Global Scale Inventions: In The Footsteps Of Noah
Noah is one of my favourite bible characters, he is one of those characters that I feel are not well understood and the scale of what they did is lost on us. At a Christian gathering, I once asked people to make a list of 5 biblical characters that did extra- ordinary feats of might and nobody included Noah on their list.
The usual suspects: Moses, David, Paul, Elijah, Samson and the others were well represented on the list. They are the heroes of old that we all want to emulate and I admit of course that they are great characters for us to understudy and imitate as much as possible, yet I believe that Noah’s accomplishment is on a scale much higher than all these ones.
We do not usually think much of Noah because as far as we are concerned, Noah is this old man that built a big boat, stocked it with diverse kinds of animals and waited out a flood. We just usually go: “Noah? He built an ark. FULL STOP”
What is the big deal with building an ark? More importantly, how does this story highlight creativity and inventiveness? Permit me to discuss with you in some detail how the story of Noah illustrates just how we can be creative and inventive, just as God created us to be.
Noah is a biblical character I have spent a lot of time to understudy. Ever since the word of God came to me about becoming an inventor, I started to study the Holy Bible to better understand what it has to say about creativity, science, technology and invention. I like Noah’s story because it highlights creativity and invention at a global scale – the level I want us (you and I) to operate at. I want us to follow in Noah’s steps.
The story seems so simple and straightforward. In the Bible, God warns Noah, a righteous man, of an approaching flood. He instructs Noah to build the ark with his family and collect pairs of animals so they may survive the flood, which was meant to cleanse the Earth of all the workers of iniquity (and the giant Nephilites as well).
A flood was approaching and Noah was asked to build an Ark. This was an era wherein there was no rainfall, yet this weird old man had a premonition that it was going to rain and rain so bad that everybody and everything was going to drown. So, how exactly do you build a boat? Knowing that there is no room for failure. If the structural integrity of the system were to fail at any point in time, it could mean loss of lives.
How much of a challenge was it to build the ark?
Let us do some comparative analysis. If someone asked you to fry a couple of eggs, you probably would take on the challenge. Even if you have never fried an egg before, with a few phone calls to friends, you could learn all you needed to and then get the job done.
Let us say it was something more complicated like bake a cake and you have never baked a cake before, you might take longer to figure it out and then deliver the cake. You might not have any friend who has baked before, but you would certainly find thousands of experts happy to guide you through the whole bake-a-cake process.
Let us take this train of thought a little further. If someone asked you to bake a loaf of boybas bread for example. You would at first be puzzled as to the meaning of that, then you could later figure out that no such food currently exists. There are no boybas bread experts to consult, Google searches would turn up empty and you had to start from nothing.
You could excel at frying the egg, baking the cake because they have all been done before. They have readymade recipes for all kinds and manner of cakes. Perfected by hundreds of years of people practising it and improving it until it became so.
On the other hand, your quest to bake a loaf of boybas bread leads nowhere – it has never been done before, NOBODY knows how to bake a loaf of boybas bread. It is MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE.
If you are able to wrap your mind around the concepts I just shared, then you are now about to understand the magnitude of the challenge Noah faced.
When God asked Noah to build an ark, there was no rain and zero evidence that man was already a seafaring race. Which means there was no reference point, no manual, no library or knowledgebase for Noah to consult. Noah was building everything from scratch.
A flood was coming and he needed to build something that would float and survive the coming disaster. He wasn’t building the ark for a voyage or an expedition, he was simply building it to float and keep him and the elect alive to carry on the torch of the human race.
Noah had to learn how to unleash his creativity and inventiveness to build the ark even though he had no human expert guide or institutions to guide him.
Noah, the tenth generation from Adam was described as a righteous man. The only righteous man left on earth during his days. His great- grandfather, Enoch had vanished from the face of the earth already after prophesying that judgement was coming upon the earth, by some accounts his grandfather, the popular Methuselah has been determined to be alive during that period and likely died within two weeks to within a few months of the flooding.
Noah was an ordinary man like me and you but one day he must have received some impartation of faith. Nobody just does great things like that, something must have happened to him somewhere and somehow that made him ready for serious things. Noah was an ordinary man like you or me, then the word of God came unto him and that transformed him forever.
Noah was described as a preacher of righteousness during his days, even though he was ignored and sneered at. The world might not have accepted his message, but to his credit, he was able to lead his household in the way of the lord.
For the people of that era, it takes great faith to be able to believe the world would be destroyed by water when there had never even been any form of rainfall up till that point.
We have established some background for our study of Noah, and now we can get into the depth of our discussion.
Noah’s Ark was a legit technological breakthrough for his era. The idea, blueprinting and the execution was completely flawless. The stakes were high and failure was never an option, yet somehow, this man managed to pull it off!
