Cleaning Up the Ark

Gen 8:1-2 (NIV)
"But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth and the waters receded.  Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed and the rain had stopped falling from the sky."

It wasn't just raining on Noah.  The Bible tells us that the flood was coming at him from every angle. Rain from the sky, water bursting forth from the deep in the earth - God was throwing everything at them, yet he had put them under his protection.  Noah and his family still had to go through the storm, God didn't relocate them to the far off planet of Zebulan while he destroyed the earth.  He could have, but he didn't.  Instead, God gave Noah very specific instructions to build an ark; these instructions would not only save the lives of Noah and his family, but would also preserve all animal life forms.

Why didn't God just remove them from the situation until it was better?  Why did Noah have to work tirelessly on a huge boat - something that had never before been built?  I imagine that he was mocked, scorned, outcast, even called crazy and yet the Bible tells us that "Noah did everything just as God commanded him" (Gen 6:22).

Noah, his wife, their sons and their wives, along with all of the animals entered the ark and God shut them in...then they sat there and waited...and waited...and waited. They waited in a boat while everyone else, their friends, leaders of the community, the town criminals walked around. They waited in a boat while people walked by and chanted about "Crazy Old Noah" and his "Crazy Old Family".  Maybe the kids had a dare going on: "I dare you three figs that you won't go touch it!" and yet Noah waited.

Finally on the seventh day the floodgates opened, the springs burst forth and the rain came down. Noah was in this ark tending to his family and animals while everything was being destroyed.  His home, his friends, his mentors, the people he looked up to were all gone - and Noah was stuck right in the middle of it.

God could have removed him from the situation completely, but instead He put him right in the middle of if.  Why? The Bible says that "Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God" (Gen 6:9) Maybe God was rewarding Noah for his faithfulness, but there's more than that.  Perhaps God needed Noah to be in the middle of it, to watch his world be destroyed, to see everything that could have destroyed him be destroyed right in front of him while he was safe (shaken, but still safe) in the ark.

Even after the rains stopped, the waves didn't.  We think that the storm is always followed by calm, that God always has to be gentle as he's cleaning us up, but the Bible says he "sent a wind over the earth and the waters receded".

What kind of wind must that have been?  A Bahama breeze isn't going to dry a flooded earth. This wind didn't make Noah want to pitch a hammock and hang out on deck.  This wind had to be violent enough to make 40 days and nights worth of floodwater draw back. The Bible says "The water receded steadily from the earth.  At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down..." (Gen 8:3).

The storm was over, Noah and his family and all of the animals had survived 40 days and 40 nights worth of raging floods, but now they had to survive 150 days with a wind strong enough to dry the planet.

Often times we think that the storms in our lives are the scariest, longest periods and that they serve no purpose, but I would contend that storms are quick, they are violent and can be terrifying, but it's the clean up that takes the longest.

God uses the storms in our lives to destroy the things that could destroy us.  Sometimes he even warns us that they're coming and tells us to get in the ark...and there we sit, but just imagine if Noah had gotten tired of being mocked, tired of listening to his sons bicker back and forth, tired of smelling the filth of the animals. What if Noah had gotten tired of waiting and left the ark before the seventh day?  He would have been swept up and destroyed with the rest of creation.

The Bible says that Noah was 600 years old when the waters began to rise and he was 601 when the ground was dry.  40 days and 40 nights - that's how long it rained, only 40 days and 40 nights.  The rest of the year God spent cleaning up the destruction.  Noah spent 40 days and 40 nights on the ark while it rose high above the tallest peaks and then he spent 150 days being tossed about by the wind before the ark finally came to rest on a mountain. He then spent another 4 months sitting in an ark on a mountain before he even opened a window to look outside.

See, it's not the storm that took the longest, but the clean up. The clean up isn't always easy, it isn't always pleasant, but it is always necessary.  Don't let the enemy trick you into believing that the storm is the end of the test, if we don't let God clean us up after the storm we'll end up spending the rest of our lives on the ark.