Is It Over?

A world so mad and dark as to break its Maker's heart. One man swept off his feet in the dance of grace and justice. An ark built big and slow, a warning falling on the world's deaf ears, a zoo zooming to the depths of the storehouse. Drip. Drop. Liquid violence surging from every direction, the earth's features erased and buried, creation crumbling to corruption. Creation is, as it were, undone, unmade. That's where we left Noah, his seven relatives, and his animal wards, adrift upon “the great mass of limitless waters..., only death on all sides.”¹ Day after day the rains fell. The ark was the lone bastion of cosmos in the chaos, surrounded by the open grave of all creation, wrapped up in twilight and gloom, imprisoned with a “turbulent and restless confinement.”²

By day thirty-nine of the downpour, I wonder if Noah was keeping both his count and his grip. I wonder if he doubted the rains would ever stop or that God was still in control. I wonder if he wondered if the ark was just a tomb and he a walking dead man, “like those whom you remember no more, for they were cut off from your hand” (Psalm 88:5). But then, after the fortieth night of rain, “God remembered Noah and all the living things and all the animals that were with him in the ark” (Genesis 8:1). This right here is “the turning point in the narrative,” the hinge on which it all turns.³ It's not that God had ever lost track of Noah. But God's attention now visibly centers on Noah for action, for mercy, for the salvation of this compendium of critters and kin.

Therefore, because God remembered them, “the fountains of the deep and the sluice-gates of the heavens were closed, and the rain from the heavens was restrained” (Genesis 8:2). All the sources of water's input into the world are here cut off by God's command. From inside the ark, Noah no longer hears the hammering overhead. He may not see, but his ears tell him the storm's run its course. He knows God has closed the abyss and sky, and it can only mean he's not forgotten, he's not forsaken, but that God remembers him after all!⁴ What's more, “God made a wind pass over the earth” so that “the waters subsided” (Genesis 8:1), and “the waters receded from the earth, retreating; and the waters decreased at the end of 150 days” (Genesis 8:2-3), “and the waters came to be retreating until the tenth month” (Genesis 8:5). Four verbs for the water ratchet up the tension, each new verb pushing off hope further from the one before it.⁵ If the description seems tedious, well, it's meant to.

The flood rewound the Bible back to its second verse, remember, when “darkness was over the face of the deep” (Genesis 1:2). But now God remembers Noah, and in order to redeem his world by and from the waters, he flips the switch, “puts the flood process into reverse,” and so creation begins all over again.⁶ In Genesis 1, it began with “the Spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2), and since in Hebrew 'spirit' equals 'wind,' “God made a wind” – or, his Spirit' – “pass over the earth” (Genesis 8:1). Under the outward appearance of a stiff wind, “the flood was made to subside by the invisible power of the Divine Spirit,”⁷ “God's life-bringer himself,”⁸ taming the great waters. As God separated light from darkness (Genesis 1:4), so now again God restores day and night by clearing away the clouds (Genesis 8:2). As God separated waters below from waters above (Genesis 1:7), so now God shuts up the deep below and the sky above (Genesis 8:2).

The next step in the creation week is where the waters are gathered, withdrawn, to “let the dry land appear” (Genesis 1:9). That's the bit that's taking so long to recapitulate. We're waiting, Noah is waiting, for the land to appear and be dry, because only then can we see plants cover the land, and animal life and human life get out on the land. Noah is waiting patiently as he can for God to remake the world in this story of new creation, this slow-mo preview of Easter morning.⁹ He drifts. He waits. And this day is taking dozens and dozens of days.

Until one day, Noah feels the drifting stop, maybe with a bump. The ark's settled ever-so-gently onto something beneath it. Sloshing has become stability.¹⁰ “The ark rested” (Genesis 8:4). Which is funny, because that's what Noah's name means: 'rest.' The ark has just 'noahed' on the mountains.¹¹ Noah's hunted his namesake all his life, and never found it until now, this rest. It's a day certainly worth celebrating, “in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month” (Genesis 8:4), a time Israel will later celebrate as the Feast of Booths commemorating God's providential care for them in the perilous wilderness (Leviticus 23:34).¹²

In one pagan tradition, the boat landed on Mount Nimush,¹³ an impressive mountain in northeast Iraq so close to the Iranian border,¹⁴ and in biblical times nicely within reach of the Assyrians.¹⁵ But we've also found an ancient Babylonian map of the world, showing known reality surrounded by an ocean beyond which were eight distant mountains, “the furthest outposts of human imagination,” and only in recent years have scholars realized that the map claims the ark is on one of those mountains (not Mt. Nimush!), across the waters from a region it calls 'Urashtu.'¹⁶ That's how Babylonians spelled 'Urartu,' a region in the Armenian highlands bridging eastern Turkey and northwest Iran.¹⁷ And in Hebrew, they pronounced that name as 'Ararat.' Genesis agrees, at least in part, with that old Babylonian map: Noah's “ark rested... on the mountains of Ararat” (Genesis 8:4).

Some Jews later took 'Ararat' as the name of a particular mountain “on the dark mainland of Phrygia.”¹⁸ A different Jewish tradition named the mountain 'Lubar,'¹⁹ from an Akkadian word meaning 'ancient' or 'eastern.'²⁰ And still another tradition – both Jewish and Babylonian – clarified that the ark landed in the Qardu range,²¹ today called Mount Judi, in southeast Turkey just above the Syrian border.²² In the centuries before Jesus was born, we hear claims that there “a portion of the vessel still survives,”²³ that “relics of the timber were for long preserved,”²⁴ that people “carry off portions of the bitumen” to “use as talismans.”²⁵ Anyway, wherever exactly the ark is supposed to have ended up, I don't know. But if the ark started anywhere close to where Atrahasis' boat did in some stories, then the ark has drifted over four hundred miles from the ruins of all Noah called home. But Noah has no way of knowing that yet; he can only hope he's where God wants him to be.²⁶

In the pagan stories, there's a symmetry: the rain lasts seven days, the boat lands, then Atrahasis waits seven days before what comes next.²⁷ Genesis doesn't land the ark immediately, but it does want some symmetry, so after the ark rests, and then – over two more uneventful months later – the other mountaintops poke up into visibility (Genesis 8:4-5), then Noah begins to count down the same number of days that the storm of judgment lasted. But you have to figure Noah and his family were getting pretty antsy. With judgment accomplished, the water doesn't seem to be... doing... anything; what they're enduring, not even moving any more, feels pointless now, unproductive, “anticlimactic and frustrating.”²⁸ And even if Noah's mastered the art of patience in “putting up with confinement in the ark through faith in God,”²⁹ have his sons, his daughters-in-law, his wife? They expect Noah to have all the answers, as the man who heard God's saving message, as their only hotline to heaven. And yet, try as he might, Noah can come up with nothing but a dial-tone. For “from the day when Noah entered the ark, nothing was said to him, nothing was revealed to him, and he saw no ray of grace shining, but he clung only to the promise he had received.”³⁰ And so day by day, as his family complains, as the kids grumble, as the animals moan and groan, as all eyes and ears are on him, Noah has only the reassurance of his own faith and his own hope to offer them. It must feel pretty thin assurance indeed.

