Tag: Noah

Origin Story — Don’t be a Nimrod

This is an amended version of a sermon I preached at City South Presbyterian Church in 2022. If you’d prefer to listen to this (Spotify link), or watch it on a video, you can do that. It runs for 34 minutes.

You’ve heard about the State of Origin, well, in this section of Genesis, we’re reading about the origin of states, nation-states, to be precise. It turns out, in the Bible’s narrative, these entities are more connected than we might think; they’re part of the same family tree, even while they appear to be lifelong rivals.

In our last section of the Genesis story things were looking up. Noah resembled a new Adam, ruling over the animals — saving them, providing for them, releasing them to be fruitful and multiply. And like a priest, he was building an altar, making a sacrifice — a precursor to the atonement sacrifices made in the temple by a righteous representative. They were even on a mountain, a heaven-meets-earth space, where God promised not to destroy everything again, even though there’s a hint that nothing in the hearts of humans had changed.

In this section there’s even more Eden imagery at play. Adam, the man of the ground, placed in Eden, is replaced by Noah, the man of the ground, who plants a vineyard. It produces fruit, and Noah enjoys the fruit of his labours — too much. Like Adam and Eve, he encounters some trouble with the fruit in his garden, and he becomes unashamedly naked. He lies uncovered in his tent.

Now, Noah finds himself in trouble. But let’s just examine some of the parallels to Genesis 2 — where Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed; there was no risk. They were meant to enjoy the fruit of the garden. Noah does something dumb, but this is not a repeat of the fall here — he becomes the fruit, lying there, unable to act. Noah becomes a test for his sons. Sin is crouching at their door. Will they be like another ‘ground man’ — Cain?

Something super sketchy happens here, and there’s a bit of “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” happening. Ham fails. He “saw his father naked” (Genesis 9:22).  We’re primed to see his actions as problematic because, when Noah’s sons are reintroduced, we get the sideways comment that Ham is the father of Canaan an historic enemy of God’s people at any time this story is being read as part of the Torah when it is completed (Genesis 9:18, 22). He’s the father of the Nephilim-sized enemies who pop up (Numbers 13:32). Genesis 6 should be ringing in our ears as readers. There’s a good case that behind this euphemism we’re reading the origin story of Canaan, and “seeing his uncovered father naked” is innuendo for something sinister. In Genesis 2, nakedness is neutral; there’s nothing to suggest that seeing nakedness itself is a sin; there’s something more happening. Ham is cursed because he does something wrong.

In Genesis 3, once sin enters the picture, coverings are first made by people, then by God as protection from our vulnerability to beastly predators who’ll take advantage of nakedness — a pattern maybe implied with the Sons of God ‘seeing’ human women that we see explicitly as David acts as a predatory Son of God and takes Bathsheba.

Ham’s transgression is a big deal; it’s a fall; he gets cursed as a result (Genesis 9:25). I’m not sure we’re meant to think he just had a laugh at his nude dad. There’s something going on where he is dishonouring, maybe even usurping his dad in a repeat of the sort of grasping evil that has led to a curse so far, it’s a pretty seedy origin story for Canaan.

Because when Leviticus — the same part of the Old Testament, by the same author, talks about uncovering people’s nakedness, well, here’s how the ESV translates these same Hebrew words in Leviticus 18:7: “don’t uncover the nakedness of your father, which is the nakedness of your mother” — and that’s a euphemism for sex. Then, Deuteronomy uses the same Hebrew phrase here in this verse — that says a man shall not take his father’s wife, or uncover his father’s nakedness. So later on, you read about Lot and his daughters, who get their dad drunk — in a sort of mirror of this story — to produce children who become the Moabites and Ammonites (Genesis 19:35-37). You can take all that with a grain of salt; but the parallels are there, and so is the law — even if it makes us feel a bit seedy, which is maybe an unfortunate play on words when we’re trying to follow the line of seed that will produce a serpent crusher; rather than the seedy, beastly humanity we see running around in the story.

But before we follow Ham, the father of Canaan’s line, we see Noah’s other two sons acting rightly. They act like God in the Garden, covering up Noah’s nakedness without bringing him shame. They go above and beyond to do what is right for their father. When Noah wakes up; he finds out what Ham has done, and acts like God, pronouncing a curse on Ham’s line (Genesis 9:24-25). Ham’s seedy line is not the line of seed. His line will be the lowest of the low; literally the servant of servants, like a serpent on its belly, and he gives a blessing to their brothers (Genesis 9:26-27). That will be a pattern that repeats in Genesis. It’s also one we’ve seen before; one brother receiving blessing and approval, while the other receives a curse because sin devoured him and made him a devourer. It’s these two family lines, God’s children and the serpent’s — a line of blessing, and a line of curse — continuing.

Shem’s really the one to watch — it’s a fun side fact that his name literally means “name,” especially because we’re going to see people keep trying to make a name for themselves… but he and Japheth are blessed, while Ham isn’t even named now; just his kid Canaan, and the nation his line represents in the story.

Then we’re told Noah dies (Genesis 9:28-29), and we get a long list of the generations of Noah’s kids  in what gets called the Table of Nations (Genesis 10). This is how the Genesis origin story offers an origin story for all the people Israel knew or dealt with in their national life in the Old Testament.

It’s a weird genealogy because it’s very deliberately stylized; it becomes a sort of symbolic picture of all the people of the world — there are seven times ten nations — those numbers repeat all through the Torah — seventy nations. Everyone.

This section is bracketed with this statement that all the people come from this family tree. This origin story — like with Genesis 1 — is making the point that everyone under heaven, even Israel’s enemies who they might want to see as not human, everyone was made to perform the same function; to represent God; and everyone in the story comes from the same flesh and blood — the one humanity. We have the same breath of life in our lungs, and the same lifeblood pumping through our bodies by our hearts.

And we’ll see, in the line of Ham — we get the Bible’s origin story for Babylon; it’ll retell that story from a different angle in the story we look at next week, because it’s going to become a big deal in the Bible’s story.

In Japheth’s line, we get a whole bunch of nations, and then we zero in on just two of their sons — Gomer and Javan — to get a spreading out into other nations — and these nations will become pretty significant in the trajectory of the Old Testament story.

So, for example, Javan is the Hebrew word for Greece, and the others found coastal city-states of the Mediterranean. These nations are spreading, each with their own language… and there’s an interesting chronology thing going on here with the Babel story where these languages emerge in the narrative; this chapter foreshadows and provides some broader background for chapter 11.

Then we meet Ham’s kids — Cush, which is Ethiopia — then Egypt, where Israel spends time in slavery and captivity before the Exodus, Put, and Canaan — the giant enemies of God who occupy the land. In this line we meet sons and nations that share names with places watered by the rivers of Eden (Havilah and Cush, see Genesis 2:11-14). Presumably, the story is telling us that the life that flowed through Eden ultimately flowed out and watered the land and provided life where these nations would spring up from the ground after the flood. The other rivers — the Tigris and Euphrates — head into Babylon.

And that’s where we go next, from Ham, via Cush, we get the story of the founding of later, and maybe greatest, enemies of God’s people. Babylon and Assyria (Genesis 10:8-12), other than this bit, the Table of Nations is mostly a genealogy with a few bits of commentary thrown in, but we throw to story mode here, which makes you think this bit is at the centre of the narrator’s purposes.

We’re told some details about the founder of these later empires that throw back to pre-flood life, or patterns. Nimrod is a mighty warrior — just like the Nephilim — it’s the same in the Hebrew as the ‘heroes of old’ (Genesis 10:8, Genesis 6:4). This is a human who spreads bloodshed like Cain and Lamech and the Nephilim; a violent ruler, perpetuating the type of behaviour that caused the flood. He’s a warrior “on the earth” (Genesis 10:8); we’ve been set up to see earth as different from heaven, and as the domain for human rule as we fill the earth, and he’s filling the earth with violence.

His name comes to mean ‘mighty hunter’ because — even though animals have only just been given to humans as food, he’s a real good beast-master — a beast-killer (Genesis 10:9).  It didn’t take long between God giving Noah and his descendants animals to eat — with the caveat that animals would fear humans — for Nimrod to give a reason why. This isn’t the sort of rule Genesis 1 pictures for humans over animals, it’s not how Noah cared for the animals. He’s an anti-Adam who builds violent cities instead of a garden (Genesis 10:10-12).

From there, we get the whole list of the people who will enslave Israel, or who they have to displace from the lands later, and a description of them spreading out into that land (Genesis 10:13-20).

Ham’s line isn’t going to be the line where the seed of the story we follow comes from — it’s a dead end filled with violent and grasping nations who get caught up in a cycle of violence, and who’ll violently oppose God’s kingdom coming. The beastly line of Ham produces Canaan and Babylon and Nephilim-like heroes like Nimrod.

