Kaspar Memberger the Elder
Fox Byte #6 ended with this question: why are we still here? If God said He would destroy all of humanity because we couldn’t be reformed, why didn’t He? Actually, God did destroy all of humanity. That’s what Noah’s flood was all about. But if we stop with God destroying everyone and everything, we only get half the story. And this is where we hit a brick wall: according to the rules God set up for His creation, He has no choice but to eliminate every form of rebellion (which is what we usually call “sin” or “wickedness”). However, if He does that, then Satan, the ultimate rebel, wins. It was Satan’s idea to bring sin into the world, thinking that if the world was corrupted God would abandon it. But God can’t let Satan have control of the earth because then He would allow rebellion to continue and grow. Satan already took one third of all the angels with him when he rebelled (see Revelation 12:3-9), so if he wins the earth there’s no telling where his rebellion will end! Given this dilemma, the only way God can win is to bring us human rebels back over to His side. And that’s where we get the other half of the story. The Bible says: “But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.” (Genesis 6:8). Grace is favor or kindness God gives even though we don’t deserve it. It’s more than just mercy, forgiveness, or suspension of punishment. Grace is the action of God that makes everything come out OK in spite of the odds. He had every right to take every single life on earth, including Noah and his family. But God extended mercy to Noah, and through Noah to the entire human race. That’s why He gave Noah a plan to build a big ship and save enough people and animals to repopulate the earth after the flood. Whether you want to believe the account of the flood is not important right now. The important thing is that God’s Grace still works for us today. Every one of us remains under sentence of death because of the rebellion in our DNA. God has no choice but to carry out that sentence unless we take hold of the Grace He offers. And now we get to the biggest question yet: How do we grab that Grace?
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