Did the Flood really happen? Geologists have theorized that there was a catastrophic event about 7,500 years ago, in which salt water from the Mediterranean Sea broke through what is now the Bosporus Strait in modern day Turkey. That sudden onrush of salt water turned a freshwater lake into what we now know as the Black Sea. There is evidence of an ancient shoreline underneath the sea today. Man made tools have also been found on the now underwater shoreline.
Such an
event today—the transformation of a lake into a sea, and the flooding of
thousands of square miles of shoreline in a little more than a year—would boggle
the mind. To those living by the lake then, it certainly would have felt
like the end of the world. And it is also the case that ancient peoples from
North America to India have an ancient legend about a flood. Could they all have
survived the Black Sea flood, and handed down those stories of survival to the
descendants?
Surely each
tribe would have wondered why their gods had done this to them. In some, that
reflection led to the conclusion that the gods cared little for the welfare of
human beings. The Israelites, however, came to a very different conclusion
about God and the human race.
“The LORD
saw that humanity had become thoroughly evil on the earth and that every idea
their minds thought up was always completely evil. The LORD regretted making
human beings on the earth, and he was heartbroken.” (Genesis 6:5-6, Common
English Bible). In fact, the Hebrew word translated here as “heartbroken” is
actually the same word used to describe the pain that Eve would suffer in
childbirth as a result of her and Adam’s sin (Genesis 3:16). God cared so
deeply for the people he made that it hurt him to see that “every idea their
minds thought up was always completely evil.”
Because of
this, “the LORD said, ‘I will wipe off of the land the human race that I’ve
created: from human beings to livestock to the crawling things to the birds in
the skies, because I regret I ever made them.” But as for Noah, the LORD
approved of him” (Gen. 6:7-8). And we know the rest of the story: the ark, the
animals in twosies, the flood, and the dove with a twig in its beak. So off the
ark they went, and now the LORD God says, “I will not curse the fertile land
anymore because of human beings since the ideas of the human mind are evil from
their youth” (Gen. 8:21)
Wait. Didn’t
God decide to destroy the human race because “every idea their minds thought up
was always completely evil”? But now God decides never again to destroy the
earth because “the ideas of the human mind are evil from their youth”? It seems
that the reason God decided to destroy the earth now become the very reason why
God will never destroy the earth again.
Yes. God knows now that the human race is
irredeemable. Yet, God also knows that
he made us, and breathed life into us.
Is God now to say that God made a mistake? No.
But if that mistake is to be corrected, God now recognizes that he will
have to take the decisive steps. Redemption
must come at God's initiative, not ours.
And God also knows that this "correction" must be a
process. In that process, God will call
and we will respond as best we can, quite often with one step forward and two
steps back, hopefully more often with two steps forward and one step back. But God will have to work with us on our
schedule.
Here we are,
however many millennia later. Have we
moved forward any from that ancient catastrophe? Is the intention of our heart any less
evil? Ultimately, only God knows the
answer. But he gives us enough of an
answer in this ancient story for us to know that God's loving patience is infinite,
without end, forever and ever.
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