The Divine's in the Details

In Genesis last Sunday, we found Noah standing in the eye of a storm, a swirling dance of righteousness and grace. But before we take one more step, we'd better rewind a moment and deal with Noah's doppelgängers.  For, as we mentioned earlier, Genesis isn't the only place in the ancient world you could turn if you wanted to hear a story of the flood. Archaeologists have actually dug up other culture's stories, written before the days of Moses in languages like Sumerian and Akkadian (which is what people spoke in Assyria and Babylon). And where Genesis really gets interesting is if you know the other ways people tried to tell the story.

Now, the trouble with pagans is, they usually believed the world was being run by many gods. Those gods can be unpleasant, unwise, bullies, and disagreeable even with each other. And so it was here. In many pagan tales of the flood, it wasn't that humans were evil or sinful, like in Genesis; it was just that we were loud, we were bad downstairs neighbors, and we got on the nerves of the god Enlil, who liked to call the shots. “Enlil heard their clamor; he said to the great gods: 'The clamor of humankind has become burdensome to me, I am losing sleep to their uproar.'”¹ In his irritation, he pressured the other gods to evict humanity from the world of the living: “An evil act Enlil will do to the people; in the assembly, they decided about the flood: 'By the day of the new moon, we shall do the task!'”² Meeting invisibly in assembly, Enlil put all the other gods under an “oath of silence” not to betray the 'secret of the gods,' their plan for a flood, to any humans, lest we escape and survive.³

Now, how were we to get out of that? Well, all the gods took the oath, but not all were on board. In the pagan stories, there was a god of wisdom – Sumerians called him Enki, Assyrians and Babylonians called him Ea – and, as the original creator of humans, he thought the other gods were making a bad call. But they'd made extra sure to bind Ea by that oath not to tell humans what the gods were up to.⁴ So what the clever wisdom-god did was, he went to the house of the man he'd chosen, Atra-hasis, and gave a message to the man's house itself, to the reed fence and brick wall.⁵ Like wind whistling through the reeds, the house relayed the vital words; and as the world's cleverest man, Atra-hasis understood, all while Ea technically abided by his oath.⁶

The Bible, obviously, has a different premise than the pagan stories. There is no Enlil, and there is no Ea. Only one God runs the world. And since he has no oath to get around, he doesn't have to play games to get his word where he wants it. The Bible doesn't tell us how God speaks to Noah, but there's no subterfuge, no secrecy as God “takes Noah into his confidence.”⁷ What does God say? “The earth is filled with violence through them,” the humans and other creatures who've been swept up in human evil, and so “the end of all flesh has come before me,” the reason for judgment was ripe, and “behold, I will destroy them with the earth,” in as total a judgment as you can get (Genesis 6:13). This God sovereignly judges not high volume but low morals; but it's also the very same God, not another, who plans grace for a remnant. And that's why he has a job for Noah.

Now, the pagan stories agree on that last point. They imagine Ea giving Atra-hasis a job, too: “Depart from your house, build a boat!”⁸ And then Ea gives Atra-hasis instructions on how to build that enormous vessel, just as God actually gives to Noah. In Genesis, God starts out by listing for Noah the construction materials, and he lists three Noah will need (Genesis 6:14). First is a wood called gopher, and nobody's really sure what it means. Some guess a resinous wood like cypress,⁹ but it also sounds a lot like an Akkadian word for a sacred hut,¹⁰ since in some of the other stories, Ea tells Atra-hasis to tear down his reed hut for resources.¹¹ The second material, as we recently deciphered, is reeds; your Bible might say Noah should build rooms, because for thousands of years this Hebrew word was misread as 'nests,' but it's reeds.¹² Reeds were used in all the other stories too. And while the other stories add materials like palm-fiber rope and lard, the Bible lists only one more, also found in the other stories. “Let the bitumen be tough, thus strengthen the boat.”¹³ Bitumen was a thick, sticky material, produced by underground pressure on ancient algae; it was plentiful in ancient Iraq, and when you pour it hot, it hardens into something firm and waterproof.¹⁴ The asphalt concrete we drive on today is about 5% bitumen. The word for it in Genesis is actually a borrowed word from Akkadian.¹⁵ Slathered all over and soaking into the reed caulking, it'd make “a very durable surface..., an integral part of the structure.”¹⁶

After the materials (and, unlike the other stories, God doesn't give Noah any quantities to work from), God tells Noah the shape and size of the ark: an oblong structure, where “three hundred cubits shall be the length of the ark, fifty cubits the breadth, and thirty cubits the height” (Genesis 6:15). We tend not to measure stuff in cubits now, but it was usually a foot and a half, so that's 450 feet by 75 feet by 45 feet.¹⁷ That makes it oblong, not like the other flood stories. In some of them, the boat is actually round, built on “a circular plan: her length and breadth should be equal,” a circle 120 cubits across.¹⁸ This type of round floating vessel, a coracle, also used to be popular on Iraq's rivers.¹⁹ This boat would be a giant rope basket with walls 12 cubits high.²⁰ And in a later story, the boat has 120 cubits for all its dimensions,²¹ “an unstable 180-foot cube,”²² which some scholars think isn't a cube at all, but a replica of a holy tower from Babylon which was shaped like a stepped pyramid.²³

Finally, God tells Noah some features he wants in the ark, “how carefully he considers and assigns all parts of the building.”²⁴ “Make a roof [or: window?] for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above” (Genesis 6:16) – no one quite knows what that's supposed to look like – and “set the door of the ark in its side; make it with lower, second, and third decks” (Genesis 6:16), unlike the two decks with cabins on each in the round boat,²⁵ or the six roofs making seven levels with nine cabins each in the cube or pyramid boat.²⁶ The pagan stories have different details, but they'd understand the Genesis logic: the ark must be “ordered exactly as God wants it to be.”²⁷

After that, God explains why this ark is so important: “I, behold, will bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to ruin all flesh in which is the breath of life under heaven: Everything that is on the earth shall die” (Genesis 6:17). The same thing happens in the pagan stories: in light of the coming flood, the point of the boat is to “save life.”²⁸ In fact, in one version, the boat actually gets a proper name: 'The Lifesaver!'²⁹ Now, our Bibles call it an 'ark,' which is a Latin word for box, based on a translation of the Hebrew filtered through Greek mythology.³⁰ Actually, the Hebrew word – maybe coming from a Babylonian kind of boat³¹ – is used for only one other object in the whole Bible. When Moses was three months old, his mom “took a basket of bulrushes, and she daubed it with bitumen and pitch; she put the child in it, and she placed it among the reeds by the river bank” (Exodus 2:3). That 'basket' is the same word as for Noah's ark: both were containers to save life.³²

But instead of just big enough for one baby, this basket is family size: “You shall come onto the ark,” God tells Noah, “you and your sons and your wife and your sons' wives with you” (Genesis 6:18). The first contents of the ark are people, human lives. The pagan stories agree, but describe a bigger family plus a crew: “your wife, your kith, your kin, and the workmen.”³³ 

After that, in Genesis, come the animals: “Of every living thing of all flesh, two of each you shall bring into the ark to keep you alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind, two of each shall come in to you to keep them alive” (Genesis 6:19-20). Caring for the world's creatures was part of the job Adam and Eve were made for, and now Noah has to step up and do it in a bigger way than anybody this side of Eden, setting us a good example of conservation.³⁴ 

