Daily Devotions
Gopher Wood
Title: Gopher Wood
Reading for January 2: Genesis 5-8
Make yourself an ark of gopher wood.
Genesis 6:14
At the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky there is a new exhibit displaying a to scale replica of Noah's ark. Based on the dimensions from Genesis, the ark is 510 feet long, 85 feet wide, and 51 feet high. It has three decks and contains over 120,000 square feet of space! It's gigantic!
One question I've always had in my mind when reading about the ark is how much wood Noah would need for a vessel this large. The replica in Kentucky required 3.3 million board feet of timber. Imagine cutting down that many trees! It would have taken many years just to acquire all of the lumber for this massive project!
Now add to this the fact that Noah couldn't just cut down any kind of trees. It had to be gopher trees. (And we have no clue what gopher trees were.) Were gopher trees abundant? I hope so. But even if gopher trees were abundant, eventually they would become more difficult to find. How easy would it have been easy to compromise and use another kind of wood from trees more available to him?
This is how faith acts and responds to commands from God. Faith obeys. Faith does exactly what God says to do. It obeys even when it is not easy or convenient.
Father, give us a faith like Noah's that we might do exactly what you have told us to do, no matter how difficult or costly our obedience might be.
