My Faith Is a Hot Mess (Part 6)

If you've been with us the past several weeks, you know this has been some of the most challenging material we've ever worked through together. In our hot mess series we've looked at how our families, our work, our schedules, and our relationships can be messy - and then we opened a bit of a Pandora's box with my faith is a hot mess. This message builds on the ones before it, so if you missed them, you can catch up on our YouTube channel or website.

Let me be clear about my goal, because I don't want to be the worst pastor ever. It is not my aim to make anyone lose their faith. My aim is to point out that when it comes to bonus beliefs - the ideas beyond the main idea, which is that Jesus is the Son of God who paid the price for our sins - there are a lot of opinions and interpretations, and often no way this side of heaven to be certain who's right, if anyone is fully right. We can disagree on the secondary things and still worship together, serve together, and love God and people.

A worried text message

A while back, an old friend texted me to check on a mutual friend - someone we'd been raised with, whose family knew ours. "He's really far from God right now," he said. "He's going off the deep end." Naturally my mind raced: gang? meth? a cult full of meth-smoking gang members who abuse animals? I asked what I was walking into.

The answer: "He went to that Noah's Ark exhibit - the full-scale ark - and when I told our buddy, he busted on the science behind it and on my belief in it." That was not what I expected. And that's when I learned my friend is a biblical literalist.

Biblical literalism is the belief that, unless a passage is clearly meant as poetry or allegory, Scripture should be read as literal statement - so the story of Noah's Ark gets taken as a precise, word-for-word account. Before we dig in, let me say plainly: if you hold that view and nothing troubles you when you read those passages, that's fine. It doesn't make you any more or less of a Christian, and we can disagree and still be on the same team. But maybe you've thought about Noah harder than the Sunday-school version - and some things have started not to line up.

The things that make you go "hmm"

Scripture says the flood covered even the highest mountains, rising more than twenty feet above the peaks. A worldwide flood that deep would take many times the water in all our oceans and atmosphere combined - and that much water in the air would crush a person's lungs, ark or no ark. The ark is described as roughly 450 feet long - but wooden ships much past 300 feet stop being watertight. The largest wooden ships ever built, in the early 1900s, still needed iron strapping and constant pumping and were only safe for short coastal runs. Noah's vessel, built two thousand years before Christ, was supposedly larger than that and survived the most violent seas imaginable.

Then there are the animals. The San Diego Zoo keeps about 14,000 animals across a hundred acres. Even reducing every "kind" to a pair, you're likely looking at tens of thousands of animals crammed onto three decks - plus all their food, plus all their waste. A single elephant can produce a couple hundred pounds of waste a day; over the months the ark was afloat, the math gets staggering (and, with that much methane and no ventilation, dangerous). Compare it to the largest modern ocean liner: nearly three times the ark's length, rated for around 9,200 people who can feed themselves, and it still has to restock in port every few days. Noah's family managed all of it, in flood conditions, for over a year.

And the landing: the ark comes to rest on the mountains of Ararat - a region of jagged volcanic rock, ice, thin air, and storms that has killed experienced climbers in modern times. From there, tens of thousands of animals - some so fragile they've never survived captivity - somehow descend and disperse back to their native habitats across oceans and continents, through climates that would kill them, finding food in a world scoured bare by the flood. Yet the fossil record shows species where their ancestors' fossils are, not a trail of fifty thousand species walking home.

A faith I respect - and a fair point

Now, some of you have what Paul calls the gift of great faith, and you'll say, "Josh, it's God - the God of miracles. He sustained Noah, put a force field around the ark, handled the animals." And you know what? I respect that. I too believe in a God who can do anything he wants. But here's the fair point that cuts both ways: if you have to make every word of an account like this line up with what we know from science and history - and the only way to do it is "miracle upon miracle" - then you can't fault someone else for struggling to believe every detail is literal. People have spent lifetimes and fortunes trying to make this story work on a strictly literal level. There's a lot of intellectual hoop-jumping and a lot of plain common sense you have to set aside.

Truth and literal facts aren't the same thing

None of that means there's no truth here. Sometimes there's a difference between truth and literal fact. Flood stories fill the ancient literature of that region. The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Babylonian Atrahasis account - the latter found on tablets a thousand years older than the likely date of Genesis - both feature a hero told to build a boat and bring animals aboard. Archaeologists have also found evidence of an enormous deluge thousands of years ago across Mesopotamia. So is there truth behind Noah? Probably. Did ancient people, who didn't know the rest of the globe existed, experience a catastrophic regional flood as the end of "the world"? Quite possibly. And notice that the first eleven chapters of Genesis differ in style and content from the thirty-nine that follow.

We haven't always read it this way

Here's something that may surprise you: reading every word literally is not what the church has always done. Early church fathers - Origen, Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose - did not hold to a completely literal interpretation, and neither did the Jewish midrash tradition. Some assume Martin Luther drove biblical literalism through his cry of sola scriptura, but he didn't; sola scriptura simply meant doctrine should come from Scripture rather than papal declarations and indulgences.

Hard biblical literalism as a hill to die on really only dates back about 150 years. At the 1878 Niagara Bible Conference, attendees produced the Niagara Creed, a statement that helped lay the foundation for Christian fundamentalism - tying literalism to verbal plenary inspiration (which we discussed last week) and to biblical inerrancy (which we'll get to later). Why did all of this erupt in the late 1800s? Largely as a reaction. The Enlightenment had championed reason, evidence, and the questioning of religious authority; the Industrial Revolution was reshaping society, education, and the roles of women; textual criticism was being applied to the Bible; and Darwin's On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859. Fundamentalism pushed back against that rationalism with a literal reading of all Scripture. Plenty of Christians never went along with it - and that split, along with a fair amount of rock-throwing, is still with us today.

