Genesis Chapter 7 Part 2

The floodwaters came, and nothing on earth was left untouched. In Genesis 7 Part 2, we watch the door of the ark close and the judgment of God fall on a world that refused to listen. This isn’t just an ancient flood story. It’s a pattern that echoes through Scripture, all the way to the cross and to the judgment still to come.

We’ll dig into the Hebrew text, the ancient Near Eastern flood accounts that Genesis quietly corrects, and why the New Testament keeps coming back to Noah as a warning and a promise. If you’ve ever wondered whether the flood is history, myth, or something in between, this lesson gives you the tools to answer with confidence.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

And welcome back to our study. Today we're going to finish chapter seven. But before we do, I want to recap the last lesson just a little bit. The first part of chapter seven. In those first 10 verses, we sat in the silence of the seven days with Noah and his family inside of the ark. The animals were loaded, the provisions were gathered, the door was still open, and the world outside was going on exactly as it always has. And today what we're going to read is that that silence ends. In Genesis chapter 7, verse 11 is one of the most dramatic events in the entire Old Testament. In one sentence, everything changes. The fountains of the great deep burst open. The floodgates of the sky are open. And the world that had been building and marrying and singing for a thousand years comes to an end. We're also going to go back and look at one of the most significant details in the entire flood narrative, a detail that most people just read right over, skim over in two seconds, and sometimes completely miss. It's when we read where it says, And the Lord closed it behind him. I want you to make sure to read that closely. It's saying that God closed the door, not Noah, the Lord closed it behind him. And we're going to spend some time there talking about what that means, because who closes the door and what it means changes how we understand salvation entirely. And so we're going to go ahead and jump into the text. Let's read, let's start in chapter 7, verse 11, which says, In the sixth hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on the same day all of the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened, the rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights. On the very same day Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah's wife, and the three wives of his son with them enter the ark. They and every beast after its kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth after its kind, and every bird after its kind, and all sorts of birds. So they went into the ark to Noah, by twos of all flesh, in which was the breath of life. Those that entered male and female of all flesh entered as God had commanded them, and the Lord closed it behind them. Then the flood came upon the earth for forty days, and the water increased and lifted up the ark, so that it rose above the earth. The water prevailed and increased greatly upon the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. The water prevailed more and more upon the earth, so that all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens were covered. The water prevailed fifteen cubits higher, and the mountains were covered. All flesh that moved on the earth perished, birds and cattle and beasts, and every swarming thing that swarms upon the earth, and all mankind. Of all that was on the dry land, all in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life died. Thus he blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things, and to birds of the sky, and they were blotted out from the earth, and only Noah was left together with those that were with him in the ark. The water prevailed upon the earth one hundred and fifty days. Now let's take this apart very carefully. Part one opens with an extraordinary section with chronological precision. In the sixth hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, year, month, and day. This is not how ancient mythologies record their flood narratives. Moses gives us the year, the month, and the day. He's writing history. The second month, 17th day, and the Hebrew calendar fell in what we would recognize now as late October and early November, the season of the early rains in the ancient Near East. But these were not just the early rains. What came on that 17th day was unlike anything the earth had ever experienced. The scripture says here, all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were open. Now I want you to notice what we're seeing here. This is two sources, not one. There's one from below the fountains of the great deep, and one from above, the floodgates of the sky. Now, the great deep is the Hebrew word used in Genesis chapter 1, verse 2, for the waters that covered the earth before God's spirit. And it says that darkness was over the surface of the deep. It's the same word. And so the flood is simply a return to what existed before. It was a pre-creation state of watery chaos before God's ordering moved over the surface of the waters. The fountains of the great deep burst open. And that suggests a catastrophic geological event, not just rainfall. Subterranean water systems pressurized underground reserves erupting through the crust of the earth. And many geologists who take the flood seriously point to this as describing something like a catastrophic rupturing of the earth's foundations, massive volcanic activity, seafloor spreading, underground water systems released all at once. And all the time the floodgates of the sky were open. The Hebrew word for floodgates means windows. And so