“Genesis 6:9-16”

Sunday, October 27, 2019

“These are the records of the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his time; Noah walked with God. Noah became the father of three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and the earth was filled with violence. God looked on the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth. Then God said to Noah, 'The end of all flesh has come before Me; for the earth is filled with violence because of them; and behold, I am about to destroy them with the earth. Make for yourself an ark of gopher wood; you shall make the ark with rooms, and shall cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you shall make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. You shall make a window for the ark, and finish it to a cubit from the top; and set the door of the ark in the side of it; you shall make it with lower, second, and third decks.”

---End of Scripture verses---

“These are the records of the generations of Noah.” (verse 9) This is the third usage of the Hebrew word “toledot” (“generations”), and marks the third major division recorded in the book of Genesis. What follows is the developments of the life of one of the greatest men in all of inspired Scripture—Noah. “Noah was a righteous man.” The Hebrew writer tells us, “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.” (Hebrews 11:7) He was declared righteous or “upright” by God because of his obedient faith.

Noah was “blameless in his time.” Compared to all other people living in the world along with Noah, he was the standard bearer for godly living. But obeying God is not a competition with your fellowman, and you need not be the only righteous person living on earth to be considered “blameless”. The word describes conduct that is “beyond reproach,” and while it by no means implies perfection, it does speak to the highest level of integrity. Noah shares the honorable distinction with his forebear Enoch to have God's word declare he “walked with God.” I can't think of a better way to be remembered in the eyes of God and human posterity than to have been righteous, blameless and to have walked with God.

“Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and the earth was filled with violence.” (verse 11) While Noah is depicted as “blameless” and “upright” in “the sight of God,” the inhabitants of the world were just the opposite. They were “corrupt” and they corrupted the whole earth with their perversity and moral rottenness and decay. This absence of moral restraint led to acts of “violence” of the worst sorts by aggressors against their fellow man. When a “civilization” refuses to hold itself to a high standard of personal ethics, disregard for the lives of others will invariably follow. The whole world had gone the way of Cain whose unrestrained anger and jealousy led to the murder of his younger brother in cold blood. It is appalling to think of the violent acts of murder currently committed against millions of innocent young babies each year, and it is certain that God is equally displeased, disgusted and grieved by what He sees when he looks down upon the earth today.

“God looked on the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth.” (verse 12) The word “flesh” has many different meanings when used in the Bible, but in this context it just refers to people. The people God created good had “corrupted their” own “way”. The burden of responsibility falls squarely upon the violators when they commit acts of sin, immorality and violence. The devil doesn't make us do it. It is not society's fault when criminals break the law. Criminals cannot rightly accuse their parents when they chose the path of corruption and violence. And, while it is true that some parents contribute to the delinquency of their grown children by neglect or abuse, the offender will bear the burden of his guilt through the exercise of his own free will to do wrong.

“I am about to destroy them with the earth.” (verse 13) It took all of ten generations from the creation of the first man for human sinfulness and immorality to plunge to such horrid depths that God saw fit to purge the earth with a universal flood. God allows people to go their own way and this is what happens when the created chooses to live their lives apart from the guidance and dictates of the One that created them. “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” (Romans 1:18-20)

“Make for yourself an ark of gopher wood.” (verse 14) There is no way to be certain what tree this wood would have been taken from or even if such a tree is in existence today. Be that as it may, Nahum Sarna opined the following about gopher wood: “The otherwise unknown type almost certainly refers to a coniferous tree of great durability. Sanhedrin 108b and the Targums, as well as Radak, identify it with the cedar. Many modern scholars prefer the cypress both because of a similarity in sound to the Hebrew and because it was widely used in shipbuilding in ancient times, due to its resistance to rot.” Whatever gopher wood may have been no matter what it was good for, God could have kept the ark together and afloat during the flood with whatever means He saw fit. He could have told Noah to sow fig leaves together in the form of a great ship and that would have equally sufficed if God's power was behind it. The important thing to note is that God specified gopher wood and Noah obeyed God's commands. That is what made Noah righteous and blameless and that is why he and his family were brought safely through the waters of the flood.

Writing on the seaworthiness and reliability of the ark based on God's required dimensions, Doctors Burt Thompson and Brad Harrub wrote in the Apologetics Press article, “An Examination of Noah’s Ark and the Global Flood,” the following:

“One of the most frequent charges critics raise is against the ark itself, as they assert that it was not large enough to do its job. This charge is easily refuted, since Scripture provides us with the dimensions of the vessel. God told Noah to make 'the length of the ark three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits”'(Genesis 6:15)... Using the most conservative estimate available for the length of the cubit (17.5 inches), Whitcomb and Morris have shown that the ark would have been 437.5 feet long, 72.92 feet wide, and 43.75 feet high. In its three decks (Genesis 6:16), it had a total area of approximately 95,700 square feet—the equivalent of slightly more than twenty standard basketball courts. Its total volume would have been about 1,396,000 cubic feet. The gross tonnage (a measurement of cubic space rather than weight, one ton being equivalent to 100 cubic feet of usable storage space) was about 13,960 tons (p. 10).

“These ratios are strikingly similar to those of the S.S. Jeremiah O’Brien (one of the 'Liberty Ships' constructed during World War II), which was launched in 1943. During the war, a fleet of ships was created in response to the critical shortage of maritime cargo ships. These ships were manned, for the most part, by merchant seamen who carried all kinds of wartime supplies through the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Persian Gulf. The S.S. Jeremiah O’Brien measured 441 feet long and 56 feet wide, and could displace 14,300 tons when fully loaded (see Jaffee, 1993). When U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was shown the plans in 1941 for this fleet, he approved of the efficiency of the proposed design, but commented, 'Admiral, I think this ship will do us very well. She’ll carry a good load. She isn’t much to look at, though is she? A real ugly duckling' (as quoted in Jaffee, p. 4). The S.S. Jeremiah O’Brien thus became known by the nickname, 'Ugly Duckling.' Jaffee, in describing the advantage of this new fleet, wrote:

“Driven by an obsolete reciprocating engine with coal burning fire-tube boilers, the vessel had been built, year after year, on the River Tyne and had proven its reliability in trades where speed was secondary to reliability (pp. 2-3, emp. Added). The ark, just like the S.S. Jeremiah O’Brien, was not built for speed (it had nowhere to go!). But it did need to be reliable—since it would have to withstand pounding waves and whipping winds on the open seas for approximately a year.”

While this is very interesting and even somewhat amusing, once again, the dimensions were perfect for building Noah's Ark because those were the specifications God commanded. If God had specified that the great barge be built in the shape of a giant cube than that would have been the perfect shape to keep the vessel afloat for the several, long months necessary. The power was in God's commandment and in Noah's perfect compliance to God's demands. When God specifies that we do a certain thing in a certain way then we dare not deviate from what He authorizes if we want to be pleasing in His sight (2 Corinthians 5:9).

Please read Genesis 6:17-22 for tomorrow.

- Louie Taylor

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