Lonang Commentary on Genesis 7

CHAPTER 7

Gen. 6:9 Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God.

Gen. 7:1-5 Then the LORD said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you are righteous before me in this generation. Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and his mate, and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and his mate, and seven pairs of the birds of the heavens also, male and female, to keep their offspring alive on the face of all the earth. For in seven days I will send rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground.” And Noah did all that the LORD had commanded him.

The Righteousness of Noah

Noah is said to be righteous, blameless, and he walked with God. What does that mean, exactly? Did Noah have faith comparable to Abraham, who believed God and it was counted as righteousness to him? Gen. 15:6. The only other person mentioned in scripture as having walked with God was Enoch. Gen. 5:22, 24. However, we are told next to nothing about Enoch’s life to gauge what it was that made him righteous before God. All Heb. 11:5 tells us, somewhat cryptically, is that Enoch “was commended as having pleased God.” Although the very next verse states an oft quoted standard of righteousness, “And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.” Heb. 11:6.

Four times in Genesis we are told that Noah “did all that the Lord commanded him.” Gen. 6:22; 7:5; 7:9; and 7:16. It would seem that the chief attribute of righteousness was his obedience. Yet, this obedience is characterized in Heb. 11:7 as a form of faith: “By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.” In all probability, therefore, the faith of both Enoch and Noah conformed to the standard of Heb. 11:6, believing that God exists and He rewards those who seek Him.

Which is ironic, since this verse (Heb. 11:6) is very often interpreted to mean that it is impossible for a non-Christian to please God. Yet Abel, Enoch, Noah and Abraham – and indeed, every saint who lived during Old Testament times – were not Christians. Not one of those people named Jesus Christ – the only name given among men for salvation. Acts 4:12. Nor did any of the O.T. saints believe in the modern conception of the Gospel, “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.” 1 Cor. 15:3-4. What is going on?

No, I don’t believe, as some do, that when Jesus died on the cross, His death reached back in time to operate retroactively on behalf of the O.T. saints. God never acts retroactively. Something else is at work, having to do with – yes – the law of nature. I believe Heb. 11:6 is, in fact, stating the rule for salvation under the law of nature. Now we know, from Rom. 10:16-20, that the law of nature does, in fact, speak to the matter of salvation. For Paul quotes Ps. 19:4 for the proposition that the words of the Creator imbued in the creation are the word of Christ, and that word includes the Gospel. Then he quotes Isaiah for the proposition that God can – and does – show Himself to anyone He chooses and bring that person into salvation.

No walking down the aisle, or a raising of hands. No praying the sinner’s prayer. No asking Jesus to “come into my heart.” No public dedication to the Lord. No running to join a local church. And no water baptism. Merely a belief that God exists, and He rewards those who (diligently) seek him.

As I mentioned at the end of chapter 4, the only names for God used in Genesis were God Most High (Elohim Elyon), and possibly Jehovah (Yahweh). But not Jesus. How does this square with Acts 4:12? Look at that verse carefully: “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” On the one hand, if the word of Christ is indeed imbued in the creation (and it is), then faith and belief conforming to that word is, in fact, faith and belief in Christ. But what about the name?

There is no other name “under heaven.” What does that mean? Well, it excludes names in heaven. In other words, God Most High and Jehovah are not names “under heaven.” To say that the name of Jesus is a name under heaven means that it is the name of a man – a human being. Whereas God Most High and Jehovah are, neither of them, the name of a man. But “Jesus” is. So there is no contradiction between belief in God Most High or Jehovah, and the requirement that the only salvific name of a man is Jesus. Of course, Acts 4:12 excludes all other names of men, including without limitation, Buddha, Mohammed, etc. as having any salvific value. But it does not exclude God’s heavenly names from having salvific value.

You may be thinking, Wasn’t all of this law of nature of saving faith stuff obsoleted by Christ? No, it wasn’t. Paul, quoting Psalm 19 and Isaiah in Romans 10 – decades after the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus – obviously believed those principles had not changed in his day. Why would it be any different now? Nothing Jesus ever did, in His life, death and resurrection, or in heaven once He ascended, changed any part of the law of nature. He could not have – the laws of nature will remain intact until the present earth is destroyed and a new earth is created. Besides, Jesus expressly denied that He came to change any of God’s laws. Mat. 5:17. So, as we lawyers like to say, the law of nature of saving faith is still good law.

