We went to see “The Ark and the Darkness” last night in the theaters. I enjoyed it, with a few caveats.
It shows the pre-flood world as a time of apostasy. It shows the flood as a violent event that demonstrates the justice and wrath of a holy God. It shows scientific evidence for such an event and demonstrates the lengths that secular experts will go to in order to find any explanation that doesn’t involve God. It moves on to the Tower of Babel and uses the languages as evidence for the validity of the Bible.
I agreed with all of this, and nothing was new information. The movie also did not present these facts in any kind of storytelling way of engaging the audience. It presented facts and then demanded a response. And that was when I rolled my eyes. The only response was to repent, which I agree with. But the response had to be now because the second coming of Jesus is imminent.
The demand to repent is not based on an immediate return. It is based on our immediate propensity to sin. It is based on the fact that our life is a vapor. But to point only to an imminent return is a lazy approach that presupposes a dispensational approach to the Bible, which has been the context for a reduction of the reputation of Christians everywhere.
They don’t take us seriously because we don’t take the Bible seriously. We ignore most of church history to pledge allegiance to a doctrinal stance that didn’t exist until the 1830s.
That is the only issue I had with the information presented in this movie. Any other issue I may have would be that it was merely a presentation of data, not a cinematic approach. It was information I’ve heard elsewhere, just spoken with different voices.
I would suggest this to you, but Christians ought to be better than this. So I won’t suggest it. Instead, check out Answers in Genesis as well as Genesis Apologetics, two organizations who were prominently used in this film. You’ll get everything that is in this movie for free, and with a reduced insertion of the same Dispensationalism that has sidetracked so many Christians, a majority of them in America. Because Americans and the study of History have a complicated relationship.
More on that another time.
