Jesse Tree - Children's Version (December 3, 2014)

Day 3:  Flood (Genesis 6:11-22; 7:17-8:12; 8:20-9:17)

Adam and Eve were fruitful and increased in number.  Their family grew and grew, and grew and grew!  It grew until it filled the land with God’s people.

One would hope that this chance at new life would be lived with more care than Adam and Eve – that they would diligently follow God’s laws, but there was a problem…

These people who were supposed to be the Image of God didn’t look very much like him anymore.  Their lives didn’t reflect God’s glory.  Instead, they were jealous, deceitful, unfaithful, lying, murdering...  They didn’t protect the boundaries of creation that God had created!  They broke his laws over and over again until their wickedness was more than God could bear.  God felt deeply, deeply sad that people had become so evil… and the time had come for the price of sin to be paid.

You remember the price that we all deserve to pay for our sin? 

Death. 

And so death came by a flood.  God's father heart wrenched. The waters rose as the rain poured down and he grieved the animals and people as they died.  

With the exception of one righteous man and his family, as well as a couple of each animal, all of God’s land creatures, every man, every woman, and every child died that day.   It was a sad, sad good-bye.  God had created it all with such promise – such possibility! And God was overcome with heartache that this was what it all came to. 

But even amidst all this sadness a note of hope resounded as two of every animal walked off the enormous boat onto freshly dry ground – a boy and a girl of each kind – and were able to be fruitful and increase in number once again.  Possibility was restored to God’s creation.  Noah and his family had a brand new chance to start over with a heart of love for God and a desire to obey him. 

God sealed this renewed relationship with his people and all of creation with a sign in the sky – a rainbow promise that he would never flood the whole earth again.  If ever the people sinned again (and as we know, they do keep on sinning), God’s judgment would come a different way.  God planned to send his son to die in our place.  It is this son that we wait for at Christmas.  This is our hope, our only hope, because we all have sinful hearts.

This story reminds us that when God says “do not,” we MUST not, for our sin brings death.  And it is this child, the child that we are waiting for right now, that is coming to die in our place, so that we can live.