In the pagan stories, no sooner have the rains stopped than a god starts yapping, telling Atrahasis to chop an opening in the roof.³¹ So that's just what Atrahasis does: “I heeded the words of Ea, my great lord and advisor: I took a wooden spade and a copper axe, I made a window at the top above me,”³² just like in the Sumerian story “Ziusudra then drilled an opening in the big boat.”³³ In another version, “I opened an air vent, and the sunshine fell on my cheek; I fell to my knees and sat weeping, the tears streaming down my cheek.”³⁴ And much the same, “at the end of forty days, Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made” (Genesis 8:6). But the order is opposite. In the pagan story, first Atrahasis opens the vent, then Atrahasis sees other mountains, and only then does Atrahasis' boat land on one of them.³⁵ In Genesis, first Noah's ark rests on one mountain, then mountaintops become visible, and only at the end does Noah open the window. Pagans could credit Atrahasis' crew with steering and rowing for land, but Noah couldn't take credit for reaching land; he couldn't even see it.

But now, with the opening of the window, it's possible for Noah to look out and see the world. What must the stars look like at night through Noah's window, with the clouds cleared away and not an ounce of light pollution on the earth? By them, maybe Noah can calculate how far he's gone now, and where he might be.³⁶ And by day Noah's long haul of faith meets that first glimmer of sight, even from afar, like Moses sighting the promised land from Pisgah (Deuteronomy 34:1-3). I wonder if, like his pagan doppelgänger Atrahasis, Noah knelt and wept at the sight. By one ancient Jewish calculation, Noah opened his window on the tenth day of the eleventh month, “the first day of the week” – a Sunday, fitting for faith becoming sight.³⁷ But where Moses also heard the LORD, Noah hears only wind, disappointingly discerning no divine whisper.³⁸

The prophet needs a prophet of his own, a messenger from the skies. And as he finds no angels astride the ocean, he'll have to scheme something a smidge more scientific.³⁹ He proposes to view vicariously through feathered friends, “extending his sense of the world” to see and know more than he could unaided.⁴⁰ It was common practice in olden days for sailors to use birds to help them “judge the nearness and direction of land.”⁴¹ So it's naturally part of the pagan flood stories, too. In one, Atrahasis explains, “I released a dove, strong of wings. She went forth and came back, exhausted her wings. I did this again and released a crane.”⁴² But there the text breaks off, so we don't fully know what happened next. In another version, though, he says that “when the seventh day arrived, I brought out a dove, releasing it. Off went the dove, and no resting place appeared to it, and it turned back to me. I brought out a swallow, releasing it. Off went the swallow, and no resting place appeared to it, and it turned back to me. I brought out a raven, releasing it. Off went my raven, and noticed the recession of the water. It was gobbling, hopping, jigging; it did not return to me.”⁴³

Like those stories, Genesis tells of Noah sending out birds, but “the details... differ entirely.”⁴⁴ In all the pagan stories, the dove is the consistent opening move, the pawn with no hope of reaching the other side of the board; and in at least the second pagan story, the raven is the ultimate hero, the beloved bird who heralds hope. The Bible puts things the exact other way around. The raven is a ritually unclean bird (Leviticus 11:15), a satisfied denizen of fallen cities (Isaiah 34:11). It's better suited for the first test, not the last.

So at the end of the forty days, Noah “sent forth a raven” (Genesis 8:7). Ravens have an impressive sense of smell, by bird standards, and had a reputation for being gifted in communication.⁴⁵ They're one of the smartest birds out there, full of savvy and spunk.⁴⁶ But they're highly opportunistic scavengers quite happy to eat carrion.⁴⁷ So perhaps “the raven was able to land on a cadaver,”⁴⁸ feasting merrily on the fruits of God's judgment. Because it could adapt so well to the flooded world, “as an intelligence agent for Noah's needs, the raven was limited.”⁴⁹ It “separated itself from the communion of the ark before time,”⁵⁰ “going out and returning until the waters were dried up from the earth” (Genesis 8:7). Forsaking the shelter and its own mate still housed therein, the raven “rejoiced in the open sky and now paid no attention to Noah,”⁵¹ despite owing its very life to Noah's hospitality. He can watch its aerial acrobatics day after day, but since ravens were back then considered “omens of rain” or even “portents of death and disaster,” its obnoxious caw might feel foreboding.⁵²

And so, after watching the raven, Noah made his next move: “He sent forth a dove from him” (Genesis 8:8). Unlike the raven, the dove is a ritually clean bird (Leviticus 1:14), “a tame yet friendly bird characterized by great gentleness.”⁵³ It's a bird beautiful in Israelite eyes (Song of Songs 1:15), very tender and sensitive, famed for its soulful moaning (Nahum 2:7). Jesus uses the dove to illustrate simplicity and purity (Matthew 10:16), so no wonder one early Christian described Noah's dove as “a sign of pure life.”⁵⁴ From here on out, that's Noah's bird, and he sends it out – according to one Jewish retelling – always on a Sunday each time.⁵⁵ In sending the dove, Noah hopes “to see if the waters had lightened from the face of the ground” (Genesis 8:8), “that he might know in his heart whether firm land had yet appeared.”⁵⁶

By this point, the mountain peaks might have been visible, but they probably remained “covered by a muddy slime; hence the dove was neither able to perch anywhere nor successful in finding food to its liking.”⁵⁷ “The dove found no resting place for the sole of her foot” (Genesis 8:9). The Hebrew word for 'resting place' is just one letter tacked on the front of Noah's own name. Out in the floody, muddy world, the dove – unlike the ark – finds no 'manoah.'⁵⁸ And so she flies back up to the man Noah she knows, all the way up “to the ark” (Genesis 8:9).

One late pagan version agrees, with him sending out birds who “found neither food nor a place to rest, and they returned to the ship.”⁵⁹ In response, Noah “sent out his hand, and he took her” (Genesis 8:9). But where Adam and Eve sent out their hands and took one of God's creatures by stealing, Noah sends out his hand and takes one of God's creatures for sanctuary, an act of kindness and protection, with the dove – as one poet put it – “sinking weary and hungry into the holy man's hands.”⁶⁰ It's a tender moment of gentleness and care on Noah's part, cradling the exhausted bird; so “he brought her to himself into the ark” (Genesis 8:9).

After that, what's Noah to do? “He waited another seven days,” counting down before rechecking his results, and then “he again sent forth the dove out of the ark” (Genesis 8:10), “so that he might know if the great waters had ceased.”⁶¹ All day long, Noah wonders what the results of this new experiment will be. Will it be a mere repeat of last week? Will it be another uninspiring Sunday? “The dove came to him in the evening,” same as before. But “behold!” What's that dove got? In one pagan version, the birds here “returned with claws covered with mud,”⁶² but in Genesis the focus is on “an olive leaf... in her mouth!” (Genesis 8:11). It clearly isn't a loose twig she found floating on the water; it was “freshly plucked,” had been photosynthesizing just this morning.⁶³ Where the Bible gives us Noah's point of view, that medieval poet tried following the dove, how “she flew widely until, exulting in freedom, she found a fair resting place and then stepped with her feet on a branch; she rejoiced contented... She shook her feathers, went flying back again with her offering, brought the sailor a single twig of an olive tree, a green shoot.”⁶⁴ Like Joshua and Caleb marching home to Moses after forty days with a branch of grapes from the promised land (Numbers 13:23), so does the dove proudly present Noah with this greenery from the promised world,⁶⁵ “a sign of her great message.”⁶⁶

Unlike the pagan tales where it's the bird who 'sees' and knows the world's situation, here it's Noah who recognizes and interprets the dove's evidence and discerns the hand of God in it all.⁶⁷ Either this leaf came from a tree that grew miraculously during the flood itself, or else this was from the top branch of a tree that survived the flood and was flourishing again.⁶⁸ Olive trees don't really grow at altitudes above four thousand feet, so this living leaf is concrete evidence in Noah's own hand that “the waters had lightened from the earth” (Genesis 8:11), stranding the ark several thousand feet high and dry while life returns to the lower slopes.

