Flood - Destruction or Deliverance

Wednesday, October 14th
 
For those of you wondering where Tuesday’s daily faith challenge was, you didn’t miss anything. I didn’t finish it in time and we as a staff had an awesome day serving in Howards Grove Tuesday, so I made the executive decision to bump it from Tuesday to Wednesday and go into Saturday.
 
If you need a refresher from Monday, go back and read Genesis 6:13-7:24, yes, it is a lot, but it gives the framework for where we are going. Simply because, we can have more questions than answers and can get distracted with what got our attention versus what SHOULD GET our attention.
 
Let me summarize it this way, from a wonderful resource The Lost World of the Flood by John Walton. “The literary-theological interpretation of the passage takes precedence over the compulsion many feel to reconstruct the event itself…What the narrator does with the flood is more important than what the flood does, and what God does through the flood is most important of all. If this is so, then we need to articulate persuasively what the narrator and God are doing through the flood….We are brought to the conclusion that Genesis 6-9 pertains to a local flood described rhetorically as a worldwide flood to make a theological point. Such a view honors both the biblical text when read in its literary and cultural context as well as the geological evidence (or lack thereof).”
 
That may be a mouthful, so let me summarize. I believe the flood happened, to the degree by which it happened isn’t the point of the author or of God. The intention, like with all of scripture, is to understand God, his character and His activity within the human story.
 
What should get our attention? This is a story of cosmic collapse. Which if you think about it, is greater than just a “flood” regardless if it was local or covered the entire world.
 
Let me draw your attention to a few things. God brought order at creation, separating and gathering, there was the deep, the land, and the heavens, a three-tiered creation (if you look back, three tiers in the ark (Genesis 7:16)- The ark is God’s new creation.)
 
But in Genesis 7:11- 11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.
 
Notice what happens, what split open? The deep. And what opened from above? The heavens. All of which collapsed creation from the top and the bottom, a deluge of disorder. God is allowing disorder to fill the land of disorder to recreated what he originally intended. (May want to reread that).
 
Not only that, remember Genesis 6:1-4, spoke of the sons of God and the sons of man breaking the boundaries by which God created, humanity and spiritual beings intermingling. Which meant he allowed the cosmic collapse of all of creation, to recreate something new through the new Adam.
 
So what? Now what? What do we do with this? These questions I asked at the end of my message, as a summary with all that we see in the flood narrative. Today however, I want us to take each one and process the application piece.
 
How do we apply this to life? Because if all you do is say, “hmm, that was interesting, I may rethink the flood narrative.” You are missing the theological impact of this narrative, God’s character and how he is always at work.
 
It was a cosmic collapse, the inevitable unraveling of a world that had chosen violence and ruin over the order God intended. Yet even in that collapse, God was not absent. He was watching. He was grieving. He was moving. When your world feels like it is unraveling, the question is not whether God sees it. He does. The real question is whether you will turn toward Him or away from Him in the wreckage. You can blame God, get bitter, or get better?
 
Write down one specific circumstance that feels out of control. Spend five minutes in silence, surrendering that circumstance to God rather than trying to solve it.
 
Collapse can be the beginning of renewal if you let God be present in it.