Genesis 7:17-23

All right, here we are, Genesis 7, 17.
Hey, welcome back everyone.
We continue the flood story today.
The animals and the family of Noah are in the ark.
The rain has come,
the flood has happened.
And so verse 17,
we pick up the story in chapter seven.
“The flood continued 40 days on the earth.
“The waters increased and bore up the ark,
“and it rose high above the earth.
“The water swelled
and increased greatly on the earth.
“And the ark floated on the face of the water.
“The water swelled so mightily on the earth
“that all the high mountains under the whole heaven “were covered.
“The water swelled above the mountains,
“covering them 15 cubits deep,
“and all flesh died that moved on the earth.
“Birds,
domestic animals, wild animals, “all the swarming creatures that swarm on the earth
“and all human beings,
everything on dry land,
“in whose nostrils was the breath of life died.
“He blotted out every living thing
“that was on the face of the ground.
“Human beings and animals and creeping things
“and birds of the air,
they were all blotted from the earth.
“Only Noah was left
and those that were with him in the ark,
“and the water swelled on the earth for 150 days.”
So this is a narrative part of the story.
It’s a descriptive part of the story of what happens
when the rain falls and the waters rise
and it lifts the ark.
Noah and his family, the animals,
safe in the ark,
but everything else upon the face of the earth
perishes.
And this language of blotted out
has to do with literally the erasing of creation.
We saw this earlier in the story.
God is sad, God is grieved
that he created.
And here,
that creation is erased.
It is eradicated, it is blotted out.
Like you might
weed a garden or like you might have to destroy something
that you are unhappy with.
That is the idea here.
God is starting over.
And the text goes out of its way
to talk to us about how complete this situation is.
The highest mountains are covered by
15 cubits.
That’s somewhere 25 feet or so of water
over the highest mountains.
And again, like the language of Genesis 1,
we get this categorical listing of life,
all of which now is covered by water
and all of it which now is blotted out
so that only Noah was left and those who were with him.
Yeah, so
there’s this real kind of undoing piece by piece
the thing that God has done.
And think about that for just a minute.
God lays out before the foundations of the earth this plan
and we remember how ordered that plan was day by day.
God puts another linchpin in this long chain
of intended sequences.
God has a plan and an order
and there’s a kind of hierarchical consistency
to the system.
We’ve mentioned this numerous times.
Well,
here we are once again.
We’re looking at the flood story
and we see how as this life is blotted out,
the earth itself is covered with water.
Then we see these things named.
The things that are on the face of the ground,
human beings, animals, creeping things, birds of the air,
we’re back to these patterns of things that God had made.
Now these things are being blotted out.
They’re being
destroyed each in order.
It reminds me of that text that we get from the prophets,
that idea where God is a master artisan
and can’t get God
start fresh if God wants to again.
If the clay vessel’s not coming together,
wouldn’t you destroy it and start afresh?
And that’s very much the kind of thing that’s happening here.
The
people have not been faithful to God.
So God has now gone sequentially
in a same kind of ordered process that he had done to make
and now he’s remaking by destroying what was.
And so let’s be clear here that this is not a God
of hellfire and vengeance,
right?
God is not being angry,
he’s not being temperamental.
This is very much an ordered calculated kind of process
because this is the way that God has chosen to move forward.
And that doesn’t all leave maybe some of the questions
of a difficult text like this, Clint,
but it does, I think,
grant us the ability to see
that this isn’t God being capricious.
This is God making steps forward to right or wrong
that has happened in the midst of humanity.
Yeah,
I think biblically speaking,
we see here the consequence of sin.
We see the destruction of human disobedience
that this resultant condition of the creation
of humankind has created a scenario
in which God says it no longer deserves to be here.
It is no longer good.
It is certainly no longer very good.
And as such,
it must be eradicated.
The way to deal with it is destructively.
And so God undoes the doing of creation.
God undoes the work that he has done in creating.
And we get a clue of that
when it says here
that the waters,
the ark floated on the face of the water,
the last time we saw that language was in the beginning, that God’s spirit
hovered over the deep,
God’s
spirit.
So we have here this sort of
return to or reset of
creation, at least stylistically.
And some of the language takes us in that direction.
The other thing that we can miss here
because we know this story,
it’s a little bit hard to imagine.
But if for a moment,
try to put yourself
in the position of these eight humans on this ark,
that in these moments,
they are literally the only living things
upon the earth.
The sea creatures, the fish may still be with them, of course,
but these animals and these few humans
represent
the only possibility of life returning to the planet.
They are alone.
They are all that is left
in this vessel,
now
floating upon the top of the very punishment
that God has sent in response to the sinfulness of people.
This is a,
when we stop and really enter this text,
this is one of those that we’ve heard since we were kids.
