But we’re we’re in the book of Genesis. What we do here at Knox is we typically go through a book of the Bible uh consecutively and we’ve been going through the book of Genesis uh particularly the first chapters this summer. And this morning we’re highlighting just a few verses from one of the more detailed narratives in all of scripture which is the story of the flood in Genesis chapters 6-8. Story of the Flood. Very popular with children. Makes a great coloring book. It’s a great Sunday school class. Not nearly so popular with thinking adults. It’s it’s a horrific story of judgment that wipes out all but a few people on Earth. Destruction sweeps up almost all the animals along with it. And we’ve all maybe you’ve seen images the past 10 days of that horrific flood and mudslide in Nepal and all the people who are grieving the loss of that great natural disaster that occurred. But how much more troubling is it for people to think of a supernatural disaster? One sent from God as a form of judgment against all the sins of humanity. Children think of the Genesis flood story. wonderful image of animals parading two by two onto the storybook arc. And adults, we can let our imaginations imagine toddlers and elderly people clinging to branches of trees as the waters rising and then finally letting go when their strength gives out and plunging into the waters of destruction. So to thinking adults, the flood narrative might seem offensive, and it’s something that a God who’s considered good and loving would never cause to happen. So, what are we to do with the flood story this morning? You know, I I I believe that it’s as historical as any other event in scripture, but requires us to do some pretty deep thinking about things like judgment and justice and grace. We approach this story. Note how in verses 11 through13, they lay out the reason God gave to judge the world in this manner. says, ‘Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, was full of violence. God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. So God said to Noah, “I’m going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I’m surely going to destroy both them and the earth.” And the violence uh being committed among human beings was so pervasive and egregious, so offensive to God that he had to put a stop to it. You and I might not immediately relate to this problem with humanity because we live in a world where we can go our entire lives without being personally touched much in the way of violence. Other than the odd fight in junior high school, I think me and my family, I don’t think we’ve had a significant brush with violence. We’re not naive. It’s around us. Occasionally, it might show up and visit our neighborhoods. Four years ago on a Saturday around noon, our amiable elderly neighbor Joe, he was 73 at the time, he was out for a walk uh on the sidewalk across from our house and he was tapped on the shoulder and then he was struck to the ground in an unprovoked random attack by some crazed 26-year-old man. The attacker and our neighbor had never met, but the attacker got on top of Joe and he pulled out a utility knife and began slashing away at his face and his neck and may well have resulted in murder. But there were a few witnesses around who were successfully able to chase the attacker away and and our neighbor was whisked to the away to the hospital by ambulance. Saw him a few weeks later. He didn’t look very good, but uh but uh it um he had survived. been a rough experience and a random act of urban violence could have happened to anyone out on the street at that time. But incidents like that, we we don’t think much about them because they’re pretty rare in our city. Likely here that most of us are never going to be touched by that kind of violence. Certainly not so in other parts of the world. There’s an organization called the Upsella Conflict Data Program and it’s tracked um violent world conflicts for decades. They recorded 65 state-based conflicts last year and that was the highest number actually since 1946 and non-statebased violence has uh increased even more rapidly. Next Friday, 25th anniversary of 9/11, the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington brought down the Twin Towers, killed close to 3,000 people, many more after the fact because of the toxic dust. And next month, October 7th, that marks the third anniversary of the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel, which by population comparison was equivalent to 15 9/11s occurring on one single day. I mean, Israel is a small nation. It’s only 9 million people. What happened to them that day was the equivalent of 44,000 Americans being killed, another 10,000 taken hostage, or 5,000 Canadians being killed with another thousand taken hostage. And then what ensued after that in Gaza over the last 3 years been a massive response of even more violence left many, many thousands more people, civilians, combatants dead. So we can only imagine then the scores of sons and daughters and brothers and cousins who have vowed revenge on the enemy, the ones that killed their family members. And that leads to a potential cascade, huge cascade of future violence. So the world’s a violent place, always has been. Early chapters of the book of Genesis shockingly recount how the first man born on the