As it was in the days of Noah . . .

“It was by faith that Noah built a large boat to save his family from the flood. He obeyed God, who warned him about things that had never happened before. By his faith Noah condemned the rest of the world, and he received the righteousness that comes by faith.” (Hebrews 11:7 NLT)

I’ve been thinking about Noah today. I’m not sure why. I have heard the story of Noah so many times, but I think I am just beginning to realize what a leap of faith it was for him to do what he did. It is one thing to take a leap of faith and do something that is hard, but that many have done before you, like going to a foreign country to be a missionary, or something like that, but to take a leap of faith into the unknown and do something that had never been done before, believing that something would happen that had never happened before; well that’s a different story!

Noah must have seemed foolish to himself, let alone to the society around him, and certainly he must have seemed foolish, or even downright insane to his family, who did not have the luxury of writing him off as just some eccentric religious nut that they could ignore. The Bible says:

“This is the account of Noah and his family. Noah was a righteous man, the only blameless person living on earth at the time, and he walked in close fellowship with God.” (Genesis 6:9 NLT)

Note that the text says that Noah, who “walked in close fellowship with God” was the “only blameless person living on the earth”. It did not say that he and his family were the only ones. As in the comedy film Evan Almighty, I believe that even his family probably didn’t understand that he was really pursuing the will of God, even though they were the only humans who would be saved by the consequences of Noah’s actions.

Building a sea-going vessel miles from the sea in a world that had never seen a drop of rain, let alone a flood; well, it defied conventional wisdom to say the least!

What moved Noah along for all those years (when nothing happened) must have been his conviction that this was truly God’s will, and that the “foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men.”
(1 Corinthians 1:25)

At what level of conviction would I have to be to be able to do something that everyone but God thought to be foolish? How strongly would I have to be convinced of God’s will to enable me to forge ahead with something that not only defied conventional wisdom, but my own wisdom (such as it is) as well.

When every bone in the body of my natural man screamed out that I was making a big mistake, yet the still, small persistent voice of the Holy Spirit within me continued incredulously to insist that I go ahead and embark upon what seemed to me to be a disaster in the making, would I be able to do it? Would my faith be strong enough to carry me through to complete whatever God had assigned?

Something to think about.

Thanks for sharing this moment with me today.