Richard Gasser – Noah – circa January 2003

I was thinking of ordinary days. We read of some of those in the scriptures. I was thinking about Noah and the Ark and I thought of the ordinary days in his life. It was keeping faithful in the ordinary days that mattered; the ark was really a by-product of his faithfulness. He had been keeping true and faithful in his daily life, those ordinary days. There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary in his daily life, and maybe he was giving attention to the right things growing in his life. He found favour in the eyes of God, and you think of our lives, and maybe we can hope to get eighty years or maybe a hundred. I was thinking even at the time when I offered to go into this work, I thought  it seems like a long life ahead, and time really does go fast, but when we look ahead, it seems to be such a long way. The Lord just gives us health and strength for today, just an ordinary day, just putting Him first. Noah lived faithfully for 500 years, and he may have thought, “Well, what is the use,” and he could have slackened off. Noah maybe had no indication just how much the world was displeasing God; he had no other example to look to. It does help us when we have good examples to follow, just having an example. As humans, we tend to follow – like sheep. They look for a leader, someone to follow. Noah didn’t have any good examples for him to follow; his grandfather and father were dead, and of those who would have been closest in age to him, he had no one to be an example to him. They were just ordinary days to him and yet he was faithful.
And then, when he was 600 years old, the flood came. A hundred years that he spent building the Ark, he had to get up in the morning, he had things to take care of his garden, whatever he had to do to make a living, and then he had to go to work on the ark – maybe some of his family helping him. It was quite an undertaking. Everyone else around him were going on normally; marrying and giving in marriage. Somebody said that today God’s people have more than one full-time job. They have to go out to work to make ends meet, but then they have a full-time job to serve God and to please Him.
The work that he was doing on the Ark was something that he couldn’t hide from the world.  We are working on this plan of salvation that God has revealed to us, and we cannot hide it from the world. We do not need to try to show it to the world, but if we are just doing what God asks us, the world will see; it is too big to hide.
In Noah’s life, there were a lot of ordinary days. Maybe it got a little harder and harder as the time went on. Every day it was a little further that he had to go to find that gopher wood; maybe it didn’t get any easier, but a little harder. Some neighbours said about some of our friends who were farmers in Canada, “They farm like they are going to live forever, but they live like they are going to die tomorrow.” They were getting things in the right priority, putting their soul first; that was the most important thing, but they were not letting the other slack.
Maybe there were no big milestones in Noah’s life. That day when it was finished, God called him into the ark, and that was a very special day for him. He made each day count in doing what the Lord had asked him to do.