Genesis 8
But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded. 2 Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavenshad been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky. 3 The water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down, 4 and on the seventeenth day of the seventh monththe ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. 5 The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible.
6 After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark 7 and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. 8 Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. 9 But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. 10 He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. 11 When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. 12 He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.
13 By the first day of the first month of Noah’s six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. 14 By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry.
15 Then God said to Noah, 16 “Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives. 17 Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it.”
18 So Noah came out, together with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives. 19 All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds—everything that moves on land—came out of the ark, one kind after another.
20 Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. 21 The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though[a] every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.
22 “As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease.”
I remember as a child we used to drive to Switzerland for our summer holidays. We would pack the car, squeeze in 6 kids and set off. Within five minutes someone would say those words that would drive my parents completely crazy:
“Are we there yet?”
NO! We are not there yet. And I think that we knew were weren’t there. What we meant was, I have done my crossword, I have listened to some music, I have done everything that I brought with me to do, how much longer will we need to wait?
I think that a lot of people hate waiting and we cry out to God with the same question: are we there yet? I have read my Bible, I have prayed, I have fasted and I have not yet seen the break through that I wanted to. How much longer?
Whether you are waiting for healing, a relationship or a promise, it is hard to wait. Genesis 8 starts with the words, ‘But God remembered Noah.’ That does not mean that God had forgotten him. He hadn’t popped out for tea and suddenly remembered that he had left Noah stranded on a boat full of animals. It can feel a bit like this when we are waiting, like God has forgotten us.
Yet God is omniscient and he sees us, even when we feel like we have been forgotten.
I wonder why god made Noah wait. There was no practical need, once the flood had achieved its goal. Perhaps he wanted Noah to know that his life was dependant on God’s favour. The number 40 is highly symbolic in the Bible. It was 40 years that that the Israelites would walk the Wilderness, waiting for the promised land, it was 40 days that Jesus would spend with his disciples after the resurrection waiting for the birth of the church at Pentecost. 40 is also the number of weeks that a child spends in their mothers womb before they are born. It is the period of waiting for new life to come.
You can not rush a pregnancy, nor can you rush God’s timing. He calls us to wait but he remembers us and brings breakthrough at the right time.
