Genesis 6 begins with a mystery. It tells of how the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful and took them to be their wives. But who are the sons of God? Angels? Fallen angels? Sons of Seth? Kings? And who are the daughters of men? Mortal women? Daughters of Cain? There are countless theories but nobody knows for sure, and at this remove it's unlikely we'll find out. Maybe we should just enjoy speculating.
This chapter also contains references to giants and "heroes of old, men of renown". Maybe this means there is some truth in the myths and legends of ancient and classical civilisations. Maybe there really were monsters and warriors once upon a time. How exciting!
Genesis 6 then moves on to tell of how the world had become corrupt and the people wicked. God saw this and "His heart was filled with pain". Another translation says "It broke His heart". It's sometimes easy to forget that God has feelings too, but He does. We were created in His image, and so we only have feelings because He had them first. Maybe if we stop seeing him as a detached emotionless being and start trying to understand his character, we can start to have more meaningful relationship with Him. And maybe if we think about how our actions pain him, we might behave a little better.
Having seen how wicked His creations have become, God begins to regret having made them. Being God, He can do something about that, so He decides to destroy all of humanity and the birds and beasts alongside them. I'm not sure what the animals had done, but the author of Genesis is at great pains to point out that "every inclination of the thoughts of [man's] heart was only evil all the time" and that "all the people on earth had corrupted their ways", with the exception of the righteous Noah who was spared. God didn't wipe out humanity for the sake of a few bad eggs, and He didn't kill the innocent - He destroyed only those who had sinned. For the wages of sin are death, right? God is just, and sometimes that may seem harsh, but it is not cruel or arbitrary.
So, God decides to destroy the earth with a flood, presumably because the earth was covered in water before the creation, and so a flood would symbolise a rebirth or a fresh start. He tells Noah and His family to build an ark big enough to hold his family and one pair (or seven pairs - I'll come to that later) of each living thing, so that they can repopulate the earth afterwards. God gives Noah some pretty detailed instructions as to how to build this boat - type of wood, dimensions, number of floors etc. According to those who know more about shipbuilding than I, an ark built to those instructions would be seaworthy, and modern ship are still built to similar ratios. God doesn't tell us to do something and then just leave us to muddle through on our own. He gives us guidance and support, and it's worth listening because His ideas really work.
I said I'd come back to the one pair/seven pairs thing. God tells Noah to take one pair of every clean animal, and seven (presumably seven pairs) of every clean animal. This struck me as odd because the laws about cleanliness aren't found until a fair bit later on in the Bible. So is the instruction about clean animals an anachronism, proof that the story was written centuries after it was supposed to have happened? Is it a later addition to the text, inserted to give a sense of continuity to Jewish history? Does it matter if it is inaccurate, or is the message more important than the facts? Or does this mean that the laws were actually set up much much earlier than we think, but just not recorded until Moses' time? So many questions.
Anyway, Noah builds the ark as per instruction, and gathers his family and the appropriate animals onto it just in time for the rising of the flood. It's a good job he was so obedient, or none of us would be here. Just one man changing the entire course of human history. It's a powerful idea, isn't it?
Noah and co were on the ark for nearly a year. That must have tested his endurance and his patience somewhat. There must have been times when he wondered if God had forgotten about him and was going to leave him floating there forever. But I guess there wasn't much he could do about it, so he just kept floating. Maybe there's a lesson in there. When things get tough, just keep floating.
When the flood waters do eventually recede and Noah finally stands on dry land again, the first thing he does is build an altar and make a sacrifice. His first action, his immediate response, is to thank God. That's why God saved him. Because his heart was in the right place and he had his priorities sorted. So many times something good happens and it's six hours or two days or a week before I remember to thank God for it, but I want to be more like Noah. I want gratitude and praise to be a reflex.
So Noah thanks God, and God responds with a promise. "Never again will I curse the ground because of man even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood" (chapter 8, verse 21). God knows that man hasn't changed. He knows we'll screw up again and again and again, yet He still makes that promise. He knows that we'll break His heart and He'll have the power to exact the perfect revenge, but He chooses not to use that power. God is not good simply because that's who He is - He's God, He can do anything and be anything He likes - He's good because He chooses to be. And the only thing that can explain it is that He loves us. That much. It's just mindblowing.
And that promise is the beginning of a covenant between man and God. Because the covenant is an agreement, not a rulebook. It's easy to focus on the law and see the covenant as nothing more than an oppressive list of dos and don'ts, but God promises far more than He asks, and His promises come first. We need to celebrate those promises and hold onto them as our asurance. The covenant isn't mean to be a burden, it should be a joy.
So if God's side of the agreement begins with a promise not to destroy the earth, what about man's? Well, God gives two commandments - don't eat meat with blood in it, and all blood must be accounted for. (He also says go forth and multiply, but that one's just common sense really.) I'm not entirely sure why eating bloody meat was so bad. Maybe it was to separate us from the animals, or maybe it's just because blood is so precious to God. It's clearly important because it is by the blood of Christ that we are saved. The second command, about accounting for blood, basically means that if you kill you will be killed. I think this was maybe more about preventing murder than avenging it. God had promised not to destroy life, so it's only fair that He should expect us to do the same.
Chapter 9 ends with Noah getting drunk and then cursing one of his sons for mocking him. Which just goes to show the Bible has its fair share of random.
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