Genesis 8:1-12

Alright friends, we’re back.
Genesis chapter 8 today.
Yeah, we continue through the story and we appreciate you being with us as we do.
The flood has happened,
Noah, the animals, the few people remaining alive
on the ark
are together,
and the water,
we left chapter 7 with the water’s swelling on the earth.
And then we begin chapter 8 with really important words,
“But God remembered Noah and all the
wild animals and domestic
animals that were with him in the ark.”
The word “remembered” is a very significant and very important word in Hebrew.
It means more than just “didn’t forget.”
To remember is to act on someone’s behalf.
So throughout the scripture,
there’s this call, “Remember the Lord your God.” Remember, remember, remember,
O Israel.
Remember the Lord.
Remember when God did this.
And it always means more than just “call to mind.”
There’s a sense of covenant in it.
It’s a call to connection.
It’s a call to relationship.
And so when this says “remembered,” this is an English word that really doesn’t have
the power and depth
that it would have carried in the language.
We just have to know that because our word “remembered” just means,
“Oh, I remembered to do the laundry,” or “I remembered to take out the garbage.”
This is a significantly more profound word than that.
God was faithful, too, would be, I think, a fair translation.
God was with Noah and the animals and the domestic animals that were with him in the ark.
So
God is faithful here to those,
and in that faithfulness is the promise that they are
going to be delivered.
Michael, anything to add on that?
I was just only going to say that this pops up again,
Clint, this word “remembered,” at
the very end when God makes this final covenant with Noah that this promise “remembered” comes
up again.
And then we see it again in the biblical witness in chapter 19 when we have
God working with Abraham.
So yes, just to emphasize your point,
this word comes throughout,
and it’s not the idea
of “remember the milk.”
It’s far more connected to God’s remembering of the people and the creation,
and therefore God’s covenant in it.
Yeah, it’s very much a covenantal word.
So with that said, then we continue,
“And God made a wind blow over the earth,
and the waters subsided, the fountains of the deep,
and the windows of the heavens closed,
the rain from heaven was restrained,
and the waters gradually receded from the earth.
At the end of 150 days,
the water had abated,
and in the seventh month,
on the seventeenth day of the month,
the ark came to rest in the mountains of Ararat.
The waters continued to abate until the tenth month,
in the tenth month,
on the first day of the month,
the tops of the mountains appeared.”
So the actual language of this is a little bit confusing.
We’re tempted to think,
perhaps we’ve learned even,
that Ararat is a mountain,
Ararat is a region,
and it’s a mountainous region,
and so the water,
the ark
comes to rest on a mountain,
in the mountains,
and then the waters continue to abate until the tops of
the mountains appeared.
This seems backwards,
it seems clear that the tops of the mountains would have to appear
before the ark could rest on one of them,
but again,
the story is not
about the particulars in that sense.
The story here is just
giving a region of mountains that the people were familiar with
that were large, that were tall, and it makes sense to them that the ark would find a place to rest
in that region.
Yeah, and there’s contextualization of this story.
You might not know
that this story actually
appears in lots of different ancient cultures,
and in their tellings,
the mountain identified is often different.
So while the substance of the idea of the story,
that there was this destructive event
that involved water and flooding,
people would naturally put that in the time, place,
context that they were.
So here,
we have that listed in the naming of a mountain,
but we have very specific details that
once again, when we make the mistake of reading the scripture flatly as just a
literal kind of scientific historical textbook, we would miss
detail here that we see all
the way in verse 1,
if I can point this out here,
at the end of verse 1,
“And God made a wind blow over the earth,
and the waters subsided.”
Well, what does that remind you of,
other than in the very beginning,
the wind that hovered over the waters of creation?
Once again,
this theme that we’ve named multiple times that was happening here,
we now have explicitly in saying that the very wind that is coinciding with these waters subsiding
brings us back in this imagery to the very beginning of all things,
when God was just
about to create the world from that brand new beginning,
here God is doing it again.
The wind,
that breath is once again in the image.
And so it’s clear here that the redemption is already built into the story, this positive image
on the heels of a very dark image of what we had yesterday,
we now see that there’s
already God’s intention to do good in the midst of this.
So we have now a kind of resting point,
and there is a little bit of a break,
a breath in the story.
