The Roots of the Kingdom: The Cleansing Water
The Public Health Department of the United States initiated a worldwide effort to eradicate Malaria in 1947. It provided $7 million to a 5 year campaign to eradicate malaria in the United States using indoor residual spraying of a chemical called DDT. Malaria had been a problem in North America from as early as historians could trace. A major epidemic swept the continent in the 18th century reaching as far north as Montreal. It was a major source of casualties in the American civil war. And until the 1930’s it was endemic in the southern states. But by 1952, the United States was malaria free and the program ended. Encouraged by the success of the eradication effort in the United States the World Health Organization began an 8 year effort in 1957 to eradicate malaria worldwide.
God in scripture is not content to live with the problem of human sin. It is a ‘pandemic’ that he does not ignore. As we have worked our way through these early chapters of Genesis we have been studying the source and spread of sin, the pathology of the disease of sin, the universal depravity of every human heart. And one of the things we have been noticing is that with every new stage in the early history of the race there is a fresh fall, to still greater depths of depravity and wickedness, followed by a fresh expulsion of God’s covenant people from the place God had given them.
That is, of course, the basic template set by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They fell into sin and were expelled from the Garden. Then Cain killed Abel and was expelled from the land, from the soil itself in chapter 4. And now in Genesis 6 we are confronted with a society obsessed with violence and the destruction of God’s pattern for marriage. Sin has reached new depths. And here too there will be an expulsion. Not this time from a garden, nor even from the land, but from the whole earth, coming in the form of the terrible climactic judgement of the flood.
Like the world health organisation that wants to eradicate disease in the world, the sovereign God of the covenant has a plan to destroy sin wherever it is found, to wipe it from the face of the earth. But his plan is far more radical and terrible than the benign ministrations of W.H.O. scientists and public health officials. The remedy of God for the disease of human sin is destruction, utter and complete eradication.
And so the very first thing to see in this story of the flood is right there on the surface, it is the most obvious message of the flood. The flood reminds us of the wrath of God. God hates sin. And since the sin we commit is the fruit of the sinners we are, destroying sin inevitably involves the destruction of sinners. And that, dear friends, remains the case as much today as it was in the days of Noah. The Bible teaches that another day of destruction is coming, a day of judgement on all people, in which it will not be the waters of a flood but the fires of hell that will execute God’s justice. 2 Peter 2:4-10 says this, “if God…did not spare the ancient world when he brought the flood on its ungodly people, but protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others….then the Lord knows how to rescue godly men from trials and to hold the unrighteous for the day of judgement while continuing their punishment.” The story of Noah illustrates Peter’s point. God destroys sinners and saves believers.
So this is first of all a story about the eradication of sin. It is a story about wrath.
And so the question it necessarily forces upon us all, therefore, is this: What about you? Will you face the coming deluge of God’s wrath or has Jesus Christ faced it for you already at the cross? That is a question only faith in Jesus Christ can answer.
But there are more positive lessons to be learned from the narrative of the flood, and today we are going to think about some of them, focused on the actions of God first of all, and then next week we will return to the flood story and look at the response of Noah.
So this evening we are looking at the actions of God here in sending this flood and we’re going to ask, ‘what is the significance of this story for the rest of the Bible’s message? What was God teaching and saying by doing this? What does the flood mean?’
And specifically I want us to think about two things that will help us fill out the answer.
I. The Flood and God’s Covenant
II. The Flood and God’s Plan
Firstly then, the Flood and God’s Covenant. Now notice that this whole narrative is very skillfully crafted. It is a wonderfully composed piece of literature and its structure is very revealing. In many ways we could spend several weeks just reviewing the intricate parallelism and repetitions, mirror effects and chiasms that are all over these opening sections of Genesis. But they are placed here remember, not simply to move us in wonder at the beauty of Holy Scripture, they are here to help communicate a point. And in Genesis 6:9-8:22 what we have is a passage that is designed to underscore God’s covenant love for Noah and his household.
Look with me for a moment at the structure of the passage. The whole flood narrative is composed in a series of ever decreasing concentric circles.
The outer circle begins with God’s plan to bring the flood and make a covenant with Noah in 6:9-22. And that is mirrored at the other end of the passage in chapter 8:20-9:17, where we read of the covenant God actually established with Noah and his family in fulfillment of that promise. Then the next concentric circle comes as we read of Noah entering the ark in 7:1-16, mirrored in 8:15-19 by Noah and his family coming down out of the ark. Then there is the narrative of the flood waters rising, in 7:17-24, which is mirrored in 8:2-14 by the narrative of the waters of the flood receding; the third concentric circle.
And, as though to make the pattern we are describing here clear, Moses records the numbers of days things took in way that underscores the deliberate parallelism of the passage. In 7:4 and 7:10 Noah and his family wait for ten days, and in chapter 8:10 and 8:12 there is another cycle of waiting ten days. In the first half of chapter 7 verse 17 we are told that the flood kept coming on the earth for 40 days. In 8:6 we read that 40 days was the length of time Noah waited before taking action to see if the waters had receded sufficiently.
