Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Genesis 8:20-22

20 And Noah builded an altar unto the Lord; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.

21 And the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.

22 While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

I mentioned yesterday how Noah represented a new beginning for mankind, and this notion is further echoed in today’s verses. And here we see that God is establishing a new covenant with mankind. The natural order of the world, its cycles and seasons, its days and nights, all these things will continue, and there will not be any more mass extinction.

And He promises this even knowing that man will go astray again. He calls out how “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth,” but that doesn’t change His promise. Jesus would accurately observe “he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). From this point on it is official and covenanted: God knows that is committed to seeing this human experiment all the way through. No matter how many rebellions we make He will continue to work with us.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Genesis 8:1-5

1 And God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark: and God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters assuaged;

2 The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained;

3 And the waters returned from off the earth continually: and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters were abated.

4 And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.

5 And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month: in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen.

I mentioned earlier how God relied on the slow and tedious process of Noah building the ark, rather than instantaneously popping one into existence as a miracle. And here again, He relies on the natural process of wind and the water is abated over time, it doesn’t just magically disappear all at once.

There was a time where I was praying for a metaphorical flood in my own life to be removed. And it was. As with this story, it was a long, drawn out process, but it absolutely was a miracle, and there absolutely was the hand of God in it. Just because we don’t always see the full results instantaneously does not mean that God isn’t prevailing in our lives.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Genesis 7:10-12

10 And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth.

11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.

12 And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.

The feats of man in subduing nature are truly impressive. We flatten hundreds of square miles for a city, pave it over, and erect towering skyscrapers. We trace the countryside with a web of highways, tunneling clean through a mountain and bridging over the sea. We send satellites into space and cables across the ocean. We genetically modify our fruit and domesticate wild animals. We produce awesome reserves of power, and we have weapons of mass destruction that could devastate all of modern civilization. And all of this can make us feel pretty sure of ourselves. It can give us the illusion that we rule this world, can make us believe that there is nothing we cannot tame.

Then, a category-5 hurricane touches land, or an earthquake weighs in at over 9.0 on the Richter scale, or the threat of a mega-colossal eruption lurks underfoot. And suddenly we realize that we might tame the periphery, but we don’t hold a candle to the true power of God. For all of our scientific and technologic advancements, we only continue to exist by His grace.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Genesis 7:2-4, 9-10

2 Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.

3 Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.

4 For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.

9 There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God had commanded Noah.

10 And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth.

While reading these verses it struck me how inefficient things are for God, doing His work through mortals. We aren’t told how long it took Noah to build the ark, but given the size of the project one would imagine it was quite a while! In fact, several scholars interpret Genesis 6:3 as saying that there was 120 years between God’s warning of the flood and when He actually sent it. Now Noah wouldn’t necessarily have been building the craft for that entire period of time, but it is possible that this was decades of hard labor!

And then there is the matter of getting all of the animals safely stored in the ark in just the last week! Either Noah had been retaining them elsewhere for a long period of time, waiting for the word to usher them into the ark, or else some divine intervention was directing all the animals out of the wilds and into the vessel.

In short, it sounds like it would have been more straightforward for God to just work some miracle without any human involvement whatsoever. How about He just snap His fingers and the ark magically appears? And forget about the animals, why not just save Noah and his family alone, then He could recreate all other forms of life, just the same as He did in the Garden of Eden?

But God tends to not rely on miracles when there are children who are able to do the work for themselves. We will see this truth many times throughout the Bible. God made the world and the rules and systems that define it, and He prefers to operate within those limitations whenever possible. God will work miracles in our lives, but the vast majority of them are going to come through His people.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Genesis 6:14-16, 19, 22

14 Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.

15 And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.

16 A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.

19 And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.

22 Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did he.

God did not simply tell Noah to “build an ark.” God laid out for Noah a very specific plan for it, describing the dimensions, the placement of windows and doors, and that it should be divided into three stories. This was, therefore, a joint effort between God and Noah, and each of them was essential for its completion. God was the architect and Noah was the constructor. Without God there would have been no plan to follow and without Noah there would have been no execution of that plan.

Of course sometimes God is more explicit in His directions and sometimes He leaves the finer details up to us. But in either case, all of us were meant to work in collaboration with Him. The natural reaction to hearing a story like Noah’s is to wish that God had a plan like that for us, to be given a great calling, and to have a work to do in partnership with God, Himself.

And according to Paul (1 Corinthians 12), that is exactly what God wants for us, too! We are all meant to be a part of the plan.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Genesis 6:8-9, 17-18

8 But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

9 These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.

17 And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.

18 But with thee will I establish my covenant; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons’ wives with thee.

There was mass evil in the world, so universal and so extreme that God was set on washing the slate clean. But in all this crowd of corruption, God did not lose sight of one who was innocent.