it's the same word used in 2 Kings chapter 7, verse 2 for windows. And some scholars understand this as referring to a vapor or a canopy, a dense uh atmospheric layer of water, vapor that may have surrounded the pre-flooded earth, which would have contributed to the longer lifespans and different climate during that time. And so when the floodgates were open, this canopy collapses. And then you have water from below and water from above. And the earth was caught in between the two sources of water, are the two sources of judgment that they had never before acted together in all of human history. Now, two sources of the flood, below and above, are theologically significant. In Genesis chapter 1, it says that God separated the waters, waters above, the expanse, the atmosphere and the sky, and waters below the seas and the underground system. God placed boundaries between them. He said, Let the waters be gathered, and so it was. And then so what you have order out of chaos. The flood is the deliberate removal of those boundaries. God unseparating what he had previously separated, returning the earth temporarily to Genesis chapter 1, verse 2. And this is not a random catastrophe. This is the creator of everything reversing his own creative work, deliberately, precisely, but temporarily, in response to a creation that has corrupted its way. And just as creation in Genesis chapter 1 came from God's word and God's spirit, so the recreation after the flood will also come from God's word and God's spirit. But I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. That's in Genesis chapter 8, which we'll tackle a little bit later. So let's move on here to verse 16, where we see that God closed the door. Verse 16 gives us the entry of the animals and the family. And then the end of the verse, there's four words, again, that most people just read right past. And the Lord closed the door behind him. God closed the door. Not Noah, not Lois' sons, but the Lord. Now, why does this matter? Why is this such a big deal? It's a big deal because it changes everything about what the ark represents. It means Noah did not secure his own safety or his own salvation. His salvation was sealed by God. Noah built the ark. Noah loaded the provisions. Noah entered, but God closed the door. The act that made the difference between life and death, between inside and outside, was performed by God, not man. And here's the beautiful implication there. Once God closes the door, it stays closed because, not because Noah can't open it, but because God closed it. In John chapter 10, verse 8 through 29, we read this. It says, Jesus says, And I will give eternal life to them, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, for no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand. So no one snatched Noah out of the ark because God Himself had closed the door. And the lesson for believers here is that the security of the people of God has always rested in God and what he does. It's not what we can hold on to, it's not unto our religion. It's all based on what God does. Once he accepts you and takes you and brings you into as his child, you're secure. But we have to always remember there's another side to this of God closing the door. And if we love people like the Bible commands us to love people, it should be kind of difficult for us to sit with. And that's when God closed the door, it closed from the perspective of those outside as well. No one outside of the ark could open it once the rain started, once the flood waters started to rise. No one could knock and be let in once the waters began to rise. The door was closed by God and it stayed closed. Now, we don't know what happened at the door in those hours or days after the rain began. The scripture doesn't tell us, but it's really not that hard to imagine. You have people who would have mocked for 120 years, people who just walked right past the open door for seven days with no one in his family just sitting inside. And now with rain falling and water rising, perhaps uh coming to the door, and the door was closed. This is one of the most sobering truths in the entire Bible. And what it means is that grace is not without limit. That means the door is open right now, but it will not be open forever. There is a moment coming when God closes the door. And once he does, it is not open again from the outside. Jesus speaks directly to this in the parable of the Ten Versions in Matthew chapter 25. Five are ready when the bridegroom comes, five are not. And the five who are not ready come to the door after it has been shut. But he answered, Truly I say to you, I do not know you. And so the closed door of the ark is represented in the closed door of Matthew chapter 25 and verse 12. The same warning, separated by thousands of years. And it's in it's an unchanged urgency that we're talking about here. Now, right now, while the door is still open, there's time to enter because the closing of the door belongs to God, not to us. We don't get to decide when that time is. He does. Now, the ancient church fathers had a lot to say about the closing door. In the fourth century, theologians wrote significantly and extensively that God closing the door was the most significant act of the entire flood narrative. One said it this way. He said, it was not the rain that saved Noah, it was the closed door. The closed door is what separated those who perished from those who lived. And God's hand on that door is the picture of the security that comes from being in a covenant with him. Augustine saw the door of the ark as a picture of the door of the church. He wrote this. Augustine said, just as there was no salvation outside the ark because God had closed the door, so