Forever after God’s people have referred back to this awe-inspiring event of the Great Flood. As we contemplate this terrible event, we understand that the continuation of the creation, of history, of mankind upon the earth is only by God's grace and patience. The sun shines today, only by God's mercy. Rain falls to replenish the earth by His lovingkindness. Ever since Noah we have learnt that God is to be feared and loved and respected, and that our lives are surrounded by God’s love, mercy, and faithfulness from the time we first draw breath. “Let all living creatures praise the Lord!”
The Flood came as wickedness reached its apotheosis. In the period from the Fall to the Flood―which represents roughly 1500 years―God allowed wickedness to mature and flourish, such that at the end of the period, “God saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” (Genesis 6:5). This was deliberately done.
The point is to let all mankind foreverafter know what happens when sinful human being are left to their own devices, to work out the principles of evil that lurks in every heart. So great was the poisonous flowering of evil that the world could not continue. It had to be cleansed. This in turn led the Lord to bring a universal world-wide judgement upon mankind. We read: “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them.” (Genesis 6:7)
Why and how did wickedness flourish? The strong implication of the text is that the period from the Fall to the Flood was a libertarian's “paradise”: there was no authority, no government, no restraints of any kind. Every man did what was right in his own eyes. There were no institutions, for example, to punish Cain for murdering his brother. Without divinely instituted restraints the true nature of man showed forth: evil matured, and became “grown up”, as it were. Lawlessness, murder, pillage―centering around the possession of women―dominated. (Genesis 4:18―24; Genesis 6: 1―4) It became the kind of world that represented our worst nightmares―society at its most lawless, murderous and degraded.
Every so often history provides a glimpse into what it must have been like. Martin Amis, writing of the horrors of the Stalinist era in his book Koba the Dread, describes how Stalin arranged for the torment of his victims. Herding his victims into prison camps, having extracted confessions out of them by torture, he set criminal gangs into the gulags and allowed the gangs to torture, maim, torment and destroy the other prisoners. We suspect that such extreme evil gives a glimpse into the world of man before the Great Flood.
This period of history, its fruit, and its culminating universal judgment, stands as a backdrop to the subsequent establishment of civil government as an institution of punishment for extreme wickedness and a restraint upon evil. Civil government, regardless of its constant shortcomings and failings, works to prevent the need for univeral judgment, prior to the Final Advent of our Lord. Civil government helps ensure the continuation of the world.
After the Flood, history began again. So, what now would be different? Genesis 8:20―22 tell us that God declares He will never deploy a universal judgment so extreme that it involves cursing the entirety of the created world. However, this is not due to man's heart being changed. He still remains intent on evil from his youth. So, if there will never again be a universal judgment, it implies that sin is going to be restrained.
What, then, will stop the recrudescence and triumph of universal evil such that a universal world-wide judgment is required? God mandated and commanded the lawful shedding of blood as punishment for murder: “And surely I will require your lifeblood; from every beast I will require it. And from every man, from every man's brother I will require the life of man. Whoever sheds man's blood, by man his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God He made man.” (Genesis 9:5―7) God institutes His ministry of capital punishment upon murderers―for murderers have sought to strike down the very image of God by taking the life of another human being.
The State punishing murders with execution (and by implication and extension, punishing all lesser crimes with appropriate punishment) has been given by God, not only to execute justice, but to prevent the kind of monstrous flowering of gratuitous evil which led to the Flood. Thus the magistrate is declared to be the Minister of God for the punishment of evil doing. (Romans 13: 1―7) After Noah, judgment was to be particular, not universal. This institution is one of the key, if not the key, ways God prevents evil from triumphing in the earth.
As well as the restraining effect of the civil magistrate and the death penalty upon murder, God uses additional means to prevent the world devolving into universal unrestrained wickedness. He brings localised judgments (Sodom and Gomorrah) as well as wars, diseases, famine, pestilence―all mediated through the cause and effect of human actions―to punish and restrain sin, preventing it from gaining ascendancy and dominance.
For example, one modern economist has argued that the drop in the violent crime rate in the United States has as its primary cause the legalisation of abortion in Roe vs Wade. This particular evil has resulted in many children, which would otherwise have been born into evil and degraded households, and which would have headed straight into the criminal underworld, drugs, and the gangs, being aborted. If true, this is serves as an example of how the Lord uses social causes and effects to restrain and wither evil. Sin now tends to destroy itself and kill itself off.
A second and major theme of the revelation concerning Noah is God's grace before and in judgment. We notice in Genesis 6 that despite the fact that God had announced His judgment upon all mankind, He gave them more time. He determined that He would strive with man for another 120 years―which is the time it took for Noah to build the Ark. This is a startling example of God’s longsuffering and patience towards sinners.
The manner in which He strove with men was to send a preacher of righteousness, Noah, amongst them. According to I Peter 3: 18-20, Christ by His Spirit, in the person of Noah, went and preached to that evil generation of mankind. This preaching continued throughout the 120 years of the Ark’s preparation. The building of the Ark was itself a visible sermon to the world of the coming judgement of God. Noah’s building of the Ark according to God’s direction and instruction was a graphic way of confronting his generation with the judgement to come: the rejection of God’s prophet during this 120 years sealed the condemnation of the world (Heb. 11:7).
