Gen. 9:8, Fretheim For God to promise not to do something again entails an ongoing divine self-limitation for dealing with evil in the life of the world. The route of world annihilation has been set aside as a divine possibility. And, God cannot annihilate and still be faithful. Sin and evil will be allowed to have their day, but God will work from within such a world to redeem it, not overpower the world from without.
. For God to decide to endure a wicked world, while continuing to open up the divine heart to that world. God thus determines to take suffering into God's own heart and bear it there for the sake of the future of the world. The cross of Jesus Christ is on the same trajectory of divine promise.
God continues:The separation and gathering of the waters (1:6-11) is first undone (6:11) and then redone (8:3-14). God's command to "be fruitful and multiply" (1:28) is repeated three times (8:17, 9:1, and 9:7) after the flood.That humans are created in the image of God is repeated (9:6b).Thus all of creation is given a new beginning, God does not create new beings, but begins anew with a remnant.. God enters into an eternal covenant with all creation without requiring anything in return. God does so fully aware that "the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth," (8:21) still. The flood has not cleansed the human heart of sin, , and God enters into covenant with us anyway. Perhaps the divine heart that was so aggrieved by human wickedness that is now moved by that same grief to seek another way to get through to us. The sign of this covenant, God's bow in the clouds, is precisely the bow of battle. To hang up one's bow is to retire from battle. That bow in the clouds is the sign of God's promise that whatever else God does to seek our restoration, destruction is off the table.
An implication of this promise is that God will try everything else. God will seek us and seek us,as eivl veils our vision of God's reality and of our own as God's creatures. Whatever dwells in our hearts that keeps us from hearing the harmony of all life in God's care, God will not give up on loving us into restoration.
Is 25, just examined by the men’s group at noon on Monday-
I pet. 3:18 n drawing on the story of Noah, Peter wants to assure his readers that they are indeed the church, a new ark rising and falling with the waters of adversity, yet proceeding toward the day of peace when the chaos around them would recede and a new world would be established. And that day would come, for the Lord into whose body they had been baptized is indeed the Lord of creation. . Seek signs of subsiding threats-"the powers that be" are still a very real part of our existence -- whether as the collective spirit of a nation, a corporation, or other organizations -- and often we are only too willing to offer them the trust and obedience that should be reserved for God alone.
Lent offers us the opportunity to search our conscience, to consider the implications of our baptism, and to assess which side we are really on. Ostensibly, the waters that wash us clean are the source of our salvation, but our actions sometimes suggest an allegiance to the chaos that lies just beyond the walls of the ark. Christ proclaims from the right hand of God that the spirits have been bound, but we too often insist through our words and our deeds that they should once again be set free. deffenbaugh
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