“I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. But I will establish My covenant with you, and you will enter the ark—you and your sons and your wife and your sons’ wives with you.”

{Genesis 6:17-18}

 I recently saw a meme that said something along these lines:

God never told Noah not to invite other people onto the Ark.

On the surface, that sounds good. Very inclusionary. Unfortunately, it lacks theological soundness. First of all, it casts blame on Noah that doesn’t belong to him. Second, just because God did not specifically say something, does not mean He did not specifically imply it. He made it clear that He was going to destroy every living thing on the earth, but, He was making a covenant with a specific family – Noah, his wife, his sons and their wives. The implication is that Noah and his family were not given permission to invite any other people into a covenant God was choosing to make.

The suggestion of the meme is that it was not God’s intention to exclude people from the ark, but that it was Noah who chose to exclude. That goes down easy in a culture that is rallying around the word “inclusion” right now, and often the snowballed effect of that easy thought process is “God would never send anyone to hell”. The everyone goes to heaven and all roads lead to God theology, which bears no resemblance to the scriptures, is shaped by culture, not truth.

This is the danger of letting the internet determine what we believe about God. We end up with a god created in someone else’s image, and we don’t know the God in whose image we have been made.

Social media is full of things that sound good and it’s tempting to adopt them as truth. Beware! In the Word of God we have been given what is true, not just what sounds true. This is where our theology is built. The Bible is our plumbline against which every other thing must align itself.

Father, help us to let our theology be shaped by Your Word and not by our culture. Teach us and help us to steward well the truth You have given us.