Genesis 6:14-22

Welcome back, friends.
Thanks for joining us today
as we continue to move through Genesis
and particularly as we move into the Noah story,
probably getting done with the sixth chapter today.
We have been at the point where God has made
his intention clear that being upset
with the state of the creation,
he is going to destroy it.
And he’s going to make one exception,
Noah,
which will turn into several exceptions,
including Noah’s family and animals.
We’re not
yet there.
As we move into this section today,
God is explaining to Noah what he wants him to do.
So he’s really kind of presenting this path
to rescue and what it looks like for Noah.
And it’s not an easy path.
There is a great deal involved.
We have this section, which gives
some kind of details,
which both add credence to the story
and complicate our reaction to the story.
We’ll talk about that in a minute.
I’m not going to read this word for word,
but we will jump in here at verse 13 of chapter six.
So God said to Noah,
“I’m going to put an end to all people
for the earth is filled with violence.
And because of them,
I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth.
So make yourself an ark of cypress wood,
make rooms in it,
coat it with pitch inside and out.
This is how you should build it.”
And then he proceeds to give dimensions.
Verse 17,
“I’m going to bring floodwaters on the earth
to destroy all life under the heavens.
Every creature that has the breath of life in it,
everything on earth will perish,
but I will establish my covenant with you
and you will enter the ark,
you, your sons, your wife, and your son’s wives with you.
You are to bring into the ark
two of all living creatures,
male and a female,
keep them alive with you.
Two of every kind of bird,
of every kind of animal,
and every kind of creature that moves along the ground
will come to you to be kept alive.
You are to take every kind of food that is eaten
and stored away as food for you and for them.
And then Noah did everything just as God
commanded him.” So this is the kind of nuts and bolts story of the ark,
and this is probably the classic version that people know.
God comes
to Noah.
We like to read into this story this sort of
incredible nature of it
and is Noah stunned by it?
How does he react?
Those are not questions the scripture is very interested in.
Generally, when it comes to faithfulness,
the Bible is binary.
You either do or don’t.
There are a couple of exceptions.
Abraham does some haggling with God.
Moses goes back and forth.
But in general,
the Bible is far more interested
in what happens when a person does what God tells them to do.
And so here,
Noah gets this massive undertaking
that he’s called to do,
not only to build an ark,
but to collect all of the foods and all of the animals
that are present on the earth.
And if you were with us in the early part of this study, particularly chapter one,
you know this language,
every bird, every creature that crawls.
This in some way is mere language
of the creation story.
And that’s not an accident,
Michael.
No, right, it’s not an accident.
It is
really connecting to the point that you made.
I believe it was yesterday, Clint,
that it’s strange really when you think of it,
the human sinfulness that has beset the world
also has an impact on the creatures,
on the very animals that crawl on the ground,
that these animals are going to suffer
the judgment as well,
that the flood will come up and kill them.
And so what we discover is that God has made
not only a way for Noah,
who we learned is a righteous man.
And so this is how he was chosen.
But he must now steward these animals
that God is also going to save from the judgment,
which is being metered out due to human violence and human sinfulness.
And so we see that original creation story mirrored here.
What’s happening is that the very creature,
you know, in this case, Noah, who we saw mirrored in that first creation story,
Adam, who’s tasked with this stewarding task, named these animals,
care for them.
Here,
Noah,
the creature,
once again, is now caring for the rest of this creation,
serving as that sort of under shepherd.
And so we do,
Clint, we’re seeing another kind of recreation,
except in this case,
it’s a reset as opposed to a make everything new,
that we’re now gonna go back to the way that things were.
And while there’s going to provide
that sort of ultimate reset button.
And it’s interesting because God has intended
to save both humanity and creatures as part of this.
And what was true in the first story implicitly
is now explicit in that
in the creation,
there was this kind of implied covenant.
There was this working arrangement
between God and Adam and Eve.
They had roles, they had relationship.
But here for the first time,
the word covenant is used.
That word in Hebrew is the same in Greek.
It means testament.
It means literally,
probably it is simplest translation promise.
And God says in verse 18,
“I will establish my promise.” In other words,
I will build.
I will make my promise with you.
And this begins the idea that there is a lineage
to God’s action.
There is a line that God has
committed to, covenanted to,
and Noah will be the first of that.
And that God, as God does this reset,
will be
particularly invested
in Noah and his people,
or at least one could say down the road
in a particular people.
And that’s really, it’s common language for everything on the other side of Genesis 6,
but it’s new language at this point of the story.
