Seven reasons God is the most important person in the flood account

Over the last four Genesis posts, we have observed Genesis 6–8. Think about what you learn from Genesis 6–8 and ask yourself who you would choose as the most prominent and influential person in these chapters: God or Noah. Why would you choose that person? For me, I would choose God. He is the most prominent person there is. There can be no one greater. That should be the obvious choice, though. So rather than take an easy out on this question, let’s dig into why God is the most crucial person in Genesis 6–8.

1. Without God, there would be no people. He is the creator. Anything that would follow of significance must begin with him. Without him, nothing would be significant. Without him, nothing would be, period. Another reason his role as creator is essential here is that since he made us, he is the only one with the right to determine the parameters by which our lives can end. If his heart becomes deeply troubled to the point that he regrets making people, he has the right to terminate those lives due to their evil wickedness (Genesis 6:5–8).
2. Because God is the eternally self-existent creator, standards of righteousness are also eternal. We cannot go back to when God decided what sin is, just like we cannot go back to a time when God did not exist. Both are equally eternal. As the creator, he has the right to call balls and strikes when determining what is righteous, what is wicked, and act accordingly in response.
3. As the creator, God also has the right to show mercy when he chooses. Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD. He was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God (Genesis 6:9). Noah’s blamelessness among the people of his time doesn’t mean he was perfect. Because he was imperfect, God had every right to destroy Noah and his family, along with everyone else. Noah didn’t earn favor in the eyes of the LORD. He found it. Just like today, under the new covenant, we don’t earn salvation and eternal life. We find it by grace through faith. This is not from ourselves. It is the gift of God, not by works so that no one can boast (Ephesians 2:8–9).
4. As the giver of mercy, he was the only one who could tell Noah what was ahead. Noah was living in a world that had never experienced rain before. The LORD God had not sent rain on the earth, but streams came up from subterranean chambers and watered the whole surface of the ground (Genesis 2:6). As such, Noah could not have predicted what was ahead. God had to reveal it to him. Therefore, not only would there have been no judgment without God, there would have been no way for Noah and his family to escape the flood.
5. Without God’s intervention, there would have been no righteous judgment that brought an end to human wickedness at that time. The earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence (Genesis 6:11). Not only were his actions right, but without them, the human race would have destroyed itself anyway. It just would have taken longer and been more painful in the end, a testimony to people’s wickedness rather than God’s holiness. That is similar to what Jesus prophesied about the end times. Jesus said it would be in the days of his return as it was in the days of Noah. Before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying, and giving in marriage until Noah entered the ark. They knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. It was the same in the days of Lot as we will study later. People were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting, and building. But the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from Heaven and destroyed them all. That is how it will be when Jesus returns (Matthew 24:37–39; Luke 17:28–29). Jesus said if he did not cut the days of the future Tribulation short, no one would survive. But for the sake of the elect, he will shorten those days (Matthew 24:22). Without God’s judgment, the world will destroy itself just as it would have eventually had the flood not occurred. In this way, God’s judgment and his mercy act in harmony with one another.
6. Without God telling Noah how to build the Ark, he would have had no idea about the size needed to hold all the animals, his family, and all of their provisions they would need for their time on the Ark. God gave the exact dimensions so that everything could fit. At approximately 510 feet long, it would take nearly one and a half football fields to equal the Ark’s length. That’s big enough that NASA could lay three space shuttles — nose to tail — on the Ark’s roof! The roof of Noah’s Ark was more than 50 feet from the ground — higher than a modern four-story house. That’s plenty of space for three extra-tall inner decks, as the Bible describes. The Ark had the same storage capacity as about 450 standard semi-trailers. A standard livestock trailer holds about 250 sheep so that the Ark could keep at least 120,000 sheep. Few wooden ships have ever come close to Noah’s Ark's size. One possible challenger is the Chinese treasure ships of Zheng He in the 1400s. An older contender is the ancient Greek trireme Tessaronteres. The Ark is near the maximum size known to be possible for a wooden vessel (How big was Noah’s Ark?).
7. The LORD shut everyone in the Ark when Noah did all that God commanded him (Genesis 7:16). Had he not done that, Noah could have felt sympathy for the perishing wicked people who could have been scratching and pounding on the outside trying to get in. Then the entire purpose of the flood would have been thwarted. So without God to shut the Ark, maybe it would not have stayed closed.

We will observe more about these chapters next time. But for right now, I think we must take time for reflection on God’s characteristics that he reveals in this chapter. In the church’s attempts to become culturally relevant and seeker-friendly, I am concerned that we have lost the fear of the LORD that he commands us to have throughout the Bible. For example, there is a misconception out there that God is all-loving. The Bible doesn’t say that. It says God is love (1 John 4:8, 16). That’s not the same thing because God is not a slave to love. He is also just, holy, and righteous. When people say God is all-loving, they imply that he is so loving that he wouldn’t judge people. God IS love, and because he is, he must punish all sin not covered in the blood of Jesus by grace through faith (The School of Biblical Evangelism). “But God knows my heart.” Yeah, that’s the problem. He does know your heart. According to Jesus, no one sins despite having a clean heart. On the contrary, our sins are evidence of our hearts. The things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, which defiles them. For out of the heart come evil thoughts — murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander (Matthew 15:18–19). The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure (Jeremiah 17:9). That is why everyone needs Jesus to transform our hearts and make us new creations (2 Corinthians 5:17).