There is always a debate of how much technology was available to Noah during his times to build such a gigantic project, the answers are not fully known. However, we do know that men were already working with brass and iron, and making instruments of music and work already. As for duration of the project, it is unknown, but most scholars agree that it took Noah and his family a very long time to complete the project.
In modern times, men have gone on to replicate Noah’s ark in its exact form, including the devout Christian businessman Johan Huibers who invested over USD$5 Million in to the project. It took him four (4) years and it was completed in 2012. The ark works exactly as described in the Holy Bible.
In 2016, Ark Encounter, a theme park featuring an ark built to the same biblical scale, opened in Kentucky, U.S.A., but unlike Huibers’ boat, this one was not built to float – it’s a building. This “Kentucky” ark was rumoured to cost over three times the budget of Huibers’ boat to build. When we talk about men of wealth in the scriptures, we seldom consider Noah to be one of them. However, if the Ark project is costing millions of US dollars to build, that is a big deal.
Noah’s ark as explained in the scriptures is exact enough for men to build it out today. Which reveals something deeper about the whole project – Noah was scientific in his operations.
Science simply means “an exacting knowledge”. Exact, measured and can be consistently repeated. Noah had to completely discover the science and then completely develop the technology needed to get the job done.
Science is the bedrock of invention and technology. You cannot invent technology beyond the scope of your science. The reason we are yet to see some wild inventions like global instant-transportation or direct mind control of devices is because the science we need to do such “impossible acts” are yet to be discovered.
The things we have today, like global instant- communication, used to be impossible until men of science developed the science needed to make it possible. The kind of inventions I wish for you to develop are the kinds that men currently accept to be impossible. To make it possible, we must develop fresh science.
So, to make your mark as someone that is solving problems on a global scale, you will have to either find new applications for existing science or you would have to develop new science. Either ways, you cannot escape knowledge and science.
If you have ever gotten an idea for an invention and you were clueless as to where to start from, please understand that it is because you were lacking in the necessary pre-requisite knowledge (and the needed science).
Noah needed to figure out a lot of things! It is not as simple and straight forward as most people seem to think it is. Just because God is backing you up does not mean you can just build a boat and dump in some animals and food and expect everything to be in order.
A man like Noah must be really meticulous and pay attention to detail. Noah was a Scientist, Inventor, Engineer, Zoologist, Biologist, Geologist, Mathematician and Physicist rolled into one.
Noah needed to figure out the science of water. What was the nature of water? What made objects float on water? Using the insights he got, he could then start building out the technological marvel of his time – the Ark.
How did Noah know which animals he could keep together and the ones he should separate? What about waste management and other utilities that would be needed? My point is that Noah was not just some old, weird carpenter building a boat. The kind of logistical challenges such a gigantic project would pose is enough to make a feeble minded man snap and go crazy.
Most importantly, he did not just worship God and pray for things to get done like most Christians seem content to do nowadays. His mind was so powerful that God could use him to build the ark. He was not only a man of God, he was also a man of knowledge and science.
I know, from time immemorial, we have been taught that Noah built the ark by faith and he did, but just like Apostle Peter admonished us in his writings, to Noah’s faith, he added virtue, knowledge – loads and loads of knowledge. That was how Noah was actually able to convert spiritual capacity into physical reality.
If we follow the footsteps of Noah and use as a guide to better understand how ordinary, everyday people like you and I can tap into the creative power of God and build technological marvels here on earth, we will discover a couple of concepts.
Noah was a righteous man who enjoyed fellowshipping with the spirit of God. It was in the place of fellowship that he was able to discover the plans of God and understand what exactly he needed to do.
There is a place of spiritual accuracy in the story also. Noah was a very meticulous man, he was very detailed, and he did not just perceive that he needed to build a large boat, he knew the exact dimensions of what it needed to be. This is not a small feat! Thousands of years later, using the same dimensions recorded in the scriptures, the exact Noah’s ark has been replicated over and over again.
I do not think God is interested primarily in people who just discover. God wants us to apply the insights he gives us. Noah understood this and so, he acted upon the insights he had and built out the ark.
The number of years he spent gathering the resources he needed and building out the project does not negate the miraculous nature of what he was building. We have been fed the impression that miracles happen overnight, all you need is a touch and all the problems will fade away. That is not always true.
I argue that Christians used to be industrious, inventive and excellent. Then “miracles” happened and folks abused the word of Faith. The excesses of prosperity messages and sin conscious messages seem to have rendered the church-force null and void.
Noah’s ark is a miracle and the first major human invention recorded in the Holy Bible. A true testimony to what can happen when a man allows his mind to be influenced completely by the spirit of God. This also shows us a sample of what we can also do if we follow in his footsteps.
We can conceive and build out inventions that can solve global problems for mankind in our own days. A greater than Noah is here.