God Wiped Out Humanity. What Do We Do With That?
- Grove Church
- Jun 18
- 5 min read
Nobody puts the flood on a coffee mug. Well — actually, people do. But usually it's the rainbow, maybe a cartoon ark with a giraffe poking its head out the top. What tends to get left off is the part where God looks at the earth, sees a world saturated with violence and corruption, and decides to wipe it out.
That's the story we're looking at this week in our Foundations series. And if your honest reaction is that's disturbing — good. That's probably the right starting point.
The Question We're Actually Asking
The easy version of the Noah story is a children's book. Animals, a big boat, a rainbow at the end. The harder version is what Mark put in front of us this week: a holy God, watching a world of his own making fill up with wickedness, deciding he's seen enough.
The question most people bring to this story is how could a good God do this?
But Mark suggested flipping it. The better question might be: how could a good God not?
If God is genuinely good — not just nice, but actually holy and just — then the idea of him watching endless violence, corruption, and evil and just letting it run indefinitely becomes its own problem. We've all felt that instinct. You see something happen to someone you love and you want justice. You see a story in the news and you think, someone needs to answer for this. The desire for a world where wrongs don't just float on unchecked isn't a dark impulse. It's a reflection of something real about how things should work.
A God who sees evil and does nothing isn't actually good. He's just indifferent.
What the Text Actually Says
Genesis 6 is worth reading slowly, because the emotional texture of it is easy to miss.
God sees the wickedness of humanity — and the text says he's grieved. Not detached. Not coldly calculating. Grieved. The word carries weight. This is a God whose heart is moved by what he sees happening in his creation.
Then he acts.
Mark made an observation that landed: darkness and light don't coexist. You can't just keep layering good things on top of corruption and call it fine. At some point the rot has to be removed. He drew this from his own life — watching his house come down to the foundation after a fire earlier this year. There's a point where you don't rebuild on top of the damage. You clear it. What comes after requires what came before to go.
That's not a comfortable image. It's not supposed to be. But it's honest about what the story is actually saying.
But Noah
Here's where the story pivots, and it pivots on one of the smallest words in the English language.
But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.
The text has just described a world in catastrophic moral freefall. And then: but. Mark pointed out that the contrast words in scripture — but, yet, however — are worth pausing on every time. They almost always signal that something is about to interrupt the trajectory. And here, what interrupts the trajectory of judgment is a man walking with God.
Not a perfect man. Noah, as the story eventually makes clear, has his own spectacular failures. But a man who is leaning into relationship with God, who is paying attention, who is taking God seriously.
And God sees him. That's not incidental. The same eyes that see the violence and corruption see Noah walking faithfully. And God moves toward him.
There's a verse in 2 Chronicles that Mark keeps coming back to: "The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to give strong support to those whose heart is blameless toward him." God is actively looking — not just for what's broken, but for the faithful. Not to reward performance, but to meet the person who is genuinely moving toward him.
Faith That Builds Something
God gives Noah a task that, from the outside, must have looked completely unhinged. Build a massive barge. Inland. Before a single drop of rain.
And Noah did it.
Hebrews 11 reflects back on this and calls it faith — "being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear, he constructed an ark." There's something important in that framing. Noah didn't just believe in some abstract sense. He believed enough to act on it, publicly and at enormous cost, for a long time.
Mark put it plainly: there's a difference between saying you believe something and building an ark. True faith doesn't stay theoretical. It eventually picks up a hammer.
That's not a works-based argument — it's a depth-of-belief argument. If you actually believe something, it changes what you do. Noah is held up in Hebrews as an example of exactly this.
The Covenant at the End
After the water recedes, after Noah and his family step off the ark onto dry ground, God does something. He makes a covenant. And he uses the word six times in just a few verses, which is the Bible's way of really meaning it.
He promises never to flood the earth again. He sets a rainbow in the sky as the sign of that promise. And what's worth noting is the kind of commitment this is — not a business transaction, not a conditional agreement, but a covenant. A permanent, relational bond. This is who I am. This is what I'm committing to. The sign is there so you don't forget.
We'll keep coming back to this word — covenant — throughout this series, because it turns out God makes a lot of them. And he keeps them. The rainbow isn't just a nice ending to a hard story. It's the first glimpse of a God who binds himself to his people and doesn't let go.
What It Means Right Now
Mark didn't let the sermon stay at a comfortable historical distance, and it would be a mistake to do that here either.
If God's heart was grieved by the wickedness he saw then, the question worth sitting with is what he sees now. What he sees in the world. What he sees in your life and mine when we think nobody's watching.
The flood isn't primarily a story about other people's judgment. It's a story about a holy God who takes evil seriously, who doesn't look away, and who is still — right now — looking for the person who is genuinely walking with him. Still looking to show strong support to those whose hearts are moving toward him.
Still making and keeping covenants with the people he finds faithful.
This is the second post in our Foundations series. You can listen to the full sermon at thegrovechurch.org.
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