“Chaotic Waters”
Genesis 7:1-24
We are reading through the book of Genesis which is a narrative beginning with the creation of the world and everything in it. The biblical narrative has some significant design patterns that are established in the first chapters of Genesis and weave their way throughout both the Old and New Testaments. Just like any good narrative, plot, setting, characterization are all different ways the Bible creates design patterns connecting its stories. The most common design pattern we often recognize is the temptation narrative. The first humans distrust God and make a stupid decision and ultimately embrace their own destruction. This story has become the template concerning the human condition.
So when we read other events that have the same key words and same behaviors and outcomes we recognize a replaying of the story of Adam and Eve. In fact, as each new story is told, the story following it not only picks up similarities from the first story but from every story along the way. Because of this, the stories given to us in Genesis chapters 1,2,3,4 set up a particular template for the way in which future stories will be told. The authors do this by using repeated key words and vocabulary. They also use phrases and situations, parallel plot situations and parallel settings. As we continue through the book of Genesis we will begin to recognize different design patterns.
Today’s Scripture, involving Noah and the flood carries with it a pattern in God’s behavior, demonstrating how God typically acts within the salvation design pattern.
To begin with, the salvation design pattern usually involves sunrise and water.
To set the stage for this design pattern we will need to go back to the first chapter of Genesis. In the very first sentences of the Bible, God creates sky and the land and we have God’s Spirit hovering over the dark, abysmal waters. It is wild and wasteful. There are two Hebrew words in this passage, “Ruach Elohim” for the Holy Spirit and “tohu va-bohu” for wild and wasteful, that will repeat themselves in future narratives. Here we have the foundational image of uncreation or the natural state of things, chaotic, that needed to be ordered.
God’s breath, ruach, authors the first word: “Let there be light.” Light becomes the fundamental image of light opposed to darkness. Light represents God’s creative life and energy that just floods the darkness.
God separates the light from darkness, day 1. God continues to form order in days 2 and 3. Then God begins creating inhabitants on days 4-6. The ordering of the six days is more determined by a literary-theological agenda than a description of watching a security camera footage of the first sentences. The days of creation should be read as an ordering of time. It’s like when you are creating a business, you begin by putting together the paperwork and stuff. You’re not actually creating anything. You are just forming the structure in which it makes sense.
So days 1,2 and 3 involve the act of separating and ordering.
Day 1 – separating light and dark,
Day 2 – separating waters above and waters below and Day 3 – separating the waters under, where waters gather together and dry land emerges.
Thus creating the separation of water from dry land and forming a place that humans can go.
Days 4, 5, and 6 are when God places animals and people into the two arenas, water and land.
It doesn’t take long in the narrative for the next story where the design pattern of crossing the chaotic waters is told.
The story of the flood.
We read in verse 11 of chapter 7,
“…on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.”
Here we have the Hebrew word phrase, “tohu va-bohu” again. This time it is translated “springs of the great deep,”
The flood story becomes an uncreation story or creation in reverse. God is allowing creation to sink back into chaos again.
God uncreates what He did in chapters 1,2,3 by having the waters take over the dry land. Then in verse 22, we read the Hebrew phrase, “nishmat-ruach chayyim”,
“Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died.”
The Hebrew phrase is used in the Bible to express the idea that humans and animals are connected to the Divine through breath.
The story goes on to list everything that lives on the dry ground, it died. Humans, beasts, creepers, birds of the skies. The very list that was presented in days 4 and 5, back in Genesis 1. The light, all the ordering of Genesis 1, collapsed. Then all that God accomplished in Genesis 4,5,6 was gone.
Decreation.
The logical sequence of decreation would be to go back to the very beginning and for light and darkness to be wiped out,
In the midst of the narrative this is the moment where you think, “Oh, no, Genesis, it’s all being undone. Oh, no, we’re all going to die.”
but instead, the next sentence is, verse 23,
“Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.”
And then Noah is there. Hope. There’s still hope.
