I won’t go see Noah. Why give the creator of this nonsense any sense of credibility? God’s Not Dead was not exactly a Hollywood piece, according to what I read. It was produced by a small company that does pictures for people of faith, much like Fireproof and a couple others. Small company, small budget. Not Hollywood, because if Hollywood had ANYTHING to do with it, it would have been compromised in some way to fit their agenda.
God Is Not Dead really is unique in that it touches on real and current issues in Christianity today, not a story from the past. In fact, if anything, it brings to light the issue that we are in a spiritual battle DAILY and that the Enemy has been winning quite handily because MANY Christians are sitting on the sidelines, not engaged, unaware that we ARE in a spiritual battle, and obviously unprepared for this battle. A basic reason for this unpreparedness is this: the insistence by American scholars that the Pre-trib Rapture Theory is the Biblical one. It is the latest, from a dream of a nonbeliever who was considered demon-possessed. At the time it was propagated because of some part of that dream that appeared to come true. Then it was heralded by Scoffield, who included it into his notes in his notorious Scoffield Bible. Since then, it has been viewed as Scripture. This is insane.
If people really read their own Bibles and not commentary, they would understand that Jesus told of the signs that would precede His coming and they are playing out exactly as He said, and if you read Daniel, Ezekiel, and all the NT references, you will see that the NT scriptures actually give more detail (especially REV) to the OT prophecies, which were sealed until “that day”...and which we are seeing “unlocked” and revealed. The Pre-trib rapture makes people feel that they are safe from Antichrist and will not be here to know who he is. That is wrong. To believe that there will be a rapture, then a huge evangelistic outreach bringing millions of the left behind to Christ has no basis whatsoever in Scripture. One of the problems is that most American scholars do not differentiate between Antichrist’s fury and God’s wrath, which is the Trumpet and Bowl judgments. I could go on here, but I am needing to get back to my Kay Arthur study on Noah and the flood, as my class is tonight.
Two things I wasn't totally happy with about the movie:
One, Josh used the "big bang" idea as an argument against atheism/evolution. He might get away with it in a movie, real life is more problematical. Big Bang is more junk science just like evolution and should have been rejected on day one on purely philosophical grounds i.e. having all the mass of the universe collapsed to a point would be the mother of all black holes, and nothing would ever "bang" its way out of that. More recently, Halton Arp has destroyed the notion of an expanding universe and, with it, the entire rationale for believing in a "Big Bang".
http://bigbangneverhappened.org
The other thing I didn't like was claiming that free will was a total answer to the question of evil in the world. I believe that God does not directly interfere with physical reality because, were he to, the entire physical universe and the laws governing it would collapse. In other words, the first time he ever relaxed o0ne of the laws of nature for the sake of any individual person, there would never be an end to it.
I'd have preferred if Josh had spent a bit more time talking about evolution and less about the universe as a collection of hydrogen atoms. It's our living world which basically cannot be accounted for without God.