God Shut Noah In Before the Waters Found the Door

The rain was already finding the seams when Noah stood in the doorway of the ark with his hand on the frame.

Click for full size

Then the door moved without him. It came across under a pressure that was not rope or peg or anybody's shoulder. The last strip of gray daylight narrowed and went out, and the Lord shut him in (Genesis 7:16).

Shut From the Outside

He stood in the new dark with his palm still raised where the opening had been. Behind him an animal shifted its weight, and a chain rang once against wood. His wife laid a hand flat on his back, and nobody spoke.

Outside, the waters found the hull and ran the length of it and found no way past the door. The seal was not his, and that was the whole of it. He had cut every board of the thing and smeared every seam with pitch inside and out, but the one join that had to hold for a year was made by a hand he could not reach. He would not be opening it again, because he had not been given a latch.

A Coat Put On a Household

He pressed his palm to the timber, thick enough that it ran over every part of the vessel without a gap, the way a man's own skin runs over him so that cold cannot get in and heat cannot get in and whatever is outside stays outside. Strip that covering off a man and he does not last a night. Strip a seam off this hull, and the year would finish all of them.

So the door had to be closed carefully, and it had to be closed by something stronger than a carpenter, because the whole vessel was going to be thrown about for twelve months. One join giving way at any point would have drowned the household in the dark.

God had not sealed a box. He had sealed a family inside a coat of wood and pitch. Noah felt the size of it with his hand and did not test the door with his shoulder. He knew it would not give. He knew who had shut it.

Twelve Months of Being Thrown

The pitching started within days and never fully stopped. Water came up the sides in slabs and fell back. The hull groaned in its joints at night, and every groan ran through the boards and into the bones of the people lying against them.

Noah fed and watered and shoveled and slept in pieces. In all that time the one thing he never did was lean his weight on the door to see whether it would open. If it opened, the water would come in. If it stayed shut, they would live until a word came, so he waited for the word.

Then the water went down. The hull scraped a mountain and stopped. Eventually a word came and the door opened, and the household walked out onto a world with nothing on it.

The First Vineyard

He became a man of the soil and planted a vineyard (Genesis 9:20). It was the reasonable thing to plant. Grapes want a hillside, and there was nothing but hillside left. A vine asks for patience rather than for good ground, and Noah had learned patience the hard way, because a year behind a door you cannot open will teach a man to wait.

The vine took and the fruit came. He crushed it and let it work, and in time there was wine in the house of a man who had spent a year drinking rain caught off a roof.

He Drank of the Wine

He drank of the wine and was drunken, and he lay uncovered inside his tent (Genesis 9:21).

He drank of the wine, not the wine but a portion of it. He took what a meal requires and stopped, the way a sober man takes bread and does not finish the store. There is a kind of man who will not leave the room while any liquid remains in front of him, but Noah was not that man, and he set the cup down.

The man who had ridden out a whole year behind a door he could not open sat in his own tent on dry ground with a cup he could set down whenever he wanted, and he set it down. The latch had been God's, but the cup was his. He used it and stopped, because he could.