November 11, 2005
The morning of “the day” came as the sun rose as it always did. A look out the window revealed that the boat was very close to land. The water had receded to a level where it had become an object held back by the land which now defined the world. The morning chores of tending to the animals went along as usual. The anticipation of coming to rest on solid ground may have even waned a bit. Still, the belief that it would happen was still real although a little fuzzy.
The bottom of the ark inched ever so slowly, closer and closer, minute by minute toward it's resting spot beneath it. Yet, the boat dwellers inside didn't see much, if anything, change. Their life would go on, requiring them to accomplish their daily tasks. Life for them would go on normally. There was no expectation that today was “the day.” But it was.
The ark hit solid ground and it shuddered when it did. The boat dwellers felt the shock of the ark's bottom striking ground and immediately knew what it meant. The time had come for life to change in a substantially material way. In only a matter of days, the ark would no longer be a boat. Rather, it would be a land-bound animal hotel; the largest barn ever to exist. It was the seventeenth day of the seventh month.
Questions about life, what was going to happen and how would they live, would have been raised. You can imagine the conversations. “Let's go get our chores done quickly. We'll have an early supper and talk about what we should do now.” How much longer would they stay inside the ark? When could they release some of the animals? Should they stay on the ark and simply live their making it their permanent home? Many questions and few answers for now. They would need to wait a while longer to understand how this all would play out. The murky, muddy, soggy world outside would not sustain life. They knew that. But how much time would pass before the earth was ready to sustain life again? That was the question.
They waited, watching the water now quickly receding below them, drain away in rivers and streams. Each day another little stream would dry up; a small pond would become visible and a lake would recede into a meadow area, but devoid of life. The rocky outcropping they landed on would hold them solid as another nearly three months would pass. On the first day of the tenth month most of the mountains around them could clearly be seen. On the fortieth day after the ark grounded, Noah performed his first test.
There must have been many conversations about how to know when it was time to leave the ark. Why not just open the door and walk down the gang plank? They certainly could use the ark as a home base. They could walk around on the mountain side, watch the progress of the recession of water, begin to make some plans about where to live. What would be the harm in that? But Noah was more in tune with God than to take on these decisions himself. He'd seen others who took control of their lives assuming that God was there only to help them with their agenda. They had no real answers to their questions then and the life that they struggled through didn't even exist now. No. Noah would not make the decision about when to leave the ark himself. He would rely on his righteous, daily walks and conversations with God to reveal the true answers. God was not there to serve him. He was there to serve God. He knew that with keeping that attitude his life would be abundant. He knew that even if he and his sons along with his wife and theirs needed to start life on the earth again, he could only accomplish the task if God was directing it. So he would wait upon the Lord.
He could, however, seek answers in the physical world as well as the spiritual. So on one morning he took a raven, a hardy, strong bird with spiritual significance and released it to the air. The raven has long been known in many cultures to be a bird of death and creation able to scavenge for food and live in the most hostile environments. It prefers dead food as opposed to live food. It may be that Noah used the bird because of it's scavenger attributes. Or maybe because of it's reputation of being a creature that can bridge between the spiritual and physical worlds. In any case he released the Raven to the wild where it flew back and forth until the water had dried up. Noah was using the Raven to test the conditions in the world outside the ark. He would not make a plan to leave the ark until God told him to do so. The raven was part of the process of seeking God's direction. The raven test would begin the process to determine if living in the new world was even possible. The raven could survive almost anyplace and if he could survive outside the ark, maybe other beings could too.
The raven flew back and forth, back and forth from the ark to who knows where and back. Noah had a good idea that God's new world was beginning to be ready. He needed another test. A test without as good a chance for survival. A test that would indicate that a more frail being might be able to survive. He chose a dove for this test. Dove's are more “earthly” creatures than ravens. They seem to have progressively adopted urban areas as their natural habitat and breeding ground. We see them in our world strutting along the ground looking for seeds and nest building materials. Noah knew that the dove would begin the process of building a life as soon as vegetation was growing. Once vegetation was know to be growing, life for humans outside the ark could begin. He released a dove, with the knowledge that if it returned, the world was not ready.
The dove fluttered away and Noah waited. The scripture tells us that Noah was a righteous man and so we can be fairly confident that his prayer went out to God as the Dove went out to the world outside.
... more later
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