Bible Talks - Sunday Night Church
Series: The Book of Promise · Talk No. 6
When God says ENOUGH!
Sunday, 03 September 2006
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1. Scarily encouraging.
The flood is one of the Top Ten Sunday School stories - but that always seems a bit strange to me, because this is first and foremost a terrifying story. This section of Genesis is all about God’s anger, God’s wrath with human beings. God is flooding the world, reversing the creative process, because He is so angry with us.
But… It’s important for us to realise that God’s anger is not always bad. It’s not a good thing that God has to get angry, but without a just anger at sin, we would have no salvation. So this passage has some good things to teach us about God’s character and about his relationship with us. In the end, it’s also an encouraging and uplifting passage.
Chapter six starts off with the world deteriorating after the garden. This is after Cain and Able, after the family of Seth has gone through many generations – at least the ten or so listed there in chapter 5.
So we arrive at chapter 6, but before we get into Noah and the flood, we have a tricky hurdle to get over: the opening verses of this chapter with it’s strange references to:
2. The Sons of God, 120 Years, and the Nephilim
This is one of a handful of passages in the Bible that attract far more attention than they deserve. It does so because of some strange sounding ideas in it, but lets see if we can deal with it, and then put it to one side as we move on to the main section of the narrative.
The Sons of God and the Daughters of Men
It opens with the horror of the marriage between the ‘sons of God’ and ‘the daughters of men’, and the terrible judgement in v5 – which might well be the second most awful words in the whole Bible – where God sees “…how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.” (NIV) – which is a pretty negative judgement on the character of human beings, isn’t it?
But who are the sons of God and who are the Nephilim, and what is it all about?
It’s hard to be absolutely certain who the sons of God and daughters of men are. There are any number of theories. Some have said the sons are the ‘godly line’, that is, the descendents of Seth, marrying the ‘ungodly lin’e of the daughters of Cain.
But that doesn’t explain why God finds it so repulsive, because there are no instructions not to marry in such a way. And it doesn’t explain the hero’s and Nephilim.
Nephilim
With passages like this, one of the best ways of seeking to understand it, is to look for hints or connections to the subject elsewhere in the Bible.
In this case, it’s more likely that what we have here is some interaction between the spiritual world, in particular angels, and the humans world. This makes reasonable sense when we look at a few passages in the N.T., namely: 1 Peter 3:19, 2 Peter 2:4 & 6, Jude 6, and 1 Corinthians 11:10.
Four N.T. passages that speak of unusual relationships between rebellious angels and humans. The 1 Peter 3 passage speaks specifically of spiritual beings at the time of Noah, whom God condemned at that time. 1 Cor 11 is that very strange verse about women covering their heads because of the angels.
Now, these are far from conclusive, but there does seem to be some allusion to the idea in Genesis 6 of the spirit world interacting in sexual union with the human world, and producing the Nephilim. The word ‘Nephilim’ simply means ‘giant’. And so one understanding of this section might be that humans have sought to overcome the fall, by attempting to breed with those from the spirit world, and so produce a half spiritual being, and half man, who will rival God. That would explain why it would be so repulsive to God.
Whatever the specifics, God’s reaction is clear – he is repulsed by the clearly sinful actions described here, and he has set a limit in v3 of 120 years – probably meaning that he will allow this behaviour for a set time before taking action, before sending the flood to wipe out the offenders.
But let’s move on…
3. God Looks Down on the World (Gen 6:5-8 )
We can learn a couple of things about God here in v5-8 as he looks down on the world.
Jørn Utzon – the great architect of the Sydney Opera House, walked away from the construction of the great building before it was completed because he was frustrated at how things were going, how the government of the time thought they knew better than he did when it came to designing and building an opera house.
Imagine then, the frustration God must have felt when he saw the world he had created going off the rails.
In particular, because he is a moral God and not capricious like the Babylonian gods. The reason he sends the flood is not to have fun playing with humans as we bobbed about in the water drowning, it’s because he sees what humans have done. He sees how sin has spread and spread. He sees our sinful and rebellious and devious hearts and is grieved with what he sees. He is filled with pain at what we humans have done (v7). To summarise:
God saw… (6:5)
God looked down on the world and what he saw was a world tainted by sin.
