PEOPLE ARE ARKS
One of the more confusing Bible stories appears in Genesis 2:19-20 where we see Adam giving names to all living creatures. It is impossible to make any spiritual sense of these scriptures unless we first recognize that in the Bible a person’s name indicates his/her character (i.e. the condition of the heart). So, when interpreting these two verses, we must be careful that we do not think in terms of animal or bird or bug names which have no spiritual value. Rather, we must be careful to think in terms of character and heart condition.

God has two ways of categorizing hearts. Are they clean and pure, or are they evil and impure? So when the Bible talks about clean and unclean things, it is talking about hearts, not animals or birds or bugs.

The story of Noah and the ark continues the clean/unclean theme that is repeated throughout the Bible. Noah is a picture of a New Covenant disciples with a clean, pure heart.

The story reports that Noah built an ark of wood. The wooden ark he built is a symbolic representation of the ark of the covenant which is also a clean, pure heart. When we remember that wood symbolizes people, we see that Noah purposed to build a clean, pure heart by humbling himself and going through the death and resurrection process that leads to being born again.

This all means that Noah was a righteous man living among and preaching to his unrighteous, religious neighbors. That means that Noah was a messiah whom God chose and sent to save people from the flood of religion.

With respect to people as beasts, we find in the story of Noah and the ark that God told Noah to differentiate between clean and unclean beasts (i.e. animals), birds and creeping things. When we look at this story as a parable for our own lives, we learn that we, like Noah, are challenged to differentiate between clean and unclean people (i.e. beasts, birds, creeping things). And when we think in terms of false and true prophets, this story should inspire us to be very discerning about listening to true prophets and not listening to false prophets. We should choose, therefore, to listen to True Prophets and do not listen to False Prophets. True Prophets are associated with New Covenant faith and False Prophets are associated with Old/First Covenant religion.

This is the same choice that Adam and Eve had: Do they eat (i.e. listen) to trees of life? Or, do they eat (i.e. listen) to trees of knowledge of good and evil? These are life and death choices that depend on how we interpret the Bible.

The story of Noah and the ark only makes spiritual sense when we symbolically interpret the ark as the place where the New Covenant is established. If we symbolically think of ourselves as wood, the story tells us that we spend a lifetime (i.e. 100 years) building ourselves as a residence for God’s presence which is represented as his laws written on our hearts.  This symbolism is greatly expanded when we consider that the ark of the covenant is constructed of wood overlaid with gold, and that the tabernacle was also made of wood overlaid with gold, with gold symbolically representing God’s glory which is his character (i.e. name) written on the hearts of people.

Adopting this expanded view of wood and gold, we see that Noah’s ark, the ark of the covenant and the temple all symbolically represent New Covenant disciples. New Covenant disciples are like Noah’s ark in the sense that they are true prophets who speak the truth that people need to hear if they are to be delivered from the flood of judgement (i.e. religion). New Covenant disciples are like the ark of the covenant because the tablets of God’s laws are contained in the ark. And New Covenant disciples are a spiritual tabernacle not made with human hands in which God makes his home.