I won’t get into the debates that rage over how it happened or whether the flood was big or small. I accept that Noah was real because Jesus mentions him by name. And the New Testament confirms in several places about how life was in Noah’s day and how God destroyed the world by water. The rainbow is His promise to never flood the earth (meaning the whole earth) again.
But step back in time with me for a moment and imagine what it might have been like to live in those times. What was it like to be married to a man like Noah? What was it like to survive in a world gone crazy?
As I wrote the chapter on Noah’s Wife (I named her Adah), I didn’t have to imagine much when it came to a crazy world. The longer I live, the stranger this world gets. If we think for one minute that we’re getting better as a human race, we aren’t looking at the world with a true perspective.
That doesn’t mean that people can’t be heroic or good, but God told Noah that He was sorry He made man because the thoughts of men’s hearts were only evil all the time. Maybe that sounds harsh, but I just have to look in the mirror of my own life to see the many ways I could have done this or that better. When I compare myself to God’s standard of holiness, I have a long way to go.
But look beyond the truth that we are all sinners and look at the evil that surrounds us every day. Mass shootings, bomb threats, racism, abductions, slavery, sex trafficking, abortion, hatred, pride, unforgiving hearts, bitterness, anger, and so much more. God lists even more in Scripture, and Jesus focused more on the inner attitudes of our hearts than He did over our actions.
Imagine living in a world where all of the evil of the heart was walking around and acting out in every person you met. That’s what Noah and his family lived with every day.
I can imagine the mocking as they built a ship on dry land – and if they’d ever had ships, they probably didn’t look like this one. I don’t know how advanced they were then or if as in Solomon’s day they had fleets of ships, but even so, the ark wasn’t a sailing vessel. It was made to float and house a lot of people and animals.
But only eight people got on that boat. Did Noah’s wife try to convince her family and friends, outside of her sons and daughters-in-law, to join them? Noah was a preacher of righteousness, so you know he tried to warn the people of what was coming. But did she?
How did evil make her feel? Did she fear for her safety, for her family? She lived in frightening times. How did she survive?
These and other questions are some of the things I pondered as I wrote When Life Doesn’t Match Your Dreams, because I have a feeling Noah’s wife didn’t expect her life to end up living on a big floating ark for a year and coming out with just her family and a lot of animals. How small the world would have felt when they realized they were the only survivors. Kind of sounds like an apocalyptic movie, yes?
I’ll save the rest of her story for the book, but I hope this little glimpse helps you imagine what life might have been like then as compared to now. She has a lot to teach us. And we have much to learn from that period of history. May we not fail to see how close we are to repeating it.
Until next time~
#whenlifedoesn’tmatchyourdreams #noah’sflood #noah’swife #survivingabrokenworld #livegrace
