Welcome to week 2 of the Family Summer Bible Challenge. Thanks for joining us, again or for the first time!

Week 2: Noah and the Ark

Read: Genesis 6:12 – 9:17 (This is a very long one! If you want to read a shorter passage, I recommend chapter 7 which focuses on the flood itself, however this leaves out the reason for the flood and God’s promise after the flood)

Apply:

Discuss why God sent the flood (because of the evil and wickedness of people) and why He saved Noah and his family (because He was righteous). This is a great opportunity to also talk about what God did later in history to save all mankind from our sins by offering His son Jesus to pay the penalty in our place.

Talk about God’s promise in sending the rainbow. Emphasize that God always keeps His promises!

Make it Stick:

A Trip to the Zoo: Take an outing to the zoo (or a petting zoo, farm, even a pet store if a zoo trip isn’t feasible). Talk about all the kinds of animals that Noah brought on the ark and try to imagine what it might have been like! What else would he have needed to bring to take care of them?

How Big Was the Ark: So often we see picture books and kids toys about the ark that the picture we have in our minds, especially for little ones, is of a small cartoon-ish boat with a giraffe sticking it’s neck out the window. But the ark was actually about 510 ft long!

Share the following comparisons to help put this size into perspective, then see if you can make comparisons of your own. Find something familiar to your kids (like your car) and do some math to figure out how many of them you could line up to equal the Ark.

• It would take almost one and a half football fields to equal the Ark’s length
• Three NASA space shuttles laying nose to tail could fit on the Ark’s deck
• To float the Ark in an Olympic size swimming pool (good for the upcoming Olympics this year!), you’d need to line up three of those large pools in a row

The size comparisons were taken from Putting the Ark Into Perspective, by Answers in Genesis. You may also want to check out a cool diagram on Thinking Outside the Box (also by Answers in Genesis) which shows the Ark next to some famous ships like the Titanic.

If you have access to a wide open space (sports fields at a school work well for this) and some measuring tape, you can take this a step further and measure out the actual length of the ark with your kids. I did this once as a kid and it was really amazing to see!

Pray: Thank God that He always keeps His promises!