The Talking Sky

THE SKY SPEAKS

© Jeannie St. John Taylor

“The heavens tell of the glory of God.

The skies display his marvelous craftsmanship.

Day after day they continue to speak;

Night after night they make him known.

There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.

Their message has gone out to all the earth,

And their words to all the world.”

Psalm 119: 1-4

            For thousands of years mankind has lifted eyes to the heavens knowing the sky would BE. 

Never changing.

A constant. 

            Constantly changing. 

For thousands of years never once exactly the same.  Not for five minutes.  Not for five seconds.  The sky moves continuously as it fulfills its purpose:

DECLARING GOD’S GLORY.

The sky whispers God’s quiet beauty as

the rising sun paints white puffs with pinks and lavender

azure melts into the deep blue of a cloudless summer sky

filmy orange stripes stretch across the horizon at sunset 

the cobalt night sky twinkles with specks of light.

The sky sighs God’s presence in the warm breeze that swirls around us, embracing, caressing faces.

The wild sky calls out the wonder of a wild God.

It roars God’s power in the storm that pulsates brilliant orange and yellow, then darkens. It lifts birds and drives them backwards. Jagged fire shoots east to west. Thunder shouts.  Clouds swirl and collide then descend as tornadoes, snatching up houses and massive oaks. 

After the storm, the sky murmurs God’s love, arching His rainbow-promise of protection through lingering droplets.

The sky’s beauty beckons us, stirring a longing in our hearts—we long to merge with God’s glory.  We ascend in metal shells.  The sky encloses us, shaking tons of steel traveling through clouds as easily as it flutters an aspen leaf. We scale the tallest peaks to touch the sky.  Its heights freeze us.  Thin oxygen sucks the breath from our lungs.

No one can survive the naked embrace of God’s sky.

Yet it reaches down to touch us and utter comfort.

It settles to the earth as fog, obliterating massive mountains.  It blankets cities with white, halting human activity. It grants permission for the sun’s warmth to pass through and coax food from frozen ground. It releases water that paints flowers with brilliant color and rushes over waterfalls.

The sky ceaselessly speaks God’s glory.

It will never pause until the day it trumpets the glory of Christ’s return,

then melts with fervent heat.

How big was Noah's ark?

The unit of measure in the Bible was the cubit. We know that a cubit is the distance from a man's elbow to his fingertips. If men in those times were the size of humans today, the cubit would have been about 18 inches. But since we don't know of the size of people in ancient times we can't know the cubit's precise length. (It's possible people were bigger than today since they lived closer to the perfect humans God created in the Garden of Eden.)

If we employ the eighteen inch cubit, the ark was 

• 450 feet long (approximately one and one half football fields in length), 
• 75 feet broad, and 
• 45 feet high (approximately the height of a five story building)
• According to the Ryrie Study Bible, the ark's carrying capacity equaled that of 522 standard railroad stock cars. Only 188 cars would be required to hold 45,000 sheep-sized animals, leaving three trains of 104 cars each for food. Today it is estimated that there are 17,600 species of animals, making 45,000 a likely approximation of the number Noah might have taken into the ark. (I read other estimates of the number of animals on the ark that was much higher. I used the lowest number of animals for the book to make the story easier for readers to comprehend.)