Against The Current

This sermon was preached at Sherwood Community Friends Church on Sunday, March 8. You can watch the video in full by clicking below.

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Where We've Been

We’re in the middle of a series called GENESIS: The Preface, taking us through the first 11 chapters of the Bible as the prologue for God’s seamless story. Without understanding these eleven chapters, nothing that follows in Scripture makes the same kind of sense.

Here is the arc of what we have covered so far.

In Genesis chapter 1, God ordered the cosmos as a sacred space where heaven and earth overlapped and placed humanity at the center of it as his image bearers to function as his royal representatives to the rest of the world. He called humans to co-rule, to cultivate, to reflect the Creator in everything they did.

In Genesis chapter 2, we saw the garden as divine space, and humanity as priests within it, called into the deepest relational intimacy with God and with one another.

In Genesis chapter 3, the relational fracture arrived as suspicion of God crept in. Trust was traded. Autonomy was chosen. And the consequence was not just removal from a garden but exile from the presence of the One they were made to walk with side by side.

In Genesis chapter 4, the fracture moved from vertical to horizontal. What began as broken trust between humanity and God became broken trust between human beings. Cain and Abel. Comparison. Wounded pride. Murder. The first death in all of Scripture was violence between brothers born of envy. Generations of human depravity sinking deeper, although the corruption didn't arrive in one catastrophic moment. It settled in slowly, the way darkness fills a room when the light goes out.

Two trajectories emerged by the end of chapter 4.
Cain's line: building civilization, advancing the arts, accumulating strength — all apart from God.

Seth's line: quieter, less celebrated, but marked by one defining phrase neatly tucked at the close of chapter 4. "At that time people began to call on the name of the Lord." That single line tells us that even inside the wreckage, some were still reaching toward God. The story was not over. Not even close.

That brings us up to speed for where we’re headed today.

The Center of the Story

Before we get to the flood in chapter 6, we have to make a quick stop inside Genesis 5.

We’re not going to read all of it because it’s, I know, a genealogy. Lists of names and numbers. This is usually where people skim ahead. But I need you to stay with me here, because there is something hidden in the middle of this chapter that is the most important sentence in the entire preface of Genesis. As a reminder, the preface is chapters 1 through 11. In fact, this sentence may be one of the most important sentences in all of Torah.

Genesis 5 is the genealogy of Adam and Eve’s third son Seth's line from Adam to Noah. And it has a rhythm. You feel it as you read it. This guy lived this many years. He had sons and daughters. He lived this many more years. And he died. Then another guy in his family line died. And other guys died. This was the drumbeat of Genesis 3 playing out across centuries. Every name on the tombstone in this list is a reminder that the consequence of death, made by human agency, spoken over all humanity in the garden was real, and it was relentless.

In this genealogical list we see a focus on the seventh generation. This “seventh generation” detail is significant literarily. In Genesis, the number seven often signals completion or culmination. In chapter 4 we see Cain’s line with the seventh generation climaxing not in redemption but in escalation. Lamech’s violent boast (Genesis 4:23–24), exposing the deep derogation of the human heart, intensifies Cain’s pattern rather than healing it.

It’s a stark contrast when we see Enoch in Seth’s line mentioned in Genesis 5 as the seventh from Adam. The text says he “walked with God.” (v24)

Two seventh generations.
Two totally different trajectories.
One deep theological point about where sin leads if left unchecked.

Let’s look back at Enoch real quick. Seventh from Adam in his son Seth's line. The text says something different about him. Just a few words that break the pattern entirely.

Genesis 5:24 CSB "Enoch walked with God, and he was not there because God took him."

He walked with God. And then he was simply, gone. Not buried. Not mourned. Taken. In a chapter full of generational death, here is one man whose story ends differently because of how he lived. Enoch walked with God.

That phrase will matter later. Remember it.

The chapter continues, and we arrive at significant chiasmic verses 28 and 29.

Genesis 5:28–29 CSB "Lamech (different guy from chapter 4) was 182 years old when he fathered a son. And he named him Noah, saying, 'This one will bring us relief from the agonizing labor of our hands, caused by the ground the Lord has cursed.'"

This is the center of the Genesis preface. Scholars who study the literary structure of Genesis chapters 1–11 have identified these two verses as the chiastic heart of the entire eleven-chapter unit.

