Noah's Ark

I am doing a series with some students on 'the evil of the human heart'. I will digress into such topics as the banality of evil (compared to the 'sexiness' of evil on TV and video games). I will also do a session on the way the spiritual realm and the material world are interlaced so that we see that drug cartels are the real manifestations of the demonic, just as the legions of Rome were in the time of Jesus. I started the series this week by reading the punch-line of the Noah's Ark story. The story begins with God sending the rain to kill all living creatures because of the evil of the human heart. By the end of the story God has learned that to eradicate evil the simplistic procedure of killing all the 'evil people just doesn't work. Evil cuts through every human heart. The solution to human evil narrated in Scripture is for God to become one of us, with us, suffer and die at the hands of sinners, and be raised.

This guy made a replica ark - some people have too much time on their hands

So God learns, but guess who hasn't learned this most simple of lessons? Yes, that's right, us, humankind. Indeed, that we have not learned this is part of the evil of the human heart, perhaps even its root. (Separating the sinner and persecuting him/her). In the Noah story God learns the lesson. Of course, God didn't actually have to learn the lesson. But that we haven't learned points to our intransigence, or perhaps blindness, and arrogance.