A Ramble About Noah

I recently saw Noah the other night. Yes, I realize I'm a bit behind on my movie watching. It just came out on DVD and there's a whole host of movies I haven't seen that have come out in the last few years. It wouldn't be that important except that some of my better rambles have come about after ruminating on different movies and TV shows that I happened to either have watched or been watching at some point in time.

This Noah is one in particular that I've been wanting to see. It's the recent film with Russell Crowe in the title role as well as Emma Watson (Hermione Granger from Harry Potter), Anthony Hopkins (Odin from Thor), and Logan Lehrman (title character in Percy Jackson), all of which are very talented, Oscar caliber actors (OK, Logan Lehrman hasn't gotten there yet, but give him time). I had seen the trailer, read about it in different reviews on news websites, and also seen some pretty negative posts about it on Facebook.

There were, in point of fact, a lot of negative responses to it from different “Christian” reviewers recommending other Christians to not watch it because it wasn't “Biblical.” One that I read labeled it “Gnostic” and spent at least a few pages explaining why it was heretical. I learned a long time ago the hard way to completely ignore most of these kinds of commentary and reviews and go straight to the source. Nine times out of ten, the commentator either hasn't actually seen the movie or read the book he's trashing, or he's seen or read it and simply doesn't understand what the author was trying to say because the worldview he used to see it won't let him interpret it the way it was meant to be interpreted.

There is something about this movie that keeps wanting to ruminate in the back of my mind; something I feel like I need to understand about it. Is it the comfortable Sunday School version of the Genesis flood? No. No, it's certainly not. Does it strictly follow Genesis? That is a point which could be debated. Yes, it does also draw from some other source material as well, most notably the Book of Enoch with the fallen angels known as the Watchers being the source of man's knowledge of technology. Does it take some license in its storytelling? Yes, but really no more than most movies of the “Biblical Epics” genre. Would I recommend it to a Sunday School class? No, because that really wasn't the purpose of the filmmakers. Would I recommend it to people to watch at least once? Absolutely.

Noah is really the story of a man and his family in a world that has been raped and pillaged by the majority of mankind. The world, once a paradise garden, has been over mined, and over forested to the point where there are no trees, and very little vegetation. Animals in general seem to not only be hunted for sport as well as for food (something which is viewed akin to cannibalism by Noah and his family), but you see so few of them you wonder if they have been nearly hunted to extinction. The rest of mankind not only brutalizes the creation, but each other as well and you are left with a graphic (though PG-13) image of the depravity of the human race after ten generations from Adam. Noah's own father, Lamech, is brutally killed early on in the film trying to protect what's left of the creation by other human beings, descendants of Cain who declare proudly that they'll take whatever they want. This tends to color Noah's view of his own species through the rest of his life.

When God begins to give him the visions of what He's going to do, it is left up to Noah to fully interpret His intentions and will, and being a just, but imperfect man, he interprets it imperfectly. As he sets about building the Ark with the help of the Watchers and a miraculously grown forest of trees for timber, he grows more and more convinced that the human race has to completely die out in order for paradise to be restored and for the great wrong which mankind had brought upon the world to be set right. Through most of the movie, the only woman besides Noah's wife is “Ilah”, Shem's wife, who because of an injury is barren and can't have children. When they are all forced to get on the ark without finding wives for Ham and Japheth, he believes that this destruction of humanity must include himself and his family, and that they are to be brought on board the Ark only to see that the innocents, the animals, are safe and delivered safely through the flood, and then they will live out their lives and the human race would come to an end when the youngest had finally buried the rest of them.

Then God throws a wrinkle into this imperfect reasoning when He heals Ilah through Noah's grandfather Methuselah, and she conceives and gives birth on the Ark to twin girls. By this time Noah had already declared that if she gave birth to a girl that he would kill the child to keep her from becoming a mother and repopulating the human race on Earth. When he goes to carry out his threat, he raises the knife and then finds that he can't do it. He can't kill his granddaughters.