In ancient literature, writers used a structure called a chiasm where ideas are arranged in a particular sequence and then after the center reflected back in reverse order, creating a kind of mirror pattern. It was a memory device and a literary spotlight, designed to pull your attention toward whatever sits at the center.

Everything in chapters 1–11 mirrors around this point in chapter 5 verses 28 & 29, especially verse 29. And at the center of the center is a name: Noah.

Noah means comfort; rest. His own father speaks a word of longing over him before Noah has done a single thing worth noting. Lamech is not prophesying from strength. He is crying out from exhaustion. The world is hard. The ground is cursed. The labor is grinding. And into that reality a father holds his newborn son in his arms and says, "This one… This one will bring us relief."

Check this out… The Hebrew word translated "relief" carries in it the concept of rest. It’s the same family of language tied to Sabbath, to nuakh: to rest, settle, repose, give rest, leave, place or set down and let alone. It’s the idea of God's presence settling into a place and bringing peace.

Lamech is not just naming his son. He is naming a longing that has been building since Eden. And when a father in Genesis 5 names his son "rest" and says he will bring relief from toil, the author is doing something intentional. He is pointing. Rest is what was lost when humanity walked away from God's presence. Rest is what the whole story is reaching toward. It's what God started as he brought an end to ordering creation when he initiated rest on the seventh day. It’s what was the main focus for the Israelites far later in the story when God brought them out of Egypt to enter the wilderness and worship him by resting. The heart of God’s seventh day was betrayed in the garden and that’s the greatest curse of all.

At the center of the preface is Sabbath. And at the center of Sabbath is God.

This is not a side note. This is the point of the entire story.

The whole world aches for rest. It has since the garden. And God's answer, slowly, patiently, across generations, has always been: I am working toward that. I have not abandoned you. I have someone coming… and he will give you rest. Amen! Amen.

Let's just pause here and let this simmer a bit.

The World in Genesis 6

So Noah is born into a world saturated in everything Genesis 3 and 4 warned us about. And by the time we reach Genesis 6, the narrative does not soften what it’s showing us.

Genesis 6:5 CSB "When the Lord saw that human wickedness was widespread on the earth and that every inclination of the human mind was nothing but evil all the time..."

This is not hyperbole for dramatic effect. The author is using the language of totality because the condition was total. The fracture had spread. Not a few bad actors here and there sprinkled into humanity. This was something systemic. Something deep.

And to understand how it got this bad, we have to talk about something most of us in the Western church are not very familiar with — something the original audience of Genesis would have understood immediately.

The Sons of God and the Nephilim

Genesis 6:1–4 CSB "When mankind began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of mankind were beautiful, and they took any they chose as wives for themselves. And the Lord said, 'My Spirit will not remain with mankind forever, because they are corrupt. Their days will be 120 years.' (He sets that boundary of 120 years because when you read in the genealogy of chapter 5, people are living to several hundred years, almost 1000.) The Nephilim were on the earth both in those days and afterward, when the sons of God came to the daughters of mankind, who bore children to them. These were the powerful men of old, the famous men.'"

I want to be straightforward with you here, because if you grew up in a traditional church environment, you may have heard this explained as the godly line of Seth intermarrying with the ungodly line of Cain. That is one interpretation that has been held across church history. But I think there is a more ancient, more textually grounded reading that takes this passage at face value and it is the reading that the Biblical writers themselves appear to have assumed.

Dr. Michael Heiser, a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, ancient languages, and ancient Near Eastern cultures, argued extensively in his work that, "In the Old Testament, the phrase 'sons of God' refers to divine beings who were part of Yahweh's heavenly host [supernatural beings, not human beings]. This is the most natural reading in its ancient Near Eastern context, and it is confirmed by the Dead Sea Scrolls " (Heiser, The Unseen Realm, 2015)

Heiser was also pointed about what happens when we domesticate this passage. His conviction was that modern Christians have flattened the Bible's supernatural worldview to the point where passages like Genesis 6 become uncomfortable and so we reach for safer explanations. He called this "interpretive retreat." He argued that the angelic reading of "sons of God" was not a fringe position — it was in fact the oldest Jewish and early Christian consensus, reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in 1 Enoch, in the writings of the early church fathers, and confirmed by the New Testament itself. Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4 both reference beings who abandoned their proper domain and were kept in chains awaiting judgment — and both authors appear to be reading Genesis 6 as describing exactly that. As Heiser put it, his signature conviction was this: "If it's weird, it's important." The passages we are most tempted to skip over are often the ones Scripture most wants us to sit with.

