Genesis 7:1-6

Bible Study Lesson for May 13

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 6:11-22, 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 7:1-16 before I offer my thoughts. We concluded last week’s study with a discussion of God as a covenant God. Covenant is an important theme for understanding Genesis, the Old Testament , the Bible, and the Jewish and Christian faiths. In this story, we see the first proper covenant in the Bible and it shows us two important characteristics of our covenant God. First, God does most of the work: Noah does not save himself or his family from the flood, it is the revelation and command of God that saves Noah. Second, God’s work of salvation calls for a human response of obedience. The emphasis of the story in last week’s reading as well as this week’s is that when God commands, Noah obeys. Chapter 7 is where the Flood actually happens. The entirety of Chapter 6 was instructions for the building of the ark and Noah and God making preparations. One of the things we notice is that this story takes up more pages of Genesis than any story we have yet encountered. This tells us it is an important story. The flood story will come to influence later biblical theology in a lot of fascinating ways. Two of these ways we have already talked about: covenant and waters as agents of chaos in the world. Genesis 7:1-5 In these verses, God repeats and expands the instructions for Noah to enter the ark. At this early stage of humanity’s relationship with God, it is worth noting that God says to Noah “you alone are righteous,” and Noah just accepts God’s judgment rather than interceding for his neighbors. Later, Abraham will famously try—in vain— to rescue Sodom and Gomorrah from God’s wrath by bargaining with God for the sake of the righteous who might be in the city (Genesis 18:22-33). This sort of bold bargaining with God will set much of the tone for Moses’s relationship with God in Exodus, but we find no trace of that in the Noah story. One element of these verses that stands in tension with the rest of the story is the distinction between clean and unclean animals. In Genesis 6:19-20, God instructed Noah to bring into the ark two animals “of every kind.” But here, we find God instructing Noah to bring in seven pairs of every “clean animal.” Interpreters have wrestled trying to figure out God’s intent here. One suggestion is that the extra clean animals would serve as a sacrifice for Noah to bring to God after the flood. At the very least, once again this serves as a reminder that there are events outside the story that we don’t have recorded in Scripture. Nowhere up until now do we have God making a distinction between clean and unclean animals. A comprehensive list of that kind will have to wait until Leviticus 11. This is a familiar story to most of us. In our telling and retelling, we have filled in some of the details that the Bible doesn’t include.Usually we introduce a miracle: all the animals just come to the ark and get on. The Bible doesn’t make it clear how Noah is supposed to get the animals, and no narrative attention is given to the methods he uses. The story is just not concerned with this detail. This section concludes with the now familiar refrain: “Noah did all that the Lord had commanded him.” Thus the emphasis on human obedience continues. This also serves as an introduction and summary of what comes next. Genesis 7:6-10 In verses 6 and 11 we get a time-marker that connects us back to the genealogy in chapter 5. This reminds us that the flood story is effectively an interruption of that genealogy. Noah is 600 years old when the flood happens. We have the elements of a genealogical entry scattered around the narrative up to this point. Chapter 5 concludes with verse 32: “After Noah was five hundred years old, he became the father of Shem, Ham, and Japheth.” 6:9 picks the genealogy format back up: “These are the descendants of Noah...” Taken together, these elements give us the impression that the flood is partly just Noah’s genealogical entry. If we read the flood story as part of Noah’s piece of the genealogy, it reminds us how important this list of names and ages is to the Bible.We care about this family because through this family God saves the world. Genesis 7:11-16 If we get lost in the specifics of dating the flood, we miss the profound storytelling in this passage. In verse 11, the two waters that were separated on the second day of creation (Genesis 1:6) meet for the first time again. God is undoing creation. This serves as a stark reminder that in the biblical worldview the world is fragile, and held together by the active providence of God. In verse 16, all the animals and Noah’s family are included in the refrain. They all obeyed the commands of God. The interesting thing is the final phrase: “and the Lord shut him in.” Again, this emphasizes how God is the source of Noah’s salvation. Noah merely follows God’s commands, but even entering the ark is an act of faith, since God has to be the one to seal the ark. Conclusion A couple months ago, I read a history about the Apollo 8 astronauts, the first crew to leave the earth’s orbit in order to orbit the moon. Those astronauts had to rely on their own tremendous piloting skill and the expertise of mission control on the ground in Houston. The computers they were using were not nearly as powerful as a modern smartphone! To step out on a journey to the stars was to step out in faith. Amazingly, in the history of human space flight, we have never lost an astronaut in space. One thought that never escapes my mind when I read about space flight is that a few inches of metal and glass is all that separated those astronauts from the cold near-vacuum of space. It takes a tremendous amount of faith to be a pioneer. I wonder what the hardest step of faith would have been for Noah. What did his neighbors think as he built the ark? It probably seemed silly to them, like modern doomsday preppers are a source of fascination and ridicule for us today. But I think the hardest part would be stepping into the ark, allowing God to shut the door behind him, and being separated from the chaos and death of the flood by just a few inches of wood. Where we are uncertain of our future I think we should look to Noah. When we feel like there’s only a hair’s breadth between success and failure, between salvation and doom, we should look to this story and realize that God’s people have often been inches away from defeat. But God sealed Noah in the ark. God seals our salvation in baptism, and even though the waters rage around us, we will not drown if God is our hope.