I Saw the Sign

When we left off last Sunday, we saw Noah at the scene of sacrifice. The flood that broke down the world is over; the storms are a painful memory. Slowly, slowly had the seas drained back to their places; the land was dry again. Noah had stepped forth, releasing creation back to itself. He'd gathered some from each kind of clean animal, a sampler platter of the creatures of land and air, and made them a gift, blazing and smoldering before the LORD whose wrath had seemed so relentless (Genesis 8:20). Before the flood, God had reacted in his heart to what he “saw” in the earth (Genesis 6:5). Now “the LORD said in his heart” as prompted by what he “smelled,” this “restful aroma” of Noah's gift of gratitude, this labor of love atoning for all the world (Genesis 8:21).

What follows in these next lines of Scripture is a snapshot of God's “interior monologue,” a matter kept totally (for now) between God and his own heavenly heart, as it were.¹ And since over these past weeks we've been holding Genesis up alongside pagan parallels to the story of the flood and its aftermath, this is an instructive spot. What happens among the pagan gods after they smell (and eat) their man's sacrifice? Well, naturally, they begin to bicker. The mother goddess “arose to complain against all of them,” accusing the flood-sending god Enlil of wanton destruction: “Your mouth issued a final verdict,” she says, “now their bright faces are dark!”² Enlil hadn't shown up on time to dinner, but when he does, he's filled with utter rage to see the boat. “How did a man survive the catastrophe?” he wants to know.³ “No one was to survive the slaughter!”⁴

Out of mortal earshot, the gods of the pagans are in bitter conflict after the sacrifice. But out of the earshot of Noah and his family, the heart of the one true God is in no conflict at all; he's perfectly at rest within himself. Unlike the kindly mother-goddess, the LORD doesn't take a sentimental, weepy view of his creations. “The forming of humanity's heart is evil from his youth” (Genesis 8:21) – to be sure, that's a milder statement than what God saw before the flood, that “every forming of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5).⁵ But what prevailed before the flood, humanity's youth in its inaugural steps east of Eden, differs only in degree, not in kind, from what you'll find in every neighborhood.⁶ Without God's grace keeping a tight leash on our inherited animal instincts, our wills are wibbly-wobbly as a bike with a bad chain. So we're not merely tender darlings, innocent victims of divine caprice. Our bright faces still conceal hearts of midnight, factories that manufacture misshapen things. “The heart of man addictively hastens to sins.”⁷

So the LORD differs from the mother-goddess, but he also isn't like Enlil, outraged at human life. Oh, he could justifiably take the Enlil path, striving in fury to abolish humanity altogether. Or he could let the problem build back up to where it was before, and solve it with a sequel flood. But “even if he punished the race of men again, punishment leads more to fear of the law and the knowledge of discipline than the transformation of nature, which can be corrected in some respects but cannot be changed in all.”⁸ A flood can hit the reset button on human population, but not human nature. And so “when it was over, they would again entangle themselves in vices and crimes.”⁹ Thus, “if God were to deal with man according to his deserts, a regular flood would be needed.”¹⁰ That would create a continual cycle, where every few millennia God would have to find a new Noah to build a new ark to save the seed of life as God yet again reset creation to zero.

So long as the human heart remains a corrupting presence on the earth, it seems as though there are only two ways forward: the Enlil option or the endless cycle. But where before God resolved to “blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground” (Genesis 6:7), now he determines to “never again diminish any more the ground because of man” (Genesis 8:21).¹¹ The earth has been baptized in the flood, and a baptism can't be repeated in a cycle.¹² Nor will God become an Enlil: he now commits himself to this world, and not another.¹³

“As long as all the days of the earth,” he decides, “seedtime and harvest and cold and heat and summer and winter and day and night shall not cease” (Genesis 8:22). The words cover all the seasons and all the times of day. Both the daily and the seasonal cycle were irrelevant on the ark: everything's the same dreary darkness, no season has a monopoly on wet or dry, and there can be no sowing or harvesting.¹⁴ During the flood, for all practical purposes, “time effectively ceases to exist.”¹⁵ That's what God decides against again.

The cycles our lives depend on will keep going. They won't stop or stagnate. Admittedly, some years things might still get weird. Thanks to a couple years of volcanic eruptions before hand, 1816 became the 'year without a summer,' many places seeing frost and snow through June and August.¹⁶ But despite however we could corrupt the climate, God ensures an underlying “fixed order of seasons for the perseverance of the world,”¹⁷ for “the ongoing stability and the fertility of the world.”¹⁸ And this fixed order will testify to his all-pervasive providence. Like we sang earlier, “Summer and winter, and springtime and harvest, sun, moon, and stars in their courses above, join with all nature in manifold witness to thy great faithfulness, mercy, and love.”¹⁹

Now, at this point in the pagan story, Enki or Ea, the god of wisdom who saved the boat-builder, is called on by Enlil to, in essence, defend his actions. He comes back with three arguments. First, he says, he did it “for your sakes,” since (as we heard last week) the gods would starve without human service.²⁰ Obviously, the Bible has no need for that argument, since God cherishes us out of love and not need. Second, argues Ea, the flood was a hasty move “without deliberation,” one the other gods were effectively bullied into authorizing.²¹ In the Bible, God doesn't second-guess whether the flood was right and wise; he knows it was.²² But third, argues Ea, mass collective punishment isn't the way to go: “Only culprits should bear the crime, only the guilty should bear the guilt!”²³ And here our God goes even further. Even if guilt again is universal, “never again will I any more strike down every living thing, as I have done” (Genesis 8:21). Even when we're most begging for it, in God's global will, “mercy triumphs over judgment” (James 2:13), adding unearned millennia to the calendar.²⁴

