Land Ho!

Hey, I bet you our listeners think they know everything about the flood story.

Well, so did I. But there's some details here that I never learned in Sundays.

Well, like what?

Well, like there was another kind of bird sent out before the dove. Not just the dove? No.

Well, and how about the two by twos coming out? Oh, they came out as families. Family, someone was making babies. Let's see that and more. Today, I'm Hornet.

More than me. And yes, this is More Than Inc. I'm Jim. And I'm Dorothy. And we are reading through the book of Genesis in the Bible and trying to dispel any.

Poorly informed notions we have about the story about the flood because we are, we left, we left last time with the flood raging. I mean, it was going. Yeah.

So Noah and his family are in the boat, and things on the land are dying, and that was the end of chapter 7. Yeah, the end of chapter 7 repeats a whole bunch of times that the Lord blotted out every living thing. Right. This is a cataclysmic flood that nothing could survive. Right, right.

And, you know, later writings by Peter in both 1st and 2 Peter, he emphasizes the fact that this was because of the sin of mankind. This was a judgment. This was a worldwide judgment. And so it's pretty serious stuff. It's not just the little Sunday school affair with the giraffes and the little plastic boats.

This is a big deal. But you know, both of those passages in Peter refer to the fact that God saved Noah through the flood. And that's a big evil. Yeah.

So, I mean, that really is the emphasis that it was God's action who saved Noah. Noah, because Noah believed God. Right, right. Kind of like Abraham later on would do.

So, yeah, that's kind of the pivotal main point in the story. Yeah, and just to take the big 30,000-foot view again, you know, this is a pre-shadowing of the judgment that will come at the end of all things. I mean, there will be a worldwide judgment that no one will avoid. No one will be able to swim their way through. I mean, everyone's going to be exposed to the wrath of God at the end of time.

Well, and Jesus himself said, it'll be like the days of New York. It'll be like the day. Just before the Son of Man returns. They'll be eating and drinking and just not paying any attention to God at all. And the Son of Man will suddenly be revealed.

Yep. Yep. People will be clueless that there's impending danger, the wrath of God. Same way. But again, there is the upside, which is there is salvation.

There were, even during the day of the flood, there were eight persons. Peter says, who were brought safely through.

So that's what we're looking at.

So, this is really a prefiguring of what's going to happen at the end of the age.

So let's take a look.

So as I just said, we finished chapter 7 where the flood was raging and all the mountains are covered, the boats flopping around. And so when we turn the page into chapter 8, which we do today, We see how it comes out.

Well, yeah, and chapter seven ends with the waters prevailing on the earth for 150 days. 150 days. You do realize that's five months. Can you imagine being cooped up with all those animals in a boat? A lot of time.

Five months.

Well, actually, it turns out being a lot longer than that. But 150 days that the waters were mounting up and prevailing.

So far. That means there was stuff going on. Yeah.

Okay. Let's start reading.

Okay. Chapter 8, verse 1. Here we go. But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the livestock that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided.

The fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed. The rain from the heavens was restrained, and the waters receded from the earth continually. At the end of 150 days, the waters had abated. And in the seventh month, on the seventh day of the month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. You want to stop there?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff around. Yeah.

What I like at the outset in verse 1, God remembered Noah. It's not like he had forgotten. No.

But after 150 days, you're thinking, you know, Noah was thinking he's forgotten. Is this going to come to an end? And actually, this isn't that it finally came to his mind. This is a word that really signals a remembered covenant, a promise. Right.

And a readiness to do something about it. And to do something about it. Yeah.

And I even looked for it a little bit in the next chapter. God says, I will remember my covenant that's between me and you.

So this is really saying, you know, this is still going according to plan. This is the purpose. Right. This is a sign of a previous commitment. And so we're following through with the plan here in chapter 8.

So Noah and all the beasts were in the ark with him. And And then God reverses the flooding. Isn't that interesting? It's almost exactly a reverse of what we were told back in chapter 7, right? That the floodgates were opened.

Well, here he says that, and God closed them, right? Right, right. He just reversed the process. Right. So he made wind blow over the earth and the waters subsided.

Ah, now that's an interesting image. It reminds me of many things. It does. What does it remind you of?

Well, it reminds me actually of the beginning of creation, chapter 1, verse 2, where it says the spirit of the Lord hovered or kind of hovered over the face.

Well, the spirit and the wind are the same word. Same word. Exactly the same word.

