Find Hope After Disaster
- 24 hours ago
- 19 min read
Genesis 8:6-14 NIV
[6] After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark [7] and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. [8] Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. [9] But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. [10] He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. [11] When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. [12] He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him. [13] By the first day of the first month of Noah’s six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. [14] By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry.
(Read the full passage at: https://bible.com/bible/111/gen.8.6-14.NIV)
Have you ever had the experience of being caught up in a situation that is completely out of control, and you have no reason to believe that things will change, but you have to hope that they will or you will go crazy?
I got the idea for this series last year. It was a very rough year in our family, particularly for my wife. In the same year, and within a matter of just a few months, her father fell sick and passed away, her brother had a heart attack and she had a health scare. Life for us felt like a roller coaster that was only headed downwards. Humanly-speaking, we had no right to hope about anything. We had no control over any of it.
But by the grace of God we came through it.
I realised then that many people would be going through similar situations.
I have an idea of how it feels.
I grew up in a relatively poor family and in a bad neighbourhood. Looking out of a window and hoping and praying things would change was kind-of our thing – except when one of the local thugs was ‘kind’ enough to smash that window with a brick.
There are so many situations – illness, bereavement, work and job issues, problematic issues with relatives (to name just a few) that we wish would end or just go away, or even just leave us for a few moments to give us a break, but just don’t.
If that’s where you are right now, then this series is for you.
And I want to start it in a strange place.
Now, we have been on some long sea voyages. It’s quite something when you stare through a window or from an upper deck and all you see is water. It makes you realise how vast the world is and how small you are in comparison.
But in Noah’s case, I think it would have felt a lot different – and not just because he had a bit of a zoo thing going on below deck, while we had a bunch of restaurants, a theatre and a bunch of cruise performers.
We always knew our journey would one day come to an end. It’s what we had paid for.
Noah, however, would have woken up every day to see nothing but the sea for many miles around. He would have wondered if he would ever see land again, if his situation would ever change.
He was searching for a sign of hope, and for many days, he had none.
Does that sound at all familiar?
Now, I am not going to get into the whys and wherefores of the Great Flood or the ark or any of that discussion. I’m aware that archaeological exploration has been going on in and around Mount Ararat in Turkey for many years and that results at the moment have been intriguing. But that is not the purpose of this study.
Instead, I want us to concentrate on the picture of the old man on the deck of a wooden boat, staring out into featureless, flooded horizon for three hundred and thirty days – almost a full year – after the rain had stopped before it was safe to leave the ark. Because when we are stuck in a hard place like the ark was on the top of Mount Ararat, with nowhere to go and nothing we can do about it, that is precisely how we feel.
I want to look at three very simple aspects of how Noah approached this situation, following the calamitous flood with its catastrophic loss of life, to understand how we can approach these difficult situations.
Firstly, we see that Noah Believed.
Noah Believed
Hebrews 11:7 NIV
[7] By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family. By his faith he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness that is in keeping with faith.
(Read the full passage at: https://bible.com/bible/111/heb.11.7.NIV)
My boss loves superhero movies. He is obsessed with them. His office is a veritable man-cave of figurines and toys and DVDs. His collection is so vast and valuable that his home insurance policy is many times what ours is.
Noah is a hero. A hero without a cape. An unassuming hero. He is a hero simply because he believed.
While the rest of his peers were behaving disgracefully and sinning flagrantly, this is what was said of Noah:
Genesis 6:8-9 NIV
[8] But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. [9] This is the account of Noah and his family. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God.
(Read the full passage at: https://bible.com/bible/111/gen.6.8-9.NIV)
Now was saved in the ark because he and his family believed God against the at least indifference of everyone else around him, perhaps also the evidence that God had permitted the world to go ahead with its moral and spiritual decline, and also the aberrance of his calling – who else at the time was building a huge ark to preserve animals from a disaster plainly no-one else believed was coming?
He is, without doubt, a remarkable man.
What makes things more interesting is that his great-grandfather was Enoch, who was known for his close walk with God (Genesis 5:24), and his grandfather was Methuselah. Methuselah was the longest living human being on earth. His name means ‘his death will send’. It’s believed that the flood took place the very year this man died.