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Gen. 7:6-10 Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came upon the earth. And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives with him went into the ark to escape the waters of the flood. Of clean animals, and of animals that are not clean, and of birds, and of everything that creeps on the ground, two and two, male and female, went into the ark with Noah, as God had commanded Noah. And after seven days the waters of the flood came upon the earth.

The Animals Went Willingly

It is hard for us to conceive of it now, but before the flood, there was no enmity, or fear and dread, between animals and people. Mankind had not yet been authorized to eat meat, so the human diet was 100% plant-based. Which meant the animals had no reason to fear being hunted by people for food. It also meant that people had no reason to fear being hunted by animals for food, as the animals – all of them – would have had 100% plant-based diets as well. I would even hazard an educated guess, based on some of God’s future plans for the animal kingdom that we’ll discuss in chapter 9, that all animals were essentially tame.

In other words, there were no “wild” animals before the flood. That isn’t to say that all animals were fully domesticated – put to useful employment by people or kept as pets. But it does mean that no animals were a danger to people, that is, for people to be mauled, bitten, scratched or trampled, etc. Nor would the animals have preyed upon each other for food, territory, or whatever. There would have been complete peace not only between people and animals, but also between all of the various kinds of animals with each other. I even believe, based on some prophetic scriptures we’ll get to later, that before the flood there would have been complete peace between people and the insect kingdom. No insect bites or stings, no insect borne diseases, no destruction of crops or cattle by insects, and no pestilences or plagues of disease.

In other words, before the flood there would have been a total operational rejection of the survival of the fittest and its religious underpinnings, namely, evolution. For the whole basis of survival of the fittest’ is enmity, fear and dread between all species of life, including people, animals and insects. Every single species on earth in one long continuous struggle to live by killing others before being killed. Evolution views all life forms as a potential threat to one’s own existence, which can only be overcome by defeating, and if possible eradicating, one’s enemies.

However, that is not the world God created. God intended that all creatures would, and for a time long past they did, live in complete peace and harmony with each other and the rest of creation. And one day in the future, that peace will be restored. But this explains how it was that Noah was able to get all the animals on the ark, to obey his commands, not put anyone in danger from the wild beasts,’ and to keep the animals from attacking or feeding off each other. In the time leading up to the flood, it simply wasn’t in their nature. Noah did not need to whip them or force them into the ark, for they went willingly. Plus, whether they knew it or not, it was for their own benefit and the survival of each species.

Whether it was prevalent in the wider culture to mistreat and abuse animals, to cage them merely to possess them, to use animals for entertainment purposes, or to kill animals either for pleasure or sport – not for food, but merely for the fun of it – no one can say. There aren’t a whole lot of things we know about the people back then, but the one thing we do know is they were prone to violence. And we know that human nature was fully corrupt from the very beginning. So anything is possible.

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Gen. 7:11-16 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened. And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights. On the very same day Noah and his sons, Shem and Ham and Japheth, and Noah’s wife and the three wives of his sons with them entered the ark, they and every beast, according to its kind, and all the livestock according to their kinds, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, according to its kind, and every bird, according to its kind, every winged creature. They went into the ark with Noah, two and two of all flesh in which there was the breath of life. And those that entered, male and female of all flesh, went in as God had commanded him. And the LORD shut him in.

Water From Above and Below

Verse 11 states that when the flood came, “the windows of the heavens were opened.” But earlier, in Gen. 2:5-6 it is said that the Lord had not yet caused it to rain, and the ground was watered by a mist. It must be assumed these conditions prevailed until the flood, when it rained for the first time. But where did the rain come from? Presumably, the ground being watered only by a mist up to that point, there were no clouds in the sky yet.

Many scientists have postulated that before the flood, the earth was surrounded by a vapor canopy – a layer of water above the atmosphere which did not form clouds or produce rain. This would be the result from a literal reading of Gen. 1:6-8, describing Creation Day 2. There, God created an expanse which divided the waters of the earth into those waters above the expanse, and those below – with the expanse itself being called Heaven. So what would be the nature of the waters above Heaven? A vapor canopy, probably, which God caused to fall to the earth in the form of torrential rain at the time of the flood.

[Note: I assume the reference to heaven in relation to the second day of creation means the first heaven, that is, the atmosphere. Whereas the second heaven would refer to outer space, and the third heaven to the throne of God where Jesus is waiting until He returns. See 2 Cor. 12:2 for a scriptural reference to the third heaven.]

