The Chief of Police for Henderson and the Sheriff of Vance County were talking about it on Thursday night. The Republican Presidential candidates have been talking about it a lot. Governors and Presidents have it as one of their constant concerns. On Home in Henderson, on other blogs and web sites, it is a source of endless debate. It is absolutely necessary to do something about it. The question that is on everybody’s mind is how do we stop evil? What can we do to prevent crime, abuse, greed, and violence? We may not call it evil. We may not want to speak theologically loaded words, but that is what we are talking about. Evil, wickedness, meanness, hatred. How can we stop it? What do we do with those who do it? What kind of punishment works? How can we put things right? How can you limit, control, punish, discipline or correct those who do evil things so that they will change or cease the evil that they do?
I can still recall an episode of a Hill Street Blues television program. The segment was about two policemen who were a team, and one of the “bad guys” had caught one of the policemen alone and beat him up rather seriously. So the partner invites this bad guy out into the alley and with his boxing skills just beats the tar out of the bad guy, and I will never forget the kind of thrill and joy I had at watching that. I was completely surprised at how much satisfaction I got from watch that bad guy get his.
That is what evil to others does to us. The pain, the suffering, the viciousness of evil, the callousness, the indifference of the criminal, the complete selfishness of the criminal evokes from us a deep and passionate desire for revenge. Every day and every night there are stories of crime, violence, and suffering, and we cry out. This has got to stop. People lobby their leaders, build more prisons, give them longer sentences, lock them up and throw away the key. No wonder in some cultures with different laws they still cut off hands and multilate the criminal.
This deep sense of outrage, this reaction to evil is as old as life. This desire to nuke Iran, to destroy the evil ones. It is right there in our Bible, and goes all the way back to this story from Genesis. This reaction to evil even has its place in the heart of God. This reaction to evil has been a part of human history since we have left the garden. Almost from the very beginning. “The Lord saw that the wickedness of mankind was great in all the earth and every imagination of the thoughts of the hear was only evil continually, And the Lord was sorry that he had made mankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I”ll drown the bums. I will blot out mankind whom I have created from the face of the earth. The Story of the Flood is God”s own “Get tough on Evil” policy. No lethal injections, just forty days of rain.
But the heart of God just can’t be that vicious. The divine spark of mercy creeps in and there is the story of Noah and the rainbow. God just can’t give up the project of creation completely. God decides to keep just a tiny bit of creation alive and see if there isn’t chance that it might still turn out well. After the flood God makes a new deal with Noah. Not some legal contract, but a new covenant where both sides have obligations and duties. It wan’t negotiated. Noah did not send his lawyers to argue his side. It is a new covenant offered by God to Noah. This is a new arrangement offered by God to Noah. This is God offering to make a new relationship with Noah and his descendants to see if another approach might be more successful. This gift of the new arrangement with Noah is a new self-imposed obligation taken upon himself by God. It is spoken to Noah, but Noah never gets a chance to argue or respond. Sometimes you hear people say, “Well, I never asked to be born.” Well, Noah did not ask for this new covenant. He never gets a chance to say anything, and his opinion on the matter isn’t important. Nothing that is being promised in this covenant depends in any way on Noah, on creation, on you or me.
There was an amusing cartoon in the paper this week. God and Satan were standing on a cloud, and God says to Satan, “Yes, indeed, your idea was right. Talk Radio and Cable TV are destroying the world, but it is taking too long, I think I will go back to flooding.”
But that is exactly what God has promised not to do. God saw all creation covered with water. He saw the death and destruction of what He had created, he watched as so many of his creatures died in the flood, and the heart of God is filled with pain and sorrow. God comes to Noah and gives to Noah, to all creation to all living things the promise that He will never again do that again. God gives the assurance that He will never deal with evil with evil and violence. He will not flood the earth again. God tells Noah about the new decision he has reached. There are no maybe or perhaps. “I will never again cut off by water, I will never again flood. This is my promise to you and all living things, with all creatures, with every beast, with all birds and cattle. God wants to make that point over and over. I am not going to do that again. This is not conditional. There is nothing that Noah or creation has to do to preserve this promise. Nothing that creation can do to make God change his mind.
