One person can make a difference. But that’s not the lesson of Noah.

John C. Maxwell’s Running with the Giants. Chapter 1: Noah.

The message Maxwell wants to put into Noah’s mouth is, “One person can make a difference.” Honestly, I think that message can be better given by another biblical figure, and more ancient: Adam. Thanks to Adam, despite his (and many other misogynist theologians’) attempt to blame Eve for the whole snafu, humanity and the whole universe have been profoundly warped by sin. God was obligated to put aside His eternal nature and cram His divinity into a human body, so that He could die, come back, and undo Adam’s massive mistake—and the billions of deaths, and the untold suffering, that resulted. But Maxwell wants his example to be positive, I think. And thanks to the magic of eisegesis, he can pick any biblical character, and pick and choose and twist appropriate scriptures to prove his point; so Noah. Noah will do.

Back in antediluvian times, God was annoyed with humanity, and decided to wipe ’em out, except for Noah, this farmer He hung out with. The writer of Genesis puts it this way, and Maxwell quotes this passage, though in NKJV. I prefer to translate it for myself:

Yahweh saw that humanity was greatly evil in the land. Every thought in their hearts leaned only toward evil, every day. Yahweh grieved that He made humanity in the land. It brought pain to His heart. Yahweh said, “I am wiping humanity, which I created, off the face of the ground: humans, animals, insects, and birds of the air. For I have grieved that I have made them.”

Noah had found grace in Yahweh’s eyes. (Ge 6.5-8 KWL)

God tells Noah to build a waterproof box (an ark, folks, is a box, not a boat); put two of each animal, seven of each bird, and seven of each eatin’ animal, into it; move in, and wait for rain. Enough rain comes down to flood the mountaintops; eventually the flood subsides and Noah and family repopulate Earth. God concludes by saying rainbows are a sign He won’t flood the world again, and Noah goes back to farming—and gets drunk, in a somewhat unrelated story.

Maxwell makes the same mistake about Noah many Christians make: “His righteousness saved humanity from extinction.” (Maxwell 3) Which is not at all what the writer of Genesis wrote. Noah had found grace in God’s eyes. He was not saved because he was the one human who wasn’t evil. All humanity is depraved; everyone thinks of themselves first and God second. All of us have to learn to do the opposite. Noah was learning, but of course Noah wasn’t any more perfect than the best of us. Even so, it wasn’t Noah’s righteousness that saved him; it was God deciding, “I like Noah. I don’t want him dead. I’ll show him how to make a waterproof box.”

Quite naturally, you might argue, “But even though God picked Noah for saving, Noah still had to obey God. So there’s that quality in Noah that we should emulate.” Exactly right. But Maxwell is not writing about Christian obedience in response to God-initiated events. He’s a motivational speaker. He’s talking about human-initated events, and he’s trying to motivate us to initiate one of them. That’s why Noah, in the midst of his jog around the track with you, manages to gasp out five PowerPoint-ready bullet points about how anyone can make a difference. You can make a difference…

• …for your family. Noah’s family was saved along with him. So, thanks to your difference-making ways, your family will be impacted too.

  Maxwell accentuates the positive, and only the positive, but of course there are negatives. Our families may suffer persecution as a result of our witness to Jesus. Our difference-making may require us to put God before family, and they won’t understand because they—like everyone else—are selfish and put God second; and despite your explanations they will curse God for it. Lot’s family chose Sodom over him. Jeremiah made a difference, but was horribly treated for it, and pre-emptively God told him not to start a family, lest they suffer with him. I could go on, but you see how non-universal Maxwell’s statement is.

• …for God’s creation. Noah’s work sorta impacted the whole world, but Maxwell tries to keep things reasonable: Just think about how you can influence your own little corner of it.

  Well, again: If this is a God-initiated event, it rarely impacts solely one corner of the world. It spreads. It becomes global. The Kingdom of Heaven is like a little amount of yeast in the dough that eventually takes over the dough. My initiative will be doomed to only impact my own little corner of the world, and will not outlive me for long; and if it does, the wrong hands can easily get ahold of it and corrupt it. Why, then, should I waste my efforts on temporal things instead of eternal things? I could think about my own little corner of the world… but unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it are wasting their time.

• …for future generations. God’s covenant with Noah (which involves the rainbow) insures that there won’t be any future global floods. Therefore Noah’s actions impacted every generation that came after him.

  Um… how exactly did Noah insure that there won’t be any future global floods? When I read Genesis 9.8-17, this again appears to be entirely God-initiated. Noah never said, “Hey God, please never do this again.” Nor, “Okay, if I do this for You just this once, could You make sure it never needs repeating?” How is Noah the cause of any impact to future generations?

  Well, actually, you have to read a little further down in the chapter.

  In vv18-27, Noah gets liquored up, then gets naked in his tent, and his son Ham catches him and makes light of it. The other brothers cover him up (walking backwards to really make sure they didn’t catch any sight of wrinkly naked Dad) and Noah consequently—inexplicably—curses Ham’s son Canaan for it. What did Canaan do? No idea. Jewish mythology says he caught Noah naked first, and started the mockery, but all the scriptures say is that Noah was pissed enough to curse his grandson, and all his descendants, to slavery. Not seven years of bad luck; generational slavery. And slaves they eventually became—what was left of them, after Joshua and the Hebrews slaughtered the rest.

  This may not be the impact to future generations Maxwell had in mind. But to my mind, it just goes to show how our long-term plans seldom produce the greatest consequences, whereas God’s long-term plans tend to result in success and growth and grace.