The Dead Sea Scrolls and the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament (what Jesus would have read) both use this exact language, and Heiser was convinced this was not an accident. It was the most natural, most ancient reading of the text.

This matters enormously for understanding Genesis 6. What the text is describing is a rebellion not just among humans, but in the heavenly realm. Supernatural beings from God's own council crossed a boundary they were never meant to cross. They took human women. And the unholy offspring of that union — the Nephilim — were something that had never existed before. Powerful. Famous. Giant men of renown. And part of the reason the world had become as corrupt as it had.

I know this is challenging for our Western mind, softened by the Puritan filter into the church, but stay with me.

The ancient Israelite reader would not have found this strange at all. This is reflected by the New Testament writers in Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4 who both reference beings who abandoned their proper domain and were kept in chains awaiting judgment — and both authors appear to be reading Genesis 6 as describing exactly that.

The whole cultural river of the ancient Near East was full of stories about divine beings intermingling with humanity, producing hybrid offspring, and bringing chaos in their wake. What Genesis does differently is frame it theologically to communicate a singular message: this was not meant to be. This was disorder multiplied. Not just horizontal fracture between humans, but a vertical fracture now running through the heavenly realm as well. The corruption had gone cosmic.

Part of God's divine council, intended to help steward order in his creation, had defected. And the result, combined with generations of human autonomy compounding upon itself, was a world in which every inclination of the human mind was nothing but evil all the time. The corruption was not just skin deep. It was structural, earthly, and spiritual all at once.

And in the middle of all of it, God's Spirit was still present. Just barely— not because of God, but because of us. Verse 3 tells us that God said his Spirit would not remain with humanity forever because of their corruption. He was still there. He had not yet left. But the weight of what humanity had become was grieving the very heart of God.

The Grief of God

This is the part of Genesis chapter 6 I want us to sit with. Because we tend to rush past it on the way to the flood.

Genesis 6:6–7 CSB "The Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and he was deeply grieved. Then the Lord said, 'I will wipe mankind, whom I created, off the face of the earth, together with the animals, the creatures that crawl, and the birds of the sky — for I regret that I made them.'"

The Hebrew word for ‘regret’ is nhm [nee hahm]. It is translated in most English Bibles as "regret," however, that word carries baggage in English that the original did not intend. Our modern Western understanding of regret is thin. We regret missing a meeting. We regret a purchase we shouldn't have made. But nhm in the ancient Hebrew mind carried something far heavier. It means to be moved with deep sorrow. To feel the full weight of a broken relationship. It is the grief of a parent watching a child they love walk into destruction. It is not fickleness. It is not God changing his mind as though he miscalculated. It is God suffering the pain of love refused and betrayed.

God created humanity for relationship with himself and one another. He placed them in his presence. He walked with them. He breathed his own life into them. And now the world he had called very good (tov meod) was so saturated in corruption that it was unrecognizable. And God was not angry in the cold, detached sense. He was grieved. Heartbroken. Moved to his core.

I think we often present God's response to human sin as primarily legal action. And that’s our Western minds at work yet again.

God’s function as a Judge in his judgement is not so much about punishment, even though that may come depending on the situation but it is secondary to his primary purpose. God is about order and restoration. Everything he is doing is restoring order to make right what was wrong. God’s justice is not retributive in nature or practice. His justice is restorative. He brings order back to that which has gone into disorder.

Which is what we are seeing in this passage leading up to and including the flood narrative.

This reads more like a Father who has watched his family tear itself apart. Deep, sorrowful grief.

And then, right in the middle of that grief, one sentence turns everything.

Genesis 6:8 CSB "Noah, however, found favor with the Lord."

That medium-sized word "however" is doing enormous work. The whole world is going one direction and then there’s Noah walking the other way.

One Man Against the Current

What made Noah different is stated plainly one verse later.

Genesis 6:9 CSB "Noah was a righteous man, blameless among his contemporaries; Noah walked with God."

There it is again. Remember— It’s the same phrase used for Enoch in chapter 5. He walked with God.

Enoch was Noah's great grandfather and I'm sure Noah heard stories over and over again about how Grandpa Enoch walked with God and then God took him. What a great example he had growing up for how to live righteously.

In a world where everyone else had stopped, Noah kept walking with God. He wasn’t perfect, but the text says righteous and blameless — which in the Hebrew speaks to wholeness of devotion, not flawless behavior. Noah was a man whose life was oriented toward God. His feet were moving in the direction of the One everyone around him had turned away from.