We don’t think much about it.
It’s
sort of familiar to us.
But when you really enter into this text, it’s confusing.
It’s terrifying.
It is
stunning.
And I think
it’s okay that we do that.
In fact, I think we should allow ourselves
to be drawn into it like that in order to understand it.
Yeah, Clint, I think that
it’s a text like Noah that especially in
modern readings
of the scriptures has come under a lot of
really sort of scrutiny because here we see God
doing this very global, massive,
visible kind of thing.
And this, the sheer level of destruction
that we see recorded here in what is a mere 17 to 24,
what is that, seven, eight verses,
that we just see so much happen here
and it’s such terse,
simple language.
And I think maybe one way for us to make sense of this
is to be reminded that in the ancient world,
the conception of the latitude of deities
was far different than in the modern conception
of God’s working within the bounds of,
we conceive of God at working within our understanding of science and
people still making choices
and having to affect all these sorts of things.
But in the ancient world,
the context of Noah,
God who made everything has now chosen
that the only way to make things right
in the midst of rampant sinfulness
and the rejection of God’s plan
is to ultimately bring the same kind of level of destruction
except of course God’s willingness
to save Noah, his family, these animals.
Ultimately,
God is free to choose to do
what God wants to do.
That’s the frame of the text.
We bring to it some of these questions about,
but
was that true?
Did everyone need destruction?
Was this the only way forward?
Can God be justified in actions like this?
These are the kinds of questions
I think that modern readers bring to the text.
And it’s not to say the text doesn’t have words for us,
but it wasn’t intended to answer those questions.
Here,
God is free to do as God has chosen to do,
and God is trying to right the wrong
that was set by the human sinfulness.
And that is the ordering that was intended.
So I think a humble reading of the text acknowledges that.
You have to be
cautious any time you try to
assign motives
or imperatives
to God’s actions.
But I do think it is worth remembering that
as of yet in the story,
the only emotion that has been attributed to God is grief.
There’s been no mention of anger.
There’s been no mention of outrage.
There’s been no mention of judgment.
There is simply God grieved over this sin,
and that sin must be eradicated.
And we get here a framework for really
a kind of biblical understanding
of justice and of righteousness.
Noah deserves to be saved
because he is righteous.
The people of the earth deserve not to be saved
because they’re sinful all the time.
They’re disobedient.
Their hearts are unrighteous.
They’re sinful constantly.
They have moved away from being righteous,
from being right with God.
And that
really is the simplest
explanation of what happens here,
that Noah finds a place in the unfolding new beginning
of creation because he has been righteous.
And those others have lost their place
because they were not.
And nowhere in the text,
and again, I think, I don’t wanna repeat myself too much,
but I wanna say this to make sure it’s understood.
Nowhere in the text has it said that God’s
predisposition to do that is from anger.
It’s from grief.
God is sad that this is the reality.
This is,
there is no good analogy,
but imagine when you have a family pet
and it’s time to take that pet to the vet to be put down.
It is both the right thing to do
and you are grieved to the heart to do it.
That’s the picture of God here.
God is doing what is right
because it is in God’s nature to do what is right,
both in the destroying the people and in the saving Noah.
And that grieves God,
that God feels that loss,
but it is deserved.
And there’s a lot of leeway and a lot of discussion
that we’d have to have down the road
as we move through the Old Testament
and into the New Testament for certain,
but that is some of the assumption of the text.
And I think it’s helpful to remember that
because this story can take us some directions
that maybe aren’t entirely helpful.
Yeah, Clint, I think that’s really,
really helpful.
We are walking on some really interesting ground here
and it really does depend upon,
I think, your willingness
to submit to the text.
I once had a professor in undergraduate school who cautioned
us and said, when we come to read scripture, to study scripture,
so the temptation is for us to want to stand over it.
In other words, to bring our questions to it,
to say scripture, we’re going to interrogate you
for the answers to the things that are of interest to us.
And his point was not to say
that that’s not a natural thing to do
or that as humans, we should
avoid ever doing that.
His point was merely to say
that when we consider the scriptures to be holy,
when we set them apart and call them scripture
and not just ancient literature,
that what we need to factor is it has concerns
and things to teach us that may not be natural
to our own questions.
And I think this is an example,
Parr excellence, Clint,
of dealing with that in practice.
Because what we have here is a text
that has a very clear point.
The cost of human sinfulness started in the garden
but flushed out between these two brothers,
Cain and Abel, and then seen writ large across cultures and generations
now that has grown and really mushroomed from that point on.
That sinfulness has reached a level
where a just and righteous God
can no longer allow it to grow like weeds in a garden.
It must be pulled out,
rooted out, blotted out is the word of this text.
