Hello
Emmanuel,
September has brought a new change
to my newsletter. September will be Ask
Pastor Joe instead of Monday Morning Pulpit.
Submit your questions to me via email at pastorjoe@emmanuel-umc.com.
I’ll give you an answer. Who
knows? It might be a good one.
If Noah and his family repopulated the earth, how are there red,
yellow, black and white people?
When
this question came to me, I thought ‘Oh no!’
This goes into the category of really tough questions that seek to align
biblical narrative with science. There
are often no easy answers and sometimes no good answers. The truth is that this is a highly debatable
subject with no clear-cut answer. Noah,
his wife, his 3 sons and their wives went about repopulating the world after
the flood. So how did various
ethnicities come about? So let me give
you a couple of theories and then my perspective.
The
first theory revolves around the wives of Noah’s sons. There are no details on who they were or
where they were from. There isn’t any
mention of how many wives Noah’s sons had.
They could have had more than one, solving the problem of the science of
DNA. In addition, ethnicity was not
described. They could have been of any
race. This allows for the ark to hold
people of various ethnicities and thus having children of various ethnicities over
the course of their lives (which was hundreds of years). This doesn’t solve the apparent problem of
incest, but that wasn’t related to the question, so I don’t have to answer that…
whew!
The
second theory is not as popular with conservative traditionalists. It considers that the flood didn’t cover the
entire world. It only covered the world
as the author of Genesis saw it (or as the tellers of the flood story saw
it). Certainly, in those days, a person’s
world-view was much different than ours.
We understand the world as a globe with hundreds of thousands of miles of
land. In those days, a person’s ‘world’
would have been only a large region; maybe as big as the area now known as the
Middle East, but maybe not even that big.
They certainly didn’t see the world as a planetary body. As a result, other areas of the world as we
know it would still have been populated, allowing for the ‘world’ to be
repopulated and allowing for various ethnicities.
A
third and even less popular theory revolves around the literary approach to
communicating God’s grace. That is, the
‘truth’ in the story is that God is a gracious God, but also a God who has
standards of living. The accuracy of the
details of the flood story is insignificant compared to the truth that God gets
angry at a world that denies Him, but allows for a new start when people turn
to Him. Those who only embrace the large
point of the story are less concerned about the problems in the details.
So
where am I at? Once I found myself
getting lost in the details, I heard God tell me to get focused on what God
says is important. A long time ago I
decided to identify the major themes of the Biblical narrative. I identified these themes, put them in a process
and called it the Discipleship Pathway.
Many of you call it the Circle Chart.
Noah’s story is one of justice, grace and promises. I am content on relying on that.
Stay
tuned to next week. Another question. More answers.
God
is Good,
Pastor
Joe
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