And one of the points here — in this narrative — especially if you’re reading the story in one of these empires — is don’t be a Nimrod — there’ll be a tradition that expands from here that pictures God’s people as shepherds who exert mastery over beasts, but who care for animals as an analogy to how God cares for people, and of God’s people beating swords into plowshares — resisting these patterns. Not being like Nimrod and his bloody empires. Empires built on seedy sex — ‘uncovering the nakedness’ of others, and bloody violence; empires that consume.

It makes you wonder how much we participate in systems of violence in our cities and empires — how much we benefit from Babylon and our own Nimrods, even in our consumer choices and how we treat animals — and look, this is a rabbit hole — but this is one of the reasons I went from thinking cheap eggs were good stewardship because we could use the money to look after people or save their souls, to thinking more carefully about what I buy; and it’s part of what’s admirable about those who choose to be vegetarian or vegan in order to not be a Nimrod. I don’t think you have to do that, but it’s a costly decision not to benefit from the Babylons around us. You can’t call people out of Babylon if you’re busy loving life in it.

But we start getting a seed planted here, for the Hebrew reader — because in Shem’s line we get the line of Eber — the Hebrew word for Hebrew (Genesis 10:24). This is the family tree that the rest of the story is going to keep following — all the way to Jesus. We’ve met men of name — the Nephilim — and we’ll see humans trying to make a name for themselves next week in Babel; but Shem’s name is literally the Hebrew word for name; and his family will be the one who represents God’s name in the world. And this is another story where God picks the younger brother, not the older.

This family ends up in the eastern hill country (Genesis 10:30). There’s another movement east; God will call them back from the east when he calls a descendant of this line — Abram — to come and live in the land of Canaan (Genesis 12:1).

But this table of nations wraps up as it begins — reminding us not of the future violence that will tear this family tree apart, but that this is one family spread out through the earth (Genesis 10:32). The story suggests all people share something in common in our humanity; and if we go back far enough in the origin story, it’s that we’re made to live as God’s image in the world; to be fruitful and multiply as we represent Him in the way we rule creation. That’s a stunning view of one’s neighbours, especially one’s enemies — to see one another as siblings. If you’re one of the Hebrew people, whose story this becomes, especially if those neighbours are staring at you along the blade of a sword, making you a slave in Egypt or an exile in Babylon, this is a powerfully different view from the stories you’ll find in those nations ruled by the Nimrods of the world.

As the story of the Bible unfolds, all the nations — even the Hebrews — end up like Nimrod; trying to build kingdoms on violence and bloodshed. And they all end up violently opposed to God — going to war not just with his people, but with him.

So in the story of this line of seed — that becomes the twelve tribes of Israel, and then the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin — the Jews — the story that becomes the Old Testament — these nations pop up over and over again until it all comes to a head. In Ezekiel, God promises to go to war with these nations of the world — nations from our table here, descendants of the sons of Noah — he says, “I am against you” — and names names who come from the table of nations — from the lines of Ham and Japheth — or their descendants. God says he’ll bring all the troops — the warriors — out… from the many nations — a mighty horde of Nimrods who violently oppose God’s people, and then God will destroy these nations (Ezekiel 38:3-6). He will execute judgment the way he did on Egypt — plagues — the many nations will be confronted by God’s holiness, and he’ll make himself known to “these many nations” — the nations of Genesis 10 — the whole world, so they will know he is the Lord (Ezekiel 38:23).

Daniel also picks up the table of nations. After the fall of Babylon and its great Nimrod-like king Nebuchadnezzar (who we’ll see more of next post) comes Persia — a lesser empire. It gets swallowed up in a violent war against the “Kingdom of Javan” (this gets translated as Greece for us in the English), but it’s the same word as in Genesis 10 (Daniel 11:2-3). There a mighty king will be raised up — probably Alexander the Great; a giant Nimrod. Once he dies two Greek empires, based in Egypt to the south, and Syria to the north, fight to the death. This all happened in history and it’s possible that the final written form of Daniel reflects this history. The conflict swallows up the nations of the Table of Nations, as these Nimrods slaughter thousands (Daniel 11:11-13), until the massive Nimrod from the south dies (Daniel 11:45).

But as these nations rage, and these kingdoms rise and fall, God still reigns. Daniel ends with this picture of God’s Kingdom emerging at this time, in this violent world of Nimrods, mighty warriors of the earth, the Kingdom of Heaven will turn up (Daniel 12:1-2). Daniel says when this happens — when God’s Kingdom emerges — the wise will shine not like earthly Nimrods (or even earthling Adams), but like the brightness of the Heavens; shining like stars (Daniel 12:3). He’s already pictured this happening when the Son of Man enters the throne room of Heaven (Daniel 7:13-14).

So, let’s tie up some threads. We’ve got Noah, a new Adam who fails, and whose son fails spectacularly and is cursed to become a servant of servants. From his line, we don’t get servants but Nimrods — anti-Adams — enemies of God’s people. Ultimately, all the lines in the table of nations become like Babylon — like Nimrod — even the Hebrews, which is why they end up in exile, living by the sword and dying by it. We’re waiting for a kingdom of shining heavenly people to emerge, led by a king who won’t take on the grasping pattern of Ham, or be a violent warrior king.

This king builds an empire with power but reveals God’s glory to the world. By the end of Daniel’s timeline — and the Old Testament — all these nations and empires have been united under the biggest Nimrod of all. What Babylon, Persia, and Greece tried to do, Rome does. Rome is an empire that unites these nations through violence. And the cross is where all these threads are tied together.

Jesus — the true Israel — has returned from exile. He’s crossed the Jordan and entered Jerusalem from the east, and entered the temple to cleanse it. At the cross, Jesus is surrounded by a bunch of Nimrods. The armies of all the nations from the table of nations, united under the banner of Rome. Even Israel joins in. These Nimrods put him to death because, like the Nephilim and the serpent, this violence has always been aimed at overthrowing God. And God’s judgment falls on the world, as he also reveals His king and saviour, who ascends to heaven as the Son of Man.

And we have a choice.

We live in a world of Nimrods. In states, and economies, built on violence, grasping, and seedy sex. We turn anything into a fight. Nation against nation. State against state. Culture against culture. Mate against mate. Sibling against sibling. Sport. Politics. Conflicts in community groups, families, even churches. We fight culture wars and jump on bandwagons behind people fighting the good fight. Sometimes we even fight for good things without realizing we’re using the weapons of warfare handed to us by Babylon, so that we become just like our neighbours.

We’ll either pick a Nimrod — or Goliath — a champion — to represent us, or try to be a hero making a name for ourselves in these fights, and that’s just stupid.

We’re called to be people of peace, following the Prince of Peace, not Nimrods.

Look how Paul describes how Jesus fulfills all these threads. We’re not waiting for this kingdom to emerge, for some future battle — the kingdom is emerging, and with it comes a new non-Nimrod pattern for life. Paul says in our relationships we should have the same mindset as Jesus (Philippians 2:5). He’s just unpacked that as having the same love as Jesus, pursuing oneness in his way of life. He says we should do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit — not try to make a name for ourselves — but be humble (Philippians 2:3-4). This is an anti-violent, anti-grasping, anti-Nimrod, anti-Ham, anti-Cain, anti-serpent way of life.

It’s the way Jesus lived when he didn’t consider equality with God something to be grasped. Adam and Eve, Cain, the sons of God, Ham, they all take things to serve themselves, chasing equality with God. Jesus didn’t seize anything for his own advantage, but made himself nothing, became a servant. Ham’s curse was service. Jesus takes on Ham’s curse. He even becomes human (Philippians 2:6-7). God being made in human likeness is an upside-down Genesis 1. Jesus becomes obedient to death on a cross (Philippians 2:8). He lets the beastly Nimrods kill him to expose the evil human heart that even kills God if it meant we could grab more, and at the same time exposing the heart of God that we’re called to share, as his children.

And as he takes on what looks like a curse, descending from the heights of heaven to become the lowest on earth, as he’s given over to violent human empires, God exalts him to the highest place, and he gives him a name — a Shem — above every name, so that at his name not only should every Hebrew knee bow but every knee in heaven and on earth and even under the earth — heavenly and earthly creatures — all the characters we’ve met in Genesis, and every human ever — will bow to him as Lord and King (Philippians 2:10-11). Jesus is the King who brings the kingdom pictured in Daniel — the anti-Nimrod King of the anti-Babylon, and who makes God’s name known in fulfilment of Ezekiel (Philiippians 2:12).

