The Door God Shut

Noah is the children's story with the animals two by two, and it is also the darkest chapter in Genesis, and both are true. Read it whole and you find a man who built a boat for a hundred years on dry ground because God told him rain was coming, a door that God Himself shut, a world that went about its business until the day the door closed, and a promise hung in the sky afterward. Jesus said the last days would look like Noah's. It is worth knowing what Noah's looked like.

What God saw

"And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart" (Genesis 6:5-6). Grieved Him at His heart. Ten chapters earlier He had looked at the same world and called it very good. Now it is "filled with violence" (6:11), and the God who made it is described the way you would describe a father whose children have become something he cannot recognise.

Then one sentence, and it is the hinge of the story: "But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD" (6:8). It is the first time the word grace appears in the Bible. Found it, not earned it; the next verse says he "walked with God," the same phrase used of Enoch, and walking with someone is not a wage. Peter calls him "a preacher of righteousness" (2 Peter 2:5), so he did not build in silence. He talked. Nobody listened.

A boat on dry ground

"Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch" (6:14). Four hundred and fifty feet long, seventy-five wide, forty-five high, on a plain, far from any water big enough to float it. Genesis says Noah was five hundred when his sons were born and six hundred when the flood came, and the plainest reading is that the building took most of that century. A hundred years of hammering, with the neighbours watching, and Peter says the whole time was God's patience: "the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing" (1 Peter 3:20). The ark was not only the rescue. The ark under construction, year after year, was the sermon, and the delay was mercy.

And the writer of Hebrews tells us what it was in Noah: "By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house" (Hebrews 11:7). Things not seen as yet. He had never seen a flood. Nobody had. He built for a hundred years on the strength of a word about something that had never happened, and "Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did he" (6:22). That is the whole of his character in one sentence, and the narrator says it twice.

The door

"And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation" (7:1). Come, not go. God is already inside. Seven days' warning, then the rain. The animals come, and Noah's family, eight people out of a world, and then the verse that should stop you: "and the LORD shut him in" (7:16).

Noah did not shut the door. He could not have; it was the size of a barn wall. God shut it, from outside, on the man He had called in, and once it was shut nothing Noah did or failed to do inside could open it. That is what being kept looks like from inside the ark: you did not close the door and you cannot open it, and the storm is God's business. It is also what it looked like from outside, and that is the part Jesus wanted people to hear: "For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be" (Matthew 24:38-39). Nothing unusual. Weddings. Dinner. A hundred years of a man building a boat and preaching, and then one ordinary morning the door was shut. They knew not.

Augustine is writing about the spear in Christ's side, and the water and blood that came out of it. A door in the side, through which the saved go in. He had been reading Genesis 6 for a long time.

Remembered

Forty days of rain, a hundred and fifty of water, and "Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark" (7:23). Then two words that are the turn of every rescue in Scripture: "And God remembered Noah" (8:1). Not that He had forgotten. In the Bible, when God remembers, He acts; it is the word used when He remembers Rachel, and Hannah, and His covenant in Egypt. The wind passes, the waters go down, the ark grounds on Ararat. Noah opens the window and sends the raven, then the dove, and the dove comes back with nothing, and a week later "the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off" (8:11). One leaf. After a year in the dark with the animals, one green leaf in a bird's mouth, and a man knew the world was still there.

The first thing he does on dry land is build an altar. "And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth" (8:21). Read that reason carefully. It is the same reason given for the flood in 6:5, the evil imagination of the heart, and now it is the reason for mercy. Nothing about man has changed. The flood did not fix the heart. God simply resolves, on the smell of a sacrifice, to bear with it. And He hangs the sign where everyone can see it: "I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth" (9:13). A bow, the weapon, hung up with the string toward the earth and the arrow pointing at heaven. Whatever else the rainbow means, the man who first saw it had just watched the world drown, and he was being told it would not happen again.

And then, because the Bible does not clean up its heroes, the man who walked with God plants a vineyard, drinks, and is found naked and drunk in his tent by his sons (9:20-21). The heart was not fixed. God had said so.

Where this lands

Peter, writing to Christians, reaches for this story when he wants to explain baptism, and he says something odd: eight souls "were saved by water" (1 Peter 3:20). By the water, not from it. The same flood that drowned the world carried the ark. The judgment and the rescue were one event, and which one it was depended entirely on whether you were inside the door God shut. "The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us" (3:21). Justin Martyr, sixty years after the apostles, drew the picture in one line: Noah is "a figure of Christ, who has regenerated us by water, and faith, and wood."

Water, faith, and wood. A man who built for a hundred years on a word about a thing not yet seen; a door in the side that God shut; a world that ate and drank and knew not; one leaf, one altar, one bow in the cloud; and a heart that the flood did not change and God resolved to bear with anyway. Jesus said the end would look like this. Not the violence only, but the ordinariness, and the door, and the One inside it saying come. Peter says there is still an ark, and it is Him, and the wood it is made of was cut on a hill outside Jerusalem. The water is coming either way. The question the story asks is only which side of the door you are on when He shuts it, and the answer, for now, is still: come thou, and all thy house.

Related: Baptism, The Security of Salvation, The End Times, and The Spirits in Prison. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of God are marked in gold, the words of Christ in purple.