The Sixth Seal

Noah, his name means Rest because, they said; "This one will give us rest from our work and from the toil of our hands arising from the ground which the Lord has cursed."

I guess it was Noah who figured out that his people made better shepherds and vintners than they did crop farmers, or it may have something to do with the fact that the flood moved Noah and his family farther north, near the modern border between Syria and Turkey. But I'm getting ahead of myself...



God told Noah to build a big black box made of gopher wood and pitch. It measured 300 cubits x 50 cubits x 30 cubits (very golden ratio).

You can make a scale model with 34 three-by-five cards, some sticks and lots of tape

I can't tell you what those measurements convert to in modern units because the cubit was the distance from the tip of the middle finger to the elbow, and nobody even knows how tall Noah was, or if he had abnormally long or short arms. My personal cubit is ~19 inches, so if I were Noah, the ark would be about 475' x 79.1' x 47.5'.

You've heard that God told Noah to collect two of every animal and to put them on the ark. That's not exactly what the Bible says. God told Noah to collect SEVEN pairs of the clean animals (The animals that were suitable for sacrificing and eating) and one pair each of the unclean animals. I'm not going to quibble about ALL the animals in the world, I'm satisfied that God was talking about the animals that lived in ancient Mesopotamia since the flood would only encompass their world, not the whole planet (no kangaroos, opossums, raccoons, Galapagos tortoises, or even Sasquatches).

Once Noah had all that ready, he had a week to load the big black box so God could seal them in before the sixth seal was broken:

I looked when He broke the sixth seal, and there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth made of hair, and the whole moon became like blood; and the stars of the sky fell to the earth, as a fig tree casts its unripe figs when shaken by a great wind. the sky was split apart like a scroll when it is rolled up, and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. Then the kings of the earth and the great men and the commanders and the rich and the strong and every slave and free man hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains; and they said to the mountains and to the rocks, "Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb; for the great day of their wrath has come, and who is able to stand?"

Revelation 6:12-17

NASB

 Noah was six hundred years old on the seventeenth day of the second month of the year; that was the day he entered the ark. His sons' name were; Name (Shem), Hot (Ham), and Open (Japheth).

Noah's grandfather, Methuselah, who was 969, stayed behind, thus preserving the family's claim on the land in and around Ur. Then came forty days of rain and 150 days of rising flood waters.

Five months later, on the seventeenth day of the seventh month, the ark did NOT come to rest on Mount Ararat. The Bible says "the ark rested upon the mountains [plural] of Ararat." Put another way, the ark ran aground in the foothills of the mountains at the edge of the world --- before the flood waters had completely subsided.

Noah had to keep sending birds out to see if the land had dried up. When he was satisfied that the flood had passed, he opened the ark and disembarked on the twenty-seventh day of the second month, twelve months and ten days after he boarded (Noah was 601).

The first thing he did was to build an altar so he could sacrifice one pair each of the clean animals and birds. God was so pleased with Noah that He made a promise to "never again curse the ground on account of man...I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done."

In addition to the promise, God gave Moses and his family some new commandments:

"Whoever sheds man's blood,
By man his blood shall be shed,
For in the image of God
He made man.
As for you, be fruitful and multiply;
Populate the earth abundantly and multiply in it."
Genesis 9:6-7 
(NASB)


God had made a promise, and formed a new covenant with Noah, so He showed Noah a rainbow as a sign that He remembers His promises.

Peace Out Y'all

Up Next: The Morning After