Genesis 08

Updated
2001-05-26; 14:31:54utc

Throughout the ages the ark has been a symbol of salvation. It was the vessel God used to carry His chosen creatures through death. It may not be a perfect picture of the work of Jesus Christ, but it is a picture that is clear enough. As Noah and his family were saved in the ark, and brought back through death to life, so we are saved in Jesus Christ. He is our ark of salvation.

In Ephesians we read that God has blessed, and chosen us in Jesus Christ "before the creation of the world." Paul writes: "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight."[ 1 ]If we interpret this to mean that God chose us individually to be blessed and saved, ages before we were born, we get entangled in all the snares of the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination. But if we take the phrase "in Christ" to mean that God chose Christ, and that everyone who is in Christ shares in this choice, we have a reality of which the ark is a picture.

God chose the ark as the vessel or means by which men might be saved. The fact that Noah built the ark in plain view and that he preached righteousness to the people who saw him build it, implies that others could have been saved also. The fact that, evidently, nobody went into the ark besides Noah's immediate family does not preclude the salvation of others. If others were not saved, it was because they did not want to be. In the same way people are lost without Christ.

Jesus says so much in John's Gospel: "All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. For my Father's will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day."[ 2 ]

According to ch. 6:18 the entering into the ark was part of a covenant, or a promise God made to Noah. It reads: "But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark; you and your sons and your wife and your sons' wives with you." Noah needed this kind of assurance, because the outward circumstances gave no stimulus for hope. All Noah could see was destruction and death. Without God's promise there would have been no basis for faith.

The boarding of the ark took seven days. It was like the boarding of a modern airplane. The bigger the plane the earlier the boarding starts. The ark was a gigantic vessel. The number of passengers must have run into the thousands. Then there were the provisions to be loaded, and probably there were operational exercises until things settled into a daily routine. To take seven days for boarding and rehearsals seems no unnecessary precaution. The preparation and departure was an organizational feat of no mean proportions.

It is amazing how detailed the account of this event is. The mention of seven days, and the age of Noah when it all happened, the way the animals arrived gives indication that the Holy Spirit showed Moses clearly what had taken place. If Moses used existing documents, it shows how minutely the accounts had been kept.

Some commentators see quite a contradiction between ch. 6:19 and ch. 7:2,3. In the former Noah is to bring the animals and in the latter the animals arrive by themselves, evidently, at God's bidding. Probably both things happened. Noah did not have to go and round up the animals. They came and he took them in.

I see more of a problem in the fact that in ch. 6:20 there is only question of "two of every kind of bird," whilst in ch. 7:3 there are to be seven pairs. Evidently the distinction between clean and unclean is to be inserted here. The Septuagint does add the word "clean" at this point. The Pulpit Commentary reminds us that the instructions in ch. 6 were given 120 years earlier. One week before the flood they are repeated in greater detail.

This is the first time in the Bible that the distinction is made between clean and unclean animals. Obviously the Mosaic law in Leviticus is no new revelation but the confirmation of an existing situation.[ 3 ]The distinction does not mean that God is not the Creator of all the animals. But some are destined for sacrifice and food and others are not. As in Leviticus, so here, we understand that the separation between animals expresses a distinction between humans; there are those who are clean before God, and those who are not. The effects of human sin are thus seen in the animal world.

One of the reasons for bringing in seven pairs of clean animals will have been that, after the flood, Noah and his family needed food. The post flood earth needed to be tilled and worked before Noah would be able to harvest. Even with seven pair of animals plus the offspring they had produced during their year in the ark, meat would have to be rationed for a while, so that the human family could stay alive. We understand that it was not until after the flood that Noah received permission to eat meat.

It is not until we get to Leviticus that we read which animals are to be considered clean, and which unclean. "You may eat any animal that has a split hoof completely divided and that chews the cud."[ 4 ]Noah must have had some idea as to how to make the distinction himself or maybe Leviticus simply repeated what was already an established guideline.

Chapter 7 opens with God's command to Noah to go into the ark. Noah has met the condition that allows him to enter and to be saved, that is, he is found righteous. Again, we have to emphasize that righteous here does not mean an absence of sin, or of the tendency to sin, but a condition that is the result of atonement. Noah's sin had been covered by the blood of an animal.

The fact that his family is saved also indicates that they had individually followed his example of confession of sin and the sacrifice of an animal. Neither at that time, nor at present, are other individuals included in the atonement of someone else's sin. Children at the age of non-accountability may be included in the parent's confession, but Shem, Ham and Japheth were married men. And none of the three young families seem to have had children yet.

