Most of us have heard the story of Noah and the flood since we were little. Even if you were not raised in the church, even if you never went to Sunday school or anything, the chances are you know the basic facts of this story. God gets mad at humanity and decides to wipe it out and start over. God decides not to start completely over, though. Instead, God saves Noah and his family, and tells Noah to save two of every living thing so that after the flood, life can start over again.
Now, just as with the creation story, I don’t want to get into whether this story is literally true. Think what you want about that. To me, the more interesting question is: why is this story in the Bible? What are we supposed to learn from it? What does it tell us about God or about ourselves? What can we get from this story that will draw us closer to God or help us in our daily lives?
When we look at the story that way, it seems like we have a lot of questions. Look at what the story says. It tells us God was sorry he had created humans. It tells us God willingly and intentionally killed every human being other than Noah and his family, no matter who they were or how they lived. It tells us God willingly and intentionally killed all sorts of animals, too. It tells us God willingly and intentionally killed the birds, the lizards, everything, other than the two of each that were lucky enough to get on the ark.
How do we square that with our vision of God? After all, the one thing we probably all agree on about God, the one thing we talk about in church we all the time, is that God is love. We talk about God’s willingness to forgive us. We talk about God’s grace and mercy. Yet, in this story, God does not seem very loving or forgiving at all. God does not show much grace or mercy here. Sure, he showed it to Noah and his family, and we’re told that the reason is that Noah was a righteous man, but was Noah really the only righteous person on the face of the earth? Was there no one else on the entire earth who was doing his or her best to follow God and serve God? Were Noah and his family really the only ones worth saving? Did no one else even deserve a warning and a second chance?
If we take these Old Testament stories seriously, they raise a lot of questions for us. They make us take another look at things about our faith that we tend to take for granted. What we decide to do with stories like this has a big impact on how we see God. It especially impacts how we see God interacting with us.
You know, when we look at this story, we tend to look at it either from the point of view of either God or Noah. It seems to me, though, that you and I can probably identify a lot more with the other people on earth, the people who were killed, than we can with God or Noah. God, after all, is God: more perfect and more holy than any of us can ever imagine being. As for Noah, well, we may like to think that we’re somewhat righteous, to varying degrees, but none of us would probably claim to be the most righteous person on earth, the way Noah appears to have been.
When it comes to the others, though, that’s a different story. I can identify with them. I’ll bet you can, too. After all, when it comes to the way we live our lives, how many of us really stand out from the crowd all that much? I’m not saying no one here does, but if you do, you’re the exception, not the rule. Statistics show that Christians in America do not stand out from the general population in terms of how we live or what we do in any significant way. In other words, according to the numbers, if someone took ten average people and told you to figure out which ones were Christians by watching their behavior, the chances are you would not be able to do it. As Christians we tend to blend in with the crowd, not stand out from it.
So, let’s think of ourselves as the ordinary people in this story. From what the Bible says, we’d have had no clue what was going on. God told Noah what was going on, but there’s no indication that God told anyone else. There’s no indication that Noah told anyone else, either. Even if he did, how many people could Noah have talked to, compared to all the people in the world? Hardly any.
If we’re the ordinary people in this story, we have no idea what’s happening. All we know is that it’s raining. And it keeps raining. And it keeps raining. The water starts rising. It looks like it’s never going to stop.
Maybe, at some point, we decide that God is causing this. Maybe, at some point, we ask God to save us. If we do, though, it does not work. The water keeps rising. We try to go to higher ground, but eventually there’s no higher ground to go to. The water keeps rising until we have nowhere else to go. And we die.
Do you ever feel like that’s the way life’s going for you? I mean, not literally, although the floods we had in this area a couple of years ago may have reminded a few people of that. What I mean is, do you ever feel like bad things are happening to you, and you have no idea why? You have no clear idea what’s going on or what’s causing it or anything. All you know is that bad things are happening. And they keep happening. And they keep happening. You think they’re never going to stop.
Maybe, at some point, we decide that God is causing this. We ask God to save us. But God does not seem to respond. We try to find higher ground, to go someplace where we can escape the bad stuff, but there’s nowhere to go. We feel like we’re drowning, and there’s nothing we can do about it. We feel like things are completely hopeless.
I’ll bet a lot of us have felt that way at some point in our lives. I have. Maybe you feel that way now. It’s a pretty terrible feeling. It’s one thing to feel like everything’s going wrong now. It’s even worse, though, when we feel like there’s no hope of things ever being different, when we feel like there’s nowhere to go and no one to turn to, to feel like not even God can or will save us. That’s got to be about as bad a feeling as we can have.
Here’s the thing, though. Whether we think the story of the flood is literally true or not, here’s the important point about it: God has promised that it will never happen again. If God ever was this punishing, unforgiving God, that’s not who God is now. We do not have to worry about that now or at any point in the future. God promised Noah that never again would God abandon humans or leave us without hope. God gave us the rainbow as an everlasting sign of that promise.
I think this is why this story is in the Bible: to tell us that, no matter what’s going on in our lives, we are never in a situation that is without hope. Even when we cannot see the hope, it’s still there. Hope is still there because God is still there. God will always be there for us.
That does not mean that God will instantly make all the bad things go away, of course. God never promises to make our lives easy or to take us out of bad situations. What God does do is promise to be with us in the bad situations and help us through them. God promises to be there every step of the way, no matter how bad it gets, and God promises to see us through to the other side of our trouble, no matter what that other side may be.
Is that always easy to believe? No. It can be hard sometimes. Depending on the situation, it can be really hard. Sometimes we think we cannot do it. But we can. We can believe it because we know who God is not the angry, punishing God described at the beginning of this story. If God ever was that way, God has promised never to be that way again. God has promised to be a God of hope, and a God of love. God gave us rainbows to remind us of that.
You and I are never abandoned by God. It may feel that way sometimes, but it’s not true. No matter how hard it seems to be raining in our lives, and no matter how much we may feel like we’re drowning in our troubles, God is still there. As the country song says, every storm runs out of rain. And at the end of the rain, there will always be a rainbow.
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