Written by: Debbie Orriss

Genesis 4 v 6-8
The LORD asked Cain, “Why are you angry? Why do you look so unhappy? If you do things well, I will accept you, but if you do not do them well, sin is ready to attack you. Sin wants you, but you must rule over it.”
Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out into the field.” While they were out in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.

Notes 
Cain was angry; God was not pleased with the offering Cain had given Him. Actually it wasn’t the offering that God was displeased with, but the attitude with which it was given. Cain was a very angry and unhappy young man, and God tried to help Cain understand that He will accept any offering on the basis of how it’s given, not what is given. God warns Cain about his rebellious attitude; that a consequence of not living God’s way, is to become vulnerable to sin’s destructive power. God challenges Cain to fight against the power of sin, but sadly, Cain does not heed God’s warnings. He does not appear to want to change. Instead he reacts out of anger, murdering his brother Abel. 

God longs to help us live our lives His way - the best way. But He is a loving God, and as a result doesn’t create puppets, but people, who have the freedom to choose to enter that loving relationship He offers each one of us. He can’t force us to follow Him; we need to ask for His help; to want to change. And actually, the further we are from God, the harder it is to resist sin, as Cain discovered. We can get out of touch with God if we don’t spend time with Him, or His word, or other Christians who can encourage us. 

If you feel out of touch with God, don’t despair; being aware of where you are is a good first step. Don’t hide away from God, but be honest before Him, and open yourself to the warmth of His love. He won’t reject you. 

Genesis 4 v 9-15
Later, the LORD said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?”
Cain answered, “I don’t know. Is it my job to take care of my brother?”
Then the LORD said, “What have you done? Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground. And now you will be cursed in your work with the ground, the same ground where your brother’s blood fell and where your hands killed him. You will work the ground, but it will not grow good crops for you anymore, and you will wander around on the earth.”
Then Cain said to the LORD, “This punishment is more than I can stand! Today you have forced me to stop working the ground, and now I must hide from you. I must wander around on the earth, and anyone who meets me can kill me.”
The LORD said to Cain, “No! If anyone kills you, I will punish that person seven times more.” Then the LORD put a mark on Cain warning anyone who met him not to kill him.

Notes 
What’s ‘eating’ Cain? He seems so resentful and angry at life and God, and was so jealous of his brother’s favour with God that he resorts to drastic measures; he murders Abel, and then gets angry with God when He asks where Abel is. God challenges Cain about what he’s done, and Cain reacts typically; he doesn’t say ‘sorry’, but just feels sorry for himself; ‘This punishment is more than I can stand...’ God is a loving God, but that doesn’t mean that he lets Cain off. All actions, whether good or bad, have consequences, and God does not protect Cain from the consequences of his bad actions; he had to learn from them. However, God doesn’t completely reject Cain. He punishes him, yes, but he protects Cain’s life with a ‘mark’ so that no-one will kill him. 

Maybe you know someone like Cain, who just doesn’t seem to be able to look positively on life, and acts out their anger and frustration, with serious results. We don’t know what the mark was, that God put on Cain, but it was a sign that God wasn’t prepared to give up on him. This can give us great encouragement; God doesn’t give up on any of us. He is always there waiting for us to turn towards Him, whatever we’ve done or said, and He will always forgive us, and take us back, just like the father in the story of the son who left home to ‘live it up’, in Luke 15. The father was waiting for his son to return home and couldn’t wait for him to reach the house, but rushed out to meet him. In His love for each of us, God is waiting just the same, for us to turn to Him and be welcomed home.

Genesis 6 v 5-8
The LORD saw that the human beings on the earth were very wicked and that everything they thought about was evil. He was sorry he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the LORD said, “I will destroy all human beings that I made on the earth. And I will destroy every animal and everything that crawls on the earth and the birds of the air, because I am sorry I have made them.” But Noah pleased the LORD.

Notes 
This is a difficult passage to understand, if we believe in a loving God; how could He wipe out all that He had created? Sometimes ‘answers’ are not easy to find, and we need to use our faith, not as a ‘cop-out’ but because we never have the full picture. Only God has that. Some have likened our lives to individual threads woven into a tapestry where only God can see the full pattern. Often all we can see is the messy back of the material, with all the knots and tangled threads, and no sense of the real picture at all. 