At this point in the story, one has to wonder if even Noah and his family might have been worried. They entered the boat a week before any rain began to fall and we are told the waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.
Had God forgotten about them?
They were in this ark just floating around with nothing but water in sight.
The hinge of this story is the first verse of the next chapter,
“But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded.”
Noah can see that he’s not forgotten because something’s about to happen, God sends a “ruach,” a wind to pass over the land and the waters begin to decrease.
There we are, back to the creation story, Genesis 1, verse 2
“…the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”
God is reestablishing order by means of the ruach, wind, Spirit by passing over the land and beginning to push back the waters.
Again, separating.
We will read in the next chapter that Noah will look up and behold, he will eventually see, Yabbashah, “dry land.” Just like back in day 3 of Genesis 1 where at the end of the day, God causes the wind to blow back the waters to separate water from dry land.
The patterns presented in Genesis 1 and 2 are repeated in this story of Noah.
By destroying the earth and all that was in it, God was again, creating room for life, ultimately, human life. He was separating chaos to create space for life to flourish.
We read this in Genesis 1 and again in Genesis 7 and 8.
Why does God cause creation to descend back into chaos?
Genesis 6:5&6,
The Lord saw 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. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.
Because everything in human hearts was evil all the time and in violence.
Humans were the ones who caused creation to descend back into chaos. God decided to allow it to happen. In Genesis 1, God fights back the chaos or tames it to create space for humans. But then humans choose to bring the chaos back.
So God says, “All right, if you want Me to let this thing go back to chaos, then so be it.”
In sorrow, God relents.
The story of Noah reveals to us that it is a good thing when God reigns in chaos in our lives, but
It is also something that we can undo and
something God can redo.
God rescues humanity in the form of Noah, one righteous human.
God began this paradigm in Chapter 1, where we are given the template for how God overcomes chaos, or in the case of Genesis 7, evil, but yet, always sparing and providing space for a means of escape or a remnant.
That is what the Noah story is.
God’s purpose is to cleanse His world of evil and chaos so that there can be space for humans to be what He intended them to be.
The narrative of the Bible contains more stories where a separating of waters becomes a way that God rescues. All of these narratives provide a portrait of the fundamental salvation story, which itself is an expression of God’s purpose for creation in the first place.
To push back the chaos, to separate and order, so that humans can flourish, which takes us back to Genesis 1.
How do all these stories meld together?
With Christian Baptism.
Jesus’ baptism and Christian baptism becomes a symbol loaded with every one of these stories. The Apostles connect the dots. They draw on all these stories to help us understand the meaning of baptism.
The “chaos waters” represent the disordered state of existence, often associated with sin and death. Baptism symbolizes the act of entering into a new life with God by symbolically “dying” to one’s old self and being reborn through the cleansing waters. Essentially demonstrating, with Christ, we overcome the chaos and emerge into a new creation.
The chaotic waters represent the turmoil and sinfulness of human life before encountering God’s grace.
Through baptism, Christians symbolically participate in Jesus’ victory over the forces of chaos and death, represented by Jesus’ own baptism and resurrection.
By immersing oneself in water, being baptized, we offer an outward expression of an inward act of dying to one’s old self and being resurrected to a new life in Christ.
It is my hope that each of us who has made that inward decision to follow Jesus, has also committed to the outward expression of baptism. I am willing to talk with anyone who has questions or thoughts on being baptized.
Each day we are presented with a mini series of the chaotic water story. We live in a world that throws storms at us from left and from the right. Sometimes we can feel swamped. That Spirit, the ruach, that separated the waters and provided dry land is the same Spirit that Jesus left with us until He returns again.
With the Spirit of God in us we are given enough grace to survive the floods that come our way. Jesus told His disciples about the Spirit that would come to them after He left in, John 16:13
“But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”
Each day, may we take our eyes off the storm and put them on the Spirit that will guide us into all truth.
Let’s pray.