Genesis 6-9
Very quickly after Adam and Eve died, their children, and their children’s children got more and more sinful, and at last things got to such a condition that God said He would not let the wickedness go on; and He also cut down man’s days to one hundred and twenty years. He saw what bad hearts those people had, and that all they thought about, and all they said and did, was only evil all the time, yet He was so patient, and so slow to anger that He did not leave them without someone to speak to them about their ways and to warn them of the certainly coming day of judgment.
‘Noah’s great-grandfather Enoch, about whom we read last time, had spoken to the people of his day in a very solemn way. God has told us in the Bible, part of what Enoch said to them; it is written in the short little Epistle of Jude, verses 14 and 15. Will you take your Bible and find it?
“Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of His saints, to execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.” ‘
Noah, too, was a preacher of righteousness (2 Peter 2:55And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly; (2 Peter 2:5).) We don’t know how many listened to his preaching, but we can be sure that hundreds, and it may be thousands, came to see the ark God told him to build, and not very many of them, we would think, went away without hearing his solemn warnings. Perhaps they laughed at what they may have called Noah’s crazy notion, that a great flood was coming to drown them• all, but the time came when there was no laughing left.
God indeed had said to Noah, “The end of all flesh is come before Me make thee an ark of gopher wood”. It. was to have many rooms, and it would need to have very many to allow a place for each kind of creature that would have to find a home in the ark for a year. It had to have a place for all that would believe Goo’ and be saved, too. This big house-ship was to be painted inside and outside with pitch: it was about four hundred and fifty feet long, seventy-five feet wide, and forty-five feet high, with three floors. There was just one window and it was about a foot and a half, on the roof of the ark. I don’t suppose this ark was very much like the “Noah’s arks” that boys and girls, when they arc not too big, sometimes have to play with; when the ark was built. God told Noah and his family to come into it. Do you notice that word “Come”? not “go” into the ark. God, through Jesus, invites us to come to Hirai and be saved, foo, not from being drowned, but from the judgment that is surely coming soon, and that will be to be shut out from Him and shut in with Satan forever.
During the week that was left before the door of the ark was shut such a strange procession of creatures came from the fields and the forests, from jungle and mountain,—every kind of animal and feathered thing, and crawling worms and snakes too, came walking and flying and creeping to the ark, two of some kinds and seven pairs of others. Who but God could have made them all come there? And we can be sure that every kind of thing (except those that live under the water) was found in the .ark, because verses 19 and 20 of chapter 6; and verses 2, 3, 14, and 15, of the next chapter, tell us so.
But did any boys and girls or men and women go into the ark? Sad to say, not one person outside of Noah and his wife, -their three sons and their wives! All they needed was to believe what God said; the door was open, and it was just to walk in! Perhaps some of them wait-. ed for others to go in, and the others didn’t go, and so they were outside when -the door was shut. In verse 16 see those words, “And the Lord shut him in”; Noah and his family were surely safe then, but what about those that were outside? They were shut out, just as those who believed God were shut in. Very .likely as the terrible down-pour of rain came on, and kept on day after day until presently the houses began to be covered with water, some would call out to Noah to open the door and let them in, but it was of no use,—Noah couldn’t open the door, for the Lord had shut it. The time -of pleading with those that were outside was past; they had been offered salvation .but didn’t take it at God’s time, and now it was too. late. Be wise, dear children, and make sure now that you are saved, -that you have put your real heart’s trust in Jesus through His word. There is a dreadful time, far wcrse than the flood, -coming and then it will be forever too late to be saved.
The great deluge of rain kept on until the mountains were covered, and there was no height left for anyone to climb to, and every living person and every creature that moved on the earth was dead, except those who were in the ark.
After five months the rain stopped and the water gradually went down until the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat; some weeks later the mountain tops could be seen; after another few weeks, Noah opened the window of the ark, and sent out a raven which flew far and near, but did not come back to him. Next, he sent out a dove, to see if the water had become low, but she found no resting place, and came back to Noah into the ark. A week went by and Noah sent the dove out again; at evening she came back with an olive leaf in her mouth, showing that the trees were to be seen out of the water; still another week passed and the dove was let loose once more, and this time she did not come back; there was a clean, dry place for her to make her home.
When they had been shut up in the ark very nearly eleven months, the water was all gone, and Noah took the covering off the ark, but still he waited for God to tell him to leave, and to bring out the many creatures that had been shut up so long, so it was ten days more than a year after the rain began to fall, when the door of the ark was opened.
Noah, now in thankfulness for being saved from the death that had come to all the world, built an altar to the Lord and offered on it both beasts and birds of every clean kind, and the Lord, while saying that the thoughts of men’s hearts are evil. from youth, yet said that He would no more curse the ground for man’s sake, and no more strike every living thing as He had done; as long as the earth remains, planting time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night would never cease. And then, as a sign of His promise to not destroy the earth with a flood again, God gave the rainbow in the sky that we so often see when the sun shines after rain.
I would like to end our story just here for this time, but I must tell you first that Noah planted grape vines, and afterward got drunk from the wine he made. Man cannot be depended on by God;, he always spoils what God gives him, and God keeps our salvation for us, because we’d lose it if it depended on us to keep it.
Messages of God’s Love 1/30/1921