Of course, the pagan stories also put animals on the boat: “I will send to you... all whose pasture is grass, and they will wait at your door;”³⁵ “two by two... enter into the boat;”³⁶“Into the boat which you will make, bring herds of the steppe, wild creatures of the steppe, birds of the heavens!”;³⁷ “Bring on board all the seed of life.”³⁸ This covered all the basic categories of animals, the several hundred kinds that people then knew about.³⁹ Neither Atra-hasis nor Noah could pick and choose; every kind was needed, and the representatives sent to him were the ones to be brought on board.⁴⁰

Finally, God tells Noah to “take for yourself of all food that is eaten, and you shall gather it to yourself; and it shall be, for you and for them, food” (Genesis 6:21). It makes good sense: however long humans and animals are on board, there's no point in staying dry and starving. The pagan versions agree with that, too, with Atra-hasis told to “gather and stock food, and heap them up.”⁴¹ He's told to “send into her your barley,”⁴² and some versions measure out specific amounts of various plants, animal fodder, even beer!⁴³ You won't find that in Genesis! Neither will you find the other cargo in some of the pagan versions, where Atra-hasis says, “I brought everything I had on board: I brought on board all the silver I had, I brought on board all the gold I had.”⁴⁴ Unlike Atra-hasis, Noah yields no precious room in the life-saving ark for mammon and the world's goods. He already knows: “Any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:33).

Unlike the talkative pagan characters, Noah is silent in his total obedience: “Thus did Noah. According to all that God commanded him, so he did” (Genesis 6:22). “By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household” (Hebrews 11:7).

In the Old Testament, the ark Noah constructs is one of “two divinely blueprinted pieces of architecture,” and the other one is the tabernacle in the desert.⁴⁵ God tells Moses he wants Israel to “make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst; exactly as I show you concerning the pattern of the tabernacle, and of all its furniture, so shall you make it” (Exodus 25:8-9), “a copy and shadow of the heavenly things” (Hebrews 8:5). God describes all this in seven speeches just like God uses the word 'ark' seven times in talking to Noah.⁴⁶ The tabernacle “was not to be similar only in part, but was to be according to every likeness” of what Moses heard and saw.⁴⁷ Both ark and tabernacle are “God-designed” but “human-made”;⁴⁸ yet neither can fulfill its function unless built “obedient to the details given by God.”⁴⁹ And then “according to all that the LORD had commanded Moses, so the people of Israel had done all the work” (Exodus 39:42), just like “according to all that God commanded him, so [Noah] did” (Genesis 6:22). Both tabernacle and ark are holy objects, sacred space.⁵⁰

The tabernacle was just thirty cubits long, nine or ten cubits wide, and ten cubits tall (Exodus 26:15-25), so it was eventually replaced by Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. Although the Book of Kings doesn't tell us where Solomon got his specifications, the Book of Chronicles adds that David left him instructions “in writing from the hand of the LORD, all the work to be done according to the plan” (1 Chronicles 28:19). The temple itself doubled the tabernacle's length and width and tripled its height (1 Kings 6:2), not counting the porch or the thick walls and side chambers (1 Kings 6:3-6). Just like on the ark, those had three stories (1 Kings 6:8).⁵¹ With all this, it might've taken up a hundred cubits by fifty cubits, making it an exact third of Noah's ark.⁵² The ark is essentially a “floating temple,”⁵³ a model of creation and a shelter against the storms of chaos in the world.⁵⁴

Early Christians, though, were convinced that the ratios of the ark – ten times as long as high, six times as long as wide – matched “in its construction the figure of the human body.”⁵⁵ And from there, “through spiritual understanding, this same text is shown to be full of more sacred mysteries.”⁵⁶ Because if the ark brings together tabernacle and temple and human body, we remember that Jesus himself said “the temple... prefigured... his very flesh [John 2:19-21],” the flesh in which the Word “tabernacled” among us (John 1:14), and so the ark that foreshadowed both “in the shape of a human body” reveals the Body of Christ, the Church.⁵⁷

This symbolic link between the Ark and the Church was figured out as far back in Christian history as you care to go.⁵⁸ They said the Church as constructed by Christ “corresponds figuratively to that famed ark of ancient times,”⁵⁹ “representing the Church.”⁶⁰ It makes sense, since the Apostle Paul tells us that the Church was part of “the plan of the mystery hidden for ages by God” (Ephesians 3:9), and now we see that the plan was hidden in the Old Testament as it “signified the mystery of Christ,”⁶¹ where “the Ark signifies the Church, and Noah signifies the Lord who builds the Church in his saints.”⁶² That means that these verses matter the world to us!

First of all, it means that the Church matters to us, matters in the same way that the Ark should've mattered to Noah's wife and kids and all them critters. For “he who was not in the ark of Noah could not be saved” during the flood, could he?⁶³ Nobody was going to doggy-paddle his way to his own rescue outside the ark. God, through Noah, “saved only those who were within the ark, whereas all without were perishing.”⁶⁴ Well, if the Church is “the ark in which [Christ] frees the human race from destruction”⁶⁵ – the “ark of wood” foreshadows “the wood that saves”⁶⁶ – then, early Christians reasoned, “if there was any escape for one who was outside the ark of Noah, there will be as much for one who is found to be outside the Church.”⁶⁷ Ultimately, they said, “all the people who are found outside the Church will perish.”⁶⁸ There is no such thing as a churchless Christianity, any more than there was an arkless salvation for Noah's family. If you claimed to believe Noah outside the ark, such faith couldn't save you. The Church now, as the Ark then, is Christ's vessel of salvation.

Second, God never told Noah to build a second ark, either as a back-up or for his neighbors to get in. Nobody was building a second saving ark; there was only the original. Neither was the ark divisible. If you cracked the ark in half, neither part could survive the flood. The ark needs to have its integrity, its unity as a single tangible structure, or else Noah's kin and critters will sleep with the fishes. So, early Christians reasoned, “the one ark of Noah was the type,” or symbol, “of the one Church.”⁶⁹ There is not a second Church besides the one Christ built; there's only one. The Church is not to be divisible; it can't be broken into a bunch of denominational rafts that tout an 'invisible unity' underlying their evident material disconnection. “Whoever gathers elsewhere than in the Church scatters the Church of Christ,” our teachers said of old.⁷⁰ So “why do we mangle and mutilate the members of Christ and create factions in our own body?”⁷¹ The salvation of the world depends, in some mysterious way, on church unity – not just on getting along, but the visible, tangible unity of the Church as a single structure, beam to beam, plank to plank. “Clearly we are instructed to have regard for the unity of the Church.”⁷²

Third, the ark shows us that the Church is built with divine detail. God gave Noah “detailed instructions about everything..., careful directions about everything.”⁷³ If we should “admire the planning which made [Noah's ark] firmly built and able to endure” the flood,⁷⁴ how much more should we admire the planning which makes the Church what it is? The Church's construction manifests “the manifold wisdom of God” (Ephesians 3:10). The ark shows the Church “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets,” on which “the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord” (Ephesians 2:20-21). Built up from this foundation, the Church, “consisting of many grades,”⁷⁵ is governed “in an orderly way... according to the ordinances of the Master.”⁷⁶ As the ark was pitched inside and out, the Church must be “on guard on all sides and protected by the power of purity and innocence.”⁷⁷ In this way, it's “constructed from planks that cannot rot..., the souls of the saints.”⁷⁸ Paul invites us to “comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth” of it (Ephesians 3:18), “and all the other details [of the ark] are signs of aspects of the Church.”⁷⁹

In constructing the ark in reverent fear on the schema set by God's plan, Noah “stays on the royal road: he adds nothing, changes nothing, and takes nothing away from God's directive, but abides completely by the command he hears.”⁸⁰ And the one charged with building the New Ark, the Church, is Christ “the Spiritual Noah.”⁸¹ We are at best his sons, his workmen, doing our part according to the instructions he relays from his Father. Noah's sons didn't have liberty to redesign the ark according to their tastes, yet we're sometimes tempted to think that the Church should fit our vision, or that we may add, subtract, or alter according to our whims and our will. We dream of a church tailor-made for us, but God already set down a detailed plan for his Church's construction.