So judgement was predicted and it was Noah’s active faith in God that saved him
But then we go back to our picture. Noah was standing at the window of the ark, staring out into the watery expanse, marooned on top of a mountain, with nowhere he could go and nothing he could do.
What put him into that position? Well, absolutely, it was his faith.
What would get him out of that situation?
Also his faith.
Noah believed God would save him. And He would.
Just not yet.
Apart from the fact that he believed, we also see that Noah Persevered.
Noah Persevered
Genesis 8:6-12 NIV
[6] After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark [7] and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. [8] Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. [9] But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. [10] He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. [11] When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. [12] He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.
(Read the full passage at: https://bible.com/bible/111/gen.8.6-12.NIV)
Have you ever had your patience tried to almost breaking point by a trial?
I don’t mean those long queues at airports or government offices. I mean a situation where you are actually genuinely suffering and you need to get out of the situation, but cannot.
Noah was right there. Imagine: the punishment had stopped. The rain had gone. But it wasn’t safe yet to emerge from the ark. The world was still flooded. The waters needed to recede.
Yet Noah waited forty days (five weeks and five days) before even checking how far they had gone down.
That is extraordinary.
Then come his three tests.
First, a raven. Ravens are scavengers. They feed off the carcasses of the dead. Judging by the sheer volume of dead bodies left behind by the flood, the raven would have had no need to return. The whole world would have been it’s all-you-can-eat buffet.
It didn’t return.
That would have been a sign that the waters had receded enough for the raven to feed.
Then Noah sent out the dove. Doves are much more picky than ravens. They are not scavengers and will not rest on filthy surfaces. It returned with an olive branch, but could not nest.
The dove with an olive branch in its mouth has long been recognised as a symbol of peace. However, peace with whom?
In the Bible, it is a symbol of peace with God and coming respite from suffering and pain.
This is only possible through Jesus Christ:
Romans 5:1-2 NIV
[1] Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, [2] through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God.
(Read the full passage at: https://bible.com/bible/111/rom.5.1-2.NIV)
Colossians 1:19-20 NIV
[19] For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, [20] and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
(Read the full passage at: https://bible.com/bible/111/col.1.19-20.NIV)
Then Noah sent out the dove a third time. It didn’t return because it found somewhere to nest. Noah then knew that the world was habitable once more.
Apart from his knowledge of behavioural ornithology, the most important aspect of this is that Noah persisted. He kept trying. If one thing didn’t work so well, he tried another. He did not give up.
And why didn’t he give up, even if his situation was completely out of control?
Because he believed in God.
Look what Jesus said in the Gospels:
Luke 18:1-8 NIV
[1] Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. [2] He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. [3] And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’ [4] “For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, [5] yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’ ” [6] And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. [7] And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? [8] I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”
(Read the full passage at: https://bible.com/bible/111/luk.18.1-8.NIV)
Matthew 7:7-11 NIV
[7] “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. [8] For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. [9] “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? [10] Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? [11] If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!
(Read the full passage at: https://bible.com/bible/111/mat.7.7-11.NIV)
When our situation seems impossible and we can’t see a way out, we must keep going to that window and we must keep looking for hope on that horizon.
Because God one day will come to our aid.
After seeing how he believed God and persisted, we also see that Noah Received.
Noah Received
Genesis 8:1, 15-22 NIV
[1] But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded.
[15] Then God said to Noah, [16] “Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives. [17] Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it.” [18] So Noah came out, together with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives. [19] All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds—everything that moves on land—came out of the ark, one kind after another. [20] Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. [21] The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done. [22] “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”
(Read the full passage at: https://bible.com/bible/111/gen.8.1-22.NIV)
Genesis 9:8-17 NIV
[8] Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: [9] “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you [10] and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. [11] I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.” [12] And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: [13] I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. [14] Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, [15] I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. [16] Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.” [17] So God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.”
(Read the full passage at: https://bible.com/bible/111/gen.9.8-17.NIV)
Often the hardest places in life to wait are the places designed for it:
Waiting rooms.
