When God Regrets: A Second Look at Noah

         300 years ago our nation was just a collection of small little towns along the eastern coast of our continent. There were no skyscrapers, no cars, no TV, no computers, there was very little technology involved in day-to-day life. Our forefathers lived very primitive lives, we drank out of streams or wells we dug, we ate food out of gardens or we foraged for it in the woods and valleys. Life was simple. The rivers were pure and untainted, the water was clean, the air was sweet, the animal life plentiful. Most everyone worshiped God and believed him to be a daily part of their life. Little did they realize then what would become of their budding colonies and what those colonies would do to this wonderful new land they had discovered.

         Now, just 300 years later what do we find? We have a population of over three hundred million people. We throw away half of everything we produce. Our landfills occupy the area of some small countries. The water is no longer safe to drink from streams; the air is brown, not blue. Skyscrapers reach as high as mountains. We have more cars than people; from the sky, our once untouched terrain is crisscrossed with concrete roads. Giant holes have been dug a thousand feet deep to supply the rock needed to build those roads. A flying machine can take you from one side of the continent to the other in just 5 hours. Whole species of animals have been killed. Millions upon millions of Buffalo have been slaughtered, other animals killed for food, clothing, and for fun. Rivers have been diverted, valleys made in to lakes, and mountains cut down to hills. Mankind has left in its wake a scared and broken wilderness. No longer pure in its existence. Very few places on this continent have never felt the impact of man. In just 300 years, we have come close to destroying what was once the most diverse country ever discovered.

         300 years has seen the invention and use of electricity, motored vehicles, airplanes, the telephone, television, and the Internet. We have amassed knowledge beyond compare. We know the answers to most complicated questions, and we have ruled out God to a large degree. We have been to the moon; we have explored our solar system and have sent satellites even beyond it. We have done all of this, and it only took a few hundred years.

         Imagine with me then, the state of our nation in 2,000 years. What inventions will we have created? What knew knowledge will we know, what knew destruction will be wrought? If you can imagine it, than you are probably imagining the state of our world before the flood. Imagine people with vastly more intelligence, living a thousand years or more. What could be accomplished? What inventions could be invented, what cities could be built, what destruction could be performed? Perhaps whole animal families were eradicated, mass murder of God's creation, and the utter ruin of the world. There was probably massive global climate change with shifting of tectonic plates and the rising of the oceans with sudden changes in pressure. The earth was a mess, in fact, the earth had gotten so bad that the Bible writes, "And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." (Gen 6:6) How bad does the earth have to be for the creator who said, "It is very good." to then turn around and say that he regretted that he ever created it?

         Some people, who watched the recent movie "Noah", thought that the violence was too much. Some felt that Noah would never have been such a violent man. They picture Noah as a meek and holy man who listened to the voice of God. I actually believe the opposite, if Noah was not a violent man, then I doubt he would have survived. Tell me, in a world where you are the only man alive who still chooses to worship The Lord, living in a culture of extreme violence, what kind of man do you think you would have to be in order to stay alive in a community who hated you? No, I think the movie portrayed the character of Noah probably better than any story ever written about that man. I guarantee you that Noah had to fight for his freedom to serve The Lord. What happened when the church was persecuting the Waldenses? They fought back and rolled boulders down on top of the forces sent to destroy them. What happened when Israel was persecuted by the nations around them? Violent men arose to protect God's people such as David, Saul, Samson, Gideon, and many more. No, I highly doubt Noah was as meek as many would prefer our children believe.

         So the earth was pretty bad, there was more than likely not a man on earth that wasn't violent. Was this why God regretted making man? Do you really think that God did not see this coming when He created man? Do you really think it is possible for God, who created everything and can see the trajectory of man throughout the ages, to miss what was coming? If your answer is no, then why do you think that same God would turn around and destroy everything that He created on purpose? Was it because, all of a sudden, God realized that his creation was worse than he anticipated?

         God does nothing by accident. As I explored in another blog post recently, God is the originator of all things created. Everything that can be created is created or will be created. God is not a created being. He does not have a brain, or a will, or a body, or any such created idea of existence. He is not capable of making a mistake because anything created ceases to be a mistake and instead becomes reality. There is a popular question thrown around by people poking fun at the idea of an almighty God, “Can God create a square circle?” The answer to the question is yes, but it would not just be the creation of a square circle. If God made a square circle it would instantly become reality and no longer appear strange to us. It would be woven in to our understanding of reality; God is not capable of making a mistake because He does not exist in any type of dimension whatsoever. (These topics are discussed at length in my posts about quantum physics, relativity, and reality).

         So then, what was God trying to get across when Moses was led to believe that God repented that He had made man? God designed free will in to the very fabric of our universe. Free will is not just the ability to make decisions; it is the ability of a cause to exert an affect. Everything in the universe is equipped with this very same principle of cause and affect. Every asteroid flying through space, every planet, every black hole, has this inherent free will to act a certain way. This is the way that God chooses to interact with the universe, by giving it absolute freedom of movement and action. God has allowed the universe to follow its laws without interruption. In just a moment we will take a look at why God did this. It seems unfair at first glance. Almost like God just created the universe and then stood back and said, “see ya, hope you enjoy dying.” Yet there is so much more to the story than that.

