Build An Ark Series

B. What about The Duration of the Flood

You know I never really had any idea how long Noah and his family were on the Ark until fairly recently, it didn’t occur to me that it mattered. I figured that it must have been a couple months, but I was quite shocked when I first found out that it was over a year. Depending on who you ask, they were on the Ark for 370 to 380 days.

Unlike many other accounts in the Bible, we are given very specific dates. He was told to start living on and filling the Ark seven days before the flood came. On the 17th day of the 2nd month of his 600th year the water started coming, it rained for forty days and nights, after the forty days the water prevailed for 150 days, and then took another 150 days to recede. Then they hung out there until God gave the command to disembark.

There are so many messages from the story of Noah and the flood that are relevant for today. First of all we’re told that Judgment is coming, and we have been given over 2000 years to prepare, are we prepared? What is God judging? He’s not judging His creation per se, he is judging their wicked and sinful behaviour, their flesh, the sin that lives in them as Paul says. It’s like when we judge something our children do. Hopefully we are not judging them, who they are, but their behaviour, what they do.

But even at that, he gave the people a chance to turn from their ways and be saved just as he does now for us. Even though he has to judge unholiness, we do not have to be destroyed in that judgment, he has provided a way out even though we are guilty. We just have to get on the Ark that is Jesus Christ. We don’t even have to build it.

This story shows us that we need to prepare and God has provided explicit instructions for this, namely to put our faith in Christ and obey his commands to love God and each other. Jesus said in Luke 17, “When the Son of Man returns it will be like the days of Noah. They were eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage (regular things), until the day Noah entered the Ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.”

The prophets like Isaiah usually follow their speech about judgment with the telling of God’s mercy and steadfast love that would come after. That he will deliver us. Jesus never does. He just bluntly and graphically talks about the coming judgment and how awful it will be, because He is the promise that the Old Testament prophets are talking about.

There will be nothing further besides Jesus, he is the final culmination of God’s mercy. That is why Jesus just has to talk about judgment. It is Him or judgment and destruction period. God has completed his redemptive work but we must make the choice. Our destruction is completely in our own hands now that Jesus has come.

He also wants us to believe his promises to provide everything we need so that we don’t become overly attached to the things of the world. The reason most people don’t give their lives to Christ is because they don’t believe this, they are unwilling to trust and surrender, and they spend their lives trying to provide for themselves.