Genesis 6:5-8 "The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great..."

"The Lord 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. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, 'I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.' But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord" (Genesis 6:5-8 RSV).

Comment:

The entire story of the great flood in Genesis is a jumble of different versions of the story, from different sources, thrown together with no attempt at logic or telling an orderly story. As one example, Noah is told at 6:19 to bring two of every sort of animal into the ark. At 7:2—just four verses later—he is told to take seven pairs of clean animals and birds, and just one pair of unclean animals. And the whole story is strongly based in the ancient Gilgamesh Epic of the Babylonians. Archeological evidence suggests that there were, indeed, periods of massive flooding in the Tigris-Euphrates basin that must have seemed, from the limited perspective of people living there, as if the entire world was being inundated.   So we don't turn to the story for historical accuracy, but for spiritual meaning and metaphysical understanding. And metaphysically, the emphasis is not on the destruction, but on the assurance that no matter how chaotic our lives may become—how “flooded” we may feel with fears and other negative energies—there is always a spark of the divine within us—an ark that will rise above the chaos and carry us safely to a place in consciousness where we can begin again with the pure essence of spiritual commitment. The Christ within us—the Lord of our being—recognizes that part of our consciousness that is always aligned with the divine, and guides us in releasing the negative, claiming the positive, and moving forward.   Blessings!

Rev. Ed