Words of Wisdom: Noah's Ark

Hi guys! I'm taking a teensy break from my normal picture posting and doing a Biblical history lesson thing. My brothers are studying the time of the Great Flood and I found several points to be very, very interesting. So, here ya go. :P If you don't wanna listen to me blab on about Noah, fast forward to the end. There's a really awesome thing that happened. :)

Genesis 5 lists the family line, from Adam to Noah. Noah was born after 9 generations through Adam's third son, Seth. When Noah was born, his father, Lamech, said: "He will comfort us in the labor and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the Lord has cursed." (Genesis 5:29)  Huh.

In Genesis 6:1-4, it says:

When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them,² the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. ³ Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not contend with^[a] humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.”

⁴ The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

This I thought was interesting. This section makes it sound like angels came down to earth and married mortal women, doesn't it? And it says that they had children - Nephilim. I don't quite know what to make of this, and as far as I know this is the only mention of Nephilim and marriage like this in the Bible, so .... I don't really know what to say about this. I just thought it was interesting. :)

But anyway. Back to the story. When Noah was somewhere over 500 years old (500 years old!) he had three sons: Ham, Shem, and Japheth (Genesis 5:32), and around this time, God told him what He was going to do.

Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence. God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. (Genesis 6:11 and 12)

The people on the earth at this time were really sinful. They had no regard for God's commands. God chose Noah and his family because they were, out of all the people on earth, were the only righteous people. The only righteous people! God was pleased with Noah, so He came down and talked to him:

So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. (Genesis 6:13)

But since our God is a merciful God (and a smart God), he said he would spare Noah and his family, for they alone were faithful. Then, He gave Noah instructions for a massive boat that he would build that would withstand the upcoming torrent.

So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high. Make a roof for it, leaving below the roof an opening one cubit high all around. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks. (Genesis 6:14-16)

A cubit is roughly the size from your elbow to your fingertips. To say all this last part in English, the ark was over three stories high and its top deck area was roughly the size of 20 basketball courts. This ark was HUGE! I mean, after all, it had to fit Noah's family, and two animals of every kind in it (Genesis 6:19-21). Every kind! From the smallest snail or butterfly to the largest dinosaur. Actually, one of the largest dinosaurs known, the Ultrasaurus, is estimated to have weighed 55 tons, with a height of 52 feet and a length of 82 feet. The ark had to accomodate two of those, and two of every other creature! Yikes!

Predictably, this would take a long time to build. Even nowadays, with all our technical equipment, that would probably take a lifetime. 

For Noah, it took him about a HUNDRED YEARS to build the ark, beginning when he was 500. A hundred years! Imagine that! Here he is, out in the desert, building a boat when no big body of water is nearby. The people of that day and age had never seen rain - their water, presumably, came up from springs in the ground. They laughed at him and teased him - for a hundred years! That's enough pressure to make any ordinary person snap in two, but Noah held firm. No wonder God was pleased with him!

And Noah did everything just as God commanded him. (Genesis 6:22)

So. Fast forward a hundred years - Noah is now 600 years old (wow!) and God comes to him. We don't know if God had communicated with Noah during the 100 years it took to build the ark. Imagine ... the last you heard from God was a hundred years ago, when he told you to build a boat in the middle of the desert, and you had to endure ridicule and gossip for that hundred years. Any normal person would start second-guessing God's judgment, right? We don't know if Noah did second-guess, all we know is that he persevered through it.

The Lord then said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation. (Genesis 7:1) 

 Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made. (Genesis 7:4)

Imagine how traumatic this might be for God. I know it's hard to think of God as anything more than a king on a throne, but he has feelings and emotions just like us. We are made in God's image (Genesis 1:27). That means that everything we feel - joy, excitement, sadness, anger - God feels, too. So, for God, this would be very saddening, I would think. It's like making this wonderful creation, a book, painting, or anything, and having to erase or destroy it. Or, "wipe from the face of the earth". Major bummer.

And Noah did all that the Lord commanded him. (Genesis 7:5) Good old obedient Noah.

In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.  And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights. (Genesis 7:11 and 12)

Pairs of all creatures that have the breath of life in them came to Noah and entered the ark.  The animals going in were male and female of every living thing, as God had commanded Noah. Then the Lord shut him in. (Genesis 7:15 and 16)

Two cool things I have to point out. It says that all creatures with the breath of life came to Noah. I think that means that only land animals and animals of the air came to him, right? Because underwater creatures don't have the breath of life. And plus, this is the great flood -- I would think that most of them would survive.

Secondly, notice how in the last sentence it says: And the Lord shut him in. I take that to mean that God, personally, closed the door to the ark. That would have been cool to see.

Well, you know what happens next. Noah, his family, and his animal friends float for forty days and forty nights. Then the rain stops. But the water doesn't go down  for a hundred and fifty more days (Gen. 7:24). The rain only rained for a little bit of time, but they were on the ark for a while! Listen to this:

Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky.  The water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down, and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible. (Gen. 8:4-6)

The ark came to rest on the the mountains of Ararat after the 40 days and 40 nights of raining and the 150 more days of the water receding. But Noah can't get out yet. For three more months the waters continued to recede, until the tops of the mountains were visible. So, Noah has spent roughly 280 days in the ark, so far. 

After forty more days of waiting, Noah sent out a raven (Gen. 8:6-7) but it kept flying around, not finding anywhere to land. Then Noah sent out a dove, but it couldn't find any place to land either and it returned. After waiting seven more days Noah sent the dove out again, and when it came back, it had an olive branch in its beak (Gen. 8:10-12).

By the first day of the first month of Noah’s six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry. (Gen. 8:13-14)

Noah spent over a year holed up inside that ark. Gosh! 

Then, Noah exits, with his family and animals, and God, using a rainbow, makes a covenant with them not to flood the Earth in a great flood ever again (Gen. 9: 8-16). 

Well, Noah began repopulating the earth, and he had many sons. His first three sons (Ham, Shem, and Japheth) split up and spread across the globe. Jesus comes through the line of Shem, and we, based on where we live and where Japheth settled, come through Japheth's line.

(If you skipped to the end, here's where you start reading ;)

Fast forward thousands and thousands of years. 

In 2006 satellites picked up a strange "anomaly" on the mountains of Ararat.

 Many people believe that this is the Ark, preserved by ice for thousands of years. I'm pretty sure it is! That would be so cool ... but look how BIG it is! It took Noah a hundred years to build that! And it's so huge that satellites in outer space can pick it up!

Well, this is probably the longest post I've ever done. :)