Lon Solomon: “People Jesus Met, part 28 — The Wedding in Cana (Full Obedience)”
January 2nd, 2010 by Menachem Wecker
This post is part of a feature of critical responses to sermons by religious leaders.
In Lon Solomon’s 12/13/09 sermon (audio, video), the lead pastor at McLean Bible errs in his analysis of the story of Noah, and offers what is unfortunately a regular feature in his otherwise thought-provoking sermons: a hateful, snide comment about rabbis. He also talks about how God told him to become lead pastor at McLean.
Though “every American child, just about, has heard of Noah and his ark,” Solomon begins, what made Noah a great man wasn’t that people know about him, nor that people have toys that look like him, but that the bible honors him as “one of the greatest men ever to live.”
Solomon mentions that Isaiah (see Isaiah 54:9 to see that this isn’t a positive reference), Peter (see here), Ezekiel (see here) and “the Lord Jesus himself” cast Noah in a positive light. Solomon also cites Hebrews 11, which he calls “the Bible’s spiritual hall of fame, the Cooperstown of the Bible.”
“There’s old Noah, big as life, and what was it that the Bible applauds Noah for above everything else? Well folks, it was for his full obedience to God.”
According to Solomon, the Bible tells us Noah had never seen rain and had no empirical proof that a flood was coming. “Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Noah obeyed God,” Solomon would have us believe. After discussing the wedding at Cana, Solomon (starting about 11:30 into the clip) adds, “What made Noah the spiritual giant that he was, what caused the Bible to applaud him and put him into the hall of fame, was his full obedience to God. What God told him to do Noah did. He did it fully, and he did it completely, and he did it without compromise.”
Indeed, the passage Solomon quotes, Hebrews 11:7, states, “By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.”
The trouble is that Solomon neglects another important Old Testament passage, Genesis 7:7 (Hebrew), “And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood” (emphasis mine).
The medieval commentator Rashi has noted that Noah entered the ark not because he was faithful even without empirical proof of the flood, but because the waters pushed him in. “Even Noah was one of those who is short of faith,” Rashi writes, “he sometimes believes and sometimes does not believe that the flood would come. And he did not enter the ark until the waters forced him.”
Elsewhere in his sermon (19:55 ff), Solomon discusses God’s reasons for stripping Saul of his kingship and replacing him with David. “Friends, in God’s mind, partial obedience is no obedience,” he says. What then of Noah’s partial obedience? How does Solomon explain the Genesis verse that Noah actually entered the ark because of the empirical evidence that promised a watery grave if he did not shut himself up in his boat?
Of course, the Hebrews verse says Noah started building the ark out of faith — since the flood had not come yet — but that can co-exist with the OT statement that what actually drove Noah into the ark wasn’t his faith in God, but actually meteorological evidence that a flood was beginning. (The Rockwell image on the right comes to mind.)
Surely, Solomon need not respond to every biblical verse in every sermon, but starting at 14:01, he says in a different context, “Well friends, every nincompoop can get this one right. I mean even those rabbis can get this one right.” In that light, I will say, friends, every school child who has studied the Hebrew bible knows Genesis 7:7. And especially the lead pastor at a mega church, who fancies himself an expert on the Hebrew Bible, should get this one right.
Image: The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark by Jan Brueghel the Elder, 1613. Getty Museum.