Noah and the Ark

Though he had already admonished (and then punished) Adam and Eve and their descendants for original sin, God continued to be displeased with His Creation. In the many centuries since Cain and his brother Seth had departed from their homeland in Eden and ventured out into the sprawling world before them, generations of people had lived and walked the earth by the time the events surrounding Noah and his ark, detailed in chapters 6-9 of Genesis, occurred. With this dramatic increase in Earth's human population, crime and violence inevitably increased as well, to the point where God, disgusted with His Creation, decided to end all life on Earth--all except for Noah and his family. Noah was an honest and moral man: He prayed to God regularly and always considered Him in his daily life. Therefore, while God was infuriated with His Creation as a whole, he nonetheless recognized goodness in Noah, and He decided to spare this man and his family from a horrible fate that He would soon unleash upon the rest of the world's inhabitants. His plan determined, God appeared before Noah and informed him of the coming purge. God also instructed Noah to build a gigantic ark (made from gopher wood) to protect himself and his family from the flood and to fill the ark with two of every animal on Earth--one male and one female--so that Noah could eventually repopulate the earth with the life it had once contained after the flood was over. God allowed Noah one week to build the ark and gather his family and Earth's tremendous variety of living organisms, and after one week had passed, God "opened the clouds of heaven," thereby releasing deluge upon the earth that raged for forty days and forty nights. In the ensuing monsoon, all life on Earth was completely obliterated, except for Noah and his party aboard the ark. Once the storm ceased and the clouds of heaven again closed, Noah cautiously peeked out of a window he had built into the ark to assess the flood's damage. He observed that water covered the surface and that his ark was resting on top of a mountain peak. Over the following months, Noah sent out a pigeon to determine if the "waters were abated from off the face of the ground" and whether it was safe to depart the sanctuary of the ark. Initially, the pigeon did not bring Noah anything that indicated Earth's surface had dried, but finally, the pigeon returned with an olive tree leaf, and after Noah had sent it out again, it did not return at all. Thus, Noah, his wife, his sons--Shem, Ham, and Japheth--and his sons' wives departed from the ark to set forth in repopulating the earth once more. Guilty for eradicating all life on Earth and realizing that His Creation is not perfect (Mankind is inherently evil from birth), God vowed to never again release destruction upon the earth. This is God's covenant with Noah, with all humanity.

I have often pondered how this world might end, as there are so many possibilities as to how it could potentially be destroyed. A meteor, for instance, could randomly collide with Earth, destroying everything with its immediate area on the surface and spreading a cloud of debris across the globe that would eventually kill off most of the remaining life forms on Earth, a fate which most ancient historians agree resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs. This catastrophe, however, would not completely destroy all life on Earth, unless an asteroid, or other large cosmic entity, were to collide with Earth. If global warming is indeed an issues, the Earth's polar ice caps  could potentially melt, covering Earth's surface in water and thereby drowning any land-based creatures, as in the story of Noah's Ark. Whatever the case, the possibilities surrounding Earth's fate in the near future will continue to remain a mystery, but I think we can all agree that the Sun, currently about 4.6 billion years old, is roughly halfway through its life. Once the Sun has exhausted all of its supply of hydrogen, which it uses to fuse into helium and therefore supply its constant high-energy output, it will begin to fuse helium together. As a result, the Sun will expand, engulfing
the earth in an enormous ball of fire. Ultimately, the Sun will also exhaust its supply of helium, at which point it will shrink into a Red Dwarf. Accordingly, Earth's temperature will lower, in a sense "freezing" the planet over. It is safe to conclude, then, that the earth will end in both fire and ice. On a happier note, all of this is not expected to occur until another 5.6 billion years. Try living that long!

Oh, and I am deeply fascinated by wolves. They are beautiful, yet misunderstood, creatures with complex social rituals that continue to perplex modern wold enthusiasts.