This is the very first time that the word covenant is mentioned in Scripture, but what exactly does that mean and why is it important to understand before Noah builds the ark? And we’re also going to talk about hyperbole again.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
(Parents, all Scripture comes from the CSB this week, the Christian Standard Bible and we will be in Genesis 6) I am going to go ahead and read the rest of the chapter, starting in verse 11 and we will spend a few weeks talking about it. It isn’t easy to teach, and it isn’t easy to understand. It really isn’t much of a children’s bedtime story, that’s for sure. But remember from past weeks’ teachings—how the earth was ruined? Humans weren’t behaving like God’s image-bearers anymore and the Bible tells us that their thoughts were wicked and violent, everyone’s thoughts, all the time. What do you do when everyone is hurting each other? When even children aren’t safe because their parents are violent and so they grow up violent too with nothing to be done about it? And they didn’t have Bibles, or Jesus. Humans were ruined. The flood story tells us that they were destroying the earth and one another, all of them were. That’s a horrible thing to imagine. Can you imagine not knowing anyone who is kind and generous? Can you imagine living in a world where no one can be trusted and absolutely anyone you meet would be willing to hurt you? That’s the kind of world described in Genesis 6. A ruined creation. And remember that the Bible tells us that God was full of regrets, sadness, over what had happened and even over making humans in the first place. Not angry, but sad. God didn’t make us to be cruel to one another but to love one another. Jesus is the perfect example of what God wants for us and from us. Let’s read the rest of the chapter:
11 Now the earth was corrupt (ruined) in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with wickedness. 12 God saw how corrupt (ruined) the earth was, for every creature had corrupted (ruined) its way on the earth. 13 Then God said to Noah, “I have decided to put an end to every creature, for the earth is filled with wickedness because of them; therefore I am going to destroy them along with the earth. 14 “Make yourself an ark of gopher wood. Make rooms in the ark, and cover it with pitch inside and outside. 15 This is how you are to make it: The ark will be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high. 16 You are to make a roof, finishing the sides of the ark to within eighteen inches of the roof. You are to put a door in the side of the ark. Make it with lower, middle, and upper decks. 17 “Understand that I am bringing a flood—floodwaters on the earth to destroy every creature under heaven with the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. 18 But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark with your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives. 19 You are also to bring into the ark two of all the living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. 20 Two of everything—from the birds according to their kinds, from the livestock according to their kinds, and from the animals that crawl on the ground according to their kinds—will come to you so that you can keep them alive. 21 Take with you every kind of food that is eaten; gather it as food for you and for them.” 22 And Noah did this. He did everything that God had commanded him.
There is a lot here but this week we are going to talk about two things and skip over most of it. Next week we are going to talk about Noah’s obedience and the week after that we’re going to talk about all the critters and maybe Noah’s family too. I haven’t decided yet. But this week we are going to talk about hyperbole again so I hope you listened to episode 34 about how powerfully God uses hyperbole to teach us things that we otherwise might skip over and ignore. Hyperbole is just a fancy word for exaggeration and we talked about the huge difference between hyperbole and lying. Anyone who says, “I am so hungry I could eat a horse” isn’t guilty of lying because they never meant for anyone to take that part of it seriously. They just wanted people to understand that they are really, really hungry. Hyperbole is what we do when we want someone to take us seriously but we say something that isn’t really serious to do it! But everyone understands what we are saying so, in a way, it’s just like idioms, expressions that mean something that doesn’t sound anything at all like what is actually being said—like “you sure opened a can of worms when you said that” meaning that you just made a huge mess and people are probably arguing because of something you said. You didn’t really go buy a can of worms from the supermarket, get a can opener and crank it open. And the person who said that you opened a can of worms wasn’t lying either—we understand what it means and so we see that it is true even though the words are ridiculous. God loves to communicate with us through exaggeration, expressions, metaphors, similes, and puns. And we will talk about all of those in the future because they make the Bible fun and sometimes they show us God’s sense of humor, or his love of beautiful things but they are also a really effective way to warn us that there is trouble ahead when He wants us to take Him seriously.
