The Good News of the Great Flood

My preaching professor in college once said that your job is to find the gospel in any passage you preach on. This week I preach on the flood and Noah and while you can see good news in Noah's salvation, most sermons seem to pass over the mass drowning of the rest of humanity. It can be difficult to see the good news in Noah.

I think we have to come at this story from an angle that we try to avoid. We like to think of ourselves as good people and God as an easy-going god. This story tells us “how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time” and God as having “regretted that He had made human beings.” I think we conjure up images of humanity before the flood as unruly kids throwing the ultimate keg party/orgy. We see it as rowdy and out of hand, not as deserving destruction.

But I what if we think about a world in which every human being is evil. Think of the things we would do to one another. Think about the things we do to each other today and then take the worst of it and make it a constant. Think about the murder and rape and abuse. Verse 11 of Genesis 6 describes the earth as “full of violence”. Think of a world with so much violence that there was no room for anything else. Ask yourself if God’s mercy could allow that to go on.

I wrestled with this story a lot this week. Because I kept seeing this as a story of God’s justice, and it seemed like a horrible justice. But I have come to see it as a story of God’s mercy, even if it is a severe mercy. A mercy that won’t allow human beings to continue to do such violence and evil to one another. A mercy that steps in and makes it stop.

But then the mercy of God goes a step further. God makes a way to carry on. When He could just end humanity as a failed experiment, He chooses Noah and his family and animals and an ark, and He keeps things going.

Sit with that for a second. God would not only have been justified in wiping them all out, He’d have been merciful in doing so. Instead, He refuses to give up on them at their worst. His mercy cannot allow human beings to continue along the path they are on, but it can allow them to continue along a different path.

So, what does this story tell us about God and His relationship to us?

First, it states that the violence we do to one another will not be allowed to go on indefinitely. And, I don’t know about you, but I see that as a good thing. I want war to end, even if it means that the parts of me that make war inevitable have to be destroyed. And God plans to do just that. He plans to destroy me.

Which leads us to the second part, how God provides a way out. And that is in the person of Jesus and the Way of Jesus. It is in the Kingdom coming and world made new. In Christ, there is a new creation.

In Jesus, God makes a way to carry on. He could have looked at those He had called as His people and simply given up on them. Instead, He makes a way where there seems to be no way. His mercy cannot allow them to continue along the way they are going, but it can allow them to continue along a different way. And Jesus is that way.

So, the cross isn’t about God’s demanding that we kill His Son so that His wrath can be satisfied, it is a story of God who would send His Son, knowing that we would kill him…because that’s the kind of people we are, full of evil and of violence. “But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

But even that is not the end, it’s the beginning. Christ’s resurrection means that we can be made new, our story can continue if we are willing to die, to have our old selves drowned in the water of baptism in order that we might be raised to new life in the way of Jesus. For our baptism is not just of water, but of the Spirit. We can carry on only if we will allow the Spirit’s fire to refine us, to make us into someone new. It will be a painful process. Sometimes it will be difficult to see God’s mercy in it. But it is His mercy that cannot allow us to be who we were and to behave as we did, It is His mercy that destroys our old selves and refines our new selves into the image of Jesus.

We use the language of death all the time in baptism, but how seriously do we mean it? Are we willing to die in order to be made new? Are we willing to see our old selves, our old desires, our old priorities, our old sickness and sin, our old ways put to death in order that we might have new life and walk in a new way? Would we rather be dead than live in a world that Jesus isn't Lord of?

That is what Christ demands, but it is a merciful demand. He seeks to destroy us so that he can start again, making us into the people that we were always meant to be.