Genesis Diaries 6:9

(No image for this post. I wanted a picture of moldy food, but apparently…not in high demand)

With a clear understanding of the definition of Evil (see previous post) we see that the Flood was not in any way a rash or capricious decision on God’s part. It was an extreme measure to save a patient so riddled with cancer that they couldn’t function. As in the Garden, when mankind chose wrongly, God was not willing to scrap everything and start entirely over. He Who Sits in Eternal Places chose to make something beautiful out of what mankind had twisted, warped, and destroyed. He could have abandoned us entirely. It was within his purview to burn the world to a cinder, end our story then and there, but again…the Bible is not the story of mankind. It is primarily the story of God and how He interacts with mankind. He is ever willing to provide a way whether we choose to take it or not.

We come to Genesis, chapter six and verse nine, and it is reiterated that among the entirety of wicked humanity there is one man who is called “righteous”; blameless in his generation. One phrase in particular jumps out at me here. “Noah walked with God.”

This simple phrase “walked with God” calls us back to Enoch, and even into the Garden where God walked the Garden in the cool of the day with Adam and Eve. It indicates something more than an acknowledgement that God exists and His ways are a thing.

Have you ever gone to the grocery store and seen someone you know? You wave, you chat awkwardly for a second, and then you walk on kind of hoping you don’t just keep running into each other on every other aisle because it’s strangely obligating that you have to say something? Or maybe you just keep your head down and hope they didn’t notice you because you don’t want social interaction? I’ve never studied the packaging of any grocery item as intensely as when someone I know only a little bit is on the same aisle.

There are also, however, those very extremely precious few people whom you love and jive with to the degree that when you see them at the grocery store suddenly you drop everything and shop with them; alongside them. You walk aisle by aisle chatting, laughing, telling stories, pouring out everything about your day and how you prefer this brand to that brand, and you end up taking much longer than you intended and come away all the fuller for it. You love them so much that it doesn’t seem awkward or weird. The rest of the world falls away as you exist in their presence enjoying them and enjoying them enjoying you.

I think that is what this “walking with God” means. It’s the relationship we were created to have with the LORD, we long for with the LORD, and we are really frightened to have with the LORD. Part of us is scared of what people would think about us if we had that kind of connection with God…and in this Noah was an oddity.

The entire world, literally everyone but Noah, was against him, doing things the opposite of this man. They were at odds with it. I have no doubt he was mocked and ridiculed. It wouldn’t surprise me if they thought he was crazy. One righteous man among a global population of wicked men. It kind of makes me wonder how his sons found wives. Imagine what their in-laws must have been like. Eesh.

Starting in verse eleven we get a reprise of God’s opinion on the situation. The earth itself is declared “corrupt” and “filled with violence”.

The word here for corrupt means “rotting, spoiled, perverted, ruined”. Too often we think of “corrupt” in regards to a politician who takes money on the side or doesn’t live virtuously. It’s a surface level judgement, where God’s version of “corrupt” goes far more deeply. It is far closer to a piece of fruit that is fully rotted, giving off a smell, and oozing in such a way that it threatens to accelerate the spoiling of the other fruits by the mere touch. There’s no redeeming that fruit. And that is what mankind made of the earth and one another.

This toxicity, the spoiling, this perversion, manifests in that the earth is “filled with violence.” The word in Hebrew here actually means “overflowing with”. The limit of violence on the earth hadn’t just been reached, it had been fully breached.

“Violence” isn’t simply a bar room brawl. The word gives hints at every worst impulse of humanity made manifest and normalized; abject cruelty and injustice in overwhelming oppression of one to the another. This wasn’t just simply a feature of this civilization, this was the absolute foundation of what humanity had made of themselves. There were no innocents. Essentially it seems to me that we are talking about the worst of the worst in society that we imprison in maximum security prisons, the ones that haunt the most disturbing horror films, these were the absolute “norm”.

With this judgement of humanity, God approaches Noah and tells him that he is going to “make an end” of all flesh. Through man this toxicity has come, and He is going to destroy both man and the earth. God is a God of Justice and Shalom, and mankind has by his own choice become a being driven by cruelty, injustice, and destruction. He has perverted himself into the dark shadow version of what he was created to be.

Interestingly the word for “destroy” that God uses is the same Hebrew word for “corrupt”. There is something of a poetic justice here that man has “ruined” and “destroyed” himself and the earth, everything God created and called Good…and so God is going to give man exactly what he wants. The LORD will bring it to its logical conclusion. Ruin and destruction.

But for Noah…one righteous man who walks with God.

Its interesting to remember that to the ancient Hebrew water, especially large open water, represented chaos. Mankind has made a chaos out of the entire earth. And what does God bring upon the earth? He covers the earth in one massive water. He returns it to the state that the story first begins in chapter one and verse one; formless and void.

However, there is even in this chaos a refuge for the righteous, for those who choose to walk with Him. Noah, in some ways, is going to man’s roots in the Garden. For the next 40 days and nights, he will care, tend, and provide for the Shalom of every animal in God’s creation in that refuge. In a way, the Ark will be a mobile mini-Garden of Eden.

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