Genesis #09 Ch. 6:15-9:19 Noah's Ark - a New Beginning — Chuck Missler

Genesis 7–9: The Flood’s Purpose and Noah’s Deliverance

This is the ninth study in the book of Genesis conducted by Chuck Missler. The subject of this tape, Genesis chapter 7 through chapter 9, verse 19.

Let's open with a word of thanksgiving for this fellowship. This is fun. Father, we just praise you for the privilege of gathering together in the name of Jesus Christ. We thank you, Father, for your word, for the opportunity to explore the book of Genesis.

We thank you, Father, for the promises that you've given us here, for the instruction that you've given us here, and for the lessons that you have here for our learning. Father, we would ask this evening that you would just open our hearts and minds that we might behold those things which you have placed here for our special use.

And, Father, we would just ask you to send the Holy Spirit that we might more fully comprehend Jesus Christ, for we know that above all these issues, that is what you would have manifested and what you would have us take away from this evening.

And, Father, we just commit ourselves afresh to your study, asking you for an increased appetite and increased hunger for the bread of life. In whose name we pray. Amen. You know, there's so much, so much that we could tackle as subject matter on the flood.

From the bibliography that was passed out, there's just a number of references in the bibliography on the flood itself. I mentioned last time, brought the little short paperback by James Whitcomb on The Earth That Perished, a little updating of a nice little book.

But if you're really a serious student of the flood, there's a book by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb on the Genesis flood. And it's the kind of book, you may have the same reaction to that book that the little girl did that had to give the book report in school.

And she got up before the class and held up her little book and said, this is a book about penguins. It's really a very nice book about penguins. It only has one problem. It really tells you more about penguins than you wanted to know.

Some of you would quickly find some of the scholarship and technical detail that Whitcomb and Morris have assembled in the book on Genesis Flood, maybe more than your diet for reading would want to absorb.

And we'll touch on some of these things. And as you know, my inclination being basically a technologist is to plunge into that and get into all the speculations, just exactly how long a cubit was. It's roughly 18 inches, give or take four to six inches, depending on what authorities.

And there's dozens of them, but they're in the range of roughly a foot and a half to two feet. But within that spectrum, you can generate all different kinds of guesses as to just how big the arc was.

It's nominally the size of the Titanic. That's probably a bad example to use. But then again, the Titanic was built by man, right? Noah had special help in the sense of the Lord designing it. And it displaced somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 ,000 to 20 ,000 tons, which is a big boat.

And we could get into all of that. What's really fascinating is the libraries are full of books attacking the concept of the Genesis Flood and the concept of the boat. Most of the skeptics point out that it's ridiculous to assume that one could put all of the animals on the earth into a boat.

Now, they don't know how many animals are in the world at that time. They don't know how big the boat was. But other than that, they've come to the conclusion it wasn't possible, all of which, of course, is ridiculous, because indeed it really happened.

And that's really... We'll touch upon that tonight. But one of the things that I'll try to do is not get distracted in too much of the technical detail, because first of all, it's mostly in the area of speculation, our attempt to infer things.

And it isn't the issue. It isn't the issue. The issue is why God sent the flood. That's the issue. And the fact that God did, and the fact that God provided supernatural deliverance for a very, very small number of people.

Okay? So, let's... We're going to overlap a little bit from last time, but just to get us back into perspective. Last time, we talked about the... Primarily focused on the conditions prior to the flood.

The anti-Diluvian, or pre-flood civilization. And it was bad news. It read very similar to your daily LA Times. Okay? Enough said on both counts. It's interesting, and I think we emphasized this, but in trying to reflect on it during the week, one of the main thoughts that haunts me about the whole program is that Enoch, who spent his entire life preaching, apparently, I mean most of it, because his son was named Bethuselah prophetically.

We talked about that several times. And he preached, and he preached, and he preached, and he preached, right? In fact, the content of his sermon was the second coming of Jesus Christ. You know that, from Jude 14, 15.

We covered that. And on the heels of his preaching comes one Noah. And what did Noah do? He preached repentance. You know the awesome thing is, is that not one person repented? In the 120 years that were specifically set out for Noah's specific ministry, just taking the tail end of the last 120 years.

And to put that in perspective, that's as half as what? How long has the United States been a government? 200 years? So in terms that we would consider as rather monumental, Noah's dedication and commitment did not result in one person of that entire civilization repenting.

