COULD YOU BE AS CONSISTENT AS NOAH?

Today's promise: Obeying God brings great joy

Could you be as consistent as Noah?

So Noah did everything exactly as God had commanded him..

Genesis 6:22 NLT

A man of consistent obedience

Imagine someone who doesn't pay employees cheap wages even though he enjoys a fancy house and swanky cars. Someone who doesn't indulge in movies full of sultry sex scenes. If you know such a person, you may have found someone seeking consistent obedience to God and his Word.

Noah went against the grain of his generation. As Genesis 6:9 says, "Noah was a righteous man, the only blameless man on earth at the time. He consistently followed God's will and enjoyed a close relationship to him." He stood out from others of his time whose thoughts and actions were "consistently and totally evil." (Genesis 6:5)

Apparently folks had never seen rain fall out of the sky (Gen. 2:5), but Noah obeyed God's instructions: hammering, sawing, and building for 120 years (Gen. 6:3). Noah warned people of God's judgment (2 Pet. 2:5), but even if he had never said a word, his pounding hammer rang a warning of wrath to come. Later, the truth of those words echoed as the ark floated above a world of corpses.

After Noah's family of eight emerged into a washed-out world, he held a thanksgiving service. If God was pained by a world of ungrateful human beings (Gen. 6:6), he must have been consoled by a grateful Noah (Gen. 8:20).

Sadly, the father who was buoyed atop a world of water got drunk on land (Gen. 9:20-27). It only takes one indiscretion to mar a life of righteousness.

A bow with arrows was a principal weapon in ancient warfare. After the world was washed away in Noah's time, God set a (rain) bow in the sky to remind us that we would never again destroy the world by water. Our God is consistently faithful.

From Men of Integrity Devotional Bible with devotionals by the editors of Men of Integrity magazine (Christianity Today, Intl), Tyndale House Publishers (2002), p 13

Content is derived from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation and other publications of Tyndale Publishing House