And if we join the kingdom of the anti-Nimrod and take up his call to be people of peace who bow our knee to him, receiving his Spirit to change our hearts and minds — taking on his pattern of love, humility, and service, we’ll be blameless and pure children of God — shining people in a generation of Nimrods. We’ll shine among the other kingdoms like stars in the sky — just as Daniel said would happen when God’s kingdom turned up (Philippians 2:15-16).

As Jesus’ kingdom unfolds in Acts — from Shem’s descendants in Jerusalem and Samaria, to the ends of the earth — we see those scattered in Genesis coming home. Even a descendant of Ham’s son Cush — the father of the Ethiopians — we meet an Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:27). He’s reading the Old Testament book of Isaiah, and when this Ethiopian is convinced Jesus is the Messiah, he gets baptised (Acts 8:28-39). This is a picture of the table of nations coming home through living waters. And so are we as we come to faith in Jesus.

Wherever we’re from — in the Bible’s story, we’re humans with the same lifeblood and God’s breath giving us life — and we can become children of God through Jesus’ invitation for all humanity to come back into God’s family tree of life, not by his breath, but with his Spirit dwelling in us.

The radical inclusion of people from all nations marks Christianity as profoundly different from the religious and political vision of Babylon. There’s no more ethnically diverse community in the world, or in history, than the church. And this unity works when we follow Jesus, because he’s a king unlike Nimrod, who builds a kingdom unlike Babylon, or any kingdoms of this world, marked by a pattern of live and love that looks like him.

Don’t be a Nimrod, or line up behind them in any kind of tribalism or culture war that pushes people away from God, be like Jesus. Find your life as a child of God by taking up his pattern of service; not as an expression of curse, but to bless the world.  

December 28, 2023 Add Comment

Origin Story — The Ark and the Covenant

This is an amended version of a sermon I preached at City South Presbyterian Church in 2022. If you’d prefer to listen to this (spotify link), or watch it on a video, you can do that. It runs for 41 minutes.

This is a story we all know, right? There are hundreds of kids book retellings. You can find toy arks with pairs of animals in houses, toy shops, and even public kindergartens and schools around the world. It’s a story that even transcends Christianity; obviously it’s a Jewish story before it becomes our story; but it’s also part of the Muslim world. In fact, many nations around Israel, and even further afield, told stories of a man, and a boat, escaping through a  cosmic flood.

I mentioned the Gilgamesh Epic last post; it has a flood story where Gilgamesh goes off to meet Utanapishtim, a man who’d been tasked by the gods to create a ship called “Preserver of Life.” He made a square box out of wood, here are the instructions.

“Make all living beings go up into the boat. The boat which you are to build, its dimensions must measure equal to each other: its length must correspond to its width.”

He took all the living beings; people and animals he could save, and they ended up on a mountain where he sent out birds — a dove, and a raven — before the ground came back, and sacrificed to the gods and became immortal.

“Mt. Nimush held the boat, allowing no sway. When a seventh day arrived I sent forth a dove and released it. The dove went off, but came back to me; no perch was visible so it circled back to me… I sent forth a raven and released it. The raven went off, and saw the waters slither back”

Gilgamesh wants the secret of this immortality, but he can’t get it.

And of course, much more recently we had Russell Crowe’s version of Noah; and look, I loved this movie, but it retold the flood story as a story where God responded not to violence and sin on the earth, between humans, so much as violence against the earth; as a parable about climate change and the coming environmental collapse.

It’s a versatile story; and it’s one where all these versions leave us wondering what the point is, and what the truth is. The story creates questions like “what scale was the flood; local, on ‘the earth’ as the readers would’ve understood it, or covering the entire globe as we’d understand it? Did it actually wipe all people out? And we saw last week that there are Nephilim, or their descendants either side of the story. Did all the cultures that have the story also have a hero on a boat? What’s the Genesis story doing in contrast with the Gilgamesh story and others like it — not just how is it similar — including stories about the foundation of Babylon, which we’ll get to in Genesis in the next few weeks.

These are all good questions worth pondering, but they aren’t necessarily the questions we’ll be answering; we’re looking at how these stories are the origin story for the Bible; the origin story for Jesus. We’re seeing how they create thread — concepts and ideas — that run all the way through the Bible, so our questions are a little bit different.

So here’s a 10,000 foot summary of the story so far as we’ve seen it in Genesis that sets us up to understand the Noah story, we’ll go from there to look at the story in more detail, then see how ideas get picked up and woven together and land us with Jesus.

You ready. In the beginning, after God made the Heavens and the Earth; the waters of the deep were a barrier to life — making the world desolate and uninhabited, while the Spirit of God hovered over the waters (Genesis 1:1-2).

God pushed back the waters to make sky — and a cosmic dome, a vault. The waters are held at the barrier between heavens and earth (Genesis 1:6-7), and then separated on the earth; so that land appears (Genesis 1:8-9); which will then be filled with plants and animals — birds, fish, and ground critters (Genesis 1:20-24). We’re told they all have the breath of life in them (Genesis 1:30), and finally God makes people as his living images; living idol statues; who ruled these other creatures, and spread the good garden of Eden across the face of what had been a desolate and uninhabited earth, to be fruitful and multiply, as we represent him. We were God’s answer to the desolate and uninhabited world (Genesis 1:26, 28), made to tend it as gardeners — male and female — who lived with God and ate from the tree of life — working together to bring life, and to resist chaotic forces from the heavenly realm (Genesis 2:15-17), like the serpent (Genesis 3:1). The serpent has other plans. He leads humanity down the garden path, so people turned against each other, and against God, and the environment became increasingly hostile; cursed and turned against us (Genesis 3:17), and humans are exiled; banished, from the garden and the Tree of Life (Genesis 3:22-23).

We saw Noah introduced in chapter 5 — super briefly last week — as a man who would reverse the curse. Noah gets positioned as a new Adam. Notice how he rules over the animals in this story; there’s repeats of the categories of animals God made in Genesis 1 over and over again in the flood story to make this point (Genesis 5:28-29, 6:8). But this new Adam comes as God prepares to begin again; to wipe out all the living stuff not ruled by Adam — and this seems extreme (Genesis 6:7), but we’re told humans were only evil, all the time (Genesis 6:5). And that the earth is full of violence.

Humans are bearing the image of all these beastly violent ‘gods’ and the serpent — so humanity increasing has become a problem because we’re not spreading fruitfulness; the likeness of God; but violence (Genesis 6:11-12). Violence is a real problem in the story, a sign of something gone wrong — corrupt — in humans. God is about to unmake what he has made, and to start again. He promises to destroy the earth; and it’s clear that he doesn’t mean totally eradicate, but there’s a de-creation happening, so he can re-create with his new Adam (Genesis 6:13). Just notice — as we skim by — that there’s a whole lot of seven-day references here; we’re being put in the mood to see the creation week as the background here. Seven pairs. Seven pairs. Seven days. Seven days (Genesis 7:2, 3, 4, 10).

As God sets Noah apart, he gives him a building plan. He’s told to put together this monstrosity that looks nothing like any boat that is actually capable of floating (Genesis 6:15-16); and often our picture books make this look more boat like than it is. This isn’t a boat. It’s a floating rectangular prism. God is going to put an end to all the life on the earth that has the breath of life in it. The breath of God that makes things alive will be withdrawn. There’s an undoing here. All these creatures — animals and humans — will perish without God to give them life (Genesis 6:17). The barrier to life that was there in the beginning — the waters — will return as the floodgates of heaven, the vault, opens along with the ‘deep waters’ of the earth (Genesis 7:11-12).

The water, we’re told, comes specifically from what God has been holding back in the heavenly dome; and in order to separate water and land. The separated waters from Genesis 1 become unseparated, the great deep bursts and the floodgates are opened. We go back to Genesis 1:1. The darkness and the deep; a desolate and uninhabitable world.

Everyone except Noah, his family, and the animals they save will die because God’s going to establish his covenant with Noah; and he’s going to start again (Genesis 6:18-19). And that’s how it happens. After the waters opens up, Noah and his family enter the ark (Genesis 7:13). The animals join him, just as God commanded, and God shuts them in. He’s going to preserve life on this ark. The people inside, and animals, are sealed in by him, and protected from the waters from death. The ark; this rectangle box; is going to be one space on earth where God keeps giving life, when everything else is overrun by chaos waters, this ark where God’s covenant people are held — where the breath of life is still on the earth —will keep people alive, through the de-creation moment, and into a new world when the waters recede (Genesis 7:15-16). And then, once the waters are in place — and once the people and animals are in place too — there’s a throwback to the beginning (Genesis 7:18-19).

The ark is lifted from the earth, up towards the heavens, just have this picture of the reality in mind.