So he was present at the creation in verse 2 of chapter 1. He's present here, reversing the flood by blowing again. It's this word ruach, which we understand is always used for spirit and always used for wind. And it's a nice simile because, and Jesus mentioned this, the wind is something that none of us can see. Right.

And yet none of us dispute its reality. Because we see what happens when it blows. We see its effects. Yeah.

So it's a nice kind of comparison into the spiritual world. We know that God is spirit. He told the woman at the well in John 4, he's spirit. Which means you can't see him, but that does not mean he's not real. I mean, he's not breathing.

Yeah, and this will come back a little bit later here.

So, when you see wind, when you see breath, when you see spirit, we're talking about something that you can't see, but it's very real and has real effects. And in this particular case, this spiritual God, he blew over the earth and the waters subsided. You know, and in kind of preparation for this new beginning, because what it made me think of, in addition to that Genesis 1 part, was when Moses led the people out of Egypt and they came to the edge of the Red Sea. Oh, yes, and the Lord, a wind arose from the Lord and blew on the water and parted the way, which they would go through out into a whole new life. It's kind of the same idea.

Same idea.

So, yeah, it's fascinating to me. As they watched the Red Sea part, they couldn't see what was doing it, but they watched the effects. They watched it happen.

So, the only way we know whether we're talking about the literal wind or the breath or the spirit. Just the context, yeah. But still, it's just a fascinating, it's a fascinating thing. I mean, I might add it's a small thing too, is the fact that not only do we exist in a sea of air that we can't see, we exist in an environment that we can't see, we also inhale it and take it into us. It's inside us and we are in it.

Right, which gives new insight into the New Testament when it talks about God's Spirit being in us. Right. Yeah, so I mean it's just really a great picture. Great upper wing picture.

Okay, let's see. We have a date. Right. This is the waters abated in the seventh month on the 17th day.

So, again, a real place, a real time, a real thing happening. And it says the ark came to rest on the mountains of Adrian. Before we leave that, you know what that made me think? You know, recently we studied through the Feasts of Israel. Right.

You know what happens on the seventh month? on the seventeenth day, You're right in the middle of Sukkot, the Feast of Booths, the last of the Feasts. And what's interesting about it is that the Feast of Booths, you know, which sort of mimics what happened when they came out of Egypt, but it always communicates that you're moving from one mode of life to another mode of life. You're coming out of something and going into something. And this is the temporary transition between those two.

So here it turns out the seventh month and 17th day, any Jew reading this would say, oh, that's just like Sukkot. That's just like Sukkot, where we're in transition in terms of our dwelling place. Oh, and that whole transitional idea, God carrying them in the ark through the flood out into a new life. Wow. Which is a temporary holding place until they get to their purpose.

I've never made that connection. I hadn't either. Thank you for that. I've never read a commentator make a point on that. Wow.

So, but a Jew who's very monthly oriented for the feast would spot this in a heartbeat. Even though this was centuries before the beginning of the law and the establishment of the people. Yeah, but it was read by people who were. Post-Torah. Yeah, so who knew this?

Okay, so I just wanted to say about the mountains of Ararat. When I was growing up, we were told it landed on Mount Ararat, right? But this is more less specific than that. This is that mountain range that actually still exists in Turkey. The mountains.

It's a region. It didn't pinpoint the exact place. It says in that region, right, where those mountains are. Yeah.

And this is, if you're looking, this is like eastern Turkey, which is also southern Russia, which is also kind of northwest Iran. We talk about Iran these days.

So it's kind of in that region right there. It's the region of the mountains there, and it's very mountainous there. Yeah.

So, ready to go on? Um yeah. And the waters, this is verse 5, and the waters continued to abate until the 10th month. And in the 10th month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen.

Okay, wait a minute.

So we were the seventh month on the 17th day, and the waters continued to get less and less and less until the 10th month on the first day of the month.

So that's a couple of months. It's about two and a half months later. Yeah.

And the tops of the mountains were seen.

So that the ark hadn't actually come to rest yet, perhaps, but they could see the mountain range. Could see the mountain range. Or maybe they were bottomed out and suddenly they could see that they were on a mountain. Yeah.

Yeah.

And at the end of 40 days, this is verse 6. Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made and sent forth a raven, and It went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth. Then he sent forth a dove from him to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground. But the dove found no place to set her foot, and she returned to him in the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole earth.

So he put out his hand and took her and brought her into the ark with him. That is such a tender picture. It's a very tender picture. Yeah, it's a very tender picture. 10.

