For in seven days I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights; and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground.”
And Noah did all that the LORD had commanded him.
NATURE’S CONDITION
We ask how the Nature created by a good God comes to be in this [depraved] condition? By which question we may mean either how she comes to be imperfect—to leave “room for improvement” as the schoolmasters say in their reports—or else, how she comes to be positively depraved. If we ask the question in the first sense, the Christian answer (I think) is that God, from the first, created her such as to reach her perfection by a process in time. He made an Earth at first “without form and void” and brought it by degrees to its perfection. In this, as elsewhere, we see the familiar pattern—descent from God to the formless Earth and reascent from the formless to the finished. In that sense a certain degree of “evolutionism” or “developmentalism” is inherent in Christianity. So much for Nature’s imperfection; her positive depravity calls for a very different explanation. According to the Christians this is all due to sin: the sin both of men and of powerful, non-human beings, supernatural but created. The unpopularity of this doctrine arises from the widespread Naturalism of our age—the belief that nothing but Nature exists and that if anything else did she is protected from it by a Maginot Line—and will disappear as this error is corrected. To be sure, the morbid inquisitiveness about such beings which led our ancestors to a pseudo-science of Demonology, is to be sternly discouraged: our attitude should be that of the sensible citizen in wartime who believes that there are enemy spies in our midst but disbelieves nearly every particular spy story. We must limit ourselves to the general statement that beings in a different, and higher “Nature” which is partially interlocked with ours have, like men, fallen and have tampered with things inside our frontier. The doctrine, besides proving itself fruitful of good in each man’s spiritual life, helps to protect us from shallowly optimistic or pessimistic views of Nature. To call her either “good” or “evil” is boys’ philosophy. We find ourselves in a world of transporting pleasures, ravishing beauties, and tantalising possibilities, but all constantly being destroyed, all coming to nothing. Nature has all the air of a good thing spoiled.
The sin, both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave them free will: thus surrendering a portion of His omnipotence (it is again a deathlike or descending movement) because He saw that from a world of free creatures, even though they fell, He could work out (and this is the reascent) a deeper happiness and a fuller splendour than any world of automata would admit.
—from Miracles
For reflection
Genesis 6:1–7
6 Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came on the earth.
And Noah with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives went into the ark to escape the waters of the flood.
Of clean animals, and of animals that are not clean, and of birds, and of everything that creeps on the ground,
two and two, male and female, went into the ark with Noah, as God had commanded Noah.
And after seven days the waters of the flood came on the earth.
11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.
The rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.
On the very same day Noah with his sons, Shem and Ham and Japheth, and Noah’s wife and the three wives of his sons entered the ark,
they and every wild animal of every kind, and all domestic animals of every kind, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, and every bird of every kind—every bird, every winged creature.
They went into the ark with Noah, two and two of all flesh in which there was the breath of life.
And those that entered, male and female of all flesh, went in as God had commanded him; and the LORD shut him in.
17 The flood continued forty days on the earth; and the waters increased, and bore up the ark, and it rose high above the earth.
The waters swelled and increased greatly on the earth; and the ark floated on the face of the waters.
The waters swelled so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered;
the waters swelled above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep.
And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, domestic animals, wild animals, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all human beings;
everything on dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died.
He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground, human beings and animals and creeping things and birds of the air; they were blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark.
And the waters swelled on the earth for one hundred fifty days.
8 But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided;
the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained,
and the waters gradually receded from the earth. At the end of one hundred fifty days the waters had abated;
and in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.
The waters continued to abate until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains appeared.
6 At the end of forty days Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made
and sent out the raven; and it went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth.
Then he sent out the dove from him, to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground;
but the dove found no place to set its foot, and it returned to him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. So he put out his hand and took it and brought it into the ark with him.
He waited another seven days, and again he sent out the dove from the ark;
and the dove came back to him in the evening, and there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf; so Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth.
Then he waited another seven days, and sent out the dove; and it did not return to him any more.
13 In the six hundred first year, in the first month, on the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from the earth; and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and saw that the face of the ground was drying.
In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dry.
Then God said to Noah,
“Go out of the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your sons’ wives with you.
Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh—birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth—so that they may abound on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.”
So Noah went out with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives.
And every animal, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves on the earth, went out of the ark by families.
20 Then Noah built an altar to the LORD, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.
And when the LORD smelled the pleasing odor, the LORD said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.
As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest, cold and heat,