The story of Noah is a very encouraging example of how God is perfectly aware of the individual, and the great lengths to which He will go to save that one. As humans we often struggle to be so individually conscious. We have limits of time and space, which is why our laws are usually applied universally, targeted towards the average, but ill-fitting to all manner of individual edge cases. God, though, can raise a flood over the entire world and still hold a single boat safe in the palm of His hand.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Genesis 6:5-7

5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 

6 And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. 

7 And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.

There have been many that struggle with the notion of a loving God who has destroyed swaths of humanity. For whatever reason, this has never been much of a concern for me. I have a sense that God made my life and He has the divine right to extinguish it at any time. I’m honestly okay with that, and by extension I’m willing to surrender the fate of all mankind into His hands as well. That doesn’t mean I know why He does all the things that He does, but I’m okay with it. I’ve already seen Him extend immense mercy to me that I wasn’t deserving of, so I’m not afraid that He is being unfair or cruel to my brothers or sisters either.

I will say, though, that the Old Testament seems to represent a fundamentally different time from the one we live in today. I get the sense that things took a drastic shift after Jesus came and performed the atoning sacrifice, providing a space between sin and consequence, a place that mercy could be more freely applied. I do believe that God has always been a loving God, that He is unchanging, but that the systems in between Him and us do change.

Posted on by Abe Austin · 2 Comments

Scriptural Analysis- Genesis 4:3-5

3 And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord.

4 And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his coffering:

5 But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.

This account doesn’t give an explanation for why God respected Abel’s offering but not Cain’s. Several theories have been made, each seeming credible in their own way, but there is no telling which—if any—of them are the actual real reason why. And I don’t think it really matters.

As I have mentioned before, what is useful to me is how this story resonates with similar experiences of my own life. I ask myself what it teaches about me, more than what it teaches about Cain. And this account reminds me of how I used to make sacrifices of time and energy to try and offset all the wrong things I was doing in my addictions. I was fundamentally warped inside, harming myself and those around me, but devoting hours of service to my church in the hope that I could tip the scales in my favor.

And you know what? It never worked. Just like in Cain’s story, I felt like God had no respect for my offerings. All of that effort and it just wasn’t going anywhere, I was running in place without ever moving forward. And like Cain I felt angry about it. It seemed cruel to me that God just wouldn’t care about what I did. I was trying so hard, why wasn’t He seeing that and fixing me?!

In hindsight, though, it would have been immensely cruel for God to have supported me in that moment. If He had done so, it would have affirmed all my broken philosophies. It would have led me to believe that I really could offset all my sins if I just did enough other works that were good. There would have been no grace in my life, no inviting God to come into my heart as it was now to heal it, no coming to see Him as He really is.

So yes, I have been Cain, rejected and angry, but I know now that when God rejects an offering it is meant only as a kindness to His child.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Genesis 2:8-9

8 And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.

9 And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Note that the presence of the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden was no coincidence. God adorned the grounds with all manner of plants: trees that were lovely to look at, trees to provide the food man needed to live, and even a tree that gave immortality. But He also intentionally added this one other tree, one that would enable mankind to fundamentally change his state from innocence to being able to perceive evil.

At times I have wondered what the nature of this tree was that it would give knowledge of good and evil. The thought occurs to me that just by God forbidding the eating of that tree it would already qualify as a tree of knowledge of good and evil, for now it could not be eaten except by an act of disobedience, which would necessarily break one’s innocence, which would bring them face-to-face with guilt and consequences. Had God instead commanded Adam to not lift a particular rock then we could just as easily be talking about the rock of knowledge of good and evil.

However this tree has the title of “knowledge of good and evil” even before God forbade the eating of it. That seems to suggest there was something inherent in its nature that God was steering Adam and Eve away from, just as He gives us commandments today to keep us from inherently harmful behavior.

But maybe these questions don’t matter, though. What is more pertinent to me is that this tree is an allegory for the breaking of innocence in my own life. I have had my own trees of knowledge of good and evil, like that time I colored red crayon on the carpet and found myself facing negative consequences on the one hand or the temptation to lie about it on the other. It was an opportunity planted in my life, able to bring me to a knowledge of both good and evil. And like Adam and Eve, I gave in to the temptation, I lied about the mess, and I entered a more fallen world as a result.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Genesis 2:4-7

4 These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens,

5 And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.

6 But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.

7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

At this point we read of God creating man from the dust, which seems confusing given that we already heard about him creating man in the last chapter. Why are we hearing about the creation of man twice? One of the interpretations is that the first account only tells of a spiritual creation. God planned and prepared everything during Chapter 1, and then in Chapter 2 we read the actual execution of that plan. Verse 5 implies this when it speaks of “every plant and every herb” as though they already exist in some context, even before having been planted and grown.

Another interpretation is that these are two accounts of the same event. One could see Chapter 1 and the first three verses of Chapter 2 as a sort of prologue, using broad strokes to describe the events that are further detailed in what follows. In either case, by the end of Verse 7 of Chapter 2 man has become a living soul, the direct creation of God, and a central actor in the story of life.