Forty Days ...

These days it seems you can’t turn on the television without watching some news pundit discussing why anyone who believes in the story of Noah and ark as real must be an idiot.  Worse yet, there are many purported Christians who agree with this story as nothing more than an allegory about justice and mercy.  Since a worldwide flood seems contrary to modern science, would it not be prudent for people of ‘faith’ to discount this story in order to otherwise maintain their credibility with those who have not yet found God?

Let’s face it, the world is full of nut balls.  People who more closely resemble a cartoon character than a real person.  And where you find nut balls, you find ‘religious’ nut balls.  It seems religion can serve as a key motivator for nut balls to get all life-and-death about their hair brained schemes.  From fanatical Muslims who kill thousands of innocents on 9/11 in the name of religion, to fanatical Christians who thought it prudent to kill millions of Muslims, Jews, and Protestants for more than a thousand years during the ‘dark ages’.  Religious nut balls sure get the press for violent behavior.  Noah’s story stays within this pattern, in fact his story tends to top them all.  An entire planet wiped clean for ‘religious’ reasons?

With as much hatred and death carried out in the name of God as has been done in our world, it is no wonder the skeptics dismiss all people of faith in a broad brush.  For the skeptics, anyone who actually believes in the literacy of the Bible falls into the dangerous nut ball category.  The Bible is full of death after all, no wonder people who believe in its literacy try to carry out half baked ideas of destruction.  This is an unfortunate fact, the people inclined to be nut balls, like to claim orders from God, when in point of fact, God has NOTHING to do with it.

But if we can discard the true nut balls for a minute, a careful reading of the Bible shows the love and mercy of God, not a reason to war, fight, kill, or condemn.  As to its literacy, Noah seems like the biggest target.  Rain for forty days and nights; animals cooped up in a big boat; the whole earth wiped out; what’s not to love?  By the way, people like to remember that animals went into the ark two by two, but in point of fact, animals designated as clean to eat went into the ark in groups of seven.  Of course escalating the number of animals in the big boat only makes the problem worse for the skeptics.

On the surface this looks like one of the more wild and crazy stories the Bible could tell.  It is an obvious target for the scientific community, although speaking strictly scientifically, the theory of a worldwide flood has both supporting and non-supportive evidence.  It has never been categorically disproven, nor proven to exist.  There are phenomenon in nature that a worldwide flood would explain, as well as some that would tend to disallow it.  In science, there are unanswered questions, just as in the Bible.

So why not allow for Christians to write this particular story off as a possible allegory?  The real problem is consistency isn’t it?  If one of the fantastic stories in the Bible is a mere allegory, then perhaps might there not be another?  I mean get real for a second, if a worldwide flood seems farfetched, how about the entire creation in 7 days thing?  That one must be an allegory too under this logic.  And while we are on the topic, crossing the red sea seems a bit much.  Maybe we can confine our allegory writer to Moses.  He wrote all those stories for us.

But then let’s not get too stingy with allegories in the old testament, the new testament must be full of them as well.  I mean, common on, a virgin birth (that one has to go).  Next up, raising the dead, and resurrection followed by ascension, that seems even more farfetched than Noah if you ask me.  Noah has no witnesses, these new testament stories would have hundreds, maybe thousands who might have seen this stuff.  Where do you finally draw the line?

If you took out all the miracles contained in the Bible, eliminated all the prophesies, all the fantastic, and left the rest what do you have – a recipe for loving others.  No reason for it, just treat others good, not sure why.  After all, if you discount the literacy of the Bible, you discount the literacy of God Himself, or of any god for that matter.  If we are going to treat the Bible as a Chinese menu from which we can pick and choose what to believe and what to write off as nut ball material, we wind up with a custom view of our own morality, complete with all our own short comings.  There remains no objective standard to measure morality against as each man reads and decides for himself what to believe (if anything) and what to ignore (likely most everything).  Why is this a problem?

John Lennon posed the question, imagine there is no heaven, no hell, no religion and suggested the results would be people living for today; as if that would be a good thing.  Lest you believe in the better nature of man, turn on the news.  It is filled daily with stories of self interest.  The self interest manifests itself in murder, greed, power mongering, you name it.  Someone always benefits from every story on the news, that person is simply “living for today”.  The discipline of morality constrains man from killing everything in his path on a daily basis.

But beyond the scare tactics of avoiding fires in the after life, there is a much better reason for maintaining the God we serve in our thinking and culture.  Our God is the only one who loved his creation so much He was willing to die for it.  The entire story of the Bible is one of reconciliation with a God who does all the work to save us from our own mistakes and misdeeds.  Yes even Noah fits this category.  The Bible paints the picture of a God who was willing to give up His throne ruling the entire universe to come to this world of hate, and live like one of us.  To be tempted and tried like one of us.

Forty days and nights.  First instance spent in rain on the earth.  The second instance spent in the desert sun with no food or water – this is what Christ endured physically before Satan came to tempt him.  It would take this for Christ to be weak enough from His human condition to make His physical weakness susceptible to temptation.  He was starving and the first thing offered to Him was food.  Then a test of his ‘faith’.  Then an offer of worldwide dominion without the need of His own death, an easy way out so to speak.  No sale.  Forty days of starvation had not starved His mind enough to submit to temptations we would jump on board with, in a moment’s notice, with no real external motivation of any kind.  This is the picture of the God we serve, described in the literacy of the Bible.

A skeptic dismissing the Bible is understandable to me.  It is unfortunate, but understandable.  To lack faith in anything is simply sad.  But a purported Christian to discount things they do not fully understand in the Bible is tantamount to nut ball if you ask me.  The nature of faith, is to accept what you cannot fully or scientifically explain as still being true.  It is acting on the basis on belief.  This is what faith is.  To discount Noah, you might as well discount everything.  After all once you prove God is a liar, don’t you pretty much have to throw out everything He says as suspect.  That is simply logical.  And it is why Noah’s story is marginalized as a mere allegory.  This is nothing more however than nice words that translated mean – God must have lied.

It takes faith to believe in Noah, an ark, forty days of rain or of temptation in a desert.  It takes faith to believe that a God exists, that He loves you, and has provided a means of salvation to you.  But the skeptic has to have faith as well.  He must believe that men emerged from monkeys, who came from mammals, who came from organic organisms, who came from hydrogen atoms that bonded together, exploded, and somehow created a spark of life that to this day we cannot reproduce.  Oh yes, the skeptic scientific supporter can clone, but not reanimate.  We can copy life but not create it.  His faith is in logic and what can be explained even though science admits it cannot explain a great many things as well.  Things that a faith in God and the Bible as being literal might answer, but go figure.

So the real question is not whether you have faith, but what you put your faith in.  It sounds logical, easy, and intelligent to say you put your trust in science.  But I would argue that it is still faith, and the result of that choice robs one of the meaning of existence.  I would rather put my faith in a loving God who not only has intimate plans for me, but teaches me the meaning in self-less-ness not in self-interest.  Strict evolution would have us kill each other for the strong to survive.  Strict Christianity would have us serve each other and find real meaning in the act of disinterested benevolence.  Which world would you rather live in?