Finally, God tells Noah and his family that they can get out of that stinky ark. I bet they kissed the ground! But what kind of life could they expect compared to what they had and why does this part of scripture sound so much like Genesis 1?
If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.
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 mostly be in Genesis 8)
Then God spoke to Noah, “Come out of the ark, you, your wife, your sons, and your sons’ wives with you. Bring out all the living creatures that are with you—birds, livestock, those that crawl on the earth—and they will spread over the earth and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.” So Noah, along with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives, came out. All the animals, all the creatures that crawl, and all the flying creatures—everything that moves on the earth—came out of the ark by their families. (Gen 8:15-19)
Well, according to the story, Noah and his family were on that ark for a heckuva long time. In fact, according to the Bible, they were on the ark for 370 days, so just over a year. I don’t know about you, but that is not my idea of a good time. I probably wouldn’t have eaten that entire time just so that I wouldn’t be throwing up because I get super seasick. And, so, yeah, I would have died, come to think of it. When the waters stopped coming down, that would have been a pleasant surprise. When the winds came and the water started to go down, that was definitely a happy occasion. When the bottom of the ark touched down on the mountain—oh boy! And then Noah sent out birds to see if they could land anywhere or eat anything and, finally, God told Noah and his family to come out of the ark.
Now, sometimes we are so anxious to do things that we don’t wait for instructions. Have you ever done that? Sometimes we think it is time—but it isn’t time! I love to teach you guys about idioms—and idioms are phrases or sayings that usually don’t mean what they sound like they mean. But some idioms do make sense if you know the history. Let’s talk about a great idiom to describe doing something before you are supposed to—“jumping the gun.” Have you ever watched a race at the Olympics or at school or on television? Have you ever been in a race? People race on foot, with bicycles, in boats, in cars, and in the water as swimmers. Have you ever noticed what happens at the beginning of the race? Someone fires a special type of gun called a starter’s pistol. They aim it up in the air and although a bullet doesn’t come out, it makes a huge sound sort of like a cap gun but you still don’t want to point it at anyone. Well, when the racers are ready to go and all worked up and excited, you can imagine how easy it would be to accidentally start running before you hear the boom. And when a racer starts too soon, it’s called jumping the gun. They aren’t jumping over the gun, of course, but they are “jumping” before the gun tells them it is time. And if you think those racers are excited, just think about those folks in the stinky ark for over a year. They are all ready and waiting to jump the gun. I bet his sons are all going, “Is it time yet?” and Noah is saying, “Oh my gosh no, how many times do I have to tell you that we will get there when we get there!!??”
Our lives are full of times when we can’t hardly stand to wait for something to start. I bet you can think of a lot of times. That’s why learning how to patiently wait for the right moment is a huge part of growing up. And there are a lot of people in the Bible who are going to jump the gun. And they all get into a lot of trouble! If you are excited for recess and bolt out of your desk too early—trouble! If you open the oven door at the wrong time, the cake you are baking might cave in and sink in the middle. If you are going over a puddle and you jump too early or too late, you get wet shoes. Abraham and Sarah, Moses, the children of Israel in the wilderness, King Saul, King David and many others are going to leap before they look and the results will be disastrous not only for themselves but for others. And in your life, you will do it too. The Bible shows us that God won’t abandon us when we do jump the gun even though we might not like the real-life consequences of what we have done.
Of course, in the case of the Ark, God closed the door so maybe Noah couldn’t even open it if he wanted to anyway. How do you even open a door that God closed from the other side? I guess a lot of times, God protects us from ourselves by making certain things impossible. We’re just stubborn enough to try and do something foolish at the worst possible time. I sometimes wonder how many times God has protected me from really messing up so bad that there is no way of getting out of trouble. Fortunately, I have messed up many times and although sometimes things seemed very hopeless and, sometimes, I even thought I wanted to die, in time things got better and now I rarely even remember things that once seemed like the end of the world. Now, let’s look at our Bible verses for this week:
Then God spoke to Noah, “Come out of the ark, you, your wife, your sons, and your sons’ wives with you. Bring out all the living creatures that are with you—birds, livestock, those that crawl on the earth—and they will spread over the earth and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.” So Noah, along with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives, came out. All the animals, all the creatures that crawl, and all the flying creatures—everything that moves on the earth—came out of the ark by their families.
Something that we see a lot of in the Bible is the theme of new beginnings. Do you remember what a theme is? The theme of a story is the topic, or the main point or you might call it the subject. For example, the theme of a movie like Toy Story is friendship and how dangerous jealousy is. One of my favorite old movies is West Side Story and the themes of that movie are love and the dangers of prejudice and hatred, and it’s based on Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet which is about the same exact things. Well, there is a theme that pops up all through the Bible and that theme is new beginnings. In Genesis 1, God created something new—the heavens and the earth and everything in them. He did that so that the entire world could know what He is like and so emptiness and chaos could be replaced by something beautiful and meaningful. He began with some people and placed them in a good place where they could do the job of making the entire earth a paradise—a perfect place where they could raise children so that the whole earth would be a wonderful and peaceful place with no violence or hatred or cruelty. Just think if they hadn’t been so anxious to become like God! Talk about jumping the gun! They could have become more and more like Him just by doing what He said to do and by becoming more and more like Him. There is no easy way to become like God, and certainly not by just eating a piece of fruit, no matter how tasty or pretty.