This is the extent to which this sinfulness impinges
upon the good character of God.
Now,
that’s not simple.
I don’t wanna pretend like we should gloss over it,
but if we’re gonna submit to the text,
if we’re gonna hear the concerns of the text,
it does have something to teach us about a just God,
what God expects of the world and orderly creation
that God made and ultimately the extent of the problem
that’s gonna need solved much farther down the road.
And we see images of this Noah story
in the New Testament gospel.
So, yeah, I think my point here,
Clint, is simply to say,
there are hard things here.
It’s best to try to submit to the text and learn from it
instead of try to interrogate it
with all the concerns we might have.
‘Cause in moments like this,
I tend to think we don’t get out of it
what we think we should.
With very few and arguably no exceptions,
the scripture and the narratives of the Bible presume
that God can be trusted,
that God does what is right,
that God is just,
that God is righteous,
that God is justified in what God does.
And it is not that we can’t ask secondary questions.
It’s not as if the Bible tells us,
just listen to this and be quiet.
We are allowed to ask our questions,
but our questions are often not
intended
by the text to be dealt with.
And so,
very much of what we would like to know,
the scripture is seemingly unconcerned with.
And that’s certainly at work
in these early texts of Genesis.
The scripture simply does not spend time and energy
justifying or explaining what God does,
because by the nature of God doing it,
the scripture trusts that it is the right thing for God to do
because it’s not right,
it’s really not imaginable
that God would do otherwise from the lens of the Bible.
And so,
you don’t have to accept that,
but it is the case when you enter the text.
Yeah, Clint, push back on me here.
If you disagree with this,
but my gut says that maybe a way to help us
navigate texts like this.
And there,
especially if you move further
into books like Judges,
I would even say Exodus,
you’re gonna have places that are gonna make
you very uncomfortable.
And what I think a faithful sort of reading
of a text like this is to recognize
that God is just and right as God behaves in the world,
and God is also merciful and graceful and gracious.
What we’ve done in modern times, I think is,
especially in the last 60,
70 years, we’ve emphasized in Christianity, specifically American Christianity,
God is loving,
God is a good father,
God is trustworthy,
you can put your hope,
faith, and loving, God wants what is good for you.
This is largely true.
And in Christ,
we’ve been given this gift
that is of sheer benefit to us,
full stop.
That said,
we cannot read the whole entirety
of the scripture without seeing that God is righteous,
that God cares about living in a right way in the world.
And because of that,
when God is surrounded by
and God’s people are beset by sinfulness,
God has no other reaction available,
other than the need to respond to root out what is evil,
to root out what is wrong,
because that is a destructive force
within an otherwise good creation.
That thing that we saw in the beginning
when God said it is very good, God meant it.
And so now this virus that’s infecting that good thing
is being dealt with.
And my point is we need to keep all of these images.
Yes, God is good and loving.
Yes, God is also righteous, just,
strong,
providential and powerful and sovereign.
And these two things, they both inform
one another.
They both speak to the other.
And I don’t think we should ever collapse them
or let them go.
We shouldn’t emphasize one aspect of this eternal God
without recognizing that the scripture
includes this whole breadth of tellings.
And we see that today in this text.
We wanna make sure,
so please hear me say this.
The stories of the Old Testament have a depth
and a meaning and a setting and a history all of their own.
They’re not simply signs
that point us to the New Testament.
These have their own life and they should be read
in that context to truly understand these stories.
You need to read them almost apart from the New Testament.
But having said that,
there are probably no two better stories
that prepare us to understand the gospel
than the flood story and the Exodus story.
These stories become in the life of the people
who produce Jesus and witness his life,
the sort of paradigms by which we can understand
the human story,
the cost of sin
and the saving of the righteous in this story,
and the call out of a place to be protected
and live affected by that call in significant ways
and identified as God’s people in the new land.
Those two stories really,
they simply revolutionize
the way that we can understand the New Testament.
They give us a tremendous amount of tools
to hear those stories.
And again, these stories mean something on their own,
but for Christians, these stories are also wonderful lenses
with which to view the Jesus story.
Yeah, I think there’s a lot here
and I think some of these conversations
will arise tomorrow.
So I think at this point,
thank you for sticking with us,
for coming through what’s a difficult
text really.
And then as we move to the latter part of this story,
I do think there’s some conversation to have
about how this does get teased out
and how it does,
it looked differently on the other side of the revelation of Jesus Christ.
And yet the reality that as we encounter this story,
it has a kind of continuity and grace unto itself.
So thank you for being with us today.
I hope that this has been meaningful.
Definitely if it spurs thoughts or questions or comments,
or maybe even concerns,
put that in the comments
and we will address those
as we jump back into the story tomorrow.
So until then, be blessed.
Take care everybody.