Fourth, we learn from Genesis that God instructed Noah to gather various kinds of food, enough of it to supply all life with sustenance for the entire duration of the ark's journey. And the Church is no less amply provisioned by Jesus. Christ has prepared to feed those in his Church for as long as the journey lasts. “The Lord has filled his Church with the varied nourishment of spiritual life,” it was said, so that “we are all refreshed in the Church with the food of life according to the measure of our own capacity.”⁸² Even back when Paul was still “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord” (Acts 9:1), the Church was already stocked with every gift and grace Jesus has set aside for me and for you nearly two thousand years later. It isn't possible for the Church to meet a novel storm it wasn't designed to handle, nor can the Church confront a challenge it doesn't contain the spiritual resources to overcome. And so it's never possible for you or I to spiritually starve aboard this Ark, not unless we refuse to eat from the Master's hand. Christ has loaded the Church with far too much nourishment, of every variety, for it to ever run out of any spiritual good you truly need.

And fifth, in including the animals, the ark was set up like a new Eden, beautiful with the harmony of “different species..., the harbor of all riches, whereby the Church is depicted.”⁸³ For “as in the ark there were all kinds of animals, so also in the Church there are men of all races.”⁸⁴ The old word for that would be to speak of the ark's 'catholicity' – it's built according to the whole of God's commandments and open for the whole range of created kinds, so it pertains universally to the whole of creation. A Church marked by catholicity thus holds “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Revelation 7:9). There are no kinds of people who don't belong in the Church, “and in the Church there are many systems of practice on account of the diversity of those who come to the faith.”⁸⁵ And not simply is every demographic covered, but, just like clean and unclean animals were in Noah's ark, so the Church equally holds both firm and wavering disciples “within the framework of its unity until it reaches its certain end.”⁸⁶ If you're in the Church and you feel sometimes like a jackal, a weasel, a snake, a crow, a cockroach, an unclean thing – there is a place for you here! This Ark has its door open to you no less than to the sweetest lamb! But where “the ark received the animals and preserved them..., the Church receives the animals and changes them,”⁸⁷ for the Church is being “built into a dwelling place for God” (Ephesians 2:22), to be “filled with the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:19).

That's the spiritual wisdom, the heavenly revelation, hidden in these verses for us. The Ark reveals so much we need to know about the Church and its role in God's mysterious plan for the ages. Jesus Christ, “the Architect of the Church,”⁸⁸ is our “true Noah,” building an Ark for the salvation of the world!⁸⁹ So let us seek refuge in his Ark, the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church” “of the Living God” (1 Timothy 3:15),⁹⁰ the Lifesaver that Jesus is building for us and with us through all the ages until it's all done – and then our deliverance will at last be at hand. Thanks be to God for the Ark, not just of ancient Noah, but of our Lord Jesus Christ! Amen.

Noah Contra Mundum

When we set down the Book of Genesis last Sunday, we might've broken a sweat, because we tackled one of the most infamously controversial and debated pieces in the entire Bible: the story of the sons of God, daughters of humanity, and the Nephilim (Genesis 6:1-4). I know last week's message might have been a bit complex and hard to understand, but if our brains didn't melt out our ears, well, we made it through better than some have! In that passage, we suggested Genesis is responding to all the pagan stories of a lost heroic age full of demigods and heroes, from whom the pagan elites traced their family trees; Genesis picks that proud boast apart, adding that such a time would've been a dark age that made clear the grievousness and bitterness of human sin.

This Sunday, we have to go back to the dark ages. Because while that time illustrates a general truth about the sin that eats away at the human heart, it also provides a portrait of a society gone insane, a world gone dark, that we need to hear about today. God assesses it as a time when human wickedness multiplied and metastasized on earth, when society had perverted human potential to be a factory of evils and so stained creation to its core.

Ancient readers looked at this as the story of a world where people “no longer rendered to God his due honors, nor took account of justice towards men, but displayed by their actions a zeal for vice.”¹ “Everyone walked in the stubbornness of his evil heart” (Jeremiah 11:8), and “fell into profane and harmful deeds.”² “Great iniquity was then spread over all the earth,”³ so “there were many wicked ones, and they committed adultery and erred, and all their conduct became corrupt.”⁴ They were “overbearing and disdainful of every virtue..., completely enslaved to the pleasure of sin.”⁵ They became “violent men who devise evil things in their heart and stir up wars every day” (Psalm 140:1-2), so that “the world was full with wickedness and crime.”⁶ They were read as “wretched, evil-hearted, fickle men, abandoning modesty, desiring shamelessness, tyrants in fickleness and violent sinners, liars, sated with faithlessness, evildoers, truthful in nothing, adulterers, ingenious at pouring out slander, not fearing the anger of the Most High God.”⁷ “They sinned against beasts and birds and everything which moves or walks upon the earth, and they poured out much blood upon the earth,”⁸ so “the whole earth was filled with blood and oppression”⁹ as “everyone became murderers, parricides, infanticides, fratricides.”¹⁰

One modern scholar invites us here to “imagine living in an oppressive, abusive culture where there is no social order, no laws, and no regard for justice or mercy.”¹¹ This is a world of lawlessness, a world of social disregard and strife, a world of sexual confusion, a world of pollution, a world of hunger and violence, a godless world. It isn't a pleasant picture at all. But it's a fruitful mirror we can hold up to any society, like ours today. I know we look around at the world we see and hear mediated through the news, and things don't look great. In many ways our society and culture would horrify many of those who came before us. Genesis 6 asks us, how much further would things need to slip in order to extinguish what good is left? What things still intact separate us from the world that so broke God's heart (Genesis 6:6), the world that needed to be blotted and rebooted (Genesis 6:7)?

But after painting this grotesque portrait, the story of the Generations of Adam doesn't end on a note of doom and gloom, as much as it has every right to. Instead, it ends with an odd note of hope, a note that's going to then be picked up in the next section. The Generations of Adam assure us that, despite the world's deep darkness and the threat that all will drown in the tears of their Maker, the light of God's face fell on one man (Genesis 6:8).

We already met this man in the genealogy, which introduced him as Lamech's son Noah, invested with a father's hopes and prayers to get relief from the pain and toil and misery of a cursed world (Genesis 5:28-29). We found that Noah's name comes from the Hebrew word for 'rest,' and it also sounds a lot like the word for 'relief' or 'comfort.' But there's another secret to Noah's name. It's an anadrome, meaning it's another word spelled backwards, like how in English 'stressed' spelled backwards is 'desserts,' or 'star' spelled backwards is 'rats.' In Hebrew, Noah's name is like that. Spelled backwards, it gives us 'favor' – 'grace.'¹² So we shouldn't be shocked to find that “Noah finds favor in the eyes of the LORD” (Genesis 6:8) – it was there in Noah's name all along.

