Noah’s Hope Genesis 8:1-22

This Sunday we’ll consider the scene in which Noah releases a dove from the ark.  Noah displays his hope that God will fulfill His promise, preserve life, and renew the earth. 

Noah and his family had waited in the ark for nine months and fourteen days before the dove returned.  Through all their discomfort, a forward-looking faith in God’s promise brightened their hearts.  In like manner, hope enables us to persevere through trial; it turns complaint into glad submission.  Geehardus Vos writes, “The quiet, but none the less intense, energy of hoping appears most strikingly in this that it is equal to transforming the natural protest against pain and tribulation into that submission of patience which the word "hypomone" expresses.”[1]

Finally, when the dove returns with a ‘fleshly plucked olive leaf’ is the first sign of things to come. We share a similar hope in Christ’s second advent.  A minister long ago said, “Nothing but the blessed hope of Christ’s glorious appearing, and of our being partakers of the glory when He appears, can draw us away from and lift us upward from among the temptations, and cares, and enjoyments of the present scene.”[2]

[1] Vos, Pauline Eschatology, 30

[2] W. H. Hewitson (1812-1850), Select Letters and Remains (1853, ed. John Baillie)