Beginnings: Power Cycling the Earth

 

But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and domestic animals that were with him in the ark. God caused a wind to blow over the earth and the waters receded. Genesis 8:1

 When you are having trouble with one of your electronic devices, your phone or maybe your computer, and you call tech support, what is the first thing they have you do? Turn it off and turn it back on again! This is called power cycling and it purges the cache of memory of all the little processes and things that were bogging down the system. Your brain does something similar when you sleep. Do you ever feel bogged down by thoughts, worries, ideas, to-do lists when you go to bed, and then when you wake up things are fresher and cleaner in your mind? Sleep actually helps with memory consolidation and emotional regulation according to this site. I think this happens in much the same way it does with computers. The longer we are thinking on something, the more those things build up and bog down the works. When we take a break from it and allow our unconscious mind to process all those thoughts and clear out the clutter, things are clearer and simpler. Thus the saying, “I’ll sleep on it.”

 What’s this got to do with Noah? I can’t help but wonder if, with the flood, God did a bit of power cycling on both the earth and humanity. Things had gotten to a pretty bad state. In Genesis 6:11-12 it says, “The earth was ruined in the sight of God; the earth was filled with violence. God saw the earth, and indeed it was ruined, for all living creatures on the earth were sinful.” Yeah, He could have thrown the Earth away and started fresh, but when your computer starts running slow or popping up odd error messages do you just throw it in the trash and go get a new one? No! You turn it off and turn it back on again! All of the earth needed a deep sleep to reset, and the only way to do that was to cover it with water. Then, when the waters receded and the soil was once again exposed to the air and sunlight, things could start fresh. The same thing needed to be done with humanity. It had started with one family, Adam and Eve with their sons Cain, Able and Seth (Genesis 4:1-2,25), and when God power cycled the earth, He brought it back to one family: Noah, Shem, Ham, Japheth, and their wives who are never named.

 The first family introduced sin into the world, beginning with disobeying God’s command in the Garden of Eden not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, quickly followed by the first murder. The second-first family started off well. It says in Genesis 6:9 that, “Noah was a godly man; he was blameless among his contemporaries. He walked with God.” God picked the best of the world to start over with, but not too long after they left the ark things started to go down hill again. Starting in Genesis 9:20 you can read the story of how Noah himself got too far into his cups and his sons were not loving or supportive towards him. Then, just two chapters later in Genesis 11 we read about how all of humanity banded together to try to do things on their own, apart from God, and He had to, lovingly, set them straight.

 So, why not just start over with a new family again? Well, based on the first two times, God showed us that this strategy would not work, should we ever wonder. There are mixed reports on the internet about whether regularly power cycling your device will cause it harm or not. I don’t know for sure, but what I do know is that humanity couldn’t live under the constant threat of being power cycled by a flood or other means. That’s why God gave us the rainbow as a promise. In Genesis 9:9-17 God tells us, “Never again will all living things be wiped out by the waters of a flood; never again will a flood destroy the earth.” If God kept bringing us back to one family over and over again, how would we grow and develop? Nope, He had a better plan than that!

Here's the Thing: I love how God shows me parallels in things that are otherwise completely unrelated! Next time you go to shut off your device and turn it back on again, maybe you’ll think of the flood and be thankful that God made a better way for us through Jesus!