When I was young and learning to
read, I would skip around the Old Testament, especially in Genesis, reading all
of my favorite stories. That love of the Old Testament stories has served me
well as I have grown in my faith and in my understanding of Scripture. I have
gone from loving separate, isolated stories to loving the God of which they
testify and the greater story that He has woven into history since the fall.
One of the stories where this greater story is clearly seen in is the story of Noah.
How It Happened
“The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had
become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil
all the time … But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD. This is the
account of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his
time, and he walked with God.”
– Genesis 6:5, 8-9 (NIV 1986)
After Adam and Eve’s fall in the
Garden of Eden, mankind fell more and more deeply into sin, until in all of the
earth there was only one man who found favor in the eyes of God – Noah. Because
Noah lived righteously and walked with the LORD, God spoke with Noah about what
was on His heart and told Noah His plans: He would send a flood, and it would
destroy every living thing on earth. But because Noah was a righteous man, God
gave him an assignment: Build an ark of cypress, 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide
and 30 cubits high. Take seven of every kind of clean animal and of every kind
of bird, and two of every kind of unclean animal, and with the animals and with
your family, enter the ark.
Everyone who attended Sunday school
or Vacation Bible School has heard this story before, how it rained for forty
days and forty nights, and how when the water had finally receded, the dove
Noah sent out did not return. How God made a covenant with Noah and put the
rainbow in the sky as a symbol that He will never flood the earth again.
Everyone who grew up around Christianity knows how it happened, but so few of
us have taken the time to understand what it means. How many times have we read
this story or told it to a child without seeing the far greater story to which
God was pointing?
What It Means
While the Bible makes it clear
that Noah was “blameless among the people of his time,” it never says his
family lived in the same way he did. While they probably did not live like
those around them, we do not know for sure if the rest of Noah’s family walked
with God as he did. But what we do know is that because Noah was a righteous
man, his whole family was saved along with him.
In 1 Peter 3:20-21, Peter
compares the saving of Noah’s family through the flood to baptism. Baptism is a
symbol for dying with Christ and rising again in his resurrection life. Just as
one man was faithful to the LORD and his family was saved from judgment through
his faithfulness, thousands of years later the God-man was faithful to His
Father so that He could save His bride and family from judgment.
“I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign
of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the
earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that
is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh. And the waters
shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in
the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between
God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.”
– Genesis 9:13-16 (ESV)
When God placed His rainbow in
the sky, He did it as a sign not only for man, but for Himself. “I will see it
and remember...” God does not forget His promises, so why was this covenant
different, that He chose to place a reminder in the sky?
A bow is only useful when pointed
in the right direction. A rainbow points up. This is the most unimaginable
thing God could have done. Not only is He showing that His judgment is not
pointed at earth, He is also pointing it at Himself. At the cross, Jesus bore
the wrath that you and I should have borne. When the arrow of the Almighty’s
wrath was loosed, He Himself took the pain of receiving it. By taking our
punishment, Jesus became our ark, our protection from the wrath our sin deserves.
The Point of the Matter
The story of Jesus permeates the
whole Bible, not just the New Testament. The stories we grew up hearing in
Sunday school have so much more to offer than what a five or six year old is
ready to hear. As we grow in our faith, we should go back to those stories and
look at them in context of the greatest of all stories – the story of our
Savior. I hope that after reading this you will go back to your Bible and
search for Jesus in the story of Noah and throughout the rest of the Old
Testament.
