A Year in the Life
How has the last year been for you? Anything significant happen? Any certain trial, illness, injury, or maybe something to rejoice over, marriage, baby, healing, reconciliation? A lot can happen in a year. Coming up on the end of the school year always makes me feel like the year is flying by far too fast. Soon it will be Christmas…
In the past year I’ve been to 3 weddings, 4 baby showers, and 2 funerals. I’ve nursed my kids through a dozen colds, a broken foot, and attended half a dozen of their music performances… And in between all those joys and sorrows is daily life, family, work, church, all while holding on to Jesus’ hand and knowing that when the floods come he’s holding me up.
Noah was 600 years old when the flood began and spent a total of 370 days in the ark. (Gen 7:6-19) The flood itself lasted only 150 days, but the process of the waters subsiding took another 220 days.
Where Did All the Water Go?
In the six hundred and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried from off the earth. And Noah removed the covering of the ark and looked, and behold, the face of the ground was dry. In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth had dried out. Gen 8:13-14
God put all that water back where it needed to be. He brought it out later, whenever he wanted to use it to show himself as the ultimate provider of life’s most necessary resource. Like when Moses brought water from the rock in the wilderness (Ex 17:6), or when He showed Hagar the well in the desert to save Ishmael. (Gen 21:19) It all came from the flood, running off into the depths and being brought forth when needed.
The 220 days it took the water to recede shows us that there is a process beyond surviving the storm. Some things are healed in an instant. Mostly it takes time to heal from the deep things. Grief takes time, wounds take time, bitterness takes time, destruction takes time.
Later, as the water makes it’s cycles in the clouds, God promises the rains as a blessing.
“But the land that you are going over to possess is a land of hills and valleys, which drinks water by the rain from heaven, a land that the Lord your God cares for. The eyes of the Lord your God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.
And if you will indeed obey my commandments that I command you today, to love the Lord your God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul, he will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, that you may gather in your grain and your wine and your oil. And he will give grass in your fields for your livestock, and you shall eat and be full.” Deuteronomy 11:11-15
From Ark to Altar
As we face trials in our lives we often get discouraged and just wish things would go back to the way they were before. But it doesn’t work that way. We live with the fallout, consequences, and changes that come from trials and sin. Even if we’re not guilty, the sins done against us change us. We start to let go of hope and cling to bitterness.
I wonder if Noah became bitter or impatient with how long it took the earth to dry out. I wonder if he regretted obeying God. It doesn’t seem like it. What was Noah’s response at the end of the flood? One of the first things Noah did was build an altar and offer a sacrifice to God.
So Noah went out, and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives with him. Every beast, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves on the earth, went out by families from the ark.
Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”
Gen 8:18-22
When it seems like every earthly comfort is taken away, is your first response worship? For me sometimes it is, but often it is not. I want to build altars of worship, instead of trying to rebuild and hold onto the idols God is trying to break down in my life.
What are the trials in our lives for? What does God mean to accomplish? His glory. His worship. The proof of His promises. To produce patience. To move us from Christian infancy to Christian maturity (Heb 5:11-14). It’s why James could say,
“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” James 1:2-4
It’s how we move from complaining to thankfulness, from anxiety to rest, from the lust of the flesh to a desire for holiness, from coveting to generosity, and from selfish distraction to humble devotion to Jesus.
Somewhere Over the Rainbow
The flood radically changed the earth and left a mere 8 people and a boatload of critters standing at the end of it. It was a new beginning for Noah, his family, and creation itself with God’s beautiful covenant hung across heaven. A rainbow. A promise from God to never again flood the whole earth to destroy all flesh. (Gen 9:8-17) The funny thing about rainbows is, they require precipitation and sunlight at the same time. If our lives were perfect and storm free, start to finish, how would we ever see our need for God or the beautiful rainbows he wants to show us?
Further Reading
All you ever wanted to know about rainbows
