The story of Noah and the Flood isn’t an easy one for us. How could it be, when its starting point is the sinfulness of the world? That’s where the story begins: God’s Creation has gone wrong.
Maybe the first lesson of the story is just to remind us of the seriousness of sin. You and I are used to the world having sin and disorder in it. But in the Biblical perspective, it’s tremendous and shattering beyond description. We think of big sins and little sins, and we tend to think of little sins as being no big deal really. That’s totally unbiblical. If only one venial sin had occurred in the history of mankind, that would be a monstrous, shattering thing. Because it means that God’s Creation is disordered, imperfect, and fallen. When I’ve recorded piano pieces, the moment I hit a wrong note I stop and begin again. There’s no way I’d want a recording to exist where I’m playing a wrong note. Why should we expect God to have lower standards for His Creation? There’s no comparison: I know that my performance is far from perfection no matter what I do, but a glaring mistake I still won’t allow to proceed. I’ll wipe the slate clean and start over. But God is perfect, infinite goodness and beauty and perfection itself. How do you think a wrong note looks to Him? How about slavery, murder, deceit, envy, greed?
That’s one of the first lessons of the story of Noah and the Flood: it forces us to face the seriousness of sin. It is a big deal. Because of sin, God’s Creation has evil in it. Many atheists give this as a reason they can’t believe in God… “if God is all-good and all-powerful, why is there evil?” We have an answer to that, but in some ways those atheists are closer to the truth than a believer who thinks sin is no big deal. They see the cosmic contradiction of this situation; an All-Good, All-Powerful God with a Creation that has evil in it. Sin, any sin, the fact of sin at all, is an affront that can’t be overstated.
So what is God going to do about it?
Well, one solution is the same one I use when a recording goes wrong. Stop. Delete. Rewind. Wipe the slate clean and start over. Isn’t this what we’re seeing in the great Flood? And remembering that all of creation is God’s free gift, we have to admit it isn’t anything we can complain about. In fact, you might assume this restart would be the inevitable response of a Creator God. God chose to create creatures with free will; these creatures brought a shattering streak of evil into His creation, and… what? Is He just supposed to accept that? Of course not. Stop. Delete. Rewind.
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To just accept sin, to shrug it off, is unjust and unloving. It isn’t even merciful, to let sin continue to make victims of the innocent, and to leave the guilty mired in their guilt. The aggrieved atheists are right about this much: the existence of evil in the creation of an all-good, all-powerful God is not a tenable situation.
So the Floods come, and the Earth starts fresh. Sin has been dealt with. Order is restored. So the lesson of this story is “don’t sin or God will kill you.” Except it isn’t. The lesson given at the end of this story, the lesson we just heard, is exactly the opposite of that: God forever rejects this as a solution to the problem of sin. It is, we must admit, the most obvious solution - but God renounces it forever. The amazing thing about this story is not that it begins with God doing what any artist would do when his work went wrong, but that it concludes with God’s rejecting this path for all time.
But, then, what is God going to do? Leaving sin in the world without answer is unthinkable. Undoing sin by annihilating it is renounced. What then?
I heard once about a musician, the leader of a jazz ensemble… I forget who… but when he was rehearsing his band he’d get them going in a good groove in whatever key, and then he’d play a bad note. A real ringer, something that stuck out and just sounded ugly. He’d do it on purpose, and his bandmates would have to instantly adjust, playing around that note in such a way that it worked into the whole, taking things in a new direction, so that what started as a wrong note ended up making sense from the perspective of the whole.
If a good jazz player can do that, what do you think God can do?
God brings good from evil. We see it throughout the Biblical story, and we see it in our own lives. This comes up sometimes in confession. “Father, I know that was a sin and I'm sorry for that, but when I think of what came out of it I just can’t regret it.” That’s God playing around our bad notes, bringing good even from evil. Sometimes it happens quickly and easily, sometimes we can’t see it even from the perspective of years, but it’s what God does. It’s why at Easter we pray ‘O felix culpa,’ ‘O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam that gained for us so great a redeemer.’ We’re testifying that in some incredible way, a world redeemed by Christ is better than a world that never fell.
I’ve been asked why, if God is so great and all-knowing, then why did He create a world He knew would fall? That’s the answer. Of course God could have created a perfect world. But I wouldn’t be in it, and neither would you. Never forget that: God could have had a perfect world, but He’d rather have you.
And that’s what redemption is. It’s the opposite of destruction. Here in the earliest chapters of Genesis, what was ancient history to Abraham and prehistory to Moses, God promises that sin will not last forever, but that we who bring it will not be destroyed. What could that mean?
The world waited for an answer to that question, until one day a carpenter from Nazareth announced that the Kingdom of God is at hand. He taught a new way of life, a way of sacrificial love, which He Himself lived out and modeled even unto death. And He claimed that of this Kingdom of God, He was the King, that He was God’s begotten Son, through whom the world was first made! And when He fell victim to the worst of our sinfulness and ugliness and cruelty, and when He suffered the whole hopeless ending of the grave, what happened then made the word ‘hopeless’ obsolete.
In the time of Noah God promised that the Flood would not return, that death was not His answer to sin. In Jesus that unresolvable tension came to a head when - so set were we on the way of death, and looking straight into the face of God - we finally said “either it’s you or it’s us.” And Jesus said, “then it’s me.” And over the next three days, the world saw what Love really is.
"Christ suffered for sins once,
the righteous for the sake of the unrighteous,
that he might lead you to God.
Put to death in the flesh,
he was brought to life in the Spirit.
In it he also went to preach to the spirits in prison,
who had once been disobedient
while God patiently waited in the days of Noah
during the building of the ark,
in which a few persons, eight in all,
were saved through water.
This prefigured baptism, which saves you now.
It is not a removal of dirt from the body
but an appeal to God for a clear conscience,
through the resurrection of Jesus Christ,
who has gone into heaven
and is at the right hand of God." (1 Peter 3:18-22)
And that is God's answer to sin in His creation.
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