Summer At Sea: Week 2 Day 1

Genesis 8:6-16

6 After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark 7 and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. 8 Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. 9 But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. 10 He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. 11 When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. 12 He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.

13 By the first day of the first month of Noah’s six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. 14 By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry.

15 Then God said to Noah, 16 “Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives.”

We see here that God was doing something to the earth. The flood is what was called a decreation event, after which God recreated. Why, however, did He take time to do this? Noah spent nearly a whole year inside of that ark, why? It was so God could prepare what Noah was returning to intricately and perfectly. We see that Noah had to wait almost two months after seeing the dry land before he could exit the boat. Why did Noah have to wait so long? I, myself, am not sure why Noah had to wait so long, but Theologian Matthew Henry says this, “God consults our benefit rather than our desires; for he knows what is good for us better than we do for ourselves, and how long it is fit our restraints should continue and desired mercies should be delayed.” To put it in our way of speaking. God is concerned with what is best for us, not just what we want, and knows what that is much better than we do. And though waiting for Him to intervene sometimes feels to long for us, God knows best. 

God had a reason for the flood; He had a reason for the duration of it, and He had a reason in Noah’s waiting. God has proven Himself Lord above the chaos. So when God asks us to wait just a bit more, let’s remember a man stuck in a boat with thousands of animals who trusted in God.