Attacks that re-affirm

It’s no secret that college is a tough place to tread for Christians. Professors attack it, your friends attack it. It just gets attacked. A lot. I’m really thankful that I’ve already found a good group of fellow Christ followers to help keep me strong, but it doesn’t get rid of the fact that I deal with attacks on my faith daily.

Granted, what I’m about to talk about isn’t a direct attack, but it is still something that could weaken my faith if I’m not careful. In my “Great Books” class today, we discussed Genesis as a piece of literature, and last Wednesday we also talked about the Flood and compared it to the similar story in Gilgamesh. Treating the Bible in such a way is dangerous ground (I mean treating it as “just another story to analyze”), but it only managed to remind me of how awesome the Bible is, amazingly.

Who knows how the flood story ended up in both the Bible and Gilgamesh. Could be cultural overlap, the actual historical influence, I don’t know. What I’m getting to here is that Gilgamesh is a story about the hero, Gilgamesh. The story involves “the gods” flooding the earth to get rid of man, but in this case they later admit it as a mistake (yes, the gods made a mistake), and the story still resolves around a human hero. In Genesis, the hero is ALWAYS God. Yes, Noah is always a very important figure, but God is the hero here, and of course as Christians one of our primary goals is glorifying God, so it’s just a reminder of how uniform the Bible is in that.

My second thought was that in Genesis, God does not say he made a mistake. He stands by his decision. He didn’t want to do it, exactly, but he never says it wasn’t what needed to be done. This is a reminder that we may not always understand God’s plan, and it may even seem a little counterintuitive, but He knows what He’s doing and it’s ultimately for the better.

I know that’s not the most sensible post I’ve ever written, but I just wanted to write it down. I just always find it funny that attacks on Christianity often only make it stronger.