It goes up higher than the mountains; high places where people would meet with God, and this box with the only breath of life left in the world, God’s breath, hovers over the waters. Just like god’s spirit does in chapter 1; it’s the same phrase (Genesis 1:2, 7:18)

The waters are now covering the earth again; and the earth is going to become desolate and uninhabited again; days 2 and 3 of the creation story are undone. The waters and land are not separated. There’s no dry ground.

Then days 4 and 5 are undone; all the creatures die — the listing of animals mirrors the list in Genesis 1. The animals. The birds. And all mankind (Genesis 1:30, 7:21). Everything with the breath of life in its nostrils — think back to Genesis 2 and God breathing life into the human — Adam — into his nostrils. Every living thing is wiped from the earth.

It all zeroes in on one man; a new Adam — Noah — and the people with him on the ark (Genesis 7:22-23).

They’re in the ark for a long time. I love the idea that we get in the Noah movie that while they were in the boat this faithful curse-reverser was telling his family the creation story in the darkness surrounded by the waters of the deep. It’s such a beautiful scene.

Noah — the curse reverser — is the great hope for a re-created humanity; he leads a remnant through this de-creation — through the chaos waters — and into a new garden.

God remembers his people on the ark and sends his breath, or Spirit, as a wind over earth; this is the same Hebrew word as when the spirit hovering on the waters in Genesis 1. He blows back the waters; and the waters recede (Genesis 8:1).

The cosmic floodgates are shut again; this is a new beginning; a repeat of Genesis 1 and God separating water and land to make a place for life. The water keeps receding; dry ground is appearing (Genesis 8:2-3). Starting with mountain tops; like the one the ark comes to rest on (Genesis 8:4-5).

And Noah — like Gilgamesh — sends birds out. First a raven, then a dove (Genesis 8:6-8). In Gilgamesh it’s the same birds but the other way round, and I’m not sure what to make of that. There’s an interesting little thing here where the dove goes out, hovering, flying, over the face of the waters; waters that cover the whole earth, a few times, until it eventually returns after another seven days. It returns with a sign that the earth is no longer fruitless; an olive branch. A fruitful tree.  So Noah finds dry ground, the water and ground are separating again (Genesis 8:13). And God calls him out of the ark; onto the dry land, with his human family, and all the animals — so they can all be fruitful and multiply again; it’s a re-creation moment (Genesis 8:16-17). Noah’s family emerges from the ark, onto a mountain. Mountains are everywhere in the Bible story right, as heaven-meets-earth places. Noah makes a sacrifice on a mountaintop, again like Gilgamesh (Genesis 8:20). God smells the aroma of his sacrifice and it pleases him so he makes a covenant with Noah and his family. A mountaintop promise to not de-create quite this way again. Even if human hearts have not changed; even if they’re still sinful all the time, there’ll always be people he preserves from judgment (Genesis 8:21).

There’s a big change in this repeat of the call to be fruitful and multiply. From this point, death becomes part of humans living in the land; specifically our rule over the animals. Where in Genesis 1, people were given plants and fruit — just like the animals were, now they’re given the animals as well. Who’ll be scared of them. It’s not Eden (Genesis 9:1-2). There are some limits to this violent domination, and those limits — around the lifeblood of an animal — build up to the prohibition against shedding the blood of another human. God won’t curse all people, but there’ll be an accounting for those who take up the pattern of Cain (Genesis 9:4-5). Those who turn their hands against an image of God will have their blood shed. Violence against a human is a desecration of the image of God (Genesis 9:6), and God makes a covenant not just with Noah and his family, but the animals too — not to destroy them (Genesis 9:9-10). It all looks so good, for a moment, until our next installment, where things go downhill super-fast.

But let’s look at some threads from here — de-creation to re-creation; through water — water where God provides salvation, while judging the earth for its violent opposition to his design for human fruitfulness. God providing dry ground for people, while holding back the chaotic waters is a type scene that repeats.

It repeats as God creates people for himself through water — little new creation moments happen throughout the Bible’s story. This word for ark gets used in one other story in the Old Testament. It’s different to the “ark of the covenant” though both are a box (and both come with building instructions that are similar), they’re different Hebrew words, but you know what is called an ark? The only other one in the story?

The basket Moses is placed in when the violent empire of Egypt orders babies to be thrown into the waters of the Nile (Exodus 2:3). When we meet Moses; Moses the rescuer of god’s people who is saved from the violence of Pharaoh, he’s placed in an ark, and put in the water.

So that old joke — ‘how many animals did Moses take in the ark?’ — the trick that’s meant to catch kids out… well… he couldn’t fit any. It was just a basket.

Moses’s mum finds a loophole with Pharaoh’s commands as she throws him into the Nile, but he is, in a way, symbolically dead in the water; relying on God to preserve him in his ark. His ark, like Noah’s, is made from plant and pitch (Genesis 6:14, Exodus 2:3). He’s raised to life from the Nile and named Moses because he’s “drawn from the water” and saved from violent forces opposed to God’s rule, and the fruitful multiplication of his people (Exodus 2:10). He’s a new Noah. The flood story is an Exodus story; God creating a covenant people through water.

Moses grows up and he goes head-to-head with Pharaoh, and there’s a fun thing where the plagues are de-creation moments too — but that’s a rabbit hole. His own origin story foreshadows the creation of Israel, God’s people, through the waters as they leave Egypt; the same waters that cover over the Egyptian war machine. The Exodus is a new creation story following the pattern of the flood, salvation and judgement fall, and God’s covenant people are protected and carried into a new fruitful land. God brings this salvation; new life because he remembers his people… Just like he remembers those on the ark (Genesis 6:14, Exodus 2:24). And as they head out of Egypt and are chased by the Pharaoh and his warriors — violent people opposed to God’s plan — Moses stretches out his arms, and just as god’s Spirit — a wind — that Hebrew word again — pushes the waters of the flood apart to make dry ground appear for Noah, God opens the waters for Moses and Israel to cross on dry ground. Israel is preserved; saved from death, brought to life, heading towards fruitful land (Exodus 14:21-22). While the violent army of the violent nation is destroyed under the waters. The chariots, the horsemen, are all wiped out (Exodus 14:28).

As God’s people sing about this salvation they sing about God’s wind — his Spirit — moving the seas; for their salvation, and against their enemies. It’s a flood again (Exodus 15:10). And on the other side of the waters they become a covenant people called to be fruitful and multiply. In Exodus they’re called to be a nation of priests, formed through the waters as god saves and judges; bringing death and life. And Moses leads the people up a mountain — into the heavens; like Noah being up above the mountains. Moses and Noah both build altars on mountains, and make sacrifices. There’s heaps of parallels (Exodus 19:5-6).

Now just imagine, for a moment, that this is your origin story; as a nation — both these stories — the story of Noah and of Moses; of God saving through waters; leading people on dry ground into fruitful life while judging violent enemies of his plan and people. Imagine you’re surrounded by a violent nation, Babylon, with its own flood story. A story where violent gods flood the earth because of noisy humans who are disturbing their partying and rest, and where you’re never quite sure if they’re going to do it again if you get a bit uppity. They’ve got this story keeping them on their toes; keeping them obeying the violent king who represents the violent gods; you’ve got the story of Noah, and Moses, and maybe the idea that god might save a people from this sort of violent empire through water again.

There’s this promise, in Isaiah — the same chapter where we got the branch of Jesse a few weeks back — that looks forward to the waters of Egypt and Babylon being swept back by a wind of God — the Spirit — so that people will walk on dry ground again and a remnant of his people will be saved and walk on this ground towards life, just like Israel in the Exodus (Isaiah 11:15-16).

At the end of the Old Testament Israel is waiting for this new Exodus — and in a way we all are. The world stays violent; human hearts are evil and opposed to God, and violent empires reign… And there hasn’t been a moment when all Israel — not just Judah, exiled in Babylon, have returned to be god’s people like Isaiah promises. God remains faithful to his promise to Noah though; holding back his judgment on a violent world, even if he does intervene in moments like the Exodus on behalf of his people.

And in this world, we get Noah, leading a remnant — a small family of people — through judgment; hoping for re-created life — but nothing changes — we get Moses — leading God’s nation towards the land; but right after he finishes his sacrifices on the mountain; Israel fails — just like Noah’s family — and we’ll pick that up next week — and then we get Jesus.

