Well, we kick off Monday, friends.
Chapter 9,
Book of Genesis, a familiar story.
We’ve already jumped in here,
Clann.
Yeah, so remember as we get into this that in the Noah story,
unlike the creation stories,
we do have a couple of sources,
but they’re folded in together.
They’re not told in separate
stories.
They’re almost told in scenes,
a scene from one and the same scene from the next.
And so most of today is going to sound like a restatement of what we’ve been.
So we’ll go through it quickly.
We’ll point out some of the differences.
There are a couple of interesting things here.
So, chapter 9, verse 1, “God bless Noah and his sons.
He said to them, ‘Be fruitful, multiply,
fill the earth.
The fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth
and on every bird of the air and everything that creeps on the ground
and the fish of the sea.
Into your hand they will be delivered.
Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you.
And just as I gave you green plants,
I give you everything.
Only you shall not eat flesh with its life,
that is, its blood.
For your own life blood will surely require a reckoning from every animal.
I will require it and from human beings,
each one for the blood of another.
I will require a reckoning for human life.
Whoever sheds blood of a human,
by a human shall that blood be shed,
for in his own image God created humankind.
And you be fruitful and multiply,
abound on the earth and multiply
in it.’” So we’ve seen this restated,
be fruitful, multiply.
Here we do have a kind of expansion of the creation story.
We talked in the first and second chapter that when the humans,
when Adam and Eve were told of the abundance of the garden,
they were told that they could eat of every tree.
They could eat of every plant.
But that it appeared to be that the original intent or design of the garden
was not to kill in order to eat.
Here we see now a new reality.
This next chapter in the human story,
I give you animals
for food.
And this is an explanation,
I think, a permission on a societal basis.
This is,
you know,
explains how we got there and why it is
that we went from eating plant to meat.
But in the course of the story,
this is the way that human behavior is kind of governed.
Yeah, so we’re in the beginning of
Genesis,
we have God making this same kind of statement.
Be fruitful and multiply.
This is obviously a restatement of that permission, that command,
you know, go out,
fill the earth.
But what is different about this telling comes very quickly.
We have the animals listed,
very much like that first chapter of Genesis.
And then as you get moving into here,
you see very quickly in verse 5,
that we also have a condition put on this.
So for your own lifeblood,
I’ll require a reckoning.
And from every animal,
I’ll require it.
From human beings, each one for the blood of another,
I’ll have a reckoning.
So here we now have the law coming into effect,
a sort of new place
where God is taking humans with God’s expectation.
So not only is God doing a reset,
we’ve said that numerous times with this flood,
but now it’s not just getting back.
It’s actually moving forward.
There’s an end goal that God has in mind.
And there’s some expectations here about how Noah and his family will now treat
creation that surrounds them moving forward.
And surely this has in mind.
Chapter 6, verse 11,
where we had this talk about the violence,
how violence had found its way throughout all of humanity.
We had this,
speaking of like this really cosmic problem.
Well,
God is now making it clear that the life of creation matters,
that that blood, that animating life that comes in,
that that is a gift.
And so it must therefore be respected.
We see God putting some fences and boundaries in place,
which are going to be fleshed out,
of course, much more fully
as the law gets laid out in the future.
Absolutely.
It’s interesting that the law is not going to be spelled out for another couple of books.
But just as we saw in the division between clean and unclean animals,
we see that the person telling this story,
the source that gives us this story
is prefiguring, is sort of foreshadowing.
That person is assuming that the practices that they know at the time
have some roots in the foundation of the creation story.
So why do we roast meat?
Why don’t we eat raw meat?
Why don’t we eat very,
very rare meat?
Well, because it’s the law and it’s the law because it comes from the mouth of God.
It is delivered to us from the instructions of the creator at the time of creation.
And here at the time of re-creation, re-population,
we have this kind of
fundamental principle that godly people,
not Jews in this case,
that’s not yet in the picture,
but that godly people are going to follow.
And the people who are writing this story and telling this story,
they know they follow it,
so they find its origin here comforting.
They find it instructive.
They find it foundational for what they’re already doing.
You might remember, too,
we made a relatively big deal about the image of God,
specifically in the second chapter of Genesis.
We talked about how when God makes humanity,
God does not do so haphazardly.
God does so on purpose and that there was this whole section that really
set out how important that image really is.
Well, here,
again, we have that emphasized in verse six here,
“Whoever sheds the blood of a human by a human shell,
that person’s blood be shed.”
For in his own image,
God made humankind.
This is an important reminder, right?
That ultimately, humanity was made in the very image of God.
So therefore,
the violence that had set in,
the corruption that had taken over the world,
this was all not only marring the good creation that God had made,
this sort of third party,
you know, God made and it exists outside of God’s life,
even as God sustains it.
It’s not the same as God at this stage of scripture.
And then what we realize is that fundamentally,
there is a divine human connection.
That God has put this image mysteriously and graciously in humanity.
And so, this just really extends this gap between God’s intention
and the sickness of human sinfulness.
And fundamentally,
what God is saying here is that
that crime that takes a life from another is not just wrong because it takes life.
Though that is wrong unto itself.
It’s wrong because it disfigures the very image of the creator.
