Water World is a 1995 movie that takes place in a future world where the polar ice caps have melted and water covers the earth. Anarchy and chaos reign in what remains of human civilization (i.e., factions known as the smokers, drifters, slave traders, mutants, etc.). Like the Mad Max movies before it and The Postman after it, WW is one of those post apocalyptic movies that offers up a bleak view of man and his future. It’s kind of hard for me to see the entertainment value of such a movie and indeed it bombed at the US box office (though it did much better outside the country).
Israel had a Water World in their past and God wanted to make sure they didn’t forget it. As He was delivering Israel out of the old world of Egypt and into the new world of Canaan, so had He delivered Noah and his family from the wicked world and into a new one.
McGuiggan is right when he says, “When there were only two, mankind sinned. When they were blessed by God in multiplying (1:28, 6:1) they rebelled. Among other things, the rebellion showed itself in the marital context.” Sin progresses into rebellion and the marriage relationship becomes the breeding ground as even the sons of God (the line of Seth—Genesis 5), approach marriage from a purely carnal perspective (v. 2). Man’s creative gift turns inward and is used only in the pursuit of his selfish pleasure (v. 5). God is grieved because man was made for so much more (v. 6)!
Paul tells Timothy that, “If we are faithless, He will remain faithful, for He cannot disown Himself,” (2 Timothy 2:13). God cannot deny Himself! Man can and that is the essence of sin—when we live in denial of what our Father intended for us to be. Arthur Gordon defines sin is “the refusal to be loved by God.” Man had continually judged himself unworthy of life and blessing and all that was left for him was judgment.
The flood is judgment and as such should be thought of as uncreation. What God did at creation (make the world habitable for man), He undoes in the flood. It is a powerfully violent act of global magnitude that brings chaos where there has been order. In fact, what happens in the flood provides the rubric for understanding the prophets when they speak of mountains quaking and hills melting away, the seas drying up, the sun being darkened and the moon not giving its light, the heavens trembling and the earth shaking (see Nahum 1 and Isaiah 13). Although the language is figurative since God didn’t literally do these things in his judgments on Nineveh or Babylon, understanding why this kind of language is employed is rooted in the flood— God isn’t just “destroying” these worlds—He’s uncreating them! To uncreate is more than destroy. Anyone with sufficient power can destroy a world but uncreation can only be done by the Creator. Implicit (and often explicit), in these judgments is the message that they are more than a military defeat, they are the undoing of a nation by the One who shaped, formed, and brought it into being.
The world is baptized and out of the water arises a man of faith and his family, saved by the grace of God (6:8). Out of uncreation comes new creation. It is not the gloom and doom seascape of Water World. It is a world of hope, resting under a rainbow of promise. If you belong to Christ, that’s your world as well. Our old life of sin and God’s judgment upon it, has been buried under a world of water and we have, by His grace, been brought through it. In Christ, we stand on the dry land of new creation.
A Taste of Grace with Bruce Green 