there is no salvation outside the covenant community of those who belong to Christ. Origen in the third century connected the closing of the door by God to the sealing of the believer in the Holy Spirit. This is what Origen wrote. He said that just as God sealed Noah inside the ark against the waters of judgment, so the Spirit seals the believers against the judgment to come. The Apostle Paul wrote in Ephesians chapter 1, verse 13 through 14. He said, In him you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation, having also believed, you were sealed in him with the Holy Spirit of promise. God closes the door. God seals the believer. The security in both cases rests on the same foundation. His faithfulness, not ours. Now, let's move on to verse 17, because verse 17 gives us the first effect of the flood on the ark. It says the waters increased and lifted up the ark so that it rose above the earth. Now, again, this is one of those details that it's so easy to read right past, but it's actually theologically profound. Think about this. The same water that destroyed the world lifted the ark. The same waters of judgment that killed everything outside were the waters that carried those inside to safety. The flood was not the enemy of those in the ark, it was the vehicle of their salvation. First Peter chapter 3, verse 20 says eight persons were brought to safety through the water, through the water, not around the water, not above the water, but through the water. And this is the pattern of salvation throughout Scripture. What we see is that Israel doesn't go around the Red Sea in Exodus. They go through the sea. They do not pass by the Jordan, they walk through the Jordan. The waters of judgment become the pathway of salvation for those who are in a covenant relationship with God. Baptism, as Peter makes clear, follows the same pattern. The waters that picture judgment and death are the same waters through which the believer passes into new life. Then, verse 18 through 20 repeat the same phrase three times. The water prevailed. The water prevailed more and more. The water prevailed 15 cubits higher. Moses uses this repetition again, the same literary technique that we saw with Noah's obedience. He is making you feel the relentlessness of the water rising. It did not come and then recede. It did not pause. It prevailed and it prevailed and it prevailed more. The word here for prevailed in Hebrew means to be strong, to be mighty, to overpower. This is the language of an overwhelming force, something that cannot be argued with, something that can't be outrun or outlasted. 15 cubits. That's approximately 22 feet above the highest mountains. There was no high ground. There was no escape. The water prevailed. Verse 19 gives us the scope of the flood. It says all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens were covered. Now we discussed in the Genesis chapter 6 lesson the two primary interpretations of the flood scope, that it would either be global and regional. The language of this verse is really comprehensive as language can be. All the high mountains, everywhere, under the heavens. So whatever scope God intended, the language Moses uses describes a total comprehensive judgment of everything over the entire earth being flooded. There was no surviving community outside the ark. There were no civilizations preserved somewhere else. The pre-flood world ended, and that ending was complete. And it's here we see the most comp comprehensive statement of judgment in all of Genesis. Verse 21 through 23 describe the death of the pre-flood world. And Moses does not spare us the weight of it. When he says, All flesh that moved on the earth perished, birds and cattle and beasts of every swarming thing that swarms upon the earth, and all mankind. Not most, not the majority, but all. Everything outside the ark, everything that had the breath of life, died. And then verse 23 summarizes us with the same word used back in verse 4. Thus he blotted out every living thing, wiped clean. The pre-flood world, its people, its cities, its culture, its achievements, its violence, its corruption, all erased. And then only Noah was left together with those who were with him in the ark. Eight people in the entire world, the whole of surviving humanity, eight souls floating on a sea that used to be a civilization, a world. And I want to pause here because I think sometimes we read this narrative a little too quickly. It should really set not set well with us sometimes in thinking about the modern state that we're in. But we we move on and we look at things like how it ends with the rainbow, the covenant, the new beginning. And a lot of times we rush there. But before we get there, I want us to feel the weight of what Genesis chapter 7 is describing. Every person who was ever born in the pre-flood world, every child, every old man, every woman, every family, the builders of the first city, the inventors of music, the men of renown, the powerful and the weak, the famous and the forgotten, all of them gone. And this is the most catastrophic loss of human life in the history of the world. And it was not random. It was not an accident. It was the response of a holy, grieved, yet patient God who would warn them for 120 years. And again, we should feel the weight of this. Not because God is wrong to do what he did, but because it's the death of image bearers. Even the death of corrupt image bearers is never a small thing to God, and it shouldn't be a small thing to us. And we know this because God grieved before he sent the flood. He grieved, and then he acted, because the holiness that grieves is also the holiness that judges. Ezekiel chapter 33, verse 11 says, As I live, declares the