I have waited in many different types: benefit offices, hospital waiting rooms, immigration offices, doctor’s surgeries, even an undertaker’s office. The worst part of it all is not always the event for which you are waiting – although these can be pretty terrible. But the worst part for me is always the anticipation: the way your mind plays tricks on you and starts to imagine fatalistic scenarios that never play out.
This mental gymnastics, for which the psychological term is catastrophisation, nearly always makes things way worse than they really are and destroys the confidence and assuredness we need to endure. It takes a lot of mental strength and discipline to push these needlessly negative thoughts from our mind and focus on the facts or the things that we know.
As former US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld one said in a news briefing about the justification (or lack thereof) for the second Iraq war:
‘There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.’
In other words, it’s the things we don’t know we don’t know that always trip us up.
Noah was in this position. He was stuck in a difficult place. He had no idea when his situation would change. There was not one thing he could do about it.
But God could. And God did. God not only ended the flood, but allowed the earth to dry up to let Noah begin again.
Now, we might have a lot of questions about this. If God was the God who was strong enough to flood the earth, could He not also be the God who could miraculously dry it?
Why did He leave natural processes to reverse this disaster?
God has His purposes. We should not ever presume to understand them (Isaiah 55:8-9).
What we do know is that Noah was in this situation for a very long length of time. And then he wasn’t.
However, I want you to notice something very important about this event – something many people choose to miss. After he and his family left the ark, it wasn’t over for Noah. Imagine the kind of world he inherited. Imagine the mess. Imagine how long it would have taken to sort it out.
God had a great plan for them.
That plan had two elements: requirements and relationships.
First, the requirements:
Genesis 9:1 NIV
[1] Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth.
(Read the full passage at: https://bible.com/bible/111/gen.9.1.NIV)
Noah’s family was told to repopulate the earth.
Now, there are some who believe this is God’s command for the now, today, so they purposefully set out to have as many children as possible. The largest family I ever met had fifteen children. They were a Hungarian family. I did find it kind of humorous that their surname was Kiss...
However, it should be clear as day that this command was given at a specific time for a specific purpose. This is not a heavy burden placed on those who were barren or in those who do not have the means to support an excessively large family. These were straightened times. There was a need to rebuild what sin had destroyed. That’s why God gave this command.
Then we see a relationship: a relationship with the natural world. While God had given the animals to Noah so he could protect them from God’s wrath, the animals would now have a different relationship with Noah and his family so that Noah and his family would be protected from them and could manage then effectively (Genesis 9:2).
Then we see another command:
Genesis 9:4-6 NIV
[4] “But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it. [5] And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each human being, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being. [6] “Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind.
(Read the full passage at: https://bible.com/bible/111/gen.9.4-6.NIV)
Don’t eat blood. Don’t spill human blood.
Look what God had told Cain after he had murdered his brother Abel:
Genesis 4:10-11 NIV
[10] The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. [11] Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.
(Read the full passage at: https://bible.com/bible/111/gen.4.10-11.NIV)
Here God places a barrier in front of Noah to prevent that happening again by commanding Noah and his family to not kill.
And, again, we see a relationship:
Genesis 9:8-11 NIV
[8] Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: [9] “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you [10] and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. [11] I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
(Read the full passage at: https://bible.com/bible/111/gen.9.8-11.NIV)
God’s covenant was that He would not destroy the earth again by flood.
There is often a belief that when everything we long for and hope for comes true, then we will really be free. And we will be. We will lose the oppressive weight of our bad situation.
But we may well gain another weight: the weight of responsibility and relationship.
Let me give you an example: on 9th November, 1989, I, as a Scottish boy, watched the news with my eyes gaped open in astonishment and tears welling up. I was watching the fall of the Berlin Wall: the separation between capitalist Western and communist Eastern Europe.
It was a day I will never forget. That sense of joy and achievement was something I will take with me to my grave. I, in my halting teenage ways, had prayed for it. And now it had happened.
What no-one fully realised was that this was not the end of the journey. Instead, it was just the start. It took decades to undo the damage communism had done to East Germany.
Tearing down the wall and reunifying the country was just the beginning. Uncompetitive factories needed vast investment or closure. Industries needed to be reformed. Local politics needed to be changed. Old ways needed to be challenged.
It took generations to reverse.
