MINING THE RICHES
Original art by Tom DuBois
Flood of
H I G H E R T H I N G S __ 20
H
ow distorted are our views of Noah and the great flood! How often we find children’s rooms decorated with quaint images from Noah’s ark as if the story was only about an old man and his family tending the animals while afloat in a big boat.There is nothing cute or fanciful about the Lord destroying the entire earth on account of His anger and wrath toward the sin of mankind. Perhaps our desire to make the flood more palatable is nothing more than our vain attempt to forget the wages of our sin and recreate God in an image more acceptable to the world.
From the primordial waters of life that covered the surface of the deep the Lord now used water to destroy all that He had created. His perfect creation would groan as in the pains of childbirth while those created in His image would suffer, working the land and bringing forth the one who would crush the serpent’s head. Yet in the midst of such judgment and death, the Lord would work His gracious rescue.The Lord would bring life out of death and set the pattern of rescue that delivers us still today through such life-giving water. Into such death the Lord brought forth life. Noah and his family came out of the ark onto dry ground and a promise,“Thus I establish My covenant with you: Never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood; never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth. . . . I set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall be for the sign of the covenant between Me and the earth” (Genesis 9:11, 13 NKJV). From death into life through water is the Lord’s way—not only for Noah but also for Moses and all of Israel as they crossed through the Red Sea on dry ground while hard-hearted Pharaoh and all his men drowned in the Red Sea. Water puts to death while at the same time it brings life. Recall the first of God’s creation—the heavens and the earth and even the waters. It is not haphazard chance that our Lord chose to rescue and redeem us through the very physical element that was created together with the crude materials that made up the first of His creation, the heavens and the earth. The water, part of God’s first creative work, even before the first day of creation, is the means by which He will recreate His fallen children by joining them to His death, burial, and resurrection in the washing of Holy Baptism! God would not have chosen another means to rescue us.