And the central ring of these ever narrowing concentric circles is there in 7:24, which is paralleled by 8:3, both of which speak about 150 days of water on the earth.
And right in the heart of all these ever smaller concentric circles is the single crucial verse in 8:1, “But God remembered Noah”.
So when we study the structure of this section of Genesis what we can see is that the covenant surrounds the whole thing. Language about God establishing or ratifying his covenant grace with Noah and his family brackets everything that takes place in the story of the flood. The story of Noah entering the ark, the waters rising and then receding, and then Noah coming out of the ark, is entirely surrounded with God’s talk about his covenant love for Noah. Noah is rescued because of the covenant.
And right at the heart of this story is the heart of the covenant itself: God remembered sinners, in this case Noah.
In 6:18 the covenant is promised, and in 9:1-17 it is ratified, but in 8:1 it is acted upon by God himself. God remembered Noah.
Whatever else is happening in the story of the flood, this is a story about the covenant love of God for Noah. Just as much as this is a narrative record of the wrath of God on sin, it is also a wonderful record of the covenant grace of God to sinners.
And that is a vital message for us to grapple with. However total the condemnation our sin deserves, there is always grace available for sinners. Whatever befalls sinners exposed to the wrath of God, there remains refuge for sinners in the covenant of grace.
And we are told that the heart of the covenant, the central reality that the covenant relationship God establishes with us in his condescension and grace is, 8:1, that God remembers us.
Now that does not mean that God is a bit absent minded and somehow got so caught up in all the watery death he was dealing the world, that he overlooked poor Noah and his family as they were blown and tossed in the waves, only to suddenly recall, with a shock of embarrassment, that he had left them untended, like a pot boiling over on the stove, in a terrible predicament and needed his help.
That is not what ‘remember’ means here. God is not absent minded when it comes to covenant people. His ‘remembering’ here means that in all of this Noah never once slipped from God’s plan to be his God and to save him in his covenant love. We might paraphrase the verse as saying that Noah was constantly on God’s mind.
And it means even more than that. Brevard Childs puts it like this, “God’s remembering always implies his movement towards the object of his memory”. God’s remembering is an act of staying faithful to the covenant promises. So for example in Exodus 2:24 when Israel was enslaved in Egypt we read that God “heard their groaning and he remembered the covenant” and that remembrance was the seedbed out of which God raised up Moses and because of which the exodus was accomplished.
Now dear friends think of that. For those of us in covenant with Him through faith in His Son, even in his wrath God remembers mercy. He has you on his mind and in his heart; he does not forget you or loose sight of you. Even amidst the darkest moments of his divine displeasure, God never once looses sight of His plan to save us. And as he remembers his covenant with you he moving towards you, acting in faithfulness with his own covenant promises to save you, sanctify you, deliver you. It was because he remembered you and remembered the covenant he made, that he sent his Son to die for you.
At its simplest what this verse is teaching us is that if we are believers in Jesus Christ we can never be plucked from the hand of God. We are forever secure from the flood tide of God’s anger on our sin. He never forgets us, never let’s go of us, never overlooks us. His love is fixed fully and irrevocably on our salvation. He is always moving towards us, always acting for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose.
But Noah is not just an ordinary covenant member. He is not really like you and me. We will never fulfill the role Noah fulfilled in God’s plan. Noah was to be the re-builder of the race, a kind of ‘Adam-mark-2’ only now in a fallen world. In other words Noah was a type of the Second Adam to come who would give rise to a new humanity. Noah is a picture of Jesus Christ, and his passing through the waters of the flood-judgment and being remembered by God, points us to the Crucified Christ who passed through the wrath of God on your sin and mine when he died, condemned in our place. And amidst all the agony and suffering, amidst the sin bearing and judgment, God the Father remembered him, he did not desert his covenant son, he did not forget the Seed of the Woman, but brought back from the dead that great shepherd of the sheep our Lord Jesus Christ.
The flood is about the wrath of God, but it is even more about the grace of God for sinners in covenant with himself through faith in Christ Jesus, and still more it is about the gospel; Jesus Christ crucified and risen for us and for our salvation. To become like Noah, and escape the day of coming ultimate wrath, you must trust in the one to whom Noah points. You must trust in Jesus Christ crucified and risen.
So the flood speaks about the covenant love of God, about the gospel. God remembers sinners in covenant with himself through faith in his son.
But it is also about God’s future plan.
We’ve seen already that the flood itself points to the wrath of God on sin coming at the end of the age. But there are intimations in the story of a glorious future design of God for the world after his wrath has passed in the passage as well. Specifically, there are two pointers to the future destiny of the world here. The first is the construction of the ark itself.
