Genesis, Chapters 6-9: The Flood

Comment:

We are still in early Genesis here—still telling the five great myths designed to answer basic human questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? Why are we different from other peoples? What happens if God is angry at us? To focus on issues of literal, historical accuracy is meaningless; that wasn't the point of the stories. I think of them often in terms of a nomadic tribe sitting around a campfire at night, passing on tribal lore to the children by repeating beloved old stories of how all things began.

Up to this point in the unfolding story, people were living for hundreds of years. In Chapter 5 we have Methuselah finally leaving at age 969. Even the youngest children hearing the story would have to wonder what happened. So we have the Lord deciding to limit a human lifespan to 120 years, and we have—as we do in many other cultures throughout the world, especially in Greek mythology—the story that this particular people are descended from intercourse between gods (or angels) and humans. These ancestors share their world with the Nephilim, uncouth giants and adversaries who are mentioned several times in the Bible (Numbers 13:33, Deuteronomy. 2:10-11, for example) and are about to be destroyed by the Flood.

Metaphysically, this particular story continues the challenge of anchoring our true spiritual nature in the limitations of a human experience. We come into life fully cognizant of our spiritual identity and power. But in order to accomplish the spiritual purpose that brings us into human form, we must allow ourselves to become increasingly dense, limited and forgetful of who, in truth, we are. It's all part of the great creative process of God—and we tell stories such as this to cling to the Truth when we're in danger of forgetting totally.

As for the Flood itself, it's again important to realize that it's a story told by and to people who believed in an angry and punishing God, and so whenever anything bad happened, they assumed that God was deliberately doing it and that the people who suffered must have deserved it. Today we still recognize the Power of God in natural events like hurricanes, floods and earthquakes. But we don't believe the people affected are being deliberately punished. Jesus taught us that God is a Power of Love, and that what happens in the world is an expression of our collective consciousness—not a specific punishment from beyond directed against specific people.

We're told that the people had forgotten their relationship to God and were making ignorant choices: "every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually" (Gen. 6:5). When the Power of God comes up against such expressions of evil, it seeks to cleanse the evil. It's not punishment. It's that the One Presence and One Power seeks to dissolve all expressions of fear and ignorance that are not like Itself. The people who died in the flood were simply experiencing the consequences of their own negative beliefs and choices. And they were still spiritual beings, so “death” was not equivalent to being destroyed forever. Their spiritual beings were lifted out of the human morass they had allowed through ignorance and sensual distraction, so that they could try again in other lives and experiences. 

Meanwhile, those who had not lost touch with their true spiritual identity and purpose ride out the storm and become the seeds of a new generation of spiritual awareness and maturity symbolized by the new covenant and its vibrant, affirming emblem, the rainbow.

So the spiritual message is clear: choices have consequences. And sometimes the most loving thing the Power of God can do is to clear away the mess we've made so we can try again. A flood or similar “disaster” can be a terrible experience, whether it expresses as an external event or an internal crisis. But if we stay focused on our spiritual truth, confident that God is present in even the worst of the storm, the result will be a cleansing of negative energies and an affirmation of the creative Power that is our source, identity and purpose.

Blessings!

Rev. Ed