God has a serious problem. Shortly after creating human beings, they start offing each other. Brother killing brother at that.
Things really go downhill from there and in the end the earth is filled with so much evil and corruption that God decides to wipe the whole slate clean with a massive flood.
He does preserve humanity by picking one guy and his family to carry on the human race. After the flood, God repeats his instruction to "Be fruitful and multiply," but he adds a stipulation not to kill each other. Seems like a fair request.
Then God makes a covenant with humanity, committing to never again use a flood to destroy the earth and its inhabitants. A covenant in the ancient world was a formal agreement between a superior and an inferior party, with the superior establishing the pact with the inferior.
A ceremony was typically involved and in this instance God ceremoniously lays down his weapon, the bow (Hab 3.9-11), facing away from humanity, as a sign of his commitment not to flood the earth again.
Next time you look to the sky and see a rainbow, let it remind you of a God who is deeply invested in the world and who is desperately concerned about evil. Think about how he was genuinely puzzled by the condition of the world (Gen 6.6ff) and so he set a plan in motion to make it better.
2 comments:
this sounds wrong just saying it, but its a shame it didn't work, as evil is most definitely back. New plan in action though....
Yeah, the new plan that started in Gen 12 was much better!
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