In the Bible, to 'find favor' in somebody's eyes is to have their positive esteem, their good will, their affectionate regard.¹³ Being helped or blessed could be evidence that you've found favor, like when Lot tells the angels that, since they'd saved his life, he must have “found favor in your eyes” (Genesis 19:19). People prefaced requests by asking them “if I have found favor in your eyes” (Esther 7:3) – the implication being, if I've found favor in your eyes, then you might favor me with a favorable response now as I come to you for a favor! When Israel has favor in the eyes of the Egyptians, the Egyptians “let them have what they asked” (Exodus 12:36). Gideon asks God, “if now I have found favor in your eyes, then show me a sign” (Judges 6:17). Moses asks that, if he's found favor in God's eyes, God would therefore forgive Israel's sins and dwell in their midst (Exodus 34:9).

Sometimes in the Bible, there can be a reason, a sort of deservingness that makes the difference. The Bible says “good sense wins favor” (Proverbs 13:15) and if you follow wisdom, “you'll find favor and good sense in the eyes of God and man” (Proverbs 3:4). God is habitually favorable toward those who love his name (Psalm 119:132). On the other hand, sometimes one person finds favor in the eyes of another for no obvious reason or even in spite of their lack of merit. Ruth asks Boaz, “Why have I found favor in your eyes... since I am a foreigner?” (Ruth 2:10). The psalmists ask God for favorable treatment on the basis of their desperation (Psalms 25:16; 31:9), or even because they're a sinner (Psalm 41:4). This Hebrew word for 'favor,' in another form, can also mean 'generous': somebody who gives freely to the poor favors them (Psalm 37:21; Proverbs 14:21). What merit do the needy bring to win favor? Just their humble state, just their empty-handed need!

And that shows us why 'favor' leads us to the concept of 'grace' as we know and love it. The Christian life is built 100% on God's amazing grace. In believing “the gospel of the grace of God” (Acts 20:24), “we have obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand” (Romans 5:2), so that we may be “saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus” (Acts 15:11). God aims to “show us the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:7), and even now we can by day be “strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 2:1). Well, Noah beat us to the punch. He was already favored with amazing grace. When all around gave God a frown, Noah “stands... as one who brings a smile to God's face.”¹⁴

The Generations of Adam doesn't explain if there's a reason why Noah got amazing grace, if there's a reason he found favor in God's eyes. But it tells us one more weird thing about Noah. All his ancestors got married and had children – ancestors tend to do that, you know – but though the numbers in the genealogy are probably more symbol than literal, four of the patriarchs are under a hundred years old when they have children, and the other five are still under two hundred. The latest bloomer among them, Noah's dad, is still less than 24% of the way through his total life span; Adam is 14% through, and everyone from Enosh to Mahalalel is less than a tenth of the way. By our standards, those percentages make for very early-in-life marriages and parenthoods.

Noah, though, breaks the pattern. He's got five centuries under his belt, over half his life, before he becomes a husband and father (Genesis 5:32). Up until then, while everybody around him was “eating and drinking, marrying and being given in marriage” (Luke 17:27), Noah wasn't. He didn't condemn them as evil, like the liars Paul knew who “forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving” (1 Timothy 4:3). But just as Paul says that “he who refrains from marriage will do even better” (1 Corinthians 7:38), so Noah refrains for most of his life, seeing celibacy as the better path in his situation (1 Corinthians 7:26). That can't have been easy. His life of self-denial stuck out like a sore thumb. He was under an “extensive moral apprenticeship... in ascetic preparation for his mission,” whether he knew it or not.¹⁵ Even Martin Luther was impressed by Noah's “extreme chastity,”¹⁶ celebrating Noah as “a virgin above all virgins.”¹⁷ But then, more than halfway through Noah's life, Noah suddenly gets married and has children; maybe God told him to. God abruptly changed Noah's perception of his vocation, for reasons that make sense to us in hindsight.

And that prepares us to leave the Generations of Adam and go to the Generations of Noah, the next chapter or tablet in the story Genesis is telling. But unlike the Generations of Adam, the Generations of Noah is a flood story. And the Bible's not the only place you could go to find one of those. Actually, we've found bunches of flood stories from the Middle East, written long before Moses. Everyone believed in a flood; what differed was how they told the story and what they thought it meant.¹⁸ The Bible's flood story was handed down by people who knew there were other flood stories out there, with other main characters in place of Noah.

One such character was a Sumerian man named Ziusudra, whose name means something like “Life of Distant Days,”¹⁹ “Life of Prolonged Days.”²⁰ In Sumerian tradition, Ziusudra was the son of Ubar-tutu, a king before the flood who reigned in a city called Shuruppak. That was a real place; there's little left, but I could show you on a map where it was. Some versions of the king list add Ziusudra as the last king before the flood.²¹ In their flood story, “Ziusudra was king and gudu-priest.”²² The Babylonians spoke of Uta-napishti the Distant, whose name means “He Found Life”²³ and who lives in Shuruppak as the son of Ubar-tutu.²⁴ He's got a royal palace and doesn't worry about what some other king thinks.²⁵ But where the Sumerian story has Ziusudra worshipping and praying when he gets chosen, the Babylonian story gives no hint Uta-napishti is especially good or close to Ea, the god who saves him.²⁶ He comes across as “a random recipient of Ea's benevolence.”²⁷

The Babylonian story hints, though, that Uta-napishti is a name he earned after the flood, and that his earlier name was Atra-hasis, which means something like “Good Listener,” “Extremely Clever,” “Exceedingly Wise.”²⁸ And most Middle Eastern flood stories, including the oldest, make Atra-hasis their star. These stories don't mention his throne or city, but they have him describe himself as “Atrahasis the priest: I live in the temple of Ea my lord.”²⁹ Atra-hasis is close enough with the god he serves that he can recognize that god's footsteps.³⁰ His god favors him because Atra-hasis grieves for his people and is especially reverent and respectful of his god.³¹

In these stories, the entire drama is based on the gods not seeing eye-to-eye: where one god leads the way in destroying, a different god takes initiative to save. These stories aren't about whether humans are good, but whether the gods are good!³² But in Genesis, the God who looks with favor on Noah is the same good God who will blot out human evil. Unlike Ziusudra or Uta-napishti or Atra-hasis, Noah's favor doesn't come through his position. Nowhere does the Bible make Noah out to be a king ruling others or a priest with office in a temple. It doesn't tell us whether Noah lived in a city. Unlike them, Noah just finds favor with the LORD (Genesis 6:8).

