Noah and the Covenant of Grace
The Third Sunday after Pentecost June 1, 2008
Text: Genesis 6-8
The Rev. Dr. Ross M. Wright
It is easy to dismiss the story of Noah and the flood as a nice children’s story. Toy arks and rainbows are standard equipment in most babies’ nurseries. Of all the stories from Genesis that we will consider this summer, this one is the most easily sentimentalized.
But the story of Noah addresses adult themes. It confronts us with the violence and corruption in God’s good creation. It reveals God’s grief over the way things have turned out with his project. Most importantly, it reveals a tension in God’s nature, in his very self – a tension between what we might call his “moral side” on the one hand and his lavish, generous grace to us on the other. Luther called it a split – a fundamental conflict in God’s very nature. It is a split between his anger and his love; between judgment and mercy.
Of these two sides of God, it is the former – his moral character – that is the hardest to understand and to accept. However, God is not morally neutral about suicide bombings or the VA Tech massacre or betrayal in marriage. If we are indignant about these things, is it possible that God feels less? Would you respect a god who never gets angry? Can you give your allegiance to a god who is morally neutral? God’s wrath is his implacable opposition to all that is evil, to all that violates his good creation. How does this side of God’s nature coexist with his lavish grace? This conflict in God’s nature is at the heart of our text this morning.
When the sixth chapter of Genesis opens, we are 10 generations from the creation of Adam and Eve – about 400 years later, as we count time, though the Bible is more interested in God’s time than in human time. As we view the scene before us, it is immediately clear that things are not going well. The meltdown which occurred in chapter three, when Adam and Eve rebelled against God, has affected all the subsequent generations. Evil has metastasized, and now God’s good creation is full of violence or “hamas,” a word that we are all familiar with because of the ruling Palestinian party, known for violent protest. There is sibling rivalry. Adam and Eve’s firstborn son, Cain, is so jealous of his brother Abel, that he ends up killing him. With the branching out of Adam and Eve’s line comes the development of distinct cultures – some are musicians; others are forgers of iron and copper; some live among herds; others in cities. And with these cultural differences comes hostility and war. It is as if the tensions between Cain and Abel are genetically encoded in all of their offspring.
The state of things is summed up in Genesis 6:5-6: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Notice how the adjectives which the writer uses convey the universality of the corruption: “every plan . . . nothing but evil, all the time.” The central word here is “corrupt.” Human corruption is both internal – our hearts are full of evil intentions – and external – these evil intentions spill out into corporate life – politics, economic policies, racial attitudes, and greed – what has been aptly called the “structures of evil.” Sin in the Bible is not limited to personal failings, like adultery, stealing, and gluttony. Sin includes these structures of evil that are as prevalent as the air we breathe.
Things in Noah’s generation are so bad that the Lord regrets ever creating the world: “And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.” Evil grieves the Lord. Although God is often depicted as passionless or unchangeable, this is not true of the God of Bible. No, the Lord is deeply affected by us and by all of his creation. His being and action are moved by our being and action. God’s actions are not determined by ours. But he freely allows himself to be moved by our action and to respond accordingly.
“The earth is now so filled with violence that God must employ a gigantic ablution to wash it free of its stain.”[1] It is beyond anything that we can do to control it. “No therapy goes deep enough.”[2] So, the Lord determines to “blot out” all human creatures and all that lives upon the earth. Do you see how this situation reveals God’s moral character, his wrath? But even here, where his wrath is most evident, there are hints of God’s other side, of his grace. The expression, “blot out,” used here to describe the destruction of creation, is the same phrase which is used throughout the Old Testament to describe the forgiveness of sins: the Lord promises to “blot out” all our transgressions. The violent act of cleansing in Genesis points to another violent act – the cleansing of our sins by the shedding of Christ’s blood – the flood which purges us and makes us new.
Here is the great paradox at the heart of our passage: at the very point that the Lord decides to destroy the earth, he establishes the covenant of grace with Noah – a new beginning for the human race and for all creation. The reign of divine grace is signaled in the text by one short sentence: “But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.” Here in the midst of the chaos is one man who follows the Lord’s way: “Noah walked with God.” He and his family are a kind of parallel race or new humanity existing alongside the old, corrupt descendants of Adam and Eve. And it is through Noah that God creates a new world. The ark, which is pregnant with life, gives birth to this new creation and pours forth creatures of every phylum and genus to populate the new earth.
The end of the story describes the covenant of grace which the Lord establishes with all creation. This is the point to which the narrative has been moving all along:
And God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “Look – I am establishing my covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living thing which is with you – with birds, with cattle and with every living thing upon the earth, with the wild beasts that are with you, with everything which goes forth from the ark, and with all the living things of the earth. And I will establish my covenant with you and all flesh will be spared from the waters of the flood, and flood will never again destroy the earth.” And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant which I am establishing between me and you and with every living thing which is with you from generation to generation. I have placed my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. And when I place a cloud upon the earth, the rainbow will be in the clouds, and I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living thing and with all flesh which us upon the earth.” And God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant between me and all flesh which is upon the earth” (Genesis 9:8-17).[3]
This is the first of a series of covenants which God makes throughout the Bible. Here, God pledges himself to the entire human race – not only to the Jews, or to believers, but to everyone and to everything. “He causes his sun to shine on the righteous as well as the unrighteous.” He pledges himself to us even in our rebellion against him, even though at times we resent him and hate him. Every sunrise and every returning spring we see concrete signs of this covenant of grace.
Ultimately, the story of Noah points beyond primal history to the future – to God’s eschatological future, God’s coming kingdom. One day, time as we know it will end, and Jesus Christ will return to create a new heaven and a new earth. We can hardly speak about this, because it is so far beyond us. We must rely on language of negation – the apophatic way: God’s coming Shalom is a world without violence, without ethnic cleansing, without death.
The story of Noah also points to God’s grace in our lives. The early church understood the story of the ark as a sign or prefiguring of baptism.
For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit, through whom also he went and preached to the spirits in prison who disobeyed long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water, and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you – not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a good conscience toward God
(1 Peter 3:18-21).
We are saved by the waters of baptism. Water, the very thing which destroyed the earth, has become the means of our rescue by God. The tide of judgment, which destroys in order to cleanse, has overwhelmed the son of man on the cross on Good Friday. It is in allowing ourselves to be judged and pronounced guilty, that we are saved. It is in our sin that we are mysteriously lifted through the mighty wrath of God and brought to safety – the dry land. Now, we have a place to stand.
This is how the split in God is overcome – through the cross, in his son, the one perfect sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction once offered for the sins of the whole world. It is to him that we come as we draw near to the Lord ’s Table this morning.
