part0012

" And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from off the earth : and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold, the face of the ground was dry. And in the second month, on the seven and twentieth day of the month, was the earth dried ." [Genesis 8:13-14]

One of the greatest and most important virtues in this life is patience. In everyday life few things are more important than being willing to patiently wait for meaningful events to pass before moving ahead in some ventures. In areas of business, for example, timing can sometimes be very important. Therefore, being willing to wait for the right time to act often becomes a necessary evil. Most people do not like to wait because what they want they usually want right away. But that is also true among people that are trying to live for the Lord. They live in the same world as everyone else. Many times they have the same needs and the same wants as everyone else. So many times they do not want to wait for certain things to come to pass either. However, none of that changes the fact that being willing to wait is very important.

In fact, when it comes to the Lord, nothing in life is more important than patiently waiting upon Him. From the time that the Prophet Samuel had anointed David to be the future king of Israel to the actual time that he had become the king of Israel had been very lengthy. He had only been a young lad tending sheep when Samuel had first come to his home. But David had not actually become the king of Israel until about fifteen or so years later. II Samuel 5:3-5 says, "So all the elders of Israel came to the king to Hebron…they anointed David king over Israel. David was thirty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned forty years…." Some years after becoming the king, he wrote about being of a good courage and of waiting upon the Lord. Psalm 27:14 says, "Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD." So in his own words, David had written that the heart of the person that waits upon the Lord will be strengthened. Psalm 37:9 says, "For evildoers shall be cut off: but those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth ." He also said that they will inherit the earth.

In the matter of Noah after God had spoken to his heart about building the ark, Noah had patiently obeyed the SILENT leading of the Lord for as much as one hundred years while his family and he had done the work. That is a very long time for someone to be doing something for the Lord without ever having received any clear audible, verbal confirmation about the work. That very long time becomes even more significant when one considers that his family and he had probably been heckled and jeered at by their ungodly, unbelieving neighbors for much of that time. However, they had ignored the taunts and the jeers and had faithfully continued in the work anyway. Genesis 7:11 says, "In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened." So Noah had been two months and seventeen days past his six hundredth birthday when the rains had finally begun.

Then, after the storm had ended, his family and he had still had to wait even longer for everything to be finished. Genesis 8:2-3 says, "The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained; And the waters returned from off the earth continually: and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters were abated." So it had taken one hundred and fifty days after the rains had stopped for the water to start draining from the earth. In all, it would take a little more than one whole year for the earth to be fully flooded and then to be completely dry again. From Genesis 8:13-14 which was quoted above, Noah had been two months and twenty-seven days past six hundred and one years old before his family and he could finally come out of the ark. They had been in that very stinky, very crowded boat for about ten days more than one year before the flood had completely run its course. So that is a very, very long time for them to have had to live like that.

As a result, one can be quite sure that Noah and his family had mastered the virtue of patience. Not only that, but they had also reaped the rewards of having been patient people. Isaiah 40:30-31 says, "Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint ." Noah had patiently waited upon the Lord. Because of that, he had been strengthened for the work that the Lord had wanted him to do. He had also completed the work with honor and integrity and had not fainted.