At this point, though, this is still that interior monologue in God's heart. Noah can't hear any of this. From his perspective, he's made his sacrifice, and there's yet been no reaction. And oh, does Noah ever need a reaction. Put yourself in his shoes. To hear about the flood is one thing; to experience it is another. Outside his walls, every person in the world he knew except seven was killed in a cataclysm. The remaining eight people have been cooped up in a dark, dank, reeking zoo for a whole year. What are the odds Noah doesn't have PTSD after this? He and his family have been through maybe the most traumatizing possible experience.

So what happens the first time Noah sees a cloud in the sky? What happens when a raindrop hits the bridge of his nose? One old saint speculated, and I think he had to be right, that “it was likely that, if some light shower were to happen to fall, he would be bound to become distraught... The odds were that this blessed man would be utterly terrified at even a passing shower.”²⁵ And even without a cloud in the sky, after enduring that year in the ark, how could Noah or Mrs. Noah or the kids not step out on the mountain terrified that, if God had been willing to go that far once, he'd do it again if they slipped up – maybe even “annually inundate the earth?”²⁶

If God means for human life to go on, that climate of constant fear and terror can't stay. We can't live like that. We'd never achieve anything; we could never commit to a world we dread will melt away beneath our feet at any moment.²⁷ If Noah and his family are to build up a world again, they need to know it stands a chance, that it will make a difference, that their works can have some lasting meaning.²⁸ To believe in purpose and hope, that we won't ultimately be crushed to dust, is “absolutely indispensable to all higher human possibilities.”²⁹

So, in chapter 9, God goes public with what he's told himself in private – as if to say, “Do not fear, O Noah, I am with you!”³⁰ God “wanted to deliver us from the fears of floods, that we might not think, each time we see violent rains, that the utter destruction will happen again.”³¹ The next cloud Noah sees will be suitably met, not with an ark, but with an umbrella – that's what God wants Noah to know. But the amazing thing we read next is that “God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them” (Genesis 9:1), that “God said to Noah and to his sons with him” (Genesis 9:8). For the first time, Noah's not alone in hearing the voice of the Lord. Up until now, if Japheth wanted to know God's word, he had to ask Dad. But for the first time, Shem and Ham and Japheth are included in receiving revelation. God's call is no longer to one man alone; now it refracts out, split like light through a prism, to this diverse rainbow of families headed by Noah's sons.³²

In the original creation, no sooner had God made humanity than “God blessed them” (Genesis 1:28). And now, despite the impending failures of some of those to whom he's speaking, “God blessed Noah and his sons” too (Genesis 9:1). In the beginning, God blessed the first humans to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28). Now, in this second world, God offers Noah and his sons “the blessing which the first Adam had received,”³³ bidding them “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 9:1).

And you might think that's totally natural, but here's where Genesis just wrecks the pagan versions of this story. Remember, to the pagan mind, our multiplication was the problem solved by the flood. To the pagan mind, even the god who rescued us agreed that the human problem needed a solution, just not a final one. In one version, he suggested lions, wolves, famines, and wars as suitable methods to thin the human herd.³⁴ In another version, he comes up with celibate priestesses, infertility, and infant mortality – all ways to divinely fight human fruitfulness.³⁵ Sadly, this pagan view of natural human fertility as an evil has seen a major resurgence today. Yet even after the flood, Genesis offers a “conscious rejection” of that entire idea.³⁶ Even after seeing what the human heart is like, God is still eager for Noah's family to begin filling the earth with God's image again. Our conservation efforts were never meant to exclude ourselves. So God blesses us, that a new world might see a new human race dancing in every field, pracing through every forest, singing from every mountaintop, starry-eyed in every valley, to “fill the earth like a school of fish multiplying in the waves.”³⁷ God loves human life!

We'll return next week to the meat of God's first speech, but for his second, “God said to Noah and to his sons with him: 'And I – behold!'” (Genesis 9:8-9), the exact phrasing he used to tell Noah: “And I, behold, will bring a flood of waters upon the earth” (Genesis 6:17). That's meant to get our attention. But this time, building on his earlier promise (Genesis 6:18), he says: “I, behold, establish my covenant with you and your seed after you” (Genesis 9:9). It's “an agreement or promise that binds together that which is naturally... separate and apart.”³⁸ A covenant is more than mere words; it's a legal commitment with “a firm guarantee.”³⁹

This here is the first of four major covenants in the Old Testament, the others being those of Abraham, Moses, and David.⁴⁰ But this one is specifically a grant covenant, one that, in response to some display of merit (say, Noah offering a soothing aroma of sacrifice), promises unconditional blessings that will be shared not just with the original recipients but with their heirs after them.⁴¹ And this has no parallel in any of the pagan versions of this story.⁴² They have no covenants. Only Genesis knows about this.

