Blogging Genesis. Chapters 7 & 8
4 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.
A
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).
Email atgravestwo2@aol.com
You
can help support Rev. Graves’ work by visiting his personal blog and
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Support
by check or money order may be mailed to
Miles
Chapel CME Church
P
O Box 132
Fairfield,
Al 35064
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