Lord God, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that the wicked turn from his way and live. Even in Genesis chapter 7, even in the blotting out of the pre-flood world, that is still who God is. Now, let me answer a question that came up that's worth addressing. This is one of our listeners who sent me this question. Why were there no human fossils? It's a great question. And it's a question that comes up whenever we talk about the Genesis flood and the fossil record, and it's a great question, an honest question that I believe this declares uh deserves an honest and careful answer. If the flood killed all of humanity, that's how it goes. If the flood killed all of humanity, why do we not find human fossils in the same geological layers as the dinosaurs? Why do we find massive dinosaur graveyards, enormous fossil beds of marine creatures buried in stone, but relatively few human remains from the same period? Did the humans just turn to dust? Did the sea creatures eat them as they floated in the water? Those are all great questions. So let me give you a full picture of this because the answer is actually remarkable and it's consistent with the biblical account. The first reason is this human bones are not good candidates for fossilization. Fossilization is actually an extraordinarily rare process under any circumstances. For a creature to fossilize, it typically must be buried rapidly in sediment before decomposition or scavengers destroy it. Buried deeply enough for the minerals, uh for minerals to replace the organic material over time. And it has to be in a chemically suitable environment for mineral replacement to occur. Now, human bones, compared to the massive, dense bones of large dinosaurs, are relatively thin, porous, and somewhat fragile. And so they decompose far more rapidly under most environmental conditions. Just an example, the dinosaur femur, which is the size of a telephone pole, their fossils are far more readily than the human tibia, for example. And this is not a problem unique to the flood model. Even secular paleontologists note that human fossils are extraordinarily rare compared to other species, precisely because human bones are smaller and far less durable. Now, reason number two is this humans would have been the last to be buried. And I think this is a very important point. And it's directly implied by the biblical text. The flood began with the fountains of the great deep bursting open. Catastrophic flooding from below and above simultaneously. What would have been buried first? That's a great question. Well, marine creatures already in the water, caught in catastrophic sediment flows, they would have been buried. Land creatures near water, buried as water rose. In the low-lying areas. And then larger animals would be overtaken by the waters as they continue to rise. And humans? Well, humans are intelligent somewhat. They can swim, they can build rafts, temporary platforms, they can climb to higher ground. And they would have been the absolute, for the most part, absolute last creatures to be overtaken by the rising waters. And the creatures that were last to be overtaken, that were floating in the open water, were the least likely to be rapidly buried in sediment. And so rapid burial in sediment is what produces fossils. Floating in open water produces decomposition, not fossilization. So the rarity of human fossils in flood sediment layers is exactly what we would expect to find if the flood account in Genesis is accurate. Now there's a third reason. There would have been scavengers and decomposition. Human bodies floating in open water would have been consumed. Marine creatures, fish, sharks, sea dwelling scavengers would have disposed of floating human remains rapidly and completely. This is not speculation. This is what happens to bodies in water today. Without a rapid burial, no fossilization, and floating human bodies in the flood waters had almost no chance of burial at all. A fourth reason is this. It's worth noting that the picture is not entirely empty. Some human remains have been found in context consistent with the catastrophic flood burial, but they are very rare, exactly as we would expect. The rarity is the evidence. It's not the problem. A flood that buried marine creatures first and then land animals, then humans last would produce exactly the fossil distribution that we actually find. Marine creatures in abundance, land animals in great numbers in the middle layers, and then human remains rare, just in fragments, and typically found in higher sediment layers, or sometimes not at all. And Genesis chapter 7 and the fossil record are not in conflict. Actually, when you read the text carefully and think about it, uh what a what a catastrophic global flood would actually do, the evidence is very consistent. Now, the second part of that question is worth answering directly as well. Did the flood victims literally return to dust, as God said in Genesis chapter 3, verse 19? In a very real sense, yes. Whether through decomposition in open water, through being consumed by sea creatures, or through burial and eventually mineral dilution. All flesh returned to the elements from which it was formed. You are dust, and to dust you shall return. Genesis 3.19. The flood did not circumvent that sentence. It was the most comprehensive and rapid fulfillment of that in all of human history. And the theological point stands regardless of the physical mechanism. The pre-flood world, its people, its civilization, and achievements returned to dust. Because the sentence of Genesis chapter 3 is not escapable by any human ingenuity or achievement. Only the ark, only being inside of the covenant, offered escape from the penalty. And that's still true today. Now, let's move to verse 24. And for those who sent that question, thank you very much for that. Verse 24 and the 150 days, the chapter ends with a single verse of time. The water prevailed upon the earth 150 days. 150 days, five months. The water is at its peak, covering the mountains for five months. And inside the ark, you have eight people and an impossible collection of animals, waiting, trusting, with nowhere to go. Five months. And this number will become important in Genesis chapter 8, when the waters begin to recede, they do so at the same 150-day mark, because the same God who sent the flood also stops the flood. And the prevailing of the flood waters is not the end of the story. It is the pause before God remembers Noah. And the word remember, when God uses it in Genesis chapter 8, verse 1, is one of the most beautiful words in all of the Bible. But that's for the next lesson we'll talk about. We've mentioned this before, but at this point in the narrative, it's worth stating clearly. The flood narratives exist in virtually every major culture in human history. Ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Greece, India, ancient China has a myth of a great flood that covered the mountains. Indigenous American traditions of flood stories that appear over 200 Native American tribes, ancient Polynesian, African, and Australian and Aborigine traditions all contain flood narratives. And this is not coincidence. It's not cultural borrowing. It is to preserve memory in hundreds of separate cultures of real events. If a catastrophic flood destroyed the pre-flood world and all its people, except for one family, from which all subsequent humanity descended, then we would expect exactly what we find: a universal human memory of the flood preserved in oral traditions of every culture that descended from that one family. The flood narratives of the world are not evidence against Genesis. They're actually evidence for Genesis. Genesis chapter 7 describes a catastrophic, rapid, global, watery event. And if that's true, what should we expect to find in the geological record? Massive fossil beds, creatures buried rapidly in sediment before decomposition? We found that. Rock layers covering enormous areas, the kind produced by water, we found that. Evidence of water erosion or massive scales like canyons and valleys, we found that. Marine fossils found far inland and at high elevations in the highest part of the mountains, that's been discovered. Evidence of the rapid burial of animals preserved in lifelike positions, sometimes still with soft tissue, we found that. Those things all exist and you can research those, but none of these require the flood to explain them, but all of them are consistent with a catastrophic global flood. The geological record is not the enemy of Genesis chapter 7. And if you read it carefully, the geological record is actually a witness to it. Now, we do see a few major tie-ins to the New Testament as I start to try to wrap this up a little bit. The flood was the most comprehensive act of divine judgment in human history. Everything outside the ark perished, the waters prevailed. And the cross was also the most comprehensive act of divine judgment. Not on the world, but on the one who bore the world's sin. At the flood, judgment fell on a corrupt world. At the cross, judgment fell on the fell on the sinless Son of God who stood in the world's place. So Isaiah chapter 53, verse 10 says, But the Lord was pleased to crush him, putting him to grief if he would render himself as a guilt offering. The waters that prevailed in Genesis chapter 7, the the judgment of God against sin, found their ultimate answer not in the destruction of sinners, but in the bearing of sin by the sinless one. The flood closed the door on the old world. The cross opened the door to new salvation. Verse 23 ends with a phrase that becomes one of the great themes of the entire Old Testament when it says, only Noah was left, together with those that were with him in the ark. This is a remnant, just a few preserved through judgment, the small group that carries the promise forward. And this remnant theology runs for the entire Old Testament. And in the New Testament, Paul picks up on the remnant thing directly. He says in Romans chapter 11, verse 5, in the same way, then there has also come to be at the present time a remnant according to God's gracious choice. A remnant according to grace. Eight people in the ark, then a handful of prophets later, then a small band of disciples, and ultimately you and I, the church. God has never required the majority to be faithful, but he has always worked through a remnant, the few who find grace and walk through the door. Now, let's wrap this up. Genesis chapter 7, the silence ends, the waters prevailed, everything outside the ark was gone. And inside the ark, eight people floating and waiting, not knowing how long, not knowing when the waters would recede, not knowing what they would find when the door finally opened, just waiting and trusting in the God who had called them, in the God who closed the door, and the God who lifted them above the judgment. And that trust in the God who closes the door and lifts us above the waters is still the only trust that matters right now. So would you put your faith in Jesus? Next in Genesis chapter 8, we're going to look at a few several key teaching teachings. We're going to talk about God remembering Noah, the waters receding, the dove and the raven, the first sight of dry ground, the first act of worship after the flood, and a God who promises to never flood the earth again. I hope you've enjoyed this lesson. Until next time, I hope that you have a blessed day.