As a grant covenant “between me and you” (Genesis 9:15), “with you and your seed after you” (Genesis 9:9), neither Noah nor his sons have anything to do with setting it up. There's nowhere for Ham to sign. Shem's yes isn't required. They all become parties by God's solemn say-so.⁴³ And if that's so for them, how much more for us? As Noah's seed after him, we receive this covenant in full by the mere fact of existing where and when we do. If that weren't enough, it even goes beyond humanity.⁴⁴ This covenant is made “with every living being that's with you: birds, beasts, and every living thing of the earth with you, of all that go out of the ark” (Genesis 9:10), “every living being that is with you” (Genesis 9:12). God gives himself no wiggle room: “It is for every living thing of the earth” (Genesis 9:10), “every living being of all flesh that is on the earth” (Genesis 9:16). A covenant is here made, not just with me, but with the cats who are undoubtedly snoozing safely on my sofa.

So what are the terms of this covenant? Only this: “that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood, and never again shall there be a flood to ruin the earth” (Genesis 9:11). God commits himself equally here to “the preservation and care of all living species on the earth.”⁴⁵ In giving this covenant, God “gives a fundamental 'yes' to earth and creatures.”⁴⁶ It's like how the United Nations Charter commits all the member states to “settle their international disputes by peaceful means.”⁴⁷ Just so, in the Noah Charter, God drafts a treaty with the world, a “covenant of peace” as Isaiah calls it (Isaiah 54:10). But this one is unilateral. “God thus bound himself beforehand by this promise so that, even if mankind were constantly to follow the evil thoughts of their inclination,” still God “would never again bring a flood” to ruin the earth or cut off all life from the earth.⁴⁸ No matter how much our corruption stabs at creation or Creator, God will not let go of his “voluntary and permanent self-restraint.”⁴⁹ He reserves the right to lesser judgments as needed by individuals or nations, but each will target only some flesh, not all flesh.⁵⁰ And they'll always be in service of God's “plans for peace and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11). God hereby obligates himself to further the goodness of this world, working with us despite our many flaws.⁵¹ And so, in effect, God “swore by his own great name” not to wage total war on the inhabitants of earth again.⁵²

Now, at this point in the pagan story, there's one more thing the gods do. After the sacrifice, as the mother-goddess is mourning her human children who died like flies, she lifts up this necklace which Anu, father of the gods, had given her when wooing her.⁵³ It's a necklace of jeweled beads carved to look like flies. Lifting it, she shouted that these flies around her neck would be her reminder every day of the grief the flood had brought.⁵⁴ “Gods! I will hang these flies like beads around my neck, to remind me of these days – I must never forget!”⁵⁵

A similar trigger for divine remembrance shows up in the Bible, but instead of a goddess's jewelry, it's God's manly war weapon – his bow. The psalms aren't shy about imagining God storming in with a storm, wielding his bow as a weapon whereby “the Most High... sent out his arrows” (Psalm 18:13-14). Babylon's favorite story of creation, where the god Bel used his bow and arrow to defeat the chaos-goddess Tiamat so that he could carve up her body to make the world, says that afterwards, Anu “lifted [his bow] up in the divine assembly; he kissed the bow... Then he called the names of the bow... With the third name, 'Bow Star,' he made it to shine in the sky; he fixed its heavenly position along with its divine brothers.”⁵⁶ Just as Anu put Bel's bow in the starry sky, so the LORD here declares, “I set my bow in the clouds” (Genesis 9:13).

When Bel's bow became a star, it was a tribute to his triumphant might. But as Isaiah says, “Bel bows down, Nebo stoops; their idols are on beasts..., they go into captivity” (Isaiah 46:1-2). In that very same chapter, the LORD announces, “I am God, and there is no other! … My salvation will not delay!” (Isaiah 46:9, 13). Then a young prophet, exiled to Flood Hill in Babylon's hinterlands, saw a marvelous vision: fiery creatures with the sky over their heads, and over this sky a lapus-lazuli throne on which he saw “the likeness of the glory of the LORD..., and there was brightness around him: like the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud on the day of rain, so was the appearance of brightness all around” (Ezekiel 1:26-28). This rainbow is God's true triumphant glory. Before, God “saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt” (Genesis 6:12); now, whenever he'll “see” his “bow in the clouds” (Genesis 9:16), he'll take his eye off our earthly corruption to behold his heavenly coloration; he'll look on his own splendor in place of our shabbiness, his own grace in place of our grossness.⁵⁷

But why a bow, of all things? Well, if it were a literal bow resting on the clouds, is it aimed at us, ready to fire? No! It's turned backwards, which is how ancient archers signaled that they meant no further harm – it was a showy display of good trigger discipline.⁵⁸ Again, it's like with the UN, where we have treaties aimed at control of nuclear weapons. Well, God's bow is a weapon of mass destruction, and this is a one-sided disarmament treaty: God binds himself to turn back his weapon of mass destruction away from us, to never use it like that.⁵⁹ His very weapon of war becomes thus “a token of reconciliation between God and man” and every creature.⁶⁰

Earlier, the turning point of the story came when “God remembered Noah” (Genesis 8:1). Until then, the storm raged, the flood prevailed, death and chaos were winning the night. But when God remembered, creation began anew, the winds of salvation blew, the love of God became the light of day. And this bow puts us all under the same stoplight. When he sees it, he'll remember us like Noah, and for us creation will be made fresh, for us the winds of salvation will blow, for us the love of God will become our light of day (Genesis 9:15). Storms die when God remembers, when God's hand of love won't let go! This sign isn't to cause him to remember, but to show us that he'll remember, “that, when we see the sign, we may take heart at God's promise, especially as it is impossible for God's promises to fail.”⁶¹ God is more gracious than we are vicious; his mountain of mercy more than plugs our pits of despair; and so “if God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31).

