I was a bit late getting this up but we got stranded in Orlando for an extra day and I developed an ear/nose and throat infection after perforating my right eardrum on the flight there. Praise God for modern medicine and although it is making me sleepy, it’s also getting me better in a jiffy.
One of the weirdest things in the flood story is that after telling Noah how to get everything done for so long, once the flood starts, God stops talking and the Bible even says that God had to remember about Noah and the animals. But what does the Hebrew word zakar really mean and how can we know that God never actually forgets about us?
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
(Parents, all Scripture comes from the CSB this week, the Christian Standard Bible and we will be mostly in Genesis 7 and 8)
Hey guys and gals, it is good to be with you again. I had a nice long vacation and we all need time off, right? Just imagine if you had to be in school all year round, every day! You’d get all burned out and you’d start thinking that one plus two is yellow. I just got to the point where I was so tired and worn out from studying and writing and recording and editing on both my shows that I just couldn’t do it anymore. Not and have it be any good anyway and you guys shouldn’t have to sit through that!
Anyway, back in September, we left off with God giving Noah the instructions about taking some animals by two’s and others by sevens. And I explained the difference between clean and unclean animals and how just because an animal is clean for one thing doesn’t mean it is clean for something else! Well, this week we are going to talk about Noah’s actual time in the ark. And it’s kind of a strange story for one confusing reason but we will get to that in a little bit.
For the time being, we are still in chapter seven, which tells us that on the day that it started to rain, Noah and his family went into the ark along with all the animals. Now, how big do you think the door had to be? Really, really big. And how would you even close a door that has no hinges? Well, it doesn’t matter because the Bible says that God shut the door Himself. Just imagine if He hadn’t done it. All the animals are in their stalls—I mean, I assume they weren’t all wandering around aimlessly—the camels would step on the bunnies. And then, it’s raining and Noah and his family are standing at the door/ramp and thinking, “Oh man, this is one huge and heavy door and I am over 600 years old and it isn’t like someone can lift it from the outside. I think I see a flaw in our plan here.” Fortunately, one of the lessons we learn from this story is that when God gives us a job, He already has all the details figured out. And anything more than that, we are just on a need to know basis and I know I speak from experience that sometimes God will tell me to do something and, like, I am wondering about the next step but He doesn’t tell me until the last minute and when we forget that He always does that, we can get really freaked out. Even when we remember, we can wonder, “Oh man, what if this was all just my crazy idea and He doesn’t have the next step for me because this wasn’t His idea in the first place???” But, like I said, we are on a need-to-know basis and He doesn’t tell us stuff until we absolutely need to know it. That’s how God keeps us listening and depending on Him and realizing that we can’t do things by ourselves. We need God. Only God has the entire picture and we are kinda clueless. And that’s a good thing because if He told us everything right away, we would just try and figure out another way or we’d skip the steps we don’t like, right? I am going to tell you that none of us are smart enough to skip steps so He protects us by telling us to do one thing at a time.
Up to now, since the story of Noah started, no one except God has said a single thing. Noah has been a quiet guy and so we don’t know much of anything about him except for that the Bible says that he was righteous in his generation, which means he was the best of the bunch, and that he did everything God told him to do, so he was obedient. Other than that, the guy is just silent and God is doing 100% of the talking. But something happens once the flood begins. God stops talking too! Boy howdy, that must have been scary. Think about all that was going on and all the animal poop and human poop piling up and God isn’t saying anything. Noah was never told anything about how long this would all take. And just the eight of them together. Bet everyone was getting pretty crabby, right? Not like you could take a walk or anything. Not like they had cans of Febreze or even toilet paper. Or tv. Or books. And it must have seemed as though God had forgotten about them because, by the time we get to chapter eight verse one, they’ve been in there for one hundred and ninety days.
Who can do the math to figure out how long that is? If we say that months are thirty days long, then that is just over six months. Half a year. Just kill me now, right? Seasickness. The smell. The same people every day. Three brothers—and you know that isn’t going to be good. Probably the same things to eat every single day. No meat. Maybe they were able to milk some of the animals. And God is being quiet and seemingly, they have been forgotten in there and they will be there for the rest of their lives. So, let’s look at that verse–
God remembered Noah, as well as all the wildlife and all the livestock that were with him in the ark. God caused a wind to pass over the earth, and the water began to subside (go down).
