Relax. Everything's going to be awesome.

Genesis 6:14-16 ¹⁴ So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. ¹⁵ This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high. ¹⁶ Make a roof for it, leaving below the roof an opening one cubit high all around. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks.

This one should be short. If you look at those measurements you have a pretty good shape for a coffin.

It used to be very difficult for me to understand why people said the bible was a unified whole. It certainly didn’t seem that way to me. Sure there were some ways in which it made sense. The old testament was the history of Israel which led directly into Jesus and the movement he started, but that didn’t make the message unified. It just made it a history.

Then, through listening to a ton of sermons on my I-pod (if you ever want to listen to some excellent sermons or if you aren’t sure who is worth listening to I can make some recommendations.) I began to see what brought the entire thing together and in all honesty it should have been obvious.

It’s Jesus (just like Jesus is always the answer in Sunday school… or so I’m told). The entire bible is about Jesus. Every single story in the old testament points to him and everything in the New Testament is either about telling His story, explaining what he did, or both.

Take the (definitely not a children’s story) example of Noah’s Ark. God sees how horrible humanity is (not was. Is.) and decides to wipe them off the face of the Earth. But he decides to save Noah. Why? It doesn’t say. You might point out that just a little while earlier it mentions that Noah was righteous and blameless before God. That is not the reason God did it.

Taking the message of the bible as a whole, no man is righteous without God’s direct intervention and help. So Noah’s righteousness was not from himself but from God. So that wasn’t the reason God saved Noah. So why did God choose Noah?

I don’t know. That’s the honest truth. I do not know.

What I do know is that God would be perfectly justified in wiping humanity off the face of the Earth. We are awful. I am awful. But God is merciful. He chooses to love us in spite of our faults and in spite of the fact that it will cost him the only thing it is possible to cost an Omnipotent being.

So how does God choose to save Noah? He puts Noah in a coffin while the world drowns and through his mercy allows Noah to live. This is pointing to the future, when we will have to accept the death of Christ in our place so that we can be saved while everyone outside of His sacrifice takes the full and just weight of the sin they’ve committed. Those are our only two options. Free grace or the wages of sin. Thank God that he is willing to extend His Grace to anyone who would accept it.