If You Really Want to Know Jesus, Know the Old Testament
Part 4: The Covenant with Creation
September 28, 2008
Genesis 9:8-17
Towards the end of one of my favorite books about an orphan boy named Harry, his father figure says to him, “You think the dead we loved ever truly leave us? You think that we don’t recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble? Your father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself most plainly when you have need of him.”
In reading these words, I am struck by the power of memory.
“Would you please put those rocks down, Ethan?” We were walking through Brookside Park along the brook, and Ethan could not help form searching through the leaves and muck of water and sand to find that perfect rock for his “collection.” His obsession is nonsensical to me for every rock he finds is worthless, except for the inexpressible value it apparently has to him in finding it. Bounding into the house up to his room, I’m dismayed to realize the pocket full of rocks that are being disgorged into containers and on shelves, adding to the “collection” of worthless bits of creation, knowing that I will be called upon to give an account of each rock’s inherent value and special character in the near future. My patience waivers …
Then this summer, Jen and the kids took off a few weeks before our vacation, heading back to Michigan with Jen’s mom, for some extra time with the family. I stayed behind to finish extra work and to enjoy the silence of solitude. After a few days, I tired of an empty house and started out for a nice relaxing walk in the park, thinking to myself, “At least I won’t be dragged down to the brook in search of stone trinkets.” It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, and a cool breeze freshened the air. As I walked along, the sun glinted on the ground with a shimmer that hurt my eyes. I bent down and noticed a perfectly shiny rock that was beautiful and I absentmindedly picked it up and put it in my pocket. Turning off the concrete path and down a gravel path carved by the hikes of many people before me, I was forced to look carefully as I walked, so as not to slip. As I looked I saw stone after stone, shining, dull, cut and smooth, and I smiled. Seeing them, really seeing them, for what felt like the first time, I understood that I was not seeing them with my own eyes but with Ethan’s eyes. He was not there, so I was seeing them for him, or maybe even through him. He was absent—or was he? He was present in me.
Barbara Brown Taylor, a wonderful preacher once wrote in a sermon, “What makes absence hurt, what makes it ache, is the memory of what used to be there but is no longer.”
What makes us despair with hopelessness more painful than any ache of absence is the possibility that no one will ever remember us.
In our text for today that follows the awful story of the flood, God says, “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you … I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth."
This is a far cry from God’s pronouncements of judgment at the beginning of our story. “The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.”
What has changed?
If you remember from last week, the creation has not changed. God’s heart is changed. God has made a decision about the grief and trouble of his own heart, and that decision shapes and forms the relationship that God has with all of creation, so God pronounces that renewed relationship in the form that is most familiar, a new covenant … “I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth."
The character of God’s relationship with creation changes:
From judgment to assurance
From destructive anger to promissory vow
From law-suit speech to salvation oracle
And the bow in the sky is to provoke the memory of both God and creation to the promise of this covenant, the shift from judgment to salvation that is so prominent in God’s own heart.
This is a surprising and irreversible turn. That is the substance of the gospel. The God who rules over us has turned toward us in a new way.
The key act of God in this surprising and irreversible turn of God is found in Genesis 8:1, “But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided.”
I wonder if the words I read to you at the very beginning of this sermon hold true for God as well in memory, “You think the dead we loved ever truly leave us? You think that we don’t recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble?” Could God remembering Noah and his creation on the ark be a way of drawing their life into the life of God? When God remembers us, we live in God.
Here is the heart of Jesus coming to live with us, coming to live as one of us. Sheer memory is not enough, for God desires to see the world through our eyes, and so he comes to live and see and experience the wonder of creation through Jesus Christ. But he gives so much more, for we receive Jesus too, and though he is absent, are we not called to see the world through his eyes, like a Father noticing stones for the first time through his son’s eyes. In looking through the eyes of Jesus, he is present in us. It is an act of remembering, certainly, but we also call it the work of the Spirit.
God remembering us, once changed the world, as it changed the heart of God. This week, as you work, and live, and rest, and play, remember Jesus, remember that God remembered you. And in so doing, He is present in you, and maybe just maybe, you are present in God. Now that is a covenant promise worth holding in memory, and that quite simply is the miracle of Jesus.
If you really want to know Jesus, know the Old Testament.
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