Genesis 6: 9-22

Genesis 6:9-22

Points of Interest:

• ‘Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence’—something has gone terribly wrong.  Humanity has filled the earth, but with violence instead of with goodness.  Instead of replacing the frightening chaos with abundance and order, they add to the scary chaos.
• ‘I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth’—this is an unsettling and confusing response on God’s part.  God’s purpose is, along with human partners, to fill the earth with goodness, abundance, and order.  Those partners double-cross God and fill the earth with violence instead.  In response, he decides to destroy them and the earth almost completely.  It’s hard to avoid the thought that God is just compounding the problem here.  Isn’t his solution just bringing about more of what God doesn’t want—violence, chaos, and emptiness?  My only thought as to how God’s drastic action makes sense is that God is creating a firebreak here.  Just like we cut down a strip of forest to save the rest of the forest from fire, God is cutting a break in human history, to make sure that the rest of history doesn’t get consumed by the level of violence he sees happening at the time of Noah.
• ‘three hundred cubits long’—a cubit is eighteen inches.  While it’s not exactly the Queen Mary, this ark isn’t some slapdash raft either.  This is no small project God is assigning to Noah.  There’s no indication that Noah had any previous experience with ship-building, or that such a thing as a ship-builder even existed yet.  Heck, there’s not even a proper name for a ship yet.  And God is asking Noah to build a ship that’s one-and-a-half football fields in length.  If I were Noah, I wouldn’t even know where to start.  I wonder if God gives him more detailed, step-by-step instructions as he gets going.
• ‘I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth’—there is little geological or archaeological evidence of a universal flood since the beginnings of human society.  There could perhaps have been very wide scale flooding toward the end of the last ice age.  There’s also some possibility of a regional flood during what could have been the time of Noah.  Interestingly, despite the geological evidence, many ancient cultures from around the world—from Greece to Scandinavia to China to South America—do have stories of universal or near-universal floods, some of them with remarkable similarities to the biblical story and no obvious direct borrowings from the Bible.  Apparently, there’s something deep in our cultural memory about civilization as we know it being destroyed by flood.  It doesn’t matter to me overmuch whether the flood being described here is actually universal or, in fact, regional.  From Noah’s perspective, the entire world he knew was threatened. In Genesis 1, limiting and controlling the floodwaters played a big part in God’s creative work.  He held back the waters to first distinguish between sky and surface, and then to separate the dry land from the oceans.  Here, God removes those limits on the waters, and they flow back in to take over.  Perhaps it takes constant action on God’s part to make the earth habitable, and in this instance God is not so much causing a flood as not stopping one.

• ‘But I will establish my covenant with you’—a covenant is an agreement, an alliance, or the establishment of a special relationship.  God has not entirely given up on humanity.  In the midst of deciding that it would be better to pretty much start from scratch, God establishes this partnership with Noah.  Their partnership is a joint effort to make sure that living things have a future.
• ‘Two of every kind’—a lot of time has been spent trying to figure out whether or not it would be possible for Noah to find two of every kind of animal, and whether or not they’d fit on the ark.  Again, I find that argument to be something of a red herring.  I could imagine a scenario in which God somehow enabled Noah to collect all the animals (the animals come to him; he’s given temporary super-speed—the possibilities are endless), and I also still find it somewhat implausible that there were two kangaroos, for instance, on the ark.  But whether or not there were technically, exactly, specifically two of every kind of animal on the ark seems beside the point of the story.  What I do find interesting and pertinent is that, for the second time in a handful of chapters, God takes on a massive project, and once again he enlists human help.  Adam and Eve were called to be God’s partners in filling the earth; Noah is called to be God’s partner in rescuing its inhabitants—or, at least, representatives of all its inhabitants.
• ‘Noah did everything’—it sounds so simple, but it’s actual quite remarkable.  Noah believed God that the earth was going to be flooded; and rather than going catatonic, he actually went about building a gigantic boat and filling it with representatives of every animal and every food item.  I wonder what would have happened had Noah disbelieved or declined to take on the mission.

Taking It Home:

• For you: In this passage, God destroys the earth to save it from violence.  I appreciate God’s passion for peace, and yet I can’t help but wonder whether mass destruction is the way to go about it.  Sometimes God can be difficult to understand.  Does this passage—or some other of God’s actions—really, really bother you?  If you feel able, ask God to give you some new insight into his thought process.

• For your six: God is willing to go to great distances to put a stop to violence.  Are any of your six the object of someone else’s attack, whether physical or otherwise?  Ask God to protect them.
• For our church: In one way, our church is not in so different a situation from Noah’s.  God has given us a huge task, and it’s something none of us have ever done or even seen before.  Pray that God would give us the instructions we need to do the work God has called us to do.