Time At Hand

Noah and his three sons and their mother and wives lived on a 450' long, 75' wide and 45' high 'boat' for over 1 year. They were responsible to care for themselves and all of the animals in the known world; which, at the time, were all of the animals they had with them. All other living creatures had been destroyed. The flood waters must have been filled with the carcasses of hundreds of thousands of creatures. The dead bodies of dogs, cats, birds, horses, monkeys, yaks, goats, sheep, pigs, men, woman, children and babies would have floated and rotted and all over the earth. That is not the picture we see in the Sunday school hand-outs we give to our children. But that is the reality.

We commonly hear about the safety of the arc during the storm. But rarely if ever do we actually hear about or consider for ourselves the realities of this story. The are may have been the safest place on earth during that awful year. But it would not have been a pleasant place to be by any stretch of the imagination. The daily barrage of visual horror outside, on the water, would certainly have turned the stomaches of the 8 people on board. Only the most calloused, uncaring person could go unaffected.

The amount of work for those 8 must have been overwhelming. Just imagine, for instance, the daily task of distributing fresh water to each of those animals. Each day, without a day off, for over a year, someone needed to rise each morning, choke past the smell and vision of death all around, grab a bucket of water and hall it to the baboon, screeching and jumping around in it's cage. Every so often, someone would need to shovel out the dung from the stable of horses and mules and donkeys and zebras. Where did all of that waste go? My guess is that it went out a chute or other small opening, above the waterline and into the murky ocean of death outside. The ark may have been safe, relatively speaking, but it surely wasn't a fun place to be.

So what does that tell us about God's “shelter from the storm” for us? Can it be that God will save us from death but not always in a pleasant manner? Surely that is a conclusion that can be drawn. Noah and the seven people with him may not have been on the equivalent of a Caribbean pleasure cruise, but the alternative wasn't a good choice by far.

But God's safety was brought to Noah more than 100 years earlier. Noah had a generous amount of time to prepare. God's provision came with ample amounts of time. Plus, the very thing that gave the opportunity to Noah in the first place was Noah's habit of spending time with God and abiding by the knowledge of life that time spent with God provides. What conclusion does that lead too? It seems obvious. The time needed to prepare for the most cataclysmic events in life is available to us right now. The time is “at hand.” How will you spend it?