When the LORD saw how great was man's wickedness on earth,
and how no desire that his heart conceived
was ever anything but evil,
It didn't take long after the introduction of evil, after a few limited a specific incidents, that evil became the comprehensive way of life for almost everyone in that world. There was something about sin that did not allow it to remain isolated in those incidents. There was, we might infer, a certain leaven to it that allowed for worldly growth and success. And no doubt it felt like this was a competitive advantage which one ought not or perhaps indeed could not do without. What happened to those without it? They often wound up like Abel.
he regretted that he had made man on the earth,
and his heart was grieved.
God wanted his creatures to be like Abel, capable of offering the best of their firstlings or firstfruits to him. By putting him first in this way they could go a long way toward ameliorating the damage done by sin. But this seemed especially counterintuitive when success went to those who did just the opposite, who kept the best for themselves and ignored the God who made them. Sin had become so systemically entrenched in the world that God saw no choice but to act drastically to bring things back in line with his original intention. He would wipe out sin, and with it sinners who clung to it, and build back from the righteousness he found in Noah.
But Noah found favor with the LORD.
The flood may have slowed the advance of sin, my have averted the utter degradation of the world for a while, but even a drastic act like the flood remained only an external remedy. Even Noah and his familiar were not entirely exempt from the contaminating effects of sin, and it was not long after Noah demonstrated his fidelity to God strikingly by means of the ark that sin was reintroduced and began to take root in the world again.
Go into the ark, you and all your household,
for you alone in this age have I found to be truly just.
It wasn't so much that the flood strategy could not have worked as that, for it to have worked, Noah and have family would have had to have been entirely righteous, entirely free of the infection of sin which spreads so easily and freely. Thus, this early recreation of the world from the chaos of the waters was a prelude to a second recreation in which Jesus himself would be the new Noah. In his baptism and cross sin would be definitively drowned and destroyed while he himself became the ark that would preserve what was truly good in his followers unto salvation. We see a hint of this in the dove that descended upon Jesus after his baptism. Jesus himself was the new world, the new habitable ground, a place that was at last fit for life.
They concluded among themselves that
it was because they had no bread.
Sometimes we allow ourselves to be confused because we don't want to confront uncomfortable truths. We need to guard against the leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod, but we don't want to confront the fact that the same defects in their character and conscience are within us as well. We thus desire, like the disciples, to bring the conversation back to mere externals.
When he became aware of this he said to them,
"Why do you conclude that it is because you have no bread?
Do you not yet understand or comprehend?
Are your hearts hardened?
Jesus addressed the unwillingness of the disciples to engage his meaning not by a deeper explanation so much as an insistence on his own superabundant goodness. They did not need to compromise with sin, to leaven themselves as the Pharisees did, in order to succeed and grow, because Jesus would always be enough for them. And more, for there were and would always be baskets leftover, enough to feed the world.
The LORD is enthroned above the flood;
the LORD is enthroned as king forever.
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