It's a heavy trip. It's a heavy trip. And one of the things that, and I think we covered this whole business of Enoch being a type of the church being raptured. I assume we did that. His being translated was by, one of the things I don't think we did point out, but I'd like to highlight to you as we contemplate Enoch and his being raptured or caught away, is that it was by faith.

And we miss that in Genesis, but we pick it up in Hebrews. Enoch is in the 11th chapter of Hebrews. By faith he was taken. So those of you that are pre-tribulation nuts like myself might find that interesting.

In other words, it was his faith that caused him to be translated. Or raptured if you prefer the Latin-based jargonese here. Another verse that I'm very fond of is out of Amos chapter 3 verse 7 where he promises that surely the Lord will do nothing without revealing his secret unto his servants the prophets.

Now that's a very, very interesting verse because most of us in this study I suspect are students of prophecy. Our interest, I think, in this book is not because of our interest in fossils or our interest in evolution or the rebuttals thereto.

The presumption that I've made in all the studies that we've taken is that we are basically attacking the book or studying the book from the point of view of prophecy. And I think it's very, very interesting that in God's word he points out that surely the Lord does nothing without revealing his secret unto his servants the prophets.

Now that's interesting. That occurred in the case of Enoch. It's occurred in the case of Noah. And certainly occurred in the case of Jonah. In fact, Jonah was even upset because his ministry bore fruit.

I don't know how many ministers have the attitude Jonah does. But I find Jonah interesting. We find it in the case of Abraham. We find it in the case of Jonah. We find it in the case of Israel in general.

Everything that God did and is doing and will do involving the nation Israel has been laid out ahead of time. And also, of course, with Jesus Christ. Remember Jesus Christ the night he was betrayed in John 14, 15 and so forth?

That very important sequence of chapters in his last intimate evening with his disciples. He says, you've been my servants henceforth ye are my friends. And he reveals to them what he's going to do and what he's up to and what might have been lacking there is completed in his unique revelation in the book of Revelation.

And I suggest that's also true of us. One of the reasons we're assembled here tonight is our involvement in effect in 1 Thessalonians 5. In that we are children of the day, not of the night, lest that day overtake you as a thief.

Paul's whole point in 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, right on the heels of 1 Thessalonians 4, which has the rapture passage. It ends, that chapter ends, wherefore one another comfort ye, one another with these words.

It's chapter 5. The essence of it is that yet, no, of course we don't know the day nor the hour, but we do know the times or the seasons. It's his intention that we are and should be aware of what he's doing.

And that's the interest that we should have in Genesis, the Genesis flood, in the prophetic sense and in the sense of the issues he's putting before us. So it's the reasons for the flood, the purpose for the flood, the things that the flood accomplished that we should really focus on.

Okay, probably the best thing to do is just jump in and then we will back off. After going through it, we'll back up a little bit and try to put it in perspective. Let's jump in. Does anyone remember the exact verse we finished on?

Verse 1, probably? Okay, Genesis chapter 6. Let's just jump ahead here, or jump back. Genesis 6, verse 1. It came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair, and they took them wives of all whom they chose.

And we talked about the various theories of that last time. And as you've figured out, I tend, I lean to what's sometimes scholastically called the Romantic school or the Mystical school as to the view of that passage, justifying my views basically on Peter and Jude, and we covered that last time.

Although there are, as I think I was faithful in reporting to, there are different alternate views to that. And the Lord said, My spirit will not always strive with man, for he also is flesh, yet his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.

This is sort of an ultimatum. This is an ultimatum. There were giants in the earth in those days, and also after that. And the also after that probably refers to the period of the conquest. When Joshua addresses the land, the devil had his brood waiting for him.

So the concept of the Nephilim, the fallen ones, which in the Septuagint the word was used instead of the Hebrew Nephilim, it was used the Greek gigantus, which, from which we mean giants. The concept of giants is consistent with what we know about the Amalekites and some of these strange tribes and the Goliath kind of thing.

But the word actually comes from the Hebrew word being the fallen ones. And again, I said, I think we probably walked that whole subject pretty hard last time. But in any case, the also after that, meaning after the flood.

When the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children of them, and the same became the mighty men who were of old and men of renown. Now incidentally, the only reason I wanted to get at that prophecy aspect of it is that we associate that whole mysterious spooky thing with Genesis 6 and the pre-flood condition.

