When it feels like God has gone quiet, has He forgotten you?

We came into Genesis 8 with the flood behind us. The water had done its work — the earth was wiped clean — and Noah was still inside the ark, floating, with everything he had ever known underwater.

Then comes one of the quietest, heaviest lines in all of Scripture: “But God remembered Noah.” Not because God had forgotten him — God does not forget — but because this is the moment He begins to act. A wind blows over the earth, and the waters start to go down.

Here is what we had to sit with, though: how long it took. Around day 190, the ark comes to rest. By day 314, Noah sends out a raven, then a dove, and the dove comes back with nothing. Seven more days, and it brings an olive leaf. Seven more, and it does not come back at all.

And it is not until day 370 — about a full year — that God finally speaks and tells Noah to come out. A whole year of waiting, and most of it in silence. So we stopped and read what God’s people have always said about waiting — Psalm 27, Isaiah 40, Lamentations 3: wait for the Lord, be strong, His mercies are new every morning. Waiting on God is not the same thing as God being gone.

When Noah finally steps onto dry ground, the first thing he does is build an altar and worship. He gives God the animals he would need, as an offering, and Scripture calls it a pleasing aroma. God answers with a promise: seedtime and harvest will never cease.

That is the shape of the whole gospel. The flood ends with a sacrifice and a promise that life will go on. The gospel ends with a sacrifice too — Christ gave Himself up for us as a fragrant offering — and a promise that sin and death will not have the last word. God’s promises never end. Christ is our ark. And we can wait on Him, faithfully, even in the quiet.

So here is the one to carry home: when God feels silent, is He really absent — or is He already at work on the dry ground you cannot see yet?

Photos by Daniel Ríos, Susana Bartolome, and S. Glisch on Unsplash.