The Flood with Sonja Knutson

What if we’ve been asking the wrong questions about the flood? Instead of debating water heights and global maps, we step into the ancient world that first carried this story and ask what they were trying to remember about God, themselves, and the shape of a good life. The conversation opens with a personal miracle and then widens to the tensions we all feel when modern sensibilities crash into ancient narratives.

We explore how cultural memory works—why fairy tales were once brutal, why children’s murals skip the grief—and why the Bible’s flood story is not meant to be cute. Drawing on the insight that scripture was written for us but not to us, we show how the text reveals divine grief over human violence, the desire to cleanse a corrupted world, and the possibility of a true restart. Along the way, we treat science as a partner asking how, while faith asks why, acknowledging that many cultures hold flood memories without forcing a single, brittle reading.

From there, we reframe the story around four anchors: Jesus as the ark and our refuge, obedience that looks odd but preserves life, baptism as cleansing that frees us from shame and addiction, and covenant hope symbolized by the rainbow. These themes move the flood out of the nursery and into everyday practice—learning to listen when outrage sells, choosing peace over performative anger, and becoming shelter for one another when life rises around our knees. By focusing on meaning over mechanics, we recover a story that steadies us through grief, makes us honest about harm, and calls us into renewal.

Join us for a thoughtful, compassionate walk through a hard text that still speaks with power. If this conversation helps you breathe easier or see the story with fresh eyes, share it with a friend, subscribe for more, and leave a review with the lens that most changed your view.

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Chapters

• 0:00 A Miracle And An Update
• 2:10 Series Frame: Reading In The Dark
• 4:40 How To Read Ancient Texts
• 7:20 Prayer And Posture For Hard Stories
• 9:20 Fairy Tales, Sanitized Stories, And Noah
• 12:00 Ancient Worldviews And The Flood
• 15:30 Science, Faith, And What Happened
• 18:00 Shifting The Focus: Meaning Over Mechanics
• 20:10 Jesus As Ark, Obedience, And Baptism