Now the Generations of Noah story picks up where the Generations of Adam left off. Each of these tablets starts by overlapping the one before it, revisiting some hint by exploring it from a different angle. So now the story starts over with Noah's “sterling character.”³³ First, using a word we haven't seen yet in Genesis, it describes Noah as “a righteous man” (Genesis 6:9). Good is the opposite of evil; righteous is the opposite of wicked (Psalm 1:6). “Whoever practices righteousness is righteous” (1 John 3:7), and to do righteousness is to do the proper thing, the lawful thing, the thing that's legally and morally 'in the right.'³⁴ Any fair-minded judge would confirm that by ruling in his favor: 'Innocent!'³⁵ Once Israel gets the gift of the Law full of God's “righteous rules” (Psalm 119:7), Moses could say “it will be righteousness for us if we are careful to do all this commandment before the LORD our God as he has commanded us” (Deuteronomy 6:25). Noah lives before Moses, and “from sinful Adam up to Noah..., there was the natural law alone.”³⁶ Noah is righteous by “living in conformity with the created order,”³⁷ and is treated as morally innocent in the midst of a guilty world.³⁸ He was “most upright and true, a most trustworthy man, concerned for noble deeds,” as one ancient writer put it.³⁹

One old Jewish writing, imagining Noah's autobiography, has him say that “when I emerged from my mother's womb, I was planted for righteousness; all of my days I conducted myself uprightly, continually walking in the paths of everlasting truth. … Then I, Noah, became a grown man. I held fast to righteousness and strengthened myself in wisdom.”⁴⁰ Therefore, “I, Noah, found grace, prominence, and justification in the eyes of the Lord.”⁴¹ Here, Noah's life of righteousness explains why he eventually finds favor in God's eyes. After all, wisdom said that although “he who pursues evil will die,” yet “whoever is steadfast in righteousness will live” (Proverbs 11:19). The prophet Ezekiel says Noah had “delivered his own life by his own righteousness” (Ezekiel 14:20).

So later Jews argued that “God loved Noah for his righteousness,”⁴² that God favored Noah “because his heart was righteous in all of his ways... and he did not transgress anything that was ordained for him.”⁴³ Many early Christians agreed that “it was thus of his own doing that Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord God: he won grace for himself through acts of virtue, and for this he received grace from God.”⁴⁴ But every now and then, an early Christian would argue that “Noah the patriarch did nothing to make himself righteous.”⁴⁵ And just as there are scholars today who read Genesis saying that Noah found favor because he was righteous,⁴⁶ others insist Noah's righteousness can't explain him finding favor.⁴⁷

I think it's more complicated than either/or. There's a weird thing Moses says after God tells him that Moses has found favor in his sight (Exodus 33:12). Moses says: “If I have found favor in your sight, please show me your ways, that I may know you in order to find favor in your sight” (Exodus 33:13). Because Moses gets grace, he wants to know God better so that Moses can get grace! If Noah was righteous from his youth, it was only ever because of the grace God gave him. God creates in us by grace the righteousness that pleases him.⁴⁸ “Whatever is pleasing to God in a man is caused by the divine love,” and Noah was no exception.⁴⁹ But because Noah has that righteousness, because he cooperates, he becomes more appealing in God's sight, he finds further favor and grace on account of that righteousness. “What God will crown is not your merits but his own gifts.”⁵⁰ Grace leads to righteousness which wins Noah favor and readies him for more grace.

Elaborating its description of Noah as a righteous man, the Generations of Noah story adds that he's “blameless in his generation” (Genesis 6:9). The word 'blameless' means 'unblemished,' 'intact,' 'complete.' Its usually the way you'd describe an animal that's fit for sacrifice. The Passover lamb had to be “unblemished,” healthy and physically intact and undamaged (Exodus 12:5). That's a refrain in all Israel's sacrifices: the offered creature must be “without blemish” to be worthy of giving to God (Leviticus 1:3; 3:6). When a person is 'unblemished,' it means they're morally healthy, spiritually intact; they've got integrity of life from the inside out. Moses urged Israel to “be unblemished before the LORD your God,” meaning not compromised by the pagan nations around them (Deuteronomy 18:13). Just so, Noah “was not implicated in the evil that was practiced all around him.”⁵¹

As for what it meant that Noah was blameless or unblemished “in his generation,” one famous rabbi thought that Noah stood out mainly because the bar was so low on account of how bad the world was.⁵² Some early Christians followed this line, thinking Noah was called righteous only “in comparison to others,”⁵³ only “relative to... his own generation.”⁵⁴ Another rabbi disagreed with the first, saying that if Noah managed to stay blameless even in a generation like his which gave him zero support and every opposition, then the darkest of societies only made Noah's virtue more obvious and impressive.⁵⁵ And other early Christians followed that path, saying that as “the guilt of other people does not cast a shadow on the just man,”⁵⁶ so Noah was “as perfect as [people] are able to be in this pilgrimage here on earth.”⁵⁷

And that version makes a lot more sense. If you want a picture of Noah, you could do worse than Psalm 15: he “walks without blemish and does righteousness and speaks the truth in his heart” (Psalm 15:2), he doesn't hurt his neighbors or friends or use words to tear people down (Psalm 15:3), he's unimpressed with those who are far from God, he keeps his word even when it hurts, he isn't out to make a buck at anybody's expense (Psalm 15:4-5).⁵⁸ Noah had “a habitual practice of integrity in all his dealings with others.”⁵⁹ He “stood apart as an exemplar of morality” whose “conduct reflected an uncompromising concern for justice.”⁶⁰

And Noah did so despite the torrential currents of global culture rushing the other way. He's already surviving a flood before a single raindrop falls. The world around him gave Noah every possible incentive to compromise a little here, a little there – to accept a small blemish, to overlook a light lie, to go along to get along just this once, to stoop even an inch in the direction of everybody else's level – and he wouldn't do it. He's swimming up the waterfall. He's looking the world dead in the eyes and saying he won't budge. Courageously he dares to “defy the entire world” by his refusal to be “conformed to this world” (Romans 12:2).⁶¹

All Genesis needs to add is that “Noah walked with God” (Genesis 6:9) – or, in the Hebrew order, “with God walked Noah.” Even during his ascetic adventures in celibacy, Noah surrendered any loneliness he felt into God's hands, and the two of them had a fellowship that made up for Noah's estrangement from his world. He lived a life of piety, rendering to God the honor and devotion due to him; Noah invested his time and energy into intimacy with God.⁶² Noah had the advantage of a good role model in Enoch, gone before Noah was born but who left a legacy that Noah could look to (Genesis 5:22-24). And even after he married like Enoch had, Noah continued to be – in the words of one old bishop – a “good man with wife and family, achieving great satisfaction in God's eyes and opting for the way of virtue in sight of everyone, hindered in no way either by marriage or by family responsibilities.”⁶³ Celibate or married, Noah's relationship with God was strong.

Later, in the fullness of time, God saw a chaste virgin named Mary, whom he had prepared from her very start to walk with him in holy blessedness; more than Noah, she was God's highly favored one, and more than Noah, when God redirected what she'd thought was her vocation, she accepted humbly the will of God (Luke 1:28-38).⁶⁴ It was through her that God then sent his Son, “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). The Son of God revealed himself in human flesh as “Jesus Christ the Righteous” (1 John 2:1), whose entire human life was a revelation of God's own righteousness to save (Romans 1:16-17). In following him as a disciple, anyone could walk with God as closely as Enoch or Noah did, “walking in the light of life” (John 8:12).

And when his fateful hour at last came, this Righteous One “offered himself without blemish to God... to purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God” (Hebrews 9:14). In dying and rising, he aimed “to present the Church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she may be holy and without blemish” just like he is (Ephesians 5:27). Through him and in her, we “receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness” (Romans 5:17). Because these gifts go together and must be used in practice, “we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain” (2 Corinthians 6:1). For if we claim we still abide in Christ's grace, we “ought to walk in the same way in which he walked” (1 John 2:6).

