By Bill King
It took us all day and part of another one to get there. We left Opelika early last Tuesday morning and headed north. We drove up through Georgia, Tennessee, and almost through Kentucky. So, imagine driving across the beautiful hillside of Northern Kentucky when all of a sudden, a gigantic boat comes into view. There’s no ocean in Kentucky. There’s not even one of the Great Lakes there. But there was a boat of biblical proportions sitting right in front of us. I’m not talking about some little fishing boat. I’m talking about a massive boat that is 510 feet long, 86 feet wide, and 94 feet high. That’s more than one-and-one-half times the length of a football field!
That’s about the equivalent of a five-story-high building. That’s a monster of a boat, but it’s not even floating in water. It is sitting on dry ground. Who would build such a ship on dry ground? Noah did. He built a boat like the one we saw, and it wasn’t sitting in water either, at least not when he built it.
Now that I think about what I just said, Noah didn’t actually build a boat like the one we saw. They built a boat like Noah’s. It’s actually not a real boat, but a life-size replica of Noah’s Ark. It’s at a theme park of sorts called The Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky. It is a different kind of theme part. There are no roller coasters or log shoots, but there is a carousel and a zip line. The zipline, however, is not the line to get into the buffet there at lunchtime. There is live music. There are no live animals inside the Ark, but there are replicas of them and recorded animal sounds. There is a petting zoo on the grounds with some modern-day animals. There are life-size models of Noah and his family inside the Ark. Noah’s model even moves and speaks to you.
I’ve often wondered what it must have looked like inside Noah’s Ark. Now I have a better idea. Imagine being cooped up inside a ship with all kinds of live animals. One might need a lot of air freshener, especially since they couldn’t let down the windows in the rain! Fortunately, there was more than one deck.
In the movie “Jaws,” when Chief Brody saw the shark for the first time, he said, “I think we’re gonna need a bigger boat.” When God told Noah to build an ark, He even gave him the dimensions he should use so the boat would be exactly the right size. Noah then built the biggest boat anyone at that time had ever seen. Some say it is still the largest wooden-frame boat ever built. Noah followed God’s instructions exactly as given. Once the boat was completed, Noah loaded his family and the animals of his world, two-by-two, onto the ship. God closed the door, and a week later it began to rain, and it did so for 40 days and nights. Everything on dry land that had breath died. Only the living beings inside the Ark were saved from the flood.
The Ark was built by amateurs, but it floated and brought its passengers to safety. Ironically, the “Unsinkable” Titanic was built by professional shipbuilders, but it sank. The Ark was large enough to save Noah and his family, plus two of every living animal, bird, and creature in their world. Man’s ways don’t always work, but God always provides a way of salvation for those willing to follow.
