Day One--July 1, 2026--"But God.."

 

Genesis 7:11-8:19

Hinge verse: Genesis 8:1

We are starting day one with a famous story to most, if not all, of humanity--The Great Flood.  The main character, Noah, has spent anywhere from 50-120 years building an ark that will rescue him and his family--8 total people--from the coming flood.  They took with them clean and unclean animals (which always intrigued me because we are only 8 chapters into the story of the Bible timeline; the law won't be given by God to Moses for nearly 1,000 years!)  Noah's family were shut into the ark by the LORD Himself and, for 40 days and nights, springs below and floodgates above burst open, flooding the earth in judgment from God against His creation.  Every living thing perished.  All of it.  

But God...He remembered Noah.  He remembered the animals that were with him.  God closed the floodgates and sent a wind over the earth.  Slowly and surely, the flood started to recede.  The flood started on the seventeenth day of the second month, and by the first day of the tenth month, Noah and his family could just start to see the tops of the mountains.  The family celebrated a new year on the ark, and by the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry.  So Noah came out, with his family and the animals, built an altar, and worshiped.  

Noah was a man who was found faithful, but he could not rescue himself.  He trusted God, and he obeyed God.  But Noah found himself floating above the world as he knew it on a boat he built himself on rain unlike he'd ever seen. Since we know our own bent to anxiety, fear, and doubt; and since we know that started with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden; since we know the sin that so easily beset them then besets us now; we can do the math and understand that Noah was not perfect.  He just trusted with all of his heart that--in God's perfect timing--there was a BUT GOD moment in his story.  

Reverend Robert Hunt was a chaplain in the 15-1600s who left some skeletons in his closet in England to come to America.  He was by no means perfect.  Rev. Hunt, along with 105 other men and boys, disembarked from the Susan Constant after an unusually long journey from London to Chesapeake Bay.  "Coming ashore in the New World, Rev. Robert Hunt and the original Jamestown settlers erected a cross and had a prayer ceremony dedicating the new land to the Lord in what is considered the first English Christian worship service in America."  Reverend Robert Hunt

But God...Elohim, singular yet plural.  One God with many attributes.  Eternal, faithful, good, gracious, holy, just, sovereign, wise....He loved His children then, He loves His children now.  He is the same God.  He is the same God.