ACTS BIBLE
Creation week 9 · Genesis 9:1-29
God's covenant with Noah, the rainbow, and human government.
Eight people on an empty planet. Genesis 9 is God telling them the terms.
It opens with the words he used in the garden: be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth.1 The commission survives the flood. What has changed is everything around it. Animals will now fear people. Meat is permitted where before it was plants. And a new sentence enters the world, because now there is a rule about killing.
We have to deal with the end of this chapter before anything else in it, because for roughly four hundred years men used it to justify owning other men.
Noah gets drunk, lies uncovered in his tent, Ham sees him and tells his brothers, and when Noah wakes he curses Canaan.2 From the fifteenth century onward, European and later American slaveholders called this the curse of Ham, identified Ham with Africa, and built a theology of racial slavery on it. American pulpits preached it. It was one of the most effective uses Scripture has ever been put to by people serving themselves.3
There is no soft way to say this: that reading is not in the text, and the people who taught it were not making an innocent mistake.
Look at what the chapter actually says. Noah curses Canaan, not Ham. Canaan is one of Ham's four sons, and the line that runs to Africa in the next chapter is Cush and Mizraim and Put, who are not cursed.4 Canaan settles in the land Israel will later be given, which is what the curse is about and where the story goes. Nothing in the passage mentions skin, and nothing in it establishes a permanent condition for anyone's descendants beyond the Canaanites.
And the curse is Noah's, spoken hungover in a tent. The text reports it happening. It does not say God endorsed it.
Say all of that plainly when this comes up, because someone in the room has heard the other version.
The new rule is short: whoever sheds human blood, by humans his blood will be shed.5 Then the reason, and the reason is the whole point: for God made humans in his image.
That is the moral foundation of the chapter and of a great deal that follows from it. Murder is not wrong because society finds it inconvenient. It is wrong because the victim is an image-bearer, and attacking the image is an attack on the one it images.
It undoes every attempt to rank people. The image is not distributed by ability, ancestry or usefulness. James says the same thing about the tongue: with it we bless the Lord and curse people who are made in God's likeness, and it should not be so.6 A chapter that has been used to justify racial slavery contains, forty verses earlier, the strongest argument in Scripture against it.
God makes a covenant, and unusually it is not with Noah alone. It is with him, his descendants, and every living creature, and the terms are one-sided: never again a flood to destroy the earth.7 Nobody is asked to do anything in return. That is a promise, not a bargain.
The sign is the bow in the cloud. The Hebrew word is the word for a war bow, and it is hung in the sky pointed away from the earth.8 A weapon put down.
Whether the physics of rainbows changed is worth answering carefully. Some argue there was no rain before the flood, from Genesis 2 saying a mist watered the ground, and so no rainbows. Others read the verse as describing Eden rather than the planet.9 The text does not settle it, and the covenant does not depend on it. God can take a thing that already exists and assign it a meaning; a wedding ring is not a new invention either.
The chapter's last act is the point of the whole week.
The world has been washed. The population is eight righteous survivors. The environment could not be more different. And within a few verses the best man of his generation is drunk and naked in his tent and his family is fractured over it.10
If human behaviour were a product of environment, this is where it would have changed. New world, clean slate, direct experience of divine judgment, and a personal covenant with God. It did not change, because the problem never was the environment. God already said so in the previous chapter: the inclination of the heart is evil from youth.11 Jeremiah files the identical diagnosis a thousand years later, and Paul says the same of everyone still.12 The heart that came off the ark is the heart in the pew today.
The Bible is our final authority. Which means reading what it says about Canaan rather than what generations of preachers wanted it to say about Africa. Scripture has been misused by people holding it, and the correction is not less Scripture but closer reading.
Christ's work is finished. The covenant is unconditional and one-sided, and God hangs up his weapon as the sign of it. That is the shape of the gospel: the terms are his, the guarantee is his, the sign is his, and the beneficiaries are told to look up and remember rather than to perform. Christ said it is finished, and the debt was paid in full.
God chooses. God establishes his covenant. Noah is not consulted and neither is any living creature it covers.
Salvation is God's work from start to finish. The chapter runs the experiment. Best available humans, best available conditions, and failure inside one chapter. Whatever saves people, it is not a fresh start.
That every person you meet is an image-bearer, and that this is the reason for the law rather than a nice sentiment attached to it.
That God binds himself with promises he does not need to keep and keeps them anyway.
And that a clean slate does not produce a clean heart. Noah proves it in under twenty verses. Christ lived the sober, faithful life Noah could not manage on a washed earth, died under the judgment the flood only pictured, and rose. The bow is still hanging in the sky pointed away from us, and it is pointed away because it landed somewhere else.
Next week: The covenant is set and the bow is hung. Genesis 10 takes the three sons off the boat and turns them into every nation on the earth.
Genesis 9:6. Whoever sheds human blood, his blood will be shed by humans, for God made humans in his image.
The reason comes after the rule, and the reason is a person's worth. Sit with what that means about the next person who irritates you.
rule out?
people were shaped mainly by their circumstances?
say?