Sin has not only spread it has become worse (as we saw in Genesis 4).
God was… (6:6 )
It is surprising to see how personally God takes this. God is not dispassionately watching the events on earth. When man’s heart turns away from God, God’s heart is filled with pain.
God said… (6:7)
The other big surprise is that God decides to wipe everything out. Four chapters ago God was justifiably proud of the world he made. Now he regrets making it. Sin is that serious, and God will not let it go unpunished.
But Noah… (6:8)
However… in all the doom and gloom of these opening verses is a spark of light. A glimmer of hope. Faint note of hope in an otherwise bleak situation. V8: “But Noah found favour in the eyes of the Lord.” (NIV) And so the whole Noah and flood narrative unfolds.
Now, my guess is that most of us haven’t read the story of the flood recently. Most of would tend to think that we know it from Kids Church or from Bible picture books that we might have read in the dim dark past. But it’s important to revisit these familiar stories every now and then and allow God to speak to us through them afresh.
4. The Flood
Note that Noah is a righteous man - he walks with God, that is, his faith in God is demonstrated by his actions. Apart from 6:9, we are reminded on this in the N.T., in Hebrews 11:7.
Notice also that we are given a reasonable amount of detail of the construction of the ark.
It was big. Nearly 140 metres long, nearly 23 metres wide, and a tall as a four story building (13.6 metres). There was nothing elegant about it. It would never have won the Americas Cup, and it really sounds like a big rectangular box – which is what the word ‘ark’ means – a box.
It doesn’t really resemble the image of the cute little boat you find in most children’s Bible story books!.
Back in the 1970’s the comedian Bill Cosby created a famous sketch about Noah, and the focus was about how Noah’s neighbours would have treated him. It was funny stuff, but the text doesn’t mention anything about it. All is says about the construction itself is in 6:22: “Noah did everything just as God commanded him.” And that is rightly the focus of the passage. Noah’s obedience to God in the face of the human race’s radical disobedience.
The other big word here is in 6:18: anyone see what it is?
‘Covenant’ – The first time in the Bible that this word is used. The word means ‘testament’, or contract, or promise. And it is the one word that can describe what the whole Bible is about. If you want to summarise all sixty-six books of the Bible in one word, this is it!
But here, it’s the glimmer of hope in the face of this awful destruction. And it is so hopeful because this is how God relates to us.
We are not like a bunch of Luke Skywalker’s. God is not ‘the force’, an energy that can or can’t be tapped into at will. God is a personal God, who makes contracts or promises or agreements with people. At this point in human history, God is making a simple deal with Noah. Everything and everyone will perish, but Noah will be kept safe. That’s God’s promise to him.
Now, covenants are always two way. And here God makes a deal: you trust in me Noah, you have faith in me, and I’ll look after you and your family.
And covenant is the basis of all of God’s dealings with us from this point on.
It’s a powerful reminder that faith in God isn’t a blind leap in the dark, it’s a covenant idea. Faith in God is taking Him at his word. And the reason why we can and should have faith in God is because he is faithful, he is worthy of having faith placed in him. He can be trusted.
It’s like a marriage. Marriage is a covenant promise. The two people makes promise to each other: I will love you for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, etc, etc, and then they live it out in faithfulness, with each person taking the other at their word, and fulfilling the word you have given to the other person. That’s why we talk about being a ‘faithful’ husband or a ‘faithful’ wife. Our relationship with God is similar.
This is the first reference to the idea of God relating to us by covenant, but the concept is central to all the rest of the Bible.
Jump over to chapter 7:6-24 which talks about the duration and extent of the flood.
At the start of the flood itself in v11 we have an extraordinary picture painted by the language: This is a reversal of Genesis 1. A devastating reversal: everything moving back into chaos, where the water is covering everything. A reversal of creation is what is taking place – instead of creation of life, there’s death, instead of order and purpose, there’s chaos.
