Noah's Rad!

Every day, I have been given gold. I’m serious! Little nuggets of gold, sometimes, more than one, have been handed to me. Ok, I guess they’re not real gold, but they could be. I have started to read through the book of Geneses in the Bible and, every day, I’m finding things I’ve never known before. I always see something new, something exciting, something treasured! (Like, I don’t know, nuggets of gold or something.)

So! I’ve got to show you a golden treasure God gave me the other day!

Remember Noah? If you don’t, no sweat. He’s an amazing man of God who lived in the early times of the world. He lived in the midst of a corrupt world where “everything they (man) thought or imagined was consistently and totally evil” (Genesis 6:5b). Wow! You think the world’s bad now! Ha! It’s got nothing on how it was then! Anyways, Noah was “the only blameless person living on earth at the time” (Genesis 6:9b) so he and God were BFFs. Because the world was totally bad, so much so that it “broke God’s heart” (Genesis 6:6b), that God wanted to whip out the entire population of earth and start over.

All except for Noah and his family.

Ok, here’s the good part that’s so cool! God turns to Noah and says (I’m seriously paraphrasing here) “Man! This world’s a mess! It makes me real sick and sad! I’m going to whip everyone and everything out! There’s going to be a huge flood and anything that breathes . . . DIES!” (Genesis 6:13-21)

Whoa! What would you do if God told you that? If God said that to me, I’d wet my pants. I wouldn’t know what to say and probably hid in my bed for a while. But not Noah. Now, the Bible doesn’t say flat out, “Noah was not afraid”, but God doesn’t have to tell him “Fear not!”, which is a very common thing supernatural beings say to us weak stomached humans. The Bible has no indication that I can tell of Noah being afraid. Sure, I bet he was a bit nervous, but I mean the terrifying, paralyzing fear an average person would feel after hearing mankind was done for.

God goes on to say (paraphrasing again) “So, Noah, build a boat. No, not a little sail boat, but a colossus, huge cruise ship! I’m calling it an ark. Two of every kind of animal will come and be you’re new pets for a while. Make the ark forty-five hundred feet long, seventy-five feet wide, and forty-five feet high. Oh, and make sure you pack enough food for your family and the animals.”

Once God slams down His flood plan, this is what Noah dose: he “did everything exactly as God had commanded him” (Genesis 6:22). He doesn’t question. He doesn’t freak. He doesn’t complain. He doesn’t argue. He just does what God said to do. And you know why he didn’t freak out? (Listen, here’s the punch line!) I think it’s because Noah had such a “close fellowship with God” (Genesis 6:9b) that he knew he and his family would be safe.

No.

Matter.

What.

Wow! I want faith like that! To be able to look around me and see horribleness, but know God will protect me against all odds! To be able to stand firm when the waves of life come like a flood, (divorce, work, depression, insecurity, pain, lies, loneliness, abandonment, rejection, and all the others) God will give us an ark. It will be hard, we’ll get wet, but we will keep our head above the waves. Oh, and if your concerned God will flood the earth again, don’t worry. He said “never again will floodwaters kill all living creatures; never again will a flood destroy the earth” (Genesis 9: 11b). He put the rainbow in the sky as a sign of His promise too.

So remember, God is with His people and “when you go through deep waters, I (God) will be with you. When you go through rivers of difficulty, you will not drown” (Isaiah 43:2a).

Thank You, God, for arks!