Something as pretty and ordinary as a rainbow is thus invested with an almost sacramental significance, one that outstrips its nature. Who can take a rainbow for granted once it's made “the sign of the Creator's commitment” to his creation?⁶² And that commitment isn't just a treaty with a 25-year term, like the nuclear non-proliferation agreement. It's an “everlasting covenant” between God and the whole living creation (Genesis 9:16), “a pledge of faithfulness between [God] and them forever, as long as heaven is above the earth,”⁶³ “coterminous with the duration of the world.”⁶⁴ And it holds good for us all whether we live well or not, whether we believe or not.

But imagine if it didn't. Isaiah had to imagine; he had a terrifying vision that “the earth lies defiled under its inhabitants, for they have... broken the eternal covenant; therefore a curse devours the earth” (Isaiah 24:5).⁶⁵ It would be terrible for this covenant to fail: “The earth is utterly broken..., its transgression lies heavy upon it; it falls and will not rise again” (Isaiah 24:19-20). That's what we could expect, if the mercies of God depended on us. But later came a voice of hope. These days of Israel's desolation, said God, were “like the days of Noah to me: As I swore that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth, so have I sworn that I will not be angry with you and will not rebuke you” (Isaiah 54:9). “In overflowing anger, for a moment I hid my face from you; but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you” (Isaiah 54:8). “For the mountains may depart, and the hills may be moved, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed” (Isaiah 54:10). God's faithful love and compassion, here and now for his faithless people, is as trustworthy each moment as the time-tested reliability of the covenant with all creation.⁶⁶ “For your Maker is your Husband; the LORD of Hosts is his name..., the God of the whole earth” (Isaiah 54:6).

Ezekiel saw that the covenant of Noah would be made something new, something bigger and better: “I will make a covenant of peace with them,” God says, “an everlasting covenant..., and will set my sanctuary in their midst forevermore. My dwelling place shall be with them, and I will be their God” (Ezekiel 37:26-27). And to make that happen, God sent forth his Son, since “all the promises of God find their Yes in him” (2 Corinthians 1:20). The covenant of Noah could overlook the darksome inventiveness of the human heart; only the gracious covenant of Jesus can heal it. That's why Jesus is “the mediator of a new covenant” (Hebrews 9:15), bringing about an “eternal covenant” between “the God of Peace” and this world of war (Hebrews 13:20). Better than the rainbow, the covenant sign of remembrance is that “as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup... in remembrance of [the Lord Jesus]... you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:23-26).⁶⁷

The covenant of Noah stands firm “until the appointed times are fulfilled; but when the years appointed for the world are fulfilled,”⁶⁸ then “by the same word, the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly” (2 Peter 3:7). For then, from the Enthroned God ringed by his rainbow, “earth and sky flee away, and no place is found for them” (Revelation 20:11). So long shall the covenant of Noah last. But where the covenant of Noah has no power to reach, the covenant of Jesus does: into “a new heaven and a new earth..., and the holy city... prepared as a bride adorned for her husband,” where “the dwelling place of God is with man!” (Revelation 21:1-3). For what the covenant of Noah whispers, the covenant of Jesus shouts in glad acclamation, that the Love of God that seeks and stalks and stands us up again from death will not let his creation go!⁶⁹ Then “the Lord their God will be their light,” an eternal rainbow of glory 'round us all, as we, the Christ-saved seed of Noah reborn in the gospel, shall “reign forever and ever” (Revelation 22:5). Hallelujah! Amen.

Back to Earth

This certainly has been a long flood we've ridden out with Noah. In bitter judgment on a world of heartbreaking evil, God had unleashed the waters of chaos, blotting out the creation with forty days of torrents from below and above, until no flesh was left alive – save what was in the life-saver, the ark, with Noah. The rain had stopped, the wind began to blow, and after many months the waters had settled this life-saving ark to rest atop one of the mountains of Ararat; from there, Noah had tenderly tested by birds the progress of the world outside.

Between the olive branch and the dove's fond farewell, Noah had boldness by New Year's Day to cast off the ark's roof and greet the world unfiltered. By that day, “the waters were dried from off the earth...; and he looked, and behold, dry was the face of the ground!” (Genesis 8:13). That is, when he surveyed what he could see of it – you know, from who-knows-how-many thousands of feet up – he couldn't spot any visible pools that remained from the flood. But Noah doesn't at this point jump out of the ark, Noah doesn't now swing open the door. He doesn't at this point even let all the birds out of their coops to soar the sky, even though he has every reason to believe it'd be safe to do so. Instead, Noah waits... nearly two more months in the open-air ark.