God has decided that he will not use force, destruction, suffering as a way to stop evil. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the late 1960’s found his campaign for human rights began to spread to include an anti-war element. He was protesting the war in Vietnam. When he was asked why he was getting mixed up in the anti-war effort, Dr. King said he had to. He said he gathered his people and told them about non-violence. He told them to refuse to return violence for the violence against them. That the evils of segregation could not and would not be overcome by force. That the hatred of the blacks could not be eliminated by the hatred of the white. He said that the young men and women he was talking to were the ones being sent by the government to go to Vietnam and to try to fight the evils of communism with force, guns, violence, and hatred of the gooks. Dr. King said, How could I preach Non-violence to my people and yet encourage them to engage in violence and destruction as a nation.
God says to Noah the same thing. I will never try to eliminate or control or punish evil,violence and wickedness with more destruction and violence. I will not flood the earth again. The great flooding of creation has changed the heart of God. Haven’t you noticed how our hearts are changed about a lot of things when New Orleans is flooded by Katrina, when Japan and Asia are hit by Tsunamis, when hurricanes come and flood New England, the way our thoughts and feelings are changed by the floods down the Mississippi? The flooding and the destruction changed the heart of God. Walter Bruggemann, of of the outstanding Old Testament scholars suggest, “What has changed is God. God has made a decision about the grief and trouble of his own heart. God has spoken that the relation between creator and creature is no longer built on the basis of retributive justice. God is no longer going to be the strict legal judge that gives an eye for an eye, an arm for an arm, a life for a life. Because the sadness and pain that God felt as he watched the flood happen, God said no more to that kind of effort to deal with evil. From now on the relationship between me and creation will be based on unqualified grace.” God’s assurance guarantees the continuation of the world and all living creatures, and that promise takes precedence over all theology. God just looked into his own heart and says to Noah that “I can’t stand doing that again.” I will not do that again.
It was a very long time ago. I guess I was about 9 or 10 years old. We were living in DeLand Florida, and for one Christmas I got a bee-bee gun. Just an ordinary Daisy bee-bee gun, but I imagined myself as the great white hunter. So in the midst of the cold and gray December, I took my new gun and some bee-bees and went out into a small sections of woods not far from the house. It was not long before I spotted a small sparrow sitting on a branch of a tree. I quietly stalked this little bird and got up to about six or seven feet from it. The bird was still on the branch. I aimed my bee-bee gun and fired. I hit it but did not kill it the first time. It fell to the ground. I was flooded with a sense of shame and guilt. I knew I could not leave it hurt, so I shot it a few more times on the ground. I buried the bird, and I put my bee-bee gun away. I vowed right then and there in those woods that I would never do that again. Never, ever do that again.
Now don’t come telling me about the benefits of real hunting. I know what I did was not sporting. I understand that herds need to be thinned. I understand that if I was starving I might do something different. But out of the pain in my heart at what I had done, I simply made a promise to myself, that I would never do that again.
The Flood did something to God’s heart which brought him to Noah, “...never again shall all flesh be cut off by waters of a flood and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.
To make sure Noah knew how serious God is about this, God said he was putting the Rainbow in the sky. The Rainbow is for his sake, not ours. God says he is putting that rainbow in the sky so that when He sees it He will remember this promise that he made and refocus his anger. He has put this bow in the sky to remind Him that he has made a promise to all future generations of living things. This is not just to Noah and to his family. This is a promise of preservation of creation for all living things. Everything that comes out of the art and everything that was affected by the flood. The Bow is the symbol of this self-imposed obligation that God will not deal with evil with evil. That God will not respond to wickedness with wickedness of killing and destruction.
The rainbow is a symbol of the promise of grace to us. It is memory devise for God to hold his anger back and to continue to deal with us in grace. It is the rainbow that needs to remind us as well that when we pray that God would come with lightning and strike that evil person we know, God is not likely to respond that way. That God has in fact determined that He will deal with evil by love, He will respond to our wickedness with grace, he will react to our violence with redemption.
God puts the rainbow in the sky as a sign of the dependability of creation. Seed time and harvest will continue. There is nothing in the Rainbow’s promise that means that we as humans cannot mess up our own nests, that we cannot ruin our own planet, that we cannot spoil our rivers and pollute our air, but the rainbow is the note on the refrigerator door to remind us that God will not respond to the evil in our world with His own evil.
The next time God decided to deal directly with evil, the next time God moved to redeem the world, the next time God came to overcome evil, God did not send a flood, God came a picked up a Cross.
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