Now, wait a minute—does this mean that God forgot about Noah?! What the heck—was He distracted or busy with something else? That is how it sounds in English but that’s because, like a whole lot of words from other languages, we don’t really have a one word that can replace the Hebrew word zakar. And zakar shows up a lot in the Bible. In fact, it is one of the best words in the whole world. Zakar is a verb and it doesn’t just mean to suddenly think about something or someone again after totally spacing it. I mean, God doesn’t forget things like we do. I am forgetting more and more things every year because I am grandma-aged now. I will decide to put something somewhere where I know I will remember it and then I never find it again until we move and I begin to pack up boxes! Like, oh my gosh, I have these containers that the vegetable barley soup from Costco that I bought came in and I remember putting the lids somewhere. And they have been missing for three months now. But God never forgets where He puts things. He never forgets about where you are and what is happening to you. No, when God remembers you it isn’t because He forgot about you. When God remembers you it is because He has decided to do something in your life.
When God remembered Noah, He made the floodwaters go down. When God remembered Rachel, He gave her a baby. When Pharoah’s cupbearer remembered Joseph, he got him out of prison—but he really did forget because he’s a person and we do that sort of thing. When God remembers His covenant, and we will talk more about that in a few weeks, He does things to save and bless people. God freed the slaves from Egypt when He remembered His promise to Abraham. And we are going to see that over and over again. Humans can zakar because they have actually forgotten, but when God decides to zakar it is because it is time to do something about what is going on. God is always watching and waiting for just the right time to do something—and more than that, sometimes God is waiting for us to pray before He remembers. We’ve talked about praying a few times and so you know how important it is that we talk to God about what is going on in our lives and to ask Him when we or someone else needs help. When we don’t ask God to help us, then we aren’t treating Him like God at all. He is all-powerful and sees us all the time and He wants to be asked to help out.
Ask your parents or grandparents or aunts and uncles or sisters and brothers or friends how they would feel if you had a problem and you didn’t talk to them about it—I know that I want to help out the people I love but I can’t do that if they never tell me about their problems. Well, God is like that too, only He knows what the problem is. And He sees the whole problem and not just tiny bits. He sees the whole puzzle of your life and cares very deeply about you. I want you to imagine something for me. Just think if your friend had a terrible problem and was hurting or they were in just awful trouble. But what if they weren’t willing to talk to anyone about it? What if you were watching the problem get worse and worse and you knew exactly how to help but you couldn’t because they wouldn’t even admit that there was a problem? Would you be worried about them? Maybe even scared? I know that when it happens to me and the people I love won’t let me help, well, I can’t even sleep at night. It’s a horrible feeling in my gut, in the pit of my stomach. It feels that way because I love them and I want them to be okay. The people who care about you feel that way about you too. I know I feel that way about you.
But sometimes, it seems like God isn’t listening at all and nothing is harder than that. Sometimes it seems like God has forgotten about us or is just so angry that He wants us to die. We think that because humans sometimes are mean and spiteful like that and give up on us. Sometimes we say the wrong thing and our best friend all of a sudden hates us. Sometimes we don’t even know what happened. When things like that happen to us, it is easy to think that God is just like people—but He isn’t anything like us. Do you remember how hard God worked to make things right with Cain and even to protect him? Cain ran away from God but God didn’t leave Cain. And goodness sakes, Cain murdered his own brother—killed him over nothing! I know you haven’t done anything that terrible in your life. But sometimes the bad things we do seem so huge and overpowering that we can’t imagine anyone would ever love us again and especially not God. But the Bible is full of stories of people who did the most horrible things you can imagine and when they snapped out of it and were sorry and turned back to God, He forgave them because He loves us and He wants all of us to be right with Him.