planet murdered his brother. In that same chapter, one of Cain’s descendants, a man named Lamek, he’s bragging to his wives about murdering a young man, an act of disproportionate revenge. And he says, “I’ll gladly avenge myself 77 times.” He had this un unending appetite for violence. We saw last week in Genesis chapter 5 that uh that this chapter 5 from uh Adam to Noah comprises 40% of biblical history. We can only imagine how many acts of violence might have gone on in the world in that broad sweep of time. So, have you ever wondered how God looks down, views our world, the world he created, when every hour of every day, someone who’s created in God’s image, is taking the life of someone else who’s been created in God’s image? I think if you or I could ever witness all the savage violence that’s happening minute by minute on our planet, how would we feel and what would our response be? Without much personal experience with violence, maybe never having been anything more than superficially touched by it. Many modern people like us might respond to the biblical story of the judgment of the flood by thinking, “Well, that’s very primitive. That’s upsetting. That’s completely unnecessary. It’s a wild overreaction on the part of God. Flood story might seem like another good reason for people to avoid the Bible and to question its relevance for modern people. But maybe the real problem is that our view and our acceptance of violence very different from that of God. Consider a few passages uh Psalm 115-7. The Lord examines the righteous, but the wicked and those who love violence his soul hates. Psalm 72. He’ll deliver the needy who cry out, the afflicted who have no one to help. He’ll take pity on the weak and the needy and save the needy from death. He’ll rescue them from oppression and violence for precious is their blood in his sight. Ezekiel 7 and8 God is speaking through his prophet of the pending judgment and he says prepare chains because the land is full of bloodshed and the city is full of violence. Must they also fill the land with violence and continually provoke me to anger? So I think we ought to concede that God probably has far more sensitivity to violence and the deaths of his imagebearers than you and I do. I don’t know about you, I I’m no prude when it comes to action movies or westerns that leave a whole trail of bodies in its wake from scene to scene. And people they they don’t have any backstories. There’s no recognition that they’re someone’s son or father or that they had any value as human beings. They’re just anonymous disposable figures. I mean, does it really bother you to see all those stormtroopers go down in Star Wars, you know, one after another and and the same extra might be killed there? They’re all masked. They might be killed 15 or 20 times in the movie. We don’t know. But we don’t care either. And our generation, our appetite for violence, it’s really, it’s no different than any other generation. St. Augustine wrote his brilliant autobiographical work called Confessions that was written 2200 years ago in about right around the year 400. And he wasn’t a Christian yet, but Olympus, but Augustine had a close friend named Olympius. and they came from the same town in North Africa. And Augustine always knew that his friend Olympus had what he calls a self-destructive infatuation with the games, meaning the public entertainment, the brutal uh contest between gladiators. And even as a non-Christian, Augustine thought that Olympus’s fascination with violent sports would ruin him. He’d end up wasting his life. So, he talked very pointedly to his friend about it. And Olympius had deep respect for Augustine. He listened to the rebuke and it had a good effect. Augustine writes with a valiant resolve. He shook his mind clean. All the muck of the games spattered off him. He resolved that he wouldn’t go again. Sometime later, Olympius moved to the capital city of Rome. And at first, he continued to be repelled by the games. He reviled them. But one fateful afternoon and and Augustine uh detail relates this in great detail. One afternoon, Olympus ran into some friends and some fellow students who were coming back from lunch. It was a time uh in the city for celebrating those sadistic, murderous sports. And his friends practically dragged Olympius with him to the event. And Olympus resisted quite a bit of force. He said, “You know, even if you haul my body to that place and sit me down there, you can’t aim my mind and my eyes at the show, can you? Though I’m there, I won’t be there. and that’s how I’ll be the victor over what’s going on and over you too. Of course, that just made his buddies uh want to test him even more. They went to the coliseum. They took their seats and Augustine writes, “Everything was seething with the most barbaric kinds of entertainment.” Olympus closed his eyes. He forbade his mind to go outside into such terrible wickedness. If only he had plugged his ears. One of the combatants fell. Booming shout from the whole crowd struck him forcefully. Curiosity overcame him and on the pretext that he was ready to condemn and overcome whatever he saw, he opened his eyes. He looked at the physical wounding that he longed to see and he fell right back into his old infatuation. Augustine goes on, “The yells came in through