Field This on For Me?
Our three girls just finished a musical theater day camp during which they performed in a production that depicted the story of Noah's Ark. The musical features a group of people who mock Noah and family mercilessly until the flood waters come, at which point their deaths are depicted in a rather light-hearted, benign fashion, suitable for a young cast and audience.
At dinner after the second night of camp, our highly inquisitive six year-old, Becca, posed the a question that went something like this: "I understand that these people didn't do what God said. But if God told us to love our enemies, why did he kill all of those people in the flood?"
Anyone want to field that one for me?
Related Tags: Noah, the Genesis flood, wrath of God, annoying questions
At dinner after the second night of camp, our highly inquisitive six year-old, Becca, posed the a question that went something like this: "I understand that these people didn't do what God said. But if God told us to love our enemies, why did he kill all of those people in the flood?"Anyone want to field that one for me?
Related Tags: Noah, the Genesis flood, wrath of God, annoying questions
posted by Matt at Saturday, June 17, 2006
2 Comments:
Cripes! This is a tough one. It can be asked about so many OT stories and even in the NT (Ananias & Sapphira). I don't know what to do with bthis kind of thing on a personal level.
I usually revert to answers about the bigger picture, about how utterly evil these people were that the good people were saved from them, or that God can do whatever He wants to do.
I feel weak in all of these answers.
Could killing these people in a flood be the only way to love them? Well, that might be something to discuss on an intellectual level, but from a practical perspective, that can get dangerous.
Then there is the idea that the story of Noah that we ahve today is highly mythologized, politicized, and biased as compared to the actual event - which appears to ahve some extra-biblical validity.
Matt, I suggest you and your family quit asking these kinds of questions. What are you teaching your kids anyway?
Nice work. I hope the converastions produce something good.
Like you, Chris, I don't know a great way to give a very satisfying answer.
I am tempted, to - well - for lack of a better way to put it - suggest that together we "take this up" with God. I want to explain to her that I don't know, but we trust that God is good and just and wise, and that he doesn't mind it when we ask him questions like this. If we take our confusion to him, he'll use it.
But...how to have that conversation with a six year-old?
I do know this - to cry out for an end to suffering has been a prayer of God's people from the first day violence found its way into the earth.
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