There is a notable theme in scripture, where the Lord repents or modifies or turns back from the decision to judge some group, after having heard the plea of Abraham, Moses, Amos, or the Ninevites. But in the story of the flood it is different; we read that God repented of creating humanity: “the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (Genesis 6:6). Elsewhere the repentance of the Lord leads to mercy for the sinners; but here it leads to destruction, not only of the sinners but of nearly all living things, with God saying, “I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created – people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them” (6:7).

This seems like overkill. A wicked murderer might be responsible for the death of a dozen or more people. An evil warlord might cause hundreds or thousands of deaths. But God would cause the death of everyone: the murderer and the warlord, the children playing in the yard, the babies asleep in their mothers’ arms (6:13, 6:17; 7:4, 7:23). Perhaps we have a strong doctrine of God’s righteous wrath: but is this a picture of it?

Yet “Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord” (6:8), and built an ark (6:13-22), filled it with food and animals (6:20-21, 7:14), and he and his family were preserved (8:15-19). God’s comment as everyone left the ark was this: “the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth” (8:21). And indeed, we soon see Noah getting drunk, passing out naked in his tent, and cursing his grandson Canaan in order to get back at his son Ham for embarrassing him (9:20-27). The story of Noah shows us that the wipe-it-all-away-and-start-over strategy doesn’t actually work, because even after blotting out all the sinners in the rest of the world, there were still sinners getting off the ark.

As we saw with Adam and Eve, focusing our analysis on the historicity and theology of the passage is a way of distancing ourselves from it: we are better served to recognize that the story is there to help us see the problem in ourselves. We want to think that if God just gets rid of all the evil people out there, then everything would be fine for us and our family: but we’ll still be the same self-centered and self-righteous people when we get off the boat.

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Teach us, Lord, that destruction of the wicked is not the answer. Help us recognize that in all the world we share one common life, in covenant with each other. Just as much as my neighbor, just as much as my enemy, I am a sinner in need of grace.