The Covenant with Noah
As I mentioned at the end of the last lesson, the sin of humanity from the period after Adam and Eve to the time of Noah became so severe that it really required a sort of “re-creation.” That’s how we need to understand the Flood. What happens is that God plunges the world back under water, just as it was in Genesis 1:2, and then brings the dry land up out of the waters as He did in Genesis 1:9 in an act of re-creation.
The ark is a kind of floating garden, you might say it’s a floating zoo, but what is our word “zoo” short for? Did you know it’s actually short for “zoological garden,” that is a garden of animals rather than plants? Well, that’s exactly what the ark is: a floating garden of life, a kind of floating Eden, that lands on a new mountain, Mt. Ararat, and Mt. Ararat becomes a kind of sacrament of the original mountain of Eden.
Noah, after the ark has landed, exits the ark and he is a new Adam figure, a new father of the human race. As a father, there is a kind of natural priesthood that he enjoys because fatherhood and priesthood are linked all throughout the Scriptures. As the natural father of the human race, he has this natural priesthood. When he exits the ark, he offers sacrifice to God. The Scriptures describe God smelling, as it were, the sweet smell of Noah’s sacrifice and forming a covenant with Noah again.
It’s important for us to realize that this covenant that God forms with Noah in Genesis 9:8-17, it’s really a renewal of the covenant that was originally enjoyed by Adam. That’s why we see a repetition of the many of the phrases and commands that we first saw in Genesis 1 and 2 now with Noah: the command to be fruitful and multiply, for example, and to fill the earth. That’s reiterated with Noah because we’re raising Noah back to this Adamic status. Noah is becoming a son of God like Adam was and humanity is being invited once more to be the family of God. That sounds wonderful!
The flood is over and Noah’s family is spreading out over the earth, we have great hopes, but unfortunately, scarcely has this new covenant been formed with Noah that it, too, is broken In Genesis 9:20-27. I’ll allow you to read that story on your own at some point. What you’ll observe there is that Noah himself undergoes a fall into sin, a sin that involves the consumption of fruit in the form of wine. It involves him becoming naked, being ashamed and ultimately calling down a curse on his descendants. Consumption of fruit, nakedness, shame, curse…when we line it up like that, we see the parallels with the fall of Adam and Eve in the garden. It suddenly dawns on us, “oh my goodness!” In Genesis 9:20-27, Noah is repeating, or, we usually say in theology, recapitulating the fall into sin of Adam and Eve.
The message is that sin re-enters human history through Noah’s fault and once more, things degenerate until a few centuries and several generations later. By the time we get to Genesis 11, we read about the Tower of Babel incident where the whole human family joins together in rebellion and defiance against God. Well, God cannot be defied, of course, and so He comes down and confuses their languages and that’s all that’s necessary to foil their effort to join together in a common active rebellion against God.
The human beings scatter over the face of the earth because of the confusion of their languages, but now we’re in a sorry situation where human beings are alienated from each other and alienated from God. That was not God’s intention. God’s intention was for a family, for all human beings to be united to Himself as their Father, and united to each other as brothers and sisters. How is God going to address this sorry situation of alienation between human beings and alienation between Himself and His creatures? Well, that involves the next step of salvation history, which is Abraham.
Let’s talk a little bit about the relevance to evangelism of the covenant of Noah. After all, the covenant of Noah is not something that we often talk about when we’re presenting the Gospel. But, it does have a powerful message. The covenant with Noah asserts that all human beings are related, we are all descended from a common pair: Noah and his wife as well as their children. All of humanity is one family. That’s not just symbolic talk that we’re talking about here, this is really a truth of faith and I would argue that this can be affirmed even on a scientific level. I could quote some biological studies that give some really strong evidence that all human beings alive have descended from a common pair, but we don’t want to digress too much into that at the moment.
To return to the theology of evangelism, the point is that all of humanity is one family. We are loved by God and the covenant with Noah shows us that God has given multiple chances for humanity to get back into a relationship with Him through human history. But, we kept, as the popular term has it, “blowing it,” by our own choices. We see the gift of a family relationship given to our first parents, Adam and Eve. We see it being extended later to Noah and Noah falling into sin. It might be also that there are even other incidents in ancient human history where God renewed or offered that covenant again to humanity, which, perhaps the sacred author did not record.
The point that we’re supposed to receive is that God gave multiple chances to the human family to return to a family relationship with Him. We kept rejecting Him over time, and so we need something better. We need God’s assistance to be able to respond to His invitation. We need God’s own help to come to Him. That’s going to come through the Holy Spirit and through Christ’s work ultimately, which we’ll discuss much more fully in a few lessons.