• …for God. God, points out Maxwell, is always looking for helpers, and Noah was just such a helper. Only Noah found favor with God; only Noah changed the course of history.

  Again, Maxwell totally misses—even as he states it himself—the idea of God-initiated events, and the success that comes from acting in obedience, not taking the initiative. Noah didn’t find favor with God because he was obedient; Noah was obedient because he found favor with God.

  Could Noah have taken the initiative here? How? How on earth would he have come to the conclusion, on his own, that a flood was coming, and the best way to survive it would be to build a giant box and put animals in it? He would have moved to the mountains; or he would have built a boat for the family and left the animals to fend for themselves. The initiative had to come from God; there’s no way it could have come from Noah alone.

  Initiative is a very good thing, in the right context. If I am taking the initiative and going ahead of God, it’s wrong. If I am taking the initiative to come up with innovative ways to accomplish God’s already-given mission, it’s so right. Maxwell never makes that distinction here. That’s the problem.

  Now, as to Noah’s obedience. God knew Noah would say yes already, but let’s speculate a bit. What if Noah had said no? Well, you’d get what had happened to Moses: God doesn’t take no for an answer. God would have pushed and shoved and needled and nagged until Noah did as He told him. Yeah, God gave us free will, but God’s a stubborn sonofavirgin. Ultimately, He gets His way.

  Yeah, you can change the world for God. But notice how much of the job falls upon God’s shoulders: The plan, the task, the helpers, the materials, the faith to follow Him, the strength to accomplish it, and the fortitude to ignore the skeptics. The greater the goal, the more we begin to understand that we do nothing. What’s really going on instead is that God is redeeming the world for Himself, and allowing us to be in the middle of it. I can’t change the world for God without His intricate participation in the task; I don’t want to do anything unless He’s in it.

• …at any age. Noah, Maxwell points out, was really old; he was 600 when he entered the box. So you should never let your age hinder you.

  True, God has a track record of picking old people to do things for Him. Abraham was old; Moses was old; Joshua was old; Zecharias was old. Likewise He picks young people—Samuel was young, David was young, Joash was young, Josiah was young, Jeremiah was young, Jesus’s disciples were young. Age is irrelevant to God, especially since He intends to do all the work.

  But relatively… Noah was 600 years old. This was back in an era where people lived more than 900 years. Not only was 600 middle age—hardly “too old,” from the perspective of people back then—but it wasn’t like you were going to retire in 10 years. Or 100 years. Or 300 years. Noah’s age, considering the context, was a non-factor.

  I expect Maxwell talks to a lot of young people and old people, who need a little extra motivation because they face age discrimination. I’ve experienced it when I was young; I expect I’ll experience it again when I’m old. It’s a subject that needs to be brought up. But this isn’t the proper context to bring it up. Try Abraham, or Moses. These guys made a point of objecting because of their ages. Not Noah. Noah had more good, healthy years left than any of us do.

But wait, there’s more! Despite bony old Noah on the verge of collapse halfway round the track, he manages to gurgle forth three more points.

These points, I should point out, come not from the scriptural text, but from tons of Noah sermons, in which the preachers hypothesized what sort of things Noah probably went through, or thought, in the process of box-building.

Don’t be afraid to stand out in a crowd. The assumption is that crowds gathered ’round the ark to mock Noah for building a boat in the middle of a plain. Not scriptural; for all we know, Noah lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere, and any neighbors just thought he was building a massive barn. Not that this is bad advice, but it doesn’t come from this passage.

Don’t be afraid to do something for the first time. Creationists believe that before the flood, it had never rained on Earth; that the mist that watered the Garden of Eden was the antediluvian ecosystem, and not just something that happened at Eden. Me, I’m pretty sure God wouldn’t say He’d send “rain” unless Noah knew what rain was. But building a giant box was new, and filling it with animals was new; and even though many Christians insist that if there isn’t a biblical precedent for something it’s not of God, the reality is that God does and orders new things all the time. So—for once—Maxwell’s advice actually does fit the story a bit. How about that.

When you see a rainbow, remember that one person can make a difference. Actually, God made it clear that when you see a rainbow, remember that He won‘t flood the earth. If you want to remember that one person can make a difference, keep looking, as usual, to Jesus.

I was trying to be nice, ’cause Maxwell’s intentions are honorable in this chapter. He really, truly does want to offer good biblical leadership advice. Trouble is, I know just enough about the bible to realize that his advice doesn’t fit the context of either the Noah story… and in some cases, not even the bible. So I had to say so.

I don’t like critiquing popular authors. It has a way of making me look like the nutjob. It’s like the album title 50,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong—if these guys are so off track, how come they have so many followers? Well, the unfortunate answer is that popularity is not the same thing as truth. Their fans honestly don’t know the difference, and because the advice sounds good—and in some cases is good, but it’s out of context—and in other cases actually has worked, sorta—I must therefore be some nay-saying pessimist who only wants to bash them out of jealousy, spite, a desperate attempt to develop notoriety through contrariness, or the usual reasons why people become constant, shrill, never-satisfied critics.

Admittedly, I was a bit annoyed by having to read Maxwell’s devotional, since I have my own devotional stuff. But I was hoping to make the best of it, and glean some good stuff out of it. I’m still gonna give him the benefit of the doubt and presume the rest of the devotional isn’t as off-kilter as this first chapter. I hope so, anyway. I’m going to be very bummed if it isn’t.

By the way—Elvis’s fans were right. Some of them may need to redirect their fan-worship to Jesus, but that’s another rant.

Next time: Esther.