Noah ultimately was Thankful for God’s provision as the end result of being faithful. At the end of the day, we have been talking about how important it is to remain faithful to God despite the fact that the world may not understand or maybe very countercultural. We have to remain faithful even though it may seem that Evil is more profitable in the short-term.

I think that sometimes we forget this final step in the process. We might be living in an evil times, and we might even stand strong to resist the temptation towards evil. At the end of the day though, we need to remember that thankfulness and gratefulness have to be in our hearts. Look at what happened when Noah left the ark.

“Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it” (Genesis 8:20, NIV).

We need to have the same attitude of being thankful when we have come through such evil times and difficult trials. After all, it would be much easier to just throw up our hands and say that everything was for nothing. I find it is much easier to be ungrateful than it is to be grateful. Even though Noah had been providentially saved, I have a feeling he probably could have found plenty of things to be upset about after spending all that time in the boat. He could have been bitter about why God did what He did.

However, at the end of the day he made the choice to be thankful. This reflects back on the proper view of who God is and what God does. We can be bitter about having to live in such horrible times. Noah easily could have rejected God for having him live in such a time that he had to witness so much evil before his ultimate deliverance. He could have been upset about having to deal with the inconvenience of ridicule. He could have been upset about presumably having to put his entire life on hold in order to build a giant boat.

Nevertheless, at the end of the day, he remained thankful. He continued to follow God (albeit imperfectly as we will soon find out), but we find him listed later in Hebrews in what has been called the Hall of Fame of faith.

I don’t know that the days we live in are as bad as the days of Noah. They are pretty bad, and there’s plenty of evil to go around, but I really don’t know how I could ever compare which days are more evil. The point that we need to remember is that living in an evil time does not give us the excuse to be evil, we need to remain faithful and we need to be thankful at the end of the day. If we do these three things, I think that will help us stay on the right track which is of course God’s path for us.