Where He Leads I Will Follow: Believing God

 

God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways.  Genesis 6:12

 Sometimes God tells you something you don’t want to hear, something that seems so difficult, so counter to the way things look or “should be” that it’s tough to believe. This happened several times in the Bible: He told Gideon that they would defeat the armies of Midian with a small rebel band, He told Mary that she would have a child even though she was a virgin, and He told Noah that He would destroy the entire earth with a flood.

 Noah probably knew that the earth was corrupt and violent, he lived in it. He saw it every day. But, just like we see and are used to the sin and corruption around us, I bet he was too. It was normal for him, expected. Yes, he may have seen it as wrong, but it also probably just was. How accustomed have we become to the sin around us, normalizing it, accepting it? What do you watch on TV, that you know is wrong, but you don’t stop watching? What sin has crept into the church, becoming permissible, even though it goes against God’s Word? Tough questions, and ones I leave you to wrestle with – I don’t have the answers and I’m certainly not above or different from any of this. But it gives me context for where Noah was at when all of this was announced to him. Yes, the earth was all evil all the time, but when it’s all you know, you may not see it for what it is.

 There’s a theory that prior to the flood, it had never rained on the earth, or at least not heavily. It’s based on Genesis 2:5-6 which reads, “Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground, but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground.” These verses have given birth to the “vapor canopy theory” which states that before the flood, there was a protective barrier over the earth which trapped all the moisture in, creating a steady, misty environment. When the time came for the flood, the canopy collapsed “opening the floodgates of heaven” (Genesis 7:11). If this were true, it would present an additional difficulty for Noah in understanding and/or believing the message he heard from God, that he didn’t know what rain was, or what it could be like. Even knowing rain my whole life, I was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, I struggle with picturing rain so intense that it could flood the whole earth. Now, if you leave your garbage can out with the lid off, you might have a foot of water in it at the end of the weekend when you go to grab it, but that’s nothing like the type of rain we’re talking about here.

 So, here was Noah, being told something he couldn’t fathom, couldn’t understand, but chose to believe. We know that because of his actions. Despite not being able to explain how it was all going to come about, he set about building an ark for the next one hundred years! He truly put feet to his faith.

Here’s the Thing: Sin has corrupted the earth. Living on the earth, in its fallen state, sometimes it's even difficult to see it for what it is because we’re so accustomed to it. When we hear from God, telling us something that doesn’t match up with our lived experience, we need to decide which we believe – what we see, or the God who sees it all as it is?