Did you see the movie NOAH? I liked it MUCH more than I expected to. In particular, they retold the fundamental faith of early Genesis and Noah over and over - a good God who creates, humankind originally good, fallen into sin, and how can they know God again?
In my sermon on Noah this month, I stated that "many Jesus-loving, Bible-believing interpreters (including such an evangelical luminary as Tim Keller) argue that a devastating regional flood may have been all that was necessary for God to destroy all human life, or all life in the area covered by this story and the remarkable wickedness that was proliferating in that pivotal part of the earth, so central to God's redemptive plan." The sermon ended up being about the covenant of God fulfilled in Jesus, not primarily about the flood. But I wanted everyone to be okay with asking questions of every text we read in the Bible.
I wonder - did you know there are a few different interpretations of Noah's flood, by those who hold equally to the Bible as the infallible Word of God, like Lake Forest does? To quote Tim Keller:
"In order to be true to my own principle, I won’t bother you with information about the different views of the flood. Let me just lay out my own assumptions. I believe Noah’s flood happened, but that it was a regional flood, not a world-wide flood. On the one hand, those who insist on it being a world-wide flood seem to ignore too much the scientific evidence that there was no such thing. On the other hand, those who insist that it was a legend seem to ignore too much the trustworthiness of the Scripture. After Genesis 1, the rest of Genesis reads like historical narrative. If, it is asked, ‘what of the Biblical assertions that the flood covered every mountain over the whole earth (Gen.7:19,21), we should remember that the Bible often speaks of the ‘known world’ as the ‘whole world’ — compare Gen. 41:56,57; Acts 2:5,9-11; Col.1:23. (Tim Keller, Genesis: What Were We Put in the World to Do? [New York: Redeemer Presbyterian Church, 2006],81)
Compare his comments to that of the BioLogos website, an organization of Bible-believing scientists, Bible scholars, pastors, etc. whose thesis is "Science and faith in Harmony:"
However, a balanced interpretation of Scripture does not force the reader to believe that the Flood was a worldwide phenomenon. The scientific and historical evidence summarized below supports the idea that the flood was indeed catastrophic, but that it was local, recent and limited in scope.
You can access their long article on the flood here How Should We Interpret the Flood of Noah. Their website has many great articles on issues of faith, the Bible, and science.
Something else I said in the sermon: At Lake Forest, our motto is that of our denomination: “In Essentials (of the Christian faith) Unity, in Non-Essentials Liberty, in all things Charity.” Whether the flood was global or regional is a non-essential interpretation. We would never consider it an essential of the Christian faith whether you interpret Genesis 6-9 as a global or regional flood. I’m fine with whichever.
This is an example of the way we are a grace-oriented church, generous toward other Christians and other streams of Christianity. Its also an example of taking a motto from the Reformation seriously: "Reformed and always reforming."