Noah and his family must have been wondering what on earth was going on. I mean, God talked to Noah at first and told him how to do everything about building the ark and gathering food. Now, all of a sudden when it is really scary, God doesn’t seem to be saying much of anything and even though He sent the wind to make the level of the waters go down, He won’t say anything to Noah for almost another eight months, when He told them to go back outside. But the important thing is that even though God wasn’t saying anything, He was still taking care of Noah and his family and all of the animals. And God was taking care of the earth too because things were starting to grow again. There will be times in your life where you will feel very close to God and other times when you will feel very abandoned but today I am going to tell you my secret for getting through those times. Yes, of course, it happens to me too—and I pray all the time and study the Bible all the time and I try very hard not to sin against God or others. But I still mess up, of course.
What I have come to learn though, through experience, is that God is faithful even when I am messing up. He doesn’t give up on me. But what He is doing in the quiet times in our lives when He seems to be gone is teaching us to trust Him no matter what we are thinking or feeling or seeing. And that’s a hard thing to do. People like to focus on what they feel and get themselves into all sorts of trouble. But what we think we see isn’t always what is actually happening. What we are feeling can be influenced by a lot of things that might not be entirely right. What we are thinking is always going to be limited by what we know and what we have gone through and not always by what is really happening. Why, just this week, I saw that something had happened and I got super worried that someone in my family was in trouble but then instead of reacting, I waited and looked into it and found out that my first assumption was totally wrong! I had assumed the worst thing possible. Sometimes when we are stressed out and feeling overwhelmed, we start to get a little bit nutty. It happens to everyone.
Now, let’s imagine Noah and his family during those first 190 days. Can you even imagine the thoughts they were thinking and the prayers they were praying to God? It’s like the Psalms. Now the Psalms are songs and poems in the Bible. Some of them are happy and joyful and some of them are sad. Sometimes they are confident about God’s goodness and power and at other times they are doubtful and even accuse God of not caring at all. The Psalms are very important because there is nothing fake about them. The Psalms are honest. Psalms show people thinking wonderful loving thoughts and ugly evil thoughts. Just like us. Because we all think all kinds of wonderful and terrible things. And I am sure that if we could look inside the heads of Noah and his family we would see all sorts of things.
“Has God forgotten all about us? Will we run out of food and starve to death?” “I really wish we had just died like everyone else, at least it would have been over quickly and we wouldn’t be stuck in here.” “This is not what I signed up for—I thought I would be in here for a week, tops, but now I am thinking that maybe God drowned in the flood too and we are on our own.” “I wonder if we made God angry and now He has abandoned us forever.” “Great! This is the thanks I get for being obedient and building this thing!” And we might think that Noah was too perfect to think things like this but the truth is that being there would have been just as much of a test as being told to believe God and build the ark in the first place. Throughout your life, you will find that it is a lot easier to do the right thing on the outside than to think the right thing on the inside. Our thoughts tend to have a mind of their own, right? We all think about things we would never really want to do. But when we get scared, angry, or excited then our thoughts sort of run wild and we start thinking of what are called “worst-case scenarios” and we come up with things that would almost never happen in real life. Like what I was assuming about someone I love being in trouble the other day. The truth wasn’t nearly as bad as what I had imagined! Do you do that? Moms and dads do that all the time when we can’t get ahold of our kids and don’t know where they are or who they are with. My kids are both adults now but I worry if they disappear on me. So, if you think those kinds of things, you aren’t alone!
And we haven’t been stuck in an ark for over six months without a change. For Noah and his family, being there without God talking to them, well they had decisions to make. Maybe his sons were saying, “Are you sure we were supposed to do this? Did you forget something? Are we missing something? God has obviously abandoned us, or he is dead—one way or another, something went really wrong. Can’t you do something???”
And maybe Noah wondered too. And so as they talked, they had to make the biggest decision any of us will ever have to make. They had to choose whether or not to trust God. They had to decide whether or not to be faithful and to keep waiting or to give up. And in your lives, that will happen to you too. Because all of us have felt sometimes that God has forgotten us, or has abandoned us, or is punishing us because He is angry. But in the Bible, when He is angry—like with Cain—He says something, right? He finds a way to let us know. Now, sometimes we have sinned and have done something terrible, but we know from the Bible that God forgives us when we are truly sorry and determined to get things right and do better. And we can ask friends to help us. But, God wants more than anything else for us to be on good terms with Him. God doesn’t enjoy having enemies or being angry.
