Words'nTone

Talking about sermons, I recall one from the Noah story that made me think to myself, “This is not a children’s story.” My mind reviewed the contrast between the various children stories (books, Sunday school, pictures, Christian comics, etc.) that I recalled about Noah and the flood vs. the real thing right there in the text.  I thought to myself, this is no children’s story.  Noah and the flood aren’t about twosies and arkie-arkie, with all the nice animals filing in to the ark.  This is serious stuff.  More on the level of explaining child abuse or drunk-driven or serial killing, or even war—now we find that hard to do when explaining those subjects to children—but we find ways.  The Noah and the flood story is certainly about courage and perseverance and faith.  But it is also about judgment and worldwide destruction—God of the universe wiping out perhaps millions of people in a short period of time.  That magnitude was brought home to us during a Vacation Bible School one summer.  The guest speaker at our closing was a dinosaur expert and believed in the universal flood (which I agree with—I know, silly, unscientific me, but the evidence does point that way).  He explained and showed to us how the evidence (that many scientists do not like to make public, but which is there to see) indicates that there was a worldwide catastrophic event (i.e., a flood).  That word is a hard sell for a children’s story—catastrophic.  Other words come to mind: cataclysmic, disastrous, calamitous, dreadful, devastating, terrible, tragic.  Even the Tom Cruise War of the Worlds showed it the way it was—there was that poignant scene of his little girl noticing hundreds of dead bodies floating down the river, one after and another and then the river filled with bodies—carnage.  I think turning the flood story—as well as many of the other Bible narratives and accounts—into children stories with pictures dumbs-down and G-rates them, and does a disservice to the stories themselves and creates the potential to lessen the impact of them.  Oh, of course they might keep their “moral to the fable” aspect, but that’s the problem.  In Scripture they are not given as fable, but as history (e.g., the flood, David and Goliath, Daniel’s friends and the fire, the cross and death of Jesus).  Turning these accounts into cute children stories might not be, in the end, a good idea.  Additionally, the trivializing of the stories’ messages and their impact (e.g., God’s judgment on the wickedness of man) also means the trivializing of inspiration and truthfulness—that is, the inspiration of Scripture and the trustworthiness of the Bible’s own claims.

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