And worth noting: nowhere does Scripture claim that it must be read literally. Literalists point to 2 Timothy 3:16 - "all Scripture is inspired by God" - but that verse says inspired, not literal.

"But Jesus referenced these stories!"

Some argue that because Jesus mentions Jonah and Noah, he's endorsing a word-for-word literal reading of those stories. Think about it this way. When I reference George Washington and the cherry tree - "I cannot tell a lie" - you all know what I mean. That story is almost certainly a myth; we can trace where it came from. But it's woven into our cultural heritage because it teaches a value through a recognizable figure. My referencing it doesn't make it literally true; it just means I can build a point on something you'll recognize. That's what Jesus does with Jonah and Noah - using familiar images to point to his death, burial, and return.

Here's the interesting distinction, though: the cherry tree didn't happen, but George Washington was absolutely a real, historical person. In the same way, the fact that every word of these stories may not be literal doesn't mean Jonah and Noah weren't real historical figures, or that large elements aren't true. Study Assyrian culture and their fish-god worship, and a prophet associated with a great fish arriving to warn Nineveh makes more sense, not less. What matters more than literal precision is the very real truth these stories carry: about our sin, our need for salvation, how we see God, and how God sees us.

Why it matters

So is there any harm in strict literalism? The theologian Jonathan Walton has argued that biblical literalists, in their drive to defend the factuality of every detail, end up compromising scientific credibility and effectively shutting down conversation - foreclosing genuine spiritual insight by insisting that nothing in a story can be true unless every empirical detail can be verified. In other words, the spiritual straitjacket forecloses the very truths the text could reveal.

And the strictest literalism carries real implications. Taken to the letter, it commits you to a six-thousand-year-old earth and a literal six-day creation. By itself that's not a make-or-break issue of faith - but when you tie all of Scripture to it and present that to people with a mainstream scientific background, you're not just asking them to reject a conclusion about the age of the earth; you're tying Jesus to that conclusion and asking them to reject him. You also can't accept carbon dating when it corroborates Scripture and then reject the same method when it points to an old earth; that's inconsistent. Strict literalism would also have you handling snakes, drinking poison unharmed, and selling everything you own - and, sadly, it has been used to defend slavery, segregation, and worse.

The truth is, nobody is a thoroughgoing biblical literalist. Everybody picks and chooses to some degree - applying literalism in some places and not others. I find it a little funny that some of the most stringent literalists use grape juice for communion. We can argue about literally every word. But no matter how you read Scripture, if you somehow arrive at a conclusion other than "we need a Savior, and that Savior is Jesus Christ," then you've reached the wrong conclusion.

Reading Noah through the lens of Jesus

I believe we have to view all of Scripture through the lens of Jesus - he is the Word, the truth, God himself, the purest expression of God we have. Watch what happens when we do that with Noah.

So the Lord was sorry he had ever made them... "I am sorry I ever made them." - Genesis 6:6-7

One of the amazing things about Scripture is that God lets his creation tell his story in their own voices, shaped by their own limited understanding. Imagine a pre-literate people whose entire known world was destroyed by water. Believing in God, they'd reasonably conclude he must have sent it; and if he'd wipe out everything, he must have been sorry he ever made it. That's a very human way to make sense of catastrophe.

But look at the contrast with Jesus. Genesis 6 says God was sorry he made humanity and sent a flood to destroy them. Jesus says:

For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son. - John 3:16

Genesis 6 says God was sorry he made the animals; Jesus says not a single sparrow falls to the ground without the Father knowing. In the story of Noah, God pours out punishment on the whole world. In the Gospel, God takes the punishment of the whole world upon himself, in the person of Jesus Christ.

Scripture is complex. There are real theological tangles here: Genesis calls Noah righteous and blameless, while Paul says no one is righteous, not one. The flood didn't actually wipe out sin - sin walked off the ark in Noah and his family and continued. So maybe this isn't only a simple tale of judgment. Maybe in Noah we also see God's distaste for evil and his love for those who seek to do good; a God who keeps his covenant promises; a God who provides refuge in the storm, who makes a way where there is none, who brings us to safe ground even on unfavorable terrain. Maybe Noah is the story of a God of second chances - and maybe the rainbow at the end is a reminder that, if we look for it, we can always recognize the goodness and love of God in any situation, even when we can't grasp it literally.

The God of second chances

That God of second chances sent Jesus into the world so that everyone could experience abundant life here and eternal life forever, both purchased by his sacrifice on the cross and his resurrection. If you've never invited Jesus to be the Lord of your life and you'd like to accept those gifts today, you can pray a prayer like this:

Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I'm a sinner. I know I've done wrong things. Please forgive me of my sins. Right now I ask you to be the Lord of my life. Help me to turn from my sins and follow you. Thank you for dying on the cross for my sins, for rising again on the third day and taking those sins away, for saving me, and for preparing a place for me. In Jesus' name, amen.

If you prayed that, I'd love to hear about it and encourage you. I'm under the weather this week and keeping my distance so I don't get anyone sick, so rather than catching me after the service, just drop me an email at josh@seacoastredondo.com.

We're going somewhere with all of this - we'll get there in a few short weeks. Until next time, may the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. God bless you.