Being in the storm is nothing like anticipating it.

Genesis 7:11-24

January 10, 2010

Safety audit

It’s one thing to take a hundred years building a boat the height and width of this sanctuary but three times as long.  You build it based on God’s instructions, and you fully expect that it will keep you, your family, and the animals safe when the floods come.

It’s quite another thing to board the vessel with your family and all those creatures, have God shut the door without your help, then sit there and wait.  You hear little drops of rain, then pounding rain and wind, then bellowing thunder, then torrents of falling floodwater.  Simultaneously, you feel and hear earthquakes that split the solid ground on which you have built your boat, allowing volcanic geysers of water to spew their fury all around.

As the boat lifts off the earth – not gently but churning and rocking violently as if running class 5 rapids, you review in your mind every joint of the structural frame – some of which you fastened decades ago – and wonder if the essential integrity of this vessel will remain intact.  Your mind also carefully examines the pitch sealing the boat’s exterior, as if you’re scrutinizing the heat shields on a space shuttle, wondering if there’s a pin hole somewhere you might have missed.

You’re trying to convince yourself that your workmanship was perfect – which it needed to be – when your wife, who is securely tucked under your arm and holding on to her 600-year-old husband as if you were a cross between a teddy bear and the rock of Gibralter, meekly croaks, “Is this boat safe?”

In other words, being in the storm is nothing like anticipating it.

Critics and literalists

Chapter 7 of Genesis is about the storm. 

In chapter 6, God is sad at the condition of the world he has made, mad enough to punish all people, and glad that there is one exception to the evil – Noah.  God tells Noah about his plans for the great flood, and gives Noah instructions about the ark.

In chapter 7, Noah enters the ark with his family and pairs of animals representing all the species on earth.  God shuts the door of the ark, and the flood comes.  The Message paraphrase describes the destruction as the waters rise –

The flood got worse until all the highest mountains were covered—the high-water mark reached twenty feet above the crest of the mountains. Everything died. Anything that moved—dead. Birds, farm animals, wild animals, the entire teeming exuberance of life—dead. And all people—dead. Every living, breathing creature that lived on dry land died; he wiped out the whole works—people and animals, crawling creatures and flying birds, every last one of them, gone. Only Noah and his company on the ship lived.

A lot of people have trouble with this story, wondering about the details of the story: whether a universal flood is possible, whether a man can live 600 years, whether all those animals could fit in the ark, and so on.  I can tell you I have next-to-nil interest in such questions.  I believe the Bible is true, but I don’t necessarily agree with everything that everyone else says who believes the Bible is true.

I will not spend my time either accusing or defending the Bible.  Those who defend the Bible feel superior because they are standing up for God.  Those who accuse the Bible feel superior because they know more than the Bible.  Neither response results in evoking the response this text is designed to evoke, which is humility about a big God who controls the elements of nature and about sinful humanity that stands under his judgment. 

So let’s just let the story speak for itself.  As Forrest Gump would say, “That’s all I’m going to say about that.”

This part of the story is about the storm.  Noah had the same quandary that you and I have in the middle of life’s storms.  “Is this boat safe?” 

Most of us who are here today have placed our trust in the boat called “faith.”  Or at least that’s our intent.  Faith includes two essential elements that we’ll sing about at the close of the worship service: trust and obey.  We believe there’s a God who can do anything, who loves us personally and unconditionally, and who knows what is best.  We want to do what he says and believe he will take care of us.

Storms threaten that faith.  In advance of a storm, we’re quite sure that our faith is strong and secure.  But it’s not the anticipation of the storm that threatens our faith.  It’s the storm itself.  When “the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens are opened,” that’s when we ask, “Is this boat safe?”

Poor old Job

Those of us who are reading through the Bible together this year have come across an interesting contrast of storms this past week.  We are reading the Bible in chronological order, which means that sometimes parts of the Bible are shuffled around.

We had barely gotten through the story of Noah and the flood when our reading schedule took us to the story of Job.  The reason is that the story of Job, though probably recorded much later, is set very early among the stories of faith, possibly during the time of Abraham or before. 

Job is about a different kind of storm.  You can’t read Job without your heart bleeding.  I came into choir rehearsal Wednesday night and sat down beside William Hall, one of my tenor buddies.   We don’t get a lot of time to talk in choir practice, you know, because we’re singing.  Which is why we’re there.  But William didn’t need a lot of time to catch me up on his emotional reaction to where he is in his Bible reading. All he said were three words: “Poor old Job.”

You can think your faith boat is safe, but what happens when it’s battered by a tempest of hurricane-force surges like those Job faced?  All your partying children die when their house collapses on them.  All your wealth is stolen by terrorists or destroyed in a natural disaster.  Your health suddenly lurches from strong and vigorous to sickly and miserable – with constant pain and incessant itching.