God had the full picture of His creation when He decided to flood the earth, and when we consider His patience with Adam and Eve, and Cain, we can only trust, by faith that He didn’t make His decision lightly. It must have been a last resort; the only way that the world could be restored to God’s ways. Unlike Cain, who acted out of anger when he murdered his brother, God acts out of sorrow and from a heart full of pain; He cares, because He loves all that He has created.

I wonder what grieves God’s heart today as He looks at the world He created? Maybe the sight of children crying through hunger, whilst we have more to eat than we need. Perhaps when He sees a beautiful animal becoming extinct because its natural habitat is being destroyed. Do our hearts grieve too? They should, if we are seeking God’s will for our lives and for the world around us. Pray for our world today, and ask God to show you what He wants you to do, to help it become what He wants it to be.

Genesis 6 v 9-14
This is the family history of Noah. Noah was a good man, the most innocent man of his time, and he walked with God. He had three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
People on earth did what God said was evil, and violence was everywhere. When God saw that everyone on the earth did only evil, he said to Noah, “Because people have made the earth full of violence, I will destroy all of them from the earth. Build a boat of cypress wood for yourself. Make rooms in it and cover it inside and outside with tar.

Notes 
‘..and he walked with God’. What a lovely image of a godly relationship. Noah was obviously highly regarded by God. He is described as ‘good’ and ‘the most innocent man of his time’. God’s decision to save Noah and his family, is a sign that He has not totally given up on human beings; Although the world had become an evil place, with people turning away from God, living their lives their way, God recognised that there was hope of a new world through Noah’s desire to live God’s way.

‘and he walked with God’. I wonder what that means for us today, in the 21st century? We have an advantage over Noah, in that we are able to look to Christ, the Son of God, who is a prime example of someone who ‘walked with God’ living His life as an example, revealing God the Father to us through His teaching, and the way He treated people around Him. Jesus’ whole life was focused on doing God’s will. The challenge for us today is to discover what walking with God means, as we try and live out our faith. My advice is... look to Jesus. He might not have had to face exams, or questions about which mobile phone is the ‘coolest’, or whether to own one at all. But He did teach how to treat others, and how to view possessions and money, and how important we are to God. And of course He guides us today through His word and the Holy Spirit at work in each one of us.

Talk to Him about the everyday things in your life - He IS interested in the details. And ask Him how you can best ‘walk with God’ - He WILL show you.

Genesis 6 v 17-22
I will bring a flood of water on the earth to destroy all living things that live under the sky, including everything that has the breath of life. Everything on the earth will die. But I will make an agreement with you—you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives will all go into the boat. Also, you must bring into the boat two of every living thing, male and female. Keep them alive with you. Two of every kind of bird, animal, and crawling thing will come to you to be kept alive. Also gather some of every kind of food and store it on the boat as food for you and the animals.”
Noah did everything that God commanded him.

Notes 
God decides not to destroy the whole of creation, even though it appears that He is close to doing so. He provides a way for Noah and his family, to be saved, along with two of every kind of living thing, by guaranteeing their safety in the ark - the boat that Noah will build. But God’s plan relies on one thing; Noah’s obedience. God gives Noah specific instructions for the construction of the ark, and we are told that ‘Noah did everything that God commanded him’. Without such obedience, what would have happened? What if Noah had said ‘no’. It could have been easy to do; imagine the embarrassment of building a huge great boat in a desert area - what would the neighbours have said! 

In the same way, God relies on our obedience to bring about His purposes for the world, and sometimes that means doing or saying something risky, something that might make us look silly in the eyes of the world, to our friends and families. St Paul talks about us being ‘fools for Christ’ in 1 Corinthians 4, and the challenge is that we are sometimes asked by God to ‘go against the flow’, to stand up for what we believe. That can be hard, especially when we are amongst friends who are not Christians, or even sympathetic to what we believe. That’s why it’s important that we have the support of Christians around us, praying for us and helping us find the confidence to be what God wants us to be. That doesn’t mean getting rid of all your non-Christian friends, but it DOES mean meeting regularly with other Christians, so that you can grow together in faith, supporting and encouraging each other, as you seek to serve God in the world. 