We sometimes might not be sensitive to the fact that same problem, apparently on a smaller scale, but a significant scale, occurred after the flood. And that was what the children of Israel were faced with in conquering the land.

And if you remember our study in the book of Joshua, bear in mind we have Joshua taking over the command from Moses. None of that first generation went into the land because of their unbelief at Kiddush Barnea by not believing the two spies that brought the good report.

So only the two spies, Joshua and Caleb, went into the land. The rest died off. The children, as a result of the 40 years of wilderness, went into the land under a plan of military conquest, which violated almost every one of God's laws.

The ark led the procession. The priests led the procession. If you study every detail of the conquest of the land, it raises more questions than it answers. And it only begins to take perspective when you recognize that what's being staged there is a model of the book of Revelation, with one Yehoshua as a military commander leading his people to gain their inheritance, to dispossess the usurpers.

And in Joshua chapter 5 we find that the real leader of the battle of Jericho is none other than Jesus Christ. And the procedures by which they take Jericho are very strange, but form a structural model of the book of Revelation.

It sends in two witnesses in advance. And we have seven cycles of trumpets. And even to the business of being faced with seven nations that they're attempting to face. And they're being led by a king by the name of Adonai Zedek, Lord of Righteousness, the type of the Antichrist.

And they defeat him at the Battle of Beth Horn by signs in the sun and the moon and the stars. And the kings go in the caves and cry, you know, rocks fall on us and so forth. There's a whole bunch of ways that the book of Joshua models the book of Revelation.

I commend that study to you, the Joshua study. The tapes are available through the regular sources, either the lending library or through the tape ministries here or the Firefighters for Christ. They're available.

They can be made available to you free of charge. The point is, though, that the interesting thing, just to tie that together for those of you that have been with us through the Joshua study and the Revelation study, is that Joshua and his armies were facing Nephilim in the land.

And Jesus does provide a basis for a parallel here by pointing out as the days of Noah were social, the coming of the Son of Man be, some of the kinds of things that may be extant upon the earth in his second coming might be far more bizarre than classical scholars have any imagination of.

And I think that's all we need to say on that. I think it's so. Let's move on. Okay. And sons of God came into the daughters of men and bore in the children of them. The same became the mighty men who were of old but And God saw that the wickedness of man was great upon the earth and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth and that it grieved him at his heart. Now, the word repent here shouldn't throw you. God doesn't change his mind. He changes not. It's a sense, a figure of speech in the sense to communicate the grief that he felt at the result.

So I don't know. A lot of people make a big thing of that as if it's some kind of big contradiction. I think the intent of the passage is clear. The attitude God has towards that civilization is clear.

It should be. It's never been a stumbling block for me, so it's hard for me to deal with it. The Lord said, I will destroy a man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast. By the way, that's Mr. and Mrs. Man.

Incidentally, the generations of Adam back there in verse two of chapter five, male and female created he them. It's interesting that he always sees woman in Adam, in man. There's a thing that we, I think, talked about in Genesis three, but you should always keep that in mind as we go here.

But in any case, let me not get sidetracked on that. Let me try to make it tonight. I will destroy a man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, and the creeping thing and the fowls of the air, for it repenteth me that I have made them.

But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. First occasion of the word grace in the scripture. These are the generations of Noah. The word Noah means what? Rest. Good. Okay. Great. Noah was a just man.

What that means is, we know from Romans three, is that he was a justified man. Doesn't mean he didn't do anything wrong. It means he was justified. How was he justified? Romans tells us. By what? By faith.

Good. And perfect in his generations, and I think we covered that in terms of his line, if you accept the view that I mentioned earlier, that he was uncorrupted by this non-humanistic strain in mankind.

And Noah walked with God. Now it's interesting with both Enoch and Noah. They walked with God. And you might notice that it wasn't a casual stroll. It was a long-term commitment. Okay. And Noah begot three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

Not necessarily in that order. Now it's no big deal here, but it will be later when we talk about Abraham. The order they're mentioned are not necessarily the order they're born in. They're ordered in the order, sometimes, for some other purpose.

The twelve sons of Jacob are enumerated, I think, on ten occasions in the scripture, and they're always in a different order. And the order is always significant, for the purpose of the hand. So just be sensitive to that.

