Noah's New Career

3rd in a series on how men and women in the Bible

deal with waiting, disappointment and unemployment

Noah’s New Career

Genesis 5:32 says, “At the age of 500 Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham and Japeth.”  Five hundred years is a long time. Five hundred years ago our ancestors were either in Europe or Africa.  Living under the light of candles and /or campfires.  Plumbing was rare and electricity nonexistent.  Transportation was mainly en pied or if you were wealthy, you might have a horse or two.  We don’t know what technology was available to Noah, but we can assume that the economy was primarily agrarian.  One can imagine that in that amount of time, Noah probably acquired many skills.  And all those skills were required to live.  There was little use for “knowledge workers”.  Any expertise you had, better be for starting fires, capturing game, growing food or building homes.  

At the age of 500 God appears to Noah and commands him to build an Ark.  A what?  An extremely large boat.  In today’s measurements: 510 feet long, 50 feet high and 75 feet wide.  And where was the boat to be built?  In the desert where he lived.  Whatever Noah and his sons had been doing up to this point, their new career would be boat building.  Of course, they couldn’t stop growing food or herding animals because they were necessary for living.  The immensity of the project begins to sink in when we read Genesis 7:6 “Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth.”  That means it took Noah at least 100 years to build the immense craft.  

So many questions come to mind.  What did the neighbors think?  Noah was already different because Genesis 6:9 says, “Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God.”  The rest of the world was called wicked in Genesis 6:11, “Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence.”  In essence, his behavior was at odds with his community.  How did he explain ‘boat building’ to a desert community?  And if he did bother to explain it to them, how would he explain God, the impending rain and God’s explanation for the destruction of the world?  What would it look like to round up two animals of every kind and the food to feed them?   Lastly, didn’t anyone in one hundred years change their mind and come to accept Noah’s world view?  It appears not, because only Noah and his family entered the Ark.

Many of us are in our ‘mature’ years and like Noah, it probably was a challenge to think differently about how one should spend their day.  Taking on new tasks and training in order to venture into the unknown had to be frightening.  God patiently waited while the massive vessel was being built but all along the way, Noah must have questioned his own sanity.  And his sons?  Did they hear God’s voice like Noah? Aren’t family members the toughest people to convince when you have a new idea? What about Noah’s wife?  We desperately need our spouse’s approval.  Without it, our homes can become very lonely.

So, can a story that’s about 5,000 years old be useful even to us today?  What principles lie within it?

1. Be a person of integrity.  “Who are you when no one is looking?”  
2. Are you performing the tasks before you to the best of your ability?
3. Do you have a support network?  People who believe in you?
4. Are you willing to retrain for a new occupation?  What would that entail?
5. How do we, in our mature years, handle rejection and restructuring?

Noah is remembered as a faithful man.  Several times it says that he obeyed God.  He was more concerned with obedience than his reputation among people.  What is our reputation?  For what will we be remembered?  May we follow Noah’s example.

“By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family. By his faith he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness that is in keeping with faith.” 

Hebrews 11:7