Genesis 8:15-22

2006.Nov.09 09:16

Give it another try

Read Genesis 8:15-22 | Full Chapter

God said to Noah, “You, your wife, your sons, and your daughters-in-law may now leave the boat. Let out the birds, animals, and reptiles, so they can mate and live all over the earth.”
(Genesis 8:15-17, CEV)

The smell of the burning offering pleased God, and he said: Never again will I punish the earth for the sinful things its people do. All of them have evil thoughts from the time they are young, but I will never destroy everything that breathes, as I did this time. As long as the earth remains,there will be planting and harvest, cold and heat; winter and summer, day and night.
(Genesis 8:21-22, CEV)

The flood is over. It’s probably messed with the climate a bit and left an absurd number of dead things lying around, not to mention destroyed all remnants of ‘civilization’ for the time being, but it’s over. And God says, “Get off the boat…and let the animals mate!” It’s a tacit admission that God really does want humanity to give it another try.

After Noah builds an alter and sacrifices, Jehovah makes this desire explicit. He acknowledges first that humans will sin from our youth, flood or no flood. But he states that he will not again destroy “everything that breathes” (Maybe that’s why Revelations takes so many scrolls). It’s like God’s saying, “You people f—ed up, you’re going to keep f—ing up and it really p—es me off, but I am not going to give up on you. I’m going to get friends out of you even if I have to cause you great pain.”

And that’s what strikes me, that Jehovah (it seems to me) establishes a policy from this point forward with regards to humanity that we would rather cause us–as a species and as individuals–exquisite pain than destroy us. And maybe we have Noah to thank for that, although I’d guess it was always God’s intent. After all, it might make the opportunity a good deal more desirable when we’ve seen his williness to destroy.

Why do bad things happen to good people? It’s sort of irrelevant since the only good human has been Jesus. But, it makes sense to me to suggest that they happen because God prefers us to suffer a little while that we might lay down our claims to godhood and humble ourselves before him. Because if we don’t, patient as he may be, he would eventually have to exile us. And considering that God is the provider of all good things…

I’ll take the pain.

Genesis 8:13-14

2006.Oct.20 16:14

The Earth Is Dry

Read Genesis 8:13-14 | Full Chapter

Now it came about in the six hundred and first year, in the first month, on the first of the month, the water was dried up from the earth. Then Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and behold, the surface of the ground was dried up. In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dry.
(Genesis 8:13-14, NASB)

Funny, usually the earth being dry is a bad thing. But, a year or so after the flood-rains started, the earth being dry is a very good thing. This isn’t the dry of mid-August, hasn’t rained in a month and the grass is dying. No, this is the dry after you’ve been working hard and become smelly and dirty and you’ve taken your shower and now you’ve just finishing drying yourself and have put the towel up and you’re clean.

That kind of dry.

Recall the reason for this flood is to clean the earth of the sin of humanity of that day, vis-a-vis the nearly complete drowning of said humanity. Okay, that bit is not real uplifting, either that it happened or that the species to which I belong sinned so much as to precipitate the event. However, the cleansing is now complete and God’s remnant is ready to reinhabit the earth, hopefully with a somewhat increased righteousness.

The rest of the Old Testament covers just how well that didn’t work out. Maybe part of Jehovah’s reason for the flood is to make it very clear to each human that we can’t blame Adam and Eve for our sin. Because onto this cleansed earth will the family of Noah depart, and they too will choose sin.

Genesis 8:6-12

2006.Oct.12 21:06

Send out the birds

Read Genesis 8:6-12 | Full Chapter

[Noah] sent out a raven, and it flew here and there until the water was dried up from the earth. Then he sent out a dove from him, to see if the water was abated from the face of the land; but the dove found no resting place for the sole of her foot.
(Genesis 8:7-9a, NASB)

Okay, so the folks on the boat have done a nice job of being patient so far, but let’s face it, Noah and family are probably ready to disembark. To get a measure of things, Noah decides to send out a bird, and see if it comes back.

He first sends out a raven. The raven, possibly sick of the ark, just flies around for a while. So, the raven was not a good idea. Next he sends out a dove three times, once a week. The first week the dove comes back. The second the dove also returns, this time with a leaf from an olive tree. So things are looking up. Finally, the next week, the dove does not return.

What I want to say about this all has to do with wisdom and patience. Sending out birds seems to me the best course of action. After all, they can fly above the water, and you get an idea of how the water is receding based on when the bird returns. Which is to say, it’s not what I naturally would have done. Yes, I would have opened the door and maybe fashioned a pole to see if I could find the bottom. And then, as soon as I knew there was an olive tree out there, I’d be trying to land the boat. And so what if a few rats jump overboard in the meanwhile?

It can be a huge pain to, well, wait. To make sure my course of action is wise instead of just jumping into action (that’s not to say I should never act unless I’m certain of the results, but just to not act rashly). Jehovah is the source of wisdom, and when I am stressed I can try to act on that stress or I can turn to him (or probably, some third option). Guess which one I usually do.

Genesis 8:1-5

2006.Oct.05 09:49

Snakes on a boat

Read Genesis 8:1-5 | Full Chapter

But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the ark; and God caused a wind to pass over the earth, and the water subsided…and the water receded steadily from the earth, and at the end of one hundred and fifty days the water decreased.
(Genesis 8:1,3, NASB)

Let’s start with “God remembered Noah…” Now I have the unsubstantiated feeling the “remember” here is more of an “attended to” than a “oh, yeah, I forgot about that boat”. But either suggests that Jehovah’s focus had been elsewhere. It seems likely to me that his attention was centered on the people dying in the flood he’d commissioned, the passing away of part of his creation, but also of a generation given over to rebellion against him. I don’t know how God’s emotions work, but I feel confident that I have never experienced emotional turmoil that might compare to this moment for God. But, Jehovah then turns his attention to what remains: a family of eight (I think) and a bunch of animals. On a boat.

Now here’s something that I hadn’t thought about until just now. Among those animals on this boat where serpents, snakes. God saves humanity, which has fallen, and the animal who represents that fall, the trickster who decieved Eve and Adam (or at least the form taken by that trickster). God has isolated this small group of humans to have another go, and he doesn’t just allow the serpent to continue existance, he deliberately has Noah puts snakes on the plane…er, boat…er, big box ark thingie.

This isn’t a short jaunt on the boat, wait for forty days of rain to end, and get off. No, they have to wait 150 days before the water starts receding. The rains began on the 17th day of the second month (Genesis 7:12) and its not until 27th day of the second month (Genesis 8:14), a full year later, that they disembark. They’re on the boat more than a year (a Hebrew year anyway; I haven’t quite figured out how that translates to the modern western calendar). That’s a lot of time. Eight people and hundreds of animals including fun things like snakes and bears and anteaters (at least, I’m assuming). And the things I get impatient over!

The miracle, to me, is less that God saved the eight from the flood, but that he saved them and the animals from a year in the boat. What peace he must have rained in that bastion, what patience he must have poured on them. And each of these eight deserves the due as well, for their faith and their part in keeping to God’s peace. This was no cruise, it was cramped quarters with the earth dying beneath them and a tempter on the boat (because, seriously, whatever you believe about Satan, what are the chances he was not going after this group, even aside from the issue of the snake as figurative deceiver?). So, yeah, I’m gonna say it again, because here it is in the Bible once again: however bad life gets, trust in God.