Before you read this post, I encourge you to read Genesis 9.
This is the third installment to our Old Testament Story series. You can read the other installments here.
A lot of time has elapsed since Genesis 3. If you work through the genealogy in Genesis 5, you’ll see that more than 1000 years have passed by the time we get to Noah. Humanity graduated from eating forbidden fruit (Gen 3:6) to murder (Gen 4:8) in the span of just 25 verses. Often we look at Genesis 5 and wonder about the long lifespans, but the real message of that genealogy is the reign of death.
By the time we get to Noah, we see a terrible indictment of our race: “The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.” (Gen 6:5-6) This is as dreadful an assessment as you will find anywhere in the scriptures. What would God do about it?
Uncreation and New Creation
God sentences the world to uncreation, but not utter uncreation. He chooses Noah and his family and a sampling of the animals to preserve. This tiny remnant goes onto a boat and the flood came. We hear that the whole world is covered by the flood and “the ark floated on the face of the waters.” (Gen 7:18) This takes us back to the very beginning where “the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” (Gen 1:2). It’s as if the creation story of Gen 1 has been erased.
When Noah and the animals come out of the ark (Gen 8:18-19), Noah’s first act is to build an altar and sacrifice to the Lord. God says there will never be another flood like this one (Gen 8:21-22). In a very real sense, the world has been remade. Children’s Bibles are full of beautiful pictures of the ark, but generally don’t include all of the distended corpses of the wicked floating on the water. What was the point of all this?
It’s not unusual for God’s people in our weaker moments to think something like “I wish God would just judge the wicked and rid the world of them.” The flood is a picture of this. God actually has judged all the wicked of the world and left behind only his people, one the Bible calls “righteous” (Gen 6:9). He started over from here, but what happened next? Well, now we are ready for Genesis 9.
Covenant
God gives Noah essentially the same instructions he gave Adam (Gen 1:28):
And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. (Gen 9:1-3)
But he does something very special with Noah. He makes a covenant. (Gen 9:9) A covenant is a kind of commitment for which that we don’t really have a good analogy. We have contracts, but contracts can be broken. The closest we have is marriage, but with no-fault divorce that’s not even a good comparison anymore.
God promises Noah and all creation with him that he will not destroy the world again with a flood. This promise flows from Noah’s sacrifice in Gen 8:20-21. The God who accepts sacrifices from his people will continue to show them grace, and that grace spills over into grace for all creation. (This will be important in our next devotion!) Most covenants have a sign, and the sign of this covenant is the rainbow (which has the same shape as the weapon called a bow.) God gives the gift of time to His people – time that allows us to serve His kingdom.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
The ending of Genesis 9 is a strange incident. We might wonder now that the wicked have been washed away, is the world reset back to Eden? Sadly, no. No sooner has the family left the ark than Noah plants a vineyard and gets so drunk that he lies naked in his tent. His son Ham “saw his nakedness” (Gen 9:22) – a term that is open a wide range of interpretations. Did he simply mock and disrespect his dad? Did he sexually assault him? It’s hard to tell.
When Noah learns what has happened he curses Ham’s family tree. Notice the curse in Gen 9:25 is against Ham’s son Canaan, not against Ham himself. Just as Ham brought shame to his father, his descendants will bring shame to Ham.
Why is this episode here? We see that despite the flood, sin is still alive and well in the world. God washed away the wicked from the world, but there is still wickedness because sin is a disease that has affected even the righteous. We see no legacy of godly lives from the family of Noah. The story returns to genealogies and death still reigns undefeated.
The question hangs in the air then: what can ever be done? Can God’s people ever be good again? We see God’s grace flow into the world because of sacrifice. Will there ever be a sacrifice good enough to cover all of the sin? Will there ever be a future where death does not reign? Genesis 9 answers none of this, but it introduces the idea of covenant, and covenant will fill the pages of scripture – particularly one who will talk about “the new covenant in my blood.”
But we get ahead of ourselves.
