Noah Found Grace

eDevotion

Encouragement for your daily walk with God 

The Bible contains stories about people who obeyed God. Their stories were not about a life of ease, but rather, confrontation, hardship, and difficulties. One of my favorite stories involves a man named Noah. He lived in a culture marked by corruption, immorality, and violence. In fact, according to the story, the earth was “full” of it.  

The inhabitants of earth were so reprehensible that God regretted making his crowning achievement — these creatures that were the divine image-bearers. So, He decided to remove them, and every living thing (except fish) from the face of the earth. He would sweep them away as a man clears a table with the back of his hand. It would be His way to start all over again. Can you imagine!

But something caught His eye, so to speak. A man in the middle of this debauchery was righteous and blameless, a man of integrity, and so he found favor/grace in the eyes of the Lord.  

It doesn’t take much to etch out a lesson from Noah’s life. Our culture is drowning in immorality and violence, much like his. And like Noah, we can be swallowed up in it, or take a stand against it, that is, to obey God and find His favor, His grace.

One can only imagine the decades of ridicule and prideful obstinance he faced during the construction of the ark. I’m sure there were times of loneliness and doubt. But he stayed the course. Step by step, one day at a time, He stayed on the path that God had laid out for him. Another way of saying it is, he stayed on track. 

Once the project was complete and the rest of humanity had rejected the notion that God would destroy the earth by a flood of water (whatever that was, because they had not known that kind of event at that time), Noah and his family escaped catastrophe. He entered the ark and the Lord shut him safely in.

You may not know this, but the ark became one of the great symbols of safety and refuge in the early church. In fact, many early churches were built to resemble the inside of a boat, a “shelter in the time of storm,” as they say. What a reminder of an obedient servant who went before us and was saved!

But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD. Genesis 6.8