And he waited another seven days, and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark. And the dove came back to him in the evening, and behold, in her mouth was a freshly plucked olive leaf.

So Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth. Then he waited another seven days and sent forth the dove, and she did not return to him anymore. She's landed someplace. You know, I got caught up thinking about the difference between a raven and a dove. Oh, yeah, right, right.

Because this was before there was any real establishment by the law of clean and unclean birds. But the raven shows up on the list of unclean birds. It's a scavenger. It eats dead stuff. Which is why probably Noah sent out a raven first because there would have been only dead stuff floating in the water.

Dead things floating. Yeah, lots of stuff for a raven to eat. It says, and it went to and fro, right? It came and went and came and went and came and went.

So it was finding lots to eat, but no place to shelter. Yeah, no place to land permanently. Right, right, right. But a dove is a ground feeder, a seed eater. And a dove has to be able to land on the ground in order to feed.

So I just had never really thought about it. The dove had to come back not just because there's no place to land, but because you need to eat. Nothing to eat. A dove is not a water bird. Yeah.

And you know, out of curiosity, I keep bringing up the Babylonian flood story. Oh, yeah. Gilgamesh one. I wondered. I knew that there were some, there were birds involved in the Gilgamesh Epic.

But what it does is it has a sequence where it says a dove was sent out first. That's interesting, a dove, and then a swallow was sent out, and then a raven was sent out. It's interesting, there is a dove and a raven in their story as well. But what's interesting is that the sequence is backwards. Yeah.

Sequence is backwards. And a lot of people think, well, you know, a raven is a stronger animal. You would expect it to go first, and the dove, which is the weaker, to be last, it won't come back until it finds land. But the Gilgamesh epic is the opposite, which kind of signals sort of a different kind of message. Yeah, you know, I think here probably it's the clean and the unclean because God had referenced it before with the clean and the unclean animals.

Yeah.

And we're going to see Noah making an offering of clean birds in a little bit. Yeah, that's right. And the difference between the one being a scavenger and the other one being a ground feeder. Yeah.

Well, in fact, the ground feeder, it says that when it came back in the end of verse 11, it came with a fresh. Freshly plucked olive leaf, which means this is new growth. Right. And if you think about the olive trees that have been underwater for five to six months. They're not going to be doing a lot of new growth there.

So, the fact that this, it found a leaf from a new growth means that something's out there. Olive trees are out there and they're living and they're getting sunlight and they're making new growth.

So, yeah, so this is hopeful all around. Oh, it really is. And especially when the dove finds some place to light permanently and it's gone after two weeks. Yeah.

Yeah, that's pretty cool. Pretty cool.

Well, you want to move on? I think we probably should.

Well, I might add this for a second.

So, Noah wants to know when the land, in a sense, is emerged and how it is. And when it can come out. Yeah.

Yeah.

But. He doesn't take any action based on this bird's information. No.

Which you'll notice. It's just, in fact, he does not come out, and we'll see in a second until God says you can come out.

So I find it fascinating that if he's trying to strategize when to come out of the boat, this information is just a sign of hope. It's not necessarily a sign of instruction. It's like we're getting close.

So it's the kind of thing he could tell people in the boat, you know what? We're getting close to coming out because look at this.

So I see it more as a gracious sign of encouragement from God to those inside saying, This is coming to an end. There is new life coming. Yeah.

But it's not an instruction saying, okay, get out of the boat. Right. Yeah.

Yeah.

So I just wanted to point that out. Because normally when we're in situations like that, we take that information and say, so here's our plan now. He doesn't make any plan now. He just, they're just encouraged by the news. Yeah.

Well, I had another thought too, just quickly, and that is that Noah was exhibiting such care for this. Of and he had clearly been caring for all the other animals all along, which was God's initial assignment to Adam, right? Steward the creation. And so he waits another seven days before he lets her go out again, like to make sure that she's going to find conditions that are right for her to survive in the natural world again.

Well, rested and well-fed. The whole thing just speaks to me of tender care. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And this is an animal he's been caring for inside the boat. Right. So this is a friend in a way. Yeah.

Okay, let's go to verse 13. Verse 13. In the 601st year.

So Noah has had a birthday.

Well, he's had a birthday. Because remember, he was 600 years. Right. 601st year. In the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried from off the earth.

And Noah removed the covering of the ark and looked, and behold, the face of the ground was dry. Verse 14, but he still doesn't go out. Verse 14. Not yet. In the second month, on the 27th day of the month, the earth had dried out.