Here’s some cool threads running from the flood story to Jesus; from Israel’s origin story to ours. At Jesus’ baptism, John is baptising people on the east side of the Jordan —the Babylon side. He’s making a way for people head back into the promised land (John 1:28); announcing the beginning of the New Exodus with language from the Old Testament. As Jesus comes out of the water, there’s the Spirit hovering like a dove — it’s a flood moment and a Genesis 1 moment all at once. Something’s about to happen. New life is about to emerge (Matthew 3:16). John has just said Jesus will bring a different baptism — one with the Spirit, and with fire. He’s come to fix the human hearts that create violence; to lead another Exodus — bringing salvation and judgment — another ark; saving those who’ll listen and find life with god that raises us to the heavens (Matthew 3:11-12). Jesus will say he’s also going to experience another baptism; before he brings this fire, describing the cross as a baptism (Luke 12:49-50). The cross is where God brings judgment and salvation; a path out of death.

If violence against a human is a desecration of the image of God, then this is the ultimate expression of violent desecration of the ultimate image bearer with the ultimate debt now owed to God. At the cross, Jesus is surrounded by the violent forces that oppose god’s plan — like Noah; like Moses and Pharaoh; like Egypt and Babylon. He absorbs the blows.

At the Cross, God provides another timber vessel that saves; that carries us from this old violent world; a world under judgment; and into new life. Water and blood flood from his side, and in that flow we find both judgment and salvation. Those who reject Jesus and side with the violent world that kill him face death, while those who cling to the cross for life will be carried to new life.

We’ll see in a couple of weeks, when we get to Babel, how the baptism Jesus brings — by God’s Spirit coming like fire — brings a new Exodus. We’ll see and how that fire judges and saves, like John says Jesus’ baptism will (Matthew 3:11-12) separating those in God’s family — on the ark — his covenant people — from who choose the violent world.

But remember the Great Commission, where Jesus goes up a mountain and tells his people that God is with us, so we should baptise people and make disciples (Matthew 28:19); that’s a picture of this story becoming our story, through our own baptism.

Because that is what Baptism is; just as Noah’s ark — and Moses’ ark, and his leading God’s people to new life through the waters were Israel’s origin story; our baptism into the death and new life of Jesus is our origin story.

Romans 6 says baptism represents us dying with Jesus, going down into the water, sharing in his death; a death that came at the hands of the violent world; so that we might be carried to new life; raised up above the waters as heavenly people. Baptism is our flood story. Our Exodus. A picture of the old being washed away and new life emerging through death, and the Cross of Jesus is our Ark, raising us up into the heavens and holding us safe as judgment falls (Romans 6:4).

Peter picks up this idea in 1 Peter — where he talks about how we’re now Exodus people; a “Kingdom of priests,“ because we’ve been united in Jesus (1 Peter 2:9). He says this weird stuff about Jesus preaching to the spirits from before Noah’s time — and maybe that makes some sense after last week; especially because there’s this theory these demons (and others) were the ghosts of dead Nephilim. Then he says we’re people who are ‘saved through water,’ not saved ‘by water.’ It’s not that baptism saves, it’s this idea of being carried through death and judgment, like Noah in the Ark hovering over the water, protected by God, ‘put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit;’ saved to be raised up into the heavens; even further than the ark. Unlike in Gilgamesh, where death is the ultimate destiny of every human and immortality is a pipe dream, this divine life is for everyone who grabs hold of the boat (1 Peter 3:18-22).

When we’re baptised in water, this is what we’re representing; a story we make real for ourselves through actions. We’re part of the people of God created through the death and resurrection of Jesus. There’s something beautiful and true about infant baptism. Just like Noah’s family on the ark, and the kids in Egypt, we’re not saved by our own effort, but by jumping on the ark following the ultimate Noah (or Moses), Jesus. There’s also something beautiful about immersion, this picture of going down into the water, covered by flood waters — dying — and coming up made new. Baptism is a picture of death and resurrection.

When we see others baptised we, the baptised community, remember our ark; that carried us through the waters, through death, and into resurrection. We live as the baptised and baptising community; the dead made alive. We live as those who know that God promises he won’t flood the earth again, but that Jesus promises to return bringing judgment and salvation; life or death. We live knowing he came to bring a baptism, of the spirit, and fire, both re-creation and immortality and judgment on the violent and evil world that would kill God.

Life in this baptised community is life shaped by this story; life with new hearts that come by the spirit; life that rejects the violent and destructive world, even if this means stormy weather; but where we cling to the cross; life where maybe, like Noah, we value God’s creation and try to make little pockets of Eden, carrying them through the storm with us and our family. Telling our origin story; the Gospel; in the dark, hoping that it’ll shape us as we seek to point people to the light.

Just as an added final touch, we finished this service baptising a member of our church family who shared their testimony of finding life in the story of Jesus.

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December 26, 2023 1 Comment

Overthinking Noah: The Movie

Back when Noah came out on the silver screen I wrote a review for our church website called 13 Things to know about Noah, a little known fact is that before I wrote that piece, I wrote a 7,000 word ‘review’ that never saw the light of day. It’s on TV tonight. It just started. So here, if you want to read 7,000 words, is the unreleased, uncut, extended edition of that post.

There are lots of reviews of Darren Aronofsky’s take on the story of Noah floating around the vast oceans of the Internet. Lots of these reviews, especially those from Christians, aren’t particularly enamoured with the latest Hollywood treatment of a Biblical epic.

Noah is a challenging movie that will make you think about the depth of human sin, how we should relate to each other and our planet, the emotional cost of judgment and justice, the need for salvation, and ultimately it will make you ask questions about who God is, and if the God presented by the movie Noah is the God who steps into the muck of creation, in Jesus, to save us.

The God of Noah is not the God of the Bible, but Noah is a powerful cultural text for us to engage with to shape our thinking.

The God of the Bible is fundamentally interested in the human race, in relationship with humanity – and invests himself into transforming our dark and broken hearts.

This review will consider how we, as Christians, should respond to movies like Noah, and then explore some of the theologically rich themes that Noah prompts us to think about.

It won’t contain much hand wringing – and, spoiler alert, it’s main ‘criticism’ will be that my own worldview leads me to interpret the source material differently and to engage with the worldview presented in the movie critically. Engaged criticism is a perfectly appropriate response to art – provided we’re doing our best to understand the art and engage on its terms – and you can simultaneously appreciate a text and criticise its message.

Art exists to be critiqued and talked about – not to be swallowed as some sort of dogmatic didactic text that tells you what you most certainly think and do.

Noah provides a platform not just for fruitful discussion between Christians and the movie going public, but most importantly for us to reflect on what we believe and why it is important that our God is different to Noah’s. There are a few points where Noah’s theology is particularly interesting discussed in the second half of the post.

This is a long review, but it’s made to be skimmed as much as pored over – because everybody responds to art differently so different parts of this engaging with Noah as a text will appeal to different people.

Note – It’s going to be complicated talking about the four different Noahs here – there’s Noah the movie, the Noah narrative in The Bible, and the two characters – Aronofsky’s Noah, and the Biblical Noah. The movie will be italicised, and those other distinctions will be made as we go, or apparent as a result of context…

NOAH AS ART. NOAH AS TEXT. NOAH AS STORY

I had incredibly low expectations going into the cinema on Monday night – I’ve been strongly affected by previous Aronofsky vehicles like Requiem for a Dream and The Wrestler, but I’d read and watched so much negativity about this movie that I thought it was going to be a disaster. It wasn’t.

Let me make a couple of important points right up front.

Noah isn’t a Christian movie. From the interviews I’ve read – Aronofsky is a “cultural Jew” who drew on a range of Jewish sources, who also has a Catholic background, and he says he has belief in the Biblical God.

Noah is a movie that makes serious attempts to grapple with big theological questions – but many of the reviews around the web operate as though Noah is a story that belongs to evangelical Christians. Aronofsky chose to make Noah because he grew up with the story – both in the Jewish and Catholic traditions. While we, as Christians, believe the story of Noah only makes sense if it’s read in the light of Jesus (because we think the whole Bible points us to Jesus), the story has a place in Aronofsky’s heritage too.

READING NOAH AS A TEXT

A movie is a “text.” It’s important to read texts on their own terms – to interpret according to genre, to the intention of the author, to review things based on the meaning the text is trying to convey (especially if the author of the text tells us what that is). That’s common courtesy. If you’re going to enter into a dialogue with someone or something, it’s polite to understand the position you’re engaging with.

Plenty of reviews have torn Noah to shreds because it isn’t faithful to the Biblical narrative. This is an understandable criticism, because the story of Noah is one we hold dear, but it assumes that Darren Aronofsky has a responsibility to present a text according to our worldview, rather than his own.

This is an odd view of art and the artist. Or of a text and its author.