Feel the weight of this. Noah did not walk with God in ideal conditions. He walked with God in the middle of the most corrupt generation the world had yet produced. He walked with God when the spiritual atmosphere was darker than it had ever been, when even the heavenly realm had been destabilized by rebellion. You think the evil and corruption and situation in the world today is bad, it was far worse back then. I know that's hard to imagine, but it's the truth.

And Noah walked with God when there was no applause for it, no community affirming it, no cultural current carrying him in that direction.

He walked against the current.

And God saw it. God found him. And that one man changed the trajectory of the entire human story.

Now let's talk briefly about the flood, and I do mean briefly because next week we'll jump in more deeply, but there is something important about how we read this passage we need to consider today.

A Word Before We Talk About the Flood

If you have been in church for any length of time, you likely grew up with the flood presented as a straightforward historical account of water covering every inch of the globe, every mountain submerged, every human and animal except those on the ark drowned. That is a sincere and valid reading of the Biblical text held by many faithful Christians, and I want to honor that.

But I want to introduce you to another reading of this text that is equally faithful to Scripture, deeply rooted in scholarship, and has been held by serious Biblical theologians for a long time.

At our church, we want to be a place where we major on the majors and minor on the minors. The scope of the flood is a secondary interpretive consideration. What is not secondary is what the flood means. And that is where I want us to put our minds and our energy.

Here is what the scholarship tells us. Flood narratives were not unique to the cultures of that day. Massive flood stories were common throughout the ancient Near East. The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic contains a flood story with remarkable similarities to Genesis. The Israelite audience would have known this. They had heard flood stories their whole lives. What made Genesis different was not the existence of a flood story, but what it said about who God was and what he was doing. The author was not writing a scientific geology report or a competing myth. He was making a theological argument which communicated a specific theological message.

The language written about in the second half of chapter 6 mentioning "all the earth" and "every living thing" was a form of ancient rhetoric, similar to the way we might say "the whole town showed up" without meaning every single person.

The prophet Zephaniah (chapter 1) uses the same sweeping language about God's judgment over the land of Judah that is clearly not describing a global geological event. The Biblical authors regularly used universalistic language to communicate totality of impact and significance, not literal geographic scope.

Dr. John Walton, one of the foremost scholars of ancient Near Eastern literature and the Old Testament, has argued carefully that we must read Genesis in its ancient context. The author was using the literary conventions of his time and culture to communicate theological truth about God's character, human responsibility, and divine order. To force it into a modern scientific framework is to ask it questions it was never written to answer.

I'm not disputing the flood occurred in any way, but simply drawing attention to it in the way the Biblical author originally intended.

Some of you may hold a different view. That is okay. This is not a salvation issue. What we can all agree on is what the text itself makes unmistakably clear:

The world had broken itself.
God, in his grief and his justice, decided to press reset.
And he chose one man who was still walking with him to be the vessel through which the story would continue.

The Flood as De-Creation and Re-Creation

When we read the flood narrative closely, something remarkable emerges. The literary structure mirrors Genesis chapter 1 almost exactly, but in reverse. Remember how we started today by talking about the chiasm. Before Genesis chapter 5 verses 28 and 29 there was a certain order. After those verses, it is in reverse order to mirror what proceeded.

In Genesis 1, God pushed back the chaos waters and brought order, dry land, and life. In Genesis 7, the waters return.

Genesis 7:11-13 CSB "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 sources of the vast watery depths burst open, the floodgates of the sky were opened, and the rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights. On that same day Noah and his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, entered the ark, along with Noah’s wife and his three sons’ wives.”

This is the language of Genesis 1 being reversed. It is as if the author is deliberately undoing the creation sequence, frame by frame. The world returning to formless chaos. What God built by pushing back the chaos, the corruption of humanity had un-built.

And yet, inside this de-creation, God's intention was not annihilation. It was re-creation. He was master resetting his now disordered world, as we do when master resetting a malfunctioning computer.

Genesis 8:1 CSB "But God remembered Noah, as well as all the wildlife and all the livestock that were with him in the ark. God caused a wind to pass over the earth, and the water began to subside."

