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Monday, November 14, 2016

DOES THAT MAKE SENSE? THE GREAT FLOOD.

 Blogging Genesis.  Chapters 7 & 8


For after seven more days I will cause it to rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and I will destroy from the face of the earth all living things that I have made.” (Genesis 7:4)

The Bible says that a long time ago, God made it rain so much that every man, woman, child, bird, and land-based animal who wasn’t inside Noah’s ark drowned.

Does that make sense?

There are over 7 billon people on this people.  How could one rain storm, even one that lasted almost a month and a half,  drown everybody? Wait. In Noah’s time, humans weren’t a global population.  We were a tiny emerging species, just a few generations old.  The descendants of Adam and Eve were only a few thousand people all concentrated in a small geographical area near Eden and Nod, the city Cain founded.    

The 1931 floods of the Yellow River in China killed at least 145,000 people.  Some estimates put the death toll between 3.7 million and 4 million.  A single series of localized flooding could kill millions of people.  In Noah’s time there were only thousands, maybe tens of thousands.

Does that make sense?

The Bible says that the waters rose so high that the mountains were covered  (Genesis 7:20).  But come on. Mt. Everest, the tallest mountain in the world (above sea level) is 60 million years old and 5 ½ miles high.  That’s 5 ½ miles of water  above normal sea level.  Seriously?

Does that make sense?

Noah and his children passed down the story of the Great Flood.  They described what they saw through stories and song, according to the great human oral tradition.  When Moses compiled Genesis into a single book he wrote what Noah and his family had seen.  From the deck of the Ark, they saw the rain fall.  They saw the waters rise and stretch to every horizon.  They saw trees and hills and mountains disappear so far below the waters that the ark could drift for year without running aground. Nothing beyond the ark moved except fish and water.  From the honest perspective of Noah, The waters prevailed fifteen cubits upward, and the mountains were covered. And all flesh died that moved on the earth. (Genesis 7:20, 21). 

Fifteen cubits is something like 7 ½ yards or about two stories.  Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the 2016 flooding of the Mississippi River both provided images of people standing in water waving for helicopters to rescue them from the tippy top of the roof of two and three story homes.

Does that make sense?

Oh, and it didn’t just rain.  Genesis 7:11 says that the along with rain so heavy that is seemed that the bottom had dropped out of the sky (the Bible more poetic says that and the windows of heaven were opened) --- along with that ---  on that day all the fountains (foundations) of the great deep were broken up.  Noah and, thousands of years later, Moses could not have known that the solid land on which they lived was actually a series of continent-sized island floating on an ocean of molten rock.  Nobody knew that until 1912 when Alfred Wegener published his theories on continental drift.  It’s not surprising that people thought Noah and Moses were making stuff up.  For 50 years, “modern” scientists that that the whole idea of continents resting on foundations that periodically shift and break apart were ridiculous.  

When the Great Flood started, rain fell, underground springs and geysers erupted, and the massive supercontinent (like Pangea) broke apart causing earthquakes, tidal waves, and volcanic eruptions.  Any poor souls not already sealed inside a giant boat under God’s personal protection were doomed.

Does that make sense?

Massive rains.  Prolonged, catastrophic flooding.  Earthquakes.  Tsunamis.  We have a term for all of that.  We call it “climate change.”  

Maybe the Earth’s magnetic poles reversed.  Maybe a natural cycle of temperature shift reached critical levels.  Something happened that altered the geographical face of the world forever.  Whatever it was so bad that every human who wasn’t prepared, died. 

2012 NPR article on ancient human populations states, “once in our history, the world-wide population of human beings skidded so sharply we were down to roughly a thousand reproductive adults. One study says we hit as low as 40 . . . "breeding pairs" (children not included).”

The Bible says that the actual number was 8. 

So Noah went out [of the ark], and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives with him. (Genesis 8:18)

Does that make some sense now?

Noah and the Flood is a Bible story, but it’s not JUST a story.  It’s a collection of reasonable, logical truths warning us of the dread consequences of ignoring the weather.  

The Great Flood of Genesis is also a promise that God is aware of and ultimately in control of the climate, even when it changes in catastrophic ways.  

Then the Lord said in His heart, “I will never again curse the ground for man’s sake, although the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; nor will I again destroy every living thing as I have done.
22          “While the earth remains,
Seedtime and harvest,
Cold and heat,
Winter and summer,
And day and night
Shall not cease.” (Genesis 8:21-22)

God warns us to prepare for the changes that are coming, and He promised to protect us from the worse of climate change.    Neither fact cancels out the other.  

To treat the Genesis Flood as a fiction with no relevance to us now is to despise on of the earliest promises of grace and to miss one of the greatest  command for stewardship of the planet.

Climatologists warn that our time has already passed the tipping point at which rapid climate change is inevitable.  The rain is coming.  God won’t let us all perish, but we all still need to prepare.  

In Noah’s time, a lot of people died because they treated the Flood as just a story made up by some guy called Noah.  In our time, if we accept the truth of the story, it doesn’t have to be quite so bad.

Does that make sense?

---Anderson T. Graves II   is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.

Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Miles Chapel CME Church in Fairfield, Alabama;  executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization (SAYNO);  and director of rural leadership development for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD).

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