It is not my intention to fully describe the physical nature of the vapor canopy or prove it scientifically. Those are matters I leave to others. I mention it simply to underscore that the account of the flood in Genesis, whether regarding the gathering of the animals, or the sources of the waters, is reasonable and credible, not mere myth or fantasy. Also, while the vapor canopy was in place, pre-flood, it would have shielded the earth from harmful radiation and been one more mechanism (in addition to others previously mentioned) that prolonged human life for the early patriarchs.

Similarly, the fountains of the great deep refers to a fact now well known among scientists that there are vast storehouses of water below the surface of the earth, even today. For many years it was thought that everything below the earth’s surface was only hot and dry, being associated with death, the grave and Hades, which biblically is referred to as Sheol, or sometimes as the depths of the earth. But in the popular mind, just think of Hell, and you get the picture. Yet the fact is these storehouses do exist up to 400 miles below ground, where water is often bound up with certain types of minerals. Again, I leave the proof of such things to others, but to me it speaks of the credibility and historical accuracy of the Genesis text.

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Gen. 7:17-20 The flood continued forty days on the earth. The waters increased and bore up the ark, and it rose high above the earth. The waters prevailed and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered. The waters prevailed above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep.

A Worldwide Flood

It is popular in scientific quarters to give a partial, and very limited, credence to the account of the Genesis flood by saying it did happen, but was confined to a local area around the Black Sea and environs. A view which, in essence, denies the global nature of the flood, in spite of worldwide evidence of fossilized sea life all around the globe, even in high elevations. At root, the failure to believe Noah’s flood was truly global stems from the belief that the God of the Bible could not possibly be that big, so as to judge all of humanity, and impose and control a flood on a planetary scale.

Yet, it is regular and routine fare in the science fiction genre to imagine people – ordinary human beings – traveling to distant stars, building a man-made structure that completely encloses a star, building a space station capable of destroying an entire planet, capturing the total energy output of a star and redirecting it in the form of a death ray, building a portable device that cannot only completely terraform an entire planet, but create life where there was none before, and erecting a human government (empire) that would span an entire galaxy composed of thousands of planets. In short, man is conceived as being capable of absolutely anything, but God is perceived as being capable of very little.

Earlier I mentioned that God will destroy the earth three times. The second of which – the greatest earthquake of all time – will bring every mountain down (except for parts of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, Zch. 14:10), and raise every valley up, to essentially flatten the entire surface of the earth. That will be no small feat, and to do it, God must have enormous power. If He can do that, flooding the whole earth seems like a relatively small thing. Although, the Genesis flood is probably the mechanism by which the mountains and valleys were created in the first place. But hey, what about the power it took to create the entire world ex nihilo, from nothing, just by speaking it into existence? This is no puny God we’re talking about here.

The final destruction – burning the entire earth, not merely part of it – requires God to act on a truly planetary scale. Which destruction will be followed by the creation not only of a new earth – likely to be substantially larger than the present earth, by the way – but also the creation of a new heaven. Rev. 21:1. The implication being that not only the earth, but the stars will all be remade (apparently there won’t be a need for either sun or moon, Rev. 21:23). Requiring a whole new universe, because if there is no death – ever (Rev. 21:4) – then nothing will ever end, and the law of entropy will itself no longer exist. In other words, nothing will ever wind down, run out of energy, fall apart, or decay. Now that requires a Creator God of absolutely staggering power, more than any man could ever conceive. Which is the point, of course.

How big a flood you believe in says volumes about how big a God you believe in.

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Gen. 7:21-24 And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, livestock, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all mankind. Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens. They were blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those who were with him in the ark. And the waters prevailed on the earth 150 days.

God’s Universal Laws

The Genesis narrative, when taken literally and historically, charts a path not only for the origin of our species, but also for the universal nature of the human condition, as well as a number of key universal moral rights, duties and obligations. This path admits of no members of the human race who are not descendants of Adam, for example. There are no people who arose in a time or place apart from the account in chapter 2, and no people who are not fallen, separated from God, prone to sin, and deserving of death from the moment of their birth. The idea that all people are basically good is one of those ideas that is completely contradicted by scripture, and has no place in a biblical worldview. This is the universal human condition, and there are no exceptions.

