THE FLOOD
Genesis 7, Boarding the Ark
HAMACO Lesson #3, 1/25/09

First, read the sections of chapter seven from “J”; then read them from the “P” sections. These sections are as follows: from “J”—7:1-5; 7-10; 12; 17; and 22-24. From “P”—7:6; 11; 13-16; and 18-21.

How would you respond if someone said to you that it wasn’t Adolf Hitler who committed the greatest act of genocide in the history of the world, but God? Does the story of the Flood tell us that God could actually do that? This story is referred to by some as a saga, because a saga tells of something in prehistory which no one could have observed. In sagas such as this one, the basic truth it underlies, the reason it is told, is veiled. But (as we said in the last lesson), the people who read it with an inquiring mind come to recognize its essential truth.

But why must the truth be veiled? Why do we have to search for it? As you know from your own experience, what we find for ourselves is so much more believable than what we are asked or told to believe. And to search for the truth in the Flood saga is a good thing for another reason. For what we learn there carries over to many other stories of brutality found in the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament, sometimes wrongly called the Books of Moses). Such stories cause many people to dismiss even the possibility of a just and loving God. Consequently, they want no part of our religion, even declaring it a negative force in human history. So searching for the truth about God and his actions is what this lesson is about, but using only the narrow focus of the Flood saga. Let’s try today to shed some light on how to understand this story.

To begin, fast forward a few thousand years and we find ourselves, and not as an entirely peaceful people either. Just in the past one hundred years we have been involved in no fewer than seven wars or other major military actions. This doesn’t even count the thousands of murders on our streets and in our homes that occur each year. And we aren’t the only ones; Israel and the Islamic peoples (who, according to our common beliefs, are our fellow descendents of Abraham) can hardly be characterized as peaceful either.

Regarding most Americans, though, I grant you we believe we go to war reluctantly and for honorable reasons, and I am one of them. But that is our perception—our reality. The perceptions on the other side of the world are quite different—and that, for them, is just as real. The way most of our enemies see it, our violent actions aren’t surprising; for instance, it’s easy, even though erroneous, to connect our belief in the Bible to acquiescence in the mass murder God committed in the flood story. How are we to deal with that? Arguing the point is useless; no one ever wins an argument. Instead of that, let’s concentrate on our own understanding. How do we Christians infer the meaning of God creating a flood that destroyed almost all life on earth, and secondarily, does that give us the right to destroy those with whom WE are estranged? You may think that is a ridiculous question, but remember in the minds of our enemies, it isn’t ridiculous at all.

When reading this saga I can’t help but grieve over the millions who perished. You know, they were more than just millions, they were people. Each had a life, each had a story; in many ways they are us. They had children and grandchildren; they loved and were loved. Such an event makes the devastation Hurricane Ike visited on Galveston or Crystal Beach trivial by comparison. But we can relate because we remember our horror at the devastation we saw there, the lists of missing persons presumed dead, a grief only exacerbated, not be numbers, but by the many personal stories we heard.

Were all of Noah’s neighbors bad? If so, what happened to their chance for repentance? At Crystal Beach most escaped. Were they good? This has to be more than a simplistic “good” versus “bad” story. The narrative tells us nothing of the victims, other than, as we pointed out last week, they had become violent and corrupted. Yet from them we hear no cries of pain, no begging for another chance, no pounding on the door of the ark. Nothing. They are silent. After the fact they simply slip out of the story, seemingly forgotten. Nothing is even mentioned of their remains, of the millions of bloated, rotting carcasses strewn over the creation of which God had said earlier, “it is good”. Could this be the same God who gave us the story of The Good Samaritan, the one who told us to help the poor, heal the sick, and visit the imprisoned; who taught us about unconditional love?
We can never fully uncover these mysteries. There is a line of theological thought, though, that helps us take a step past the obvious. If we go back to chapter six (6:3) we read, “Then the Lord said, ‘I will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years.’” If you remember, and surely you do, we said at the time that these words seemed strange, for the text tells us elsewhere that Noah himself lived to be 950 years of age; his sons also had long lives. So there must be another way to understand God’s meaning by saying, ‘his days will be a hundred and twenty years.’ God, the story implies, was talking with Noah. He had observed the total breakdown of morality among his people, and says to Noah in frustration, ‘‘I will not contend with man forever…’ (Did they think he would? Do we?) But that statement alone certainly doesn’t close the door on the possibility of redemption. Why? Because God goes on to say, ‘…his days will be a hundred and twenty years.’ In other words, God is giving them a hundred and twenty additional years to turn back to him; a hundred and twenty years to repent. And if that is the proper understanding, God surely must have asked Noah to be the proclaimer of this good news to his lost generation, a sort of prophet, even before the days of the prophets. For Noah was the one God saw as righteous. Noah was the one called to bear witness to God’s grace in a world that was under a sentence of death. I’m beginning to see some parallels here to my Christian beliefs. Are you?

But did anything change? Obviously not! For now we are back to the place in the story we read today. God comes to Noah again, declares again that he is righteous in his generation, and tells him to get into the ark that now was completed; rain was on the way; or, according to your local weather man or woman, a thirty percent chance! I’ll bet Noah was saying to himself, “Gosh! I hope I didn’t cut too many constructions costs here.” Anyway, the point being that the millions of people who perished HAD been given the chance to repent and they chose not to do so. Are the parallels we mentioned still visible? Looking at it this way, the Flood story represents the ultimatum of Jesus, his own call to repentance. It also tells of consequences for not doing so. Or, as Paul said, “The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life.” (Romans 6:23)

But this is still a gruesome story that strikes at our concept of a loving God. Did God actually do this, or does the story mean that he allowed humankind to die of its own evil malignancy? We can only ponder that. I’m not sure, really, if it even makes a difference. How would death be different if one is killed by a God-created disaster or allowed to drown in the consequences of one’s self-inflicted sinfulness? One thing we don’t have to wonder about, though; the faithful one was saved.

Whichever way you choose to believe, there is something else in the story that is nothing less than astounding, given the things we think we know about God. Let’s go back to chapter six (6:6) where we read, “The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain.” As we said last week, the phrase, “was grieved”, is rendered in some other translations as, “was sorry” or “it repenteth him” (It caused God to feel the need to repent for what he had done). Taken together, the Lord, looking at this creation grown evil, his being sorry and feeling the need to repent, all leads to one of two inescapable inferences: either God made a mistake or he is showing us what to do when we err! What other conclusions are we to reach when the text says he wished he hadn’t done it; he had tried to persuade humans to change the way they chose to live their lives, but this didn’t work either. They refused; as we read in chapter six (6:5), “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.” So God repented by destroying them (or allowing them to destroy themselves). And God repeats, “…for I am grieved that I have made them.” Those tragic words underlie the Christian belief, born two thousand years ago, about the indictment under which we live even today. They necessitate both God’s need to send a savior, and our need to accept his offer of salvation through that savior. “…for I am grieved that I have made them.”

In our next lesson we will look into the implications of this, of the text saying “God was sorry”; and “it repenteth him.”