Easter has come and gone. I find it interesting this year there were three movies with spiritual themes released around Easter — Son of God, Noah, and Heaven is For Real. I grew up watching The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston playing Moses. The very best scene was the parting of the Red Sea. Impressive special effects for the time. My sisters and I would ooh and ahh.

This year, I went to see Noah. The movie tells the story of Noah, his family, and building the ark. The special effects were quite impressive, well beyond those of The Ten Commandments. And the movie answered questions I had wondered about when told the story in Bible class. How did he build an ark big enough to hold all these creatures? In the movie, he has supernatural help. How did he keep natural enemies apart? The species arrive together. Birds as one, insects as one (couldn’t live with bugs but I understand the need for them), reptiles as one, mammals as one. Imagine the noise. How did he keep them all quiet? Noah and his wife, a healer, developed an inhalational anesthetic that put the animals to sleep. Nitrous oxide might be the modern equivalent.

Epic movies have a villain. In The Ten Commandments, it was the Pharaoah and his army. In Noah, the villain is Tubal-cain, a descendant of Cain – a sociopath, thief, and someone not above murder to get his way. He raises an army for an unsuccessful attack on the ark though Tubal-cain manages to sneak aboard to set up the final battle between good and evil.

Noah is a man under pressure – from the knowledge of the planned attack, by the schisms in his family as the ark nears completion but, mostly, from the demands of God. While the family relationships depicted are artistic license, I hadn’t considered that aspect of the story before.

The world Noah inhabits is represented by the villain – one of violence and war, of not protecting the earth, of power used to take from, abuse and kill others. There are definite parallels to the present.

When the rains start and the floods follow and the people drown, Noah and his family must listen to the screams outside the ark before the sounds die away. It is not pretty.

The overarching message of the movie is to love one another and protect the earth. Perhaps, the changes in weather patterns, with greater droughts, floods, and harsh winters, and the greater numbers of species  endangered or dying out, added to the current climate of war and strife, is a prelude to a larger cataclysmic event that might result in man dying out. We would do well to heed the warning.