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Is the Flood Account a Beautiful Story about Rainbows?

By Jeremy Myers
23 Comments

Is the Flood Account a Beautiful Story about Rainbows?

the flood rainbowOf all the violent texts in the Old Testament, the portrayal of the flood in Genesis 6–8 may be the most difficult text to understand.

As I was struggling with the way the flood is presented in Scripture, I had frequent conversations with my wife about this troubling text. One night, as we went back and forth on how to understand this passage, she playfully said, “I don’t know what the flood story means! All I know is what I was taught in Sunday school, that it’s a beautiful story about rainbows!”

We laughed, but the tragic reality is that this is what most people think about the flood. It is often read and taught sort of like an old-wives tale about how rainbows came to be.

The Flood Story is Appalling

The flood story, however, is anything but a beautiful fairy tale. On its surface, the flood story is an appalling account of how millions (and possibly billions) of people died a horrible death by drowning because God was angry at them.

family drowning in the floodAside from the grim image of every living thing on earth gasping for breath and choking on water as they sink beneath the waves, the flood story also paints a troubling portrait of a God who seems incompetent because He regrets that He made mankind (Didn’t He know this would happen?), and who then foolishly tries to solve the world’s addiction to evil and violence by committing the greatest atrocity of all: worldwide genocide. One author describes the story with these words:

The Old Testament also describes God as a mass murderer. …Despite cute songs, child-friendly play sets, and colorful artistic renderings of the story, “Noah’s Ark” is not a happy tale of giraffes and panda bears clambering aboard a floating zoo. It is a story of catastrophic death and destruction that, incidentally, results from divine decree. Nearly the entire human population perishes because God drowns them. It is a disaster of such epic proportions that even some of Hollywood’s doomsday scenarios pale by comparison (Seibert, Disturbing Divine Behavior, 20).

Strong words! Yet the apparent genocidal behavior of God in Genesis 6–8 is not the only troubling element to this text. Although there is a rainbow at the end and a promise by God that He will never do such a thing again, one is left with several questions about the way God is presented in this text.

The Troubling God of the Flood

For example, if He can promise that He will never do it again, why did He send the flood in the first place? Did He realize the flood was a mistake? If so, He sure seems prone to mistakes, for He first regretted making mankind, and then He regretted killing them all. So is God schizophrenic? Is He bi-polar? Did God realize the flood didn’t work as intended, and that mankind would not learn to refrain from evil simply because God annihilated them all? Maybe He realized this isn’t the example He wanted to set for mankind, and so resolved to be a nicer, gentler, more merciful God in the future? Was the flood “Plan A” and when the violent drowning of all mankind didn’t work, God decided to go with “Plan B” in eventually sending the Messiah?

[Read more…]

God is Uncategorized Bible & Theology Topics: Bible Study, Genesis 6, Genesis 6-8, rainbow, scripture, sin, the flood, Theology of God, When God Pled Guilty

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40 Days and 40 Nights on the Flood

By Jeremy Myers
2 Comments

40 Days and 40 Nights on the Flood

40 days of the floodI am going to start posting on the flood account tomorrow for my book When God Pled Guilty. 

This post is to provide fair warning….

I initially wanted to try to cover the flood in about 1000 words. 1 or 2 posts maximum.

Then as I studied, my first 1000 words on the flood became a flood of words, until I finally ended up with nearly 20,000 words.

Overkill? Maybe. But so was the flood. Ha!

Seriously though, this is a tough text in the Bible – maybe the toughest of all the violent passages in the Old Testament. And besides, it lays the framework and foundation for all the violent texts that follow.

[Read more…]

God is Uncategorized Bible & Theology Topics: the flood, When God Pled Guilty

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When God Pled Guilty Book Update

By Jeremy Myers
9 Comments

When God Pled Guilty Book Update

It has been about three weeks since I published a post on the book I am writing, When God Pled Guilty. 

In case you are wondering, I haven’t forgotten about it!

To the contrary, I have been working on it like mad! And even when I am not studying, researching, reading, and writing on the topic, I am thinking about it. As they say, “A writer is working even when he’s staring out the window.”

So why haven’t I written any posts on the book for three weeks?

It is just that… well… I ran into some snags. Or maybe I should say that I ran into A snag. 

What snag is that?

The biggest snag of all… Scripture!

Ha!