Eventually, “by the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth had dried out” (Genesis 8:14). This here's a different Hebrew word for 'dry' than before; it means withered, parched, dried through. On New Year's, there may have been no visible pools, but that doesn't mean the ground down there wouldn't yet be as squishy as a sopping sponge underfoot.¹ Now, though, Genesis tells us that – though Noah can't see a change – the land is dried through, it's back to normal. Once again it's “dry land” (Genesis 1:9). And would you look what day it is? Month 2, day 27. The flood started “in the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month” (Genesis 7:11). But Israel counted by lunar months. This is “the appointed time, a complete year,”² “three hundred sixty-five days” after the flood began,³ “an entire solar year” which brings the earth back to the same position around the sun where judgment began.⁴

And as we round out a year since the world started coming undone, we read some long-lost words: “then God spoke to Noah” (Genesis 8:15). The last time Noah heard a word from God was when “the LORD said to Noah, 'Go into the ark'” (Genesis 7:1), which was seven days before the rains began to fall (Genesis 7:4). God hasn't spoken to Noah the entire time he's been on the ark, as though the walls blocked out his voice.⁵ But Noah has endured patiently, waiting for the word of God. After all, it was the LORD who sealed the ark's door against the flood (Genesis 7:16), and not without God's word will Noah dare open what God has shut. Perhaps Noah reasoned that “one who had entered by a heavenly command should await a response from heaven that he exit.”⁶ Besides, Noah has no way to know, until it's revealed to him, that the earth is truly ready.

But now God speaks: “Go out from the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your sons' wives with you! Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh – birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth!” (Genesis 8:16-17). This structure, this ark, had always been “a means, not an end,” a shelter for the year, but always meant to deliver life back into the world.⁷ Noah doesn't waste another minute in complying (Genesis 8:18). As one Jewish author pictured it a couple thousand years ago, “Noah took courage and jumped to the land from the ark, and his sons with him, and his wife and daughters-in-law, and serpents and birds, the species of four-footed animals and all the other creatures went out of the wooden house in one place; and then Noah, most righteous of men, came out eighth.”⁸ It was their exodus.

And I don't say that lightly. Compare the two stories. Under Moses, Israel was faced with a mass of water they couldn't cross, until “the LORD drove back the sea by a strong east wind all night” (Exodus 14:21), just as here “God made a wind blow over all the earth, and the waters subsided” (Genesis 8:1). For Moses, the LORD “made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided” (Exodus 14:21), just like on Noah's New Year's Day “the waters were dried from off the earth” (Genesis 8:13). The parting of the sea exposed “dry ground” (Exodus 14:22), using the same Hebrew word as now where “the earth had dried out” (Genesis 8:14). And just like “the Children of Israel walked on dry ground through the sea” (Exodus 14:29), so “Noah went out, and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives with him” (Genesis 8:18) – their exodus story! Moses' exodus took him from Egypt through the sea until he set foot atop the mountain of God. So Noah's exodus takes him from the world through the flood until he set foot atop this mountain in Ararat – a Sinai before Sinai, holy ground!

What's more, we heard last week that the flood was a story of God rewinding to the Bible's second verse, before the world was more than darkness and a deep; but then God hit the play button again, and we've been tracing our way forward through the days of creation, with the wind over the waters, the return of light, the confinement of waters above and below, and only now, at the end of the flood year, can we say we've finished revisiting Day Three. Once again we have “dry land” (Genesis 1:9), and we've already seen that “the earth vegetated vegetation” (Genesis 1:12). The world is no longer formless. The trouble is, it's still void. But now God aims to fix that.

In answer to God's command, out comes “every beast, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves on the earth” (Genesis 8:19). Out fly the birds of Day FIve (Genesis 1:21)! Out creep the things that slither and hop and creep, out walk the beasts, out come all the land animals of Day SIx (Genesis 1:25)!⁹ I wonder how long it took Noah to get them all out. In the beginning, God had blessed those creatures to “be fruitful and multiply... on the earth” (Genesis 1:22, 28). Now, God restores their blessing, calling them to “swarm on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth” again (Genesis 8:17). It's in answer to his summons that the animals “went out by families from the ark” (Genesis 8:19), “not in the same manner in which they entered.”¹⁰ This is the only time the Bible applies this word – 'family' or 'clan' – to animals; but after the exodus, the Israelites registered in a census “by families, by fathers' houses” (Numbers 1:24). Now, like a Moses before Moses, Noah leads them all forth, acting almost as “God's partner in restoring the world to what it was.”¹¹

And when Noah steps out for the last time, along with his own family, there stands a second Adam, feeling the terra firma beneath his feet. What must that have felt like, to stand at last in a new world? An old Jewish book, imagining what Noah might have written, has him say: “Then I, Noah, went out and walked through the land, through its length and through its breadth.... The entire land was full of grass, herbs, and grain. Then I blessed the Lord of Heaven, whose praise endures forever, and to whom be the glory!”¹² With the reintroduction of the human being into the world, the replay of Day Six can finish, as “the whole of creation recovers its proper order.”¹³ And now we know why Noah waited to open the door to the ark. In the first creation, the earth didn't make a move to bring forth living things until it first received God's word (Genesis 1:24) – so neither, in new creation, will Noah bring forth living things until he, too, receives God's timely word (Genesis 8:15-19).

