There are two types of shadows; one casts darkness and the other casts the brightness of revelation. Noah’s ark, in Genesis 6:14, is a shadow of the second kind, for it casts the bright revelation of God’s Salvation, Jesus Christ.
To the non-revelatory, Noah’s ark is just about a boat, and in Genesis 6 and 7 there is the neat little story of this boat and it’s maker, Noah. It would sound like grand fiction, except for the fact that Jesus believed it to have been real history. And of course, there is the constantly disputed geological record all around us, on casual display for all to see. The facts remain constant, while the interpretations vary according to worldviews.
Noah’s ark was a “shadow” of a later reality. The boat itself, was a hiding place from worldwide judgment, built by direct revelation from God which was given to the only receptive human of his day. We have the bare bones of the construction story, but it is revealed that Noah built the boat in the midst of at least probable verbal persecution from everyone else in his society.
Until Noah’s ark was built, it had apparently never really rained, for there was no need of it in the pre-diluvian world. There’s some amount of conjecture in this statement, but today it rains, and we live after the collapse of the atmospheric protective water canopy that enclosed the earth before the Flood. So it’s likely it didn’t rain then like it does now, if at all.
Following his long construction project, possibly lasting one hundred years, Noah was told to get inside the ark. By this time, the ark was stuffed with all the pairs of animals God chose to preserve. They came to the ark; Noah didn’t trap them; he didn’t have time to do so – they came by God’s choice and by God’s command. (It would seem obvious that God loves animals, and has only entrusted them to us).
In Genesis 7:15 and 16, we read how the animals that entered the ark, indeed, all the occupants of the ark, were male and female (not male with male or female with female). Aren’t we fortunate Noah took aboard his wife, instead of a male significant other? God’s rules; not mine.
It is significant that Noah finished the construction in time to benefit from it. God made sure it would happen that way, for He had already promised His salvation to Noah and his family. It is also significant that Noah didn’t close the door to the ark – God did, indeed, the beginning of God’s judgment was not the rain, but the sealing of those inside the ark safely away from those outside of it. And with God closing the door, Noah couldn’t take credit for the salvation that followed.
The entire story of Noah and his ark is a technicolor preview of the true Ark of God – Jesus Christ. Those who have been chosen for the Ark of God today will undergo various forms of persecution from those who have rejected God’s Ark. And only when God judges that the Ark is full will He, and He alone, close the door. Then judgment will rain on the earth, and it won’t be a forty day drizzle, but like the first judgment, it will be cataclysmic and worldwide. To those outside, it will be unavoidable and decisive.
Jesus Christ is the Ark. He Himself is the true Ark foreshadowed in Noah’s boat. Like Noah’s ark, Jesus is the only way to Salvation. There are no other ways; God has seen to that. This is a divine parallel to our statement, “His Way or the highway”.
And while Jesus is now equally available to all, like Noah’s day, not all will get in. Many, maybe most, will be derisive until God closes the door – then for them, the party will be over.
For those inside the Ark, the party will have just begun.
John
