God is faithful and remembers Noah, though I have to wonder if Noah was beginning to wonder whether or not God was going to help them at all, floating at the top of the world with no end in site for 150 days. Yet God works and sends a wind to decrease the waters on the earth until they dry up. When Noah comes out of the ark, he offers a sacrifice to God which we read pleases God. How unfortunate to be those animals… saved from the flood only to be sacrificed… seems kind of ironic…
Here we see a renewal of the blessing given to Adam and Eve to be fruitful and increase upon the earth. We also see here the first of many re-commitments and expansions of God’s covenant relationship with humanity. We saw this with Adam and Eve, that one of her offspring will crush the head of the serpent. We will see this again with with Abraham, Issac, Jacob, Moses, and David. God says, ““I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”
It is interesting reading this coming out of a year in which the world was supposed to end at least twice, at least two times that were well publicized. I posted about this in my personal Blog a while back. Whenever we are confronted by uncertainty of this sort we need only remember God’s promise in Genesis 8-9 and know that He will be faithful to them. After all, God is, to date, still 100% on keeping His promises.
The Tower of Babel is an interesting way to end this first section of Genesis. I’m trying to wrap my mind around how big this tower must have been. With no modern technology, cranes, or other modern machinery, how tall would they have gotten it? Perhaps it wasn’t the height that was the problem as much as the motivation. People did this as a way of “making a name” for themselves rather than doing it for the glory of God… I wonder if there is some application here regarding our motivations in the things that we do in our lives. Is the glory of God our motivation?