his ears. They unlocked his eyes. So there was access for assaulting and bringing down the mind that was daring but not yet strong and was weaker in that it relied on itself when it should have relied on you, oh God. When he saw the blood, he guzzled the cruelty. At the same time, he didn’t turn away, but instead riveted his gaze there. He gulped down the demons of rage, and though he didn’t know it, he was delighted at the criminal contest and got drunk on the gory diversion. No need for a long narrative, Augustine writes. He says, “He watched, he shouted, he got fired up. He took away with him an insanity that prodded him sharply to go back and not only in the company of those who dragged him there, but in advance of them. And he was dragging others along with him. With your overwhelmingly powerful, overwhelmingly merciful hand, you snatched him out of there.” This is Augustine speaking to God. And taught him to have faith not in himself, but in you. But Augustine says that was much later. So why does why does Proverbs 3:31 have to be written particularly to young men as Proverbs is? It says, “Do not envy a man of violence or choose any of his ways.” Why would that need to be written unless we all had some proclivity for violence that needs to be regulated and we we actively need to choose against it. And that brings us back to those reasons for the flood. Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight was full of violence. God said to Noah, “I’m going to put an end to all people. For the earth is filled with violence because of them.” People may view the Genesis flood as an act of divine violence without considering what it actually cost God to prevent his created image bearers from destroying one another. People who get upset by the idea of God’s judgment in the flood need to know that the one who was most upset by the violence was always God himself. Chapter 6 uh verse 5, we read it last week. The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth and his heart was filled with pain. That’s that’s an incredible statement that last line that God allows his heart to be filled with pain because of us. God God was under no compulsion to glue his heart to his creation, to glue his heart to us like he did. He didn’t create us because he needed to. You know, a little child can play with toy soldiers all afternoon and have great battles and have whole platoon fall to their deaths on the bedroom rug and and he can sleep soundly that night with no twinge of conscience. But although he could, God doesn’t treat us like toy soldiers. Instead, he ties his very heart and his emotional world to us. Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth. His heart was filled with pain. I’ll wipe mankind whom I’ve created from the face of the earth, men and animals and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air, for I’m grieved that I’ve made them.” So God took no delight in making the extreme decision to bring a hard reset to his creation due to all the mounting violence, but it had to be stopped. God experienced pain and sadness, deep grief in order to save humanity from itself. Everything was going wrong in the human world. God couldn’t look the other way because he had bound his heart to us. So we live in a very violent world. God feels it more than any of us ever will. He’s the only one also who has the wisdom and the knowledge and the power to deal with violence. We’re not very good at it. We humans, we can be pretty obtuse and we can stumble around aimlessly just trying to understand violence and deal with it. We don’t know how to navigate between sides when there’s competing sides and violence on both sides. Author Douglas Murray writes of how he was in New York uh on the day that the Hamas terrorists attacked Israel and how even before the terrorists had been pushed back while the massacres of Israeli citizens were still going on before Israel had ever mounted any kind of response all over the place in Western cities like New York and London, places in Germany and France protests were already taking place against the state of Israel. you know the banners uh from the river to the sea, resistance is justified, resistance is not terrorism, all those were already flying and there had not been a single major protest in the western city against the violence that Hamas was actually um perpetrating. So there there’s no denying then the scale of violence and suffering that occurred in Gaza in the days and the months and the years that followed. But the entire incident just shows shows that we humans were pretty clumsy and unqualified when it comes to dealing with matters of justice and judgment and violence. In Genesis, God dealt with it through the flood. He gave humanity a second chance to thrive on the planet. But God was under no illusion that the problem would be dealt with once and for all. Because along with the elephants and the rhinoceroses and the hippopotamuses, probably the thing that weighed the most on the ark, displacing more water than anything else was just the sinful natures of the eight human beings that were on that boat. Sin wandered onto the ark in the in the hearts of humans, floated around for about a year, disembarked, and showed itself just as strong as ever afterwards. You know, one of the earliest incidents that took