Flee Babylon, All Arrogant Kings (Isaiah 13)

This chapter is heavy duty.

Up until now, Isaiah has been writing to Judah, condemning the nation for its corruption, warning of her coming destruction, and comforting her with the promise of a Messiah-Redeemer, who will her scattered remnant home and restore her in justice and righteousness. Isaiah 13-23 is a new portion of the book. The first twelve chapters are likely from Isaiah’s early years. This section of the book is from Isaiah’s middle years. In these chapters, Isaiah turns his attention from Judah and Israel to the nations surrounding her, Assyria, Babylon, Egypt and Cush (modern Ethiopia), Tyre and Sidon, and Moab. Isaiah warns these empires that though they see, and some may rejoice in, the fall of Israel and Judah, the same God who judges the nation of God will judge them as well.

Though it may be difficult to read such portions of scripture, a passage like this one can give us great hope. We may be encouraged to remember God's sovereignty over the corruption of the empire of this fallen world. No matter how things appear to be now, justice will be done. The kingdom of God has come. The kingdom is coming. We long to see the growth of the living kingdom and the new earth fully realized.

It is right for us to deeply wish to see justice done, to see the wickedness of this world finally be burned away. In Revelation 18-20, we hear the cry of the righteous as they rejoice in the justice of the Great King, after the final fall of Babylon. The kings of the earth mourn her loss. The citizens of the kingdom praise God for the manifestation of his power and authority in her judgment.

Isaiah 13:9-11 (ESVUK)

Behold, the day of the Lord comes,

    cruel, with wrath and fierce anger,

to make the land a desolation

    and to destroy its sinners from it.

For the stars of the heavens and their constellations

    will not give their light;

the sun will be dark at its rising,

    and the moon will not shed its light.

I will punish the world for its evil,

    and the wicked for their iniquity;

I will put an end to the pomp of the arrogant,

    and lay low the pompous pride of the ruthless.

Here is the Lord's declaration of judgment on Babylon, the great empire in which God's people will live as exiles. Israel would live in Babylon as exiles and then be brought out by God back into their land. Celestial bodies usually represent the powers and authorities of the present age, and especially so in prophetic books. Isaiah warns of a day when all the great lights of the earth, the kings, governments, authorities, and judges, will turn dark at the blazing brightness of God’s judgment.

Today, to live as citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven is to live in the earth that has not yet fully turned to justice. Like Israel in Babylon, we are also in a sort of exile. In both cases, God calls God’s covenant people to live as a blessing among their neighbours, to manifest the character of God to the world, to invite whoever would to leave the empire and join the forever family of the eternal kingdom.

God is just. Isaiah says God acts with vengeance upon evil.

Hard as this may be to consider, how much better this is than a God who would leave the world as it is. I could not believe in a good God who would leave us as we are, unconditionally loved though we may be.  There are girls born into this world who will live their whole lives as sex slaves and then die young. Everything is not okay. There are things in this world that are worth our fierce anger. A God that does not judge such evil is no God worthy of our worship.

Of course, in the light of such a just God, we ought to tremble. But why would we dare claim to follow a God that does not inspire such awe? We tremble in the presence of a God so just and holy that only God's very presence in human flesh could ever contain God's full wrath. We are free in the presence of God not because of some pass God gives to evildoers in the world. We are free in God's awesome, electric, transcendent presence about and within us precisely because God is sovereign, God is just, and by God's righteous judgment, vengeance has been had, and full redemption of all victims and perpetrators of oppression will be made.

God’s promise to act in vengeance means we don't need to. God’s judgment sets us free from the bondage to bitterness, resentment, and cynicism. We are free to forgive.

God's wrath was satisfied on the cross. Justice has been accomplished. All will be turned to right. We can forgive.

We can also be free to be people who love justice. We serve a God of justice, who loves justice. We can also love justice. God is a fighter. We can be fighters, too.

This freedom, however, is still a costly freedom. In the awe of God’s fierce judgment, we may be free to fight, but only ever as agents justified by God’s righteousness. No one of us is so holy on our own that we may dare to wield the sword of justice against another human being. By the same standard that rulers, kings, and tyrants are judged, so may we be.

We may be tempted to excuse ourselves from the focused judgment described in these chapters because we are not the kings and governments of these corrupt empires. We should not be so quick to justify ourselves. First of all, in a general way we have all been guilty of the same sins upon which these empires were built. We have all sought our own comfort at the expense of others. We have all chosen at some point to build our own kingdom or influence for the sake of our own glory or power or fame, maybe even using manipulation or conspiracy to do so. However, our own shared guilt with Babylon in Isaiah may be even deeper and more specific than this.

This writer and most who read these words are likely citizens of some kind of representative democracy. We have each been given a voice in the direction of our nation's policies and laws. We are privileged. We are all little Caesars, little Pharaohs in our world. Have we used our authority, our privilege, to make a more just world for the vulnerable and marginalized? What have we done to minister greater mercy and compassion in our nations, in our communities, our neighbourhoods? We all live in Babylon. We are all guilty.