God remembered Noah. That phrase is not forgetfulness recovered. In the Hebrew, "remembered" carries the sense of covenant fidelity. Active attention. God turning toward someone with purpose and care. And that wind passing over the water — in Hebrew, that word is ruakh. Maybe you picked up on that. It’s the same word used in Genesis 1:2 when the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters before creation began. The author is not being subtle. He is saying: what God did at the beginning, he is doing again. A new creation is coming.

The ark riding on top of the chaotic waters is not just a survival vessel. It is the protected space inside the chaos where life continues, where God's purposes are preserved, where the story does not end. God's bringing Eden back!

Where We Land Today

That’s where we’ll stop and yes we are stopping in the middle of the flood. Next week we will emerge from the waters with Noah, receive the rainbow promised covenant, and see what God was building toward. But I want to close today with what we already have.

The world of Genesis 6 and 7 is not unfamiliar to us. It’s a world where corruption runs deep— where the spiritual atmosphere feels dark and disorienting— where human attempts to build order, to find meaning, to establish security apart from God keep producing the same devastating results. We are more sophisticated about it than they were. Our tools are better. Our coping mechanisms hide it well. Our self-justifications are more polished. But the current is the same: human autonomy compounding on itself.

This world lives blatantly without wanting to be accountable to anyone. Humanity lives as though God is either absent or irrelevant. And the world lurches toward the consequences of that choice.

Into that world, God is still looking. Still searching. Still asking us a question he has been asking since the garden: “Where are you? Is there anyone still walking toward me?”

Noah's faithfulness was not spectacular. It was not famous. He did not post about it or build a platform around it. Noah just kept walking with God when everyone around him had stopped. And that quiet, costly, countercultural faithfulness became the hinge on which history turned.

God remembered him. God found him. And through him, God kept the story alive.

Here is what I need you to hear:
If you are in a season right now where walking with God feels like swimming upstream, you’re in good company.

If you are the person in your family, in your workplace, school, or in your circle of friends who is still reaching toward God while everyone around you has moved on — that is not a small thing. That is not irrelevant. God sees you. And what God sees, he does not forget.

The world needs people who will walk with God when the current is against them. Not because they are stronger or better, but because they have decided that he is worth it. That his presence is the only rest worth reaching for. That the ache Lamech felt when he held his son and named him "rest" is an ache only God can satisfy.

Comfort. Rest. Relief from the toil of a world that is trying to hold itself together without the One who made it.

That is what Noah pointed toward. And it is what Jesus came to give us fully and finally.

Jesus, who walked through the chaos waters of a world saturated in the fracture of Genesis 3, who descended into the deep waters of death itself on our behalf, who rose as the first fruit of a new creation, says to every person who is weary and burdened and swimming against the current, "Come to me. I will give you rest (Matthew 11:28)."

The center of the preface is Sabbath rest. And the center of Sabbath is God. And God is found in Jesus— who is still, this morning, now, reaching toward anyone willing to walk with him.

Let’s start there. Walk with him today.

That is enough. That has always been enough.

INVITATION

If this has resonated with you today and you want to surrender your heart and your life to walk with God for him to transform you from the inside out into a new creation, a new person, who says “yes” to following Jesus, pray together with me to invite him to start walking with you today.

And we’re not walking alone. The greatest path to destruction is through isolation and being in our own head. We’re called to walk together to be set free to live in Christ’s Kingdom together with one another as his church.

If you want that, and you’re ready for a change, let’s take the next right step and pray together now.

It’s a simple prayer and it goes like this: I’m sorry. Thank you. Please.

Father God,

I’m sorry for my sins. I recognize I am a sinner and I need a Savior. I’m sorry for trying to fill my soul with other things than you. Help me not do that anymore.
Thank you Jesus for dying for me on the cross and sacrificing yourself for me. I believe you resurrected from the dead. I choose today to make you Lord and Master of my life.
Please rescue me, forgive me, transform me, save me, and bring me into your Kingdom family of God. Walk with me because starting today I choose to walk with you.

In Jesus Name. Amen

Sources:

Heiser, Michael S. The Bible Unfiltered: Applying the Bible in Your Everyday Life. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2017.
Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015.
Imes, Carmen Joy. Bearing God's Name: Why Sinai Still Matters. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019.
Mackie, Tim. BibleProject Genesis Series. Portland, OR: BibleProject, 2017. www.bibleproject.com.
Walton, John H. The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009.
Walton, John H. Didasko Seminar Notes: Genesis 1–11. Portland, OR, July 28–August 1, 2025.