place as Noah and his family were off the ark and they were getting resettled, we have this this picture of Noah getting drunk and kind of stumbling around naked in his tent. And and that that’s a scene that seldom makes it into the Noah and the Ark coloring books for kids. Yeah. And one of Noah’s sons, he seemed to get a chuckle out of his dad’s exposure and already sin and shame and judgment. It’s already winding itself back up. I mean, the flood didn’t take care of anything in human hearts for all time. One of the first instructions God gave Noah back on dry land was this. He said, “And from each man too, I will demand an accounting for the life of his fellow man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed. For in the image of God or God has God has made man.” So already he’s giving a warning against violence and murder to Noah and he’s just got back on dry land. So God was under no illusion that that hard reboot given through the flood was ever going to keep the sin virus out. Flood was always only a temporary way to keep humanity from killing itself. And God then declared he’d never again bring down waters that would kill all life. Now, you and I, we have lived most of our lives, maybe all of our lives, in a world where humans have enough nuclear firepower. It’s stored. It’s ready to launch. Buttons just need to be pushed. Enough to do far more destruction on our planet than the flood ever did. If humanity in Genesis seemed bent on self-destruction, our society has caught up and and exceeded that. God continually must restrain us to keep humanity from killing itself off. None of our human proclivity to violence has been done away with by the flood. It just extended the ramp of survival uh through through to us. But while the Genesis flood brought temporary relief to humanity’s self-destructive nature, God did have a way of permanently destroying the power of human violence in our hearts. And that was to absorb the violence himself. You know, he came to earth in the person of Jesus. As he grew, his character was assassinated. His motives were judged. His face was slapped. Soldiers beat him on the head with rods. Crown of thorns was jammed on his forehead. He was flogged mercilessly, nailed to a Roman cross to suffer unspeakably and then die. All of that sadistic human violence was absorbed by God himself through his son, Jesus Christ. And all Jesus said during that time was, “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know what they’re doing.” So on the cross, Jesus absorbed and he paid the penalty that Jesus demanded for all the violence that still resides in our hearts. No one but Jesus could dismantle that bomb inside us. And then he calls us to be his followers. Now, for those of us who put our faith and trust in Jesus alone for salvation, we can lay aside our our passion for violence and revenge, leave room for God to deal with all matters. Never take your own revenge. Leave room for the wrath of God. We can do that because we follow Jesus. So, the Genesis flood, it ought to be thought of as much of salvation as judgment. Because although multitudes were sinking, there’s no denying that. As that was happening, God was bringing salvation to Noah and his family and a way for salvation to extend even to us in the flood of God’s judgment. His people who are trusting him, we can keep bobbing to the surface because God allows us to be there because of Jesus. Nicholas Walter Stof, he was a theology, he is a theology professor at Yale Divinity School. He wrote a little book called Lament for a Son in which he he mourns the loss of his 25-year-old son Eric who was killed in a climbing accident. And among his reflections, the reflections of a of a father mourning the loss of his son, he makes the brief but I think fairly profound comment that the tears of God are the meaning of history. He says, “Every act of evil extracts a tear from God. Every plunge into anguish extracts a sob from God. And in thinking about how the how in the flood in Genesis, it was motivated by the pain God felt in seeing a world he loved self-destructing. See that God’s sorrow is always caused by the evil and the injustice and the brokenness. People like us, his image bearsers. But we can trace the tracks of God’s tears through the flood all the way to the cross and then out into our lives where we can worship him with with hearts that are set free this morning with liberated hearts. One day we know we’re going to rejoice with him forever. Violence and death aren’t going to be the last word. We have to deal with it now, but one day all the violence and all the death is going to be taken away forever. I just thought we’d spend a few moments in prayer together. And one thing to pray about is to praise God that he cares about the violence in our world far more than any of us. If violence has happened to people around us, our hearts might be broken by that. But uh but God’s heart’s much more broken by that. And thank him that one day all violence will be exposed to the light of his justice, his mercy. And just pray for a heart that cares as deeply about the things of God on our planet as as God cares. This is just your time to just uh bow your head and be with God and pray some of those things and anything else on your heart. And then I’ll close us off in a moment.