...and the mess-up continues!

This week, you told the stories.

Chapter 4: Cain & Abel - the story of the first murder. One brother got jealous and killed the other. He was sent away from his home and from God. Evidence of a breakdown in all relationships with people and God. Oh dear...

Chapters 6-9: The flood - it got so bad, that God had to destroy it all and give us a fresh start. Noah and his family were spared, so were loads of random animals... then, the rain stopped and the flood eventually dried up and God made a promise - not to destroy the earth by flood again. He set up the rainbow as a reminder of the promise.
Some of you got really excited there: Yeah, God isn't going to flood the earth again, he's going to send FIRE!! That was my reaction too - yep, it's that bad, that serious. Because after the flood, we got a new start but...hey we messed up again, BIG TIME!!! (Ring any bells?) But have you ever thought about this: isn't God really taking a loooooooooong time with this fire business??? We talked about God's love and his patience with us... he really is taking his time, so we have a chance to get back with him.
Simon, you asked a good question about this story that we didn't get round to answering: why did God tell Noah to build an ark?? I wonder if you guys read it again, thinking about how we talked about God wanting to give people chances...can you figure out some good reasons why God might have told Noah to build this massive floating zoo? Ideas below in backchat please!

Chapter 11:1-9: The Tower of Babel - people just don't learn do they? They go and make the same mistake again. This time, they even explain what they're trying to do. Let's build this huge tower to reach up to the heavens and make ourselves look really smart and powerful. Let's see if we ain't better than God is what they were basically saying.
So... God confused them with loads of different languages and they had to scatter - the tower was not finished because they couldn't understand each other. (God is so good - if he did something else to separate people, Deb would probably have no skills to speak of hahaha...)
Some of you wondered how people even managed to ever communicate with each other again? How do people learn each others' languages? People keep building skyscrapers now, why doesn't God just knock em all down? Some of you have ideas for the answers to these questions... we'd like to read them - chat back below!

So, you came up with some good stories... you also came up with a load of questions. We answered some of them in youth group. But not all... pray about them. The Bible doesn't give answers to everything - e.g. what colour were the chickens back in the day? Some things we just won't know, you'll have to keep them in mind to ask God hehe.. but bottom line is... God made a promise... can you trust him? Even if you don't know all the details and all the answers to your questions?