The Dove Returns: Genesis 8:1-19

But God remembered Noah.

Three words that changed everything. God remembered. Not that he had forgotten—the Eternal One does not suffer amnesia—but that he turned his attention toward deliverance. The time of judgment was ending. The time of restoration had begun.

God sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded. Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky.

The wounds in the earth sealed. The windows above shut. The water that had come from above and below began to drain, to evaporate, to find its proper place again.

The water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down, and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.

The ark grounded. After months of floating, of rolling with swells, of helpless drifting—solid ground beneath the keel. The mountains of Ararat, somewhere in what is now eastern Turkey, became the landing zone for a new creation.

The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible.

Land appearing. Like day three of creation, dry ground emerging from the waters. The passengers inside the ark could not see it—but the world was being born again.

After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark and sent out a raven. It kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth.

The raven circled. Found nothing. Returned. Circled again. The carrion bird could survive on floating debris, but it found no resting place.

Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark.

The dove was gentler, needier. It could not land on corpses like the raven. It came home.

He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf!

An olive leaf. Green. Fresh. Alive.

The first sign that life had survived outside the ark. Trees were growing. Vegetation had returned. The world was waking up.

Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth.

Hope in a leaf. Promise in a bird's beak. The flood was ending.

He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.

The dove had found home elsewhere. The world was ready.

Then God said to Noah, "Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives."

Come out. After more than a year sealed in a floating box, the door opened. Eight people stepped onto a mountain, blinking in sunlight, breathing air that smelled of mud and new growth.

"Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it."

The animals streamed out. Pairs becoming populations. The restart of everything.

Noah came out, together with his sons and his wife and his sons' wives. All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds—everything that moves on land—came out of the ark, one kind after another.

The old world was buried under layers of mud. The new world waited to be filled.

Creation had begun again.