Does that mean Noah can go out for his morning jog the next day? Not exactly; it's still quite the mudball. So Noah “waited for another seven days” (Genesis 8:12), to what some Jews calculated as “the first day of the twelfth month, on the first day of the week.”⁶⁹ Once Sunday morning rolled 'round, Noah “sent forth the dove” for the third time (Genesis 8:12). It flew off, silhouetted against the eastern sky. All through the day, Noah waited and wondered in anxious anticipation. If last Sunday the first signs of greenery, what now? Was their ordeal reaching its end? Could Noah be set free from his kids asking impatiently, “Is it over? Is it over?”

Hours went by, and the sun fell low toward the western horizon; I wonder if Noah had an angle that let him see the sunset. As daylight dwindled and died, there were no pecks at the window, no fluttering of feathers. Where was the dove? Elsewhere. Just as the pagan birds sent out the third time “did not return to the ship,”⁷⁰ so in Genesis the dove “did not again return to him any more” (Genesis 8:12). As the poet pictured it, “she found land, green groves; not gladly would she ever again show herself under the dark deck in the planked fortress when she had no need.”⁷¹ The dove had found a world that suited her, one growing soon suitable for all.

And, in time, “the waters were dried from off the earth.” The Bible tells us it was then “the six hundred and first year, at the head, on the first of the month” – in other words, by Noah's calendar, this was New Year's Day.⁷² And on that holiday, by his own reasoned choice, “Noah removed the covering from the ark” (Genesis 8:13). He unveils it, exposes it, opens it up in a new way to the world – a daring risk of vulnerability. A wave of fresh morning air blasts away the staleness, hitting Noah's lungs like electricity to an arrested heart. Sunlight flooded in, blazing through the formerly dim interior. Blinking and adjusting, Noah now has a 360-degree view for the first time. So “he looked, and behold! the face of the ground was dry!” (Genesis 8:13). The ground looks up at Noah, blinking back at him. It's been liberated. “The purification of the whole world had been achieved.”⁷³ This New Year's Day was “the new birthday of the world, reborn out of the waters of chaos.”⁷⁴

What Noah understood was that “for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). The rains had their time and their season. And so did the abatement of the waters – a long season, distressingly long. Just because God can create a world lickety-split, doesn't mean he'll redeem us on our schedule. The next time and season in God's plan may seem like it'll never arrive. The wait for salvation can be frustrating, boring, claustrophobia-inducing; it may feel anticlimactic and pointless and wasteful. But “the Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness” (2 Peter 3:9). There is – God has promised – a time also for the fountains to seal up, the sluice-gates to slam shut, the relieving breeze to blow, the land to dry off. Salvation does come. God does remember. And the long wait through stagnating waters is not wasteful. “It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD” (Lamentations 3:6). As one old saint said, “when God lets us endure some trial, he allows it to continue for as long as he knows we can endure it, so that he may grant us reward commensurate with our fortitude and give evidence of his characteristic love.”⁷⁵ “The LORD has remembered us; he will bless us” (Psalm 115:12).

To “fulfill all righteousness” (Matthew 3:15), our Lord followed his ancestor Noah to the waters of baptism. “And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open, and the Spirit descending on him like a dove” (Mark 1:10). This is one of the rare details mentioned in all four Gospels (Luke 3:22; Matthew 3:16; John 1:32). All four link the Holy Spirit at Jesus' baptism to the dove returning to rest on Noah with an olive branch in its mouth.⁷⁶ The Holy Spirit begins to rest on Jesus and never budges again: “it remained on him” (John 1:32), all the way to the cross and beyond.

So, from the early days through the Middle Ages, Christians always hunted a deeper meaning in the sequence of Noah's birds, even if we couldn't always agree on the details. For one great bishop of old, the raven symbolized sin, “whatever is cloudy and unclean and heedless,” being chased out of the believer's soul.⁷⁷ The dove first returns quickly because virtue is too pure to be at rest amid “the floods of worldly desires.”⁷⁸ The dove second is sent out to bring the olive branch as “a mark of reform.”⁷⁹ The dove is third sent out for good because a wise person offers his goodness as a gift to the whole world, “a common good.”⁸⁰

To another ancient teacher, the sequence of birds presents a portrait of spiritual growth: while the raven is an unfaithful disciple who meets temptation unsuccessfully and is lost to sin,⁸¹ the dove is a faithful disciple who, sent out first as an immature believer, rushes back to his teacher for “help and assistance,” as from Noah's hand; sent out second as a more mature disciple, he comes back with the fruit of good works to show, like the olive branch; and sent out third in full maturity, he's become so “independent of a teacher” that he no longer needs to return again.⁸² Perhaps such a disciple is ready to be a teacher, to make disciples (cf. Hebrews 5:12).

Others understood the birds as pictures of salvation history. For Martin Luther, the raven is Moses, sent out by God to convict consciences and correct conduct, but unable by his Law (or any morality or reason) to give life.⁸³ The first dove is then the prophets, sent out to announce in advance the hope of the gospel; they're justified by faith, even if they can't yet rest in it.⁸⁴ The second dove is the ministry from the apostles to now, sent out to preach the gospel in the present tense, with mouths full of olive branches of mercy, grace, and peace.⁸⁵ And the third dove is what we're waiting for, the coming flight “into another life” when words yield to truth itself.⁸⁶

For another medieval preacher, the raven is like those who rejected Christ when he came, left behind to wander the world as fleshly people, still “gaping at the carcasses of the old” ways; the first dove shows the apostles after Easter, given the Holy Spirit's power to forgive sins (and in the Christian life, this corresponds to turning through forgiveness from the impurity of ravens to the purity of doves); but whereas before Pentecost the apostles were afraid and sheltering, at Pentecost they're filled with the Spirit, sent out to boldly preach the gospel of peace to all nations and bring back a harvest like the second dove (and in the Christian life, this corresponds to confirmation, when the Spirit distributes spiritual gifts and empowers disciples to live for the gospel); and the third dove then comes at the end, when the Holy Spirit does his third gracious work by raising the dead and wrapping us up in Christ's own glory to reign eternally in a new creation.⁸⁷

And other ancient Christians took the birds as symbols of the life of grace. The raven is a believer who's led astray, either by the attractions of the world⁸⁸ or by the deceptions of false teaching.⁸⁹ But the dove is a believer who isn't led astray by such things. The first sending of the dove, when it can't find a resting place and returns soon, shows that we're purified by faith but have no rest in the present world,⁹⁰ so we spurn worldly delights, cling to the safe haven of the Church, and apply the grace we're given to righteous deeds.⁹¹ The second sending of the dove, when it brings back the olive branch, is a picture of Christians who minister to the world,⁹² preaching the gospel of peace, and with winsome words bringing back heretics and unbelievers “to the unity of communion by the mouth of the dove, as if by the kiss of peace.”⁹³ And the third and last sending of the dove, when it doesn't return, was taken by one old bishop as a picture of the end-times falling away,⁹⁴ but most took it as a picture of holy souls leaving this earthly life “for the free light of the heavenly fatherland,”⁹⁵ or else as the day of Christ's return when the saints as one will go forth for good to claim their rest in the kingdom.⁹⁶

Now, those are a lot of different quests for a deeper meaning. Scripture is a complicated, multifaceted thing; it's a living word with many senses, so that, by winging our way through its fathomless depths and infinite skies, “God... makes us wiser than the birds of the heavens” (Job 35:11). So if any of those pictures inspire you, if any of them fill you with hope, if any move you to be more faithful disciples yourselves, embrace that. “You see the water, you see the wood, you see the dove, and do you doubt the mystery?”⁹⁷

The other week, we saw how the flood was an advance picture of the truer flood, a baptism which drowns sin dead. But from the flood, through the wind of God's Spirit rushing over the waters, a clean world slowly arises. And just so, once we're born again, the Holy Spirit fills us in a new way; and through this power of water and the Spirit, God is working a new creation in us, in each of our lives. And “according to his promise, we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13).

