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1 So God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them: "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. 2 And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be on every beast of the earth, on every bird of the air, on all that move on the earth, and on all the fish of the sea. They are given into your hand. 3 Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. I have given you all things, even as the green herbs. 4 But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. 5 Surely for your lifeblood I will demand a reckoning; from the hand of every beast I will require it, and from the hand of man. From the hand of every man’s brother I will require the life of man. ~ Genesis 9:1-5
Today, we transition into Genesis 9 where the Flood is now in the distant past. In the opening chapters of Genesis, we have seen God create the world and we have seen man ruin it with his sin. Since God is holy and man is totally corrupt, man's sinfulness had to be judged. In response, God decided to destroy unrepentant sinful man with the Flood. In the context of all of this, we must not lose sight of the fact that God offered corrupt man a way out of the destruction and all but one family rejected God's kind offer of grace.
In today's chapter Moses fills out more of what God was doing with Noah, his family and the earth during the post-flood period. Here, we see that the God who recreated the earth and promised to preserve it until He redeems it from sin and death. The main takeaway for us from this text is that God’s grace is the only reason any of us are still alive and the world is still running. In this text, we will consider in the next few studies the survival of Noah in v.1-19, the sin of Noah in v.21-22, and then, the sons of Noah in v.23-29.
In v.1 of today's passage we read, "So God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them: 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.'"
Before God required anything of man, He blessed Him; With Noah God was no different. We are woefully unaware each day of all of God's blessings. In Matthew 5:45, the Lord Jesus said this about our Heavenly Father: "He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust." Rain has always symbolized "God's blessing" throughout the Scriptures. The only time rain has been seen as a bad thing was during the Great Flood due to the evil state of humanity. A close analysis of the covenant God offered man before the Flood was an offer of His blessing, unrepentant man was not willing enough to see it. This was why God had to destroy sinful man in the Flood.
The good news is we serve a supernatural God. When He commands blessing upon us, there is nothing that the forces of darkness can do to stop it. With God's commanded blessings, we will go places we never thought possible. Doors will open that we could not have imagined would open to us. Of course, all of this is predicated upon God's will, not ours. We must be very careful that our faith is being placed in the promises of God rather than in our preferences of the way we think our lives should be. Our Heavenly Father always knows what is best for us.
The command "to be fruitful and multiply" in this verse is a repetition of the original command given by God to Adam back in Genesis 1. The Lord tells us that the fruit of the womb is His reward. Today there are 7.7 billion people on earth. It took from Noah's day to the year 1804 to produce 1 billion people on earth. The modern concept of cutting back on population growth isn’t just unbiblical, it’s anti-biblical. God has ordained that man and animals multiply, not abort. And we are instructed to fill the earth, not to worship the earth.
In v.2 of today's passage we read, "And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be on every beast of the earth, on every bird of the air, on all that move on the earth, and on all the fish of the sea. They are given into your hand."
Back in Genesis 1 when everything on the earth was perfect, man was given dominion over the creatures of the earth. Man's dominion continued after the flood but with sin and death reigning on the earth. And, after the Flood, a new aspect of man's relationship with the animals came about; the animals had come to fear man. With this new paradigm, we now see that we are not as we once were. Where once we were the keepers of a creation that was in far more harmony with us, now we find the animals fearing us and hiding from us.
In v.3 of today's passage we read, "Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. I have given you all things, even as the green herbs."
At this point in history the animals became food of man. With this change, man now would be reminded that every meal should remind us that life is made possible only by the death of another. We are alive only because other creatures have died on our behalf. We do not live in and of ourselves, we live by virtue of feeding upon other life. This is a reminder that we are not independent creatures, going our own way, mastering of our own fate. We have no life force of our own; life as we know it is all borrowed.
The Lord Jesus said, "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. But whosoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life." In that verse the Lord Jesus did not mean that we should feed on Him literally, but symbolically. We are to feed on Him, and draw from Him all that we need. He is our life, and without Him we will never be what we were created to be.
In v.4-5 of today's passage we read, "4 But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. 5 Surely for your lifeblood I will demand a reckoning; from the hand of every beast I will require it, and from the hand of man. From the hand of every man’s brother I will require the life of man."
When the early church was facing legalism and the Judaizers were arguing what believers in Christ could and could not eat, telling them that they had to be circumcised, or telling them that they had to observe certain feasts or festivals or the Sabbath, a council was called in Jerusalem. The conclusion of that council was simple and concise: abstain from things offered to idols, from blood, from things strangled, and from sexual immorality.
Clearly, since then, the epistles of the apostles have to be considered and applied to our lives, but nothing written by the apostles contradict this early decision, especially concerning what can and can’t be eaten. The Apostle Paul later clarified the part about things offered to idols and he and the other apostles speak in detail about sexual immorality. Beyond this, things that are strangled has its own context in which to be considered. And the drinking of blood is forbidden because it predates the Law of Moses and the blood contains the life.
Life is God's property. Man does not impart life; he does not originate it and it does not belong to him. Therefore, man has no right to take life. The life of man is peculiarly sacred to God; only God has the right to take it. If anyone else violates this, God says he will require a reckoning, and that would be a terrible price. The emphasis throughout the Bible is on life and the preservation of life, otherwise man would look upon life as cheap. It is a cheap view of life that leads man down the path of not appreciating the sacred. And, we will not value life unless we see it as all things as sacred.
