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dark as pitch...

on sunday mornings, pop and mom watch jentezen franklin (among others) while they drink their coffee before getting ready for church (living word fellowship in green forest...stop by around 9:45 for breakfast before the service!). a couple weekends ago, i was over there when jentezen franklin was talking about noah and the ark:

"so make yourself an ark of cypress wood;
make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out.
this is how you are to build it:
the ark is to be 450 feet long,
75 feet wide,
and 45 feet high.
make a roof for it and finish the ark to within 18 inches of the top.
put a door in the side of the ark
and make lower, middle, and upper decks."

 it was father's day, and his message was about a father's responsibility to make sure his family is saved. definitely an important subject, and in all honesty one i should probably have been paying a little closer attention to...but instead i found my mind wandering.

has that ever happened to you? it has nothing to do with the preacher, but at times i find myself getting a totally different lesson out of what's being preached than what the preacher is trying to get across. i guess this was just one of those times.


i got hung up on one part of one verse: "coat it with pitch inside and out."


answers in genesis has this picture to show the size of the ark.


 their picture shows it as 550 feet instead of 450, but basically the ark would have been just over half the length of the titantic.


think about the sheer, intimidating size of that boat.
and now think about brushing thick, sticky, smelly pitch over every surface, inside and out.

jentezen franklin mentioned that covering the inside would have been the hard part. just think about trying to get the pitch into every single nook and cranny...in between every board...
 
i imagine that was some messy, nasty work.

what makes it even crazier is the fact that noah and his family really had no idea what was coming next. yeah, God had told them to build a boat because He was going to flood the whole earth, but come on...do you really think they even had an inkling of an idea of what that meant?

if i had been in their shoes (sandals?), i imagine i would have been overwhelmed by all the prep work God was having me do for some future i couldn't even picture.

to be honest, i find myself that way quite a bit now. there are times i feel like i'm moving around in the bowels of the boat, slopping pitch all over the place, doing the prep work for a future i have a really hard time picturing.

ever feel that way?

Comments

  1. I do...
    Pitch, mess, and what does that "rain" thing mean?
    But I am patient. As well as Noah I have to and will endure the pitch in faith my family and I will be completely-absolutely-surely safe in that unknown future.
    So, I let pitch be
    Thank you Mandy.

    ReplyDelete

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~Mandy

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