Lessons From The Noah Story

WED., SEPT. 8, 1993, 8:50 AM
OFFICE, PULLIAM HALL

Your participation in the discussion this morning was rather minimal, even as you did offer one important relevant comment. There obviously has been much speculation, scholarship, rumination, and proclamation about this family and their featured role in the flood story. So I shall add My observations and assume you will accept them as the best truth you have available. Do I encourage other lessons than these? You do know by now that I do. Some of this will be repetitive, but just accept it as needed reinforcement.

The Scriptural story says the earth was both highly populated and the site of much evil. That’s as good a prologue/reason as any for My action. Yet I tell you that conditions were no worse then than years later… or as now. Noah was a righteous man, but there also were others. Were his sons as righteous as he? And what about the son’s wives, from whom would come forth all of present humanity? I was disappointed, but, as the ultimate Creator, I fully accept that I have no one to blame but Myself.

So I tell you that the main purpose of the flood was to show forth My Power, as Almighty God. I had created. I now show that I can destroy, even what seems valuable. It is important to know that about Me… I can both cause and allow destruction. For everything there is a season… a time to build up and a time to break down… a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together. And, still, I devised a way for life to be maintained and “started over.”

The Noah story is also a story told in the spirit of fun. I have loved Bill Cosby’s rendition of it, even more than you have. So a major “fun purpose” of the story is to encourage some people to doubt the veracity of Holy Scripture. As you have observed, it is meteorologically unlikely… even impossible… for rain to fall all over the earth for 40 days and 40 nights. It would be physically impossible for a 600 year old man to gather 2 of each kind of animal from all over the world, put them in the ark, and have them all survive for nearly a year. It would be botanically unlikely for the variety of plant life, including yeast, to have survived nearly a year under water. So where’s the truth in an unlikely story? Science causes some to doubt, and I have to smile, because “I did it.”

The drunkenness story affirms that plant life did survive, and isn’t it interesting that wine is the only food substance mentioned in the whole tale?! It also illustrates, as I have told you, the truth that event the righteous commit sin and need forgiveness. Noah has 3 sons, from whom all of humankind shall come, as the story tells, but for one strange questionable act the youngest is cursed, and all of his descendants. So righteous Noah compounds his mistake in judgment. Or did I want a third of humankind to be cursed into slavery for all time?

I approve of your conclusion that the story tells that from early in human history drunkenness brings harm to other family members, perhaps even more than for the one who becomes drunk. As I have allowed alcohol to develop, in the simple and likely way that it does, I have known that drunkenness will ensue for some number of drinkers. I know that its effects reduce inhibitions and impair judgment. Results of this are both pleasing and troubling. And I knew it would be so.