Therefore, Isaiah warns, challenges, and invites all arrogant kings and queens of all levels of privilege and power to flee Babylon and enter the rest of the Kingdom. The judgment of God on those who have made gods of themselves is swift and terrible. Those who refuse to lay down their arms before the Almighty are swept away. The fear of The Lord is a sure foundation, not that we remain in God for our fear of God, but that the love of God in which we are made safe is made all the more sweet for the knowledge of the power of God’s terrible wrath. We are motes of dust before the awesome Creator.

We dare not lift our sword or stake our claim upon the earth in which we are but tenants of the only great landowner.

Only when we realize that we have nothing are we made free to, in God, have everything.

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Next: Isaiah 14 - God Taunts The Empire

Thursday, July 10, 2014: 1 Peter 3 - I'm Too Sexy (For This Shirt): A Case For Real Biblical Modesty

Click the image for the entire series from Isaiah.

Darren Aronofsky’s Noah: An Evangelical Theological Review

Noah is a challenging and beautiful film. Darren Aronofsky's story took my breath, made me cry, frequently made me laugh, and even magnified my love of scripture and of God.

Violence, human depravity, inheritance, passion, lust, mercy, stewardship of the environment, human capacity for love, will, the sovereignty of God, and sacrifice all get a treatment in this challenging piece.

Much has been said about the beauty of the images, the green Icelandic hills, the artistry of the storytelling and Aronofsky's unique and masterful use of the medium. I do believe that this film was an excellent piece of art. As a Christian, I also found it to be iconic, a piece of art that drew me to meditate on and be enriched by the character and nature of God. It is this theological and meditative value that I intend to explore with this review.

The film deviates from its main source material, the biblical deluge myth* from roughly the fourth through ninth chapters of Genesis, and borrows from other legends of prehistoric floods, possibly including the Jewish mystic teachings of Kabbalah as well. People most familiar with the story of The Flood as told in Sunday School may find themselves surprised by some of the fantastic elements, especially the large ancient rock creatures, called Watchers, who help Noah build the ark. The story also includes a miraculous seed from Eden that sprouts a garden for Noah’s family, from which they get the wood for their ark, a mineral that bursts into flame when struck, and a common ability by many of the human characters to put humans and creatures to sleep. Besides these elements, those less familiar with the biblical account may be surprised by some details such as Noah’s drunkenness and vegetarianism, both clear and important elements in the biblical account that are often missed in the retelling.

Far and beyond which literary elements Darren Aronofsky chose to alter or add is the many ways that his film actually told the story of Noah more truly than it is often even told from the pulpit.

The story of Noah is a horror. It is an apocalyptic tale, more similar to the terrors of the tribulations described in Revelation than the Doctor Doolittle version we often tell in church. Death by drowning is one of the most painful and terrifying ways to die, and simulations of drowning are considered some of the most horrific of torture methods. The story of the flood should shock us to the core. It is an incredibly challenging tale of judgment and violence and death, an un-creation of the world only pages after the song of its birth. For those of us who claim to read the Bible as Holy Scripture, we should find ourselves trembling at these chapters.

Gone from this film are the apocryphal additions by the evangelical mainstream of a persecuted Noah building a boat for years in the sight of his mocking neighbours. Whole sermons have been preached on Noah’s example of perseverance in persecution, though nothing in the text ever suggests that it was so. Eisegesis of this sort reveals more about the persecution complex of North American Evangelicalism than the God of the Bible. Instead of mocking Noah, in Aronofsky’s version, the rest of humanity assumes that Noah does know Creator’s will, that a deadly flood is coming and that there is no hope for their rescue. This far more challenging reading doesn’t fit as well into today’s cheerful and upbeat positive-thinking evangelical culture, but it is a lot more faithful to the original text. If God created the world, then God may do to that which was created whatever he wills. This is a challenging and even frightening thought, and the boldness with which Aronofsky explores and exposes it places his film among the best of truly powerful religious art.

Aronofsky’s film faces the problem of human violence and the corruption of power without apology. Noah is confronted with the depravity of humankind divorced from Creator and the consequence of the war with Creation that follows. Humanity has made itself god, rising above the heavens as sovereign over the very earth from which it was formed. The cultic hierarchy that arises from such arrogant hedonism is a chaos of violence, as every person does as they wish, the powerful prey on the weak, women become property, animals become food (not for nutrition but to absorb their strength, another consequence of humanity’s lust for power), and the earth is raped for her resources in a frenzy of short-sighted and selfish ignorance. To be blunt, Noah’s world looks very much like the worst of ours.