         Science is just beginning to realize that our brains are vastly more complicated than they had originally thought. They used to assume that the human brain was just a complicated network of electrical impulses sent down axons to terminals. We thought that we were on the road to solving intelligence once and for all. Yet recently it has been discovered that even as complicated as those networks are, they would only be able to hold about 35 MB of memory. We have computers that hold millions of megabytes of memory, yet the human brain can always outperform a computer. This baffled science until a very recent study. It has been demonstrated that the human brain actually operates on a quantum level. It draws memory from a quantum source. This gives the brain, for all practical purposes, an endless ability to store and use information. It also means that the human action can never be absolutely calculated. Yes, we operate based on our experience and learned behavior, but at any moment, a free will agent has the ability to make a completely unexpected decision. God designed a brain that not even He could control without altering the way the universe works. So why did God do this, knowing that it would lead to such catastrophic results?

         God looked down throughout the ages, He saw what was coming on the world. He saw where free will would lead his creation, both angels and man alike. He recognized that it would lead ultimately to bad decisions and terrible affects. Yet He made it anyway. Why would God do that? If He really is good, why didn’t He design a perfect system? The answer is very simple, because love cannot exist inside a perfect system. If God had designed a perfect system that could be calculated, planned, and directed into only being good, He would have only created a computer with the ability to follow complex programming. We humans have already done that. We can create robots that follow complex algorithms to perform specific functions. Yet that is not what God had in mind. He designed something that had the ability to create its own algorithms. That is the secret behind artificial intelligence. The reason why man has not be able to create an intelligent robot is, for one, we have not created a working quantum computer that can work with, store, learn and use the amount of knowledge necessary, and two, we cannot create a computer that can write its own code and program itself. It is possible that we may some day, but not yet.

         The question then is not, “How could God do this?” but rather, “How could He not?” God created man for relationship; He created us to contemplate, to understand and to explore. As Carl Sagan once wrote, “We are the universe contemplating itself.” Creation required us to exist. The universe is so complex that it required an intelligent, autonomous creation in order to make sense of it all. God designed the universe to require intelligent life. Without something to comprehend the universe, the universe would cease to exist at all, there would be no point to it. So then, knowing that God did all of this with a purpose and a goal in mind, what did He mean when He told Moses to write that He regretted making man? Notice that it doesn’t just say that God regretted making His creation it says that the state of man grieved Him in His heart. God did not regret his creation of man. Mankind was not an accident, what God grieved was the choices we made. It grieved him that the cost of knowing love was the ability to cause pain and destruction.

         In Noah’s time, the earth had become so bad through the choices of man, that the Bible tells us that the thoughts of everyone were only evil continuously. No one person, besides Noah, even considered choosing what was right. The character of God had been so twisted that no one understood who He was. The movie portrayed this in a way I’ve never seen done before. Not even Noah understood who God was. The story was passed down from ages to ages that God had caused the flood, that God was angry at the world and sought to destroy every last human on the planet. Yet we missed the point of the entire event. Moses missed the point when He wrote down his account of Genesis. We have subsequently missed the point today as we continue to tell the story, write movies about the story and preach about the story. Just as i stated in my article on the story of Job, “God did not do it!” The story of Noah is not a story of divine wrath for the sins of man, the story of Noah is a story of God seeking and saving those who otherwise would have been lost. It is in fact, a story of the love of God poured out for, not merely humanity, but all created things.

        As has been the case with every civilization from the beginning, man destroyed himself. We were created to give order to the part of the universe we were put in. We were made to be the guardians of creation, to direct the cause and affect of reality; instead, we acted as the cause to bring it to ruin. Noah may have misunderstood the character of God as he passed down the story of God to his children and grandchildren, yet He did indeed have a relationship with God. Noah saw the destruction that man was bringing on himself and he prepared to save the innocent from the destruction that man would ultimately bring. Noah saw the compassion and love of God, that no other human alive had stopped to contemplate. Contrary to what the movie portrayed, God did indeed desire for man to live, and He saved the one man who was still listening to the voice of God speaking to him through creation.

        It is left for us to speculate how mankind brought this destruction on themselves. Perhaps, in their thirst for power and as the need for energy increased, they sought to harness the power of what the bible calls “the deep.” Maybe they thought they could contain the water that God had placed under the earth to keep it a constant temperature, but instead, in releasing that energy, they caused the entire earth to flood, they caused an ice age to occur, and they shifter the earth’s rotation and altered its climate drastically. Will history repeat itself? Will mankind yet again destroy itself? The Bible is clear that it will not happen by flood again, it is obvious why not; we no longer have pressurized water under the earth, or in the sky above. All of our water is contained in the oceans that cover 70% of our earth. The waters are contained now, but never underestimate the destruction of man. Nuclear war, mass genocide, what will be next? More importantly, who will stand up to save those who desire a better existence than the thoughts of man can conceive?

         The Bible speaks of hope for the future, and indeed the very last book contained in the Bible we have today is dedicated to the subject of restoration of humanity and an eternity spent with a loving God. I believe that God desires that once again. He desires to restore us to our original function. He desires to reveal character to the universe and to direct the free will of creation. God desires us to once again enter in to that love He originally created us to know. Do we desire that love to be a part of our life? Are we willing to allow that love to abide with us and change the way we view this life and those around us? Like Noah, will we be the voice of reason calling others to end the destruction that mankind often brings through the exercise of free will? The message is not to end free will, but to direct it toward choosing to understand the ultimate character of God. God desires you to live, but He desires you to live more abundantly than you do now. There is more to this life if we just desire to find it out.