A Year on a Boat

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I’ve been taking some time this summer to read Scripture in larger chunks than the sermon-sized bites that I’ve grown accustomed to over a decade and a half of regular preaching. I read the gospel of Matthew over a few mornings while on a holiday. This week, it’s the book of Genesis. The first book of the Bible is, of course, a vast sweeping landscape which takes us from the creation of the world to the death of Joseph and the Israelites flight to Egypt. The narrative is rich, the characters are compelling and bewildering and oh-so-very-much-like-us in countless ways. Again, I am finding the experience to be a rewarding and interesting one.

A few days ago, I was reading the story of Noah in Genesis 6-9 and I noticed something that, while obvious on many levels, struck me in a new way. In Genesis 6, the Lord notices “how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.” As far as diagnoses go, it’s a strong one. And in one of the saddest verses in all of Scripture, we read, “The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth” (Gen 6:6). 

So, cue the flood. God’s plan to deal with the wickedness of the human heart is to wipe them out and start again. Humanity 2.0. A hard reset. Noah and his family alone will be spared, and he will be tasked with piloting a floating zoo for the better part of a year to ensure that there will be animals to populate the new and improved world. And so, the rains fall and the floodwaters rise and the job is done. All the filth and wickedness of the human stain is washed away (minus Noah and co.) The waters gradually recede, the dove that Noah optimistically sends out to discover evidence of land eventually returns with a freshly plucked olive leaf—this wonderful image of hope and promise—and eventually everyone staggers off the boat into a new world uncontaminated by human wickedness. 

Noah immediately builds and altar and shows his gratitude for surviving the ordeal by sacrificing a bunch of the animals whose lives he’s just spent a year carefully preserving (as one does). The Lord is, naturally, pleased by this. And then, the verse that struck me in a new way. With the sweet aroma of burnt flesh still in his nostrils, the Lord says to himself:

Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood (Gen 8:21). 

This is followed various promises and covenants and of course the well-loved story of the rainbow in the sky. But hang on a minute. So, the entire motivation for the flood was the great wickedness of the human heart and Noah is barely off the boat when God is promising never again to resort to such drastic measures even though the inclinations of the human heart remain unchanged (evidently a year on a boat didn’t alter the human condition)? Not to be irreverent or anything, but gosh, that seems like a pretty radical surgery to do precisely nothing to alter the human condition. If the people tasked with populating the new world are just as wicked as the ones wiped out for contaminating the old one, then what, exactly, was the point of the exercise? We might wonder.

(And, in case, we are tempted to think that Noah is exempt from all this language about the wickedness of the human heart, the very first thing we read after God’s eloquent promises in Genesis 9 is that Noah built a vineyard, got slobbering drunk, passed out naked in his tent and then cursed one of this sons for not hiding his eyes from the spectacle. Humanity 2.0 seems as unimpressive as the first go-round.)

What’s going on here? Is God a kind of blunderingly incompetent DIY creator? Did he not know that the miserable sinners that trudged on to the boat would emerge in the same condition or that the world they would populate would be the same as the one that originally broke his heart? Did he even expect anything to change? Was the flood actually more about vengeance than restoration? Is that what God is like? Whatever is going on in the story, the God at the heart of it certainly seems to bear very little resemblance to the One who would be called the Friend of Sinners and who said he desired mercy, not sacrifice. 

There is plenty to ponder in the story. But my thoughts turned to this impulse to destroy in order to purify, to purge in order to cleanse, to wipe all the bad people out so that the good people can start again. This is, of course, a profoundly human impulse. Consider any conflict in any part of the world right now. Or our manic political moment. Or the ideological polarization that has been ripping through our culture for the last decade or so. Or the fevered attempt to rebrand all the institutions named after bad people and replace them with, ahem, “good” ones. Or our desire to distance ourselves from moral norms that are deemed oppressive or insufficiently attuned to the needs of our bespoke identities. Consider our approach to anyone deemed to hold the wrong views about any controversial issue. Consider every church split ever. Increasingly, we seem to want to just wipe away the stain. Get rid of them. Banish them from the domain of the good, right-thinking people. Start again with good people like us.

I’m not suggesting that the story of Noah and the flood was recorded to address this most depressingly human of instincts or to somehow attribute the same tendencies to God. It’s just where my thoughts went as I read the story the other morning. If nothing else, the story reminds us that the wickedness of the human heart is, indeed, pervasive and remarkably resilient. It does indeed hover around our every thought and inclination, much as we wish this were not the case, much as it flatters us to pretend otherwise. None of us are exempt from the strong diagnosis. None of us. 

And, as the story from Genesis 9 onward will make abundantly clear, the redemption of the world will proceed only and always alongside human sin and stupidity. The story of Scripture is manifestly not the story of the good and righteous people vanquishing the wicked and stupid people. It is the story of sinners stumbling toward the home they had forgotten, despised, and turned their backs on. Against all odds, it it is the story of God graciously involving sinners in advancing the story forward, even repurposing human wickedness toward good ends (see the story of Joseph). And ultimately, of course, it is the story of the one true righteous One, the firstborn of humanity 2.0, the exemplar, the template, the guide and the rescuer allowing himself to be wiped out for newness to begin.