There's no big issue having to do with Shem, Ham, and Japheth. There will be an issue later. The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And by the way, just already, do you get the sense that this is a local problem?

That Noah and his bunch lived in the bad neighborhood? There's a lot of discussion about the flood as being a local phenomenon. The skeptics attack the concept of a worldwide flood, and well-meaning evangelical Christians somehow feel their position is strengthened by acknowledging that, well, maybe the flood was a local affair.

And that raises more problems than it solves. And we'll get at those later. But I mean, just even in the thrust of the passage, I think it's very, very difficult to get sort of a, you know, a localized view of what's going on.

Verse 13, And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me, for the earth is filled with violence through them. And behold, I will destroy them with the earth, make thee an ark of gopher wood.

And as I think I mentioned to you, we're not sure what gopher means. It sounds like it's the same root from coffer and all that. The concept of wood in the tabernacle was to speak of humanity. There was shit in wood, I believe.

But the point is that in the tabernacle, we use gold for everything in the tabernacle pointed to Jesus Christ. We've covered that before. It's a fascinating study if you haven't done it. The materials by which things are made, the dimensionality, their placement, every detail of the tabernacle speaks of one thing, Jesus Christ in some way.

But some of the things were gold, pure gold, speaking of his deity. Other things were wood overlaid with gold, speaking of the incarnation, wood having been alive. Okay. And speaking of his humanity, gold speaking of his deity, silver speaking of the blood, the whole thing rested on silver sockets.

Silver was the redemption tax. And even Judas is true to the model when he throws this 30 pieces of silver, the price of blood on the thing. He says, behold, I betrayed innocent. Silver, no blood. The silver, the equation of silver and blood Levitically is consistent throughout the scripture.

Anyway, even here with the ark, the emphasis on the wood, the fact that it's pitched, the word pitch is the Hebrew word coffer, which everywhere, everywhere except in this chapter is translated atonement.

And anyway, so we begin to get a hint right away that this ark did not only physically provide for the protection and sustenance or the taking care of the deliverance of Noah and his seven charges, his wife, his three sons and their wives, four guys and four gals through the flood, but it also is there for some other purposes.

Book of Romans, I think it's chapter, what is it? 15, four says whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning that we through the patience and the comfort and the comfort of the scripture might have what hope.

That's a prophecy term, by the way, hope, a blessed hope. So we must be tuned to that more so than whether or not Navarra saw the ark at Ararat and whether the Russian aviators in 1916 did or did not really see what we think is the ark or the fact that it's been spotted from the satellites and all that stuff.

We'll get a little of that. But I think what's more valuable to us rather than get into this this archaeological excitement that surrounds the ark is to focus on it spiritually. Anyway, make thee an ark of gopher wood, rooms shalt thou make in the ark, by the way the words actually nests, but that's fine, and and and shalt pitch it within and without, both sides, inside and outside with pitch.

Pitching on the inside doesn't do a lot for water tightness. It does do a lot for preserving the thing. Preserving the thing. Now it is going to be used for 371 days, but I can't sense whether that would require pitching it or not.

From the people who appear to have seen it, they say it looks like shellac. It's a some kind of a and this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of. The length of it shall be 300 cubits and the breadth of it 50 cubits and the height of it 30 cubits.

And as Bill Cosby is immortalized, what's a cubit, right? A window, incidentally for your own rough guess, without boring you all evening with the details of what a cubit probably was, there's an Egyptian cubit, a Pavilionian cubit, several different Hebrew cubits and so forth.

It was conceptually the length, tip of the elbow, the tip of the finger, but that depended who you're talking about, right? And so anyway, the net of it is is that it's if you use in your own mind's eye 18 inches, you're not far off from whatever scholarly tradition you come from.

And it goes as high as, I think, 22 or 24 inches and it's as small as 13 or 14 inches. And in that range, you can pick a lot of different standards and there's all kinds of dry and dusty footnotes you can track through if you're really excited about that subject.

We'll pray for you. Yes. So, but it's a good sized barge. Now, a couple of other things we could spend, I'm a Naval Academy graduate, so I could, you think I could bore you with some of the stuff, I could really bore you with naval architecture.

I will tell you, I will tell you that a one in six ratio turns out to be ideal. It's very, has the stability characteristics of this dimensionality is, there's instantly books written on the stability implications of this boat, recognizing it's not a boat.

It's not a boat. It is not intended to provide motion. It's a barge. It's a float. It's a, it's a barge. And it's called an arc. There are three words, there are three arcs in the scripture. This is the first one we run into, right?

There is another arc that we run into that, it was in, you know, folk picks out of the river, right? I'm being facetious from the Ten Commandments movie, but the one that Moses was in, right? In which he also is put in an arc and preserved from a judgment.

And then, of course, is the arc of the covenant, as we call it, the arc of testimony, which is a container that was used prominently in the tabernacle affairs. Now, the word arc, believe it or not, in Genesis chapter 50, verse 26, is translated coffin.

So while the word arc here carries the concept of a barge or protective float, floating shelter, it also suggests death. If you were a linguist and sensitive to the roots, it is, it is, it suggests death.

Whose death would this arc suggest? Could not know us, it caused him to live. By whose death does Noah live? Jesus Christ. Incidentally, it's always, and I think this is a rule you can apply in your own Bible study, it never hurts to try the idea on of putting Jesus Christ modeled in the middle of it and see what happens.

And I want to suggest to you before the evening's over that the arc is a type of Jesus Christ. God is already inside the arc. He says come when they go in. The whole idiomatic use of the arc is going to be instructive to us.

Far more instructive, I think, than worrying about whether or not it did break in half in the landslide up in Ararat and all of that. There's a lot of, well, I mean, in fact, let me at this point stop, since I've touched upon that, and dismiss just to make a few remarks.

The existence of the arc, the physical existence in a secular historical sense of the arc on Ararat is recorded hundreds of years before Christ in the Babylonian records. I've forgotten the name, I forgot to jot this all down, by a king who makes reference to the fact that the arc can be spotted in the mountains in Armenia.

And this tradition is carried through by, I think, half a dozen of the ancient Babylonian, Greek, and Hebrew scholars, all the way into the days of Josephus. They make reference of the existence of the arc.

Now, this doesn't mean a lot to a cynical scholar, because they're just historical references that may or may not have, it certainly is a historical tradition. The arc is referenced by Marco Polo in the 1300s.

Now, whether he actually saw it, or whether he just, you know, trafficked in tales of other caravans, obviously we have no way of knowing. But there are references to the arc, all the way into relatively recent times.

And one of the most famous sightings was by a Russian in 1916, the result of which the Tsar commissioned an expedition, only to be unseated in the Russian Revolution, and that all fell apart. But the Russian aviator did report his findings, and caused a lot of stir at the time, and it's been often quoted in some of these books.

And on it goes, there are stories of eyewitness accounts, and what I really recommend you do, you're either not interested in all of that, or you're intensely interested in that, I strongly recommend you get one of the several good books, in most of the Christian bookstores, on the arc.

And they will recount for you, first of all, the history of the various proposed sightings, the so-called, I'll put it that way, because it's all hearsay evidence, of eyewitness accounts. The account, and I meant to write his name down, but that died in 1960, when he, as a young boy, with his grandfather, claims to have climbed it, and describes it.

There have been expeditions, some of which have actually brought pieces back, and subjected them to some tests. There's been, so there was a major expedition planned in 71, with laser equipment and others, to get through the ice, and the Russian government managed to put pressure on the Turkish government to prevent it, which makes you wonder what they're afraid of.

And so you will find a continuing archaeological interest in attempting to more fully establish the presence of the arc on a mountain called Ararat in Armenia. Ararat actually means elevated or holy mountain.

It actually is a range of mountains, but there's a great deal of evidence, not free of controversy, but a great deal of evidence that they've found the exact one. There's also evidence from a satellite reconnaissance that they think they've spotted it, and there's a great deal of interest, of course, to try to track it down.

I have some very peculiar views on that. I think the whole gist of the arc story in the Bible obviously rests on the proposition that God was providing providentially, supernaturally for Noah, right? So that says that God could have dropped that arc anywhere he wanted to.

There wasn't anything accidental about where it landed on Ararat. Now that happens to be 16 ,946 feet above sea level, and if you're trying to land Noah in a reasonable place, you and I wouldn't exactly pick a 17 ,000-foot altitude unless you really want oxygen bottles for all of them, and what have you.

Our human knowledge would say, gee, wouldn't it be more practical to drop him down in an ice-green valley and let him cannibalize the shelter for a start, and so forth? But God didn't do that. He put it at the top of Ararat, and Ararat turns out to be an ice most of the time.

It turns out to be one of the most geodetically unstable places on the planet earth, and it's also at an altitude that forced Noah and his entourage to seek lower altitudes, leaving it intact. So that says to me, and I'm assuming that I take the basic approach to that, not the approach of the skeptic, but rather the one of a believer, that God had a purpose.

That's not by accident. I don't think any God does anything by accident, so why did he put it up there? And why is it in such a place that it almost defies access by man, even with today's modern technology?

It is so tough to get at, and most of the year it's under ice, so it's been spotted by explorers under the ice, but they can't get at it. Why? And the presumption is, my personal presumption, not alone, but I'll just put it that way to avoid getting into big controversies, my personal presumption is the ark is there for another purpose.

That ark, which stood in Noah's driveway for 120 years, as a testimony to the unbelieving world, I think will again emerge in God's own time as a testimony to an unbelieving world of another judgment coming.

And one of the evidences I have or feel is there is this idea of pitching it within and without, because there's no real reason to pitch the ark from the inside if you're building a boat, unless you have another purpose.

You certainly don't pitch on the inside to keep the water from leaking out. I don't think, I haven't really. So I have a feeling this whole business of the ark is not just a casual archaeological search.

I think the ark will be tractable to discovery in a more manifested way in God's own appointed time. And someday, one of these days when you open the daily newspaper and you discover that Expedition XYZ has finally made it, and by the way here's a floor plan of it, we have very interesting descriptions of the ark.

It's in three floors and some rooms are very, very large, more than large enough for an oversized elephant. Others are very small bars. All this has been described by people who claim to have been aboard at various times in history.

But the point is that obviously you can't help but think that wouldn't it be interesting to have the ark accessible to ABC News or something right now. And the real question is why? What purpose would it serve?

You sort of have the conclusion you and I jump to erroneously is that would cause people to believe. Wrong. Wrong. Remember the rich man in Lazarus? Remember? Rich man answered, gee if somebody could just come back from the dead that would convince everybody.

And he had his answer. They've had the prophets and so forth. And even after that parable, Jesus interestingly enough raised one from the dead and his name happened to be Lazarus. Did that convince anybody?

No, the concept of believing is not an intellectual process. It's a supernatural process. It has nothing to do with reason. But God will use it, I think, the same way he used Noah's ark to condemn an unbelieving world.

That time will come. Anyway, we got down to verse 16 before we got this distraction. A window shalt thou make to the ark and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above. Now most of us, because of the little Sunday school picture books, visualize that as a little square, you know, 18 inch square window, which isn't a lot of air circulation for that bunch, okay?

And in fact, the descriptions of the eyewitness accounts, all are similar. That's what makes them, increases their credibility, by the way, because a number of different independent records of visiting them, visiting the site where the ark is, describes it as a window, it's 18 inches high, going the whole length of it, as sort of an open, unfinished eve, if you will, where you can get air circulation.

So it's 18 inches high, but it's a little square. But like an open eve all the way along the edge. And the artist's sketches of the, from these witness accounts is in these books, and you can track that down.

The door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof, with the lower second and third story shalt thou make it. And behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life from under heaven, and everything that is in the earth shall die.

But with thee will I establish my covenant, and thou shalt come into the ark, thou and thy sons and thy wife and thy sons' wives with thee. And of every living thing, of all flesh, two of every sort, shalt thou bring into the ark to keep them alive with thee.

They shall be male and female. Of the fowls after their kind, and of the cattle after their kind, and of every creeping thing of the earth after its kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee to keep them alive.

And thou shalt take unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee, and it shall be food for thee and for them. Thus did Noah, according to all that God commanded, so did he. Now we're going to find out as we get into this a little more, that he just didn't bring two of each.

He brought seven of certain kinds. And that's apparently for sacrificial reasons and other reasons. And so the two by two is a basic rule. He amplifies that a little more in a little bit. It might be useful, I think, to just continue the narrative and then back up and overview it.

Noah’s Ark as a Type of Christ

Chapter 7, verse 1. And the Lord said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house unto the ark, for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation. Do you notice how he's righteous? God sees him as righteous, because he's wearing, if you'll excuse it, maybe a poor pun, Christ-colored glasses.