God’s ark

Out of the estimated four billion world population before the Great Flood completely covered the earth, only eight people survived --Noah and his wife, their three sons and their wives. From these eight came the little more than eight billion humanity today, after an estimated 4.3 millennia. It doesn’t take advanced mathematics to understand that we have much less time than we think to overpopulate the world to extinction. Maybe that’s why people are thinking of going to the moon or Mars.

It took until the early 1800s for the world population to reach one billion. But population growth is exponential, not linear, and now, we add a billion every 12-15 years, in spite of the global thrust to curb it. Population control may curb it a bit, but other factors tend to negate that, too. As a side note, even the current debate on legalizing divorce should weigh in this factor --the more divorces and remarriage, the higher the proclivity for childbearing, which will bring us nearer to overpopulating the earth.

While we always think of it and call it as Noah’s Ark, it was never his in the first place. Noah lived in an area that had no huge bodies of water, save for the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and he probably lived upland, and would have no idea what a boat is, much less, building one. All the design and dimensions of the ark, to the very feet or meter, came from God --including the doors, windows, and rooms, number of decks and the material (gopher wood), and how to waterproof it (with pitch). God doesn’t leave us to fend for ourselves --when he asks us to do something, we should always remember he gives precise instructions. Or to trust him when he doesn’t, as he leads and guides us along the way. Noah simply obeyed, as he built the ark from God’s design and instructions.

And how did Noah bring all the animals? God’s instructions were, “… you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female.” (Genesis 6:19). One would wonder how ever Noah could do this feat! But no, in times when we sometimes think God’s instructions are impossible to do, we need to remember we simply still depend on him, too, and he will do the impossible. God will enable his instructions to be accomplished when we simply depend on him. In the case of Noah, this is what happened – all the living things, in pairs or in sevens, as God commanded, went inside the ark by themselves. As God commanded them. (Genesis 7:14-16).

God flooded the earth once, and all except those in his ark perished. God promised in Genesis 9:15 he will never flood the earth again and created the rainbow as a perpetual sign of this promise. But the next (and last) time he will cleanse the earth of sin and wrongdoing will be by fire. No man-made ark could ever protect us from that, only the ark who is Jesus Christ can. The question we may want to ask ourselves today is, “Am I already in the ark or not?”