My Name Is Noah

(delivered in a gruff but loving manner of a dottery old man)

My name is Noah, the son of Lamech, who was the son of Methusaleh, and he in turn was the son of Enoch…

Now there was a man for you. Enoch. Walked with God he did. They say that one day he and God were out walking and God said: "Enoch, we appear to be closer to my home than yours, so why don’t you come on home with me?" Enoch, now there was a man to pattern your life after.

Enoch was the son of Jared and Jared was born of… born of… Now don’t tell me. Jared was the son of… Mahalalel.

Always had trouble with that name: Mahalalel. Never could figure out why anybody’d ever name their boy Mahalalel.

Anyway, Mahalalel was the son of Kenan and Kenan was born of Enosh, Enosh was the son of Seth… and of course, Seth was the third son of Adam and Eve.

Ah, the stories I could tell you about those men, the books I’ve read. We had books back then before the flood. A few of them made it over on the ark.

Now, some of those men were good and some weren’t so good, but… well, you didn’t come to hear about all that, now did you? You know when a man gets to be 900 years old he begins to ramble on a bit.

Don’t mind if I sit down do you? My legs get tired. You know, this getting old isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

So, what you want to hear about? Oh… I know, I know. You want to hear what everyone else wants to hear about. I go to visit my boys, Shem and Ham and Japheth and their kids gather around and it’s always the same thing - "Grandfather tell us about the flood." Every time it’s the same old thing. I try to put in details they haven’t heard before but they never seem to tire of having me tell it. I swear that when I die - all anybody gonna remember about me is "Noah and the flood… Noah and the flood."

I was a young man then. A mere 500 years old. Back then, there were 2 branches to the family of Adam. There were the descendents of Cain... Now Cain, there was a mean one for you. Never could figure out why God let him live... But then, it doesn’t pay to go arguing with God - it doesn’t turn out to well in the end. Anyway, Cain’s descendents turned out to be a lot like him. Arrogant, self centered, vain. If there was anything evil to do, they thought of how to do it.

Then there were the children of Seth. At first they were good people. Worshippers of God. Those people knew how praise God the way it ought to be done.

But then, well, the children of godly parents married - ungodly. And before you knew it women were sleeping with husbands that weren’t their own. Men were sleeping with men. Sacrifices that had once been grain or animals were replaced by those of human flesh. And probably the worst of it was the babies. If people didn’t want their babies, they left them to die along the road.

(sigh) But I don’t want to say anymore… don’t want to shame myself. It was an evil time and it seemed that even the thoughts of the people always dwelt on impurity and violence.

Hard to raise 3 boys in that kind of atmosphere. Shem, now he was my oldest. Then there was Ham, my 2nd born. And Japheth, he was my youngest boy. They were good boys, those three. It was hard to raise them right in that evil world. It was harder still finding 3 wives fit for them to marry.

I suppose what saved us was that - I loved my sons. I stressed to them God’s faithfulness and power and mercy and love. Even after they were married, we met regularly to worship. We’d offer up sacrifices, sing praises to God and bow our faces to the dirt in prayer.

But, no one else seemed to do that. They all thought it was a waste of time.

One day, out in the fields I heard the voice of God. I don’t know how I knew it was God’s voice - I’d never heard it before. But He said to me: "Noah I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I’m surely going destroy both them & the earth."

Build me an ark 300 cubits long, by 50 cubits wide, by 30 cubits high. …

Oh, I forgot, you folks probably don’t even know what a cubit is, do you? Well, a cubit was the distance from a man’s elbow to the tip of his fingers. But then you don’t need to know what a cubit is to know that was one BIG boat. Three stories high and longer than a field of grain.