The order to board the ark was given seven days before the beginning of the flood. Whether it took seven days to complete the boarding, or whether the inhabitants of the ark just waited for things to happen after they boarded, we do not know. If we understand Jesus' words in Matthew correctly, there were no outward indication to the people outside the ark that disaster was about to strike. Jesus said: "As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; And they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man."[ 5 ]

People only had the Word of God to go by, both inside and outside the ark. Two months and seventeen days after Noah's six hundredth birthday the flood started. Three times in this chapter we hear about the animals that entered the ark. It is as if the writer cannot get over the fact that this happened.

In vs. 16 we read that God closed the door of the ark. There was no way in or out. In the Negro Spiritual "Didn't it Rain Children" the people outside the ark are said to be crying to Noah to be let in when the rain starts, and the floods come up. And Noah answers them: "Your life is full of sin; God has the key, you can't get in." Whether this is the way it happened or not, we do not know; but people must have realized that the Word of God that Noah had preached was true. They believed it when it was too late. The rich man in Jesus' story in Luke, who had "Moses and the prophets", came to the same conclusion when it was too late.[ 6 ]The time for salvation is when we hear the Word of God. As Paul says: "For he [God] says, 'In the time of my favor I heard you, and in the day of salvation I helped you.' I tell you, now is the time of God's favor, now is the day of salvation."[ 7 ] And Jesus says: "Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it."[ 8 ]

Vs. 11, "In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, on the seventeenth day of the second month; on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened." The arrival and duration of the flood is recorded in quite some detail. The seventeenth of the second month in the six hundredth year of Noah's life. It rained forty days, (vs.12) and the ark was in use for one full year. Noah kept a precise calendar, like people usually do when they are shut in. Vs. 24, "The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days." Ch. 8:3-6, "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 waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible. After forty days Noah opened the window he had made in the ark."

Ch. 8:13,14, "By the first day of the first month of Noah's six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry." It is hard to argue that this is not written as a historical record.

There is an amazing similarity between the way the flood came over the earth and the way Jesus pictures the storms of life at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. "The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock."[ 9 ] Of course Jesus used those words on purpose to evoke the image of the flood. The interesting inference is that one's life can, at the same time, be built on the rock and float on the water!

From the account of the flood we understand that disaster came from two directions: from above, from and below. We have no record of the earth's condition before the flood. It is logical to presume that God created the planet as much more livable than it is now. Huge sections of our globe are sparsely populated, because of harsh living conditions. The Sahara or the South Pole do not attract large numbers of people. The climatological differences of our planet may have been much less then than they are now. If it is true that the earth was blanketed in a thick layer of humid air, like some presume, the temperature between one part of the world and another and between day and night, may not have differed too much. Also, if there were large reservoirs of water underneath the surface, which were kept warm by the magma underneath, the temperature of the soil would have been rather stable and uniform.

This balance seems to have been disturbed suddenly at the onset of the flood. What the physical cause of this disturbance was is impossible to guess. It must have been linked with some cosmic event, like the leaving of a star or planet from its orbit. The opening up of the great deep must have pushed up mountains.

The verses 19 and 20 tell us: "They [the waters] rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet." We cannot imagine that there would have been twenty feet of water above the summit of our present Mount Everest. Under our present conditions there would not have been enough oxygen to keep the population of the ark alive at this altitude. Probably even mount Ararat may have been lower than it is now.

So the flood was not just a heavy rain, which caused rivers to leave their banks. It was earth's major upheaval, which disturbed the balance of the planet and changed its surface and condition irrevocably.

The way Moses describes the rising of the water and the death of every living creature is extremely impressive. The rendering of the event is done in a moving way. It makes excellent poetry. But it was terrible nonetheless. With the water coming down from the sky and up from the ground, I imagine that it did not take long for life to be wiped off the face of the earth. God did not submit His creation to a slow dying process. There will have been very little floating around of people, trying to hang on to driftwood for days. You die fast in a flood with strong currents.

Three times we are told that the waters increased greatly, and three times we read that everything that breathed died. Compare these words again with the account of Genesis ch. 3. Satan told Eve the great lie: "You will surely not die."[ 10 ] I do not know if Eve could have looked from above to see the water cover the planet and the dead and decaying bodies floating on the surface. Sin had completed its work.

But the ark floated high above it all. There must have been anxiety inside the ark too, though. The flood must have caused strong currents and maelstroms, and the boat must have been swept away swiftly by the force of the water. I suppose that between the top layer of water and the bottom there was little or no wind. There were no hurricanes yet, as we know them now. They are the results of air currents that did not exist under the canopy of moisture that covered the pre-flood world.

It took six weeks of rain and five months of flood to finish the work. Then everything became quiet.

[ 1 ] Eph. 1:3,4

[ 2 ] John 6:37,39,40

[ 3 ] See Lev. 11

[ 4 ] Lev. 11:3

[ 5 ] Matt. 24:37-39

[ 6 ] Luke 16:19-31

[ 7 ] II Cor. 6:2

[ 8 ] Luke 11:28

[ 9 ] Matt. 7:25

[ 10 ] Gen. 3:4