Our world often doesn't make that easy, given “the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire” (2 Peter 1:4). “The whole world lies in the power of the Evil One” (1 John 5:19), and “whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God” (James 4:4). Being chosen “out of the world” like Noah was, “therefore the world hates you” (John 15:19). But “everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world” (1 John 5:4). Pure religion is “to keep oneself unstained from the world,” like Noah did (James 1:27). Our calling, says the Apostle, is to be “blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life” (Philippians 2:15-16). If “the whole earth marvels as they follow the beast” (Revelation 13:3), if worldly people take “pleasure in unrighteousness” (2 Thessalonians 2:12), all the more reason that those “redeemed from the earth” should be “blameless” and “follow the Lamb wherever he goes” (Revelation 14:3-5).

So be like Noah. If the world chooses to be against the truth, against beauty, against goodness, then to that extent, be against the world – by their choice, not yours. If the world grows darker, shine brighter. If the world gets sadder, be more joyful. If the world gets madder, be more peaceful. If the world gets badder, be righteous beyond its understanding. If the world gets more crooked and twisted, show yourself ever more blameless in how you live. Hold fast to the word of life. Follow Jesus wherever he goes. Walk with your Lord. Understand that his grace is “better than silver or gold” (Proverbs 22:1), and that you dance for an Audience of One. The world may choose to be what it chooses to be; but you follow Jesus even if none go with you. For Jesus leads you to salvation. Jesus leads you to righteousness. Jesus leads you to the Father. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Heroes of Hate, Dark Ages, and the Grief of God

For the past few weeks, we've been exploring an account of “the generations of Adam” (Genesis 5:1), which up to now has mainly been a genealogy with stories sprinkled in (Genesis 5:3-32). Unlike the Cain genealogy (Genesis 4:16-24), here we've caught glimmers of hope we're looking at a new humanity, a righteous people of God. But as we try to wrap up these generations of Adam, our foot gets stuck in the mud of 'sons of God,' 'daughters of Adam,' 'fallen ones,' 'mighty men'... oh boy, quite the quagmire. These four verses that launch chapter 6 are nobody's idea of a cakewalk! They've been called “the strangest of all the Genesis narratives,”¹ “ambiguous by nature,”² “mysterious,”³ “cryptic and obscure,”⁴ “one of the most difficult texts to interpret in the Hebrew Bible,”⁵ “among the most debated texts in the entire Bible.”⁶ Well... don't you just feel encouraged?

It all starts by pointing us back to the time already covered by the chapter 4 and 5 genealogies; we're retreading ground previously gained.⁷ Those genealogies are all about how “the human began to multiply on the face of the ground” (Genesis 6:1). In pagan stories set in this time, humans multiplying doesn't go over as a good thing: “the peoples had increased, the land bellowed like a bull, the god was disturbed with their uproar.”⁸ But in the Bible, God doesn't mind that; actually, humanity multiplying is a sign of his original blessing (Genesis 1:28). So the human being, the Adam, is multiplying, “and daughters were born to them” (Genesis 6:1), just like last chapter told us (Genesis 5:4, 7).

Onto the stage step characters we don't yet recognize: “the sons of God.” A whole lot depends on who or what they are, but that's a big question we'll have to circle back to. For now, let's read what they did. “The sons of God saw the daughters of humanity, that they were good” (Genesis 6:2). The 'daughters of humanity' – we just heard about them a verse ago. But the sons of God see these human women and appraise them as good⁹ – which probably means, in this context, somehow attractive, beautiful, and desirable.¹⁰ That's often taken to mean that the sons of God feel a passionate desire, a lust for the women's physical beauty.¹¹

If so, they act on it: “they took for themselves wives” (Genesis 6:2). And some readers figure there's nothing going wrong here: “no commandment is broken.”¹² But notice the three key words: they see, they say it's good, therefore they take. Who's that remind you of? Eve in the garden, that's who (Genesis 3:6).¹³ That's not a promising sign. Acting out of their own vision, they take wives for themselves, like Lamech when he “took for himself two wives” (Genesis 4:19), making us wonder if the 'sons of God' here stick to one wife a piece or not.¹⁴ Notice, after all, that they take wives “from all whomsoever they chose” (Genesis 6:2). But it's in the pagan world, not in Israel, where people are said to 'choose' a wife.¹⁵ And the phrase 'from all' contrasts with God's warnings Israelites not marry Canaanite women (Genesis 24:37; Nehemiah 13:27) and mandates that their priests marry none but ladies of Israel (Leviticus 21:14; Ezekiel 44:22). Legally, “nobody [in Israel] could choose freely among all women.”¹⁶ But the 'sons of God' abide by no such laws. In at least one way (if not more), a boundary is being broken by “a mixing of things that should be separate.”¹⁷

Into this situation, the LORD himself suddenly speaks (Genesis 6:3), but what he says is hard to read – there are a lot of words that show up only here in the Bible, and I've seen totally different translations of this verse. God says his spirit – (the Holy Spirit? the breath of life?) – won't strive (or remain, or be strong?) with humans forever, since also he's flesh (or by their transgressing he is flesh?).¹⁸ All we can tell for sure is, God answers a problem. Somehow, the sons of God marrying human women could be thought to lead to humans exceeding all limits, like when the serpent promised to make humans like gods (Genesis 3:5) but then God refused to let humans 'take' what would let them live forever (Genesis 3:22).¹⁹ The LORD says he's not having any of that this time either: humans are still just flesh and have a limited number of days to live, either individually or collectively.²⁰ Because of this weird new situation, God has to be extra clear about this.²¹ And the way the story's written, God acts immediately, “before the story can begin to unfold any further.”²²

After that, we get a further comment: “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days (and also after), when the sons of God came in to the daughters of humanity and they bore children to them. These were the Gibborim who were of old, men of the name” (Genesis 6:4). You'll note two weird words there. 'Gibborim' is easier: that means 'mighty ones,' like warriors or heroes. Then there are 'Nephilim,' who most scholars think are the same as the Gibborim here, children of the sons of God and daughters of man,²³ though some think they're unrelated.²⁴ 'Nephilim' means, literally, 'the fallen ones.'²⁵ Fallen from heaven to earth?²⁶ Fallen morally from prior holiness, like Adam and Eve?²⁷ Fallen, as in born abnormally?²⁸ Fallen in battle as a slain warrior, like when David laments “how the mighty ones have fallen in the midst of battle” (2 Samuel 1:25) or when Ezekiel sees “the mighty ones, the fallen... who went down to Sheol with their weapons of war” (Ezekiel 32:27)?²⁹

The big question of it all is, who or what are the 'sons of God'? Setting aside more crackpot ideas like aliens³⁰ or Neanderthals,³¹ one major theory is that they're angels, who – maybe assigned on mission to earth already, maybe looking down from heaven – decide they have an interest in human women, and so they show up, adopt human form, marry, and have kids who are just... all wrong. That theory sounds weird – it is weird – but that's “the earliest known explanation” of what's going on here,³² accepted with utter sincerity by Jews up to the time of Jesus,³³ plus Christians for the next couple centuries.³⁴ Gradually, though, people got uneasy with that theory. Didn't Jesus himself contrast “the angels in heaven” with humans who “marry and are given in marriage” (Mark 12:25)? So “how could it not amount to folly to say that spirits... desire fleshly things?”³⁵ No way can “spiritual natures have carnal relations!”³⁶ Only “mad fools” could buy that... right?³⁷

