Genesis 7:1-5, 17-24
When everything was ready, the Lord said to Noah, “Go into the boat with all your family, for among all the people of the earth, I can see that you alone are righteous. Take with you seven pairs—male and female—of each animal I have approved for eating and for sacrifice, and take one pair of each of the others. Also take seven pairs of every kind of bird. There must be a male and a female in each pair to ensure that all life will survive on the earth after the flood. Seven days from now I will make the rains pour down on the earth. And it will rain for forty days and forty nights, until I have wiped from the earth all the living things I have created.” So Noah did everything as the Lord commanded him.
For forty days the floodwaters grew deeper, covering the ground and lifting the boat high above the earth. As the waters rose higher and higher above the ground, the boat floated safely on the surface. Finally, the water covered even the highest mountains on the earth, rising more than twenty-two feet above the highest peaks. All the living things on earth died—birds, domestic animals, wild animals, small animals that scurry along the ground, and all the people. Everything that breathed and lived on dry land died. God wiped out every living thing on the earth—people, livestock, small animals that scurry along the ground, and the birds of the sky. All were destroyed. The only people who survived were Noah and those with him in the boat. And the floodwaters covered the earth for 150 days.
There are plenty of
disasters from which to choose an image:
·
Wildfires in California destroying subdivisions and memories
·
Tsunamis in Indonesia decimating coastline life
·
Terrorist attacks and the incredible stench of death’s aftermath
·
People standing dazed in the rubble after a tornado
Noah is the poster
child for disaster. Yet, the magnitude
of the destruction of that global flood is largely contained in just two
paragraphs; essentially it boils down to:
God said he’d wipe the earth clean, and it was so.
Just like the account
of creation, God said – and there was!
This morning, when I
went to the computer to post today’s devotion, I found the tech version of Noah’s
world; everything was gone. The physical
computer machine was there, looking all innocent and 21st century
put-together, like the Earth after the flood.
But, when I booted up the criminal, all my files were under the deepest
blue sea. Here last night; gone this
morning. What now? I felt the electronic equivalent of being
cut-off from the past 40 years of ministry records, sermons, correspondence,
bills, and (oh, my) FACEBOOK.
I spent the next hour
muddled in confusion about what to do next and recriminations over not being
more diligent with backing up my files; I also prayed fervently…Oh, LORD, if you’ll just give me back my files I’ll
be good….
I’m still not entirely
sure what happened, but one word popped into my technologically-challenged
brain – RESTART. So, I did, and voilà, my files
were back, and now I’m writing the next devotion.
Noah wasn’t so
lucky. Or, was he?
There are two hinges to
consider here:
·
Hinge #1. God said He was going to
do a new thing
·
Hinge #2. God did it.
God told Noah to get in
the boat, and then God closed the door on the previous chapter. Then God opened a new chapter for the righteous
man and his family. This begs the
question that is frequently my cling-to thought whenever it seems my world might fall apart (or be flooded over
to 22 feet above the mountaintops):
What could be better than being in the center of God’s will?
Even when He decides it’s time for a restart?
For You Today
Our new normal after
the virus flood is (at this moment) just a foreboding. I’m not sure I’ve seen any pairs of animals
gathering by twos…but, stay tuned, you never know what God is up to; our only
certainty is the cross and an empty tomb.
Everything else is like what Noah left behind.
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