But in the beginning, we saw that God created the birds, and the wild animals, and the livestock (farm animals), and all of the tiny critters like bugs and mice and snakes and stuff. And, of course, He also created people. And He told those people and those critters to be fruitful and multiply. That’s why when God speaks to Noah and the animals to come out of the ark, it is just like when He spoke when He created the world. And He wants them to spread out over the earth and to have babies and to do all the things that God created them to do.
But things aren’t entirely the same. Noah and his family aren’t like Adam and Eve. They’ve already lived a long time and they have seen a lot of horrible, evil things. They lived in a world where no one could trust anyone, a world of horrible violence and people doing whatever they wanted to whoever they wanted. It wasn’t a safe world, and everyone was suffering—people and animals and the earth. God loves His creation, and He hates suffering. In the Bible, the prophets talk over and over again about how much God hates it when the strong are mean to the weak, when the rich are mean to the poor, and the powerful take advantage of the powerless. But that is the only kind of world that they have ever been a part of. The time they spent all alone together in the ark would have been their first experience of not having to worry about someone hurting them. Noah and his wife didn’t have to worry about whether Ham, Shem, and Japheth were in danger. And Ham, Shem, and Japheth didn’t have to worry if their mom and wives were safe. Although, that being said, it was probably hard to feel safe in the ark as the months passed and they must have wondered if they would ever get out of there. But when all people have ever seen is craziness, violence, and hatred in the outside world, it is hard to live any other way. When we are around mean people, being mean starts to look normal.
If you have had friends who used to be kind but then started hanging around someone who is mean, then you probably know what I am talking about. Mean people don’t usually get nicer without Jesus’s help—nice people get meaner instead. Not that people can’t change but generally we start to act like the people we are around. It’s just how we are because being mean is easier than being nice and sometimes it feels really good to make someone else feel bad. Sometimes it feels good to hurt people and especially when we are angry or frustrated or not getting our way. When we feel hurt, sometimes we want to hurt someone else. And when we are hanging around people who do that all the time, it gets easier and easier to give in. Hopefully, just being around their parents was a good example for the boys and their wives. We’ll find out later.
But even though it isn’t a clean start, a totally new beginning with brand new perfect people, it is a new beginning. And because Noah was considered to be righteous in his generation, we know that means he was the best of the bunch and so his family was probably a whole lot better than most as well. Whatever horrible things people had done, they were gone now and Noah and his family had the power to choose to live in an entirely new way. They knew what it was like to be in a terrible situation, and now they could choose to make the world a really wonderful, peaceful, and loving place to live. They could have children and grandchildren and could make the decision to teach them what was right. Everyone should have learned their lesson because of how bad their world had been. If only they would refuse to make the same mistakes. If only they would just say no to being unloving to one another.
Did you know that God is going to do this many times in the Bible? Not send a flood, not that, but start over again with a new family so that He can fix what was broken in the Garden? First there was Adam and Eve, and then Noah, and then Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and finally Jesus. Do you remember when we talked about how the story of Adam and Eve tells us that all human beings are one big family with no one any better than anyone else? That God wants us to see ourselves as all coming from the same place so that no one will think that some people are superior, or better than, others? Well, as if it wasn’t enough to do it once, God is doing it again when Moses tells us the story of Noah and his family. Later on, we will hear about how the children of the three sons and their wives went out in all different directions. Some went to Asia, others to Africa, and even to Europe. That’s what God wanted, for people to live all over the world so that we could wisely rule over all of His Creation. This world is full of wonderful places and wonderful people. Because of where we live, we look different and we like different kinds of music and our languages are different and we eat entirely different kinds of foods. And it’s all wonderful. We are different because God is like an artist, so creative. Think of all the different kinds of birds and how beautiful they are and they are different sizes. God doesn’t just like one kind of bird or cat or butterfly or flower or tree. God is not boring. If God was boring we would all look exactly alike and do the same stuff and it would be awful.
It’s really hard to start from scratch. Noah and his family will have to do a lot of work to survive. They will probably use the ark for shelter, for a home, as long as they can but as everyone begins having children and grandchildren, they are going to have to leave where they are and plant crops like wheat and barley, and find good sources of water to drink, and they will certainly have to be somewhere else for the winter because the mountains would be too dangerous. And they have animals that will need to travel around in order to find good grass to graze on. They’ll have to build fences to keep the farm animals from wandering off or being eaten.
Have you ever moved away from your home to somewhere new? Maybe a new town or a new state or even a new country? Do you know what it is like to have to start all over again? You have to get a new home, go to a new school, figure out where to buy groceries, get a new doctor and a new dentist, find a new favorite place to eat pizza, make new friends, find a new church, and sometimes people have a different accent or might even speak a different language. I can tell you some stories about how hard it was for me to move to new places. And I will tell you that when you move to a different country, even if they speak the same language, those words do not always mean the same thing and you can get into big trouble. I found out that the hard way! If you’ve had to do any of that then maybe you can relate to how Noah’s family is feeling as they needed to start over.