When we see God saying this to Noah, “I have decided to put an end to every creature, for the earth is filled with wickedness because of them; therefore I am going to destroy them along with the earth.” Well, we know this really got Noah to listen carefully, because it would be a very shocking thing to hear and Noah would definitely pay attention after he heard that because everyone included him too! It isn’t any different than saying, “I am going to just get rid of everything.” Everyone pretty much knows that you don’t mean literally everything, but it is an expression, an exaggeration. It’s what we say before we explain what we actually mean, which God is about to do. I might say, “Ugh look at all this mess, I am going to get rid of everything,” when what I am really going to do is to get rid of everything that I don’t really need. Whenever anyone opens up with a statement like that, we start to pay attention because now we need more information. We are listening now because we have been told something that is hard or difficult to understand. If we were animals, you could say that our ears are up! God talks to us the same ways we talk to each another because that is all we are really able to understand.
But how do we know that this is what God is doing? Well, the earth was not actually destroyed in the flood. We are still living on the exact same planet, right? Also, the fish weren’t destroyed, so not every creature was killed in the flood either, and we know that word creature also includes fish because they are used together in Num 11:4 and 5. Really, it isn’t much different than going home to your loved ones after school, throwing your arms around someone and saying, “Everyone hates me.” I mean, if it was true then you wouldn’t be hugging anyone because they would hate you too but you say it because it feels as though it might as well be true. If you say that “everyone” is being mean to you, you are telling people that everything just seems awful right now and you feel very alone and sad and picked on. You aren’t lying—you are talking about how big the problem is. God does that in the Bible too when He wants us to see how big a problem is or talk about how terrible something is going to be. With the flood, saying that everything is going to be destroyed (even though it was just covered with water, which is bad enough), is a way of telling Noah that he needs to take this very seriously if he wants to survive. If we say, “Um, this is bogus because the fish lived” then we are missing the point. This is the equivalent of God telling Noah, “I am hungry enough to eat a horse.” Only, a lot more serious. Noah needs to listen or he and his family are going to be in big trouble.
What Noah is not going to do is come back afterward and say, “Um, the earth wasn’t really destroyed and the fish lived, so I don’t trust you anymore.” We all understand the power of exaggeration when we talk and we all understand that when we do it in certain ways, we aren’t lying. Now, some exaggeration is flat out lying. If I tell people that I am a world-famous best-selling author, I am totally lying. Do some people in other countries know me? Yeah. Have some of them read my books? Yeah. Does that make me world famous? Um, no. I would never want to be world famous, ugh, that would be my nightmare. What about a best-selling author? Yikes, no. I mean, maybe on the day a book is released, I might make the top of an obscure list on Amazon but that is not what people mean when they say best-selling author. That would be lying in order to make myself look really important but it wouldn’t be true. I sometimes sell about twenty books a month, sometimes. I am not famous. Or popular. Or the best teacher in the world. But sometimes I am hungry enough to eat a horse! Or maybe just a chicken.
17 “Understand that I am bringing a flood—floodwaters on the earth to destroy every creature under heaven with the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish.”
Aha! Now God is actually telling us in His own words that not every creature will be destroyed but only the ones who breathe air. See? He wasn’t lying, He was using hyperbole. God is a whole lot more interesting than we give Him credit for sometimes—I mean, He just has to be more interesting than we are, right? And that’s great because it means that we always have to be thinking about what He says and about what He doesn’t say. And one thing about God is that He knows what it takes to get us to listen to Him when He needs to tell us something important! He speaks our language, and not His own. I am betting that if God taught us a science lesson about all the stuff He knows, we wouldn’t understand a word of what He was saying—we wouldn’t even have words to describe all that He sees and understands and knows. Have you ever thought about how God really has to talk to us in terms of what we are capable of understanding and even accepting? If He described how to make a star, would you understand what He is talking about? I wouldn’t. I am a chemist and I had to take a lot of math and physics in college so I know a lot of stuff about science but I know I would be totally lost. Even Albert Einstein wouldn’t be able to keep up with God teaching a really accurate science lesson explaining how He actually created the sun, and cells and eyeballs and mice and flowers and all of that.