I think many of you were predicting this! And no, I am NOT doing this to my Bible:

When God Pled Guilty

You see, up to this point in When God Pled Guilty, I have only been writing “theological theory.” I built a hypothesis that I wanted to test against Scripture. Though I have been a student of Scripture all my l life, I have always had difficulty with the violent passages in the Bible, and how to reconcile them with the loving portrait of Jesus in the Gospels. I felt that something was amiss, but could never put into words exactly what was wrong. 

[Read more…]

God is Uncategorized Bible & Theology Topics: flood, Genesis, Jesus, Theology of God, When God Pled Guilty

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Bloody Jesus

By Jeremy Myers
11 Comments

Bloody Jesus

A few nights ago I was talking with my incredibly smart and beautiful wife about the violence of God in Scripture and how we can interpret both in light of Jesus Christ, and we realized that in some ways, Christianity has fallen into the same trap that Judaism fell into so many years ago.

bloody Jesus bibleBefore Jesus came (and in fact, even today) when Jewish people read their Hebrew Scriptures and saw a violent God doing violent things, they projected this onto their expectations for what the Messiah would be and do when He finally came. They saw a violent God, and so were looking for a violent Messiah. They wanted a Messiah who would throw off Roman rule, would slay the enemies, kill the wicked, and banish all the unrighteous into eternal pits of darkness and gloom.

This was partly why the Jewish religious leaders rejected Jesus as the Messiah. He did not fit the bill! He did not live up to their expectations. He did not match what they read in the Bible. He did not fulfill the expectations, promises, and prophecies of what the Messiah would do when He came. And in fact, on numerous occasions, Jesus flat-out told them that the reason He was not doing these things is because they had misread and misinterpreted their Scriptures.

Hmmm…. now take those two paragraphs and substitute in what Christians think about the second coming of Jesus….

By an amazing twist of hermeneutical skill, we Christians have learned to nod our heads at both Jewish and Christian interpretations of Scripture.

We say, “The Jewish interpretation and understanding of God was correct. They just got the timing all wrong. God is violent and bloody, and so is the Messiah. But Jesus didn’t come the first time to kill all the sinners; He will do that when He comes again. Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus! Let the bloodbath begin!”

[Read more…]

God is Uncategorized Bible & Theology Topics: Christians, Jesus, Jews, Messiah, return of Jesus, second coming, Theology of God, Theology of Jesus, violence, When God Pled Guilty

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God Sometimes Withdraws Protection

By Jeremy Myers
35 Comments

God Sometimes Withdraws Protection

Hand of protectionFrequently, due to sin, rebellion, and the other factors, God simply withdraws His protective hand and allows sin, Satan, and chaos to have their way.

Everything we have seen in the Chaos Theory leads up to this final point. God has incarnated Himself into the world in such a way that He gives away aspects of true freedom and power to His creatures to do with it what they will. But when we misuse this freedom and power, God does not (indeed cannot) simply stop the ways we abuse our freedom and power, for then it would no longer be genuine freedom or power.

As a result of our rebellious decisions and misuse of power, nature flies out of control and creates chaos all around us. Satan, who is at war with God and His creation, seeks to destroy anything that comes from God or aligns itself with God. And wherever sin is found, it eats away at everything it touches. Through His incarnation and by His infinite wisdom and foreknowledge, God slows the death and decay down, and rescues those who are perishing in sin and destruction, but frequently, due the nature of sin, the consequences of abused freedom, and the misuse of power, God cannot stop the natural results of rebellion. When this happens, nature falls into chaos, the destroyer destroys, and sin brings death.

When humans persist in sin despite God’s frequent attempts to call them toward obedience and to warn them of what will happen if they continue down the path they are on, there comes a point where sometimes, God simply withdraws His hand of protection and allows people to suffer the consequences for their sin, for chaos to reign, and for Satan to bring death and destruction. I have put this principle last because I think that this element of the Chaos Theory is the last resort for God.

When bad things happen to us in life, we should not be too quick to believe that God has withdrawn His hand of protection, but instead, should go first consider some of the other elements of the Chaos Theory as possible explanations for what has happened to us. So also with some of the terrible events in Scripture. We must not be too quick to say that God has withdrawn His protection from a certain person or place so that sin, death, and the devil can have their way.

[Read more…]

God is Uncategorized Bible & Theology Topics: Chaos Theory, death, destruction, God, satan, sin, Theology of God, When God Pled Guilty

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