Then God said to Noah, Go out from the ark, you and your wife and your sons and your sons' wives with you. Bring out with you every living thing that is with you, of all flesh, birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, that they may swarm on the earth and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.

So Noah went out, and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives with him. Every beast, every creeping thing, and every bird and everything that moves on the earth went out by families from the ark.

Now, I just noticed that going out by families. Families. When they went in, they went according to their kind and they went in pairs. But when they come out five, six, seven months later or longer, they come out. And this is an interesting word.

I just looked it up. It's the word that's used for clans, like a circle of relatives.

So clearly, Animals had multiplied, yeah, in there. Then they're coming out with their young. And some of them with longer gestations might have been pregnant when they came on, right?

Well, that's probably true. Yeah, so yeah, it's kind of cool. And they didn't come out in pairs, they came out in families, which is just again really hopeful because they had been in there a long time.

Now, I looked at a chart earlier today that added up all the days and said they were in there about 370 days. About a year. That's a long time. That's long enough for most animals to gestate and give birth. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and probably the ark is getting a little crowded. Crowded and stinky.

So we need to get out of the boat. Yeah.

There's what looks like kind of a, it's a, it's not a conflict, but if you go back to verse 13, you know, the waters were dried from off the earth in 13, and then they're dried out at the end of 14. And that caused me some. Curiosity, and this is what you do in your Bible study. Did it, is that the same word? It's not the same word.

The first word, dried, means sort of dry, like drying. The last word means completely dry. Right. So, so verse 13 signals that it was drying, and 14 says it was done dry. Right.

Yeah.

That was not no longer ankle-deep mud. Right, right. So, in that almost two months, there, it went from drying, like I can see dry ground, but it's probably mud. And now it's not flooded ground. And now, and now it's not flooded ground.

And you can walk on it if you're an elephant and not sink up to your knees. Yeah.

So, that's really important. It's got to be really sturdy for the heavier animals.

So, that in Bible study, when you see that, you go, that seems like a conflict. He mentioned it twice. Did it dry up in 13 or 14?

Well, the answer is yes. It started in 13 and it completed in 14. And you can tell that if you have a Bible concordance, you'll look up the two words, find it's two completely different things. That's really helpful. That helps us resolve a lot of things that cause us problems.

Many times. To look up the words. But you know, something else struck me in this passage, and that was that God, when he tells them to come out, he says, Be fruitful and multiply on the earth. That sounds familiar. That's exactly the same thing he had said originally in Genesis 1.

Yes, Genesis 1:28, he says exactly that. Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. And then he goes on about having domination over everything there.

So, I mean, it's like, it's like as a start, it's a do-over. It's a start. It's a do-over from the original creation in Genesis 1:28. Only this time, these have been animals that have been nurtured and cared for by the man through whom God was going to start over. Yes.

Right. Which, like I said before, had been Adam's original assignment. It's just very parallel. Very parallel. Yeah.

You could almost say that Noah was the second Adam.

However, Paul says that Jesus was the same. That's right.

So we can't really say that. But there's just a lot of types going on here. That's what I'm saying. Yeah.

Well, let's. Yeah, we need to press on and read the end.

Okay, so starting in verse 20. Then. Noah built an altar to the Lord, And took some of every clean animal, and some of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And when the LORD smelled the pleasing aroma, the LORD said in his heart, I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature, as I have done.

While the earth remains, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease. Yeah, and that last phrase is considered a poem by many. It is. It feels like a poem. It feels like a poem.

Well, even in English, it feels like a poem. Yeah, and his whole point at the end of that there was that the way things are on earth now, they're going to stay like that. God's not going to mess with them, even though man remains terribly bent by sin. Isn't that astonishing? The contrast there that in spite of the wickedness of man, God.

God's grace and faithfulness will continue while the earth exists. Right. Which kind of implies maybe the earth is temporary.

Well, until the end where there's a new heaven to the day of the earth, which is the seed, the big judgment still to come, that this kind of foreshadows. Yeah.

So God's saying, I'm not going to curse, I'm not going to curse the ground. In fact, that caused me to be curious too.

Okay, me too.

So go ahead. What did you find?

Well, you would think that he's reversing the curse of Genesis 3:17. He's not. And he's not. He is not. And in fact, the word for curse in 3:17 is different from the curse here.