And this is where we begin to see really a restatement of what we saw in Genesis in this divine image,
but in some ways, an intensification,
a response to the ways in which it went wrong
that required God’s reset.
And now we see God re-emphasizing the importance of this original point.
It will be quite a while before we see it in print,
but we have here the roughest and earliest statement of what comes to be known as an eye for an eye.
That is,
what you do to someone is then visited upon you.
And this happens at a human level,
this happens at a divine level,
but this is a kind of, again,
basis for much of what we’ll come to know as the Old Testament law.
That this guiding premise,
eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life, that when the law is written,
those things are going to be included significantly and repeatedly.
And here we have,
again, we have that foreshadowing of it.
If you shed the blood of a person, a human,
then that blood is going to be,
your blood is going to be shed.
And God says even requiring that from animals,
that there’s a kind of continuing protection over humans
that will have God calling even the animals to account if they spill human blood.
And then I think it matters a great deal that within this story,
that last part is a restatement and you be fruitful and multiply a bound on the earth
and multiply in it.
So again, we have that restatement of the creation mandate,
fill the earth, be fruitful,
multiply,
subdue.
We kind of talked about that way back when,
but to expand essentially.
And several of the next stories,
at least in the next chapter perhaps,
maybe more so,
sorry,
chapter 11, probably more so than chapter 10,
we’re going to see that that has happened, that humans,
some of the rest of the story is going to have to do with this expansion.
I’m going to
maybe just slow down the pace for a second to point out
that this is the second time now where God has given this command, be fruitful, multiply,
bound on the earth,
multiply. We really have this ironic sort of turn
where one of the major critiques of Christianity is
that it is moralistic and it’s self-centered,
it’s self-seeking even.
There’s this sort of public idea that Christians are about morally pointing out the failings of
others and holding them to account for that.
And you can go all the way back to the earliest pages of Genesis to find the antidote to that idea.
I mean, fundamentally, what God intends for humanity
is flourishing,
is life abundant,
that humans can move forward in their life and in their world
and that they can live in right relationship with one another and then ultimately with God.
And that in that living,
they have an opportunity to appreciate the best of what God intended from
the beginning of the world.
This is God’s positive vision for what the world should be.
And as you know,
as scripture continues on all the way through to revelation,
it’s not until those last few pages of scripture where we see this fruitfulness,
this multiplying, this abounding,
that we see it without a caveat,
without significant question.
And that point being that while we don’t experience this life as God intends in its fullness,
this is yet still God’s command.
God’s desire is for you to be fruitful and not at the expense of another,
for the whole creation to be fruitful and to multiply.
This is not a zero sum game as it applies to God’s vision.
And as we see it laid out here,
God’s intention is that all of the creation would flourish.
And so those places and times where we get sloppy and we set things against each other,
like people’s well-being against the environment or one people against another people,
these are false distinctions.
These are tensions we create and not bound up in God’s intention.
And we see God’s intention explicitly named,
in fact, in the Noah story multiple times.
And we’re only in chapter nine.
We’ve seen it four or five times already.
So it’s clear that the authors want us to know God wants flourishing.
He wants multiplying.
He wants for human and for the created order to do well.
And though that sounds fundamental,
and maybe it sounds a little childish,
a little Sunday school-ish,
I think that it’s good to be reminded of that fundamental,
because it’s purposely and carefully made explicit here multiple times.
Tomorrow we will look at the end of the classic Noah story,
and then we will,
the next day on Wednesday,
discuss a part that’s maybe not always included in the Noah story.
But as we transition,
the point you make,
Michael, is I think a good one in the sense that
as we see closure tomorrow on the story,
it ends with this idea that God continues
to have a role of preserving creation,
of watching over it,
that God sets some limitations on the relationship that God and the creation will have.
And I think that will help clarify some of this as we look at the ways in which God
wants to help fruitfulness happen upon the earth.
Yeah, that’s interesting, Clint.
Not to steal future conversations,
but where we tend to see simplicity,
in other words, where we tend to see commands like be fruitful and multiply,
we fill in the gap with all these things that we consider fruitfulness and multiplying,
and we maybe are tempted to not consider,
well, what does God frame as fruitfulness and multiplying?
There’s a sense in which our imaginations need to be shaped even about that idea,
that ultimately it’s God’s vision that is fruitfulness.
It’s God’s plan that will make a way into the best of God’s intention,
but we do.
We like to fill in that gap, well,
fruitfulness would obviously look like a yacht.
Well,
okay, hold back.
Maybe our materialism and self-centeredness and our internal temptation to make it about ourselves,
our own advancement, maybe these things cloud even our understanding of God’s directive that we see here.
That’s really the problem,
if you allow me to frame it that way,
of biblical interpretation, is we can only come to Scripture with ourselves,
and that’s why we read it together.
We allow one another to critique and to correct one another’s
perspective because alone we’ll only be able to see the text from our advantage,
and there’s so much more there than what we might see in that larger community.
If at all possible,
join us tomorrow or check out tomorrow’s video,
because I do think there is a
lot at stake, there is a lot sort of crammed into the ending of this story,
and it is fascinating
the ways that some of these creation threads and these Noah threads are sort of wrapped up in the
end of this text.
Thanks for being with us today.
I hope we look forward to seeing you tomorrow.
Be blessed.