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 theark 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.
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 the earth—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 human beings, even though[a] 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.”
My Thoughts:
How thrilled Noah and his family must have been after all that time in the ark when he was finally able to remove the covering and see the light of the sun and breathe fresh air. Even though it was nearly two more months before God told him to come out of the ark, those two months must have been far more comfortable.
Perhaps during those two months the bird on board all began to fly to and fro as the raven and dove had done. Perhaps the elephants lifted their trunks and trumpeted. Opening up that ark must have been a great occasion for joy.
And Noah knew well that God had saved him from a great disaster; so when God told him to come out of the ark, his first act was to build an altar to the Lord and sacrifice burnt offerings of the clean animals and birds. This showed his overwhelming gratitude and faith because, you will recall, there were only seven pairs of all the clean animals taken aboard the ark. Noah sacrificed some of these precious animals in faith.
And the Lord justified his faith. Because He then promised that even though “every inclination of the human heart is evil…” He would never again destroy all living creatures as he had done in the flood for as long as there is an earth.
Betty Killebrew
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