Reluctant Demon (14 page)

I tucked my tail and hunkered down just in case, but to my surprise, Satan did not swing at me as he usually did when he had nothing else to do with his frustration.

The look in his eyes was not so much anger as shock. He didn't say or do anything at all right then. He dropped his noisemaker by his side; the party was over. He walked out to my perch, climbed up on it, and looked down at Earth. He sat there for a long time and then began to mumble to himself.

"The Nephilim are hunters; how did they miss him?

Where was he hiding?" As he walked back toward his den, he snapped at me. "Listen to every word. Let nothing happen that I don't hear about before it happens."

So I hopped back on my perch, and I listened.

This is where it gets hard to explain what I saw. Ruah Ha Kadosh was clearly talking to Noah; I heard Him.

But because no one can really 
see
 where He is at any given moment, only where He's been, it looked like Noah was talking to the thin air.

"Noah, you are a righteous man and have found favor with God," the voice said.

Noah was a righteous man. That's what I heard Him say.

But what exactly did He mean by "righteous"? Satan would want to know. Certainly neither Noah nor his family had copulated with the mighty ones, but to be honest about it, he was not the only one on Earth who could say that. Maybe Noah had not broken any of God's rules.

"No," I reasoned. "That cannot be it. God hasn't made any more rules since that incident with the trees in Eden." Mankind had only one rule to obey, and look what happened. God was not about to make things worse by giving him any more. Whatever it was that had made Noah righteous, it was not about 
not
 doing something God had forbidden.

I looked over my left wing to see if the party had resumed, but it hadn't. It was eerily quiet. The other demons had gone back to their common lair. I had a clear line of sight to Satan's throne, where he sat staring at nothing.

He had not anticipated Noah. Now he had to regroup.

CHAPTER 17

MY ASSIGNMENT WAS
to stay on guard and watch how things developed with Noah.

Satan wanted to know if God's declaration about him being righteous might have a loophole in it somewhere.

"I hope so," I thought. "Maybe I can improve my standing with the group if I can report how I've found a legal technicality that might void the whole deal."

God continued to talk to Noah. "I am going to put an end to all people because Earth has become a sewer filled with violence and degradation. I am surely going to destroy every living thing. So make yourself an ark of cypress wood with rooms in it, and coat it with pitch inside and out."

Noah did not answer God. But if he had, by the look on his face, the whole of his reply would have been,

"OK, whatever." Noah did not come close to grasping the enormity of what God had said. God announced an extinction-level event, yet Noah failed to emit the slightest gasp. I wondered if God was a little disappointed in Noah's lack of enthusiasm.

I have a theory about how God wired humans. It's like He put a genetic code in their central nervous system to link them with their ancestors and descendants through a corporate memory, so to speak. The code and memory somehow keep them linked to one another across the centuries. That's why it's not uncommon for a person to look like or behave like a distant relative who lived long before. No doubt about it, Noah was from the same gene pool as Adam and Eve.

Think about it. Suppose God Almighty Himself stopped in your backyard one day to talk with you. Then suppose He told you He was about to destroy the whole neighborhood and save you and yours. Suppose He assigned you to do something you did not understand, and when you finally grasped it, it would be completely ridiculous. Wouldn't you have a few questions?

That is exactly what happened to Noah, minus the questions part. God talked to him about the end of the world, and Noah just stood there, nodding obediently at every word as if he understood everything being said to him. I could stand no more.

"Noah!" I shouted across the expanse, knowing full well no one would hear me. "This would be a good time to ask Him about the fine print. Get a little detail.

Define some terms. Let me help you out. Let's start with the obvious, what do you say?"

I paced back and forth on my perch as I tried to coach Noah from afar. "Ask God what an ark is. Start right at the beginning."

If I didn't know what an ark was, which I did not, I was dead certain Noah did not have a clue; but did he ask for clarity? Not one bit. Noah stood there with no more understanding of what God was saying than if He had told him to build a barbeque pit for a neighborhood get-together.

Then God said to Noah, "I'm going to bring a flood on Earth that will destroy everything alive under heaven.

Total destruction."

"Here's your chance, Noah," I coached from my perch.

"Impress God with your intellectual curiosity. Ask Him what a flood is. He knows you have no idea what He's talking about. You've never even seen it rain."

God continued, "I'm going to establish a covenant with you. You will board the ship, and your sons, your wife, and your sons' wives will come on board with you. You are also to take two of every living creature, a male and a female, to preserve their lives with you: two of every species of bird, mammal, and reptile; two of everything so as to preserve their lives along with yours. Also, get the food you'll need, and store it up for you and them."

Several alarms should have gone off in Noah's head right then, but nary a ding-dong sounded. God's plan failed to consider the personalities involved. Noah should have pointed out a few things to Him. He should have said, "God, You haven't really been down here in quite a while. Things have changed. You can't imagine how complicated these people You've made have now become, especially the women.

"Let me explain the downside of this plan and what You're about to unleash if You put these people on an ark together. An ark must be a boat of some kind, right? A mother-in-law and her three daughters-in-law in one boat, full of wild animals?"

"And with no one to help out but Adam's grandsons,"

I would have added.

Noah should have waved his arms at this point for effect. "I mean really, Your Majesty, stop and think this through for a minute. W h o is going to be in charge of what? W h o gets kitchen duty versus potty patrol? W h o is going to referee? It's not that I'm worried about the water, you understand. I am sure that I could survive Your flood if that's what You've got in mind for me.

Believe me, I'm grateful, but You've got to know it's tenuous at best as to whether or not any of the men can survive the boat ride."