Now, you might ask the question, why did Noah get to take his family with him onto the ark? Well, that’s a story that is going to take us right to Jesus! We are going to see in the Bible, and especially in Genesis, how loyal God is to the people He loves. In fact, He is so loyal that sometimes He does really nice things for the families of the people who obey Him and love Him. Because Noah obeyed God, his family was allowed to join him on the ark even though we aren’t sure yet what kind of people they are. Because Abraham obeyed God, God rescued his nephew Lot and Lot’s family when a city was destroyed, and God even blessed Abraham’s son Ishmael even though God chose Isaac for Himself. Because Isaac was obedient to God, God blessed Esau, even though Esau wasn’t really very interested in serving God. In fact, God gave the descendants of Lot, Ishmael, and Esau lands of their very own, and no one was allowed to touch them. And all because God loved Abraham! Because Moses obeyed God, and because God remembered Abraham and how faithful he was, hundreds of years later God looked out for the children of Israel, who all came from Abraham and Sarah, even though they often made God sorry for it. Because Aaron’s son Phineas was obedient and loyal to God, God specially blessed his family. And because David obeyed God, usually, God was loyal to David’s family even when they became increasingly evil and rebellious. What that doesn’t mean is that the people who God was loyal to and generous with were awesome people. God did good things for them not because they were good but because someone else was, or at least they usually were. God loves loyalty. But what is loyalty about?
We say that someone is loyal when they are on your side no matter what. When you can trust them not to play nasty tricks on you or lie to you or about you or switch sides when bullies come after you or tell your secrets to everyone so they can make fun of you. Being loyal to God is a bit different because with God, He is just perfect and He made us, and when He sent Jesus to die for us so we could live with Him forever. Well, we kinda owe it to Him to be totally devoted to Him and only to Him. But the really amazing thing about God is that when we are loyal to Him, He is even more loyal to us! That doesn’t mean that nothing will ever go wrong for us—I wish! But it means that when things do go wrong that God doesn’t abandon us. God won’t switch sides on us, or leave us just because we do something wrong. No matter what we do or how far we might try to run from Him, He’s just waiting for us to turn around and see that He has been right there waiting for us. Now, there are some people who might try to take advantage of that but God will deal with that too.
Why does He do that with us? Why is He so loyal to us? He is loyal to us when we believe and give our loyalty to His beloved Son Jesus. Lot was saved because of Abraham, and so was Ishmael, Esau, and the children of Israel in slavery in Egypt. When they messed up really bad, God remembered His promises to Abraham and saved them from trouble, and more than that, He also blessed them. When the Kings of Judah sinned terribly, God remembered His promises to David and sent prophets to them to turn them around to do what is right, but He didn’t destroy them. Jesus is like that for us, but He is much more than that. In the book of Isaiah, God said that Jesus would be a light to the nations, that He would bring God’s word and salvation to the nations. When we follow Jesus as our Savior and our only King, we are telling God that we believe His promises, that we believe He did everything He said He would do to save the world by sending Jesus for us. Before Jesus, when God looked at His sinful people, He remembered Abraham and His promises and saved them. Now, God looks at us and remembers Jesus and His promises, and saves us. But now things are a lot different because just believing in and trusting Abraham or Moses or David never changed anyone on the inside. They were still the same people. They might keep the commandments on the outside and might even have been very good people, but they didn’t get to be a part of the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus brought to everyone who trusts Him and gives Him their loyalty.
A lot of people think of the Kingdom of Heaven as something up in the sky but Jesus said that the Kingdom of Heaven came with Him and came to stay in everyone who belongs to Him. And anyone can belong to Him if they want to—all they have to do is trust Him enough to believe and to obey Him. So, we read the stories about Him and we can know they are true. We read that He died as a totally innocent person so that Satan would have all of his authority over us taken away. Satan worked through evil men in order to kill someone completely innocent of anything wrong. That never happened before in the history of the world. When Satan did that, he broke his own power. And when we give our love and loyalty and trust to Jesus, the Spirit of God comes to live with us and changes us from the inside out so that not only will we act more loving and good, we will be more loving and good. That’s how powerful God’s salvation is. It doesn’t mean we are perfect, or that we are good right away, but little by little, day after day and year after year, we become more and more like Jesus—and Jesus is exactly like God.
We become His image-bearers just like it talks about in Genesis 1. We get the chance to live in this beautiful Creation wisely and kindly, not doing damage to anyone but treating others like they are created in God’s image too—because they are.
The Bible tells us that before the flood, people weren’t treating one another as though they were also in God’s image but were hurting them, treating them unfairly, were being violent, and just being horrible. Noah and his family grew up in that world but now they would have a chance to start over and do things right. Of course, they wouldn’t have the Holy Spirit to help and change them, so what do we think is going to happen? Can they do it? How long will it take them to start messing up? We’ll see.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray you have a wonderful time this week studying the Bible with the people who love you.