Yeah, and that is interesting, Clint, because
the covenantal part of Noah’s story
is substantial.
It is the beginning of God making these commitments.
First of all,
making this covenant
that is ultimately gonna protect the world
from this same kind of cataclysmic disaster,
a very kind of universal covenant.
As Genesis goes on,
that covenant’s gonna be much more specific.
That covenant’s gonna happen with Abraham,
and it’s gonna be named for his particular errors
and for the generations that will follow him.
And then the author of Genesis is gonna tease out
how God remains committed and faithful in relationship.
This is
an amazing term here in Genesis 6.
The interesting thing is,
especially to modern sensibility,
I think our imaginations are far more captured
by the questions of like,
what did the ark look like?
How did you fit that many animals in the ark?
How much food would you need to feed that many animals?
We have such a very under the hood kind of imagination,
and we bring very kind of practical questions to the text.
What’s interesting is,
though while we do get some dimensions of the ark here,
far more of what this text is about
is about God making this promise,
and then ultimately God seeing to this promise as we go.
So we see the implications of Noah
in many chapters beyond just Noah’s story,
and yet oftentimes we sort of get fixated on,
well, what did it look like and how did it happen?
And it’s not that those questions are wrong,
Clint, but they are a little bit red herrings.
They lead us away from the center of the text,
and as we sort of engage them,
we miss some of the questions
that the original authors might have asked us
to consider, I think.
I wanna be very careful with this,
and so please listen to this carefully.
There is no doubt that the people who received this story by and large
received it as a literal story.
That is, they believed in the details of the story as facts.
But when we try to take the story apart literally,
in other words, when we get drawn into
how could you gather animals
from cold places and warm places?
How could you get all of the fruits
and all of the things that aren’t even in season?
What about the things that don’t even grow
in that part of the world?
How could you get animals?
When we get bogged down in the literal questions,
I think that ironically,
it leads us further from the text.
In other words, even though the hearers took this as literal,
they didn’t take it as something
that had to be defended and explained.
They simply received it as truth.
And if we can read it that way,
if we can simply read it as true
without having to think,
well, how did he do this?
And how would that have worked?
When we get bogged down in that,
it seems to me
that we run the risk of missing
some of the spiritual truth of the story
and replacing it with a kind of practical approach
that I don’t think this story really was ever meant
to convey.
This is a God story.
This is not an arc story.
This is not an animal story.
This is not a storage or a flotation story.
This is a God story.
And when we get our focus on those other things,
we sometimes are inclined to minimize that.
Yeah, it’s interesting
how easy it is for us to fixate
on the two of every kind and take with you all the food that is eaten,
store it up.
We might get fixate on,
well, how many cubic feet
does it take to store that kind of food for that many days?
And we completely miss that what’s at stake is, will Noah follow
God’s directions?
What matters is whose direction setting
is Noah gonna follow?
Is he gonna say yes to God?
Or, and therefore, is he gonna do it God’s way?
Or is he going to pursue his own means?
And what is striking about Noah’s
story is its connections, literally.
So the word arc that’s translated here,
arc, is gonna appear again.
It’s gonna appear in Moses’ telling way into the next book in Exodus,
Moses is going to be put into an arc.
And that’s the thing that’s going to save him.
Of course, we know it as a basket of reeds,
but the words translated are equal.
So God is choosing this instrument,
that he’s choosing to tell Noah,
this is the way that you’ll be saved.
And Noah has the choice to follow God.
And in the same way,
God is going to save Moses
so that Moses can be this leader
who will take the people out of Egypt,
another story of God’s faithfulness and protection.
So just even in the vocabulary,
we have the connections here to the central figure.
And the central figure is God.
It’s God who’s faithful to Noah and to Noah’s family,
which is another interesting detail of this story,
that God doesn’t just save one person,
he saves those who are connected to him.
And then God will choose to work in future times
to the same end,
to make and keep the same promise
that we see God being willing to keep in this case. I think that I would even go so far
as to say, Michael, that the story simply assumes
that God’s instructions will be enough.
The story feels no compulsion to explain any of this
because if God has given the direction,
the direction can be trusted.
The instructions are completely reliable
because of the source they come from.
And I want to sort of highlight something
that you alluded to yesterday.
One of the things,
and again, if we
get bogged down in that stuff,
if we chase those rabbit trails too far,
we miss the hammer of this story.
The end of verse 17,
“Everything on earth will
perish.” The idea that creation is at risk
and God’s mercy is such
that God protects a
family
and a portion of the creation
from the destruction that is about to fall upon it
in order that there can be a continuation,
in order that there can be life.
