Recently my wife and I watched the movie, Noah. One of our favorite actors, Russell Crowe, starred in the film. We saw the movie when it first came out in 2014, but since it has been a while since we last watched it, we watched it again. The film takes liberty with the biblical text, but for purely entertainment purposes, it captures the attention of the audience.
The movie portrays a man faithful to what he believes God has said to him and details the events surrounding the flood that wiped all humanity off the face of the Earth because they were given over to sin and depravity. God promised to never again use a flood to destroy the Earth.
God is not a religious teddy bear reflecting the image of a favorite pipe-smoking uncle who tells funny stories in front of a fireplace during the holidays. He is the Holy One. The God of all gods, the Lord of all lords. He is to be worshipped, not formed into a lesser image that allows us to get away with sin winking his eye in passing.
Our definition of spiritual reality can become skewed by our misunderstanding of God and His Kingdom. What many have defined as the judgment of God is the consequence of our willfulness to sin. When sin is lived out in people’s lives without repentance, God can remove His hand of protection from a person or nation as they stubbornly and willfully continue to sin. Once God’s hand is lifted, all kinds of evil have access to our lives, the kinds of evil the Lord never desired for us to experience. Those in Noah’s day had a will. They could have chosen God, but instead, they rejected Him moving deeper into depravity.
We are not responsible to make people feel comfortable about the uncomfortable aspects of God or how He acts when the consequence of a person’s sin is making life unbearable. The consequence of sin has been used since Eden to cause people to turn to God and cry out for forgiveness. As challenging as it might be, we need to let people struggle with the consequence of their sins. It is an act of tough love. That is not a time to hand them a teddy bear version of God and hope for the best.
Once the consequence of sin is felt, the accompanying sorrow we feel over that sin will move us toward God. This is the kind of sorrow Paul referred to in II Corinthians, where he said to a church who saw the error of their ways, “I now rejoice, not that you were made sorrowful, but that you were made sorrowful to the point of repentance; for you were made sorrowful according to the will of God so that you might not suffer loss in anything through us. For the sorrow that is according to the will of God produces a repentance without regret, leading to salvation, but the sorrow of the world produces death” (7:9-10). The sorrow of the world has no resolution for sin. It creates a sorrow that chokes the life out of people creating a desperate and hopeless existence.
We are living in a moment of history when the consequence of sin will begin to be manifest in ways many of us have never seen in our lifetime. Noah survived by entering a physical ark. We have a different ark that will do greater work of rescue. Our ark is the living presence of Jesus Christ.
Today, before the coming flood of consequences arrives on Earth, we need to secure ourselves deep within the ark of God’s presence. To move deeper into the ark of His presence requires that we offer to the Lord any sin that stands in the way of fully embracing Him and His truth. As the world is turned upside down and submerged in a sea of consequence, the enclosure of His love will be our only safe place.
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on Garris Elkins
Featured Image by Ria Sopala from Pixabay
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