“The Story” is a 9 month series at the Southwest Church in Jonesboro, AR. We are reading the bible through, from beginning to end, as a church family. My series “The Story” here on this blog is nothing more than my wonderings and wanderings about that journey. Hope you will join the conversation
What do you do after the flood? After the waters have dissipated and the boat comes to rest, what do you do? After all the animals are safely ashore, and the people have stretched their sea-faring legs, where do you go?
I remember a similar feeling after my baptism, don’t you? I am clean. I am fresh. I am made new. I have a new start, a new beginning. I am a new Creation in Christ. I am now part of a new humanity. I am now part of a new reality. What was sin is now gone. What was in the past has been washed away. But what now? How do I begin again? What do I do within this new reality, this new humanity? What is my first order of business? What if I mess this thing up again?
And now we can identify with Noah. Here is a passage from I Peter 3:18-22 that helps us think through the connections between that flood and our baptism into the new humanity:
For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit, through whom also he went and preached to the spirits in prison who disobeyed long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water, and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also—not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a good conscience toward God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at God’s right hand—with angels, authorities and powers in submission to him.
Ends & Means 