Notice the idea
because Noah is going to be saved,
then the creation should also be saved.
There hadn’t been language about saving animals, saving birds.
That comes in after the promise is made to Noah,
that there will be a kind of refilling,
a return to be fruitful and multiply.
We’ll see that literally.
And I think we shouldn’t miss that.
The other questions are interesting.
By all means, have those conversations
and visit the museums and do the things.
But we have thought about those things so much
that in some ways they’ve become the point
and they were not intended to be the point.
Yeah, that is actually,
I think, one of the larger to pull back from the Noah conversation.
Maybe I should explain why I’m doing that.
I think Noah is a particularly difficult section to study
because of how ingrained of Noah’s story
is into our memories.
A lot of this comes from belt boards and children’s
Bibles and pictures.
We get this idea of the Noah story and it’s so narrated.
It has such a clear character,
has such a clear crisis,
right?
Water coming up and building this thing that saves you.
It has a very kind of apocalyptic feel to it.
And so it grabs our attention,
it holds our imagination.
The danger of that is when we frame it
into that kind of story,
we become tempted then to always
return to it as if that unto itself
inherently holds the meaning.
That, you know,
look at the, imagine the ark and imagine how big it was
and how incredible the thing this is.
It grabs our imagination.
What it fails to do though,
is help us to begin to see the lesson.
The lesson is at what great cost sin has cost humanity,
right? That reaching in the garden,
that knowing good and evil,
what is the outcome of that?
We now see it in full display.
That the only way to prune the plant is going to be,
for the plant to grow is going to be to prune it.
It’s going to be for it to be cut back.
Judgment must be brought so that there’s a positive
and constructive way for humanity to grow and flourish.
Such is the state of violence,
such as the state of human sinfulness across society
that there must be something done.
And then God is going to take this drastic action.
We had all the way back,
I think it was on Tuesday of this week,
this deep and difficult language,
God being grieved to the heart.
It’s clear that this judgment isn’t being brought
by a joyous, lightning throwing kind of God.
This isn’t Zeus,
right?
This is a God who made and cares
and sees this as the only way forward.
So my point I’m trying to make is,
don’t be captivated by the two by two conversation
and miss the really dark subject matter here.
That the cost of sin is unbelievably high
and that God is working by God’s promise
and by God’s providence to further humanity
and to make creation in a sense new again.
But this has all come about because of the thing
that humans have chosen to do.
And so the Noah story is far more about God making
an accommodation for us than it is about the details
that we often get fixated on.
And so we learn something from the story
if we can let go of some of those presuppositions
that we might not learn if we hold on to them.
Right, and let’s try to end on maybe something
a little bit more positive.
So the last verse here,
Noah did everything just as God commanded,
which is a kind of refrain
we’ll see in this story.
But we are close enough to chapter three of Genesis
that we still hear the echoes of Adam and Eve did not
and all of the people did not.
And this wickedness on the earth gives evidence
that the people did not.
And yet Noah met with this
extraordinary news and this
extraordinarily difficult task
does everything,
not only does everything
just as God commanded to the measurement,
to the cubit,
to the
ingredient,
to the seed,
the species,
the kind
that this is complete obedience from Noah.
And this is really the
first we’ve seen of that
in the story, and it stands out in contrast
to the wickedness of people whose hearts
are full of evil all the time.
That’s really well said,
Clinton.
In fact, in some ways
in Genesis, it becomes a template
those who will make similar choices.
We’re gonna meet people like Abram who God comes to
and gives a command and Abram chooses to follow.
We learn that these characters
have very complicated motives.
They don’t always get it right,
but they are willing.
They’re open to be obedient.
And God not only knows that,
but God rewards that.
And for all of the time and press we get
in the Old Testament for God bringing judgment
of all different kinds,
God is also faithful
and loving and kind and compassionate.
And yeah, we see that lived out here
and even Noah’s story that God chooses not only Noah, but his family.
And he says to your whole unit,
I will show mercy
and I will use you because of your obedience
and faithfulness to carry this on.
So thanks be to God for those symbols and those people.
Template is a good word because God
God remembers Noah and
Noah obeys God.
So this is a,
there is a paradigm here that we’ll see again.
We’ll see it repeated.
Well,
thanks for being with us everybody.
Yeah, Lord willing we’ll be with you in the studio on Monday.
Hope you have a good weekend.
Take care everyone, thanks.