If you remember the image of the tsunami in Asia from 18 months or so ago, or one of the terrible storms that regularly strike places like Bangladesh. Hundreds of thousands of people killed, and a powerful reminder of how the forces of nature are so terribly destructive when they are unleashed.
It’s a very sad and tragic picture here. And its clear that everything perished – absolutely everything within reach of the flood (v21-23).
Which brings to the question that is always posed about this passage: Did the flood really cover the whole earth, or was it just one bit? Fundamentalist Christians love to take the Bible literally, at it’s word, and so they will say that the whole earth was covered. But if we do take the Bible at it’s word, then that is not clear at all.
The language of v17-24 is such that the extent of the flood is not clear. What does ‘the earth’ mean in the mind of the writer? Did he mean to include Tasmania or the South Island of New Zealand? Of course the writer didn’t know they existed, so it’s most likely he is speaking about the known earth, the earth that he knows about – whatever that was!
It may have been the area around the two rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates, it may have been a big area beyond that. Whatever it was, the earth as the author knew it, was completely destroyed. Beyond that, we are just guessing.
You can’t help but think how sad it is that the world has degenerated that far compared to Genesis 1. Note that even some of the same phrases are used in her and in Genesis 1 (every living thing that moves on the earth, birds of the air, everything that has the breath of life, creatures that move along the ground). God’s work in creation has now been undone.
Chapter 8 deals with the receding of the waters, but the key word of the chapter is in 8:1 any ideas which one? [take answers]
‘Remember’ – It’s key because it’s a covenant word. If a covenant is a promise that you make, then a key part of that is remembering it, keeping it. And that’s what God does. He remembers his promise to Noah and sends a wind to push back the waters and dry the earth up. It took a while – ten months until the tops of mountains became visible, and other four months before they could finally exit the ark.
8:15-19 details the ‘new creation’, post flood, using language that is again very similar to Genesis 1 language.
5. A new beginning – a new covenant
And with the new creation, a new beginning, comes a new covenant, which really at the heart of this whole section: 8:20-9:17. Look at the parallels between what God said to Adam and Eve and what he says to Noah (Gen 9:1ff). Noah is like a ‘new Adam’, reversing the curse of the fall – now the land is not going to be cursed as it was previously, from this point on, the land will never again be destroyed as it has just has been destroyed! Now, seed time and harvest will be present again. We’re still outside the garden, just not as far outside as Adam or Cain were.
In many ways, God is starting again using the new Adam, Noah.
But… it’s not quite as rosy as that. 8:21: There has been a certain reversal of the curse on the land, certain victory has taken place, but still sin continues: “…every inclination of his (mans) heart is evil from childhood.” (NIV) And this spelled out even more clearly in the last section where we hear about Noah’s drunkenness, and his sons’ behaviour.
When all is said and done, Noah is as sinful as the rest of us.
Yes he was a powerful figure in God’s plan for the world, yes he was a new Adam, but he is not the ultimate answer – no human being can ever be.
It may be a new beginning with Noah – but it is a new beginning in a sinful world. The sin has not been flooded away.
6. Conclusion
So what are we to bring away from this narrative? A couple of things:
i) Everyone wants to ask: “Why doesn’t God do something about evil in the world?” And the answer is: He has. We see that in the story of Noah. He did not tolerate the wilful rebellion of humans. And don’t forget, when we ask that question: “Why doesn’t God do something about evil?”, we need to realise that we are part of that evil!
God has done something about evil, and He will again.
God has said that he will judge the world. Read Matthew 24:36-39 sometime. God will again judge the world and the only escape from the judgement is through the ultimate ‘new Adam’, his son Jesus.
ii)
God is trustworthy. If there is a powerfully good and encouraging thing to bring away from the story of Noah, it is that God is totally trustworthy. The powerful presentation of covenant as the means of us relating to God is just the start of a much more powerful and far reaching covenant – the New Covenant, or New Testament that has God’s own son, the ultimate new Adam at the centre.
We can and should trust God to bring his good and perfect will for this world, and us as his people, to it’s final conclusion, when all evil will be dealt with in Christ, and when all who are in Christ will know eternal life the way God planned it from the start.