So that's one big clue that something else is going on. And you know what? I also found out, and this was, I've never seen this before, is that you can see these two different words for curse side by side in a very famous phrase about Abraham in Genesis 12:30. I was just thinking that very thing. Where he says, I will bless this.

Is God talking about Abraham? I will bless. Will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors, that's the kalal word, curse here, that you, whoever cursed you, I will curse them. The other curse word.

So basically, what it's saying is the first word, kalal, means kind of a dishonoring, means kind of a think bad of. Disregard or to show contempt for. Right. But the second word, I will curse, which was the original Genesis 3:17, is a word that means kind of anti-blessing. Right.

Well, they are destined for trouble. I will condemn them. You are headed for trouble. You are not headed for blessing anymore. Yeah, that's exactly right.

So that's not the kind of curse that God says. I never again do that to the ground. Right. Because it's already been done. Right.

But in this total disregard for the earth when flooding and destroying everything, he says, I'm not going to do that anymore. You're not going to do that again.

Now, there have been many localized floods that are terrific and horrible, but never again every living thing wiped out. Right. Until the end. Until the very end. And then we have, instead of a flood, Peter says we have a fire.

Yeah.

Oh, we need to back up to the altar.

Okay, go back. Because we've only got two or three minutes. Do the altar, because that's a fascinating thing. And this actually is the first occurrence of the word altar in the scripture.

So, what is an altar, right? It is a place of worship and sacrifice. Right. A dedicated, set-aside place to meet with God that requires or that is dedicated to sacrifice. And now, the idea of sacrifice had been around from the very beginning.

But this is the first time we have Noah fresh off the boat, establishing an altar, intending clearly to do sacrifice right away, but probably to continue to sacrifice there. And the word here for sacrifice is ola. It's a whole burnt offering that signifies the whole surrender of the heart of the worshipper. It's not just, oh, I hope this is enough to appease you. Right.

This sacrifice represents a heart. The physical thing. Holy me. Yeah.

In fact, there's a clue of it again, too. Remember, I said that rock, spirit, and wind are the same thing.

Well, here you have wind smelling. Right. You're smelling. And when you smell something, you have the assurance that something exists without ever seeing it or touching it.

So, again, we're back to the spiritual sense of all this.

So, when the Lord smells a pleasing aroma, although that's kind of an anthropomorphic kind of thing, what he's saying is that in a spiritual sense, he is sensing something about the heart of Noah. You know, we're back in the spiritual realm. That's what this is all about.

So, even the physical sacrifice is a physical representation of a gratefulness and a worship coming from his heart. And so, that's what we need to see.

So, here we have for the first sign of the fact that even though man is continually, the intention of fire is continually evil, there's sacrifice and there's still redemption on God. God's part of a fallen mankind. Right. Right. And the fallen nature came through the flood.

Exactly. Right. Noah. The heart of man really has not changed. It has not changed.

And Noah's heart is continuing to be faithful as he always had been. We're going to run out of time here, but I want to make sure that we touch on Hebrews 11:7, because Noah is mentioned a handful of times in the New Testament, and we referenced the earlier ones. But let's read this one because the writer of the Hebrews says, by faith, Noah, being warned by God about things not yet seen, in reverence prepared an ark for the salvation of his household, by which he condemned the world, and became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith. Faith, faith, faith. The righteousness of believing God, even though he couldn't see him.

And that's what was attributed later to Abraham. Exactly. He believed. He embraced what he believed. He embraced God's solution for being saved through the wrath of God.

And then he took action as a result. And that's the formula for faith. You believe, you have faith, you trust, you act. And here, his offer of a sacrifice is again an act of faith, offering his whole self. This animal represents his own heart, and God senses that.

So don't overlook the spiritual aspect of the sacrifice. It's actually an outward action of a changed heart, a grateful heart, a heart that knows that were it not for God, we would all be dead. Salvation comes only from him.

So, anyway, I'm Jim. And I'm Dorothy. And we hope to come back next time. And next time, we're going to look at the rainbow. Right.

And I think you're going to find a very surprising interpretation of what the rainbow means. We're going to see that next time here on More Than Inc. There are many more episodes of this broadcast to be found at our website, morethanink.org. And while you are there, take a moment to drop us a note. Wow, five months in the ark.

It's pretty clear they were not going to survive that flood without the ark. Yeah, and like Peter says in 2 Peter, the Lord knows how to rescue the godly. Yeah, he sure does. Join us next time. We'll see you here.

Bye. This has been a production of Main Street Church of Brigham City.