The world is neither formless nor void now. It's a new creation. So what's the first thing a person should do in a world made new? How does Noah react to his finished salvation? You might think that, finding himself in an unfamiliar land, he'd promptly start to build a house. Or maybe, with time running out, he'd hurry to sow some crops. But that's not what Noah does. He blesses the Lord of Heaven. He begins with worship.¹⁴ For “then Noah built an altar to the LORD” (Genesis 8:20), making it “from what lay at hand.”¹⁵ It's a public monument, standing in front of the ark and bearing witness to salvation accomplished, proclaiming the kingdom of God over this new world he sees before him.¹⁶ What he builds is “the first altar in Scripture,” the prototype after which every later altar is modeled, and serving at it makes Noah the “archetype” also of every priest to follow.¹⁷

Now, you'll remember from other weeks that, as we've been hearing the flood story, we've been eavesdropping also on other ways of telling it, pagan ways, since some of Israel's neighbors also spoke about the man who built the boat that saved life in the flood. They also knew that worship comes after the flood. At this point, one popular Babylonian version imagines the flood survivor Atrahasis saying: “I brought out a sacrifice to the four winds and offered incense to the mountain peak; I laid out seven offering bowls and seven more, with sweet reed, cedar, and myrtle underneath.”¹⁸ And a broken Sumerian version fleshes this out by mentioning how “the king was butchering oxen, was being lavish with the sheep, barley cakes, crescents,” and that “juniper, the pure plant of the mountains, he filled on the fire.”¹⁹ Genesis doesn't spend time detailing things like fragrant wood, sweet incense, baked goods, bowls, ritual implements – though in early Jewish retellings, they added in such things, kneaded dough, heaps of frankincense.²⁰ Genesis shines its spotlight on one thing only: the animals.

Here, for purposes of an offering, Noah had gathered “clean animals” and “clean birds” (Genesis 8:20). As St. Augustine pointed out, “after the flood, Noah did not offer to the Lord a sacrifice from the unclean animals.”²¹ It goes without saying that an “unclean animal... may not be offered as an offering to the LORD” (Leviticus 27:11). In fact, so much as touching an unclean animal could have distanced an Israelite from communion with the peace-offerings of God (Leviticus 7:21). So Noah knows somehow to “separate the clean beast from the unclean, and the unclean bird from the clean” (Leviticus 20:25). Noah excludes, leaves alone, any and every creature that, while having a rightful place in the world, in some way falls short of the beauty of the Lord.

Going further, Noah “took of every clean animal and of every clean bird” (Genesis 8:20). In fact, early readers wondered if the very reason God “gave orders for the preservation of more clean animals” on the ark was for the sake of giving Noah the option, though not the demand, “to offer him sacrifices.”²² Some Jewish retellings count up no more than “a calf, a goat, a lamb..., a turtledove, and a young dove,”²³ and some early Christians thought that list sufficed.²⁴ But I just don't know if that does justice to what Noah's up to. In the Law of Moses, there's no exhaustive list of clean animals; it's the unclean ones that are listed, implying that every other animal out there counts as 'clean' (Leviticus 11:3-8, 13-19). So far as livestock and birds are concerned, if it could be given to God, Noah puts at least one in the sacrifice pile. This is the only time in the whole Old Testament when every clean creature of earth and sky is combined in one single sacrifice; one scholar suggests it's because, through the flood and its end, effectively “the whole creation had been killed and resurrected.”²⁵

Having essentially assembled a sampler platter of everything in creation that's simple and pure, Noah thereafter “offered burnt offerings on the altar” (Genesis 8:20) – or, as somebody else put it, Noah “roasts up large numbers of his animal former roommates.”²⁶ Given the sheer scale of the offering, that's no light time commitment; just ask the teams who came to the barbecue competition last weekend how quick it is to roast whole animals. Noah's worship isn't easy-breezy; he labors at this for hours and hours, maybe days on end.

This was not a kind of offering that left anything over for Noah to enjoy – not flesh nor bone nor skin nor fur. Noah received no tangible benefits as a byproduct of what he was doing. In a whole burnt offering like this, “the most potent form of sacrifice,”²⁷ “nothing fell to the use of those making the offering.”²⁸ That makes it all the more stunning that Noah gathers and gives up to God, in a single act of surrender, at least 7% of all the livestock animals in his world; it's mathematically the closest he can get to an exact tithe of every clean species.²⁹ And this comes after Noah has just been told to ensure that the animals can “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 8:17). Yet his first act, three verses later, is to round up a bunch of them and light them on fire on the altar.³⁰ Is that really on-script, Noah? Well, in a deep and mysterious way, it is. Never is a creature more fruitful than when burning up for God. Never is the earth greater or vaster than when it rises to heaven.

For what we call a 'burnt offering' is, in Hebrew, literally 'that which ascends,'³¹ referring to the way the whole flesh of the offering is turned into fire and smoke that rise up, up, and away toward the sky. That's why I prefer to translate it, not as 'burnt offering,' but as 'ascension offering.'³² Essentially, to the ancient mind, this was a way of sending mail to heaven – and, just like mail, such sacrifice was a way of “establishing communication” and “nurturing the bond between humans and God.”³³ Beyond that, an ascension offering was a sort of all-purpose type of sacrifice, not tied down to one specific aim.³⁴ So what's Noah up to?

