Creation of the past points to the future

The mystery of life sustained and life renewed

Every time I’ve wanted to start writing again, I’ve been caught instead reading the creation through the flood stories over and over. I’m going to backtrack a little and try to pull my pieces back together.

First, in the Clines article, he argues that violence and the dismantling of God’s created order by all of creation are the reason for the flood and that the flood was simply a continuation of what creation had started - the uncreation of everything and a return to chaos. We see this decline into violence in the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain, and Lamech (and perhaps the sons of God marrying the daughters of men). When Noah gets out the boat, after he makes an altar, he is identified as “a man who works the ground,” which correlates him with Cain and with God’s curse on man/Adam. Noah plants (like God planted), partakes of what is planted, and becomes drunk. Then he is naked.¹ Like Clines highlighted, the author of this passage is making sure the reader understands that humans have not changed. Like Adam who ate and then was naked, Noah partakes of fruit and is naked. The preservation of Noah, instead of completely destroying all of humanity, was an(other) example of the judgement of God being made less.

Let’s quickly go back to Genesis 8:1,

But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind to pass over the land, and the waters subsided.

I argued that this passage was supposed to point us back to the first creation story where the wind/spirit of God was over the waters. But, in Genesis 8, the wind is sent by God instead of it being the wind of God over the waters. It is also notable that in the Genesis 8 context that God makes a wind cross over “the land,” since it was supposed to be covered with water. I think that this is because this passage is also pointing forward to the next time that God will save his people from waters - at the Red Sea, fleeing from their oppressors.²

Sailhammer says regarding the biblical story:

We must reckon with the fact that the author is deliberately recounting these various events [in the Bible] in such a way to highlight their similarity. God’s dealings in the past prefigure his work in the present and the future.³

We see this writing strategy of the repetition of details from one story to another all throughout scripture. The barren woman giving birth to a child of promise theme (Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah, Sampson’ mother, etc.) is an easily identifiable example of this technique.
So, the Noah story looks forward to God’s deliverance of his people from bondage and it looks back to when humanity rested in “the land,” (that is Eden) and God provided all they needed until they disobeyed his commandment and were kicked out of “the land” and sent east (which even this detail points us to the future of the story of the exile, where God’s people disobey and are kicked out of the land that God had given them to go east to Babylon).

And this finally brings me back to my question I was exploring: God’s wind/breath/spirit placed in people in creation and if there are any theological implications for this.

Well, first, in my post on Malachi where I started exploring this, I noted that Malachi seemed to argue that the people shouldn’t follow a foreign god because they are related to the One (God) through the spirit/breath He put in them in creation. All of humanity (and all creation?) lives because the breath/spirit of their lungs is from God. Because God is creator and father, allegiance is owed to him.

BUT, the image of bringing the ground to life is also a pattern that God will continue to follow. God will make the wastelands into fertile gardens (Ezekiel 36:35). Metaphorically, God’s spirit hovers over the chaos of this world and separates the waters and provides dry land for his creation to cross over unharmed. God takes what is dead (Ephesians 2:1) and breathes his spirit again (John 20:22) and gives humanity new life where creation’s undoing of itself and attempt to return to chaos will be reversed. The way God worked in the past points to how God will work in the future.

I don’t think this forms a tidy systematic theology. There are loose ends in what I’m saying. But, as someone who loves to study the Bible, I have found that the Bible is not really written for tidy systemization. It happily holds seemingly conflicting statements on equal levels. We usually call this “mystery” and accept it as that. This mystery is that all life is from God, and just as God gives and sustains life, he is and will also give new life, again by breathing his spirit into humanity. Like the breath of life pointing towards our family relationship to God in Malachi, the breath of recreation is a sign of our family relationship with God.

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1. John Sailhammer, The Pentateuch as Narrative (Grand Rapids, Zondervan: 129).  ↩︎

2. Note other similarities: the words “God remembered” of Genesis 8:1 is the same phraseology that we find when the people cry out to God from slavery in Egypt. Similarly, in the final plague against the Egyptians, God says “I will pass over the land” (Exodus 12:12) and he strikes down the firstborn of all humans and animals that do not have the blood of a lamb over their doorpost. The imagery of the flood is used this way in Isaiah 24. See Chris Seitz, Isaiah 1–39, 179–184.  ↩︎

3. John Sailhammer, The Pentateuch as Narrative (Grand Rapids, Zondervan: 127).  ↩︎