Main news for 14 December 2025

What is the meaning of the covenant God makes with Noah, and what is its significance? It would seem that God promises Noah nothing special. It is only a matter of the stability of the existing order of nature, of the fact that a catastrophe like the flood witnessed by Noah will not happen again. But it turns out that this "only" is a real miracle of God: the very possibility of living while avoiding planetary-scale cataclysms that threaten humanity with destruction is not something self-evident at all, but the result of God's direct intervention in the life of the world, an intervention that follows from the covenant made with the righteous man and from the fulfillment of the promises given to him. And at the same time, the full limitation of this covenant is also evident here.

In every age people have asked the same question: why did God need some special people of His own? Why did the Messiah need to come? Are there not enough righteous people in the world as it is? Is their righteousness really insufficient? In our day, however, people usually speak not of the righteous, but of "good people," but this does not change the substance of the matter.

And so it turns out that all the righteousness of all the righteous of all times and nations, and Noah can in a certain sense be regarded as a collective image symbolizing such righteous people, is enough only for the world not to perish, not to collapse into the abyss under the weight of the sin that has burdened it since the fall. There can be no question of any fundamental change, of any deliverance of the world from the power of the evil in which it lies, of any transformation of it. The world is balancing on the edge of its own destruction, and all the righteousness of all the righteous barely suffices to keep it from falling into the abyss. And for something greater to become possible, as we can see, special efforts are needed. And God undertakes such efforts, creating His people and then sending into the world the Messiah, who will bring the Kingdom to the world, giving it what all the righteous of all times and nations could never have earned for it.