Jeremy L. Berg

Here’s an excerpt from chapter 2 of my manuscript Spirit on the Water, this time focusing on the flood narrative and the theme of divine judgment.

Photo by Lucas Dial on Unsplash

Have you considered how strange it is how many soon-to-be parents decorate their nursery with wallpaper depicting sanitized scenes from a global catastrophe that claimed countless lives? We would hardly place our baby in a Hiroshima themed nursery surrounded by images of mushroom clouds in a crib staring up at a mobile of little gas masks going round and round to put junior to sleep. But there our baby sleeps peacefully surrounded on all sides by genocidal waters and an ark full of smiling(?) survivors and refugees.

Let’s be honest: the good-hearted Sunday school teacher is given an impossible task when faced the actual facts of this story and a room full of preschoolers! 

No wonder most walk away from this episode with a caricature of a cranky God and a floating zoo all tied up with a pretty rainbow at the end. A closer look at this story reveals some deeper truths we want to explore here. The Flood story reveals 1) God’s true heart, 2) God’s order and boundaries being ignored, and 3) God’s mercy from this point onward. 

God’s Grieving Heart

There are a number of other flood stories in the ancient world, with many common threads but also significant differences. In a Sumerian flood story, for example, the gods decide to wipe out the human race with a flood because they were making too much noise! It’s not hard to form a portrait of a cold and capricious angry god out of an account such as this. Contrary to the picture of an angry God sending the flood, the biblical text gives us a far different picture. God is portrayed as grieved and heartbroken. A look at a few translations of Genesis 6:6 reveals:

The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. (NIV)

…and it broke his heart. (NLT)

…and it grieved him to his heart. (ESV)

This is not the description of a thunderbolt throwing Zeus-like God fed up with human beings. This is the description of every human parent who has ever watched a child shipwreck their life on the rocks of self-destructive decisions. This sounds less like an angry and vindictive deity, and more like a doctor faced with the reality of a rapidly spreading cancer. What is left to do but take drastic measures to rid the world of this pervasive evil? If there is anger in the heart of God, it is anger toward the sin that has captivated the hearts of human beings and threatens to thwart God’s original purposes for His image bearers. There is still a great deal of truth in the worn out cliche: God “loves the sinner, but hates the sin.” 

God’s Order and Boundaries Ignored

As we have repeatedly emphasized, God is the God of creation and life and order. The flood story must be seen as an episode of anti-creation, the tragic reversal of Genesis 1. The waters that were separated to create inhabitable space for life to flourish, now come crashing back together as the water chaos returns. What has brought this judgment upon God’s good and ordered earth? 

We tend to see God, in this story and in general, acting unilaterally in the world and in human affairs. We seem to see God blessing a person here, and bringing judgment on a person there. God is working an isolated miracle here, and allowing evil to win the day there. We would be wise to ponder the fact that much of the suffering and wrath, judgment and evil, experienced in this life and on this earth is simply God allowing the natural consequences of actions to play out. Again, living in sync with God’s design and within Gods established boundaries is biblical wisdom, and naturally leads to personal and collective shalom.  Going against grain of God’s order and transgressing God’s designated boundaries is what the Bible calls folly, and leads to sin of various kinds. “And sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death”(James‬ ‭1:15‬).

We live in an age where we want to define our own moral boundaries, and many resist the notion of some higher power imposing some universal moral standard upon everyone. Sadly, we are also reaping the pain and dysfunction our morally confused age is sowing. Look, you can shake a defiant fist at the law of gravity as you step off the ledge of a tall building, but your defiance won’t prevent you from falling to your death. Likewise, many are ignoring God’s order and transgressing God’s boundaries, and experiencing the cause and effect punishment. We’re reaping what we have sown, and we should not blame God as we do so. 

The flood story should be viewed not merely as a unilateral act of divine judgment. The story of watery chaos returning follows on the heels of the creation story where God brought order out of the chaos. And this should lead us to see the cause of the flood, in large part, as human beings bringing punishment upon themselves for flirting with and courting Chaos for too long.

In the flood story, God is withdrawing his protective hand, allowing disorder to have its way. Anti-creation Chaos reverses the “good” order and boundaries established at creation. The flood narrative is far from a divine temper tantrum; it’s an ancient theology of sin and evil that  highlights how human and angelic sin leads toward “decreation” as the watery chaos returns, and the floodgates and waters above crash back upon the land God had once carved out for human habitation. 

We can blame God, or think this seems cruel; but we do the very same thing every single day in smaller ways, flouting God’s moral boundaries, bringing together things God has separated, pretending all these little transgressions won’t eventually have consequences. We throw the moral boomerang out with gusto, and act surprised when it returns to us. We over eat as if our cholesterol won’t be affected. We drive while intoxicated as if we won’t end up on the evening news. We smoke two packs a day as if our lungs are immune to the toxins. We harbor a grudge thinking we won’t grow bitter. We cheat to get ahead thinking we’ll never get caught. Eventually, the Chaos will come calling our name, and we’ll find ourselves deluged by the consequences of our decisions.

The freedom God gives to his image bearers comes with serious responsibilities. As every parent who has ever handed car keys to their 16-year old knows, real life is not a game and there are serious repercussions for mistakes on life’s highways. God’s global family of adolescents in Genesis 6 have gotten drunk on Sin and have totaled the cosmic car. Chaos has come calling their name, and the consequences for flouting God’s moral boundaries and order in this case are cataclysmic. But the story doesn’t end with gloom and doom, but with a ray, or rainbow, of hope….