Floods and Towers

Read it: Genesis 4–11

Outside the garden, life goes on. Adam and Eve have children. But the sin that came in through one bite spreads fast, and Genesis 4 to 11 shows how fast. These chapters cover a huge sweep of time, and they read like a slide downhill, broken by moments of grace.

Two brothers

Cain farms; his brother Abel keeps sheep. Both bring offerings to God. God accepts Abel’s and not Cain’s, and Cain is furious. Before anything happens, God warns him: “If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you refuse to do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires you, but you must master it” (Genesis 4:7).

Sin is pictured as a wild animal waiting outside the door. Cain doesn’t master it. He lures his brother into a field and kills him. When God asks where Abel is, Cain shrugs: “I do not know!” he answered. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9). God replies: “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground” (Genesis 4:10).

In one generation sin has gone from eating forbidden fruit to murder. Yet even here God shows mercy. He puts a mark on Cain “so that no one who found him would kill him” (Genesis 4:15).

The chapter shows two lines of people. Cain’s family builds cities and invents music and metalwork, but violence grows, and a descendant called Lamech boasts of killing a man for wounding him. Then another son is born to Adam and Eve, Seth, and of his family we read: “At that time men began to call upon the name of the LORD” (Genesis 4:26).

Genesis 5 is a list of names, and it sounds like a bell tolling, as each life ends “and then he died” (Genesis 5:5). The curse is real. But one name breaks the pattern: “Enoch walked with God, and then he was no more, because God had taken him away” (Genesis 5:24).

The flood

By Genesis 6 the world has grown dark: “the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great upon the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was altogether evil all the time” (Genesis 6:5). The next line is one of the saddest in the Bible: God “was grieved in His heart” (Genesis 6:6). Judgment is not something God enjoys.

“Noah, however, found favor in the eyes of the LORD” (Genesis 6:8). God tells him to build an ark, a huge wooden box of a boat, and to bring his family and pairs of animals aboard. Then the rain comes, the deep springs burst open, and the waters cover the land. Everyone outside the ark dies. Don’t hurry past that. It is a terrible picture of what sin deserves, and the Bible doesn’t hide it.

Christians differ on some details here, such as whether the flood covered the whole globe or the whole world Noah’s readers knew, and how to read the long lifespans in Genesis 5. All agree that this really was God’s judgment on human evil, and that He rescued Noah’s family through it.

When the waters go down, Noah builds an altar, and God makes a promise: “Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from his youth” (Genesis 8:21). Read that carefully. The flood washed the earth, but it did not wash the human heart. The problem is still there, inside the ark. God promises to hold back from destroying the world again, and He puts His rainbow in the clouds as “the sign of the covenant” (Genesis 9:12). A covenant is a solemn, binding promise, and it is one of the big words of this whole story.

Almost straight away, Noah plants a vineyard, gets drunk, and his family falls into shame. The rescued man is still a sinner.

The tower

Noah’s descendants spread out and become nations, listed in Genesis 10. Then in Genesis 11 people settle on a plain in Babylonia and have an idea: “Come,” they said, “let us build for ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens, that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:4).

That’s the heart of it: make a name for ourselves. It’s Eden all over again, people trying to reach up to God’s level on their own terms. God comes down, confuses their language, and scatters them. “That is why it is called Babel, for there the LORD confused the language of the whole world” (Genesis 11:9).

So Genesis 1 to 11 ends with humanity divided, scattered, unable even to understand each other. Then comes one more family list, which slows down at a man called Abram, whose wife has a problem: “Sarai was barren; she had no children” (Genesis 11:30). It doesn’t look like much. It’s where God is about to start again.

Where Jesus is in this

Jesus pointed back to Noah: “As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man” (Matthew 24:37). People ate, drank and married, and didn’t see the judgment coming. Peter sees the ark as a picture of rescue through Jesus: “only eight souls, were saved through water. And this water symbolizes the baptism that now saves you also ... through the resurrection of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 3:20–21). There was one way to be safe, and it was inside the ark. In Jesus there is one place to be safe from judgment, and the door is open now.

And Babel is reversed at Pentecost. When the Holy Spirit came on Jesus’ followers, people from many nations heard them, “because each one heard them speaking his own language” (Acts 2:6). What pride scattered, Jesus gathers, and the Bible’s last book shows a crowd “from every nation and tribe and people and tongue” (Revelation 7:9) worshipping together.

Think about it: Babel was about making a name for ourselves. Where do you feel that pressure most, and what would it look like to let God give you your name instead?

Go deeper: The Key Teachings of Dwight L. Moody — Moody never forgot the night of the great Chicago fire, when he sent a crowd home to think about Jesus and never saw them together again; this chapter tells that story and walks through his sermon on Noah, where “God always precedes judgment with grace” but God Himself, at last, shuts the door. Start with chapter 19, “Come Thou into the Ark”.