Genesis 6:7-13

Good, well, welcome back friends.
We are continuing through Genesis in the sixth
chapter today as we make our way into the flood story.
You’ll remember yesterday that we saw the conclusion
of kind of the preface to the Noah story
where God had looked upon the earth,
saw that humans hearts were full of sin
that remember this language,
every inclination of the thoughts of their heart
was only evil all the time.
And the Lord was grieved,
a very profound verse,
a very profound introduction to a story
that we often attribute some emotions like anger to God,
confidence maybe,
it is rare in the scripture
that a negative type of emotion like sadness
would be attributed to the Lord,
but here God’s heart is grieved.
And so where that leads God
is where we pick up the story today in verse seven.
So the Lord said,
I will wipe mankind whom I’ve created
from the face of the earth,
men and animals and creatures that move along the ground,
the birds of the air,
for I am grieved that I made them.
But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.
So here we have the preface to the story.
God, because he is grieved says,
I’m just done with them.
They’ve had this run and it has gone downhill
and it is now at the bottom.
It is bad.
What I created good has now become a thing that hurts me
to my core, that grieves me to my heart.
And I’m just going to push the reset switch
and be done with it.
And then there is this
kind of a bridge verse
or a connector verse,
but Noah found favor
in the eyes of the Lord.
And it’s interesting in that
we’re told that fact
before we’re told anything about Noah,
which is an interesting way to tell a story.
Yeah, it’s an interesting way to tell a story.
And it’s maybe an interesting way to soften
what’s otherwise a not very soft text here.
I mean, let’s
not rush past the uncomfortable nature
of where we’ve just been.
But
the very God who made chapter one, chapter two
is now speaking about destroying that very creation
and the beings within it.
We’re just now in the beginning of chapter six.
This
is really the question that has been raised
ever since chapter three.
Once we get to sin and this brokenness
that’s been unleashed into the world,
the resulting and natural question is,
what’s God going to do about it?
And as we see that sin has progressed
as we spoke about yesterday,
we now see it embedded in a society in an entire world.
God now identifies the only solution to this problem
to be the one of complete destruction,
to get rid of the problem is gonna require killing
those who bear this sin.
And
this is a very,
very, very difficult text.
I mean, even as we see it from the side of the New Testament,
I mean, the fact that this is the extent
to which God would have to go to solve the problem of sin
is this is a shocking kind of thing.
And it’s
worth bearing out
some of that with us
as we go into the story,
because it only gets darker
really as the story goes along.
Agreed, Michael, and such is the extent of the sin
that it not only affects mankind,
you would expect God to say,
so I’m going to exterminate mankind.
But here God says that it has spilled
into the whole creation.
Mankind as the sort of crown jewel of creation, remember the story,
particularly that first chapter
that everything is created in order
and finally man and woman are created and it is very good.
Now their fall has taken all of creation with it,
the birds, the animals, that I’m going to get rid of all of it.
And so we have brought the world down in our sin.
We’ve brought the world down with us
with this one exception of the man named Noah.
And I wanna point out as we move into this story,
unlike Genesis 1 and 2,
unlike Genesis 1 and 2,
the first story and the second story
where we have two different accounts
and they honored that by keeping them in different chapters.
When we get to the Noah story,
we still see two different stories.
We see them put together.
So one of the easiest ways to keep track of that
is when you see the word God versus when you see the Lord.
And you will notice that in the early part of this story,
we’ve been using Lord in all capitals,
which is Yahweh, the Hebrew sacred name for God.
And then as we switch verses,
you’ll see that we move to Elohim
or what is translated God.
And unlike those early parts of Genesis
where they separated the family stories
into first chapter and second chapter,
here they kind of mash them together.
So we go from verse nine,
I’m sorry, verse eight, but Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord to verse nine.
This is an account of Noah and we change sources here.
Noah was a righteous man,
blameless among the people of his time.
And he walked with God.
Noah had three sons,
Shem, Ham and Japheth.
And so the most important,
the single determining characteristic of Noah in this story
is that he’s righteous,
that he alone walked with God,
blameless among the people of his time.
We’ve already seen this preface
that all of humankind was sinful all the time,
but Noah stands out as righteous.
And righteous is a significantly important
and powerful word in the context of the story.
Of the story.
And ultimately it will be of the,
really the entire book of Genesis actually,
because there is none found righteous,
right?
This is why God is looking to bring this kind of destruction.
And so he sees Noah.
Before I run to that though,
Clint, I wanted to point out to the same point that you made,
a careful reader here is going to have moments,
not only where you see the name of God’s ship,
you’re also going to have moments where you recognize
that there’s a kind of repetitive nature to the text.
And if you ever get to a point and you say, man,
this sounds like a repeat
of something I’ve heard previously,
it often is.
If you look up a little ways,
you’re going to often find a different way of saying
the same exact thing that you just encountered.
That’s another version of what Clint was just describing,
the ways in which you see these stories are brought together.
And sometimes biblical scholarship
may not make biblical study incredibly accessible.