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Go ahead and sit down. So welcome again. So I wanted to give you um just a heads up. If uh again, if you haven't heard, my uh husband was on in a really bad ladder accident on December 3rd, and many people have been asking how he's doing. And perhaps you're new here and you don't know, but it is a miracle story, and we're talking about miracle stories through this series. So he was hanging a Christmas star with lights on it for me. So if I feel guilty, um and he was on the top of a ladder and he fell. The ladder went one way and he went another way. And it was a very serious accident. Uh, we were told several times that he probably shouldn't have survived. He had several brain bleeds. Most of his face is fractured. You could talk to my son about that, who is a doctor. He had surgery around his skull. He had to restructure his left wrist, which saved his life, but it's full of titanium now. He's recovering slowly. Um, and it is truly a miracle. It's been, I think we're going on week eight now, coming up to this week. He ended up back in the hospital last Sunday after church. I went home and took him in for what they thought might have been a CSF leak. They think it ended up being a sinus infection, but because there's so many fractures in his sinus cavities and his cheekbones, the fluid has nowhere to go. And so we need to keep it out of the brain, obviously. So he's stepping still somewhat serious, but he is healing so much better than what he was eight weeks ago. So thank you so much from our family. I'm gonna start to cry now, from our family to yours for your prayers and your support and your meals. My freezer was so full at some point, I'm like, no more meals. But now you can bring them because it's empty. And I hate to cook. So no, and he hates my cooking also. You could you could pray for continued healing for him. He has a long ways to go. We were told by the neurosurgeon on Wednesday, I think, Connor, that he might be able to start going back in a couple weeks for a couple hours a day. Um, and this is the first week he's actually asked to go back to work. So I know he's feeling a lot better. He's more excited to drive. Um, so pray for that. And then uh pray for our patients because we've been home together for eight weeks. So that's been a bit of a challenge, but um, thank you so much. And he truly was a miracle coming out of that situation. So, moving on now, we are in the third week of our series called Reading in the Dark, which talks about troubling text and stories and scriptures in the Bible. And this Bible is full of these ancient world stories that are hard for us most of the time to understand. And as Ryan shared, even the scholars and the disciples of the time were confused, as we read in 2 Peter, where he states Peter is actually speaking about a Paul, and he says, There are some things in this book that are just hard for us to understand, which gives me a sense of peace because then I know I'm not alone in my confusion of the scripture and of text stories. And maybe it's because we're trying too hard to fit the Bible into our Western thinking. I love a quote by Dr. John Waltons, who is an Old Testament scholar from Wheaton College that states, the Bible was written for us, but not to us, meaning it's our for our benefit and application today, but it wasn't written directly to modern Western readers. So we need to understand it in its original ancient Eastern context to grasp its true meaning, avoiding imposing our own cultural ideas into the text, which guides me then as a reader to attempt to understand the word of God, the context, the key factors in symbolism through a different lens. And I love the questions that Ryan put in front of us two weeks ago, where he suggests that we ask these questions as we read these difficult texts. What did people find this important enough to tell and retell the story? Why has this passage endured all of this time? Number three and number four are probably my favorites. And as I've been reading the Bible in the last couple of weeks, I keep going back to three and four. What does this passage tell us about people who under how people understood who they were and who God was at the time, and what was true then that is also true yet today? So far, some of the hard stories that we've talked about are the Abraham and Isaac story, which of course is a difficult story because God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son. Last week, Ryan shared the Pharaoh and Moses story, where Pharaoh's heart is hardened. Why would God do that? Why would he harden his heart? And this week we're going to dig into the flood story, which, yes, we know we've discussed this story several times in different series, but I hope that we can process the story through these questions and maybe bring new light and understanding to the story. Sound cool? Good? All right. Well, let's begin with our prayer. Father, this morning we lift to you these difficult stories and we entrust them in their hands as we read them, as we hear them in different ways, as we question them, as we take ourselves as Western civilization out of the story and try to understand the ancient people, the ancient times, and how they understand you to be while they live through these stories. God, we ask that this morning the story would be used as a vessel into our hearts and our minds and our understanding of who you are and how we apply these stories not only to our lives, God, but to the lives of others who may not know you or to the situations that are going around in this world. How do we apply such a story that sounds destructive to a world that feels destructive right now? We entrust this into your hands, Jesus, and we love you. In your name we pray. Amen. So who doesn't love a good story, especially a fairy tale story? When I was growing up as a child, I loved hearing fairy tale stories and sitting on my mom's lap and having her tell the story, whether she was reading it out of book or she was just telling it through her imagination and through her memory. And I loved placing myself into the story, into the imagination, until I found out as an adult that most stories I grew up hearing were actually sanitized horror stories. Now, not to crush any of your childhood memories, but did you know that Little Red Riding Hood originated from a story where a werewolf was fornicating with a girl? I know gross, right? Or Hansel and Gretel. Did you know that this story was based on child abandonment and cannibalism? Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Who doesn't love Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? Those little guys are so darn cute. But this was actually based on a true story where a king used children as slaves to work his minds. And Sleeping Beauty was a woman being assaulted in her sleep by a king. And don't get me started on Pocahontas. And then Disney came along, cleaned up the fairy tales to make them child friendly and to make billions of dollars off of these tragic stories. You gotta love capitalism. Amen. No offense, Ben, because we know how you love Disney. And the church has done the same as we've characterized our biblical stories, such as Noah's Ark, so kids and parents can feel and experience warm fuzzies and paint rainbows and pairs of animals on their nursery walls. I was one of those moms, rather than sharing the gruesome tale of a flood story that killed lots of people and drowned animals and washed away all living species, which really doesn't make for a great bedtime story, am I right? The flood story, it wasn't cute and it wasn't cuddly. It was a horror story, at least what we know of this story that was shared by the ancient people that lived it and shared it in 2348 BC, placing it approximately 1656 years after creation. We tend to think of it as a literal history with our Western minds. But what was the truth? Did the ancient Easterners tell the truth? Or did they, like our uncles and our dads and sometimes Pastor Ryan, exaggerate the bit of the fish story? We know the fish wasn't that big, Pastor Ryan, and it didn't almost drown you while you were trying to pull it into the boat. But we get it, you're excited about your six-inch crappie. Oh, I'm so glad he's not here today. Whether it's intentional or not, stories, ours and ancient stories, can get stretched because who wants to hear about a small fish? Or for that matter, when stories are told, if information is left out, people can add in their own fluff and stuff to make the story more interesting. When my husband fell from the ladder, he was airlifted from Princeton Hospital to the Robinsdale Hospital. But a couple weeks after he had been home, I was visiting with a friend and she said, I didn't know the helicopter came out to your lake and landed on your lake to take him to the hospital. I'm like, I didn't know that either because that didn't happen. I also heard a story where it was circulating circulating around that my dog is the one that saved my husband. And yes, he was there and made me aware of what was happening. But the story was that he licked him for hours and kept barking at him to keep him awake. And in reality, I was there with him, and within minutes, we were able to get my husband in the car and take him to the hospital. So we can hear how stories can be altered without accurate information. This is my little Oliver. Isn't he cute? He's really a pain sometimes. But he did bark a lot when Jeff fell. The ancient storytellers were like us, and at times they would exaggerate their stories to make them more interesting. But also it was more difficult for them to know the truth behind a story with the resources that had they had available to them. We have instant information in the palm of our hands with the simple swish of our phone or with our thumb as we scroll up, right? Their resources consist of oral and written methods, material evidence, or they relied heavily on travelers and merchants or official messengers to interpret events. They lacked telescopes and satellites and other modern scientific equipment. Therefore, they depicted the universe as it appeared to everyday observation, or you could say as far as the eye could see. So they might have thought as their whole world or their whole earth was as large as the edges of their current maps, which mostly consisted of today's Middle East. It was their truth and is what they knew. So the flood narrative relies on some ancient understanding of their world and the sins of the world at the time, and their understanding of their God when the flood hit was to just naturally push restart on creation. The ancient people knew the creation story from Genesis, where it states, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. They knew their world was corrupt, and while this reading describes an initial chaotic watery state of creation, the flood narratives show God using waters to cleanse the world of corruption. So for their God to wash the sins of the world away with water seemed not as an act of cruel cruelty, but rather as an act of necessity. And not only did they see it as necessary, but they also knew God was mournful and he grieved. We read in Genesis six that the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil, and it grieved God to his heart. Which tells us the God of ancient times and our God today has feelings, he cares, he loves, and he allows us to make our own decisions. Remember the story from last week, the Pharaoh story? God allowed Pharaoh to be human and to make poor choices, and what happened? His heart was hardened, just like God allows us to make our own choices in a corrupt world, and he is blessed when we build his kingdom up, and he grieves when we disappoint him. Because why? Because the Lord saw the wickedness of man and it grieved him to his heart. This was their truth. And as we learn more about the ancient people and their view of God, for me, this story softened through their lens, no matter how I feel, about the physical flood itself, which to be honest with you, sometimes I struggle with. The flood story, as we know it, is played out like a Hollywood movie. The world is dark, it's a sinful place, God is mad. God seeks Noah, who is the superhero, to build a refuge, a big boat, and he collects his family and his animals, and then the waters come, and only those on the boat survive. The waters then withdraw, and the boat lands on a mountainside, and the animals and Noah's family were released. And finally, God sends his promises and creates a new beginning, and everyone lives happily ever after. It's what blockbuster movies are made of, right? In fact, in 2007, Evan Almighty, played by Steve Carell, the modern-day Noah, grossed a profit of one or grossed$174 million. And in 2014, Russell Crowe played Noah in the ever-creative name Noah movie, which grossed$360 million. And this October, a new release is coming out called The Flood, The Flood, The End of Mankind. And it's hoping to gross over$500 million. So obviously, this story is something that we love and it piques our interest. But also it is a story that draws people away from their faith. Why? Well, number one, because it portrays a very cruel God in our civilization. And why would anyone want to follow a God that would destroy all living things? And number two, really? A flood that covered the whole earth? How realistic is that? Did the worldwide flood happen? I don't know, but something happened. Whether you look at it from the faith point or a science stance, something happened and a water disaster hit somewhere. Faith often sees it as a literal, global, and supernatural event of divine judgment. And I can live with that. Our God is miraculous. Amen. And I love a good miracle story. My husband just lived one. But science, based on geology and history, finds no evidence for a worldwide flood, suggesting it's likely a myth, or perhaps it was based on a localized flood in the Near East. Hmm. Remember the ancient people thought their world was as big as the eye could see, or as large as the map consisted? Do you hear the challenge in views between science and faith and how tensions can rise when debating the story? Faith demands a literal interpretation that clashes with scientific evidence. Either way, something happened. And many religions and ancient cultures share flood myths, including a divine punishment through water, a chosen survivor building a vessel, and a new beginning for humanity after a devastating surge. This doesn't mean that our Genesis flood story is borrowed from the stories of other cultures, such as Greek mythology, Islam, Judaism, or from the indigenous people, but it is based on a common cultural memory of a water disaster. So what do we do with that? Well, a few options. We could reconcile faith and science, and we have this flood story, metaphorically or regional event, allowing for a scientific finding without upholding faith, which allows science to explain how, how it happened, and faith to address the why and the meaning and the purpose. Or we can just simply ask ourselves, does it really matter? Does the physical flood really matter? Is the flood itself the focus of the story, or should we look at other key factors as takeaways? When my youngest son was growing up in our home, he would get fixated often on different arguments. And when I was disciplining him, there was a time, and to the point where it would distract me of why am I disciplining him? There was a time when he was three years old that he loved putting Legos in the toilet to see if they would flush or clog or float. And it didn't matter how many times I said to him, Don't put the Legos in the toilet. He'd be like, But mom, it floated, so like it's okay. And I would say to him, Buddy, it's not about the Legos surviving the Legos surviving the flush. That's not the point of the discipline. The idea of me telling you time and time again not to put them in there, that is why you're getting in trouble. And just like the Legos floating or clogging in the toilet, the flood itself is not the point of this amazing story. Like all of Genesis, the flood story is a part of God's revelation to humankind. It's not a revelation about the bare facts of science or natural history. And in trying to reconstruct the details of what really happened, we then missed the theological points of the story. So what if we reframed this story? What if we thought about it in a different way? What if we lived in the promises of the story and we saw Jesus as the ark, as our refuge, when we make a choice to be in a relationship with Him? Noah's family made a choice to enter the Ark just like we do when we accept a relationship with Jesus. And in that choice, Jesus saves us from eternal judgment through grace and through grace alone, which comes from the cross where God's wrath fell. If we framed this story through that lens, would the physical flood really matter? And what if we read this story through the lens of obedience and faithfulness? A story where we are called to obey and trust his guidance in our lives and all that we do, even if the call feels hard and pushes back against the ways of this world. Noah's faithfulness would have been hard, and others surely would have thought that he was crazy and pushed back for what he was doing. But in that crazy obedience and faithfulness, Noah was saved. What if we trusted as Noah did and stepped out and crazy act, knowing that God would save us? Perhaps in a political uprise. Instead of jumping on the bandwagon of anger and destruction because someone thinks differently than us? What if we were called to stand in peace and to make a conscious effort to listen and to respect those with whom we disagree? What if we were called to pray and serve and love on them as Jesus would? Would the physical flood matter? And what if this story was viewed as a baptism and as a cleansing? The water of the flood in this story brought destruction, but the waters that pour over us through the cross bring us new life and new beginnings and new hope. And just like Christian baptism symbolizes a cleansing and a new start, what if this story flooded the destruction of our lives? Our brokenness and our grief, our sins, our hurts, the things that have a hold on us from our past, our addictions? What if this story washed us clean and the darkness of our hearts and our minds and our hearts were rinsed away? Would then the physical flood matter? And what if we read this story through the covenant, the promise of his faithfulness that was symbolized by a rainbow, a promise filled with hope, a promise we could spread to others, not by the watery details of the story that diverts people from their faith, but a promise that brings peace and forgiveness, grace and mercy and love to the broken, to the oppressed, to the widows and the grieving and the lost. If we read this story through that lens, would that flood really matter? Friends, the answer I hope you hear is no, not really, unless that's what you want to believe, and that's okay. We can have a difference of opinions. That flood, the one that distracts us and sticks us in a place of controversy, often it doesn't really matter. It, like so many other stories in the Bible, interrupt our relationship with Jesus and others because our focus is not on what matters. What matters is the truth and the flood of Jesus as our ark, as our refuge. And when we frame our understanding of these stories around the saving grace and the promises of Jesus, when the floods of this world hit, we are ready to receive his truth, the truth, and be saved no matter what the outcome is. Trusting in him through our obedience and faithfulness, knowing that he will cleanse us and this world with his. Promises and living with him in this covenant in the world that desperately needs hope, help. So this morning, I want to leave you with these questions as you go into this mission field that we call our world. What version of this story will flood your heart? What version of this story will you invest your faith in? What version of this story central will you be an agent of that will grow your faith and the faith of others in a world that is so broken and uncertain? Amen.