To receive it, we, the Church, are to become the beautiful dove of Jesus our Beloved, the dove whose “voice is sweet” to him in praise, the dove whose “face is lovely” to him in holiness (Song of Songs 2:14). When we at last fly forth to him, he'll stretch out his loving hand, and ever so gently will he catch us and pull us to our wide home of freedom, drawing us to the bosom of light unending, calling us “his love, his dove, his perfect one” (Song of Songs 5:2). But in the meantime, each and every Sunday, the spiritual dove of grace and peace flies forth, bringing a harvest of heavenly gifts to those who will but wait on his ark in faith. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Waterworld

In these past weeks, we've been walking the world before the flood. It was a world filled with proud warriors and strong men (Genesis 6:4). It was also a world that broke God's heart (Genesis 6:5-6), on account of how widely evil had multiplied and metastasized through all flesh until the whole earth was corrupt, ruined (Genesis 6:11-12). And yet God found one healthy spot: a man named Noah. God favored him, graced him (Genesis 6:8). Noah was righteous in his ways, unblemished in his integrity, and walked with God like Enoch had (Genesis 6:9). And so God disclosed his plans to Noah, commanding him to build something unusual: a massive ark out of wood and reeds and bitumen, with very clear specifications, because this ark was going to be a foreshadowing of Christ's Church (Genesis 6:13). It was going to rescue man and beast alike at the end of the world. And so God waited patiently as Noah built his ark, years whizzing by (Genesis 6:22; 1 Peter 3:20). Noah bore witness, a preacher of righteousness (2 Peter 2:5), but even as the final days and hours counted down, none would follow. And so Noah entered the ark with his household and the grand zoo God had sent (Genesis 7:7-9, 13-15).  And then God sealed the door (Genesis 7:16). The hour was here.

We've been reading Genesis alongside other Middle Eastern stories about the flood – one scholar suggests that “probably some version of the story had been told for millennia,” since before there was even writing to write it down with.¹ These pagan versions of the story describe the flood as coming by darkness and storm, with the gods having a very open and visible role in the disaster: “A black cloud rose on the horizon; Adad the storm god was roaring inside it, Thunder and Lightning marched at the front, bearing his throne over mountains and plains.”² “Adad rode on the four winds, his mules...; the gale, the storm, the downpour blew for him, the wicked wind...”³ “All the evil winds, all stormy winds, gathered into one.”⁴ “The chariot of the gods was flashing, it was flooding, it was killing, it was threshing.”⁵ “Erra, god of war, ripped out the moorings; the dikes overflowed as Ninurta walked by.”⁶ “Anzu with his talons ripped apart the heavens.”⁷ “All that was bright turned dark. Like an ox he trampled on the land, and it shattered like a pot of clay. For a full day the wind blew, it stormed from the east and brought the flood that spread like war over the country.”⁸ “The Flood bellowed like a bull; like a screeching eagle the winds howled. The darkness was dense, there was no sun.”⁹

Now that's some storm! In comparison, Genesis is simple, sparse, stingy with the details, too concise to indulge our fancies.¹⁰ Goodness knows Israel's psalms and prophecies are littered with vivid pictures of God getting his hands dirty, riding in and dominating the scene like that; but in the Bible's flood story, the LORD doesn't ride in on his chariot, doesn't fly his clouds or fire his arrows, doesn't march through the land spewing forth his wrath. He's behind the flood (Genesis 6:17), but from the moment the flood gets going, he stays off-stage, unobtrusive, allowing things to play out.¹¹ And where the pagan stories are so obsessed with wind and darkness that any rain feels almost an afterthought, Genesis saves wind for the resolution (Genesis 8:1) and goes all in on the water.

“The sluice-gates of the heavens were opened, and rain fell upon the earth” (Genesis 7:12). Now, a sluice-gate was a kind of gate used to control waterflow out of an irrigation canal into a farmer's field; they'd usually be opened slowly and just a bit, to carefully measure out how much water the field needed. But now the great sluice-gates of the sky are thrown open, as it were, dumping their full force into the field of the world!¹² And as if that weren't enough, “all the fountains of the great deep burst open” (Genesis 7:11). It's bad enough that the rain is crashing down so out of control all at once, but the ocean beneath all things has come unglued. It isn't gently trickling upward, like a drippy spigot defying gravity. The springs are cracked, split, exploded!¹³

Some Jewish writers dramatized the flood so much that it started to sound like the other flood stories again, how God “threw clouds together and..., having covered the moon together with the stars and the crown of heaven all around, he thundered loudly, a terror to mortals, sending out hurricanes. All the storm winds were gathered together and all the springs of waters were released as the great cataracts were opened from heaven, and from the recesses of the earth and the endless abyss, measureless waters appeared, and the entire immense earth was covered.”¹⁴ Can you see that in your mind's eye?

Now, the pagan stories were all clear and unanimous how long this stormy, windy flood lasted for: “For six days and seven nights, the wind blew; the storm and the flood flattened the land.”¹⁵ “For seven days and seven nights came the downpour, the storm, the flood.”¹⁶ To which Genesis replies, “A week? Well, ain't that cute!” I mean, come on, we nearly tried that just this past week (and, sadly, some of our neighbors further north did experience pretty devastating flooding from it). No, the downpour of the True God beats the pants off the storms of the fraud-gods. Not just seven days and seven nights, but “rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights” (Genesis 7:12), “and the flood continued forty days on the earth” (Genesis 7:17). Ever after, the Bible measures out “sadder events” of trial and testing in forties,¹⁷ like Moses doing penance for Israel “forty days and forty nights” (Deuteronomy 9:18), Goliath taunting Israel daily “for forty days” (1 Samuel 17:16), Ezekiel symbolizing Judah's downfall for “forty days” (Ezekiel 4:6), and of course Jesus “fasting forty days and forty nights” in the desert (Matthew 4:2). This downpour of rain marks the world's first Lent.