So some turned to a new theory, the idea that that the 'sons of God' were the upper class – maybe kings who claimed to represent God, maybe judges who acted like gods on earth, maybe the rich in general, maybe especially strong or skilled people.³⁸ This would then be a “self-deification of the powerful,” when “the ruling class became captives of their own appetites.”³⁹ In the second and third century, this approach became popular among the rabbis.⁴⁰ One problem (among others) is that nowhere else are judges or kings, as a group, called 'sons of God.'⁴¹

Around the same time, Christians, starting in Syria,⁴² began pioneering the soon-to-be-popular idea that the 'sons of God' were actually the male descendants of Seth in Genesis 5, while the 'daughters of humanity' were only the female descendants of Cain from Genesis 4, and the problem was then being “unequally yoked with unbelievers” (2 Corinthians 6:14).⁴³ This theory held sway for over fifteen centuries in the church, but the problem is that it's based on iffy translations of an earlier verse,⁴⁴ plus that it's Seth's family that's identified with Adam and is known for daughters, so the 'daughters of humanity' can't just be the people of Cain.⁴⁵

Most pastors I talked to about this sermon said they'd just leave things here: lay out a few major options, shrug, and call it quits. They said they'd leave it up to you to go read your Bible and try to make up your own mind, to decide whatever it means to you. That doesn't quite sit right with me. “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16), and so God breathed out these verses, he gave them a meaning, and so it must be profitable to teach from them somehow. After combing through as much of the up-to-date research as I could find, taking hundreds of pages of notes, and turning it over in my mind for several years now... let me tell you what I think makes most sense.

The cultures around Israel used the phrase 'sons of God' or 'sons of the gods' to refer to divine beings, deities.⁴⁶ They were often the chief god's courtiers and companions, those who make up the heavenly assembly or divine council, “the celestial entourage of God.”⁴⁷ 'Sons of gods' could also be a class term, meaning 'gods.'⁴⁸ The Bible has no problem with this: it says that when the LORD made the world, “the sons of God shouted for joy” (Job 38:7), and that on occasion “the sons of God come to present themselves before the LORD” in his royal court. In the Bible's view, they're never the LORD's peers: “Who among the sons of God is like the LORD, a God... awesome above all who are around him?” (Psalm 89:6-7). Later Israelites came to understand the sons of God as angels serving the LORD. But they could also be identified as “the gods of the nations” (Jeremiah 14:22), since “the Most High... fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God” (Deuteronomy 32:8).⁴⁹ In Genesis 6, we're probably looking at pagan ideas about their gods.

The idea of gods sleeping with mere humans, especially a long time ago, was a common idea in the mythologies of pagan cultures around Israel; and so was the idea of them producing children who'd go on to be important heroes and kings.⁵⁰ This is, in fact, “a defining aspect of the time of the heroes.”⁵¹ Many pagans looked back at a heroic age when these sorts of things happened, a time of ancient human women “mingling with gods” and so bearing them “splendid children,” starting with “the race of illustrious kings.”⁵² There was then “a race of heroes, godlike men... called demigods.”⁵³ In Greece, for example, the hero Heracles was born when the god Zeus rushed down from Olympus, “desiring the love of a fine-girdled woman.”⁵⁴ The famous Argonaut heroes of Greek mythology included not only Heracles the son of Zeus,⁵⁵ but Ancaeus, Erginus, and Euphemus the sons of the sea god Poseidon;⁵⁶ Erytus, Echion, and Aethalides the sons of the herald god Hermes;⁵⁷ Ascalaphus and Ialmenus the sons of war god Ares;⁵⁸ Augeas a son of the sun god Helios;⁵⁹ and, oh, you get the picture. Even some Romans thought the founder of Rome was the son of a mortal maiden who “united in marriage” with the god Mars.⁶⁰ The Hurrians had a king named Kirta whom Canaanites called a son of the god El,⁶¹ and a myth about a boy named Silver who was fathered by the sky god Kumarbi and a mortal woman.⁶² The Babylonians looked back to legendary kings like Gilgamesh, “a giant in height, 18 feet tall...,” since he was “two-thirds god and only one-third human,” having been born to the god-king Lugalbanda and the goddess Ninsun.⁶³ Pagans often figured some of the ancient heroes of that age had ultimately been fully “changed into gods” themselves.⁶⁴

Although that was a lost age ended by the gods, who for unknown reasons had chosen to “destroy the lives of the semi-gods” in a great catastrophe,⁶⁵ pagans often celebrated that heroic generation as having been a golden age marked by justice, much better than our world and its people afterwards.⁶⁶ Those were days, they said, of “righteousness and piety,” when humans were often “guests of the gods, eating at the same board,”⁶⁷ and so the heroic race were “more righteous, better far,” than other generations.⁶⁸

Such heroes and kings might be gone now, the pagans said, but pagan elites claimed special privileges and pride due to being descended from these part-divine heroes.⁶⁹ The Sumerian king “Shulgi, mighty man, king of Ur,” started spelling his name with the symbol for a god,⁷⁰ and he claimed to be a brother of the god-king Gilgamesh.⁷¹ Plenty other kings claimed to be descended from gods and striving to earn godhood through their rule.⁷² Two noble families in Athens boasted their descent from Neleus son of Poseidon and Aeacus son of Zeus, respectively. The kings of ancient Sparta claimed to be descended from Heracles,⁷³ as did the ruling house of Macedonia, including Alexander the Great.⁷⁴ Julius Caesar thought his family was “descended... from the immortal gods,” tracing his heritage back to Aeneas the son of Venus.⁷⁵ It was a common pagan brag.

So in that light, what's going on in Genesis 6? God is giving Israel a way to take the wind out of everybody's sails. Genesis is saying, let's suppose for a moment that your myths are all real. Fine, say the pagan gods came and had kids with human women. Well, if they did, they that was an aggressive transgression of both natural and nuptial boundaries: like Eve, they blurred heaven and earth; like faithless Israelites, they married outside the law (Genesis 6:2). Those gods are, at best, idiots. It's like Psalm 82, where God “takes his stand in the divine assembly and judges among the gods” (Psalm 82:1), convicts them of being too ignorant and incompetent to deserve their godhood (Psalm 82:2-5), and declares: “I said, 'You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you.' Nevertheless, like humans you will die, and like one of the princes you will fall!” (Psalm 82:6-7).⁷⁶ And so these 'sons of gods' shouldn't really be called gods after all.⁷⁷ And their sort of religion is therefore wrong,⁷⁸ exposed in all its falsity by “the radical and subversive gaze of God.”⁷⁹

Where pagans thought some of those ancient heroes had been awarded immortal godhood,⁸⁰ Genesis says those pagan heroes are as “flesh and blood” as the rest of us (Genesis 6:3).⁸¹ The LORD marks here “a clear division between divine and mortal.”⁸² All heroes, no exceptions, were “mortal human beings;”⁸³ each did “die like a mortal.”⁸⁴ The heroes were 'fallen ones,' doomed from the get-go (Genesis 6:4). Not merely noble “heroes falling in battle strife,”⁸⁵ they were monsters of sin, fallen to damnation, for “the proud shall stumble and fall, with none to raise him up” (Jeremiah 50:32). Calling them 'Nephilim' might as well be naming them 'the losers,' 'the goners'! And for all their credit as “men of the name,” men with a heroic reputation sung about in legend, Genesis denies them any individuality (Genesis 6:4). “Their story is jarringly brief” here,⁸⁶ and their names and supposed stories are “lost in the dustbin of history.”⁸⁷ In Genesis, any pagan heroic age came and went and wasn't worth remembering. Such heroes of old were just “weeds sown among the wheat” (Matthew 13:25),⁸⁸ and those who claim descent from the ancient heroes are, at best, frauds.