The oldest Jewish readings emphasize that Noah's idea was to “make atonement... for all the sins of the land, because everything which was on it had been blotted out.”³⁵ Thus, by this sacrifice, Noah “atoned for all the earth in its entirety.”³⁶ And it makes sense: Noah is effectively humanity's high priest in this moment.³⁷ In the wake of all that corruption that's been washed down the drain, Noah aims to cover over the residue, completing what the flood accomplished. But ascension-offerings also tended to be joyful occasions, voluntary outpourings of delight in the Lord (Leviticus 22:18).³⁸ Early Christians said that, after such a profound salvation, righteous Noah “thought it right to offer the firstfruits in gratitude to the Giver,”³⁹ “a token of gratitude for all that God had done.”⁴⁰ So naturally Noah “offers thanks to his Lord both for what happened and for what lay ahead..., giving thanks as far as possible.”⁴¹ 'Twas “true thanksgiving,” through and through.⁴²

But here we have a massive difference between what Sacred Scripture shows us, on the one hand, and the pale pagan myths, on the other. Like I said, in the pagan versions, Atrahasis – like Noah – picks this point to make an offering; but the function and reaction are very different. The thing about the pagan gods is, they're pretty needy. Instead of self-sufficient, they exist in a “great symbiosis” with their creatures.⁴³ They made humans to be, in effect, their plantation slaves – farmers, chefs, butlers. Now, what befalls a spoiled rich family when the help goes on strike? The pagan gods, in their story, drowned the hand that fed them, and realized all too late that “the gods could not do without humankind to bring them sacrifices.”⁴⁴

As a result, not only do the gods spend the flood being terrified of the storm and its dangers, but “the great gods were sitting in thirst and hunger,”⁴⁵ “their lips were dry with distress, they were unceasingly convulsed from hunger.”⁴⁶ And, needless to say, these 'hangry' gods have emotional breakdowns, crying in grief, turning on each other and themselves in blame.⁴⁷ Then, all of a sudden, “to the four winds [Atrahasis] offered sacrifice, providing food.”⁴⁸ A dinner bell rings; they sniff what's cookin'! “The gods smelled the scent, the gods smelled the sweet scent, the gods swarmed to the sacrifice like flies.”⁴⁹ Just think about that picture, the way flies get all over a summer barbecue. When I was in Africa some years ago, I happened across a pride of lions settled down after a very raw lunch, and their gory faces were coated thick with flies attracted to the blood. That's the picture this pagan story gives of their supposedly 'great gods' who, frenzied by a ravenous hunger and thirst, drop their dignity to the level of mere insects at the alluring aroma. How anyone could've told that tale and still worshipped a pantheon as low as buzzing bugs is beyond me. But in the pagan yarn, this is no mere metaphor; the gods actually ate and were nourished by what Atrahasis fed them.⁵⁰ Not only is the pagan sacrifice a bribe of angry gods who wanted Atrahasis dead,⁵¹ but it's an emergency medical intervention for starving gods.⁵²

No wonder the Bible says that “all the gods of the peoples are good-for-nothings, but the LORD made the heavens” (Psalm 96:5). Early Christians preached that it's mere demons who are actually “greedy for the savor of fat and the blood of the sacrifices.”⁵³ Neither we nor Noah may comply with their greed, for “we who are living do not sacrifice to dead gods!”⁵⁴ But our God, the God of Noah, is alive! In fact, he's the Source of Life itself; he is Life, he is Existence. And because he's completely complete in himself, fully full with his infinite fullness, “the eternal God shall neither hunger nor thirst.”⁵⁵ So he doesn't actually “eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats,” like the pagan gods would if they could (Psalm 50:13). But “the Master is in need of nothing... and craves nothing from anyone.”⁵⁶ Like God tells the psalmist, “If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and all its fullness is mine” (Psalm 50:12). Therefore, God “has no need of sacrifices or whole burnt offerings or regular offerings.”⁵⁷ But he invites us to “offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving... I will deliver you, and you will glorify me” (Psalm 50:14-15). God “made no demand for the sacrifices offered, but for that on account of which they were offered: the honor of God.”⁵⁸

It's in that spirit that, in response to Noah's sacrifice, “the LORD smelled the pleasing aroma” (Genesis 8:21). It isn't that God's just a really big barbecue fan, tantalized by the delicious smells of smoked meat like I am.⁵⁹ But “the Lord smelled, not the smell of the flesh of animals or the smoke of wood, but... the simplicity of heart with which [Noah] offered the sacrifice from all and on behalf of all.”⁶⁰ It's Noah's total devotion, Noah's sincere self-surrender, Noah's faith working by love, his interior worship seen through his exterior worship, that God smells and finds so absolutely appetizing, so savory and satisfying.⁶¹

Now, your Bible might say that God smelled a 'pleasant aroma.' Perhaps more accurate would be 'soothing.' It's literally 'restful,' 'rest-bringing' – and it comes, once again, from the same root as Noah's name.⁶² Noah's dad hoped that Noah would somehow bring rest to creation (Genesis 5:29); instead, God gave Mr. Rest's ark a rest on the mountain, and now Noah returns the favor when his worship sends a restful fragrance to the Creator. He thereby appeases God, gratifies and satisfies God, pacifies and soothes God's (apparent) wrath.⁶³ In other words, Noah's worship brings this new creation to Day Seven, to a state of sabbath. And in that, we see again what creation is for. The creation is made for the sake of worship. Creation was made to be given back to Love by love, to rise to God, to be transfigured into a peace that transcends the gulf between Creator and created.

