Genesis 7:1-12

“Then the Lord said to Noah, ‘Come into the ark, you and all your household, because I have seen that you are righteous before Me in this generation. ² You shall take with you seven each of every clean animal, a male and his female; two each of animals that are unclean, a male and his female; ³ also seven each of birds of the air, male and female, to keep the species alive on the face of all the earth. ⁴ For after seven more days I will cause it to rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and I will destroy from the face of the earth all living things that I have made.’

⁵ And Noah did according to all that the Lord commanded him. 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.”

Last week, we began to take a look at the pictures of Jesus in the Old Testament, and our intent is to show that the entire Bible is about Jesus. There continues to be this heresy among too many who call themselves Christians, and sadly, many preachers who say that either the Old Testament is not relevant to modern Christianity or that the Jesus we see in the New Testament is not the same as the God of the Old Testament. But in Hebrews 13:8, we see that Paul tells us that Jesus is the same, “yesterday, today and forever.”

In John 5:46, Jesus says this, “For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote about Me.” That means that the Torah, Genesis through Deuteronomy, written by Moses, is about Jesus. There are stories and pictures in these writings that picture and tell us about Jesus.

Just this morning I was reading in Isaiah 9, and there we see in verse 2, the prophecy of Jesus being a great light to the people in Galilee, and He fulfilled that in Matthew 4:16. In Isaiah 11:1-4, Jesus is the Branch that will come from the line of Jesse, King David’s line, and that He will be righteous judge. We can go on and on, but I hope that you are seeing the picture here.

Today, we will look at a very familiar story, the flood. Now we understand what is happening here, and the people on earth are just evil. All of men’s thoughts are evil all the time. Genesis 6:5, “Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”

It seems that we are living in a similar situation today. I listen to people talk about abortion like it is nothing; that the killing of a child is just something one does. Just yesterday here in Canada, one of our Federal Ministers of Parliament proposed a law to make reading or teaching certain parts of the Bible illegal. I will bet you that they will not propose the same for the Quran. They know that someone would die. And in fact, the very fact that they are not banning the Quran shows that it is not about ‘hate speech’; it is about the Word of God. But I digress.

Noah, we are told in Genesis 6:9, “This is the genealogy of Noah. Noah was a just man, perfect in his generations. Noah walked with God.”

For many years, I heard a lot about the ‘Noah walked with God’ part, and that is good. But in the first part of the verse, there is an important reference to Jesus in that Noah’s bloodline was ‘perfect in his generations.’ He had a direct, unpolluted bloodline back to Adam. As such, he needed to be preserved to make sure that Jesus, the second Adam, would have a perfect, unpolluted bloodline so that He could truly be the Savior of Mankind.

This is how we know, by that way, that the ‘Sons of God’ mentioned in Genesis 6 are NOT a human bloodline through Seth. These ‘Sons of God’ that cohabited with women were able to pollute the bloodline with their non-human ‘DNA’. Thus, to save Mankind, to preserve the promise of Genesis 3:15, Noah had to be saved and preserved for the bloodline to trace perfectly back to Adam.

Now, how do we preserve the bloodline of Adam through Noah? We are to build an Ark. If you have ever been to the Ark Encounter in Kentucky, you will have an idea of the massive endeavor that God called Noah to take on. The flood is one of the very first demonstrations of God’s patient grace, how He made a way and prepared a way for others to live if they chose to do so. God would have saved others who did not have pure bloodlines if they had entered the Ark, as well as preserving Noah. It was simply an act of Faith.

Like Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him for righteousness, so too, these folks just had to believe God and get in the Ark. Noah built the Ark; he was obedient. Genesis 7:5, “And Noah did according to all that the Lord commanded him.”

We do not know exactly how long it took to build the Ark. We know that Noah was a ‘preacher of righteousness’ (2 Peter 2:5). But we see in our verses above that Noah and his family entered the Ark, and God left seven (7) days of grace for others to enter (verse 4). God did not shut the door right away. Even a skeptic who simply out of curiosity had entered and stayed would have been saved. But no others believed and obeyed God.

The Ark is a picture of Jesus and His salvation. All those ‘in Christ’ are saved. Those who trust the word of God, obey the word of God, and all those who stop trusting in their own righteousness and ONLY trust in His righteousness to cover their sins, are saved. For almost 2,000 years, God has extended Grace and sent ‘preachers of righteousness’ to call people to be in Jesus. Get in the Ark that saves eternally and guarantees us eternal life. But like the millions of Noah’s days, many scoff and walk past the open door of the Ark.

Genesis 7:11-12

“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. And the rain was on the earth forty days and forty nights.” The flood came, just like Noah had said, just like God had promised, and only those in the Ark were saved. It terrifies me to think how many scratched at the door, banged on the sides of the Ark, and yet, there was no hope. The window of God’s grace for that period was over.

Soon, sooner than we think, God’s grace for our age will come to an end, and His wrath, like the time of the Flood, will be poured out on all mankind, and we who are in Christ will be saved. What an awesome peace to have in our hearts! We have to keep trying to tell the story of Jesus.