The Bible is all about God explaining as much of Himself as He can while still respecting the fact that we are pretty much clueless and we can’t handle it all, or even understand it all anyway. He actually had to send Jesus to show us who He is better than the words in the Bible could because we weren’t really getting it. You know, sometimes you just have to see things or to experience them or feel them, right? Are you like that? Could you learn to swim by reading a book and never even getting wet? What if you had never seen water? Could you imagine it if someone wrote a book telling you what it felt like to be wet? Maybe that would be a good project today—you could try to describe what getting wet feels like to someone who has never seen water, or cried, or even spit or sweated. Describe water to an alien from Mars! I think that’s kind of what it is like for God to describe things to us—except that He actually does as good a job as can possibly be done. He has no limitations on what He knows and understands but we sure do! But He is compassionate so He tells us as much as He can in ways that we will best understand it—and when something terrible is about to happen, the best way to tell us about it is by shocking us with exaggeration. So, when God first told the story to Noah, He said everything except the heavens was going to be destroyed, and then when He had Noah’s attention, He made himself clearer. It would certainly seem to Noah like everything was destroyed, but a whole lot would still be there for him when the rains finally stopped.
Are you like that too? As a mom, sometimes I couldn’t get my kids ready for this or that until I exaggerated and said, “Okay, I am heading out the door and leaving without you!” and they would panic and scramble to get ready and make it just in time for when we actually had to leave but if I didn’t do that, we’d be late. Guess what? We’re God’s kids and we drag our feet and don’t do what we need to do until the last minute unless He does something to get our attention. In ancient Israel, that was the job of the prophets. They were the ones yelling, “Okay, I am heading out the door right now and if I get to the car without you, you’re going to be in big trouble!” Humans are just strange like that and God knows it. He knows that sometimes we have to be shocked into doing what needs to be done. Noah needed to build a boat and God didn’t have time to mess around. It needed to get done and Noah had to take things seriously. Because God loves us, He does whatever it takes to get us to take His warnings seriously. Not to hurt us. Not to control us or to get us to do bad things. But because He wants us to do what is good. He won’t lie to us, but He will shock us when we need it. Just like parents and grandparents and the people who love you have to do sometimes to get you to take serious stuff seriously.
If God had said, “Okay, well, you know, one of these days I am going to send a lot of water and everything and everyone will like be underwater,” and Noah would probably just shrug and say, “Whatever. Sounds like it is a very long way off and I have other stuff to do.” We like to fritter around and goof off and procrastinate and assume nothing bad will ever happen to us. The prophets would yell, “Dudes, you are gonna get nuked if you don’t get your act together!” But because God is so merciful nothing would happen for a long time and people would just say, “Yeah, whatever,” and go on with life as usual.
Now, as you grow up you will notice that people will often lie when they want to get you to take them seriously because they don’t want to be treated the way we treat God when He is trying to warn us about stuff. They will also exaggerate, but in ways that are actually lies, and not just expressions that we all understand. They might tell you something that isn’t even remotely true, or might have a tiny bit of truth in it, because they want you to do something or not do something, or believe something or not believe something. But God? He doesn’t do that. If God doesn’t want you out in a violent rainstorm because of thunder and lightning and flash flooding, He might say something like, “It’s raining cats and dogs out there—stay inside and you won’t get hurt!” He isn’t going to say, “It’s raining sulfuric acid from the sky.” That would just be a total lie. It’s very important to learn to tell the difference.
A few weeks ago we talked about the Creation Covenant where God created the earth and everything in it so that His creations would be taken care of. Creating such an excellent planet and all the plants and animals was God’s way of promising to care for us. But the first time in the Bible that we see the actual word covenant is in Chapter 6, verse 18:
18 But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark with your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives.
