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7 So Noah, with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives, went into the ark because of the waters of the flood. 8 Of clean animals, of animals that are unclean, of birds, and of everything that creeps on the earth, 9 two by two they went into the ark to Noah, male and female, as God had commanded Noah. 10 And it came to pass after seven days that the waters of the flood were on the earth. 11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. 12 And the rain was on the earth forty days and forty nights. ~ Genesis 7:7-12
Today, we continue our study of Genesis 7 which was the fulfillment of what we had seen in Genesis 6. In Genesis 6 God had told Noah what He wanted him to do and in Genesis 7 Noah did it. God kept His word to Noah. He sent the flood that destroyed every living thing on the earth, and yet He saved Noah, his family, and all of the animals that He brought to the ark. The main point of this chapter is that God always keeps His promises and is always faithful to His word.
God rendered the Flood due to the fact that mankind spoiled His creation. God created all things to be good, but Adam and Eve believed the lies of the serpent and doubted God’s goodness and disobeyed His word, bringing sin into the world. The sin of man pained God and moved Him to bring judgement upon rebellious man. We are told several times early on here in Genesis that the earth was "corrupt" which means to mar, to mutilate, to pervert, to go to ruin, or to destroy. As a result the whole world was "filled with violence." The Hebrew word for "violence" means lawlessness, unrighteousness, or injustice. This Hebrew word is a broad term referring to all the ways sinful man mistreats all of God's creation.
The flood was God’s response to the evil, the corruption and the violence that man exacted on God's creation. The flood was God taking merciful action to restrain humanity’s ever-increasing evil. God saw that "every intention of the thoughts of man’s heart was only evil continually." So, He decided to destroy what was self-destructing. God didn’t take pleasure in the flood. Rather, man chose His judgement by ignoring Him and embracing the self life which always leads us down the pathway of wickedness. Man's embrace of the self life caused all living things on the earth sorrow and grief. God made the earth to be a place where all of life could flourish, but instead selfish man turned it into a theater of violence and disaster.
In v.7 of today's passage we read, "So Noah, with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives, went into the ark because of the waters of the flood."
Noah was a righteous man because he believed God enough to be defined by Him. God had told Noah to build the ark and then to gather the animals that He brought to him into the ark. Then Noah and his family took shelter in floating savior that was given him by God. Noah illustrated that if we believe God enough, we will obey Him. This does not mean that we will be perfect. Just as our faith will never be perfect this side of heaven, so our obedience will never be perfect. But Noah's faith was good enough that day.
In v.8-9 of today's passage we read, "8 Of clean animals, of animals that are unclean, of birds, and of everything that creeps on the earth, 9 two by two they went into the ark to Noah, male and female, as God had commanded Noah."
This means everything God has created is to be seen as sacred. Those things and places and people that we see as unclean were made by God, and therefore we should love and care them. We should always see all people as redeemable even though they may incessantly reject the free gift of salvation. Noah and the animals all obeyed God because of God's grace. God’s grace toward Noah created a man who obeyed Him. Noah didn’t just want to obey God, he actually obeyed God’s commands. Obedience is evidence that the light has come on in our understanding with regard to what is true, real, and substantive. Disobedience always leads to some form of death because it always takes us away from God, the source of life and reality.
In v.10 of today's passage we read, "And it came to pass after seven days that the waters of the flood were on the earth."
God is trustworthy and can be trusted. I have discovered that the more I trust Him, the easier I find it to trust Him more. As God had said, seven days later it began to rain. God kept His promise about sending judgment on the earth because God never breaks His word. God always does what He says He will do. The Bible contains somewhere around 2,500 prophecies, and of those approximately 2,000 have already come true. They have come true with perfect accuracy, not a single error! The remaining prophecies predict events yet to occur. If God says He will do something, or says something will happen, we know His words is true due to His track record.
In v.11-12 of today's passage we read, "11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. 12 And the rain was on the earth forty days and forty nights."
The water of the flood came from two places: from above and from below. The first source came from the canopy in the upper atmosphere that shrouded the earth at that time. The second source was from below the surface of the earth. About ten miles below the earth's surface were these subterranean interconnected chambers of water. Volcanic like pressure in those caverns produced an explosion of water that traveled at three miles per second and covered the whole globe in two hours. Once again, as God said it would happen, so the flood came to pass.
There is much evidence of the flood. Fossils are one of the best evidences of a global flood, especially where many of them have been found. We haven’t found marine creatures, such as fish, clams, and corals, buried and fossilized on the sea floor where they once lived. Instead, we have found most of them buried in sedimentary rocks on the continents, even on high mountains. For that to happen, the ocean waters had to totally flood the continents.
Countless billions of plant and animal fossils have been found buried in extensive graveyards around the world. Billions of straight-shelled, chambered nautiloids of all different sizes were discovered fossilized with other marine creatures in a 7 foot thick layer within the Redwall Limestone of the Grand Canyon. This fossil graveyard stretches for 180 miles across northern Arizona and into southern Nevada, covering an area of at least 10,500 square miles. To form such a vast fossil graveyard required 24 cubic miles of lime, sand and silt, flowing in a thick, soup-like slurry at more than 16 feet per second to catastrophically overwhelm and bury this huge, living population of nautiloids. And people say the flood did not happen.