This is a part of the story, I think,
that, oh,
we know, but we forget,
we kind of remember
it from our childhood,
but it’s a little bit different maybe than some of us
have remembered.
Verse 6, “At the end of the forty days Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made
and sent out a raven,
and it went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth.
Then he sent out a dove from him to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the
ground, but the dove found no place to set its foot,
and returned to him in the ark,
for the waters were still on the face of the earth.
So he put out his hand and took it and brought it into the ark with him.
He waited another seven days,
sent out the dove from the ark,
and the dove came back
to him in the evening,
and there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf.
So Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth.
Then he waited another seven days
and sent out the dove,
and it did not return to him
anymore.” So this is really just a kind of a sideline in the story.
Doves are preferred over ravens.
Doves are more trustworthy than ravens.
Ravens in literary history have a kind of
sketchy
persona.
Though they’re intelligent, they’re often thought not to be trustworthy.
They’re dark.
They come at night.
They make noise, et cetera.
Significantly here, we start with the 40,
again, the concept of a
waiting period,
a difficult period,
and then we have this very condensed telling.
The dove goes out.
The waters cover the earth.
No place to rest.
A week later, brings a butted leafed branch back.
So again,
the story is not dealing with chronology here.
The story is dealing with events.
The story is dealing with a process.
Yes, if you want to argue that God is
miraculously growing olive trees in a place the dove didn’t
look the first time,
by all means do that.
But that’s really not what the story is doing here.
And then Noah takes the last trip,
the dove’s absence, to indicate that the dove has now
found a place and that there is an opportunity to leave the ark,
that the land has returned,
the water has subsided,
and that the time may be at hand to leave the ark.
The passing of time here is very much illustrated by the choice of using these birds.
So my commentary
here points out that using birds to find ground would be a common maritime
practice, so it would fit within the context of the culture and any who knew something about navigating water.
But this is doing more than that.
It’s more than just sending out a bird and hoping to find something.
There’s a real kind of passing of time that’s happening here as we see Noah over and over
and over again sending out another bird, trying again,
another form of trusting God.
Remember how much we’ve emphasized that this story does ultimately show us God’s faithfulness,
even in the midst of human sinfulness?
Well,
here we have,
once again,
Noah trusting that even in the midst of this cataclysmic
disaster that there will be dry land on the other hand,
that God will not only close the floodgates,
but that God will restore creation to a livable state.
And in this act of repeatedly sending out birds,
we see Noah putting that trust in faith in God.
Another example,
another illustration of that thing that began Noah’s story,
where it says that he was righteous amidst an unrighteous generation.
And then there’s some wonderful symbolism here too.
You know, the dove, we see dove in other parts of the scripture,
most notably that the Spirit
descends on Jesus like a dove at his baptism.
Doves are a symbol of peace,
a symbol of
tranquility.
And here we have the olive leaf.
The olive branch is a sign of peace.
It’s a sign of prosperity in Israel.
The people who
told this story relied on olives,
new olives, took that as a sign both of success
and prosperity,
but also the richness of olive oil and the use of olives.
So even here,
the symbols in the story itself kind of find themselves within the general
traditional narratives of the people of Israel.
These are their symbols.
These are their parts of their story.
And they represent good things.
A dove is a good thing,
a good thing.
An olive branch is a good thing.
And so here in the midst of the 40 days of struggle and waiting and waiting for water
to recede and hoping there’s dry land,
there are these little hints in the story that there
continues to be goodness given to the people,
though that’s only a few people at this point in the story.
Another detail that you’re going to notice if you’ve joined us,
especially in the beginning of this study.
Do you notice here how many days he waits?
It’s seven days.
So Clint mentioned yesterday,
and I think it just bears quickly repeating that numbers
do matter in the scripture.
And when you’ve got the number seven,
which is a number that represents perfection,
wholeness,
it does in Genesis chapter eight,
just a few chapters following the creation
story where God creates in seven days.
Friends, we should not miss that that is connected.
Once again, what’s happening in this story connects to that previous story.
And in many ways,
I feel like Genesis and Clint,
you know, maybe push back on this if you disagree.
One thing that I think Genesis does, especially
in these early stories,
is it in very many
ways, it builds the story on top of itself.
It’s like a foundation kind of story because it starts with the very beginning.