Similarly, as descendants of Adam, all people without exception are subject to and bound by the Dominion Mandate. Thus, all people have a moral duty to be fruitful and multiply, that is, to bear and raise children. I do not say this is a duty enforceable by man – just the opposite – it is strictly between each couple and God as to how many children each family decides to have. But to advocate for Zero Population Growth, engage in the practice of eugenics and/or selective breeding of people, to coerce the sterilization of undesirable populations, and of course, to promote and/or practice abortion – all these directly contradict the Dominion Mandate and have no place in a biblical worldview. Yet there are other duties flowing from the Dominion Mandate as well.

Such as the duty to cultivate and work the ground, and to care for the earth – not to pollute it (either spiritually by sin, or chemically by poisons), and to preserve the earth. Read the laws of warfare in ancient Israel sometime (Dt. 20:19-20), and see how God forbade the destruction of fruit trees during a siege of an enemy, for an idea how the Almighty views land stewardship. “Are the trees in the field human, that they should be besieged by you?” The same kinds of things can be said about mankind’s stewardship duties with respect to the fish, the birds, and all the land animals. These are universal moral duties from which no one is exempt or excused. The needs of your business do not override your duties to God.

The situation is exactly the same with respect to the flood. The biblical narrative admits of no one surviving the flood except for the eight members of Noah’s family. No one else built their own watercraft and rode out the waves, hid in a mountaintop cave and avoided being drowned, or got far enough away from the flood area that they survived. Literally every person in the world other than Noah’s family – perhaps as many as 200 million people – died. This of course affected the human condition in numerous ways, as we will see – anthropologically, linguistically (after Babel), restriction of the human gene pool, etc. No people were born after the flood who were not descendants of Shem, Ham and Japheth, which means everyone alive today is a descendant of Noah as much as Adam.

As with the Dominion Mandate, the terms of the Noahic covenant coming up in chapter 9 are universally binding on all people today, without exception. Both the Adamic covenant (Dominion Mandate) and the Noahic covenant, though technically part of the laws of nature’s God (God’s laws revealed in scripture after creation), they are applicable to the same extent as the laws of nature (the creation laws). Meaning, there is no one in the entire history of the world after the flood, who was not, and is not, subject to and bound by these three sets of laws. These are God’s universal laws.

Consequently, the duties imposed by the Noahic covenant are universally binding on all people without exception. Oh, the depths of ignorance among the general population, and the gross neglect and failure among Christian ministers and educators to understand and teach these universal rules God has prescribed. These things are not optional. But everyone thinks they can pick and choose what they will or will not subscribe to. I will speak more about each of the duties flowing from the Noahic covenant in a bit.

Yet, we dare not ignore the flip side – that our duties towards God are as rights towards men. The premise of this statement is that duties owed to God are owed to Him alone, so that no one else has the right to interfere with how such duties are performed. Which means that the rights, as well as the duties, coming from God are inalienable – meaning they can never be lawfully deprived by other people or governments. As James Madison famously expressed it in his Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments (1785):

“Religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.” The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable; because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds, cannot follow the dictates of other men: It is unalienable also; because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator.

Which means that all of the duties we owe to God under the Dominion Mandate – every one of them – are also inalienable rights as against all other people. Thus, the duty to be fruitful and multiply is also an inalienable right to marry, to have children, and to raise children as the parents alone see fit, that government may not abridge. The duty to subdue the earth also translates into an inalienable right to own, use and control private property. The right to rule over every living thing translates into a right to own, use and control livestock and other animals for food, labor, etc. Even the duty before God to exercise dominion over plant life translates into a right to grow the plants one desires, and to own, use and control the crops thereof, without government interference.

Similarly, duties towards God flowing from the Noahic covenant are rights towards men. To be fruitful and multiply, again, is an inalienable right. To eat meat, and to raise and slaughter animals for food is a right, not a privilege. To eat and drink blood is a grave moral sin, one which indicates a degree of moral depravity, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a civil matter. And capital punishment is a law enforcement mechanism that, if a people or nation forbid it, only deepens the pollution of the ground and further burdens the sin debt of the land. Every nation has the right, before God, to execute murderers and to help atone for the land.

The extent to which these various inalienable rights granted by God are openly, regularly, and customarily regulated, licensed, taxed, and oftentimes outright banned, shows the extent to which modern laws and governments are opposed to God and operate in defiance of His laws.