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Sometimes obedience to God means having the guts to stick out like a sore thumb – like when the Patriarch Noah built the ark.  Noah’s ark – estimated at about 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high (converting the Bible cubit measurement) – would mean that the ark’s gross tonnage (100 cubic feet = one gross ton) is about 15,100 tons.  Its total volume of over 1.5 million cubic feet would equal the capacity of 569 modern railroad stock cars.  Scholars’ estimates are that between 16,000 and 35,000 animals were in the ark.

All this sounds fantastic, for this vessel built in Noah’s time, as we look back in awe.  But in Noah’s time, that behemoth boat – sitting on dry land while he built it – was the subject of ridicule by people.  It is not hard to imagine the taunts that Noah endured – just see how people mocked the Lord Jesus on the lonely cross.  The taunt against Jesus Christ was: “He saved others, but he can’t save himself!” (Matt. 27:42; Mk. 15:31).  The taunt against Noah might have been: “Who is this man who thinks he can save the world with one boat?”

Imagine how long he suffered the mockery from people.  The Bible does not say how long it took Noah to build the ark but Noah was 500 years old when he was first mentioned as father of Shem, Ham and Japheth (Gen 5:32).  He was 600 years old when he, his family and the animals entered the ark.  Going by the precise dates mentioned in the Bible, he would have been in the vessel for about 370 days.  Consider floating in a three-storey vessel for that length of time with only one window in it. But “moved with fear” of the holy God, (Heb. 11:7) he heeded the warning of the global flood, built the ark, and got in.

But the back-story to Noah is that obedience meant swimming upstream all his life.  He purposed to live – and did – righteously while “all the people on earth had corrupted their ways” (Gen. 6:12).  Consider that he stood out like an odd ball and was persecuted for preaching righteousness.  Matthew Henry (Bible commentator) reminds us that Noah was willing “to appear for God when no one else appears for Him” and that “God looks down upon those with an eye of favour who sincerely look up to him with an eye of faith”.  Might we also always have the guts to do what is right before God and to obey Him.