God" from the first part of this chapter all suggest that the problem (evil) is that creation refuses to be God’s creation, refuses to honor God as God. Thus both the world and God are denied their rightful place. According to Paul, in Romans 1:25, “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator…” The prophet, Jeremiah (2:11) has God saying, “Has a nation ever changed its gods? (Yet they [the things people worship] are not gods at all.) But my people have exchanged their Glory (Me) for worthless idols.” Then the prophet Hosea (4:7) writes for God: “The more the priests increased, the more they sinned against me; they exchanged their Glory (Me) for something disgraceful.”

This seems to reveal the essence of sin: not worshipping God as God. But still we are left wondering about the origin of sin. From where could it have come? Jurgen Moltmann writes of a Jewish interpretation that asks why God created man and woman at all, knowing as he must have, that they were going to cause him much grief and pain. (We’ve probably asked ourselves that question more than once regarding our own kids!) But the flood story, Moltmann believes, provides this elusive answer. The narrative tells us specifically that God “grieved”, and that he “repented”; meaning he was sorry for what he had done. In other words, God made a mistake, and it was so egregious that he decided to wipe the whole thing out! I’ll bet you’ve done that too; you created something and didn’t like it, so you destroyed it. I know I have sat for hours working on a paragraph, read and re-read it, and then said, “Nah!” and hit the delete key. In fact, I don’t even think about the time I spent; I just know it isn’t what I wanted—it doesn’t measure up—so out it goes. I made it so I have the right to get rid of it. Or as Bill Cosby said to his teenage son, “I brought you into this world and I can take you out!”

So since I have found no other answer, could it be that the origin of sin is God—who made a mistake? Does my own search for the origin of sin and maybe yours as well, culminate with the insightful words of C. S. Lewis: “I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer.”

But there is another way of thinking that is a little more traditional. In The Interpreter’s Bible we find a quotation from Ecclesiasticus (“The Wisdom of Jesus, son of Sirach”). (Ecclesiasticus, or Sirach, is a book in the Apocrypha which is a collection of books included in almost all Christian Bibles throughout the world except Protestant Bibles.) Ecclesiasticus 15:14 says, “He (God) himself made man from the beginning, and left him in the hand of his [own] counsel [or ‘imagination’].” According to The Interpreter’s Bible, “This verse is part of…Sirach’s explanation of the presence of moral evil in God’s creation. Its origin is within man…” Evil, then, would be a product of our own imaginations which are corrupted by our failure to acknowledge God as God. I think it would be wise now to leave you with those thoughts since I see some of you about to go into cardiac arrest. Remember, though, that I never committed myself as your teacher to sweet platitudes. If I can’t cause you to think, I have failed. But if you silently refuse to think, you have failed!

As with almost all of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament), this story has at least two authors, or sources. They are called “J” and “P”; one (“J”), refers to God as Yahweh (our Jehovah) and is the earlier tradition; the other, (“P”), was written later by priests. I only bring this up because we will see in chapter six that the flood story is told twice, as was the creation story. Rather than omit one tradition, the chroniclers included both.

It is important, too, to know when these stories were put together. We are accustomed to seeing an event happening anywhere in the world immediately on television and then reading about it the next morning in the newspapers. The flood story didn't happen that way. There was no reporter embedded in the ark! The flood supposedly happened centuries before it was written about, and what we have is not even the first written account. So no, it wasn’t a first hand account by a member of the Noah family after the ark landed; and no, Moses probably didn’t write it later as was (and still is) thought by many. It was almost certainly written as we now read it during the dark days of the Babylonian captivity, sometime in the sixth century B.C. What is important, though, is the hope it offers in the face of the seeming disappearance of God. The Hebrews felt abandoned and vulnerable because of their displacement, by being enslaved, and by the destruction of the Temple which, for them, was their “refuge”, the place where God lived—God’s own house. I mean if God couldn’t defend his own house, why not find a God who could. Thus was the temptation—thus is the temptation. In modern vernacular that might sound like this: “If God can’t help me get what I want, I will resort to the money God (to which I have access) or the power God (to which I do as well!”)

Now let's spend some time on verses five through eight. These are the operative verses if we are to glean information helpful to us as we live today.

(These verses, five through eight, come from the “J” version) 5) The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The KJV renders it thus, “and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually”. Our imagination, someone once said, is our creativity. It seems less than likely that God gave us a creative imagination and then curtailed it. We either have imagination or we don’t. There is no half-imagination. So maybe man did create evil, using his God-given imagination. But then we come to verse 6:
6) “The Lord was grieved” (KJV: “And it repented the Lord”, or it saddened him; made him sorry), that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain.” This passage, saying, ‘The Lord was grieved’ and, ‘his heart was filled with pain’ instantly grips us in solidarity with God. It owes this pathos, its emotive power to identify, to what is called anthropological characterization. ‘Anthropological’ means describing something, in this case God, in human terms; he was ‘grieved’, ‘was sorry’, ‘filled with pain’; he even has a heart. And how else are we to know God? He gave us no other receptors than human ones. Or did he? We can hardly speak of the indwelling Holy Spirit as human, can we?
Anyway, to Moltmann this “grieving”, necessitating “repentance” is seen as a conflict within God himself. You say, “Come on Phil, a conflict within God?” Let me ask you this: is it any different than Jesus, God on the cross, crying to God, the God in heaven, “Why have you forsaken me?” God forsaking God? How can we understand this except as a conflict within God himself? We are reading today from an Old Testament expression of God’s suffering that will eventually take on human qualities as it is lived out on the cross. The bottom line, though, seems to be that when we sin, God suffers—thus, “the suffering servant”. That is why, when we hurt one another, it is to God that we must first confess and repent; not to our victim. This, “Well if I’ve hurt you I’m sorry” quasi apology won’t do. Only under the aegis of God’s forgiveness can we approach our victims honestly with genuine repentance.
7) So the Lord said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved (KJV: “it repenteth me”) that I have made them." Why the animals, birds and creatures? Aren’t they innocent victims? Maybe. But we must accept that when we choose to foul our nest, we aren’t the only ones who suffer. The innocent suffer too. And if there are ‘innocent victims’ (and there is a large body of theological and philosophical writing saying they don’t, in fact, exist), they are our responsibility, not God’s. William Sloan Coffin says it best: “So when in anguish over…human violence done to innocent victims, we ask of God, ‘How could you let that happen?’ It’s well to remember that God at that very moment is asking the exact same question of us.”
8) But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.
“But”… will God’s mercy triumph over his justice?