Ark(59)

Thunder crashed directly overhead, so loud and close my eardrums ached and my stomach tumbled inside me.

Again, and again, and again, lightning struck all around Noah, until the air around him was a blinding torus of purple-blue-white, pure fire, pure light. The thunder detonated, rattling my bones in my skin, booming and booming and booming.

I could just barely make out Noah’s form inside the blazing ring of light, his arms stretched high over his head. He was at peace, unafraid. The thunder boomed in a rhythm, crashed in a syntactic pattern and became a voice.

A Voice.

His Voice.

I huddled against the side of the ark, weeping in abject terror, as the lightning seared and the thunder cracked and the whole earth shook, as if straining at the seams.

I heard the voice of El speaking in the howl of the wind, in the sizzle of the lightning, in the crash of the thunder, and I knew His Voice . . . but His words were not meant for me.

I heard Him, but I could not understand.

I wept, and I wept, and I wept.

After a time without measure, the lightning ceased to strike and to spin, the thunder faded into distant rumbles, and the presence of El receded.

Noah strode aboard the ark, his staff in his hands. He paused at the top of the ramp, and he cast his eyes down to where I hid, huddled against the belly of the ark.

He saw me.

His flesh radiated, the glory of El Shaddai staining his skin luminescent.

He saw me, and I felt the sorrow in his gaze. His eyes swept across the land, from east to west, and I thought perhaps his gaze saw all the lands and all the peoples therein, all the lives in the cities, all the souls awaiting their deaths.

In that moment, Noah saw them all, and his sorrow was for them. His gaze swept across the earth and came to rest once more upon me.

Now his sorrow was for me.





14





The Windows Of Heaven





“. . . On that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.” Genesis 7:11 (NLT)





A single crack of thunder, so loud my ears rang and I was rendered deaf.

In the moment of that peal of thunder, the skies opened. Heaven was cracked open upon the command of Elohim, and the rains descended. Rain so thick I could not see my hand in front of my face. Rain so dense, so hard, so fierce that the sound of the waters pouring from heaven was a roar so great and so mighty my bones shook from the violence.

The shaking from within the earth intensified, the ground rattling audibly, and the rumbling changed and deepened, the shaking became violent, and then ceased. The rains roared unending, but the rumbling from below had been so ever present for so many days that its absence was a deafening silence.

The quiet did not last for long.

The sound I heard then defies human language. It sent the ark to swaying on its supports, and the sound knocked me to the ground. It was a wall of noise, so all consuming, deafening, violent, and vengeful that I was compelled to flatten myself to the ground before it. All the earth heard it, then.

The shaking, the trembling, the rattling in the earth was gone, and now I heard a new sound, a new roaring, as of a lion prowling the floor of heaven, a lion so great it could swallow the earth in one gulp.

I cowered on the ground, waters rising around me, swirling around my ankles, wetting my belly with icy cold. I crouched, waiting, watching.

In the distance, I saw a mountain peak split open like a pebble dashed against a boulder, and from within the crack spat a column of water, spurting into the sky hundreds of cubits above the top of the peak. My gaze swept east, and I saw the earth shake and watched the ground itself crack apart, and a spray of water gush into the air with a roaring hiss. To the west, in the plains south of Umma, I saw a hundred such fountains pouring skyward from cracks in the earth.

The waters rose around me, until I was forced to stand. It passed my knees, rushing and eddying and swirling, the currents violent, tugging at me. The floodwaters lapped at the ark, slapping against the side, and I heard the mighty vessel groan and creak. I put my hand against the pitch-sticky side and felt it swaying as the waters rose.

My death approached.

Yet . . .

I looked up and saw the opening of the ark’s great door, the ramp still lowered.

Lightning flashed, and the rains hammered down in a blinding deluge.

The floodwaters caught at my thighs, and I felt the final pangs of fear bite into me.

A new sound, then, yet another kind of rumbling, a bone-shaking roar, from the northeast, from the mountains thence. I peered through the gnashing, pelting, weltering wall of rain, and saw white. The ark shook, and the sky shook, and the ground shook, and I stared hard through the rain.

The whiteness was a wall of water. Rushing. Cascading. A flood, god-high—God-high. A flood that touched the sky itself, smashing against the hills and pouring over them, covering them.

I wept and saw my death approaching.

Of its own accord, the ramp ascended, pulled by no ropes, pushed by no hands, guided by no man. It rose, trembling, creaking, and dripping floodwater.

I was covered to my waist, now, shivering, weeping, crying out loud to the Lord of Heaven, to Elohim, but my cries of torment were lost in the roaring of the approaching flood.

At the last, as the waters bore me upward, as the wall seethed toward me, I knew my weakness, and I knew my sin.