Mother"s Helper / Daddy"s Helper
NOAH
Boys and girls, are you ready for another Bible story told to you just like the Bible tells it? I hope so, because we have a good one for you. I want to tell you the story of Noah and the ark.
A long, long time ago when people had been living on the earth several hundred years, they became very wicked – very, very bad people. They were so bad they thought only evil thoughts continually. God did not like that. He decided to destroy them by causing a flood to cover the earth.
One man and his family pleased God. His name was Noah. Noah had three sons. God planned to save Noah and his wife, his sons and their wives, by having Noah build a very big ark, a big boat. The ark was to be longer than a football field. It was to be very wide and three stories high. God said it would have one door and one window.
God told Noah to build the ark out of gopher wood. We do not know about gopher wood. We don’t know for sure whether we still have gopher wood on earth. We do know this was the only kind of wood God authorized, and Noah, being a good man, built the ark out of the wood that God commanded.
After the ark was built, Noah gathered seven pairs of all the clean animals, birds, and things that crawl, into the ark. He also gathered a pair of all unclean animals into the ark. God told him to bring more of the clean than of the unclean animals. After all the animals were in the ark, Noah and his family went in, and God shut the door.
Then, do you know what happened? God opened the windows of heaven. It rained for forty days and nights. There has never been another such rain. God also broke up the fountains of the deep. That means the seas, rivers and lakes overflowed their banks. Water was coming from below and above. Everything was covered with water and all the bad people died in the flood.
Noah sent a dove out to see if the water had gone down, but the dove found no dry land, so she returned to the ark. After seven days Noah sent the dove out again. This time when the dove returned she had an olive leaf in her mouth. Noah knew that the waters were receding from the earth. He waited another seven days and sent the dove out again. This time the dove did not return.
After one year and ten days, God told Noah and his family to leave the ark. The first thing Noah did was build an altar and worship God. Noah was that kind of man. He did what God told him to do, in the way God told him to do it. Noah believed in God and worshipped Him.
Then God made a rainbow and placed it in the sky. It reminds us, and Him, that He would never again destroy the earth with a flood. Isn’t that wonderful? God is good to us. He gives us so many things to make life pleasant and happy.
Remember this about Noah. “Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did he.” Noah did what God told him to do, like God told him to do it. When you and I do the same, God will bless us.
Drawing to Color
Questions
1. What kind of thoughts were the people in Noah’s time thinking?
2. What was the name of the man in our story today?
3. What did God tell him to build?
4. What is an ark?
5. What kind of wood was used?
6. How many days did it rain?
7. What happened to all the mean people?
8. When Noah came out of the ark what did he do first?
9. Of what does the rainbow remind us?
10. How did Noah do things that God commanded?
