God Restores


Genesis 8:14-22
14In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth had dried out.
15Then God said to Noah,
16“Go out from the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your sons’ wives with you.
17Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh—birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth—that they may swarm on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.”
18So Noah went out, and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives with him.
19Every beast, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves on the earth, went out by families from the ark.
20Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar.
21And when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done.
22While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”

The devastation is finally over. The calm has come and the land has reappeared. Noah and his family are invited out of the ark to begin again. The animals are released to go out and do what animals do – reproduce. And God – He again chooses mercy. He promises that there will never be another global flood. Verse 21 is clear. That mercy is not an earned mercy on the part of man (in this case Noah.) God accepts the fact that the people He created are evil to the core. Despite that, He decides to withhold His wrath until the end.

Noah and his family are now responsible to start again. It is their job to repopulate the earth and to share the story of God’s greatness with their descendants. What we will find is that for the most part while the repopulating happens the sharing doesn’t. The fall back into depravity won’t take very long. God knows that this is what will happen, yet He makes the promise anyway. God’s mercy prevails.

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