When we look at the divine prescriptions for the building of the Ark in 6:15-16 we notice that they are very precise, and it is built with three decks. Now it has become a common place among commentators to see in these three decks a reference to the ancient beleif that the cosmos was constructed as a kind of triple decker universe. There was heaven on the top deck, and the earth on the middle deck, and then the shady world of the dead on the bottom deck.
Now whether that is intended or not here is hard to say, but what is clear is that the construction of the Ark is deliberate, in order to afford specific compartments for different classes of animals. And this is the second consideration that makes me conclude that the ark here speaks to us about God’s plans for the world’s destiny. There are three categories of animals listed in verse 20, birds, animals, and creatures which move along the ground. And these three categories of animals are further grouped into three in 7:2-3, where Noah is to take seven of every clean animal, but only two of every unclean animal, and seven of every bird.
There are three decks, and there are three types of creature; birds, animals and creatures moving along the ground. And there are three categories of creature; clean animals, unclean animals, and birds. Now it seems very likely that the three decks were designed to accommodate that threefold distinction and give to each creature its allotted space. And notice that Noah is there, plus seven others of his own kind as well; seven of every clean animal, but 8 human beings. Made in God’s image still, Noah and his family are given a unique place in the ark.
Now it is beginning to become clear that the ark is designed to picture the plan of God for the world. It’s full of connections; back to the history of Adam in Eden when the Lord brought all the animals before Adam (chapter 2:19); back to a time when the race lived in harmony with God’s creation and when we were given the role of tending and caring for it, to rule over the animals and exercise dominion (chapter 1:28). But that world was broken by Adam’s sin and disobedience. But now God is acting to wipe the slate clean, to begin again, staring with Noah. And the composition and inhabitants of the ark are a kind of microcosm, a world in miniature, depicting God’s plan for the world to come when the flood waters finally subside.
The ark is an image of God’s plan for creation, for a new heaven and a new earth, and that plan saw a temporary fulfilment in the wake of the flood. But that new beginning was only ever to be a symbolic one. The real thing had to wait for the appearance and return of the greater than Noah the Lord Jesus Christ. He will not only “comfort us, as did Noah, in the painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the LORD has cursed”, as old Lamech put it in chapter 6:29. Jesus will remove the curse completely. He will deliver us from sin and its effects in our world. The land will be healed and a new heaven and a new earth will finally appear.
What we see in the Ark and Flood story of Genesis 6:9-8:22 is a symbolic anticipation of what John saw with clarity in Revelation 21:1. “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea”. The flood and the ark speak to us about a time to come when, as John puts it in Rev. 22:3, ‘no longer will there be any curse’.
Until then “all creation groans as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for or adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved.” Romans 8:22-24
At one time Spain controlled both sides of the narrowest part of the Strait of Gibraltar. At that narrowing of the two land masses (Africa and Europe), there was a huge marker called the “Pillar of Hercules,” and prior to Columbus’ voyage in 1492, it carried the Latin motto of the Spanish nation chiselled into its stone: NE PLUS ULTRA, which, being interpreted means, “No More Beyond.”
In Valladolid, where Christopher Columbus died in 1506, stands a monument commemorating the great discoverer. On the memorial is a statue of a lion destroying one of the Latin words that had been part of Spain’s motto. Before Columbus made his voyages, the Spaniards thought their country marked the outer limits of the earth. Hence their motto; “Ne Plus Ultra,” “No More Beyond.” The word being torn away by the lion is “ne” or “no,” making it read “Plus Ultra.” Columbus had proven that there was indeed “more beyond.”
Written not on some moldering Spanish monument, but written by the Spirit in the pages of Holy Scripture, Noah’s memorial records a voyage of discovery far more astonishing and dramatic, than Columbus’ ever was. As he was saved through the waters of the flood, and placed in the ark which pictured the coming world of God and man, man and creation restored to fellowship and harmony, where there is no more curse and where the chaotic waters of the flood-judgment are silenced, where there will be no more sea, Noah’s monument nevertheless shares the same motto with Columbus... Plus Ultra…more beyond…heaven awaits…eternity is calling and soon coming….
Let the story of the flood lift the eyes of your faith once more heavenward with renewed expectation. One day soon shall come the time when your groaning shall cease, when the eager expectation of all God’s people will be satisfied and the redemption of our bodies complete. One day soon this world’s futility will be done away, and with a renewed creation we shall stand in awe around the throne of God and of the Lamb in the heavenly city, eating from the tree of life freely, and celebrating Christ’s victory.
That day is coming. God’s actions in saving Noah from the flood remind of us that. For sinners who reject Christ it is a day of destruction and condemnation. For those who like Noah, walk with God by faith in Jesus Christ, for God’s covenant people, it will be a day of consummation and joy beyond our present ability to conceive.
Do not let the pains and trials, the sorrows and sickness, the painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the Lord has cursed, do not let it stop you looking up and waiting for the Day of deliverance to come, and learn again to cry with John, “Even so come Lord Jesus”
Amen