The pagan stories, focusing so little on the rain, tell us nothing of the water but that, by the seventh day, “the flooded land was flat as a rooftop.”¹⁸ But Genesis tells us that, since humans “multiplied” evil on the earth (Genesis 6:5), it's fitting that “the waters multiplied” (Genesis 7:17); and since humans boasted of being “mighty men,” 'prevailers' (Genesis 6:4), it's fitting that “the waters prevailed and multiplied much on the earth” (Genesis 7:18).¹⁹ By the time in the pagan stories the storm clears, you could look around with your binoculars “fourteen peaks rising from the water.”²⁰ But the Bible, adding more and more water to the point of absurdity, says that “the waters prevailed so very much on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered; fifteen cubits upward the water prevailed, and the mountains were covered” (Genesis 7:19-20). “An immeasurable flood of water”²¹ – behold, “the terrible and strange water of God!”²²

As for what that does to what lives in the world, whereas Genesis leads with the animals and saves the people for last, the pagan stories are silent on the animals but very much want you to know that nobody outside the boat was having a very good time. “Annihilation came upon the people like a battle array. A brother did not see his brother, they were not recognizable in the destruction..., the offspring were like flies.”²³ And before the storm was done, “all the people had turned to clay.”²⁴ Like the Bible puts it, “all flesh expired that moved on the earth … He blotted out all existence that was on the face of the ground, from human to animal to creeping thing and to bird of the sky, and they were blotted out from the earth” (Genesis 7:21-23). So “the whole world was wiped out by the flood in accord with God's just judgment” in the face of its corruption.²⁵ But even so, Christians wondered if it was out of God's “characteristic love” that the rains lasted forty days – maybe that meant God slowed the flood down, because even though the people outside had no more chance to board the ark and save their lives, perhaps some might tread water long enough to repent and save their souls.²⁶

The pagan stories gloss over the animals and let us know, briefly, that the humans die in disaster. But you know who also has a hard time in the pagan flood? The gods who let it loose. Since pagan gods don't transcend the world, they aren't masters of what they've unleashed. The raging flood climbs so high that it corners them in real danger from their own stupidity.²⁷ “The gods feared the noise of the flood, they took refuge in heaven... The gods' heart was seized by fear; Anu was beside himself, while the gods, his sons, were huddled together before him.”²⁸ “The gods curled up like dogs in the cold.”²⁹ How different is that from the Bible, where Israel sang with gusto: “The LORD sits enthroned over the Flood!” (Psalm 29:10). Unlike the cowardly, cornered gods of Assyria and Babylon, the LORD God whom the Bible exalts is totally sovereign, totally master of this flood, and not a drop of water budges an inch without the knowing consent of the Almighty's will.

And in the wake of this downpour over which the LORD sits enthroned, the rest of creation has turned to clay, and so “only Noah was left, and those who were with him in the ark” (Genesis 7:23). God “delivered righteous Noah from the flood in an ark.”³⁰ That much is pretty obvious. Less obvious is that God also saved Noah, not just from the flood, but by the flood (1 Peter 3:20). Early Christians marveled at “the flood that saved Noah,”³¹ teaching that “the water of the flood was salvific for those within the ark,”³² all of whom “enjoy the salvation that comes through faith and water.”³³ The flood is “an act of salvation toward humanity” by tearing down a world that was too ruined to support humanity's reason for being; only through the flood can humanity thrive.³⁴

That's how Noah is saved, but and everyone and everything else that lives is defined here as “those who were with him in the ark” (Genesis 7:23). Noah is the anti-Jonah: where the sailors in the boat couldn't be safe until Jonah was tossed overboard (Jonah 1:15), those in the ark can only be safe because Noah, who found grace in God's sight, is in there as the reason for the ark's salvation (Genesis 6:8). To Noah, as was said to Paul, “God has granted you all those who sail with you,” who are saved for his sake (Acts 27:24).³⁵

The Bible tells us next to nothing about what's going on in the ark, what it's like in there. Readers of Genesis have asked a whole lot of questions, like “how could they have survived without fresh air?”, or “where they got their supply of drinking water from,” or “how did he put up with the stench?”³⁶ The Bible contentedly leaves it to our imaginations. It doesn't even tell us, as some readers speculated, that it was a rough ride, “battered by many raging waves and swimming under the impact of the winds.”³⁷ Genesis just says that, as the waters grew, they “bore up the ark, and it rose high above the earth” (Genesis 7:17). The very same waters that destroy the world exalt Noah above the earth, an image of Jesus who says, “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). And by being with him, so too “the Church is raised on high” by the floods of this world, floods of tribulation and persecution and woe which only serve to lift the Church up, up, up.³⁸

As the waters prevailed and multiplied still more, “the ark moved around on the face of the waters” (Genesis 7:18). The ark walks on water, dances on the face of the flood. Unable to stay still, the ark is speedily adrift, “steered not by human prudence but by divine providence.”³⁹ Throughout this flood, those on the ark have no control where they're being taken; but God protects them above the flood and uses it to move them where he wills. So often God employs frightful things to move us where we have no power to reach ourselves.

“And the waters prevailed on the earth one hundred and fifty days” (Genesis 7:24). From the dates in the text, we know this has to include the forty days of rain. But then beyond those forty days, there's another 110 days of the waters being at flood level, with no way to notice that they're gently easing off (Genesis 8:3).⁴⁰ Through it all, this long season, “all they can do is wait and hope,” this remnant left in the ark.⁴¹ And we'll join them in a couple weeks. But for now, what is this flood about? What does God want us to see in this story?

What's happening here is that the story of creation from chapter 1 is being watched on rewind mode. Have you noticed how the way creatures are described in these chapters is in the same language as when they were first made (Genesis 1:20-26)?⁴² But now they're being unmade, losing their breath of life (Genesis 7:21-23). During creation, God ordered the water to stay in just part of the world “and let dry land appear” (Genesis 1:9). Now the dry land disappears, and water fills all the places. Earlier still in creation, God “separated the waters that were under the firmament from the waters that were above the firmament” (Genesis 1:7). But with the sluice-gates of heaven and the springs of the great deep both open, these waters from above and below join and mingle and lose their God-given separation (Genesis 7:11). Still earlier in creation, God “separated the light from the darkness” (Genesis 1:4), before which “the earth was formless and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep” (Genesis 1:2). And the flood brings us right back there. That's what's outside the ark: a “watery wilderness,”⁴³ plunged back into “the primeval night.”⁴⁴ In this 150 days, the flood has “returned the whole world to a state of fluid chaos,” rewound things all the way back to the Bible's very second verse.⁴⁵

This is an “unmaking of the order of creation.”⁴⁶ And as this comes undone, the ark is the only ordered creation left. The ark – which, remember, foreshadowed the Church – was said by one ancient Jew to be “carrying the universe” here.⁴⁷ The other stories picture the ark as totally dark amidst the swirling waters, an image “unmistakably symbolic of the womb.”⁴⁸ In contracting to the ark, creation has returned to an embryonic state. But the obvious reason was so that it could have a new lease on life. One early Christian saw that the flood's “purpose was..., by means of washing, to restore the world, which was completely soiled, to its pristine cleanliness.”⁴⁹ The flooded world, this watery undoing of creation, is in “a state of useful formlessness,”⁵⁰ one ready and primed for “reshaping and refashioning it and returning it to its pristine form.”⁵¹ Only on the other side of that great refashioning can there be “a new beginning to the world,” a creation born again.⁵²

And so hidden under the story of the flood, God has written “the mystery of redeemed mankind.”⁵³ No sooner in the Bible does the Apostle Peter mention the flood, the time when “eight persons were saved through water,” than he adds these shocking words: “Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you” (1 Peter 3:21). Open your eyes, and it's obvious that “in the flood..., already at that time there was a figure of baptism.”⁵⁴ The flood, uncreating the world by water so that it could be remade, was in effect “the baptism of the world.”⁵⁵ But the flood of Noah was the symbol; it's baptism that's the substance, the real deal, the thing the flood meant.⁵⁶

