The Flood

Genesis 7-8. A week before the flood, God told Noah (age 600) that it was time to board. The Lord shut them in the ark. This is significant because it means that Noah could not open the door to any of his screaming neighbors once the flood started. It’s merciful, because it takes judgment out of Noah’s hands. Noah is not the one laying out or enforcing the sentence. In the same way, we are not to judge whether anyone is saved or not, even if we don’t think they “act like a Christian.” God still has total control of the doors.

We saw in the previous chapter that God felt actual pain at the evil of humanity. When God created humans, he did not have to tie his heart to them. God chose to love people so that when things go wrong, as they will in a free will universe, he feels actual pain. Love is not safe. You won’t be able to really love someone without suffering, giving, sacrificing, getting your feelings hurt, taking hits to your pride, or grieving. Supposedly, it’s all worth it.

God “opened the floodgates of heaven,” meaning that the waters above the firmament mentioned in chapter one broke up. These waters existed in the upper part of the earth’s atmosphere since God created the world. Waters also came up from the earth. God sent rain for forty days and forty nights. The number 40 is usually significant in the Bible. It comes when people need to be tested or purified and when they are coming into a new phase of life (Moses on Sinai, Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, Israel wandering the wilderness for 40 years, Elijah in 1Kings 19).

This was a global flood. More than 200 cultures (including Native Americans, Hindus, Chinese, Egyptians, Celts, and Brazilian tribes) have a great flood story, and most of them include details similar to the Genesis account. This indicates that a great flood really happened and the story was passed down through history.

The rain covered the mountains. Everything on dry land died. The floodwaters remained for 150 days. We guess God really wanted to make sure everybody was good and dead. Then God sent a wind over the Earth to speed the waters’ recession. The ark landed on Mount Ararat and Noah sent birds out to see how much longer they had to wait.

Lots of Westerners have trouble with the wrathful God of the Old Testament. Other cultures have a problem with the merciful God. Our culture is saturated with Christianity, and it therefore values forgiveness and charity. Other cultures value judgment and righteousness and have trouble with the God of grace.

Plenty of pastors point out that there is a bigger problem with a God who is not just and who never punishes. If God is not outraged by evil and suffering, then there is no justice and evil wins the day. If you never get angry, you don’t care. God cares and made people for better things than this. Also, we must keep in mind that God takes every life eventually. The death curse is already in play. God is just speeding the process here in order to avoid more suffering. It is wrong for us to cut other lives short, because we did not give them life in the first place. It’s not ours to do.

Noah’s first act after leaving the ark was to build an altar to God and sacrifice some of the clean animals on it. The Lord smells the pleasing aroma and said in his heart that he would never curse the ground again because of humans and he would never destroy all living creatures again. He also remarked that every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. He said, “So long as the Earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”

Tim Keller points out in his environmentalism sermon that Christianity is the only faith with hope for the world and creation. Salvation doesn’t apply to anyone but humans in the others. For example, in Hinduism and Buddhism, the goal is to drop out of the Earth. In those Eastern religions, the world is an illusion, not a real eternal concern. In atheism, the world will eventually burn up. In Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Heaven is not someplace else; it’s here. God is going to restore the Earth to its former glory. Here, God makes a commitment to creation that will last forever. Salvation doesn’t just transform human souls, but that's where it starts. What God is going to do through Christ and healing applies to everything. The lion will lie down with the lamb. It won’t be destroyed in another flood.

Humans should have learned a lesson here, but they didn’t. They should have learned that you can’t cure the world’s problems with eugenics or mass killings. The sin curse was still in Noah and his family. A world-wide, human-killing flood was not powerful enough to wipe out evil in the world. It will take something more powerful. It will take the death of God himself to kill this disease and start the healing of the entire world and humanity. So when Hitler or someone comes along and says, “Let’s kill or exile all the bad people, and then everything will be alright,” they aren’t remembering the flood story.

As humans, we know there is something wrong with humanity. That’s why we are so sensitive, devastated when we are criticized, and constantly either picking at ourselves or others. Self-improvement books sell like hotcakes. We strive to be more successful, thinner, better. If only we had this certain personality or this opportunity, we would like ourselves. We use psychology and biology to attempt to weed out our flaws and not pass them on. But nothing like this is ever going to work. Killing all the evil people doesn’t work. Someone once said, “Why do bad things happen to good people? That only happened once, and he volunteered for it.” It’s true. Destruction on this level cannot cure the problem of evil and suffering, so it is foolish to think human efforts or human killings can help matters. God shows us that here. Later in the Bible, he will show us grace.