This is a very important moment in the Bible and we will talk about it more next week. I want you to notice that the verse begins with the word “but” and I want you to learn to be on the lookout for words like and, but, therefore, if, then, so, before and after and a whole bunch of others. That word “but” means that something is about to change. Yes, there will be a terrible flood, BUT I am making a forever promise to you, a covenant that will never be broken. What is going to happen to the violent people will not happen to you. I will protect you and keep you and guard you from what is going to happen to fix what is ruined. But you need to take me seriously and trust me and trust the promise I am making to you to protect you. And not just you but your whole family! Your wife and your three sons and their wives. And God is saying that He will do all this, but I want you to notice that God isn’t just making promises to magically protect Noah and his family. God is making promises but He is also telling Noah what he has to do. You see, there are different kinds of Covenants in the Bible—in some of them, like the Creation Covenant, God does everything no matter what. He makes a promise, and He keeps it forever. Other covenants are more complicated. With some covenants, God makes promises to do certain things and humans have to also promise to do certain things. When we get to Moses, we will see that kind of covenant.
But right now, nothing is going to happen unless Noah does what God tells him to do. God is telling him to build something unbelievably big and to just take His word for it that all this water is coming. You know what? Noah could say no! If Noah says no, then there will be no covenant in the future and God is going to have to choose someone else entirely. Noah had a choice. He wasn’t a puppet. God is telling Noah about this huge disaster that is on the way and telling him to build something and to store food and all that stuff and I would bet Noah had more questions than answers, right? I sure would. But, in the ancient world, they weren’t entirely like us today. They took their gods and goddesses a whole lot more seriously than we do today. Now, that doesn’t mean that they always obeyed because otherwise there wouldn’t be any legends out there about all the things that humans did to make their gods angry, right? And the Bible would be shorter because Adam and Eve would still be gardeners! “In the beginning, God created everything and put two humans in His garden and told them what not to eat and they didn’t and they lived happily ever after. The end.” Most boring story ever told. So, what’s Noah going to do and why is it so important? We’ll talk about that next week.
God told Noah that He would make a covenant with him and that his whole family would be saved. That’s a story we are going to see all through the Bible. Do you remember the word metanarrative? That long word that means the big stories that all join together to make one story. The metanarrative of the Bible is the story of salvation. Sometimes we see small salvations and others are huge. When Adam and Eve were given animal skin clothes by God, and when Cain was given the mark to protect him from people who would want to kill him, those are smaller stories of salvation. When Noah and his family were saved from the flood, that’s a big salvation because his descendants are still alive today because of it, right? You and me! Jacob and his family were saved from the famine by going to Egypt where Joseph had prepared for them, that was a huge salvation. When Moses, Aaron and Miriam led the children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt, that was another huge salvation. And God made many more miracles, each time saving His chosen people so that a very special baby could be born who would grow up to save the whole world.
When God saved Adam and Eve, that meant that Noah could be born and when Noah and his family were saved, that meant that one day Abraham would be born. And God would make a covenant with Abraham, and He would keep it with Abraham’s son Isaac and his grandson Jacob and all of Jacob’s children. Then God made an extra covenant with Aaron and from him came all the priests who served in the Temple—including John the Baptist. And much later, God made a very special covenant with David and many, many generations after David, came Jesus. The whole Bible points toward Him, and to what He did in His life and how He died and how He rose from the dead and how He saved us from our sins. But, we can’t get there without Adam and Eve and without Noah and without Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Judah and David and Mary and Joseph too. And the reason all of those people lived was because of God’s covenant and because He never goes back on His promises.
God makes covenants because He has plans. The covenant He makes with Noah after the flood is very important but He will also make a covenant with the earth and everything in it. It’s very important that we learn about His covenants so that we can understand how much He cares for us and what He expects from us in terms of how He wants us to treat each other, and so that we can trust Him. And, through Jesus, we become a part of God’s covenant promises too. When we say yes to Jesus, when we give Him our allegiance as God’s chosen Messiah and King—and when God raised Him from the dead He proved that Jesus was His Messiah, right? –when we give Jesus our loyalty we become a part of God’s covenant promises and He begins to change us into Kingdom people. Just like He did with Noah even though everyone around him was wicked and violent.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I hope you have a wonderful week studying the Bible with the people who love you.