After this, the ark makes landfall, and Noah makes wine and gets drunk. Most of his family is angry and hurt by everything he has done (including leaving Ham's girlfriend caught in a beartrap when the rains started) in order to carry out what He believed was the will of God and he is alone and haunted believing that in sparing his grand-daughters he has let God down. Finally, it is Ilah who goes to him and counsels him on what his grandfather had said, that God had left the decision to spare humanity up to him, and he made it by sparing his granddaughters who would eventually become the wives needed by Ham and Japheth. And it is only when he accepts and blesses those girls that God sets his rainbow in the sky promising to never again destroy the world by flood.

I think what's caught me about this movie is that, in it, Noah didn't interpret the will of God perfectly. He allowed his anger, fear, and prejudice against mankind in general to color that interpretation. What's striking about this is that his view of mankind is in fact more or less what the Scriptures teach. It isn't a humano-centric “people are basically good and the world was made for them to conquer” like you might typically expect from a Hollywood Biblical Epic. It isn't a feel good about being human. It's a stark “all have sinned and the whole creation was cursed because of us”. This wasn't just a Bible verse to him, but the daily reality of the world he lived in. And from the deepest part of himself, he wanted to make that right, and making that right, in his mind, required that mankind be allowed to die out.

I have posted my views on Creation and evolution before this. And, in a nutshell, I personally prefer thinking that God had at least a few billion years to enjoy His creation before we came along and ruined it and ourselves for Him. So, the truth is that I can understand and even relate to Noah's issues regarding mankind. Some time ago, I once watched a documentary about what would happen if all of a sudden, all human beings everywhere on Earth were to suddenly disappear. The show progressed this scenario over a series of years, then decades, then centuries. Their conclusion was that without human beings, the Earth's environment and ecosystem would eventually right itself, and return to a pristine condition. The only thing driving this world towards the ecological and environmental collapse that it is headed for is in fact us, mankind.

But Noah's interpretation of his mandate was imperfect. His creator was not without compassion for Noah and his family as representing the best of mankind, but Noah, being a compassionate man, had hardened himself against compassion to do what he thought the creator wanted done. In the end, however, love and compassion won out. The Creator's compassion for mankind in sending two more potential mothers to continue the best of humanity, and Noah's love and compassion for his family as personified by his baby granddaughters.

There are times in our lives when we all interpret God's instruction to us imperfectly, just as Noah did. I remember talking about this very thing with my wife when we would go on walks up and down the road in Arkansas. We both would get things from God; direction, images, things we should do or say, or not do or say and we would try to follow it to the best of our ability. But as we talked we realized that where we always got hung up was in trying to interpret them. We would be given things thinking that they would pertain to just that moment, when in fact we wouldn't actually see them until years down the road. Our RV was a case in point. The first time we started getting from the Lord that we would be going across the country and living in an RV was when we left Tennessee for Idaho back in 2010. We didn't actually do it until 2013.

Noah's problem was in fact our frequent problem. He thought he understood what the Creator's plan was when in fact he didn't. He thought he could take what direction he was given, run it through his own understanding and then know exactly what was the next step the Creator wanted him to take. Had he followed through with his imperfect understanding, he would have become a murderer and sealed the fate of the entire human race. It was love and compassion which stopped that imperfect understanding in its tracks and guided it, even unwillingly and in confusion, back on to the right course and in harmony with his compassionate and loving Creator.

As I think about this film Noah, I am reminded of how many times my wife and I have thought we knew what the next step was for us when we were only just taking the first step. I think the truth in this film is that God doesn't give us the next step until we've completed the step He has given us, and however we misinterpret what that step means, if we use love and compassion as the foundation of what we do He will keep us from going off track even when we're so mixed up and confused that we think the next step is something profoundly disturbing.

One of the biggest lessons we've learned through all of this is that, when God gives directions, don't try to figure out to where they're leading, just follow them. Don't try to guess what's at the end, or set your own goals, or even just try and figure out what you're supposed to do after you've followed the directions you're given. Just do what He tells you. No more, and no less. Go where He tells you and don't try to guess why. And whatever you do, don't tell other people about why you think you're doing it. You'll probably be proven wrong. It's when we inject ourselves and our own imperfections into the equation that we get thrown off the rails.

In the end, I appreciated Noah. It made me think, and I always appreciate stories that make me think.