God's Covenant with Noah and the Flood
The story of Noah begins several generations after Adam and Eve and starts not with Noah himself but with God. God recognizes that everyone in the world is sinful and they do not honor Him, except for Noah, who is called righteous. God’s plan to solve this problem is to flood the entire world, killing everyone except for eight people who are preserved on a boat called an ark. These eight people consist of Noah, his wife, his three sons, and their wives. God executes his plan to flood the world, and as a result, everyone on the earth dies. After the flood recedes, the eight remaining people leave the boat and step out onto dry land.
The first thing that Noah does upon leaving the ark is to build an altar and make an animal sacrifice to God. God smells the pleasing aroma and makes a promise to Noah. This promise is one of the earliest covenants in the Bible and is often called the Noahic covenant. God tells Noah that he shall never again kill every living creature and that he will never again send a flood to destroy the earth. This is a covenant, but it is also a promise, meaning that Noah does not need to do anything in order for God to do what he has said.
God tells Noah that he made this promise because humans are naturally full of evil intentions, even as children. I have always felt like this was an odd reason to give for not flooding the earth again. If we look back to before the flood, this is the same reason that God gives for why he chooses to flood the world initially. God observes this one fact, that all humans are naturally evil, and uses it as his reasoning for both choosing to flood the earth and choosing not to flood the earth.
The answer to this contradiction is simply that the flood was not able to solve the problem of human sin. Just as the seeds of plants were preserved in the ark, so too was the seed of sin preserved in the hearts of Noah and his family. Even though Noah was the most righteous person on earth, he and his family were still sinners. The world post-flood was still a fallen world with sin as present as ever. If the goal of the flood was to eliminate sin from the world, then it was a massive failure.
I have heard some people say that God is not doing enough to solve the problem of evil in our world. They see news reports filled with cruelty and violence and ask how God can allow these things to persist. Would it not be better for God to just eliminate everyone in the world that’s evil, and just leave us good people behind? This is the question that the flood of Noah answers. If God were to eliminate every evil person in the world, there would be no one left. And even if God were to eliminate everyone except the most righteous person, sin would still remain in the world.
God is all-knowing, which means that he already knew what the outcome would be when he sent the flood. Yet he sent it anyway. He did this for two reasons. First, God sent the flood to punish sin. God has the right to punish sin however he pleases, and it is up to his discretion whether he sends a flood or chooses to be patient. In this instance he chose to punish sin by sending the flood. God also sent the flood to demonstrate to us that it is not possible to selectively breed away sin like some kind of mutation. We’ve bred dogs to be friendlier and fruits to be sweeter, but that approach will not work with sin. Sin has become bonded to our very nature, and because of this we are unable not to sin.
God’s covenant with Noah, that he would never again send a flood to destroy the earth, is a confirmation to us that this cannot work. God has demonstrated this unchangeable fact: humanity will always be stuck with the problem of sin. We cannot prevent ourselves from sinning, so the only solution is atonement, to deal with the sin after it has already occurred. And this is exactly the approach that God takes in his future covenants and his plan for salvation. Atonement for sin is achieved first for a time by the blood of goats and bulls, but then once for all time by the blood of his Son.