Why did God send the flood?

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I don't know.

Curiously Caitlyn.

Matthew Lynch, thank you for joining me today.

Felt, like I could group them together. They've got some similar themes, so we'll hear both of them.

Don't ruin that. Be careful that you don't, you know, destroy this thing. And then God not only kind of, you know, does it a bit, but it is total destruction. And he resolves to do it. He's like, that's the solution to what I need to do with the earth.

So that's my initial reaction. I mean, I have thoughts on, like, how we can puzzle through it. But that's my gut take. And I really resonate with those questions. I think it's great that those kids are thinking about it.

Maybe we even have a little toy Ark and animals. If the kid is asking from that direction, how would you describe just the story? Like, what does the Bible just straightforwardly tell us about why God sent the flood?

And then suddenly we're told that the entire earth is consumed in corruption and consumed specifically by violence. And so it ramps up. It's one of those like, well, that got bad quickly. And then suddenly we're at the resolve to destroy the earth, where God looks at it and is like, this is completely ruined. And that's a key dramatic moment in the story in Genesis 6-11, where you have an inversion of Genesis 1-31..

So in Genesis 1, creation story, things are going well. God looks at the earth and behold, it was very good. That's the dramatic statement there, God's assessment of all he had made. And Genesis 6-11 is like a callback to that. And it says God, in the Hebrew, it literally says God looked and behold, it was ruined.

So I think the lead up to the story that the biblical writers want us to get is that suddenly things are completely ruined. It's not just that you've got some bad people out there, or even sort of rampant crime or something along those lines, but this is thoroughgoing, it's systemic, and it ruined everything. That's another key part of the logic of the story of Genesis is that what we do to each other affects the land. And that's a connection that for some moderns we might get at a sort of ecological level. Like if I spray DDT on our fields, it will have a negative impact on bird life and so on.

It will endanger the eagle. But the idea that our moral actions toward each other, like if I lie, cheat, steal, and harm other people, that that impacts our ecology, that's a little bit different way of thinking. But that's kind of. what Genesis wants us to get, is that there's a creational effect to our moral actions. So that's why, by Genesis 6, the creation-consuming murder actually ruins the entire creation.

ill-formed creation, and then the ark is opened, and you have that microcosm of creation that comes out, and that's the beginning of this new creation, creation 2.

0, that begins then in Genesis 8.

. So it's a story of decreation and recreation. That's the heart of the flood story.

And I remember as a kid, even just when someone told the story, hearing that and going, oh, that sounds like God left a loophole.

And so, when God resolves not to send a flood again to destroy the world, really what he's saying is, I'm resolving to never again let creation devolve back into formlessness, which is a ruined state. So I think fire would qualify for that. if it was this, you know, cosmic conflagration, that would be the same idea. Right. So I think what he's resolving there is to never allow creation to become utterly and completely ruined again.

I had the same thought when I was a kid, too, of like, well, great. All right. That one's off the checklist. Now we have. we have a lot more we could do, but I don't think that's the point there.

So then he makes that covenant.

Covenants can be made between people, like in a marriage. But in Scripture, covenants with God are initiated by God, and God sets the terms for them.

You could have a house that's eaten out from the inside by termites so thoroughly that the house is still standing, but it's almost like if you lean against it, it would collapse. So God looks at creation, that's a teardown,

that's the state it's in prior to the flood, and he says, I'm going to tear it down. And so he does that in order to remake it. And then post-flood, it's like, I'm going to preserve this against that happening again. So we're going to get some termite protection in this creation. It doesn't mean we'll never see a termite again.

Sometimes they'll launch an attack, but they're not going to ruin the house again.

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I want to ask you in a minute about kind of some general approaches that you've written about for how we deal with instances of violence in the Old Testament. In particular, I mean, there's other things you could say about violence in the New Testament as well. But, because I think that's part of the question an adult might be thinking too. When a kid asks, you know, why does God destroy stuff? I have found it's always good to ask some follow-up questions, because they might not be asking as intense of a question as you think that they are.

I was like, oh, this is a different conversation. So, this kid probably isn't asking quite as in-depth of a moral question as why does God destroy things. But, a kid slightly older probably could. I once taught this story in elementary Sunday school. And the first question a kid asked afterwards was, when Noah and his family got off the boat, were there just dead bodies lying everywhere?

