A Prophet's Eye-View Of Bible History"

This period of history covers the lives of Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. These are pretty substantial characters in Jewish and Christian history, so we will devote a lesson to each one. This lesson will look at Noah, and the next lessons will cover the others.

Noah

Noah lived in an incredibly wicked time. According to Genesis 6, mankind had become so corrupt that "every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time" (Gen 6:5b). As a result, God's heart was filled with pain and He found himself wishing that He had never created humanity or the earth (Gen 6:6-7). Yet in the midst of all that, Noah found favor with God. Noah was Enoch's great-grandson, so he had a very godly heritage -- but his great-grandfather was not why Noah found favor with God. He found favor based on his own personal relationship with God. The bible tells us that "Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God" (Gen 6:9).

Noah did come from a godly line, but most of them had died before Noah's sons were born. The bible tells us that Noah was 500 years old when he had his three sons. At that point, only his father Lamech and his grandfather Methuselah are still alive. (When Noah was a child, many of his ancestors were still living. Enosh, Kenan, Mahalel and Jared were all alive in addition to his dad and grandfather. Enosh died when Noah was 87, so he had a chance to know him personally. Joash died when Noah was 369, and the other ancestors in-between those two.)

Genesis 6 and 7 lead us to believe that Noah was 500 years old when God instructed him to build the ark, and that it took about 100 years to complete it. Five important events took place in Noah's life during those 100 years. The first three were happy events -- each of this three sons got married. But the other two, which occurred near the end of that period were very sad events. His father, Lamech, died when Noah was 595 years old. A mere 5 years later, his grandfather, Methuselah, died.

The flood began very shortly after his grandfather's death -- it was a maximum of 7 weeks (the 17th day of the second month -- Gen 7:11), and it may have been substantially less than 7 weeks.

Noah and his family were still grieving for his grandfather, who had just died. God did not wait until a convenient time to spare their lives! The entire earth had been spared from destruction while Methuselah was alive because his life was a prophetic living intercession for mankind. Once he died, destruction followed swiftly. God gave Noah and his family a week's notice to get themselves and the animals on the ark. Then the flood began.

The flood was no small event. Gen 7:24 says, "The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days." The early Jews did not use the same calendar as we do, but I am going to use our modern day calendar to give you an idea of the passage of time. Noah and his family were sent into the ark on Feb 7 and the flood started on Feb 17. (Noah was 600 years old when the flood started.) The ark came to rest on Mt Ararat (the tallest mountain in the area) on July 17 and on Oct 1, the tops of the other mountains became visible above the flood water. Noah sent out the dove the first time on Nov 9, but the dove came back because the earth was still flooded. He send out the dove a second time on Nov 16 and it came back with a freshly plucked olive leaf. Noah sent out the dove a third time on Nov 23, and it did not come back. The following Jan 1, Noah took the covering off of the ark. By Feb 27, the earth was completely dry and they left the ark. They were in the ark a year and 20 days.

The first thing Noah did when he got out of the ark was to build an altar and offer a sacrifice to God. Noah's sacrifice pleased God because his heart was set after God. God responded to Noah by promising: "Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done." And God created the rainbow as a reminder of His covenant with all the living creatures of the earth.

Then, God immediately entered into a covenant with Noah and his family. God gave them the original mandate He had given to Adam and Eve -- to be fruitful and multiply and fill (e.g., re-populate) the earth (Genesis 9:1). He also gave them a restriction, just like he'd given one to Adam and Eve. The original restriction had been "do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." The new restriction was "you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it" (Gen 9:4). This restriction remains in effect in Jewish dietary law to this very day. That is what makes meat Kosher -- draining the blood out of it before cooking it.

It is very interesting that the restriction was not lifted off of the church in the first century. They were released from the covenant of circumcision, but they were charged: "You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality" (Acts 15:29). I believe the "abstaining from blood" restriction was left in place more from Jewish thinking than from the direction of the Holy Spirit. This restriction predated the law and went back to God's instruction given Noah right after the flood. In Jewish thinking, abstaining from blood was the "modern day" equivalent of abstaining from the forbidden fruit -- it was how they exercised their free will to obey God -- by honoring this one restriction God placed on them.

Over time, that restriction lifted from the church. God has not treated the breaking of that second restriction (don't eat blood) like He treated the breaking of the first. That is because Christ's death and resurrection lifted that restriction off us. Now we are under a new and different type of restriction: Instead of choosing to abstain from something to please God, we must choose to receive something; Every man, woman and child must come into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ to receive eternal life and intimate relationship with God. The shed blood of Jesus for us removes us from the restriction of abstaining from blood. It is replaced by the communion, where the bread is symbolic of partaking of Jesus' body, which was killed for our sakes and the wine (or grape juice) is symbolic of receiving the shed blood of Jesus to cover our sins.

After the flood, Noah became a farmer and he planted a vineyard. Even though he was a godly man, he was not perfect. One of the things he made from the fruit of the vineyard was wine. One night he got so drunk that he ended up naked and unconscious in his tent. His son, Ham, found him and then went out to tell his brothers about their dad. The other two came in backwards and dropped a blanket over their dad so that they did not look at his nakedness. The bible does not say precisely what Ham did/said, but it must have been pretty bad. When Noah awoke and heard what his son "did to him," he was very upset and pronounced curses on the boy and all of his future offspring.

Noah was 950 years when he died. He lived 350 years after the flood started.