Noah had nothing close to the training needed to go into the boat-building business. Maybe that's why it took him so long to get it done. He should have asked God from the get-go how long this project was supposed to take. Once he began, it seemed to take forever. To be sure, people lived longer in those days. Noah was himself six hundred years old, so perhaps they were not subject to the hurry-up syndrome that would develop in future generations. No matter, the longer it went on, the more people talked.

Noah tried to do everything just as God told him.

Unfortunately for Noah, God didn't mention anything about how the neighbors were going to react to a construction site and a petting zoo in the neighborhood.

They complained loudly when they weren't laughing at the crazy old man next door. His family was so humiliated; they finally stopped leaving the house at all during daylight hours.

Then one day it started to rain. It rained, and still it rained. It rained so much that for the second time in its history, floodwaters were about to cover the earth. Let me tell you, the water came from everywhere. It came from above, and it came from below. It poured from the sky, and it sprang up like a geyser from beneath the surface of the planet. It was a flood all right, but oddly, it was not the same kind of flood as the one Lucifer had caused before Adam.

Lucifer's flood came from Earth itself as creation retched and rebelled against the demonic hostility that had ravaged it. Lucifer's flood was a response by creation to drown itself rather than endure the onslaught of Lucifer's horde. In Lucifer's flood, the seas left their banks and became hostile and a haven for the disembodied spirits who had fallen from heaven with the rest of us.

Noah's flood was not like that at all. Lucifer's flood rendered all of Earth empty and void. Noah's flood was water, but it was just water. What it would cover would emerge again in a viable form. The flood would not destroy Earth itself, only the breathing life upon it.

I watched as Noah and the kids, the kids-in-law, and all of those animals went into the ark as God Himself closed the door behind them. More than that, I watched the other people who stood around mocking Noah.

Even as the rain fell, they remained unconcerned and completely unaware of what was about to happen to them. But when the waters rose above the roofs of their houses and the ark began to float, they began to call to Noah for help. Some swam toward the ark and might have latched on to it, but they were overrun and pushed down into the water by the Nephilim, who were intent on escaping the flood.

Being part human and part angel, the Nephilim were enormous and of great strength. They swam madly for the ark and climbed its outside walls, grabbing hold of the deck with their fierce clawlike hands. Noah and his sons fought them off by pounding their hands with hammers, forcing them to let go. The Nephilim were the very reason for the destruction of life upon Earth; they could not be allowed to escape the flood.

Soon all life would succumb to the waters, which covered Earth for one hundred fifty days. I sat on my perch for every one of them watching the ark. I could not stop thinking about why or how Noah had found favor with the Lord.

"Based on what?" I asked myself. "Of all the human possibilities, why was Noah singled out for such a purpose? When did Noah come to know God so well that he would sign on to such an outlandish plan? Noah must have had some doubt as to whether two of every kind of animal in the world would simply wander up to the ark and get in. He didn't even own a dog. He didn't know the first thing about taking care of wild animals, some of which were natural enemies; some were even prone to eat the others.

As I thought about how simple Noah was, I wondered whether or not he was God's first choice for the job. I watched humans all the livelong day. I knew how many there were and where they were, and I can tell you from my careful observation, there were other candidates who had it more together than Noah did. Whether or not God had spoken to anyone else about the job opening, I could not say since that whole interview process slipped right by us. But if He had, I suspect one or two of the other humans would have interviewed pretty well.

Right off the top, I could think of several engineers I had monitored in the past who had a lot of potential.

Any of them would have had some good ideas for God.

Certainly they would have been able to show Him how to make the construction process more efficient. In a one-on-one tussle of know-how and corporate ambition, Noah would have lost out against any of those guys who could have done the job in half the time. As I saw it, Noah was a poor choice and barely got the thing built before the rains came. Why did God choose him? What made him righteous? God spoke, and Noah obeyed.

Could it really be that simple?

"Of course," I clicked my claws together and said aloud. "It's God's soft spot."

God was a soft touch when confronted with unquestioning obedience; He always had been.

Finally, on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat, and by the first day of the first month of Noah's six hundred first birthday, the water had almost completely dried up.

Noah removed the covering from the ark, and by the twenty-seventh day of the second month, Earth was completely dry. God called them out, and Noah was so glad to be off that boat, he set up an altar and sacrificed an offering to God. You might know he would lock dead-on to God's other soft spot: worshipful gratitude.

This pleased God so much that He went way over the top and spoke an incredible promise over Earth, which I was sure He would come to regret.

"I'll never again curse the ground because of people.

I know they have this bent toward evil from an early age, but I'll never again kill off every living thing by a flood."

"God," I wanted to cry out, "will You listen to Yourself? This human experiment of Yours has fatal flaws.

Don't get sentimental now. Retain your options. You know You will never put up with the evil that man is capable of conceiving."

I was getting so worked up I was tempted to fly right out there and confront God to His face.

"Remember how You completely overreacted to that pride business when You threw us out of heaven?" I would demand. "What? Now You're going to ignore all that man is sure to do to rebel against You in the future?

Listen to what You just said. How could You promise such a thing? What can You possibly be thinking?"

I was mad at and felt bad for God at the same time.

I knew such an impetuous display of love and hope like what had burst forth from Him was going to be a heart-break later on. He had to know that it would only be a matter of time until mankind fell into rebellion again.

Noah was old and now too dependent on the wine to hold out much hope for further exploits. His children held no great promise that I could see. One of them, Ham, well, let's just say that apple not only fell far from the tree, but also it rolled down the street to the next block.

The cold chill crawling up my spine alerted me that Satan had come close to my perch. I wished he wouldn't do that; my nerves were bad enough.

"Is the flood over?" he asked.

"Yes," I replied. "And it looks to me that God has made a tactical error that will make it more difficult for Him to deal with Earth in the future. Maybe He has no further plans for it after this generation."