Liam Hungate
Tonight continued the Redemption Series into Genesis 6-9, following the line of Seth down to Noah, described as the one righteous man left on an increasingly corrupt earth. Tonight covered the flood that reset humanity and the covenant God made with Noah afterward.
Passages: Genesis 6-9; Romans 1, 5; 2 Peter 3
By Genesis 6, human wickedness had spread so completely that Scripture says God was deeply grieved He had made mankind. This wasn't God losing control of His plan or being caught off guard, but it was still real grief over His creation's corruption. Sin, left unaddressed, spreads like a stain, and Romans 1 was used to show why judgment against that kind of unchecked sin becomes necessary.
Noah stood out as righteous, someone who walked closely with God in obedience, with three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Rather than wiping out humanity entirely, God chose to preserve a remnant through Noah's family, inviting him into His plan and establishing a covenant to save him, his wife, his sons, and his sons' wives through the coming flood.
God gave Noah detailed instructions to build a massive ark, roughly the size of the Titanic, with more than enough room for the animals it needed to carry. Noah's response was complete obedience, with no recorded complaining or resistance, a pattern that carried straight into the next chapter.
In Genesis 7, the animals came to Noah rather than Noah having to gather them himself, evidence of God's direct hand in the process. Once everyone and everything was inside, Noah and his family had to wait seven full days before the rain actually started, a real test of faith. All together, roughly a century passed between when God first told Noah what was coming and when the first rain finally fell.
The flood began in Noah's six-hundredth year, with water bursting up from below and pouring down from above for forty days and nights, a number tied throughout Scripture to testing and purification. The same ark that meant salvation for Noah's family meant judgment for everyone else, and the text notes that God Himself shut the door, since only He determines who enters into salvation. As Noah entered the ark, the old corrupted world was being left behind for a renewed one, a picture of the same kind of renewal believers experience in Christ.
The water eventually rose more than twenty feet above the highest mountains, wiping out every living thing outside the ark. The lesson pointed out that flood traditions show up in the stories of more than 200 cultures worldwide, most involving a catastrophic flood, a favored family, survival by boat, and animals being saved, treated as supporting evidence that the flood was a real, remembered event rather than only a myth confined to Genesis.
The water took about 150 days to fully recede, leaving the ark resting on the mountains of Ararat. Noah sent out a dove three times to check for dry land: first it found nothing and returned, then it came back with an olive leaf, and the third time it didn't return at all, signaling the earth was finally ready to be lived on again.
God told Noah's family to leave the ark and spread across the earth. The first thing Noah did once outside was build an altar and offer a costly sacrifice from the animals he'd just spent a year preserving, an act of real gratitude. Costly sacrifice matters to God not because He wants to take from His people, but because it reflects the same pattern of costly sacrifice Christ Himself would one day give. God promised never again to destroy all life with a flood, though the lesson noted one future judgment still remains, this time by fire at Christ's return rather than by water.
In Genesis 9, God renewed His original mandate to be fruitful and multiply, gave humanity authority over animals, permitted eating meat for the first time, and established that human life carries such weight, since people are made in God's image, that taking a life would carry the ultimate consequence. As the sign of this covenant, the third major covenant after the Edenic and Adamic, God placed a rainbow in the sky, a reminder of His promise of mercy both to us and, in a sense, to Himself. The lesson also noted that although the rainbow's meaning has been reshaped by today's culture, its original meaning as a sign of God's mercy hasn't changed, and encouraged staying grounded in that. The night closed by tying Noah's story to Romans 5: Noah's righteousness spared his family, and in the same way, Jesus' righteousness is what spares us. The flood cleaned the outside world. Only Jesus cleans us from the inside out.
These are the same questions the group wrestled with tonight. They are a good way to keep the conversation going at the dinner table.
A few easier openers if you want to start smaller: