A little while ago I was sitting at the table with my wife and 8 year old daughter. It was dinner time and our daughter had her new Bible with her. It’s an NIV and she was excited about it because it’s her first full Bible, so she wanted to read some of it at the table.

She decided she wanted to start at the beginning so she opened it up and began reading Genesis 1 out loud. I pointed out a few things about God, creation, how it compares to other ancient near eastern creation stories, and I also pointed out the rhythm of the poetry through its repetition. She picked up on that. The words came out a number of times ‘And God saw that it was good.’

After reading for a while, tears started to well up in her eyes. She was tired, which magnified the whole thing. We asked her what was wrong and she said ‘but what about the trafficking?’ She knows that some of my work over the last couple of years has been around combating the issue of human trafficking and slavery. She has put in a lot of effort to raise money to contribute to TEAR Fund’s work in that fight.

She was reading that God saw the world as good, and it didn’t match the reality she knows of the world. We talked that through a bit and we chatted about the opportunities we have to give glimpses of a good world. Very quickly her grief at the brokenness of the world turned to anger, and she strongly expressed that she thought the world would be better without people and that God should wipe humanity out. We worked through that as well.

Thankfully, after a good sleep she didn’t feel like that the next day.

In that moment of her grief and anger at humanity, one story in the Bible made more sense to me than it ever has, the story of Noah. With the crux of it beginning in Genesis 6, the Noah story is a direct reflection of what she was feeling. From Genesis 3 through to the story of Noah there is a decline. Following God’s good creation in Genesis 1 there is the Fall, then Cain kills Abel, and in Genesis 6 we see that it has descended into evil being the main inclination of humanity. So we get the story of the flood and a glimmer of redemption in the middle of it via Noah and his family.

That glimmer shifts the tone thereafter, with God’s work towards redemption from there on becoming the central theme of scripture. Thankfully, in the story God didn’t react just like my little girl. He almost did, but redemption is the point of that story. As horrid as it can seem, his mercy is the main point.

This post isn’t to argue about whether the flood story is literal, historical fact or not, but any student of scripture will say that the author put it there for a reason. In that moment at the table with my daughter, as she read about how ‘it was good’ and then felt the grief and anger at the current pain and evil in the world, I think I got a glimpse of that reason.