In other words, it may feel like,
well, why does that matter?
I do think it matters here because you’re going to see,
if you read these stories carefully,
how they’ve been laid on top of each other,
though they’re telling us the same story,
they’re bringing very different perspectives and advantages
that the authors believed were important enough
to keep together, to allow that tension to exist.
And so it’s worth keeping attuned to that
as we go throughout this story because,
and what we want to make this clear,
what God is doing here in the flood is substantial.
I mean, this is a kind of re-creative moment
that we’re not going to see again.
God doesn’t command this kind of natural destruction
at this scale anywhere else.
Maybe you look to the book of Revelation,
but nowhere at least in the Old Testament
do you see God working at this scale
and you see it now within these first six chapters of Genesis.
So yeah, pay attention to how these stories
have been laid on to each other as we go together
over the next few,
I guess it’ll be into next week,
because I think it’s really interesting
how they share those different perspectives
of this pivotal text.
And there are people for whom this is problematic,
the fact that there’s clearly two streams
coming together here, and that in some cases,
even the details may repeat one another
or in a couple of instances,
they may challenge one another,
though in not very,
I would say substantial ways.
But
I would say rather than be troubled by that,
I think it offers us a chance to see a different perspective.
Clearly they’re telling the same story,
but from slightly different vantage points
and from slightly different
layers of what they find most important.
And I think it doesn’t have to distract us,
I actually think that it can help us.
So we get one of those repetitive details right now, verse 11,
“Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight
“and was full of violence.
“God saw how corrupt the earth had become
“for all the people on the earth had corrupted their ways.”
So again, this is this story’s way of telling us
that God sees no path forward with the world
that doesn’t involve destruction.
God sees no way around
a kind of cataclysmic punishment
upon the wickedness of humankind,
that so far has their fall been that they’re really,
to use a loaded word from the New Testament,
it’s really irredeemable and it must be punished,
it must be dealt with,
there must be a consequence.
And so God says to Noah,
“I’m going to put an end to all people
“for the earth is filled with violence.
“Because of them, I am surely going to destroy
“both them and the earth.”
And that’s kind of where we’ll draw the line today,
but it doesn’t necessarily get us to a different place,
but here it’s conversation with Noah.
Noah is much more in the circle than in the first story
where he says, “Oh yeah, everybody but Noah.” But here,
Noah is the one to whom God reveals the plan ultimately.
And we get to the same place by the same path,
corruption and violence and a righteous man
who will be saved because one of the things
we learn about God’s character in this story
is that God will honor righteousness,
that God will hold,
Michael, is that you?
I’m here.
Okay, we had a crazy,
like a vacuum cleaner going on,
that God will honor righteousness.
And that’s, again, a very significant part of this story.
It may be, Rochelle is practicing viola right now.
So maybe you’re hearing viola in the days,
then? – This was like static or raised.
Maybe it was just on my end.
Well, so I’ll add in here,
Clint, back to that point of righteousness that you made,
this is maybe a part of Noah’s story.
It’s possible you don’t know,
it comes at the very end.
But it’s important for you to recognize
that when we encounter Noah, who verse nine,
“Noah was a righteous man,
blameless in his generation.”
That is at best an account of Noah and his current standing,
not an eternal statement of Noah’s character.
Noah’s gonna make some very clear missteps
in his story here in Genesis.
And it’s clear when God looks upon
the righteousness of humanity,
he looks upon that righteousness conditionally.
God knows that there’s no perfect human.
There’s none who lives with unstained life.
And that is ultimately the threat of scripture
we see fulfilled in Jesus Christ,
from a New Testament reading of this text,
what Noah could have never been was the permanent solution.
But yet God has conditionally chosen this one by grace
because God has seen righteousness that lives within him.
But the point I’m making right now is that
this righteousness is not an eternal one.
Noah does not stand out in history
as one who is not blotted by sin.
If you hold on to the end of Noah’s story,
you’re gonna find out that he too is scarred
by this same sinfulness that actually lives on
on the other side of the flood.
So there’s none who escapes the want of righteousness,
yet Noah is seen to be righteous
as in relation to those who surrounded him.
Is that fair, Clint?
Yeah, I think that’s a good point,
Michael.
We want to not read righteousness here
through the lens of the New Testament.
We read it through the lens of that previous phrase
that he walked with God,
that while no one else honored God in their life,
that while everyone else let themself lead them
to selfishness and violence,
as we saw in Cain,
that has now become the rule for all humanity
with the exception of Noah.
And so Noah stands out as righteous
in that he continues to look to God for direction
as opposed to all of his peers.
Yeah, this is not a theological statement,
I think, as much as it’s a practical statement.
Yeah,
that’s good.
Well, Clint,
thanks for being with us.
I’d say tomorrow is an interesting text
in that it is the sort of nitty gritty
of putting together an ark
and there’s some interesting conversation we had in that.
So I hope you join us for that.
Thanks for being with us, everybody.
We’ll see you tomorrow.