Noah Movie – Fact of Fiction? Who cares? What about God? (Part 1)

The epic blockbuster Noah opens this weekend, and it has stirred quite a bit of press from both Christians and non-Christians alike. Is the story true to the bible’s depiction? While many Christians debate whether or not to see the movie, fearing how it doesn’t stay true to the bible story, to me there’s a bigger problem that the Christian world is not addressing.

Whether this movie is true to the bible or not is not nearly as outrageous as the story’s implications within the biblical account itself.

Why is God drowning the whole world except for the eight that came into the ark? The difficulty for me is to admire, love and worship a God who decides that He’s had enough to wipe away everyone who doesn’t agree with Him. The worse is that the bible doesn’t only have this story, but it has too many other problem stories throughout. A person I much admire once said about the bible, “keep reading it, it might get worse before it gets better.”

If the Bible is indeed true and it is reliable evidence of God dealing with humanity, then why are these stories included in?

The whole story of the flood underlies one or two main questions, “how does an all-powerful God use His power?” “Why would God drown the whole world?”… whatever other questions like “did dinosaurs get into the ark?”, “was it a local or global flood”?, or any other logistical question pales in comparison to the one that deals with the character of God.

It saddens me that while the movie brings this story into evidence, I know the movie won’t address the “why” God did it, or it might, but it probably will imply that the “why” is because He’s a blood-thirsty, petty, angry deity much like Zeus. And I’ll grant that the bible doesn’t help much in his PR.

I think that understanding the why is the most important question for us today, and perhaps throughout our lives. This question is the one that immediately comes after the “Does God exist?” question. I would suspect that many atheists would have no problem conceding that God does exist if all we had was the story of Jesus… but the problem is the rest of the bible… the way God is portrayed in Genesis and everywhere else.

If you’d like to dialogue about the why, here’s a starting set of questions:

• What is your take on God’s character in regards to the flood?
• Why did He wipe out the entire human race?
• Suppose you have 10 kids and 9 of them misbehave so terribly… would you wipe them all away?
• If God is love, then why did He do this? Is this the loving thing to do?

I’ll offer my thoughts in a few other upcoming posts.

PS: And about the movie, I’ll have my take on it after I watch it, but before then, I’ll leave you this quote, from Kathleen Parker in the Washington Post:

… Note the frequent use of the word “movie” in the preceding paragraphs. This is because “Noah” is a movie. It is not a sermon or a call to prayer. It cost $130 million to make and is intended to entertain, inspire and — bear with me, I know this is crazy — make money. It does not presume to encourage religious conversion, disrespect a prophet or evangelize a snake, though it does glorify virtue in the highest.