A few years ago, while I was reading through the story of Noah in Genesis in the Bible, I was struck with a new thought. The story begins by saying, “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth… It grieved him… So God said ‘I will blot out man.’”
Then it says, “But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord… Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God… Noah did all that God commanded him.”
He was about 480-500 years old at that point.
Then God tells Noah to build a boat to save him and his family from the great flood that would cover the earth. Noah did. It took 100-120 years to build.
Noah was 600 years old when he entered the ark. The flood came, and he and his family were in the boat for 12 months.
When Noah was 601, he then stepped off of the boat and onto dry land, the new earth.
He died when he was 950 years old, which means he lived 350 more years – establishing and working at setting up a new world for the new generation.
The genius of Noah was not that he built the boat.
The genius of Noah was that he was a man of God; faithful, committed, and intimate for 400 years leading up to the great flood.
He was found faithful before the flood.
It was because Noah walked with God for 400 years that showed God his trustworthiness. God then entrusted him to build an ark for 120 years, to stay on the ark for 12 months, and to set up a new generation for 350 years until his death.
In those first 400 years, they learned how to talk, walk together, and endure through the evils of the earth. Four centuries of relationship would be the foundation on which Noah could do something as crazy as build a massive boat for the next 120 years.
The story of Noah is largely about his life prior to the ark. It is about who he was as a man; how he was intimate with God, walking with Him, and learning to obey his voice. My guess is that this was a relationship of love, not of dreaded obligation.
The boat was fantastic, but without Noah having a relationship with God, there might not have been a boat.
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This encourages me – and hopefully you, too – to know that God is not looking for me to build grand and vast boats in my life; an empire, or monument, or big work or ministry. He is looking for and needing my relationship, my heart, my love; to walk with him.
And the world needs to know this, as well; that walking with God and with each other is what is needed. It is about faithfully walking together, closely, and loving each other. The world needs this, the same way it needed Noah’s 400 years of walking with God.
However, my own efforts cannot do what Noah did or what Jesus did – living a blameless life and being found righteous. But Jesus gives me, and you, the free gift of righteousness. So that when God looks at us, he does not see a sinner but a new creation, a righteous one. And then like Noah, I get to choose if I’ll walk with God in that gift.
The genius of Noah was not the boat. It was that he believed. It was that Noah walked with God for 400 years before the boat was even discussed. That, then, is our example. Not that we build large monuments of boats and programs and ministries. Those come as a result. But that we learn the lesson of Noah, and realize our life is found by walking with God:
Through our teenage years of struggle and despair,
Through our young adult years of building our life works,
Through our adult years of captaining the work of our lives,
And through the retirement years of finishing and preparing the new generation.
As Noah, will we then be a people through whom he can choose to build boats?
Citations:
English Standard Version Study Bible. Crossway, 2011. Genesis 5-10.
Spirit, Holy. (2013) Personal Revelation. Guatemala.
Timms, David. (2009) Sacred Waiting. Chapter 1. Pages 22-35.
