Genesis 6:1-10

Bible Study Lesson for Wednesday, April 29

Usually on Wednesday nights, some in our community get together to share prayer requests, we pray together, and I bring a Bible lesson for them. Last week, we covered Genesis 4:25-5:32, so I will pick up today where we left off. First I’d like to talk about prayer requests. Online communication being what it is, I would rather not get into specific requests in this space, and will leave that for the more private communications that the church has with each other. But I do want to remember a few general prayer requests: -our government, those making decisions on our behalf -those in the medical community -those in food service, grocery stores, and other essential businesses -teachers and students still figuring out what the closures of schools means for them -prisoners and prison guards -first responders -those whose life and income has been disrupted by the current crisis. I also want to remember all of those suffering from Covid-19 and the communities that it is affecting, including our own. Take a moment to pray for these folks now before we begin.

Now I hope you will take a moment to read and reflect on Genesis 6:1-10 before I offer my thoughts. 6:1-4 Limits These four verses kick off the flood narrative, but scholars are either divided or at a loss for what several key phrases really mean. This passage reminds me of what one of my Old Testament professors taught me: sometimes the only honest answer to the question “what does this passage mean?” is “I don’t know.” Like much of the material in the first 11 chapters of Genesis, many people have a lot of interpretations of what is going on in this passage. I will try to stick to what the verses seem concerned with us knowing. When I make a guess about something, I will try to be clear about how confident I am in my hypothesis.

Verses 1-2, 4 These verses begin with humankind fulfilling a part of their job that God has given them. They are filling the earth, fruitfully multiplying (see Genesis 1:28). This immediately creates an occasion for brokenness to take advantage of God’s blessing. There has been much discussion of what Genesis means when it says “the sons of God” in verse 2. Throughout the Bible, we are given a picture of a far more active spiritual world than we are accustomed to seeing. Heavenly powers are active and present in the world. The gods of the nations are presumed to have some power, albeit a power inferior to the power of God. It is often supposed that the “sons of God” in these verses are the lesser deities, or the angels, in this case fallen angels who rebel against God by violating the boundary set in Genesis 1. At the very least, we are invited to imagine that the boundary between heaven and earth is being crossed. In Creation, God separated the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1), and humans (and angels) are to respect that separation. The sons of God and daughters of men are crossing that boundary. Walter Brueggemann makes the point that the world presented in these four verses is not the divided world supposed by other religions of the time. Other religions presented a world where heaven and earth are against each other. Here, the chief division is between God the creator and creation, whether heavenly or earthly. Created things by necessity have needs and limitations. The uncreated Creator exists over and above the creation. God has no limitations, and places limits on creation that humans (and here Spiritual beings as well) consistently try to violate. Verse 4 gives us a word that we can’t easily define, but it sheds some light on what the storyteller in Genesis has in mind here. Nephilim is a word often left untranslated in our modern Bibles. The King James Version calls them giants. The root word seems to mean “fallen” and this has given rise to a lot of speculation about fallen angels and other spiritual entities. Verse 4 presents the unholy union between “the sons of God” and the “daughters of men” as resulting in legendary heroes. Verse 3 This verse presents us with the best connection to the surrounding narrative. Here God again resets the limitations of human life. While 120 years is certainly longer than any lifespan with which we are familiar, it is much shorter than the legendary length of days accounted in the genealogy of chapter 5. Like in Genesis 3:22, the violation of boundaries set by God results in a shortening of life. This “punishment” however also presents us with a reminder that life itself is a blessing. Life here is connected with God’s spirit. In the King James Version the translation is “my spirit shall not always strive with man”; more modern translations prefer “my spirit shall not abide in mortals forever.” A more direct meaning might be “my breath shall not remain in mortals for such a long time.” If we remember back to Genesis 2:7, at the creation of Adam, God formed Adam from the dust of the ground, but Adam did not become a living being until God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” The surest interpretation seems to be that life itself is on loan from God. If life is a gift, then a life lived well will be a grateful response to that gift. Humankind as a whole has failed up to this point in the story by repeatedly crossing God’s boundaries. 6:5-10 The Breaking Point These verses introduce one of the most famous stories in the Bible. It is somewhat disturbing that we teach this story to children and give them coloring pages with an ark floating on top of a flooded earth. It is a story about God wiping out every person on earth except for one family. It is a story about the world drowning. Over the next few weeks we will wrestle with this story. I want us to keep in mind how unsettling it can be. But I think it is important for us to trust God, even in troubling and unsettling stories. Learning to trust God while looking at a troubling story will prepare us to trust God even in troubling times.  What does trusting God mean when confronting a story that ought to terrify us and might lead some to question the goodness of God? I think, in light of what we saw at the beginning of the chapter, we must always keep in mind the profound distinction in biblical thinking between creation and God. The Creator inherently has certain rights over the creation; there are things that God can do that we cannot, at least partially because God knows more than we do. If God does something, it is because in God’s infinite wisdom it is the most fitting thing to do. Verses 5-6 One thing to keep in mind is that most other Ancient Near Eastern religions also had an account of a global flood. In the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish, the gods destroy the world because humans are too loud and it annoys them. Here in Genesis 6, however, the flood is God’s response to a profound wickedness. This is an important contrast because the God revealed in the Bible is not impulse-driven and selfish like other gods were in contemporary mythologies. What motivates God to take such a drastic approach to the creation? It becomes clear in reading verses 5 and 6 that God sees in creation a fundamental rebellion against the created purpose. On Walter Brueggemann’s reading, the world was created to have a certain unity or harmony. In contrast to this, we see just in the Cain genealogy a selfishness that disrupts that harmony. Cain spills his brother’s blood on the ground, and Lamech thinks that he can claim God’s protection by seeking his own vengeance. Verse 6 begins with a phrase that might make us uncomfortable: “And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind.” What does it mean for God to be sorry? Here it means that God is going to take some surprising steps to set right where creation has gotten off track.

