The Boat Built Before the Rain

Noah's name sounds like the Hebrew word for rest, and his father had hoped Noah would bring the family some.

But the world Noah grew up in had no rest in it. People grabbed and hit and hurt. Every thought in their hearts was evil, all the time.

The LORD saw it, and it hurt him all the way to his heart.

"I will wipe the people I made off the face of the earth," he said, "and the animals and creeping things and birds with them. I am sorry I made them."

But one man was different. Noah walked with God, the same words the Bible used for his great-grandfather Enoch. Noah did what was right, and God looked on him with kindness. He had a wife and three grown sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

God spoke to Noah.

"The earth is full of violence because of people, and I am going to put an end to them. Make yourself an ark of gopher wood."

(An ark is a giant wooden box that floats.)

"Make rooms inside, and cover it with pitch, inside and out," God said. "Make it three hundred cubits long, fifty wide, and thirty high. Give it a roof, three decks, and a door in the side."

A cubit is the length from a man's elbow to the tip of his middle finger. Three hundred of them is longer than a football field, and every board had to be painted with pitch, thick black goo that keeps water out.

"I am bringing a flood of waters on the earth," God said. "Everything that breathes will die. But I will make my covenant with you. You will go into the ark, you and your wife, your sons and their wives. Bring in two of every living thing, a male and a female, to keep them alive. They will come to you. And store up every kind of food, for you and for them."

A covenant is a promise God ties himself to. The animals would come on their own. (So Noah would not have to chase two rabbits through the hills, or talk two crocodiles into following him home.)

Day after day the saws rasped, the beams went up with a THUD, and the whole family smelled of sticky pitch.

"Father, where will all that water come from?" one of the sons asked, squinting up at the empty sky.

"God says it is coming," said Noah. "So it is coming."

Noah did everything God commanded him.

The ark would carry eight people and a great many animals through one flood. The water would wash the earth, but it could not wash the evil out of anyone's heart, not even Noah's. The rest his father hoped for would not last.

Thousands of years went by. God gave his people a day of rest each week and a land of their own, and still the hurting went on. They kept hoping for someone who would bring rest that lasts.

God had been getting that someone ready all along, the way the ark stood finished before the first cloud. He grew up in a carpenter's house with sawdust on his hands. Then he carried our sins in his own body, and he died on a cross of wood.

On the third day he was alive. And Jesus calls to everyone worn out by the hard work of a broken world: "Come to me, all who are tired and carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest."