The Flood of Judgment
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2019 · 5 May 2019
“6 Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters were on the earth. 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. 13 On the very same day Noah and Noah’s sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and Noah’s wife and the three wives of his sons with them, entered the ark.”
“14 they and every beast after its kind, all cattle after their kind, every creeping thing that creeps on the earth after its kind, and every bird after its kind, every bird of every sort. 15 And they went into the ark to Noah, two by two, of all flesh in which is the breath of life. 16 So those that entered, male and female of all flesh, went in as God had commanded him; and the Lord shut him in.”
The Genesis Flood has massive implications with regard to understanding the exclusivity of salvation. There is a movement today called "The Openness of God Movement." They believe that God doesn't control the future, because He doesn't know the future. But here He says to Noah that, "I'm going to drown the entire world 120 years from now," and He proceeded to do exactly that.
The Flood account is given in simple, precise and repeated detail. This is to be sure that we have here an unmistakable historical record of judgment. And so nobody is mistaken, it is repeated. It is designed to show us how God deals with sin. And it is a previews of the coming judgment of what God will do in the end of the age when He destroys the world by fire in 2 Peter 3.
At the time they were ready to enter the ark, the 120 years were up. So in Genesis 7: 2 God says, "You shall take with you of every clean animal by sevens, a male and his female, and of the animals that are not clean, two, a male and his female." The clean animals were those used for sacrifices. They were called clean in the sense that they were set apart for sacrifice.
And God says, "You're the only ones that are righteous." We know they were righteous because God declared them righteous. They were righteous not on their own merit, but by virtue of the provision that Christ would make later at the cross. And they were righteous because of 120 years of long obedience. It says in Genesis 6:22, "Noah did according to all that God had commanded him."
And all of these animals were taken on board in order, and the reason for that in verse 3, "To keep offspring alive on the face of all the earth," which again is an indication of a universal worldwide flood. So you have the future of humanity and the future of the animal creation under one roof, all those animals and those eight souls on the ark. And all the genetic data for all the variations of life had come from those few.
The largest estimate was that you needed 30 to 40 thousand species of animals to cover all the species. And the capacity of the ark was large enough to contain 125 thousand animals according to their size. There was plenty of genetic capacity on the ark for the reproduction of all those animals. We all originally came from Adam and Eve and the difference in genetics between two people is only 0.2 %.
Now in the original creation there was no rain. There was just this mist from spring water rising from the ground watering the surface. An underground watering system that also created rivers that are in the description of the Garden of Eden. That hydrological pattern was very different from the hydrological pattern today where water evaporates into clouds, dumped on land, runs into rivers, and then back into the ocean.
And God used rain here to destroy the entire human race. But since then He has used it to bless the human race. The word for rain is in the Hebrew is ‘matar’, normal rain. But if you have it for 40 days and 40 nights all over the planet, it becomes something greater than normal rain. And the rain in verse 12 is described using a different word, ‘geshem’, meaning a torrential downpour.
Rain for forty days and forty nights is completely impossible under current conditions. That's why we know that the hydrology of Noah's day was very different. Genesis 1:6-7, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” 7 Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.”
There was a vast blanket of water in order to rain for 40 days and 40 nights, there had to be a lot more water up there than there is now. If all the water currently in all the clouds surrounding the earth were dumped on the earth, it could only cover the earth less than an inch in depth. God designed it to do what He wanted it to do to create that environment. It must have been transparent to see the light through it.
It's reasonable to assume that this vapor did filter out some of the killing effects of ultra-violet light because people lived so long. Also, if there was kind of a greenhouse effect from this vapor, there would be no variation in temperature. And if there's no variation in temperature, there's no wind, so you had this perfect environment, warm, tropical with adequate moisture everywhere.
And then all that was changed. In Genesis 7:4, God says, "I'm going to send rain." That means that God held that water up there for just such a time as this. In 2 Peter 3, it tells us that God is going to destroy the earth next time with fervent heat. Just as in the pre-flood world, the instrument of destruction was built into the fabric of that creation. So the instrument of our future destruction is also built in the fabric of this universe.
And God says: I will blot out, all that has life, all that grows. The earth will be stripped of all animals, stripped of vegetation, plants, trees, whole forests will be uprooted in the cataclysmic floods that would come about. This judgment will mark the end of the first creation. This is the greatest judgment in that time. And we know that this is a preview of the greater judgment to come.
Noah was 601 when he got out of the ark, according to Genesis 8:14-16, so he was in the ark for one year and ten days. It rained for 40 days and 40 nights, but it took a long time for the water to subside and the ark to land and for them to leave. Does it matter that he was 600 years old? Yes, if you're a historian it matters. And Moses, the inspired writer of the Pentateuch, fixes this event in time and history.
Genesis 9:28-29 tell us that he lived to be 900, so when he came out of the ark he had 300 years left in his life. This is not myth or symbolic. Ancient historical records are dated by some significant point in a person's life. This is true of ancient writing, modern writing and it's true in Scripture. And at the time of the Flood there was only one king and that was Noah. So Noah did all what God said.
Verse 7, “So Noah, with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives, went into the ark because of the waters of the flood.” They got on and just waited. Verse 8-9, “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.” Noah was just the welcoming committee, and the animals just showed up.
Earlier in Genesis 2, God brought to Adam all the animals for him to name. So similarly He could certainly bring them all to the ark. This is one of the great miracles of the Old Testament, and in terms of volume it's the greatest. This is an expression of the power of God. Why do people believe that God created all animals, but do not believe that He could also make them do whatever He wanted them to do.
And the Lord just brought them exactly at the time they needed to be brought in. They were all put in their special compartment, no doubt there were thousands of them on the three floors. Some people said, "How did the kangaroos get from Australia? They can't swim." But remember, the earth before the Flood was quite different from the present earth configuration. There were no great oceans nor high mountains then.
One of the things following the Flood, study geology, was that ice piled up on both poles and we had the great Ice Age. And before it melted, the continents were not fully submerged and there were land bridges that stretched from the Middle East to Australia. So different animals could migrate to different areas. It's enough to know that God can do whatever God wants to do.
What about dinosaurs? If you put them in a pre-flood environment and you have got a protected environment, then you are going to have reptiles that are huge such as the skeletal remains that we find in the ground of those great massive dinosaurs. But God controlled what animal species got on the ark, and He only took a few lizards and a few other reptiles that we are familiar with.
The same can be said of mammoths. An estimated five million mammoths whose remains are buried all across the coastline of northern Siberia and Alaska were frozen and buried in the ground. All the descendants of large animals became smaller in size as the environment changed. And the second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy, states that matter breaks down, and life is getting shorter for animals.
And then the Flood came. Verse 10, “And it came to pass after seven days that the waters of the flood were on the earth.” Here is God saying something is going to happen in 120 years and it happens exactly that way He said it was going to happen. God fixed this chronology: A hundred and twenty years, seven days, the six hundredth year, the kids are a hundred years old.”
Verse 11-12, “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.” So for us we don't know what the second month is. The point here is to make it clear that this is history and that it really happened.
It rains 40 days, 40 nights, and the water floods the earth for 150 days. The water later recedes to the point that the ark rests on Ararat mountain in the sixth hundredth year of Noah, the seventh month of the seventeenth day. Forty days later, in his six hundred and first year he comes out, and he waits 26 days before disembarking in the second month the twenty-seventh day. This indicates the historicity of this event.
So what exactly does “fountains of the great deep” mean? Genesis 1 tells us there was water below the earth and water above the earth. The water below the earth here is described as springs in the great subterranean reservoirs. We do not know where this massive amount of water down inside the earth flowed. But it tells us it burst open maybe caused by volcanic eruptions.
It says on that same day the windows of heaven were also opened. And it took six weeks for that water up there to be dumped on the earth. And all that water filled up the sunken places known as oceans, and rising high enough to cover Mount Ararat and other mountains close to 20,000 feet in elevation. Mountains rose, valleys fell, polar ice caps were created quick freezing animals.
So when Noah got on the ark, he left one kind of planet. When he got off the ark, it was a whole different one. Look at Isaiah 24:1, "Behold the Lord lays the earth waste, devastates it, distorts its surface and scatters its inhabitants." Isaiah describes the Flood. Verse 18, "He who flees the report of disaster will fall into the pit and he who climbs out of the pit will be caught in the snare, for the windows above are opened.”
Psalm 36:6, “Your righteousness is like the great mountains; Your judgments are a great deep; O Lord, You preserve man and beast.” The same God who brings destruction also brings comfort. Genesis 7: 13-16 remind us of that, “On the very same day Noah and Noah’s sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and Noah’s wife and the three wives of his sons with them, entered the ark.”
This is history, “14 they and every beast after its kind, all cattle after their kind, every creeping thing that creeps on the earth after its kind, and every bird after its kind, every bird of every sort. 15 And they went into the ark to Noah, two by two, of all flesh in which is the breath of life. 16 So those that entered, male and female of all flesh, went in as God had commanded him; and the Lord shut him in.”
The Lord brought the animals and the Lord closed the door. Remember, there's only one door on the side in the original instruction. God closed the door and He sealed it from the outside miraculously, without human hands. The whole world was behind them, never to be seen again as they had known it. The world was soon to be below them and they were embarking on the most incredible journey of faith ever.
Nobody had ever or before or since taken such an incredible journey as this. What an adventure. The biggest floating structure ever built up to that time, rain they had never seen, and the destruction of the entire planet. They're floating along in a zoo, guided only by God and living in the hope of a better world and a new life. And all the future of the world is huddled under that one roof.
And in 1 Peter 3:20 - 21, Peter sees the ark as a picture of Jesus. Because it's when we come to Christ that we rise above the judgment waters, right? As the eight were brought safely through the waters of judgment by being sealed in the ark, so believers are brought safely through judgment by being sealed by the Spirit in the ark who is Jesus Christ. Sinners, come into the ark of safety. Let us pray.