The doors of salvation are still open, and the grace is still being extended. I leave you with 2 Peter 3:8-10, “But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.”

Jesus is coming to get us soon!

God bless you,

Dr. Sean Gooding
Pastor of Bethany Baptist Church
70 Victoria Street, Elora, Ontario

John 5:46

“For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote about Me.”

Luke 24:44-48

“Then He said to them, ‘These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me.’ And He opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures. Then He said to them, ‘Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.’”

Jesus, the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. One of the cries that we see from many today is that they think that Jesus would teach differently today than He did when He walked the earth. Many would say that Jesus would have ‘learned more’ and that His teaching would be different. Many try to make it look like Jesus and Paul taught differently about things, and that if Paul were to teach today, there would be very different teachings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jesus did not abolish the law of Moses; He fulfilled it and obeyed it right down to the nth degree.

The entire Bible is about Jesus.

Just this morning in my devotions, I was reading from Matthew about the birth of Jesus, the new King of the Jews, and the Scribes were able to quote Micah 5:2. And then when the children were hunted down and killed by Herod, we are told that this is a fulfillment of another prophecy from Jeremiah 31:15. We can go on and on, but over and over we see that event after event in the life of Jesus is supported by an Old Testament prophecy. There are some 309 prophecies about Him that are fulfilled in the New Testament.

So, over the next little while, we will explore the person of Jesus in the Old Testament and show Him and the real, present face of God and the Person of God. It can be difficult for people to see Him at times, and I will endeavor to be as clear as possible so as not to cause more confusion, but to cast a light and show Him more clearly.

We begin right at Creation; we are told in John 1:1-2, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.”

Jesus, we are told, was right there at the Creation. Look at the last phrase, nothing was made without Him. This is an interesting irony, as we explore the verses in Genesis 1:26-27, where Man is made. Here are the verses: “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”

I had never thought of it until one of my Preacher brothers mentioned this, but Jesus made Adam in His image; we understand that to mean that Man is a triune being at the existence level: mind, body, and soul. But let us even look at the mechanics: two hands, two feet, legs, shoulders, muscle structure, ligaments, and the like; how our bodies work, the need to eat, drink, sweat, and all the ways that our bodies work, we are made in the image of Jesus. Thus, this body design existed before us, in Jesus.

We know that angels can appear in the image of a man; both Gabriel and Michael appeared as men, but other angelic beings were very different. The cherubim, for instance, had 6 wings, and even though they had the face of man, they were obviously different. In contrast, the angels that accompanied Jesus (God) to Sodom looked like men, and they could speak in the known language and engage in conversation.

Genesis 19:4-5, “Now before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both old and young, all the people from every quarter, surrounded the house. And they called to Lot and said to him, ‘Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us that we may know them carnally.’”

The men of Sodom assumed that the angels were simply men from their appearance. So, we see that we are made in Jesus’ image right down to how we look and how we walk, talk, breathe, and exist.

One of the other images of Jesus to look at in Genesis today – and there will be many others as we move on in this journey – is in Genesis 3 in general, but we will specifically look at verse 15. In verse 8, we are told that Adam and his wife (not yet named) ‘heard God walking,’ and they ‘hid’ themselves from Him. God, in turn, had conversations with Adam and his wife, and if we take the conversation as far as we can, it would seem that this was not the first time God had seen Adam. Many think that Adam was made in the Garden of Eden, but we are told that God put him there.

Genesis 2:15, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.”

But after Adam had sinned, God made this amazing promise to Adam and his descendants in Genesis 3:15, “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel.”

This is the very proclamation of the Gospel in the Bible; this is the Promise that the Second Adam, Jesus, would do what the First Adam could not and be perfect and sinless. Notice that the promise is that ‘her Seed’ will come and kill the serpent (Satan). Many of you will know this, some may have never heard this, and for those of us who have our faith in this Promise, it is good to hear it again. In biological terms, the man produces the ‘seed,’ the sperm that brings life to the dead egg of the woman. This should say ‘his Seed,’ BUT it does not; THE Seed is of the woman without the help of a man. This, of course, is the promise of the virgin birth. We see this repeated in Isaiah 7:14.

“Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.”

Jesus, born of a virgin, no help from a man, thus no sin nature that is passed from the first Adam. This Seed, the Promised Immanuel, will come and crush the head of the Serpent, and in the process, be temporarily hurt, a bruised heel. One recovers from a ‘bruised heel’; one does not recover from a ‘crushed head.’ This Seed, Jesus, the Messiah, will come and kill Satan, and in the process, be temporarily hurt. This Seed will deliver us. By the way, Immanuel is God with us. Jesus is God, the promised Seed.

There are many more wonderful pictures of Jesus in the Old Testament, and we will explore as many as we can over the next few weeks. He is coming again soon, and just like He was the principal character of man’s history, He is also the principal character of our future.

Look up, Jesus is coming soon, very soon.

God bless you,

Dr. Sean Gooding
Pastor of Bethany Baptist Church
70 Victoria Street, Elora, Ontario