It’s also an interesting view of the ownership of an ancient text that belongs to many traditions – including Christians. We can’t assume that there were no storytellers telling the story of Noah and the flood before Moses wrote it down a long time after the fact. While we may believe we have the truest telling of the story that doesn’t give us exclusive rights to tell it or to criticise people for not telling it our way.

Noah is a creative use of a story contained in the Bible to present a worldview, sure, and this worldview is theological – it’s just not about the Christian God because there is no sense that the story is connected to Jesus.

Here’s perhaps the greatest irony in the online outrage about Noah. Harnessing the Noah story for theological agendas outside of God’s agenda is so old that it actually predates Moses writing down the Noah story in Genesis (the story would have been passed by word of mouth until it was written down). Moses wrote about Noah generations after the fact, and by that time just about every culture and religious group from the Ancient Near East had a flood story that interpreted a cataclysmic flood according to their theological convictions (eg the Gilgamesh Epic).

And when it comes to the story of Noah itself – Jewish, Islamic, and Christian interpreters all understand and tell the story of Noah (and indeed the entire Old Testament) differently. We understand that the story of Noah helps us understand the story of Jesus. And we should, as Christians, be thankful that Aronofsky chose the story we’re conversant with, so that we can converse with it. This could easily be Gilgamesh.

You don’t have to like a movie for it to be a good or useful movie. You don’t have to agree with the worldview a movie presents in order to enjoy the movie and think it is worth engaging with. You don’t have to dismiss a movie simply because it challenges your view of the world. If we only want to view and consume art and media that conforms to our own view of the world we’re very quickly signing up for a propaganda campaign.

INTERPRETING TEXTS (LIKE NOAH) WITH THE WRITER IN MIND

If we approach Noah as though Aronofsky’s decision to choose a story we like means it’s our story to control, and he has to tell it the way we like, that’s a pretty interesting and disconnected understanding of how texts work in our world.

Writers have always adapted stories to suit their own purposes, according to their creative agendas to put forward a worldview. That’s what Aronofsky is doing here, he told The Atlantic:

“For me, there’s a big discussion about dominion and stewardship. There’s this contradiction [between the two], some would say, in the Bible, but it doesn’t have to be a contradiction. It can work together. The thing is, we have clearly taken dominion over the planet. We’ve fulfilled that. But have we been good stewards?

Leviticus, also in the Bible, talks about how every seventh year we’re supposed to give the land a rest. When’s the last time our land has gotten a rest? We’re way overdue for that jubilee. And I think that’s what I want. That’s why I made the film. For that reason.”

He told Christianity Today that he is responding to and engaging with the text in a manner consistent with his background.

“Within our tradition, being Jews—a long tradition of thousands of years of people writing commentary on the biblical story—there isn’t anything we’re doing that’s out of line or out of sync, but within that, you don’t want to contradict what’s there. In all the midrash tradition, the text is what the text is. The text exists and is truth and the word and the final authority. But how you decide to interpret it, you can open up your imagination to be inspired by it.”

I went in to the movie expecting to be confronted with a radical environmental agenda – but Noah critiques the radical environmentalism of its protagonist as much as the pillaging of the environment he confronts.

I left thankful that the Christian God isn’t a standoffish God, like the God of Noah, he doesn’t leave people wondering about how they can be saved, or what he wants them to do, interpreting signs and following dreams – but that he got his hands dirty in order to rescue people, that he revealed himself and his character progressively through the Old Testament and then ultimately in Jesus coming into the world, dying for the world – to fix the broken human condition – in a simultaneous act of judgment and mercy. Aronofsky got that paradox right. We felt the weight of it, from Noah and his family’s perspective, as he travelled the narrative arc of restoration of relationships, broken relationships, punishment, and redemption of relationship that drives the Old Testament. This perspective enabled us to feel the emotions of a human on sidelines watching on, and the weight of being an agent in the arc, while as judgment falls on people no more or less deserving of it than ourselves. It wasn’t that Noah’s heart was any different to those around him, it too was darkened by sin.

I left the movie feeling enriched for having seen it – even with the schlocky rock monster/fallen angels, and the narrative liberties Aronofsky took to further his own agenda – particularly leaving two of Noah’s sons wifeless, and the third with a barren wife (who – spoiler alert – miraculously conceives, which, surprisingly is a nice tie in with the OT narrative and with the miraculous birth of Jesus).

USING NOAH AS A TEXT, AS CHRISTIANS

For Noah to be useful you don’t even have to use it to have conversations with your friends, colleagues, and family who aren’t familiar with the story or who don’t believe in God – Noah is useful because it challenges us to reflect on the God we believe in, the God who takes sin so seriously he wipes out a planet full of people, we need to remember, despite Noah, that the Christian God does not stand back from the disaster of the human condition, but enters the fray to rescue people at great cost to himself.

The Christian God is not the God of Noah. But the God of Noah will help us think about who the true God is, and who we are as followers of the true God.

People won’t take us seriously as Christians – people who are defined by our understanding of a significant text – if we continue to read culture and media with an essentially illiterate interpretive approach. We can’t interpret cultural texts from other worldviews while ignoring things like genre (this is a Hollywood movie from an art house director, trying his hand at an epic, not a Christian puff piece) and context (the author of this piece is not claiming to present your views or your understanding of the story of Noah). Too many Christian reviews floating around the web don’t make those two connections.

We won’t just look disengaged from the people and culture around us, but we will be disengaged if we continue act as the entitled kid in the playground who wants the world addressed on our own terms and who will take our ball and go home if it isn’t.

We rightly get annoyed when people bring a foreign interpretive approach to our text – the Bible – and tell us what we should think… and we could rightly get annoyed if Noah was presented as an accurate rendition of the Biblical story… but it’s not. Noah is a movie. It’s based on a wide variety of source texts including the extra-Biblical Book of Enoch and the Midrashic interpretive traditions (where the crazy rock creatures, The Watchers come from – though their rockiness is an invention). Aronofsky’s presentation of the story, while it takes certain liberties with the narrative, is incredibly theologically rich, and while its aesthetic won’t be everybody’s cup of tea, I left the cinema feeling confronted about the depths of human sinfulness, challenged to think about how we should be looking after God’s creation, and struggling with the enormity of God’s judgment and its cost.

If we want to follow the examples of the writers of the Bible – and of Jesus who became a human medium to step into the muck of creation to communicate God’s rescue plan to us – then we need to be prepared to engage with the culture around us, and the worldviews that we don’t agree with, in order to connect the Gospel with the world we live in.

Engaging with, critiquing, and rewriting secular texts and stories in order to present God’s plan of salvation is also as old as the Old Testament. The Bible is full of appropriations of Ancient Near Eastern traditions corrected to point people to the true and living God – we don’t have any textual evidence to suggest that Egyptian sages got up in arms about the inclusion of Egyptian proverbs in Solomon’s compendium of Proverbs that are presented in a framework that tells people that true wisdom comes from fearing Israel’s God. So why are we indignant when people use our source material?

ENGAGING WITH NOAH’S THEOLOGY

This is a telling of the Noah story worth engaging with, not just dismissing, even though it’s a problematic telling of the story (partly just because of the rock monsters). It is richly presented, with sensitivity to the array of source material and some nice narrative driven imagination around some of the details we’re not given in the narrative – like where the wood came from, how God called the animals to the ark, and how they got the animals not to kill each other on the ark) – especially around the Eden motif. It explores big themes surrounding who God is, who we are, what justice, mercy, and righteousness look like, and ethics, especially environmental ethics.

Noah gets plenty of stuff wrong, and it takes liberties with the Biblical story to present another story – but it is a theologically rich and challenging story that uses Biblical themes in a stimulating way. Here are some of the themes I particularly enjoyed… Just beware, this contains serious spoilers…

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO “BE A (HU)MAN?”

The question of what it means to “be a man,” or be human, is one of the interesting threads carrying the narrative, and, in a nice homage to chiastic Jewish story telling (a chiasm is like a hamburger layers that are paired around other layers on the inside) – it opens and closes the narrative. The question is posed at the beginning and only answered properly at the end. The story starts with Noah’s dad sitting Noah down for the chat, to tell him about humanity’s proper place in God’s world. Only the chat is interrupted when (spoiler alert) the film’s villain caves Noah’s dad’s head in while his shocked son looks on from a hiding spot behind a rock. Noah’s dad is killed in the name of pillaging the planet by Tubal-Cain. As a result, Noah is left with no real understanding of humanity’s place in creation, and a serious chip on the shoulder when it comes to protecting the environment.

Flash forward a few years and he won’t even let his son pick a flower, he murders three men for killing one dog, and he has a theological conviction that animals are innocent and humans are evil and corrupt. He has one shaky anthropology.