Later, on another mountain, God will meet with a new Noah named Moses, teaching him and all Israel how to follow in Noah's footsteps. They'll built an “altar of burnt offering” (Exodus 27:1-8), lit by a continuous fire that's never allowed to fade (Leviticus 6:13). Every morning and every evening on that altar, they'll give a lamb as a “regular ascension-offering throughout their generations” (Exodus 29:38-42), which will reproduce every day Noah's “soothing aroma... to the LORD” (Exodus 29:41). But God warned them that, if they closed their hearts and ears to his voice, he'd have to judge them like Noah's neighbors, “and I will make your sanctuaries desolate, and I will not smell your soothing aromas” (Leviticus 26:31). Tragically, that judgment came to pass, and they were dispersed into foreign lands, a stench before the Lord.

But already through Moses, God promised that even then, they could apply the spiritual cologne of repentance; turning back to God, they could receive mercy once again (Deuteronomy 30:1-3). And so, God promises by his prophet, “when I bring you out from the peoples,” then “as a soothing aroma I will accept you” (Ezekiel 20:41), returning them to the holy “mountain height” from which God would receive their “sacred offerings” (Ezekiel 20:40). When it was fulfilled, they gathered bulls and lambs, goats and rams, as a great “ascension-offering to the LORD” (Ezra 8:35), after the example of Noah. But even as the temple was being rebuilt, God indicted their worship, how “with every work of their hands..., what they offer there is unclean” (Haggai 2:14).

And so, in eventual answer to the hopeless impurity of the world, God sent his own Son. When pure divinity and pure humanity were united, the seed was sown for a new creation. “On the altar of the holy cross,”⁶⁴ Jesus “offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins” (Hebrews 10:12), “the whole burnt offering of his flesh which was offered through the wood of the cross.”⁶⁵ Now that Christ has “cleansed [people's] hearts by faith” (Acts 15:9), St. Peter says, we “should no longer call any person common or unclean” (Acts 10:28), for “we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once and for all” (Hebrews 10:10).

The Apostle Paul proclaims that “Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a gift and sacrifice to God for a pleasant aroma” (Ephesians 5:2). The faithful obedience and limitless love of Jesus, all the way to that cross, is far more potent in the nose of God than if Noah had the help of every angel to sacrifice more clean beasts than there are atoms in the universe. To the Father, there's simply nothing that smells as good as Jesus' love-unto-death. Nothing is so savory as the sabbath of the Savior; nothing is sweeter to secure peace for the world.

Christ then rose from the dead so that he could ascend into heaven and present this gift there (Hebrews 9:11-14). But first he appointed his apostles, and those who came after them, to baptize into Jesus' own holy word naming Father and Son and Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19), for “you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you” (John 15:3). Rising from the waters marked by that word, the creatures of this new creation could leap forth to “enter into the earth's new face.”⁶⁶ The apostles and those who followed were then to “teach my people... how to distinguish between the unclean and the clean” (Ezekiel 44:23), in other words, “to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:20), so as to “increase and multiply by the constant augmentation of spiritual virtues.”⁶⁷ “You are my friends if you do what I command you,” our Lord told us (John 15:14), and “if you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love” (John 15:10).

For the sake of our abiding in his love, “he established a new altar and a new rite of sacrifice,”⁶⁸ such that “we have an altar from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat” (Hebrews 13:10). There we make “a pure offering... among the nations” (Malachi 1:11), prophetic words the first Christians knew meant “the sacrifices which we offer to him at every place, namely, the bread of the Eucharist and the chalice of the Eucharist.”⁶⁹ Having been washed clean in the flood, it's only fitting that, as one medieval monk put it, “we are renewed at the sacred altar by the offering of holy communion.”⁷⁰ For our first reaction to salvation must be worship, if we're to honestly profess that “my heart shall rejoice in your salvation” (Psalm 13:5).

So long as we thus abide in Christ's love, so long as we reek of Jesus, “we are the aroma of Christ to God” (2 Corinthians 2:15). “A sweet fragrance to the Lord is a heart that glorifies the One who made it.”⁷¹ And the Apostle Paul adds that our deeds of truthful love and loving truth are not only “a sacrifice acceptable and pleasing to God,” but that they produce “a pleasant aroma” (Philippians 4:18), one which spiritually overwhelms what one early Christian called “the stench of the teaching of the ruler of this age.”⁷² In this way, by our words and works and witness of love rooted in the sacrifice of Christ, “through us God spreads the aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere,” perfuming all the earth (2 Corinthians 2:14). To those whose spiritual sniffer is burnt and dead, Paul grants that Jesus' goodness “an aroma from death to death” for them; but to those who smell as God smells, a life in Christ is “an aroma from life to life” (2 Corinthians 2:16).⁷³ And to the extent we surrender our lives as disciples who deny ourselves for the sake of his sacrificial cross (Mark 8:34), we become “a whole burnt offering at the altar of God,” rising fragrantly toward the Lord in heaven.⁷⁴

But hark, already we hear the Father calling, pledging, “Behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind” (Isaiah 65:17)! One day, we'll fully leave this ark that sails the stormy seas of this world. All at once, at our Savior's shout, everyone aboard will disembark into “new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13). And when we step foot on that new world the first time, as we begin to understand what it means that “the dwelling place of God is with man” there (Revelation 21:3), what will we do first? What will eternity mean? Nothing but what Noah showed us. To set foot in a new creation, to finish the exodus to the promised land, to stand upon the mountain height of God as all things give way to fire and glory, is to worship by offering up the whole new creation. “His servants will worship him; they will see his face..., and they will reign forever and ever” (Revelation 22:3-5). Hallelujah!

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.