The One Safe Door

Seven days before the rain, the ark stood finished in the dry field, and God spoke to Noah again.

"Go into the ark, you and your whole family," God said. "Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights."

So the animals came two by two, a male and a female of every kind: lions padding up the ramp, sheep shoving, turtles taking most of the week. Then Noah went in with his wife, his three sons, and their wives, eight people in all.

And the LORD shut them in.

God's own hand closed the door behind them. No one inside had to lean on it or hold it shut.

That very day the sky broke open. If you had been inside, you would have heard it on the roof first: a tap, then a drumming, then a roar. Water poured from the sky and burst up from the ground, and the ark creaked and lifted off the mud.

For forty days it rained. The water rose over the fields, the trees, and then the highest mountains, deeper above their tops than a giraffe is tall. Everything that breathed on the dry land died: the people who had spent their lives hurting each other, and the animals too. Only Noah was left, and the ones with him in the ark.

But God remembered Noah and every animal in the ark. He sent a wind across the water, the rain stopped, and the water began to go down. One day, with a long scrape and a bump, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.

Months later Noah opened the window and let out a raven. It flapped back and forth over the water and never reported back. (Ravens are clever birds, but they have never been good at errands.)

So Noah sent out a dove. She found nowhere to set her feet, and she flew back. Noah reached his hand out the window and brought her inside.

Seven days later he sent her again, and that evening she came fluttering home.

"Look!" said Noah's wife. "What has she got?"

It was a fresh olive leaf. The next time Noah sent the dove out, she never came back.

Noah pulled the covering off the roof. Mud everywhere, drying in the sun. "Can we get out yet?" somebody asked every morning. (For nearly two more months, the answer was no.)

At last the ground was dry all the way through, and the whole family stood by the shut door, waiting for God to tell them it was time.

The ark had one door, and God's own hand had shut it. But the ark was only wood and tar. It could keep out the water, and that was all. Every person who walked out of its door would still grow old and die.

Olive trees grew back and doves nested in them, and still people waited for a rescue that could carry them through death itself and out the other side.

Then came a rescue better than any boat. A man went all the way down into death for the wrong in every heart, and on the third morning he came up out of it alive, the way Noah's family stepped out onto clean new ground.

"I am the door," Jesus said. "Anyone who comes in through me will be saved." And the same hand that shut Noah's door holds everyone who comes in.