Even Tubal-Cain knows humans are made in God’s image, though he thinks this means exercising dominion and trashing the place in pursuit of power. When Noah’s son Ham sticks a knife into his armpit, killing him, Tubal-Cain whispers “now you are a man.” This is an understanding of humanity built on the foundation of our post-Eden brokenness, and a weird picture of God as capricious, with no real connection to our created role.

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So God created mankind in his own image,

    in the image of God he created them;

    male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” – Genesis 1:26-28

That’s what we were meant to be – but human nature in Noah’s day – as described in Genesis 6 – is a pretty messed up.

“The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.” – Genesis 6:5

This is a theme Aronofsky and his co-writer say they were exploring. Deliberately.

“What intrigued me and Ari was that Noah is the fourth story in the Bible. You have creation, original sin, the first murder, and then it jumps forward and everything’s terrible, and God wants to start over again. What was clear to us was that Noah is a descendant of original sin. There are three sons, and he’s a descendant of Seth, so his ancestors are Adam and Eve, so he has that inside him. That brought to us this weird question: Why restart if that possibility [of being sinful] is still there? Man still has the possibility of being tempted.

AH: Especially because you finish reading Noah and all the wicked people have been wiped out, and one family survived, and you flip the page and it’s Babel. So it immediately raises the question, what does that mean? If you look at the context of the story within the Bible, what is that trying to say about the sinfulness and wickedness within us? That was what we had to explore, not the good guys and the bad guys, but both the good and the bad within us.”

There’s a great scene in the movie extrapolating what happened between Cain and Abel into modern times, modern killing – the darkness of the human heart is universal. This movie nails sin. There’s another great scene where Noah is in the middle of a clamouring, angry, mob and he sees a picture of himself participating in the depravity. He’s struck by the realisation that he’s evil too. As a result he becomes committed to wiping humanity out and giving the animals a fresh start. He tells the creation story to his family while they’re locked in the boat – and he stops before the creation of man, suggesting that’s where God hit perfection, the pinnacle, paradise – with man something of an afterthought that quickly trashed the joint. This is fiction – it’s not in the Bible. It’s also not the view the movie presents (even though it is presented in the movie). The movie demonstrates this is an inaccurate view. We’re meant to get that Noah is getting it wrong.

In the Bible it’s when God creates man that the world is “very good” not just “good,” in the Bible it’s clear that human life is meant to be preserved by the ark (there are more animals that are good for eating taken on board than the other types of animals). We’re meant to get that Noah is wrong about this, in the movie, that it’s the result of Noah’s theologically broken understanding of humanity’s place in the world. We’re meant to get this when the women in his life speak reason, compassion, and mercy to him.  We’re meant to get this when we see his understanding of humanity is righted as he first confronts his heart’s capacity for love when he meets his new twin granddaughters. We’re meant to get it when at the end of movie (and the closing of the chiasm) he tells his children and grandchildren that being human means being God’s image bearers, stewarding creation.

Some people have suggested that we’re meant to see Noah rejecting the harsh approach of ‘the Creator’ in his love-fuelled epiphany, but we’ve earlier been told that God doesn’t speak in the way Noah keeps expecting him to – he speaks in “a way we will understand” – he speaks through people, circumstances, and through qualities that are in line with his plans and character. Every time Noah is about to do something stupid, or things look dire, he’s delivered by providential timing. Even if he’s an oblivious idiot, hell-bent on self-destruction the self-destruction is interrupted by circumstances – like the ark crashing into the mountain. Though he feels like he’s left stranded and unaware of what God wants, he is riding the waves of God’s plan from start to finish. The God of Noah is bigger than the characters in the movie appreciate.

What’s nice about this theme is that it lays a platform for Christians to talk about what it means to be human. It gives us a chance to point to Jesus, the “image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15) who demonstrates what sacrificial love for God and for others looks like and renews our humanity by giving us the changed hearts the Old Testament promises and anticipates. The only way out of the darkness of our hearts is to turn to God, we can’t just love our way out of trouble and into goodness. Noah’s quest to save humanity is ultimately doomed – as we see in the very next chapter of the Bible. It’s only when God steps in to the picture that things can change.

WHAT IS THE ‘GOOD LIFE’ IN GOD’S WORLD? AND HOW DO WE KNOW?

Every pre-flood character is operating with a shaky understanding of humanity’s relationship to God and, as a result, in how to live in the world and care for the environment. The champions of the film’s two human sides – the descendants of Cain (Tubal-Cain) and of Seth (Noah) have competing ideas from competing extremes on the spectrum.

Tubal-Cain thinks following God – as an image-bearer – means digging up all the precious resources to dominate the planet.

Noah thinks the environment is more important than human life and that it’s right to wipe out humans in order to give the environment a second chance.

Their views are clearly flawed. It’s not just left up to us, the audience, to figure that out. The idea that it is morally good to kill two newborn children so that humanity can die out is clearly repugnant, as is the idea that having dominion means trashing the planet. Adam and Eve were given a job in the Garden of Eden – to cultivate and keep the garden, presumably to extend its amazing life-giving presence over the whole planet. They were also to be fruitful and multiply. This is the tension – between dominion and stewardship – that drove Aronofsky to make the movie. He’s not an environmental crazy person just because his protaganist is, and Noah’s views change and grow through the movie.

Noah is not the environmental propaganda film some have painted it to be.

And even its call to care for the environment has theological merit. Those who would follow the God of the Bible have a responsibility to care for the creation God left us to operate in. From the preceding chapters in the Biblical narrative it is clear that humans had an environmental responsibility, and if they are being “only evil all the time” you can be certain this includes mistreating the environment.

Both Noah and Tubal-Cain have wrong views of man, of the world and of God. Both struggle to figure out how God reveals himself, and are given to looking for mystical dreams, drug induced revelation, or the sky splitting open, to figure out what God wants of them. Both expect a God who is so distant he is essentially absent. Their creator is essentially a ‘demiurge’ – a small god who exists within and is confined by creation, a small and mechanistic deity that is only present if he is obvious. The god Noah and Tubal-Cain are looking for is the sort of god that the New Atheists think Christians follow, and the sort of God they’d stand up and take notice of if he’d only fling lightning bolts at their heads or rearrange the stars to write them a message.

In a bit of a contradiction, Noah’s God is both distant and about to step in with an apocalyptic intervention because he’s not happy with what’s happening in his world. This makes Noah’s God seem petty and vindictive. Aloof but angry. The Watchers – the crazy rock monsters  – don’t help here, their inclusion paints Noah’s god as petty and small-minded. It’s only Methuselah – and later Noah’s wife, Naameh, and daughter-in-law, Na-El – who have a view of God working through and authoring events, who expect God to be operating and revealing himself through the ordinary and mundane – “speaking to people in a way they will understand” as Methuselah puts it. It’s these three who come closest to seeing God operating relationally through judgment and mercy – not being a detached monster. Noah gets there in the end. But the journey isn’t pretty.

Noah’s descent into craziness (in the film) involves a movement from complete trust in God’s providence (he tells Ham that God will provide the wife he desires as he provided the wood for the ark – in a nice hat tip to Abraham’s answer to Isaac when he asks where the sheep to be sacrificed is a little later on), to an inability to recognise that providence even when it appears miraculously through the pregnancy of his apparently barren daughter in law. It’s clear that Noah stops relating to, and listening to God, when he stops seeing his provision of salvation as a form of revelation of his plan.

It’s only when we see God as very (infinitely) big, and outside of creation – supplying life and breath and being to the universe (Acts 17), while also being very (omnipotently and omnipresently) engaged with what’s going on in the world, especially with what’s going on in the human heart, that we can understand how God might be working in our lives without us noticing, or without us hearing the blaring trumpets in the sky heralding his every move.

It’s only when we see God as deeply invested in the fate of humanity and the planet that we can even begin to appreciate the motivations behind the flood, and Noah goes some way towards asking and answering that question in a real way.

GOD’S DEEP INVESTMENT INTO HUMANITY IS DISPLAYED MOST VIVIDLY AT THE CROSS OF JESUS.

The good life is a life connected to God, the giver of life. It’s a life lived in the light of his revelation to us, in a relationship with him. God is not distant. The Christian God is the God who comes near. The God who speaks. Who speaks to create. Who speaks to reveal. Who spoke to Noah (in the book version) with detailed instructions. Who speaks through texts people understand, using genres they can engage with – and who then reveals himself in Jesus, his word made flesh (John 1:1). The Christian God is not petty, small-minded, and vindictive, he doesn’t stand back from the problem of sin, but gets involved. He was prepared to become nothing in the person of Jesus, prepared to become human, prepared to sacrifice his son to save the world (which makes the horror Noah feels at that idea even more poignant – God went to lengths we can’t imagine). Jesus also provides the guide to living the good life – a life lived for the sake of others, to reconnect them with God. We know what the good life is, because we see it in Jesus – the true image bearer.

“In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!” – Philippians 2:5-8

THE DEPTH OF SIN AND COST OF JUDGMENT: BOTH JUSTICE AND MERCY

One thing the movie Noah belts out of the park is the picture of the human condition. I don’t think I’ve seen any movie that deliberately captures the darkness of the human heart like this one does, or that thinks a massive reboot of the human race is a fathomable response to this sort of darkness, the movie is sympathetic to the cost involved in carrying out judgment like this. The anguish on Noah’s face as people – even evil people – are erased from the earth and his dejected response when they finally hit land is a really helpful picture of how broken humans should respond to God’s judgment when we’re, through no merit of our own, recipients of his saving mercy. We should be horrified by the fruits of sin – the death it brings into the world, and by the cost of sin.

This part of The Atlantic’s interview with Aronofsky is profound.

“We constructed an entire film around that decision. The moment that it “grieved Him in his heart to destroy creation,” is, for me, the high dramatic moment in the story. Because think about it: It’s the fourth story in the Bible. You go from creation to original sin to the first murder and then time jumps to when everything is messed up. The world is wicked. Wickedness is in all of our thoughts. Violence against man and against the planet.

And so it was so bad that He decides that He is going to destroy everything and destroy this creation. So what we decided to do was to align Noah with that character arc and give Noah that understanding: He understands what man has done, he wants justice, and, over the course of the film, learns mercy. What’s nice about that is that is how I think Thomas Aquinas defined righteousness: a balance of justice and mercy.

Maybe what made Noah righteous was that he mirrored, in some sense, God’s own heart about what was happening?

Sure. That’s another way of looking at it. And we completely connected that. Because really, Noah just follows whatever God tells him to do. So that led us to believe that maybe they were aligned, emotionally, you know? And that paid off for us when you get to the end of the story and [Noah] gets drunk… What do we do with this? How do we connect this with this understanding? For me, it was obvious that it was connected to survivor’s guilt or some kind of guilt about doing something wrong.” 

I spent most of the latter half of the movie pretty angry with Aronofsky’s Noah, because he didn’t seem to have any understanding of mercy whatsoever. This was a fruit of his anaemic understanding of humanity (as something like a cancer), a result of a poor understanding of God (as someone distant and dispassionate) and of creation (as paradise ruined and innocence lost). This cold-hearted pig-headed lack of mercy made me want the story to end with a twist, where Noah died and everyone lived happily ever after, because that seemed the just response for people having to put up with Noah on the ark for so long. But in a nice picture of sacrificial love – it’s the daughter in law who reaches out to Noah to redeem him, to bring him back from the wine-addled abyss he found himself in. The daughter in law who he had terrorised, whose children he held at knife point in his pursuit of justice. She restores Noah’s humanity, she mends his broken understanding of how God might reveal himself, and she invites him to come back home because God is a “God of justice, mercy, and second chances.”

Because Noah treats sin as a big deal, it treats salvation as a big deal, and as a result, sees the cost of justice and salvation being carried out simultaneously as carrying an incredibly heavy toll. Noah is at the point of emotional breakdown on the ark, just as the last sight of land disappears – and he has the breakdown when they finally land. Pursuing justice and offering merciful salvation at the same time is costly.

PARADISE LOST – THE RETURN TO EDEN

My favourite motif in the movie is the use of Eden. The theme of paradise lost, and seeing Noah’s journey as an effort to recreate Eden, an effort that everyone – from Aronofsky in his interviews to Noah in his character – knows is doomed to fail because of the mess in the human heart.

Eden becomes a vehicle for the film’s environmental agenda. Noah’s Eden is a place where humans live in harmony with nature – stewarding it. Where humanity in some sense, exists for the garden, not the garden for humanity. Noah spends a significant part of the movie believing that humans should not be present in the garden at all. Pushing us a few steps towards a return to the environmental paradise is the ethical goal, or end, of the text.

Aronofsky does some really fun stuff with Eden. The ark is made from wood from a forest created by a seed from Eden that Methuselah has carried around with him waiting for the right time. When the forest springs up, five waterways appear and spread around the planet, inviting the animals to the ark – back to Eden. There is certainly an element of ‘recreation’ going on in the Noah story in the Bible. Noah is a new Adam. Adam named the animals and ruled over them, Noah protects the animals carrying them in an Edenic sort of boat – a wooden replica of Eden’s ‘tree of life’ – delivering salvation in the midst of God’s judgment. There’s a nice sensitivity in Noah to the place of Eden in the Old Testament. Eden imagery appears everywhere in the Old Testament – in prophecies about what it to come when God restores hearts, and in the interior design of the Temple.

What really interests me is that the Bible already has a concept for a seed surviving out of Eden. And it’s not about the trees. It’s about humanity. We lose this a little bit in most of our English translations – but in Genesis 3:15, where God provides a glimmer of hope about the future of humanity and the future of Satan amidst the cursing and expelling Adam and Eve from the Garden, there’s the launch of a thread that works its way through the Bible all the way to Jesus – there’s a seed that we follow from here on in. Passed on from generation to generation – it’s a theme in Genesis. The NASB chooses to use the literal “seed” rather than offspring – here’s what it says:

“And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise him on the heel.” – Genesis 3:15, NASB

Interestingly, Jewish and Christian interpreters read this seed line very differently. For Christians, it’s a very early promise that God will intervene with a messiah. It’s a glimmer of hope amidst the darkness of Genesis 3 – the breaking of our hearts and the breakdown of our created relationship with the Creator.

If Aronofsky’s Noah understood the seed of Eden as human he’d have had a very different view about the purpose of the ark (one that was more consistent with the Biblical narrative). And it’s a helpful way to engage with the film’s environmental agenda – it helps us order the relationship between humanity and creation rightly. We are to steward creation so that it helps us do what we were created to do – exercise dominion and carry God’s image around his creation. As Christians, who are people being recreated in the image of Jesus, our divine mandate looks more like the Great Commission – we’re to steward creation in a way that helps us help people reconnect with God through Jesus. Compare Genesis 1:28 with Matthew 28:19-20…

“Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” – Genesis 1:28

We’re told to fill the earth with God’s image bearers in Genesis 1. And then in Matthew we’re told to make disciples – people being transformed into the image of Jesus, all over the world…

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” – Matthew 28:19-20

We’re to “subdue the world” in this new commission by connecting them with Jesus and the Creator (baptising them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) and teaching people to obey Jesus’ commands – commands Jesus sums up a few chapters earlier in Matthew. This is all about the restoration of our humanity and the restoration of our relationship with the Creator.

“And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

Loving God with all our hearts is something the Old Testament demonstrates is impossible – it’s the complete opposite to God’s diagnosis of the human heart just before the flood (Genesis 6:5), and this restoration of human heart’s is also tied to the restoration of the planet. This is what Christianity offers to the environmental agenda – hope that when the world is one day populated only by people with transformed hearts, it too will be restored.

“For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies.” – Romans 8:19-23

While this waiting is going on, God is transforming hearts and transforming people into a new image – the image of Jesus – by his Spirit.

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified. – Romans 8:28-30

God is profoundly interested in this “seed” from Eden continuing, and coming back to what it was like in Eden, being restored to Eden like status – a relationship with the Creator.

In order to return humanity to Eden, God does use something like the tree of life, a new wooden vessel where salvation and judgment are played out. The cross. Where Jesus, the true seed of Adam – the true Adam. God’s image made flesh. Is crucified. Nailed to a tree that takes our curse and brings life in an amazing exchange. The cross is Noah’s Ark on steroids. It’s capable of carrying any human who turns to God back to Eden. Back to paradise. It shows the value God places on human life, the cost he’s prepared to pay in order to be the God of justice, mercy, and second chances.

A Jewish understanding of God as presented in Noah misses this vital piece of the picture – the vital piece where God steps in to the world, where God is not absent, still. We are not waiting for the Messiah to come. We are living in 2014AD. Counting the years since Jesus arrived. Our God is not silent and distant. He is not able to be understood as capricious or vindictive. He knows the cost of justice because he paid the price.

Aronofsky’s Noah prompted me to think through this aspect of God’s character, and God’s desire for us to steward creation well in order to connect people with Jesus, the giver of life, through the tree of life – the cross. If he’d told the story my way, that would’ve been amazing. I’d love for Darren Aronofsky to meet Jesus, and to understand the Noah story through his worldview, but in the mean time I’ll settle for appreciating the care and sensitivity he put in to telling his version of the story in a rich way.

June 12, 2016