“To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams”. The lord values obedience even above sacrifice. Saul was not really repentant when Samuel pointed out his failings. Compare that to David’s contrition when Nathan confronted him about killing Bathsheba’s husband. Saul lost the kingdom, but David kept it.
Let us establish some groundwork for our later exposition about Noah’s ark:
1. Elisha sent a messenger to say to him, “Go, wash yourself seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh will be restored and you will be cleansed.” Naaman obeyed, did as instructed and came away healed.
2. For this is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ‘The jar of flour will not be used up and the jug of oil will not run dry until the day the LORD sends rain on the land.’” The widow and her son were provided for from a single jar of oil that supernaturally never ran dry, because she obeyed the prophet Elijah.
3. God commanded (the Israelites) concerning Jericho: “… You shall march around the city, all you men of war; you shall go all around the city once. …”
4. To put the next quote about Jericho into context, according to the Bible, “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.”
5. Then in the book of the sons of the prophets, it is written: “I Ariel, one of the sons of the prophets. I stood with my brethren just behind the ark. And the spirit of the Lord was upon me, and my eyes were opened. And behold on the seventh day, at the end of the seventh sojourn round the city, at the last shout, I saw a man in appearance as one of the sons of God, who he stood in height about half as tall as the wall. He set his shoulder to the wall, and he pushed, and the walls tumbled down. And the men of war went before us into the city of Jericho, and we plundered it just as the Lord our God hath commanded us to do.”***
Having established legal precedence on two fronts i.e., there are myriad types of miracles including miracles of unlimited output, and miracles unbounded by space, let us take a brief trip into the future before revisiting the matter of the ark for a few additional events that also fall into similar categories of miracles as the previously mentioned ones:
6. “Go,” he told him, “wash in the Pool of Siloam. So the man went and washed, and came home seeing. (The man that was born blind obeyed Jesus and received his sight).
7. “But so that we may not cause offense, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.” Peter obeyed and paid the taxes with coin from a random (fish) catch.
8. Jesus feeds the five thousand: “… Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people. They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. The number of those who ate was about five thousand men, besides women and children.
Now, to the matter of the ark, just as that jug of oil was almost empty but then never ran dry till the famine ended, so also the food Noah put on the ark would never have been enough on its own, but still it never ran out until the rains stopped and the ark struck dry ground. Obedience was key, the human effort was secondary. God is able to create unlimited abundance from our little effort if we are obedient.
In fact, as we have demonstrated in setting the stage for this discuss about the ark, the Christian God has a track record of taking puny human effort and elevating it supernaturally to achieve His goals so that there can be no doubt about the results. So asking Noah to build an ark that was approximately 1.52 million cubic feet, was the obedience part. Filling the ark with animals and food enough for the duration the ark was sealed up and floating on water was God’s doing – Noah just had to obey and build the ark. So therefore we may conclude that in terms of capacity, the ark was infinite – it could have accommodated all the animals and people in the world at that time if God had deemed it necessary to save all of them. Thus the ark’s true capacity was infinite.
In addition, consider that For mount Sinai (traditionally “Jebel Musa” in the Sinai peninsula in Egypt) at about 2,391 meters above sea level, and one of the highest points in the region – to be under water, less than 1% of the earth surface would be left above water (including places such as Mount Everest whose height is 8,849m). And since we don’t know how high the water rose, we can safely say indeed all the earth was covered with water as stated in the Bible.
So in conclusion: to the astute judges, my learned fellow debaters, and our discerning public audience, I hope with these few points of mine, I have been able to convince you (and not confuse you) that we may easily set aside the argument about the physical size of the ark being a limitation to its ability to contain pairs of all the animals in the known world at that time – after all it was the infinite (capacity) ark, and God works in mysterious ways.
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NOTES:
***Bible references:
1 Samuel 15:22
2 kings 5:10
John 9:7
1 Kings 17:14
Matthew 17:24-27
Matthew 14:13-21
Joshua 6:2-17
Gen 6:4
Joshua 5:13-6:27
***PS: There’s nothing like the “book of the sons of the prophets”. This comes under creative liberties. I made up the book along with the quoted text by “Ariel”. Why? Because I wanted to include the Nephilim in the write up. Consider that if the giants were the result of (fallen) angels breeding with human women, angels in their true form must be really huge beings – and they likely take on human appearance and size so as not to frighten the humans who behold them.
December 22, 2025 4:34AM (Dallas, TX)