But then you have the introduction of sin,
that sin grows here.
Now we have an example of where God is doing a reset.
And in some ways, creation starts again.
God’s faithfulness brings a new day, a new hope,
a new kind of possibility.
And we’re going to see this happening here.
And if you know what’s to come,
we’re going to see a pattern where the earth goes dark
again.
And in fact, we’re going to see in the Tower of Babel a very different kind of
destructive practice that God’s going to do to reset the growth of human sinfulness.
So the point being here is these stories I think you can see build on top of one another.
They intersect,
they speak to one another,
they use the same imagery.
This isn’t an accident.
These metaphors of
specific dates and times,
you know, they really do connect these stories
together and show us how this is all one story representing God’s one purpose and plan.
That’s a really helpful point,
Michael.
And I think that we do ourselves a favor when we realize that these stories are,
yes,
they’re stories about history and yes,
they’re stories about characters,
but they are sacred stories.
These stories are vitally important to the people who told them,
the people who recorded them.
And as we read them,
if we can build a sensitivity to pick up on details,
when we see a number to think,
oh, we’ve seen that number before,
that’s not on accident.
Those kind of things,
those kind of reinforcements,
those kind of standout details really
are purposeful in the function and in the content of the story.
And one of the things we can most do to help ourselves read scripture is be attentive to
that.
When we’re in the book of Genesis,
we’re going to see things in Chapter 48,
49, 50 that are still ringing bells and echoing
some of the things we’re reading in these first
few chapters.
And that’s on purpose and that is incredibly well crafted.
And if we’re sensitive to that,
if we allow ourselves to recognize that,
I think that we
will find our reading of the text really deepened and enriched as we go through it.
Yeah,
maybe just a final note from me here on this,
I think I would say
this is an example,
par excellence for me,
of a story that represents the danger of believing that we know what the scripture says.
And the reason I say that is because Noah is a familiar story.
In fact, I doubt that there’s ever been a Sunday school that’s existed in the history of the church,
that a character like Noah hasn’t made a strong showing,
because there’s something compelling about this image
of the ark and the animals and God’s faithfulness and the extraordinary nature
of what happens here.
This sticks out in the canon because of that.
The problem with that,
though, is we might not come back to it with an adult’s eye or with careful attention.
And in that we make the mistake or we at least experience the error of not then coming to these texts and
realizing how deeply connected it is to the things that come before and after it.
And I think if you
appreciate that, it can really open your awareness.
And I think if we hear it rightly,
it can provide a opening, an opportunity for us to see that Noah’s story is
not here to be an extraordinary
telling of the man named Noah.
But rather,
it starts with God seeing Noah about God opening the floodgates,
then God, as we are today,
closing those floodgates.
And God being faithful to
recreate that wind that we see is once again a reflection of God,
who’s the main character of this story.
In other words, and maybe to make a long case for a simple point,
Clint,
when we come to this story with adult faith,
what we realize is that this is God’s story.
God’s actively at work
and that when we look to the scriptures,
we see these people who, yes,
sometimes occupy very pivotal moments in history,
but they’re only here to point the finger to the one who connects those
things.
And I think that’s a beautiful, richer,
more detailed and nuanced understanding of scripture
than just animals getting out on an ark and an amazing rescue kind of story.
One of the great aspects of Genesis.
We see this throughout the scripture.
It’s maybe most notable
in the Old Testament.
There are times when God does what God does on behalf of the people.
You will see as we go through the book of Genesis,
there are times that God is clearly
the one orchestrating events and doing things.
And then there are these other times where the
people seem left to their own devices and they have incredible freedom to make decisions and
follow their own choices.
And God doesn’t seem to have a lot to say about it.
And what I think is
wonderful about that is that it is so symbolic of our own life of faith.
There are moments in each
of our journeys where God is big and bold and like the North Star observable and we set our course.
And then there are other seasons of life where it feels like we kind of have to navigate on our own.
And I love that that seems from the very beginning,
literally the beginning, written into the story of the scripture and the story of the people of faith as well because I think it feels very true.
I think that brings us to the end of our study today friends.
Thanks for being with us
and we look forward to continuing on with Noah’s story when we join you tomorrow.
Thanks for listening.
We will talk to you soon.