Verse 7

God decides to “blot out” all life on earth. Here we are confronted with the power of God. God can end what God started. God can pull the ripcord at any time. Since, as we saw in verse 3, life is a gift of God, God can also say “enough.” But, as we have already seen, God’s judgment and punishment always include grace.

Verse 8-9 “But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.” God’s condemnation of the world finds a limit in a more fundamental characteristic of God. Nowhere in the Bible does it say “God is wrath.” 1 John 4:8 says “God is love.” So here, where the wrath of God is most prominently on display, we find the love of God pushing in as a balance. How quickly God will move from putting an end to all flesh to a new plan of starting over through Noah’s family. It is interesting that we are not given a specific reason that Noah finds favor. It is just a fact in the story. “Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God.” The last time we saw the phrase “walked with God” was the description of Enoch in the last chapter. I said that this described an ongoing description of Enoch’s life. Something in Noah’s character, like that of his great-grandfather, gave God a reason to pause and make an exception. Noah lived according to his purpose and through Noah God decided to continue the great story of creation. Verse 10

The naming of Noah’s three sons creates a kind of bracket for the story. After the flood, we will see the genealogy of Noah continue (Genesis 9:18, 28). But for right now we are prepared to enter a story that interrupts the genealogies. The flood marks the second decisive break in the story of humanity. The first break was the Fall. Each break moves us to see the hopelessness of the human situation and, more importantly, God’s ability to redeem the brokenness. Conclusion Up to this point in the chapter, it seems that we have warnings of what happens when humans violate the limits set by God. I am tempted to view this as a repetition of the cycle started by the Fall. Recall that Eve’s (and Adam’s) desire to be “like God” is what led them to eat the forbidden fruit (Genesis 3:5). So the intermarriage of humans with heavenly beings results in divine punishment: a limiting of human life. Likewise in the flood we will see a connection between human sin and the natural order. In our world we see that human greed and pride often result in ecological damage. Our world is polluted and that pollution results in death and reduced quality of life. Sin has consequences, both eternally and in our life on earth. But we can ultimately trust that God’s grace is always a part of God’s judgment. As I said earlier, it is somewhat baffling to me that we sometimes reduce the story of the Flood to a cute story that we can tell children. The flood must have been a traumatic experience for Noah and his family. Even though he would have been aware of the sin of the society around him, the world as he knew it came to an end. We can presume that his daughters-in-law lost their families, his sons lost their friends. But through it all, Noah obeyed the commands of God. Christians have always believed that the “God of the Old Testament” and the “God of the New Testament” are the same God. This God often moves in mysterious ways and does things we don’t understand. Sometimes we cannot make sense of it. But at the end of the day, I think we have to remember to trust that since God is bigger and smarter than we are, when God does something like flood the whole earth, we can trust that God has a reason.