. I mean, he's thinking, I think, logistics. And honestly, it was like a little kid that I think was kind of excited about that idea. But, you know, a moment later, horrified, right? And the kids around him were suddenly like, oh my goodness, is this cute little Noah story actually really dark and scary?

But before we get into some of the ways we might think about stories like this in the Bible, stories where there's morally questionable instances of violence, related to that question is a question of historicity, of did the flood even happen? And we don't have time to get into everything we could say about that. But could you just give us a little help thinking through? Because it's related. Did this really happen is an important question, for how we think about the second question of how should we feel about this particular instance of violence?

that seems really horrifying?

Exactly. Straightforward. And then there are others who say, well, it seems like there were local floods in ancient Mesopotamia where Israel didn't come right from Mesopotamia, but they have roots there and connections there. So the Tigris and Euphrates would flood periodically cause these pretty devastating flood in the area of modern Iraq. The memory of that is reflected in this story.

So there there's a historical connection. And then other people recognize that in the ancient world, where Israel was living, people were already telling flood stories about a guy in a boat who preserves animals from a catastrophic flood because God told him to build a boat. And there are other stories that are older than Israel's, that have that exact storyline. And they have very different outcomes and very different representations of those gods. But you might think of it in that if you take that view, like there's a popular story being told and Israel retells it with Yahweh, the true God, at the center, as if to say, I'm going to tell you the true myth of the flood about the true one God.

But one of the things with those other flood stories from other cultures is that they come out of a polytheistic world, multiple gods. And so in those stories, you have one God resolving to send a flood and another God telling the hero to build the boat. And that works well in a polytheistic culture. And so then the question for a biblical writer might have been, how do I tell this story when there's one God? Yeah.

When the one God could potentially be the protagonist, the antagonist. And I think one of the innovative things that Genesis does is it portrays violence as the antagonist that ruins creation prior to the flood. So those are different approaches. And it depends on what kind of story you think Genesis 6 is.

The Psalms are poems. Jesus tells parables. Paul wrote letters. Sometimes it's harder. For example, was this story intended to be a description of something that actually happened historically?

Or was it intended to be a theological point about God told in the form of a creative retelling of a story that other nations were already telling? Or is it somewhere in between those two? We have tools for helping us answer this kind of question, but Christians can disagree about how to answer it.

And that does impact, I think, how we think about the violence of the story, too. If the question wasn't like, are you going to tell the story of flood, but more, how are you going to tell it, then it kind of makes a little bit more sense in its culture. So those are a couple of different options. And I don't want to kind of push one really strongly, but I do think it's good to think about those and their implications.

And this describes something of the God that we worship. And some people might find no issue with this story. They might go, God created the world, God can do whatever he wants. Great. But I think many of us have questions about this.

And they're not necessarily big doubting questions. Sometimes we have big doubting questions of, is this a good God? Is this a true story? But for many of us, it's, I believe this is a good God and this is a true story. But there's got to be, I need some help figuring out how that, both of those things can be true with this particular story.

And that's true of the Flood. It's true of other stories throughout scripture. So can you just give us a little bit of overview of like, what are different ways of thinking about this? Not that, again, people have to pick one. In fact, I think in your book, you even say a little bit of some of them can be a good thing.

But just give people an overview of, like, what are different ways, that when people think of these kinds of stories in general, not necessarily even the Flood specifically, they have found help, understanding how they can be truthful and God can be good.

But, as Dr. Lynch says here, sometimes this way of reading the Bible has been used not to see deeper and fuller meaning, but to get around parts of the Bible that make us uncomfortable.

Basically, God can do whatever God wants, and so you need to just accept that. And the advantage of that approach, I guess you could say, is, I think, as Christians, there is a need to submit to God's will and to recognize His ways are higher than our ways, and so on. And also, it's an attempt to preserve God from being held to some higher standard of justice that is above God that He's beholden to. The problem, of course, is that then you have a situation where whatever God does is just, is the logic. But that can sever the connection between our notions of justice and what God's revealed to us regarding what is just and right and good and what God does.