And last of all, Genesis makes clear that the heroic age was no golden age of justice after all; it was a dark age of spreading evil, violence, and corruption (Genesis 6:5). All this time the 'sons of God' were impulsively looking at the goodness of the daughters of humanity (Genesis 6:2), the true God and Father was looking, taking centuries of evidence into account, and seeing something very different: that “the evil of humans was great on the earth” (Genesis 6:5).⁸⁹ These 'sons of God,' presuming to see and judge like God, were blind to what he can plainly see.⁹⁰ As humans multiplied (Genesis 6:1), so humans multiplied evil on the earth (Genesis 6:5).⁹¹

And this wasn't accidental or casual; it was deliberate, outward actions of wrong and harm which testify to an inward heart-rot.⁹² Where God had once “formed” man from the dust (Genesis 2:7) and day by day “forms the hearts of them all” (Psalm 33:15), the human heart turns out to all day be “forming” designs that are pure disaster (Genesis 6:5).⁹³ This picture of “constant, unceasing, and active devising, planning, and carrying out of evil” is a shocking dash of hyperbole showing what happens when we cut the brake lines amid our downward spiral.⁹⁴ “In the state of fallen nature,” we all have such an inborn “impulse to evil” that we “need the help of grace in order not to fall.”⁹⁵ Or, as Scripture puts it, “the hearts of the children of humanity are evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live” (Ecclesiastes 9:3).

Here, instead of multiplying to “fill the earth” with God's image and goodness (Genesis 1:28), humans have opted to “fill the earth with violence” (Genesis 6:11). If “the one who sows to the flesh will from the flesh reap corruption” (Galatians 6:8), then humanity's become a gambler on the carnal slots, which always pay out their poison. God sees that “sin had reached its climax, ruling from the depths of the human soul and filling the breadth of the earth.”⁹⁶ As a result, the earth itself is polluted, corrupted, ruined (Genesis 6:13). Our savagery spreads to other creatures, who react to our beastliness by becoming beastlier; our behavior hurts the health of the land, as we pollute it and treat it like garbage.⁹⁷ The earth becomes unfit for God's purposes for it.⁹⁸

The other Sunday, facing the curse already on the ground, we read Lamech's dear wish for “comfort from our making and the agony of our hands” (Genesis 5:29). Now, those same three Hebrew words crop up again, in a “poetic interweaving of linguistic irony.”⁹⁹ Lamech's root for 'comfort' can also form a word for 'being sorry.' And God is sorry, remorseful, regarding his 'making' humans who produce agony or grief, not for our hands, but for his very heart (Genesis 6:6).¹⁰⁰ Now, God is all-knowing. “God sees what will happen many generations in the future as if it had already happened.”¹⁰¹ In fact, before God made one molecule of the universe, he knew each and every deed, word, or thought – good or bad – that would take place in his creation. So nothing catches God by surprise. God is sovereign and has no second thoughts. “God is incomprehensible and immeasurable, for whatever it is that we're able to know or sense about God..., he is by many degrees far better.”¹⁰² Nothing harms or shocks him or disturbs him, because “God always abides in his own glory.”¹⁰³ But for us to apprehend this God beyond comprehension, “the Bible uses words of God as if he possessed human passions.”¹⁰⁴ It may not be speaking literally, but it's definitely speaking seriously.

At the mind-boggling interface of the timeless God and our time and space, the only way we can begin to understand is to imagine God heartbroken, to imagine God disturbed, to imagine God disgusted. Only by such impassioned pictures can we reach out to the impassible God. As heavy as the curse weighs on the ground of this globe, so heavy does the evil of earthlings weigh on the mind of their Maker. As bitter and piercing as all the thorns and thistles, such are the arrows of our sins shot into the tenderness of God's purity. More noxious and rotting than the foulest decay to us is the stench which the corruption of creation causes its Creator. The relentlessly imaginative devisings of the human heart are what frustrate the holy heart of Heaven (Genesis 6:5-6).¹⁰⁵ These are agonies of a Father whose children torch the neighborhood and throw away their lives.¹⁰⁶

No wonder God's portrayed this way, to help us understand “the bitterness of our sins.”¹⁰⁷ So God is said to regret his creation, and resolves: “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the earth – man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heaven – for I am sorry that I made them” (Genesis 6:7). The cost of our dominion over creation is that they share the consequences for our corruption. Since all flesh had “ruined the earth in God's sight” (Genesis 6:11), God will therefore “ruin both them and the earth” (Genesis 6:13).¹⁰⁸ It's “both devastating and undeniably just.”¹⁰⁹ Because human evil had so thoroughly infected earth, the only remedy yet available was a system reboot, wiping things clean.¹¹⁰ ...Yet available.

But in the fullness of time, God would show a fuller solution to human evil, and that was to send forth his Son. God the Son took on human flesh, human blood, a human heart, a human will. And that will never once swayed toward evil. Here was a Son of God who never called evil good or good evil. Here was a Son of God who did not take as he chose, but always receives what his Father gives. Here was a Son of God who came to redeem the sons and daughters of humanity, offering liberty from first to last. Here was a Son of God whose giant goodness worked mighty works on the earth.

Embracing human feelings, he made visible and palpable the grief of God over sin. As he taught us stubborn crowds, “he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart” (Mark 3:5). But in the end, over the very city whose unbelief cried for judgment, he wept hot tears of sorrow (Luke 19:41-44). Facing the darkest depths of human evil, his “soul was very sorrowful, even to death” (Mark 14:34). The Son of God offered his life to raise those who had fallen. Only through an agony shared somehow between God and man could the perfect likeness of God in creation take shape, and so “surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4). Now that, in God's sight, is a hero! He embraced our ruin and devastation, opening his heart to be pierced so sharply. He stretched all human evil from first to last on the length and the width of his cross, excruciatingly bearing it all, to blot out, not human life, but human sin (Psalm 51:9).

“Repent, therefore..., that your sins may be blotted out” (Acts 3:19)! And let us not, by further sin, “grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom we were sealed for the day of redemption” (Ephesians 4:30). “Take care, brothers and sisters, lest there be in any of you an evil and faithless heart” like the hearts of the failed heroes (Hebrews 3:12), and “do not devise evil in your hearts against one another” (Zechariah 8:17). “Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed, and make yourselves a new heart” this day (Ezekiel 18:11), that you may “love the Lord your God with all your heart..., and your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27). This is not easy. “The righteous one falls seven times – and rises again” (Proverbs 24:16). In so rising again, “the one who overcomes will be clothed thus in white garments” for an eternal golden age ahead; “and I will never,” says this true Son of God, “never blot his name out of the book of life” (Revelation 3:5). Hallelujah! Amen.