If I had to name three Bible stories that everyone in America knows, the story of Noah and the ark would always make the list. Perhaps the great irony of this story is that we’ve turned it into a cute little bedtime story, where we paint it as a mural over a baby’s crib like it’s a soothing, cuddly bedtime image.
I would suggest to you it’s far from a soothing bedtime story.
The story of Noah is about a global flood that God sent to kill every living thing on earth, and it raises a lot of questions.
Theological questions, like, How could a good God do this? Where is God’s love and forgiveness?
Apologetic and historical questions, like, Was it literally the whole world that was flooded, or was it just the known world?
And then there is the big one: Why didn’t Noah screen out the two cats from getting on? Think of how much better history would have gone if he’d done that.
These are all (well, mostly) great questions, but they’re not the main focus. The question the writer of Hebrews asks is, How is Noah an example of the faith that pleases God, the faith without which it is impossible to please God? (cf. Hebrews 11:6–7)
One reason Hebrews gives us is that Noah believed God instead of his eyes or his feelings. Here’s how the author put it: “By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen …” (Hebrews 11:7 ESV). When God told Noah to build the ark, it didn’t look like it was about to rain, and no one had any reason to believe it would flood. Yet, Noah got up each day and got to work, for years, believing that what God had said was true.
That’s the essence of faith—basing our perception of reality on what God says rather than what we see and feel. It’s knowing that there are different ways to discern reality, and often our eyes and feelings are not the best way.
I recently read about an interesting phenomenon that illustrates just this point. For pilots, following the instrument panel is critical in knowing what direction they’re going or how high they are. It turns out that the most dangerous time in a pilot’s career is when they have between 50 and 300 hours of experience. By that point, they’re experienced enough to feel confident in their command of the plane—far better than when they had five hours under their belts. But they’re still inexperienced enough to rely on their feelings and instincts more than their instrument panel and flight plans. Pilots call this phase of a person’s training “the killing zone.”
Many of us trust our eyes and feelings entirely too much in discerning spiritual reality. We live in “the killing zone” of our training, knowing just enough to navigate life, but being far too confident in our own feelings and instincts. This is bad news, because this world is in a storm worse than anything a pilot faces in the sky. Sometimes everything is upside down and we aren’t able to tell which way is up. When it comes to questions of purpose or origin or value, we need something much more reliable. We need God’s Word.
The moment we attempt to navigate our lives without God’s compass, we immediately get ourselves turned around. We conclude, based on our “50 hours” of training, that we know better than God.
Case in point: There’s an ancient problem philosophers call “the problem of evil” that dates back (at least) to Epicurus in the third century BC. It goes something like this: “If God is loving, he would want to stop suffering. If God is powerful, he could stop suffering. The fact that suffering exists proves that there’s not a God who is both all-loving and all-powerful.”
For years, people of all educational levels have let that reasoning cause them to doubt whether there’s a God. And it seems reasonable—until it’s not. Why? Because it’s missing a premise, and it is this: If God is all-powerful and all-loving, it stands to reason that he’s also all-wise.
If God’s wisdom is as high above ours as his power is, then shouldn’t we expect that there might be a lot of things that don’t make immediate sense to us? Shouldn’t it follow that it’s at least possible that he has beautiful purposes he is working out, that we just can’t see yet? Shouldn’t we trust that instrument panel over our measly 50 hours of flight experience?
Just think about it: God created everything in the universe with just a word. Astronomers estimate the number of stars at more than 200 billion trillion. Here’s what that number looks like written out:
200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
That’s an absurdly big number. We don’t really have context for how big it is. As just one point of reference, there are 8 billion people on the earth. If you divided the stars among everyone, each person would end up with this many stars to their name: 25,000,000,000,000,000.
Each of those stars puts out roughly the same amount of energy as a trillion atom bombs, every single second.
And while the stars are generating power without using a muscle, I can’t even lift my mattress without a struggle.
That’s the difference between God’s power and my own. If his power is so much higher than mine, shouldn’t I assume his wisdom is too? Shouldn’t I lean on his instrument panel, rather than the 50 hours of flight experience I’ve amassed in this life?
Noah learned this lesson. He based his understanding of who God was on what God said. Not on what he saw with his eyes, perceived by his feelings, or understood with his head—but wholly on his Word.
And so should we.
