1 Year and 17 days

Genesis 7:4 Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made."

I’m sure most of us, if not all, know of the story of Noah.  But in the Genesis account itself there are a number of details that reveal the quality of the faith of this man who obeyed God.  One such quality was his patience.  How do we know Noah was a patient man?

In the verse above, verse 4, God tells Noah that He would send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights.  That’s a long time.  But was this how long Noah actually stayed inside the ark?  I was one of those who thought that Noah stayed in the ark for forty days and nights.  Not bad, actually – one month and ten days inside an ark with noisy and smelly animals.  But how long did Noah, in obedience to God, stay inside the ark?

6 Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth. 7 And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood.

So he was 600 years old when the floodwaters came.  How old was he when he finally stepped out of the ark?

Genesis 8:13-14

13 By the first day of the first month of Noah's six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. 14 By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry.

He was 601 years old when the earth finally dried up.  All in all, according to the Bible Knowledge Commentary, Noah was in the ark for 1 year and 17 days.

Imagine being inside the ark, filled with animals, floating and moving with the waves, probably doing the same things again and again, eating the same food again and again, smelling the same animals day after day.  All this out of obedience to the Lord.

God told Noah to build an ark.  He did.  God told him to go in the ark.  He did.  And he waited, patiently, until the Lord told him to get out of the ark.  No questions asked.  No complaints.  He just waited patiently for the Lord to tell him to get out of the ark.

Now that’s faith.  It’s a faith that produces patience.  It’s a faith that trusts – if God said it, then it must be right.  And for a man of faith there is no other option, only obedience.

It’s a far cry from what people call “faith” today.  Yes, we obey, but we ask “for how long, Lord?”.  And when we start getting bored with our obedience, with our walk with God, we begin to complain, or we ask “Lord, when is this going to end?”.

But not Noah.  He stayed put, shut inside the ark for 1 year and 17 days.  He waited for the Lord to say that it was all over.

So, how are we doing in our “ark” of obedience?