NOTES for Gen 7:1-24

So the Lord looked at all this ugliness and came to the conclusion that He had worked in vain. He had created the world and cared for it, while people took it for granted and forgot the Creator. What next? And next... Every evil, like a stone thrown upward, returns and falls on the one who threw it. Up to a certain point the Lord held out His hands and protected people from these stones, the consequences of their sins. But then came the moment when He decided to remove His hands. Dishonest, unfair? But why, exactly? After all, we are speaking of a situation in which people reject God by all their behavior. And the Lord chooses one person, more precisely, one family. Let us venture to suppose that the one chosen was not simply someone especially pleasing to God. Most likely, Noah was simply the only one capable of hearing His voice! So God speaks with the one person who hears Him. And if enough people had been ready to listen, most likely there would have been no flood at all. But in that situation the Lord did the only thing possible: He warned of the danger the only one who was listening, and by his faith the fragile little vessel on which Noah was saving his family and the animals protected them from the water. A fairy tale, a parable, an image? Is it so important what the scale of the flooding of Mesopotamia was in unknown ancient years before our era? Something else is more important: in this story, once again, we are given the opportunity to look at how the Lord acts. And the main conclusion that can be drawn is simple: the foundation of relationship with God is readiness to listen and trust.