Noah's Ark

One day as God was thinking about the people on earth His heart became very sad. He could see that all the people had become very bad, so bad that they stopped thinking of anything good. God was so sad and hurt that he wanted to get rid of every person and all the creatures that He had made. He wanted all the evil to stop.

The thing about God is that He gets very angry at our sin and all the bad stuff in the world but we also know that God is love. God IS love, so that means that He can be disappointed when we do bad things but He still loves us, and that's why He remembered Noah. Noah was the only one that was righteous (which means that he did things right). He was a good guy and he walked with God. So God said to Noah, "I am going to put an end to all the people because the earth is full of fighting because of them. I am going to destroy them and the earth."

God then gave Noah instructions on how to make the boat. He told him what kind of wood and how big to make it. He also told him to put a door in the side of the ark and to make it with three floors. The ark was humongous! We'll get to that more later in the story. The Bible says that next God told Noah that He would make a covenant with him. A covenant is an agreement with a promise. He would save Noah, his wife, and his three sons and their wives. They would be safe in the ark because God was going to flood the whole earth and everything else would die. I'm missing one other BIG thing that's going in the ark with Noah and his family... and that is... The animals! Two of all living creatures male and female (or the boy and girl of each). Plus two of every kind of bird and every creature that moves along the ground.

Then food for each of them for as long as they were on the boat. Yikes! That's a lot of animals and a lot of food. I think it would've been a very full, noisy, stinky place to be, but they would all be safe. It's hard to describe how big the ark actually was but if you think of some of the biggest animals you know (elephant, moose, buffalo, giraffe, rhino, gorilla) and make sure you have 2 of each of those plus all the other little animals that couldn't be stepped on...they needed a lot of room! Some people think it took over 100 years to build the ark and the Bible says that Noah was 600 years old when the flood waters came.

Then Noah warn every people but Everyone did't listen and some people teased Noah When the ark was done God gave Noah 7 days warning before the

flood to get all the animals and food on board, and told him that He would send rain for 40 days and 40 nights.

When everyone was in the ark God shut the door. Then the rain started. The Bible makes it sound like the rain came from the clouds and that there was also water coming up from the ground. So everything probably was covered pretty quickly. The floods kept coming for 40 whole days!

The ark floated on the water and all the high mountains were completely covered with water. Every living thing died on the earth that wasn't in the ark. So the rain came for 40 days and nights but when it stopped

Noah and the animals couldn't just leave the ark. There was too much water and no land for them to walk on, everything was covered. The waters flooded the earth for one hundred and fifty days, which is about five months. God remembered Noah and all that was in the ark

so he sent a wind to help dry the earth. Finally in the seventh month after the floods had stopped the ark rested on the top of a mountain. A little while after that (40 days) Noah opened a window he had made for the ark and probably let in some fresh air! Ha! Even more importantly he let a raven out. So the rain came for 40 days and nights but when it stopped

It would fly back and forth to the ark until the water had dried. Then he sent out a dove but the dove couldn't find any place to go. He waiting a week and then sent the dove out again.

This time the dove came back with an olive leaf which meant the waters had gone down. He waited one more week and let the dove out again and this time it didn't return.