When early Christians read about this flood, they saw there “the mystery of holy baptism, in which all human sins are abolished through water,”⁵⁷ “a flood... in which all sins are washed away.”⁵⁸ And that's biblical. It's why Ananias told Saul to “be baptized and wash away your sins” (Acts 22:16), why Peter told the crowds to “be baptized, every one of you..., for the forgiveness of your sins” (Acts 2:38). So “in the baptism of water is received the remission of sins.”⁵⁹ Now, obviously, any mere bath is just “a removal of dirt from the body,” like Peter says (1 Peter 3:21). But Paul says Christ aims to sanctify his Church through “cleansing her by the washing of water with the word” (Ephesians 5:26). That's Jesus' word, “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). Then the almighty grace of God showers down from the sluice-gates of heaven and uses the washing of water to blot out sin. And “as long as Christians are being baptized..., the ark appears to be floating on the waves..., being cleansed by baptism as by the flood.”⁶⁰

Paul describes being “buried with Christ by baptism into death” (Romans 6:4). “You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me... The waters closed in over me to take my life; the deep surrounded me” (Jonah 2:3-5). And that's what baptism is: drowning, dying, to destroy the old self, the old world, the old humanity, “in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing,” as Paul puts it (Romans 6:6).⁶¹ After all, “what is the flood,” one old saint asked, “except where sin dies?”⁶² In baptism, Jesus holds the old you, the 'body of sin,' underwater until the bubbles just ain't comin' up any more.

It's baptism Paul means when he says that “God our Savior... saved us... by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:4-5). We're “regenerated by Christ through water and faith,”⁶³ with the flood having come beforehand to “show what restoration takes place in baptism,”⁶⁴ “separating us from the world, lifting us to a new heavenly position.”⁶⁵ On the other side of uncreation comes “creation reborn and cleansed from sin.”⁶⁶ If the flood forced creation back into its womb, then “by the grace of the saving waters,” we too can receive “a second birth,”⁶⁷ being “born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3). That's why, just like the world was only flooded once, just like Jesus only died and rose again once, we can only be baptized once.⁶⁸ And so, as with the flood, that's how we come up from that one baptism: “The old has passed away; behold, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

And that's the gift Jesus brought you. He suffered and died on the cross, which he called “the baptism with which I am baptized” (Mark 10:38), so that his death could sum up the entirety of the flood. The fountain of his heart burst like the great deep, the sluice-gate in his side rained forth grace, and he baptizes us into his death, flooding away sin, drowning our former self, birthing us anew in the waters of salvation. If you're baptized, you've been through that flood, are going through that saving flood even still – thanks be to God! And now, as we journey on those waters, with all the world drowned to us and us drowned to the world (Galatians 6:14), survivors are few. “But the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13), for “many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it” (Song of Songs 8:7). If you want to come through the flood with flying colors, just become love – love as it lives can't be drowned, no matter how many days the rains fall. May this great baptism with which we've been baptized make us all love, a love that stays clean from sin. Let all former things, all corruptible things, be swept away; but let life and love in Christ remain, a new creation. Amen.

Patient God, Patient Man

In these last few weeks, we've been exploring the Bible's account of a world gone mad, so consumed with evil as to break the heart of God. And in the midst of that world, when all sorts of boundaries were starting to get crossed, there was something God said: “My spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be one hundred and twenty years” (Genesis 6:3). Now, one way to understand that is that God is emphasizing a cap on the human lifespan: any given human being has, at most, 120 years to live.¹ But another way to read it, and what used to be the more popular way, is as setting a collective lifespan for that generation of humanity. In a world littered with evil, God would effectively assign humanity an expiration date, “the span of 120 years.”²

Of course, he wouldn't have to wait. The moment he saw that the human heart was evil, he could have sent us a judgment without so much as a second's delay. But if there's one thing that's surprisingly true of the God of the Bible, it's that he's incredibly, awesomely patient, even in the face of our greatest horrors. That's just who God is, “the One Who Is Patient.”³ One early Christian marveled how “long has he... allowed the deserving as well as the undeserving to enjoy the benefits of the seasons, the services of the elements, and the gifts of all creation. He endures ungrateful peoples who worship the trifles fashioned by their skill..., who persecute his name and his children, and who – in their lewdness, their greed, their godlessness and depravity – grow worse from day to day. By his patience, he hopes to draw them to himself.”⁴ Now, the man who said that got it from his Bible, where he read in one of Peter's letters: “the Lord is... patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9); and in the prophets: “As I live, declares the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live” (Ezekiel 33:11).

That's the God we're meeting in this story in Genesis: a God who's bending over backwards to offer mercy, to give people every conceivable chance to turn around. “Thus the Lord gave space for repentance because he wanted more to forgive than to punish.”⁵ That's always why God is kind and gentle and forbearing toward us: “God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance” (Romans 2:5). “Nothing, after all, so gladdens him as our conversion and our reverting from evil to virtue.”⁶ And so “for the time being, he suffers men to stray and to fail in duty even to himself while he remains just, gentle, and patient.”⁷ “It is not, in fact, day by day that God vents his wrath, despite sins being committed.”⁸ Really, God “punishes very few sins in this world,”⁹ said Saint Augustine, who added beautifully that “the reason many things are kept for the judgment while some are judged here and now is in order that those whose cases are deferred may fear and be converted. For God loves saving, not condemning, and therefore he is patient with bad people in order to make good people out of bad people.”¹⁰

For all the generations since Adam, then, God “showed his forbearance, for each generation was insolent before him.”¹¹ But especially, as the Apostle Peter tells us, “God's patience waited in the days of Noah while the ark was being built” (1 Peter 3:20). How long was that? Genesis will tell us “Noah was a son of six hundred years when the flood of waters came on the earth” (Genesis 7:6), so when did he tell Noah to build the ark? Many readers figured God made his decree “in the 480th year of Noah's life” that “their days were determined at 120 years until the time of the waters of the flood,”¹² but others said in Noah's five hundredth year.¹³ The interesting thing is, up to that time, Noah was a bachelor, a celibate. Only “after Noah was five hundred years old” did he “father Shem and Ham and Japheth” (Genesis 5:32), being around 503 when Shem was born (Genesis 11:10). So when God tells him the ark will hold “you and your sons and your wife and your sons' wives” (Genesis 6:18), Noah doesn't have those yet; now he knows he needs to get them!¹⁴

Either way, both logistically and from this reading, the ark must have “taken a hundred years to build.”¹⁵ Thus God “purposely delayed, granting a reprieve for repentance” to the people of Noah's era.¹⁶ God “provided them with such a lengthy period of time in his wish that they might come to their senses.”¹⁷ And so Scripture sums up this whole century of Noah's life in the words: “According to all that God commanded him, so he did” (Genesis 6:22). The New Testament adds that Noah “constructed the ark... by faith,” believing what God had revealed to him, and was “moved by fear,” or better put, by caution or by reverence (Hebrews 11:7).

