God Shut Noah In Before the Waters Found the Door
Noah cut every board of the ark and pitched every seam. The one join that had to hold for a year was closed by a hand he could not reach.
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The rain was already finding the seams when Noah stood in the doorway of the ark with his hand on the frame.
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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. 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. That was the whole of it. He had cut every board of the thing and smeared every seam with pitch inside and out, and 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. He had not been given a latch.
A Coat Made for a Body
What he was standing inside was a body.
A man comes wrapped, all the way round, in one hard dense covering that runs over every part of him without a gap. Nothing was left uncased. It is a coat, and it was put on him so that cold could not get at him and heat could not get at him and whatever was outside would stay outside. Strip that covering off a man and he does not last a night.
The ark had the same design at a larger size. Timber for the skin, pitch for the sealing of it, one door, and past that door a year of weather that would kill anything it touched. 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 and one seam giving way at any point would have finished all of them.
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.
God had not sealed a box. He had sealed a household. Noah fed and watered and shovelled and slept in pieces, and in all that time the one thing he never did was test the door with his shoulder to see whether it would give. He knew it would not. He knew who had shut it.
Then the water went down, and the hull scraped a mountain and stopped, and 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, and a vine asks for patience rather than for good ground, and Noah had learned patience the hard way.
The vine took. 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).
Read the first half of that slowly, because it is precise. He drank of the wine. Not the wine. A portion of it. There is a kind of man who does not leave the room while any liquid remains in front of him, who finishes what is there because it is there, and everyone has seen him. That is not the sentence. This one took what a meal requires and stopped, the way a sober man takes bread.
There are two ways to be called drunken and only one of them is a charge. The first is sottishness, the misuse of the thing, and it belongs to men who have already gone wrong in other rooms of their lives. The second is simply the use of wine, which belongs to the wise, who drink and are said to have drunk and are not thereby accused of anything. Noah is drunken in the second way. He used the wine. That is all the word is carrying here.
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 set it down.
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