Noah Part 2: Dandelions

After initially thinking #Noah would be a three part series, I have extended it to five or six after more study.

In Part 1, we honed in on the fact that Noah found favor with God and explored what all that means. I’m still stuck on the idea of Noah being beautiful to God despite his imperfections (some of which will come into very clear focus in the last part of this series) and felt like it deserved more than a couple paragraphs to fully unpack.

So as I’ve reflected on this concept, I was reminded of a popular #CCM song from my high school days called “Dandelions” by #FiveIronFrenzy. Here are some of the lyrics:

In a field of yellow flowers underneath the sun

bluest eyes that spark with lightning, boy with shoes undone

he is young, so full of hope, reveling in tiny dreams

filling up his arms with flowers right for giving any queen

running to her, beaming bright while cradling his prize

a flickering of yellow light within his mother's eyes

she holds them to her heart keeping them where they'll be safe

clasped within her very marrow dandelions in a vase

she sees love where anyone else would see weeds

all hope is found, here is everything he needs

fathomless Your endless mercy, weight i could not lift

where do i fit in this puzzle? what good are these gifts?

not a martyr or a saint. scarcely can i struggle through

all that i have ever wanted was to give my best to You

Lord search my heart. create in me something clean

...dandelions...You see flowers in these weeds

You might be surprised to find out that I actually never completely understood what this song meant until I re-listened to it recently. I sort of got the gist of it as a kid, but after having 3 boys and watching this scenario between them and their mom play out over and over again in real life as a dad, I now understand this song on a much deeper level.

I have watched each of my three boys search tirelessly for “beautiful flowers” for Charissa on walks and hikes. Almost 100% of the time, they’ve brought her common weeds - usually dandelions. I’ve watched them beam with pride as they present these “flowers” to their mom, eagerly anticipating her reaction. And she has never let them down. I’ve never received a reaction to “real flowers” like my boys have enjoyed for their weeds, and that’s ok. My wife understands the heart behind their presentation. In this moment, they’ve truly given her their very best and she rewards their love and adoration with an overwhelming acceptance. You might say she shows them favor.

This is God and Noah. The best Noah can offer God is dandelions, yet God shows him favor. Like us, Noah’s righteousness is as filthy rags (verse), yet God finds him beautiful. This is a paradox that confuses people who’ve never had a real experience with Jesus. How can God simultaneously hate our sinfulness and also love us? How can he reject our hard hearts but accept us wholeheartedly? The answer is found in I Samuel 16:7, when Samuel is surprised that he is to anoint Jesse’s youngest and smallest son to be the next King of Israel. Where Samuel saw a little boy, God saw a giant killer. It’s all a matter of perspective.

Allow me to further explain:

My youngest son has an extremely rare and currently incurable disease. From the little we know, it’s a bone eating tumor that lives in his face and, left unchecked, would eat all the bones in his face and skull, eventually killing him. Thankfully we have fantastic doctors who have been able to not only keep the tumor from growing, but shrink it to a manageable size for the foreseeable future. How long it will work is anyone’s guess, but for now we’re buying time while we wait on him to grow up a little more and medicine to advance a little further. His case is already helping to move things along in that regard.

From the description of my son’s horrendous face-eating tumor, you might assume he looks pretty gnarly. You might expect to be taken aback when you first meet him. You might expect for his condition to be obvious. But it’s not. You could put him beside any other healthy kid and I bet more often than not, you’d guess he was the healthy one. He’s strong, big for his age, and scored 9 goals in one soccer game as a 4 year old in his first season. He’s also pretty handsome (his genes are fantastic).

My point? Without a doctor who could look inside him and determine how sick he is, we might never know. My wife saw a small spot on the roof of his mouth a week before his second birthday and from there it took several doctors doing scans and other tests to identify his illness and determine just how bad it was.

What kind of doctor would simply look him over and, noting all the outward presentations I mentioned, send us on our way with a clean bill of health? If a doctor only focuses on what’s going right, they will never understand what’s wrong. If they only look at the outside, they’ll never fix the inside. For my son, this is life and death because even though he looks healthy on the outside, he’s literally dying on the inside.

And this is where lost people get confused. You see, the Bible says that God is a doctor (#Mark 2:17). This isn’t accidental language. God is a doctor who looks past your talents, your trophies, your income, your job, your achievements - all the things about you that you believe say you’re ok - and instead focuses on what needs to be fixed. That’s what a good doctor does.

The truth is, your heart is bad. The Bible says that more than anything else, your heart is evil (Jeremiah 17:9). This contradiction between how you look at yourself (outside) and how God looks at you (inside) can be hard to overcome for some people.

Like my son, you may not look sick or act sick or even feel sick, but in spite of all that, you desperately need a doctor. And you need a doctor who will tell you the truth about your condition. We could have shopped around for a doctor who would tell us that our son is fine. We could have gone on our merry way in blissful ignorance of the disease that was wreaking havoc on his body. We could have accused the doctors who told us the truth of hating him or not wanting us to be happy. We could have rejected the hard truth of the real doctor and embraced a fraud, which is what some of you have chosen to do with your hearts (2 Timothy 4:3). And there is no shortage of wannabe doctors on this planet. You can find any number of people who will flatter you, affirm you, and tell you how amazing you are. Feeling down? There are all sorts of quick fixes to mask your symptoms. There are a thousand roads that lead to bad doctors who can't truly make you whole.

But there is one road that leads to a good doctor. God knows just how sick you are. He also knows just what will cure you. But it starts with being honest with yourself about your condition and trusting the guidance of the Great Physician.

And God isn’t just a doctor. The Bible says He’s also a Father.

And when you come to Him with your soul-eating, heart-destroying, always-only-evil spiritual disease, he looks at you like a mom looks at her dirty, smiling son whose outstretched hand is proudly waving dying weeds. And He thinks you’re beautiful.

This is how an imperfect man like Noah finds favor with a holy God. Because as a parent God wants Noah's heart and as a Doctor, he'll also fix it so that with God's help Noah can become something he could never be on his own. And once God changes him, he becomes so radically devoted that he will do anything God asks him to do, including building a boat in the middle of the desert. More on that in Part 3.

Lord search my heart

create in me something clean

...dandelions...

You see flowers in these weeds