Back in 1995, about the time we met, my friend Calvin Miller published a children’s book called: When Aardvark Parked on the Ark. We used to read it to our kids. If I can find it this weekend, I will read it to my grandkids. Just between us: if you had to choose the animals to go on the ark, wouldn’t you be tempted to leave some of them behind? Which ones? Some animals were clean and others were unclean. Still, God told Noah to bring them all on the boat, to repopulate the earth after the flood. To this day, we have aardvarks, anteaters, and armadillos, just among the “a’s.” Can I hear an amen? Alleluia!
Our God not only cares about the animals he created, but also about the people. Noah took his wife, his three sons with their wives and closed the door. Why did they get to go? They were deemed righteous or tsedekh in Hebrew. The word means straight. My friend Wesley Shotwell used to say, “God can hit a straight lick with a crooked stick.” But he prefers that we be right. As the story unfolds, we discover that Noah and his family were not perfect. But in that generation, Noah set himself apart by walking faithfully with God, as his great grandfather Enoch had.
A story is told from the old west about two cattle rustling, crooked, drunken cowboy brothers. When one died in a gunfight, the other asked the local preacher to give his brother a good sending off. “I want you to say that he was a good man.” The preacher balked, but the brother promised to recompense the preacher if he fulfilled his wishes. In the sermon, the pastor said, “We all know this man had no morals. He was a cattle thief. This man robbed others, drank heavily, and lived an immoral life. But compared to his brother here, he was a good man.”
Noah busted the grading curve in his generation. As morality declines in our culture, Christians may be tempted to compromise on God’s standard of holiness, by saying, well this person is not as bad as that one, so they must be O.K. Let’s not devalue the currency of holiness. I know we don’t want to be seen as “holier than thou,” but we do want to be holy, don’t we? What do we know of holiness? In every generation, God looks for someone or hopefully, many who will walk with him. Later, in scripture we learn, “The eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him” (2 Corinthians 16:9). When the Lord surveys the earth, I pray that he sees us, fully committed to him, and strengthens us to fulfill his purpose. We trust that he sees us through the cleansing blood of Jesus as pure and blameless in his sight. “God made him who knew no sin to become sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21).