Now, here we find a big difference between the Bible's story and the pagan stories of the flood, which we began to compare last week. In the pagan stories, their stand-in for Noah, Atra-hasis, wants to know first how he can clear this big boat-building project with his city, its elders, and the general crowd.¹⁸ So his god Ea, who warns him secretly about the flood another god named Enlil has planned, gives Atra-hasis a very cleverly worded reply that has a double and even a triple meaning.¹⁹ Each and every phrase can be taken in different ways which add up to very different messages.²⁰ In one message, Atra-hasis warns his people that Enlil has rejected humanity, so the land will soon be uninhabitable because Enlil will send darkness and heavy rain, a harvest of death.²¹ But this warning is veiled in riddles and rare words; few would assume that's what he means.²² Because what he seems to say is much more positive: that Enlil is banishing Atra-hasis alone due to some divine drama, so he'll go live with Ea in the deep, hence his need of a boat; but Ea will shower the land with blessings of free food: birds and fish, cakes at dawn, all the wheat that's fit to eat.²³

As a result of this divinely endorsed trickery that's seemingly meant more to exploit than to save,²⁴ Atra-hasis gets the people of his city to show up promptly “at the first flood of daylight” to get to work on his boat, each group bringing a different supply to contribute or tool to wield.²⁵ No wonder that in the pagan tradition, building the boat takes not a century but is done within the week.²⁶

Again, what we read in the Bible is a very different story. Unlike Ea, God offers no cruel deceit, and Genesis says nothing about who helps Noah build the ark. Presumably his family, as they grow, and some have guessed that he could “employ other craftsmen” who only cared whether they got paid “their salary for their work.”²⁷ So imagine for a moment you're Noah's neighbor. He's always been a different sort, maybe not quite right in the head, you think. Then one day, he starts investing all his money into wood, reeds, bitumen, other supplies.²⁸ He traces out a giant rectangle on the ground, longer than a football field. And on it he starts to build something. Now, human nature says you're going to get curious, aren't you? And as years go by and word starts to travel, he might become a bit of a tourist attraction, the big thing you just have to go see for yourself, like one of those giant balls of twine in Kansas or Minnesota.

Early Christians remarked that Noah worked day by day “so that the very sight of the ark may also provide them in turn with an adequate reminder, and that no one would be unaware of the magnitude of the punishment due to be inflicted,” as evidenced by the size of this huge ark.²⁹ “Noah, pressing on with the work of the ark for a hundred years, showed by the daily performance of the work what was to happen to the world,”³⁰ for like the New Testament tells us, in building the ark, Noah implicitly “condemned the world” (Hebrews 11:7).

Later in the Old Testament, God sometimes asked his prophets to be really weird people: Isaiah “walked naked and barefoot for three years as a sign” (Isaiah 20:3), Hosea got into a dysfunctional marriage (Hosea 1:2-3; 3:1-3), Jeremiah wore a yoke like a cow (Jeremiah 27:2), and poor Ezekiel played with a toy model of Jerusalem in danger (Ezekiel 4:1-3), ate bread cooked over a manure fire (Ezekiel 4:9-17), and shaved his head and then chased his loose hair through the town streets, hacking at it with a sword (Ezekiel 5:1-2). The goal was to goad people into asking, “What are you doing?” (Ezekiel 12:9). Acting so questionably as to actually be questioned created an open invitation to give an answer, like Peter says: “Always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15). That's how it was for Noah: the reason why the ark was so big and time-consuming was “so that, on seeing the novelty of the construction..., people should ask the reason and..., hearing and learning the reason for it, people might desist from evildoing.”³¹

In time, though, maybe Noah figured coaxing the crowd's curiosity wasn't cutting it. Ancient Jewish readers fairly took Noah to be a “prophet” (Tobit 4:12), so they came to imagine God had told Noah to “proclaim repentance to all the peoples,”³² and so Noah publicly “urged them to come to a better frame of mind and amend their ways.”³³ The New Testament characterized Noah as “a herald,” i.e., a preacher, “of righteousness” (2 Peter 2:5), so early Christians agreed with their Jewish neighbors that “Noah proclaimed repentance,”³⁴ and as “the building of the ark went on for a hundred years,”³⁵ Noah “announced to them the flood during that one hundred years.”³⁶ The secrecy of Atra-hasis just wouldn't do. Noah got the word out plainly!

Maybe his message was short, sweet, pithy: “Come, God calls you to repentance,”³⁷ or “Repent, for a flood of waters will come upon you.”³⁸ Or maybe it was wordy: one writer put together a sermon for Noah, addressing “men sated with faithlessness, smitten with a great madness,” urging them to “stand in awe of the exceedingly great, fearless, heavenly Creator, imperishable God,” and to “entreat him... for life, cities, and the whole world..., for the time will come when the whole immense world of men perishing by waters will wail with a dread refrain... unless you propitiate God and repent as from now and... be guarded in holy life.”³⁹

Just imagine what might have been. Noah's bearing witness to the work of God, and I think it's safe to say his wife and kids believed him. But what if his brothers and sisters had, or his cousin, or his next-door neighbor? God later declares: “If a wicked person turns away from all his sins... and does what is just and right, he shall surely live; he shall not die” (Ezekiel 18:21). Anybody who believes Noah's preaching and changes his or her life can have a place aboard the ark and can voyage to the new world. “If they repent during this time, they will be saved from the wrath that is about to come upon them.”⁴⁰

But what if Noah's preaching had gone over as well as Jonah's in Nineveh? “If at any time I declare concerning a nation... that I will destroy it, and if that nation... turns from its evil,” God says, “I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it” (Jeremiah 18:7-8). If that's so for a nation, how much more a world? The whole point of Noah's preaching was “so that all may be saved,” not just a few.⁴¹ If the sight of the ark or the words of Noah sufficed to turn the world's hearts, that world “would not have failed to experience the loving-kindness of God.”⁴² For “if they had heard and repented, the flood would not have been sent.”⁴³ In fact, early Christians saw it was always God's preferred wish here that “he would not have to bring the flood upon them.”⁴⁴ And as for Noah, I dare say he'd have been happy 'wasting' a century of work if that spelled the salvation of the world.

But that's not how things played out, is it? This was, after all, “the world of the ungodly” (2 Peter 2:5). “They were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage” all century long, “and they were unaware,” in that they were unbelieving (Matthew 24:38-39). “For a hundred years while the ark was building and the wood was being wrought and the righteous man was calling aloud, there was no one who believed.”⁴⁵ “When they heard him, they sneered at him, each one, calling him demented, a man gone mad.”⁴⁶ “They all mocked and ridiculed him, treated him like an idiot, and abused him,”⁴⁷ “the eccentric building a contraption apparently as senseless as it was large.”⁴⁸ They “undoubtedly ridiculed it as the utmost stupidity,” a refuge of fools, cheats, losers.⁴⁹

Far worse than taunting and mocking Noah, though, is that they mocked the God in whose name Noah spoke. “Fools reviled him: 'Where is the flood?'”⁵⁰ For “all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation,” they scoffed (2 Peter 3:4). As the years went by and everything seemed normal, it seemed ridiculous that they'd be brought to account. Such stories appeared like fantasies of an overheated mind. They didn't see that “the Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness” (2 Peter 3:9).

In the face of such resistance, one Jewish writer imagined that Noah would've shaken the dust from his feet and left them to their own devices, that “he feared that they would murder him, and, with his wife and sons and his sons' wives, he quitted the country.”⁵¹ But that's not the Noah I see in Genesis – not least because once you start building an ark, it's not exactly easy to relocate it! No, while Noah understood the proverb that “whoever corrects a scoffer gets himself abuse, and he who reproves a wicked man incurs injury” (Proverbs 9:7), Noah also learned the gospel precept that “this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly” (1 Peter 2:19). James tells us: “as an example of suffering and patience, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord” (James 5:10). Noah was one of those. Maybe, as the decades distanced him from the fading memory of God's voice, he was himself tempted to doubt and surrender.⁵² But in faith, “for one hundred years he subdued his debating within his heart” and pressed on.⁵³ Noah persevered through that long and lonely century, no matter how many frustrating, humiliating, bruising days gave way to dark nights of crying with the psalmist, “How long, O God, is the foe to scoff?” (Psalm 74:10).