Emerging from disaster or catastrophe is a joyous moment. But it is just the beginning. We must be mindful of that. There is much to be done.
And what is it that will help us with it?
Our relationship with God. His laws and His love.
Our relationships with other people. Their help and support.
Not for nothing was this advice given to first century Jewish Christians:
Hebrews 10:23-25 NIV
[23] Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. [24] And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, [25] not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
(Read the full passage at: https://bible.com/bible/111/heb.10.23-25.NIV)
Noah received everything he sought. The flood was over. Hope had arisen like a celestial body on the horizon. It was time to start again.
But there was a long road ahead of them, as there always is when we are taken from disaster.
Those twin supports of relationship with God and people are there to strengthen us and keep us encouraged.
We must not neglect them. At all costs.
Conclusion
Genesis 8:15-17 NIV
[15] Then God said to Noah, [16] “Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives. [17] Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it.”
(Read the full passage at: https://bible.com/bible/111/gen.8.15-17.NIV)
There is one day I will never forget.
I was a student, still a teenager. We had lived since I was six months old in one of the worst neighbourhoods in Europe. We were constantly harassed there. Our door had been graffittied. Our windows smashed. Our car had been broken into on multiple occasions. We had been chased, had rocks thrown at us and verbally abused.
For seventeen years.
Finally, an attempted assault against my sister as she rode her bike to church became the last straw. The police didn’t turn up until nearly midnight. My dad was furious. He wrote a letter to the Chief Constable. The story goes that he had picked up his phone, called the head of social housing for our council and uttered three infamous words: ‘Get them out!’
After seventeen years of praying and pleading with the social housing authority, we were informed that there was another house for us, just two miles away. And so, in just a few days, we packed all our belongings into the back of a van and moved to our new house.
We arrived so late that there wasn’t enough time to assemble our beds. We slept on mattresses on the floor. The whole place needed redecorated. We could not afford decorators. And so, around school and university work, we pealed off years of wallpaper, scraped old paintwork, painted, wallpapered and cleaned. We assembled furniture, cleaned windows and basically made the place habitable step by step.
But the most important thing in all the chaos was this: we were living in a peaceful place.
Our lives had changed.
I know how easy it is to write a sermon based only on what we see in the Bible. Any halfway decent preacher or theologian can do that.
But I have lived it.
And so have my in-laws: through typhoons and earthquakes and flash floods.
When hard times come and we are facing disaster, it’s often impossibly hard to see through them to the other side.
But we must. Because if we don’t, what’s the point in even trying to make it through them at all?
The picture of Noah staring through the window of the ark waiting to see when the water would recede is a picture many of us can relate to – not because we too have managed to get a big boat full of animals stuck on the top of a Eurasian mountain peak, but because we too have found ourselves in difficult situations we are unable to change, waiting for a situation over which we have no control to change in our favour. These are very distressing times. That will never change.
But what can and does change is how we react to them.
Noah provided us with a masterclass in how to react. He didn’t freak out. He didn’t go crazy. He simply had faith in God and kept persisting until the water level fell. His calm, reasonable faith led to him receiving what God promised.
That is already a beautiful picture.
But what we have to remember is that he didn’t get everything handed to him on a plate.
The world did not revert to being a paradise. He and his family had a lot of work to do to set things right. They did that work depending on the Lord: on their relationship with Him and the people He had given them.
You might be facing seemingly insurmountable issues right now. I have no idea what they could be. They may be if your own making (if they are, I have no right to judge, and neither does anyone else), or they may have been inflicted on you.
Whatever the cause, Noah’s calmly reasoned faith is an example to us all.
One day all our troubles will be resolved and will be in Heaven with the Lord.
Until then, let’s trust and depend in the Lord, and strengthen our relationships with Him and each other.
Because they will give us the help and encouragement we need.
Prayer
Lord Jesus, thank You for Noah’s example. I realise there will always be times when my situation is beyond my control. Help me to trust in You and strengthen my relationships, as I know these will help me keep going until my situation changes. Amen.
Questions for Contemplation
What situation was Noah in to which we can often relate? How did he deal with it?
How did he get into it? Why is this important?
After Noah’s situation changed, was everything immediately okay? Why not? What can we learn from this?
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