Genesis 7 v 1-5
Then the LORD said to Noah, “I have seen that you are the best person among the people of this time, so you and your family can go into the boat. Take with you seven pairs, each male with its female, of every kind of clean animal, and take one pair, each male with its female, of every kind of unclean animal. Take seven pairs of all the birds of the sky, each male with its female. This will allow all these animals to continue living on the earth after the flood. Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth. It will rain forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe off from the earth every living thing that I have made.”
Noah did everything the LORD commanded him.

Notes 
The flood was going to be a significant event. It was going to give the world a fresh start, a second chance to live according to God’s ways. It’s also important to notice that all animals were represented in the ark, whether they were considered (by the Jews) to be ‘clean’ or ‘unclean’. The Jews used only the ‘clean’ animals for food and sacrifice, so the ‘unclean’ ones that couldn’t be used for sacrifice would simply be able to reproduce once the flood had subsided. Noah might have been tempted to choose only the ‘clean’ animals, considering the unclean ones as not worth saving. However God doesn’t treat the ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ differently. When He created animals, He regarded them all as ‘very good’ (Genesis 1;31), and therefore they all had a place on the ark.

Do you consider anyone as ‘unclean’ - not worth saving? It’s easy isn’t it, to write some people off, especially if they are different from us, or seem to go out of their way to annoy us! However, God doesn’t write anyone off, and Jesus didn’t die on the cross just for people we like! In his second letter, Peter talks about God’s patience with all of us; ‘He does not want anyone to be lost, but he wants all people to change their hearts and lives’. (2 Peter 3;9). Peter is writing from experience. After all, it was he who denied Jesus three times just before Jesus’ crucifixion. And yet, after the resurrection, Jesus reassured Peter that he was forgiven, and loved. Maybe, before we think about discounting a particular person as beyond saving, we need to remember that they are also forgiven and loved. Think about someone that you find difficult, and commit yourself to praying for them each day this week. 

Genesis 7 v 6-12
Noah was six hundred years old when the flood came. He and his wife and his sons and their wives went into the boat to escape the waters of the flood. The clean animals, the unclean animals, the birds, and everything that crawls on the ground came to Noah. They went into the boat in groups of two, male and female, just as God had commanded Noah. Seven days later the flood started.
When Noah was six hundred years old, the flood started. On the seventeenth day of the second month of that year the underground springs split open, and the clouds in the sky poured out rain. The rain fell on the earth for forty days and forty nights.

Notes 
What a picture this passage paints - every species of living creature making their way to a six-hundred year old man and his family, and them all entering a gigantic boat to escape a flood! It’s interesting that the flood didn’t actually happen for seven days after they entered the ark. I wonder whether there was a point during that time when Noah wondered whether he had imagined God telling him to build it? How much temptation was there for he and his family to leave the ark and discount all that God had told them? It must have been hard for them to wait... and wait... especially if the neighbours were taunting them all, watching them sitting on a boat in the middle of a desert! 

Noah needed faith in order to ‘sit it out’, and often we have to rely on faith as we pray for difficult situations, when we’re trying to discover what God is saying or doing. Prayer can be tough when we’re waiting for an answer - when we can’t understand what is happening. One of my favourite psalms is Psalm 77. The psalmist begins in total despair, feeling that God has forgotten him. However, gradually he finds hope, as he begins to recall God’s loving actions in the past, and realises that God has not left him, and will help him again.

This should encourage those of us who feel in despair, or maybe just confused about what God is (or isn’t) doing at the moment. Noah waited, and it paid off. He and his family were saved. Be patient, keep praying, and remembering what God has done in the past, believing that He will act in the future - according to His perfect timing.


word-on-the-web uses the Scripture text taken from the Youth Bible, New Century Version (Anglicised Edition) copyright 1993 by Word Publishing Milton Keynes