Like all of Darren Aronofsky’s films, the characters are complex. Many are deeply troubled, Noah in particular. When Noah is exposed to the worst of violent humanity, his response is not judgment, as though he lives above them, but disgust at even himself. He honestly believes that he is no better, and neither are any of the members of his family. Later, when he speaks to his wife Naameh, he tells her that their willingness as parents to kill for the sake of their children makes them no better. God’s choice of Noah as the ark builder, therefore, has nothing to do with his own merit, but only his obedience to the Creator’s will. This is no righteous, persecuted preacher in the midst of mocking strangers. Noah is a brother to all humanity, and he grieves the judgment of every one of them as he grieves the judgment he also deserves. These elements of his character make him more Messianic than evangelical, and once again brings him far closer to the source material than our comfort often allows. The theme is explored even more deeply when one sequence of images shows Cain’s murder of his brother Abel as the violence of every war in all of human history. Noah is not innocent, and neither are we.

Some of the elements of the story that do not come directly from the biblical flood myth narrative still communicate other frequently explored themes of narrative theology, especially from the Book of Genesis. Emma Watson plays the young Ila, adopted daughter of Noah and Naameh. A wound from her childhood has left her unable to bear children. She wrestles with her identity as a woman, her sexuality, and the weight of her responsibility to reproduce for the sake of not only her family, but all of humanity. She becomes the symbol of Sarai, mother of Isaac, Rebecca, mother of Jacob and Esau, and Rachel, mother of Joseph. All three of these women in the book of Genesis are unable to bear children, and in each generation, they are miraculously able to give birth. Her rescue and adoption brings her through the flood, as in Exodus when Moses’ tiny ark brought him to the house of Pharaoh and safety. When Ila prepares to leave the ark on a raft with her tiny family to escape the violence and judgment of her adopted father, we are reminded of the murderous exile of Hagar and Ishmael when they are sent away into the desert by Abraham to die. The same blessing of Creator that rescues Ila and blesses her womb also rescues her from her exile, just as Hagar’s cry was also heard in the wilderness in the book of Genesis. We are also reminded of the powerful story of Abraham’s test of faith on the Mountain of Moriah when he showed himself willing to sacrifice his own son. Noah finds himself in a very similar situation, knife in hand and ready to kill the only hope of an heir when he believes the Creator has commanded it. When a lone figure walks away from his family and into the wilderness of the new world, we are reminded of Cain’s exile to Nod. All of these biblical allusions are handled with incredible depth and honesty. Despite all the accusations the film has received for being untrue to the biblical narrative, I would argue that the film reveals Aronofsky’s great depth of knowledge and respect for the story of Noah and its context in Genesis and the entirety of the Hebrew Scripture.

Some have suggested the film has a conspiratorial agenda to promote radical environmentalism. It is not the purpose of this article to combat such accusations, but I personally found the theme of Creation care to be consistent with the Genesis account. Like the common evangelical additions of Noah’s persecution, I think this accusation reveals more about contemporary North American evangelical culture than it does about the film. As for accusations by other evangelicals of Kabbalism or heterodox mystical elements, I’ll admit that I saw a lot of evidence for these sources as inspiration to Aronofsky’s vision. However, the themes and motifs arising from the film are so honest, even viciously, daringly, frighteningly honest to the ancient theology of God in Genesis that I am not concerned by these potential extra-biblical sources. It may be that the best of mystical spirituality helped inform the incredibly thoughtful approach that Aronofsky has taken with this film.

The greatest achievement that I believe this film made was the communication of the mercy and love of the Creator character that one feels at the end of the film. Noah leaves the viewer with a sense of hope, a deep and awesome hope and trust in this Creator character as Noah’s family gathers to worship on a hill in the new world. Considering the horror to which we have been witness, to be left with such a feeling is truly remarkable. Much of the reason we are able to be led through the horrors of the flood to the shores of hope and mercy and love is because of the extra elements Aronofsky inserted into the story, especially the story of Ila and her relationship to her adopted father. It was by her story that Aronofsky was able to place the story of Noah in its greater context, by allusion to the rest of the narrative of Genesis. In doing so, he elevated the film above the strict boundaries of the flood myth in Genesis, and let the text breathe with the rest of the narrative with which the story danced, revealing the more complete picture of the God of Genesis, a God of love, of mercy, and of justice.

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*My use of the word "myth" is intentional and precise. It describes the genre of literature in which the story of Noah is recorded in the book of Genesis. In the New Testament, Jesus and Peter both reference the story of Noah as though it was a true event. I intend to interpret the story in the same way as they do, giving it the same weight of scriptural authority as they do.

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A popular blog post by Brian Mattson has suggested that Darren Aronofsky's Noah is coded Gnosticism. I don't believe these accusations have merit. This article does a good job of explaining why.

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For more on Genesis and narrative theology, please visit Shawn Birss' old blog, poetpunkpastor.blogspot.com.

The articles in this old blog, from 2011, are now being rewritten and expanded into a book on Genesis 1-11, and how the narratives in this one passage of scripture lays the canvas for the theology of all of the rest of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.

The working title for this new book is West of Eden, and is forecast to be published in 2016.

For more information, please contact the author at shawnbirss@gmail.com.