So then we have this real disconnect. God acts justly, but it doesn't look like that at all. And we're called to live justly and imitate God, and how on earth do we do that with that huge disconnect? So I think that's one of the problems of divine command theory. Then there are other views that take into account progressive revelation, that the story progressively reveals more of who God is.

And so we have a partial understanding, say in Genesis 1-11, that is clarified more as we get on in the story, and that reaches its ultimate clarifying moment in Christ. And so I think we can't deny the unfolding nature of revelation in Scripture, but it can also risk creating still a huge disconnect between the portrayal of God in the Old Testament and portrayal in the New. And what do you do with any revelatory value to the earlier revelations of God? Are they just sort of updated and then we throw them away? So I don't think that's right either.

Other approaches say that we have to kind of surrender this to mystery. That there's a bunch of stuff that's very violent in the Old Testament, other stuff where God's portrayed as gracious and merciful, and we just have to sit with that mystery of the tension between those, or between the Old and New Testament. And again, I think there's an advantage to recognizing the mystery of the God we serve. We're not going to fully understand God, and so expecting to fully understand all of God's actions in creation is a tall order and unrealistic and wrong, probably. But on the other hand, the sort of mystery solution can just be a card we play when we don't want to think through something.

We don't want to accept the implications of the contradiction or tension between two parts of the Bible. So this is where I think each of these different approaches has something to offer, but none of them is a total solution on any of these. There are more I talk about in the book, but what I think we need to do in every instance is to read the story carefully and slowly, and make sure we're paying attention to what it's saying and what it's not saying. That's my advice in light of all of these different approaches that we have.

We did an episode with Amy Peeler where someone asked about Paul saying that men are in the image of God and women are in the image of man. And she was like, well, that's not even quite what actually it says. There's a good reason why we should think about that. But Paul doesn't say women are not made in the image of God. Someone has told you that, and that's not actually what it says.

So thank you for that. We've been asking at the end for your kind of kid answer to this question. I like to imagine, partially, because I like to imagine scholars being in the church and being in the church with little kids, and imagining that there's a little kid that, heard you, wrote a book about this and has some questions about the Flood. And maybe their specific question really is, well, why would God destroy things? And maybe they are thinking, like, that doesn't seem like God, as I've heard God preached in my church.

Why would God do that? What would your answer be to a small child?

And that's what is driving the story from the beginning. And that's why the main emotion that we see from God in Genesis, in the flood story, is not anger. Anger is not mentioned once, but grief. Grief is meant twice, that God is grieved over what's happened. So he's come, he's looked at his creation that he loves, and it's completely ruined.

And so he does the thing that the creator, God does, which is he creates the conditions for it to be remade.

And there might be anger there. There might just be pleasure in destroying things. And we import that into our understanding of this story. Or it might be parents telling the story who go, I know what it's like to be mad at my kids and want to be like, we need to fix this. We're ditching the plan we had before and we're starting again.

And it's helpful, like you said before, to go back and be like, have we read the story well? If, in the story, the emphasis is grief, that's something that I think even kids, but especially adults, can understand. Especially adults that take care of children, whether it's their own or others. I know what it's like to be so sad at what you are doing to yourself and the home that I have provided for you. And I don't want that to happen anymore.

God's promise is not just to humans. It is a promise to all of creation. A promise to redeem and restore this creation, not destroy it. Sometimes we are tempted not just to think that God has special care and concern for us humans made in his image, but that the whole story is really about us. We can forget that God made this creation, called it good, and has promised to be faithful to it, even after our sin has affected it so deeply.

Adam and Eve were given a commission to take care of creation on God's behalf, to steward it. They failed at that job, and we fail at it often too, but it's never revoked in scripture. In fact, in this story, the job is given again to Noah and his family. There are some changes. if you want to go back to Genesis 9 and read it.

The meat lovers will be especially thankful for these changes. But even as God acknowledges that creation is now broken, and our relationship with the birds and the animals and the ground is broken too, he still gives us some rules about how to treat this creation. Rules that make clear that we aren't the only important ones in this story. This story should change how we live in this creation. A place that God made and called very good.

A place that God told us to take care of, not dominate over. A place we will one day live in, forever.

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