One of Jesus’s own disciples said this, “The Lord does not delay his promise, as some understand delay, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish but all to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9) But what does that mean? This means that God isn’t going to fly off the handle and nuke you if you mess up. He really, really wants to save people. I mean, just look at how annoying and hopeless we all are and how badly we mess stuff up on a daily basis? If God was anything like me, we’d all be dead already. So, in your prayers, thank God that He isn’t like Miss Tyler!
I want to tell you a story about the time that Jesus even had thoughts that God had abandoned Him. Of course, no such thing had happened because that isn’t how God works. But, you know, Jesus experienced all the things we experience. People He loved, they got sick and died. People He loved, they rejected Him and made fun of him. They even told people that he was crazy! And His own disciples, when things got scary, they ran away and one even denied ever knowing Him. And one betrayed Him. Jesus knew what it was like to hurt and to feel abandoned—because He was abandoned! And on the Cross, it got so horrible that He quoted from one of those honest Psalms I was telling you about. He said, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? (Psalm 22:1).”
Had God really abandoned Jesus? Well, everyone listening wouldn’t know for sure until three days later. You see, if God abandoned Jesus, then He would have stayed dead. Jesus kept telling His disciples that He would be raised from the dead, and that is something that only God can do, right? They were really confused. They all believed that everyone who was obedient to God would be raised from the dead but they thought it would happen all at the same time on what the Bible calls “the last day.” So, why would Jesus even tell them something they already knew? Well, Jesus was saying that it would happen to Him pretty much right away—without a prophet even laying his hands on Jesus’s body the way that Jesus prayed for others and they came alive, and both Elijah and Elisha did as well. But no one did that when Jesus died. They wrapped him in spices and put Him in a garden tomb and rolled a rock in front and sealed it so that no one could break-in. There were even guards outside. Nobody was getting in there so if He was going to be raised from the dead, there was only one who could do it and that was God Himself. But that’s exactly what happened. And then He appeared to a whole lot of people!
But for those three days, things seemed pretty hopeless. The disciples must have felt like God really had abandoned Jesus, and if that was true then He would have abandoned them too. I mean, if Jesus got abandoned then no one is safe. Because, I mean, there are good reasons for God to get rid of us—but He doesn’t because He is patient and loving. If He puts up with us then Jesus is totally safe. But Jesus cried out on the Cross because it felt like He was alone, probably for the first time in His whole life. He had always known God. Now, the people standing around the Cross, they knew Jesus was quoting from Psalm 22 so I want to read some of that:
My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Why are you so far from my deliverance and from my words of groaning? My God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, by night, yet I have no rest. But you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel. Our ancestors trusted in you; they trusted, and you rescued them. They cried to you and were set free; they trusted in you and were not disgraced. But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by mankind and despised by people. Everyone who sees me mocks me; they sneer and shake their heads: “He relies on the Lord; let him save him; let the Lord rescue him, since he takes pleasure in him.” It was you who brought me out of the womb, making me secure at my mother’s breast. I was given over to you at birth; you have been my God from my mother’s womb. Don’t be far from me, because distress is near and there’s no one to help. Many bulls surround me; strong ones of Bashan encircle me. They open their mouths against me—lions, mauling and roaring. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are disjointed; my heart is like wax, melting within me. My strength is dried up like baked clay; my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. You put me into the dust of death. For dogs have surrounded me; a gang of evildoers has closed in on me; they pierced my hands and my feet. I can count all my bones; people look and stare at me. They divided my garments among themselves, and they cast lots for my clothing. But you, Lord, don’t be far away. My strength, come quickly to help me.
Jesus was describing what had been done to Him. He was also showing that what happened to Him had been written about a thousand years before. And He was telling people that God could be trusted because everyone in the past had been able to trust Him too. The Psalm is a lot longer than that and you can read it all as a family.
Anyway, I love you. I am praying for you and I hope you have a wonderful time learning about God with the people who love you.