A Righteous Man

Genesis 6:9,  "This is the account of Noah.  Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God."

Genesis 6:22,  "Noah did everything just as God commanded him."

    After teaching Bible studies and Sunday School for forty years, I would sum up the way to live the Christian life in this one sentence, "Choose to trust and obey, abide and pray."  If I were to distill the

instructions further, I would shorten it to "Trust and obey."  This is exactly what Noah did.

    When I was growing up, it was not so hard to be a Christian.  The same values taught in church were also taught in school and in most homes.  This is not so today.  Many parents fail to teach their

children about God.  The public schools no longer have prayer and Bible reading on a daily basis.  We live in the most technologically advanced and affluent era in human history.  Society in general promotes a selfish, self-centered, materialistic, and humanistic viewpoint and lifestyle.  People who want to please God today must swim upstream against a current of godlessness, much as salmon swim upstream to spawn.  Noah lived in an even more godless world than ours.

    The tasks that God assigned Noah must have seemed overwhelming. The ark was an enormous boat.  It was 450 feet (or 1 1/2 football fields) long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high.  Until 1850 it was the largest ship built.  In addition to building the ark, Noah was instructed to bring aboard every kind of animal, male and female (or, as my granddaughter Heather once said, "male and email')  and 7 of each clean animal.  Don't you imagine Noah wondered how in the world he would ever be able to build a boat that big, much less get all those animals aboard?

    What did Noah do?  First, he shone like a star, lighting up a dark, depraved world by his righteous life.  He is such an influence for godliness that he is mentioned 50 times in 9 different books of the Bible.  Then he did what he could and trusted God to do the rest.  He trusted and obeyed God.  By those simple steps his life is a challenge to us to fulfill the Scripture in Philippians 2:15-16a which exhorts us to "become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe as you hold out the word of life..."

Father, may we follow the example of righteous Noah in trusting and obeying You and walking closely with You.  Amen.