A third theme of divine government of human history established ever since the time of Noah is the continuity of the world. The natural order will be maintained; natural law will continue to exist; the seasons will cycle. (Genesis 8:22) The rainbow was placed in the sky as a perpetual sign of God's promise to this day. This is why Jerusalem refuses to get caught up in the apocalyptic catastrophism which racks the modern world (atomic annihilation, mutual assured destruction, the poisoning of the planet, global warming catastrophies, global pandemics). This firm and confident faith of Jerusalem is expressed in one of her most ancient hymns, the Gloria Patrie:
Glory be to the FatherJerusalem believes and knows that Jesus was resurrected from the dead and has commenced the work of the recreation of the world, which involves changing men's hearts from the inside out. As a result all the nations are going to be discipled and the creation itself is to be regenerated―but this is happening from within human history.
And to the Son
And to the Holy Ghost.
As it was in the beginning
Is now and ever shall be
World without end
Amen, Amen.
Now it is true that not a few in Jerusalem have faltered at this point, and have sucuumbed to a kind of “Christian” global catastrophism. They see evil getting stronger, the kingdom of God fading and a great apocalyptic battle―which they call the Battle of Armageddon―to end all things. They have failed to reckon with the covenant God made with Noah, and with the ascension and investiture of our Lord. But these folk, sadly, have listened more to Athens than to Jerusalem and they have drunk deeply at the wells of cynical unbelieving pessimism. They have come to read their Bibles through the glasses of modern Athenian newspapers. But, in time, these little ones will grow up. They will turn back again to the Scriptures and will lay aside their newspapers.
A fourth legacy of Noah is that he represents a new beginning, a new Genesis. God re-institutes the Cultural Mandate. God commanded once again, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.” (Genesis 9:1) One can imagine that Noah and his family would have been quite dispirited and overwhelmed at having to begin again. Nevertheless the commands of God do not change. Regardless of what localised judgments we have to go through―poverty, famine, degradation, wars―God's people must always begin again.
Jerusalem is the City whose Spirit cannot be broken. Jerusalem never stops. Tyrants have arisen which have sought to wipe Jerusalem off the pages of history (Haaman, Antiochus Epiphanes, Mao Tse Tung, Stalin, Honecker,) but it is they who have been wiped out―Ozymandius's all―and Jerusalem flowers again. It starts again. It comes back. Why? It cannot do anything else. It is constrained to begin again and come back. The Spirit of God won't let any other outcome eventuate. This is why Jerusalem will eventually fill the earth and Athens will die out. All enemies are being progressively placed under the feet of the King of all kings.
A fifth element of the revelation of Noah is its prophetic significance. In God’s determination to punish mankind for their great sinfulness, God provides for us a picture of His wrath and judgement to come. All judgements in history (Sodom, Jerusalem etc) are aftershocks of this great judgement. But the judgment of Noah serves as a small precursor to the great Final Judgment when all men of all time, and all demonic heavenly powers will be thrown into the Lake of Fire in one great universal, final judgment.
Notice how Jesus deliberately refers back to Noah when He was warning our fathers of the soon-to-come destruction of Jerusalem. “But as the days of Noah were, so shall the coming of the Son of Man be . . .” (Matthew 24: 36-42)
The destruction of the world the day that Noah entered the Ark becomes the picture of how it was just prior to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70. People were eating, drinking, marrying―they were insensible to their spiritual dangers. They were dead to God. They ignored His about-to-fall wrath. They had not listened to one-greater-than Noah who had preached amongst them and warned them to flee from the wrath to come. They were totally absorbed in their life and its natural processes. But suddenly they were swept away to judgment. Two were ploughing in the field; one was taken.
Peter, likewise, writing to the Hebrew Christians, warning them of the coming judgment upon the Israel of his generation, refers his readers back to the days of Noah and God’s destruction of mankind (I Peter 2:5). He warned that it was going to be exactly as it was in the days of Noah. People would be mocking the warning of coming judgment. “Nothing ever changes. Our fathers were not judged, so why should we worry?” (II Peter 3:4)
Just as people in Noah’s time forgot that the whole world was established and sustained by the Word of God, and that by that same Word it was swept away in the time of Noah, so our fathers in Peter’s day had chosen not to remember and heed.
Note that Peter changes the image of destruction from flood to fire. Jerusalem, and particularly the Temple, was razed to the ground with a terrible fire in AD 70, as God’s judgment fell upon apostate Israel.
The destruction of Jerusalem ended the age of the Old Covenant. It was an aftershock of the judgment that fell upon Noah’s generation. But both judgments are also prophetic of the great judgement yet to come upon all mankind. (Matthew 25:30-46) But because of God’s covenant with Noah, that judgment will not result in the destruction of the creation, but in its cleansing—even as the Great Flood cleansed the world.
The curse of sin upon the saints and the creation in general will be removed. (Romans 8: 19-23). This will occur at the Final Advent of our Lord (I Thess. 4:15-18). It will be the final outworking of the covenant made with our father, Noah. When Noah sacrificed to the Lord, He said to himself: “I will never again curse the ground on account of man, for the intent of man’s heart is evil from his youth. And I will never again destroy every living thing as I have done.” (Genesis 8:21,22)
There is a wonderful promise implicit in these words. If God promises never again to destroy every living thing, it implies that He would work throughout history, from the time of Noah to this day, to restrain the sin of mankind.
It also implies that God would extend His hand of grace and mercy to mankind to save mankind. In other words, the unfolding of human history would be the unfolding of His grace so that in time to come, His grace would extend to every corner of the earth and every nation will be discipled unto Jesus, our Lord. And so it is coming to pass.
As the scripture gradually opens out God’s purposes they reveal that God’s grace is extending over the whole earth and that all peoples and nations will come and worship the Lord.
The floodgates of God’s mercy were opened after the resurrection when our Lord commanded that the Gospel be preached to all nations and that all nations would be discipled unto Him. (Matt. 28:18―20.) Thus we come to see that mercy triumphs over judgment and that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked.
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