All you have left is a wife who tells you, “Curse God and die,” and three friends who try to convince that it all happened because you have a rotted core underneath your veneer of public goodness.  If you would agree that you deserve all this, it would go away.

With friends like that….  Poor old Job, indeed.

Maybe you’re in the middle of a storm.  I know some of you are.  Or maybe you’re just in the phase of life when you are building the boat – knowing that a storm is inevitable.  The storms of life can be losses or pains or frustrations or walls or floods or heartaches or unmet needs – and more often than not include all of those.

The question I want to raise today is this.  What do you do when you’re in the middle of the storm and you are seriously asking the question, “Is this boat safe?”  Is it safe to trust and obey with all of the external threats and the internal anxiety?  What do you do when you are terrified that the boat is going to leak?  Here are some ideas.

What to do in a storm

First, say it.  You may think that the most God-honoring thing is to hold it all inside.  But you don’t have a lot of biblical precedent for squelching your anxieties.

If Noah was worried about his boat, we’re not told about it.  I’m taking a little bit of liberty with that aspect of his story, but I just have to believe that he, or his wife, or their sons, or their wives, or the dogs or cats or spotted owls or hippopotamuses or all of the above were more than a little nervous when the storm came.

Let’s talk about Job.  There’s a guy who knew how to put his feelings into words.  The first words out of his mouth from the ash heap after are along the line of, “I hope my birthday dies.  I wish I had died when I was born” (Job 3).  As he continues, he gets angry, even sarcastic, with his so-called friends.  “Doubtless you are people, and wisdom will die with you!” (Job 12:1).  My favorite line of his misery is when Job sounds like the frustrated parent of an adolescent: “What ails you that you keep on arguing?” (Job 16:3)

It’s not only that venting your feelings is therapeutic.  It is quite possible to commiserate yourself into truth.  Job also expresses some of the great one-liners of faith, all mixed in with his despair.  “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him” (13:15).  “I know that my Redeemer lives” (19:25).  “He knows the way that I take” (23:10).

So during the storm, work through your fears by expressing them.  Maybe in a journal.  Maybe to a friend.  Maybe just out loud.  Be honest.  Say it.

Second, consider the alternatives.  If you’re Noah floating around in that boat, you may not like it much, but what exactly else are you going to do?  There’s no Plan B.

The same is true of Job, or you, really, when it comes to the boat of faith.  The only other alternative is exactly what Job’s wife suggested: “Curse God and die.”  I’ve known people – only a few, but some – who did, indeed, decide that the best way to handle life’s frustrations is to give up on the idea of a loving, all-powerful, all-knowing God and just live out life in misery, resentment, and despair: “If life is this bad, we must live in a random universe.”

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather live out my life trusting in a God who is sometimes confusing than to give him up altogether and abandon myself to nothing.

Third, relive the past.  Don’t you believe that whatever Noah’s anxieties he kept reminding himself that everything God had said up to this point was true.  The storm was far more terrifying than he had imagined, but it wasn’t unexpected.  (It shouldn’t be unexpected for us either.  Jesus said in John 16:33, “In this world you will have trouble.”

In a different but complementary way, Job relived the past.  He knew that he had lived most of his life with physical and emotional blessings that others could not match or perhaps even imagine.  He remembered all the joys of his life.  When the storm came, he simply said, “Shall we accept good from God and not trouble?” (Job 2:10).  There’s a one-liner to put on your fridge.

Fourth, discern God’s part and yours.  Let me say clearly that your part is not to figure out the bigger picture of why this is happening or what God is going to do next.  Noah’s job was not how God was going to get rid of all that water or how the earth would be replenished. 

As for poor old Job, you do realize, don’t you, that he was never told what was going on behind the scenes between God and Satan that led to his trials.  God never said, “OK, Job, let me explain what happened.  I was really trying to prove to Satan that there is such a thing as integrity and that you’re a prime example.”  Nothing like that.  All God said to Job was, “Did you make the earth?  Have you looked around to see the creatures I created?  Can you do that?”  And Job said, “I give up.  I choose to trust.”

It was God’s part to pronounce judgment in Noah’s time, to call the animals, to shut the door.  It was Noah’s part to build the ark, get his family into it, and provide for the animals.  Discerning God’s part and yours is a lot like praying the serenity prayer.  “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” 

Finally, persevere.  Nobody said it would be easy.  Trust and obey.  Hold on to him and do the right thing.

Noah just kept getting up one day after the next, throughout the forty days of rain and the 150 days of flooding.  Get up, feed the animals, scoop out the dung, eat, sleep, and do it again.  Storms are inevitable, but they are never permanent.  The sun will shine again, and God is good. 

Job declared, “But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold” (23:10).

I wish I could make it all better.  I wish I could calm the storm.  I wish I could explain why you have to face it.  I cannot.

I do know that Noah and Job are only two of countless saints who have gone before us, many of whom have weathered storms far worse than you and I have ever endured or will endure, who have testified to this truth:

The boat is safe.

Amen.