We can drift in and out of periods of sadness; we can walk through seasons of anger; we can experience the pain of regret; but there is something unique about feeling forgotten. See, as bad as those other emotions and experiences might be, you can still feel validated as a person inside of them. But to feel forgotten?

Genesis 8:1 contains only three words, but they are three words that should bring us great encouragement:

God remembered Noah.

Let’s not miss what has happened up to this point. God had found Noah to be righteous in the midst of a generation of wickedness. So wicked, in fact, that God decided to judge the earth through a cataclysmic flood. Noah and his family, however, would be saved through the building of a great ark.

So Noah took God at His word and went to work. He built and shaped and fashioned and after the ark was completed, God told Noah to get on board because in seven days the rain would start. Once again Noah obeyed. They boarded the vessel and there they stayed. For quite a while.

The Bible does not tell us exactly how long Noah and his family were on the ark. But it does get us close, so let’s do a little math here. Genesis 7:6 says that Noah was 600 years old when the floodwaters began. The flood waters receded enough for the ark to run aground on Mt. Ararat on the seventeenth day of the seventh month (Genesis 8:3-4), and the mountain tops became visible above the water on first day of the tenth month (Genesis 8:5). After that, Noah waited forty days and then began to send out birds to see if the earth could sustain life. That process took another three weeks (Genesis 8:7-12).

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