But even if Noah resisted doubting God's voice, was he ever tempted to doubt himself? Was he tormented by how little he had to show for it all? Noah “toiled to warn men year after year, and without any success except with his sons and their families.”⁵⁴ One hundred years of annual reports with a zero in the conversions column. Whatever 'church growth' strategies he employed, whatever 'missional restructuring' he tried, it did nothing. His discipleship groups couldn't manage to multiply. By the standards that get used in many churches today, and certainly some of the rhetoric I hear at our conferences, Noah was a fruitless failure, a pastor whose church is stuck at himself and seven others, and whose century of ministry gets as far as a treadmill.

And yet, at the end of that century on the treadmill, God has a word for Noah that might by that point come as a surprise: “I have seen that you are righteous before me in this generation” (Genesis 7:1). You see, “the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance,” on the quantifiable things and the observable habits, “but the LORD looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). God isn't measuring how many disciples Noah can claim credit for. God isn't timing how fast Noah's church is growing – or not growing. What matters isn't what comes of the work; what matters is that Noah is doing as God asked. Noah's is a faithful 'unfruitfulness' – a long, long, long faithful 'unfruitfulness.' And apparently, such a faithful 'unfruitfulness' is of greater glory in the eyes of God than so much of our flash and flurry of today. In the face of his statistical bankruptcy, some have recognized Noah as “the greatest prophet” in the entire Old Testament, apparent fruitlessness and all.⁵⁵

Now God speaks to Noah one last time before things get serious. For the first time, God gives Noah a concrete timeline: “In seven more days, I will cause rain on the earth forty days and forty nights” (Genesis 7:4). Noah obediently leads his seven followers aboard the ark (Genesis 7:5-7), followed by all those “clean beasts and unclean beasts and birds and everything that creeps on the ground” (Genesis 7:8). Without coercion, without stampede, “two by two they went to Noah into the ark” in an orderly and civilized fashion (Genesis 7:9).

This sounded a final boarding call for the human race. God “delayed yet seven more days for them, even after Noah and every creature had entered the ark, leaving the gate of the ark open to them.”⁵⁶ Noah, like God, waits in patience. Maybe Noah preached from the hatch of the ark, reminding them of just seven days left, “so that they might be stricken with the urgency of the situation,”⁵⁷ so that, “anxious in their fear of the imminent flood,” they might “beg for their forgiveness” and “renounce impiety and injustice.”⁵⁸ Noah could've borrowed words from Paul and others, asking them: “Do you presume on the riches of God's kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?” (Romans 2:4). “We should feel shame and stand in fear of God's patience, that it not turn into our judgment!”⁵⁹ “But because of your hard and impenitent heart, you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day when God's righteous judgment will be revealed” (Romans 2:5), a day that's now falling upon us. “Behold, now is the favorable time! Behold, now is the day of salvation!” (2 Corinthians 6:2). If a man or woman runs through the open door this week, leaving behind old ways and believing God's way of salvation, they'll be just as saved at the eleventh hour as the sons of Noah (Matthew 20:9-10). In fact, if the people as a whole were to turn to God right there and then, their repentance can in a day wipe out “an offense that lasted as many years as there were from the creation of the world,”⁶⁰ and so “could... have avoided experiencing the deluge.”⁶¹ What a depth of forgiveness was offered!

But the last hours and minutes are trickling by, and no one is running for the open door. What do you think Noah felt? Even in the pagan stories, while the workers feasted on beef and mutton and beer and ale,⁶² and while Atra-hasis' family on the ark feasted joyfully in ignorance of what was really going on, Atra-hasis grieved deeply: “He could not sit, he could not take his place, for his heart was broken, he was retching gall,” literally throwing up thinking of the devastation to come.⁶³ Do you think Noah had nightmares on the sixth night, dreaming of darkness and choking and gurgling and silence? After all, “neither the brothers nor the sisters of Noah were saved.”⁶⁴ Was Noah, like Christ, “grieved at their hardness of heart” (Mark 3:5). Did Noah, like Paul, feel “great sorrow and unceasing anguish” for his kinsmen who were being lost (Romans 9:2)? Ancient readers of Genesis imagined Noah might have wondered to himself “how much will I lament, how much will I weep in my wooden house, how many tears will I mingle with the waves?”⁶⁵

And though it grieves God's heart too, the countdown reaches its end. “None of my words will be delayed any longer, but the word that I speak will be performed” (Ezekiel 12:28). Judgment day is here. But the door is still open, and that makes the ark no safer than the ground. In early pagan tellings of the story, Atra-hasis just seals it himself from inside.⁶⁶ But that won't do: the outer gap between frame and door will leak. And so the later tale from Babylon has Atra-hasis make a deal with one of his lead engineers, Puzur-Enlil: as Atra-hasis seals the hatch from inside, Puzur-Enlil will do the same from outside, in return for which Atra-hasis will give him the palace with all its possessions.⁶⁷ Puzur-Enlil doesn't see how Atra-hasis' double-tongued words also mean “the palace for as long as its existence” – which won't be long now.⁶⁸ Puzur-Enlil is tricked into dying in Enlil's flood.⁶⁹

How different the Bible is! There's no Puzur-Enlil who has to be duped into sacrificing his life for Noah. Here there's a divine solution: once everyone is inside who's going to be, “the LORD shut him in” (Genesis 7:16). In these short words, we realize that Noah can build, Noah can stock, Noah can recruit, Noah can enter, but only God can make the ark completely safe.⁷⁰ God must be in control, or else there is no salvation.

With the door sealed, “the waters of the flood came upon the earth” (Genesis 7:10). And I have to imagine that as the deep surged up and the rains cascaded down, those outside realized their mistake. As Noah's faith turned to sight, their unbelief also turned to sight. In their bitter desperation, “beseeching Noah to open the ark's door for them,” maybe they tried to pry their way in with all their might.⁷¹ But it had been omnipotently sealed. “In that day you will cry out..., but the LORD will not answer you in that day,” said the prophet (1 Samuel 8:18). Divine patience being fulfilled, the Son of God said that “the flood came and destroyed them all” (Luke 17:27).

As for us, “since the Lord is patient, he wants everyone called through his Son to be saved.”⁷² Until the harvest at the end of the age, good and evil “grow together” in the world by God's patient permission (Matthew 13:30). “Be patient, therefore..., until the coming of the Lord” (James 5:7), “patiently enduring evil” in hopes God will grant your friends and family, neighbors and strangers, “repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 2:24-25), out of which you proclaim his excellent salvation (1 Peter 2:9), “waiting for and hastening the coming Day of God” (2 Peter 3:12). God's patience is “postponing to the end of time... his judgment upon the living and the dead,”⁷³ and he “still postpones it for this reason, that he may first fill up the total number of the elect.”⁷⁴ But the minutes have their limit, after which Paul says “sudden destruction will come upon them... and they will not escape” (1 Thessalonians 5:3). For “just as it was in the days of Noah..., so will be the coming of the Son of Man,” says our Lord (Luke 17:26; Matthew 24:39). And yet if we heed the gospel of our Spiritual Noah, if we will accept his summons and give thanks for the awe-inspiring patience of God, then we may know that the Apostle's words hold true for us: “God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 5:9). Thanks be to God for his saving patience! Amen.