When God floods the earth in the days of Noah it’s like he turns the clock back on everything that’s happened in the last six chapters of Genesis, and the world reverts to Genesis 1.
Before God created and ordered over seven days, the world was water. In Noah’s flood he unmakes and disorders by reverting creation to where it started. The deluge that we call ‘the Flood’ started with ‘the fountains of the great deep’ bursting forth and the ‘windows of heaven’ opening. Springs from the primordial abyss rise up to fill the earth.
That’s evocative in the Biblical view of the world for three reasons. First, this is the pre-ordered ‘stuff’ of the cosmos returning—and I’m assuming here that creation is ex nihilo and happened in the first verse of Genesis 1, but then Genesis 1.2 onwards seems to describe God making by dividing what is there in numerous ways—everything going back to square one. Second, this is the chaotic realm of the dragons and demons, which is appropriate considering the problem God is trying to solve on the earth. Third, this associated with death. The clock is turning back, order is dissolving into chaos, life is drowning into death.
Incidentally, this is why I assume that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a result of the fall and will not operate the same way in the new creation: entropy must end.
The abyss opens up, and heaven rains down. The earth is crushed in the middle. Creation is undone. To make this point more clearly, Genesis 7 tells the flood story in the inverted order of the creation story. Once the rain starts, we hear of the man and woman (four times over) then of the beasts and other creatures from the earth. That’s day six. Then we hear of the birds, which is day five.
Then the ark rises on the waters until the earth is covered, which is day three, until everything is just water again. The rain itself, perhaps, extinguishes the division of day two between the waters and the sky. It’s not a perfect match, the sun and moon don’t fall from the sky (that’s later) and light isn’t extinguished; while it’s romantic to suggest that it would feel like they were due to a deluge of forty days of rain, that isn’t what the text says which means we shouldn’t think of it as part of the pattern.
More obvious is that when the waters recede we have a creation pattern again. Genesis 8.1 sounds a lot like Genesis 1.2, with God’s Spirit hovering over the deep. The rain stops and sky and sea are separate again (day 2), the earth returns (day 3), first birds appear (day 5) and then the animals leave the ark (day 6) along with Noah and his family. This is a new creation.
This is made clearer in Genesis 9 as Noah grows a garden, a vineyard, making a parallel between him and Adam. Adam grew bread and now Noah grows wine. Noah is meaningfully the second Adam. The new creation is better than the first.
In the midst of that, God gives the rainbow promise that in the future wrath will be aimed upwards. Any subsequent new creation will require the wrath of heaven to aim its crushing power at heaven instead. This is, of course, what happens. Noah’s world was still tainted by Adam’s sin; both Noah’s world and Adam’s end on the cross as Jesus declares the old creation finished. A new world opens in a garden with a man and a woman, smelling of spices.
There are other threads for us to pull on that are helpful for our own Christian walks. The first is to notice that Noah’s Ark is explicitly paralleled with baptism in the New Testament (1 Peter 3). Baptism is an act of decreation and recreation. We are a new creation (2 Corinthians 5) and new creation is what counts (Galatians 6). We ourselves have been remade but we’ve also been remade for a new world—the kingdom—as outposts of new creation living. Part of our Christian mandate is to practice for the new creation by trying to live that way now. We, of course, are far from perfect images of the new creation, but that’s the goal we’re trying to make.
That’s what ‘cultural transformation’ amounts to: living like the new creation. We must be aware that will fail due to our own sin, but also that what we build that is good and true and beautiful will in some fashion last after the Resurrection of the dead. Tell your neighbours about Jesus, but also start a business to be the kind of the employer who will treat employees like we think they’ll get treated in the new creation (or as close as you can manage), and most importantly, make the kind of friendships that will last. It’s the only thing we know for sure will still be there in the age to come.
Secondly, we should notice that sin is, ultimately, decreation. It is to return the world to chaos. Sometimes that’s just our own hearts, sometimes that’s our worlds and sometimes that’s on a much grander scale, but all sin is to rebel against created order and therefore attempt to return creation to chaos.
We live in a cultural moment where chaos is cool. Any fantasy work that deals with order and chaos is, nine times out of ten, going to code chaos as the cool guys. Most likely they’re the good guys too. ‘Chaotic Good’ is the ‘correct’ choice on the classic Dungeons and Dragons alignment chart.
Except that’s all nonsense. Why we think that way would be another post, but God loves order. Chaos is things that oppose his reign and his way. True chaos is immature, rebellious, and stifling under a veneer of freedom. True order is freedom through limits, kindness through clarity, and the release of following the rule of your rightful king.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
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