"God Refuses to Give Up" (Genesis 6-9)

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This semester, we are looking at the big storyline of redemption that is laid out for us in the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. In this week's message from Genesis 6-9, we explore the story of Noah, his family, the flood, and the promises that God makes to humanity and to the whole creation. In this next chapter of the story, we learn that nothing in all creation (not even our worst actions) can stop God’s gracious purposes from coming to pass, because God refuses to give up on his good plan for his creation. “Genesis 6-9 is not first and foremost a story about Noah. It is primarily a story about God, his anger, and his judgment. We tend to think of God's anger in terms of two extremes, each inadequate: God is either presented as the benevolent granddaddy who would never hurt anyone (and who is therefore no help in bringing justice to a hurting world and stemming the tide of wrongdoing) or as a capricious, unhinged despot (the deity of Richard Dawkins's imagination) liable to fly off the handle at any moment. What is fascinating about the way God is presented in the flood narrative (and, for that matter, in the rest of the Bible as well) is that he is neither simply furious nor utterly benevolent, but he acts to save people our of the midst of his own wrath and settled opposition to sin. The waters that drowned the human race were also the waters that floated the ark and saved Noah and his family: judgment and grace flow from the same source, not from a good god fighting against a bad god. . . . In the flood narrative it is God who saves Noah from God. In the midst of the torrent of his own raging justice God places a floating ship of mercy. This is a distinctive biblical figure. It is God whom we fear: his anger at our rebellion against him. But it is in God we hope, in his promise of rescue, of the serpent crusher. “—Chris Watkin