A New Creation

Introduction

Imagine that you do not own a Bible. Imagine that the only way you ever learned anything about the Word of God was from public readings and being taught sections that your parents had memorized and passed on to you. How differently would you treat it? What effort would you put into memorizing it, and what parts do you think would be the easiest to remember when you had only heard the Word of God and never read it yourself? For the Israelites who lived in most of the Old Testament period, this was how one got to know the Scriptures. For the people first heard the book of Genesis read to them, the printing press would not exist for another 3000 years! This not only affected how things were written down, but also how languages themselves worked. When you don’t have the luxury to read something whenever you want, you have to rely on one of the most important gifts God has given each one of us: our memoury. There were all kinds of tricks to memourizing ancient texts, from turning it into a chant or song to using subtle but effecting linguistic devices to help the listener remember certain events. One of those devices is simple repetition. Not really in repeating the story, per se, but rather by telling the story using repetitious words or phrases so that the details wouldn’t be missed, and repetition on important themes. So when God decided to give his word to human beings, it was important to him that the message of his Word would be easy to memourize and that certain themes and events would stick in the mind of those who heard it. That way, as the themes develop throughout Scripture the listeners who had hopefully committed much to memoury would be excited as all the pieces of the puzzle started falling into place. What may seem dull or boring to us in Scripture is often actually what helped the first listeners understand it.

But the fact of the matter is we read the Bible in an entirely different way today than people have for many years before us. Some of us are stuck in the habit of opening to seemingly random parts of God’s word, or just our favourite NT passages, and not experiencing the scope and dynamic storytelling that is going on as the revelation of God’s plan of redemption progresses from page to page. But when you follow the emphasis placed on certain people and themes in the light of a bigger story, repetition shows you what God thinks is important in these stories and what you should put your focus on as you read them. Now, the story of Noah and the flood is perhaps one of the most well-known stories from the Old Testament in existence, but the purpose of this story is almost never mentioned. Why God sent the flood seems obvious to us at this point: people were wicked, there was only one righteous person left, and God wanted to rid the world of this wickedness and did so by sending a flood. However, the second important question for us to answer is, “why did God tell us this story?” This is a bit harder to answer for a lot of people for one reason: they don’t know why God is telling us anything. For many who read the Bible, an underlying story and theme is never acknowledged. They see the Bible as a collection of stories that tell us lessons or give us warnings, much like the legends and fables of the other nations in the ANE. But the Bible is not like this. Through many stories, God is patching together one major story and each small story adds to the metanarrative, the big story that is being told.

So what is it about the story of Noah that adds to this big story? As we explore it in detail and with care, we begin to see themes and patterns emerge that point us to other parts of Scripture, even parts that we have already looked at in the book of Genesis. These are themes that we can trace throughout Scripture and, not surprisingly, see elaborated on and fulfilled in the New Testament in the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. So let us dive into the story of the flood through chapter 7, 8, and the beginning of chapter 9. WE can divide this narrative into three parts. The flood, the recession of the waters, and the promise in the covenant given at the beginning of chapter 9.

The Flood

The Covenant

Now it is really difficult to go over this very long stretch of text and stay in our time limit, so I will assume that most of you are rather familiar with the story. Noah, who was commanded to build an ark, or giant box, has finished his construction project and is told only a week before the waters of the flood hit the earth to get everything and everyone in this massive vessel which took years to build. In this ark God seeks to preserve the one righteous family left on he earth along with all of the created world which could not survive the flood and thus shows himself faithful to his creation and to those who call upon his name.

The Line of Cain Endured

The Recession

The Promise

Conclusion