Clough Genesis Lesson 23
Man/earth corrupt; Design of the ark – Genesis 6:9-16
I have two feedback cards I’d like to answer. One is I have been told that the actual translation of Genesis 1:1 should be God recreated the heavens and the earth; the first creation was supposedly when the prehistoric age occurred. What is the actual translation? That is a detailed question and I would advise you to get the tape which I did on Genesis 1:1-3 and go through all that, it will answer it and show you the different positions.
The second card said you noted that the word “preached” in 1 Peter 3:19 is different from preaching the gospel. Why are the two words not the same? I neglected to point that out last time; the point is that when Christ went to hell for the three days and the three nights, He announced, apparently to the demon powers that were active in Noah’s day that the cross had been fully effective; the plan of salvation had gone through all right, and that ultimately their great plot to hold up the plan of salvation never came to fruition. So it’s more of a victorious proclamation than it is a preaching of mercy and grace.
The second part to the question is if the nephilim are the product of sin that upset God enough to destroy all that He created why are they still around in numbers? Well, the nephilim were part of the sin problem but sin is still around, and the nephilim that occurred in numbers are genetic freaks once again, and apparently not this time caused by angels but nevertheless real genetic freaks and that being so the only nouns that Moses had available to him to communicate what this bizarre thing was that was going on back in Genesis 6.
Also, was the main reason why God destroyed man his worldliness, or was it the sin of Genesis 6:1-4? If it was the sin of Genesis 6:1-4 why would He destroy man for something the angels did? It doesn’t seem like man would be able to stand up to the wiles of the angelic realm; why weren’t the angels alone punished. Well, man wasn’t the completely passive agent of the demon powers. I tried to make it clear last time and if I didn’t I’ll try to make it again clear, that the reason that you had the demonic infiltration was simply that man in his sin attracted the demonic infiltration. Never can somebody say like in these movies, The Omen and a few of the other popular things that oh, the devil made me do it. Nonsense! We will to sin and the devil just kind of juices us up and gives us the power to do it, far more effectively, perhaps, than we had hoped we’d do it but nevertheless, that’s the role of Satan. It’s not he causes us to do something; it’s rather he’s very willing to help us to do what our sin nature would love to do. And that’s always been the interaction between man and angel that we can observe elsewhere in the text of Scripture.
Let’s turn to Genesis 6; we left off with Genesis 6:8 because verse 8 was the last verse of the third book of Genesis; notice verse 9 begins: “These are the generations of….” Genesis is made up of this set of these smaller books and you can tell where the books start by these giveaways, and Genesis 6:9 is one giveaway telltale sign, and the next one occurs in Genesis 10:1. So we say that book four goes from Genesis 6:9 to Genesis 9:29. And the subject of this particular book is the survival of the human race through the greatest cataclysm that the human race has ever seen… has ever seen. It’s very important that we make this extremely clear at the beginning, that of all the historic events of the Bible there is not one that God considers to be so significant that He makes it the model of the return of the Lord Jesus Christ.
So, in our divine viewpoint framework of doctrine this is why the key event, event number three, the flood, is so crucial. You can know 42 different points about a particular doctrine of Scripture and be absolutely paralyzed in trying to apply it if something hasn’t happened in your soul. And what has to happen in your soul is that you have to have a simple picture because your mind thinks in terms of pictures. If you’ll just kind of look inside your head and think about how you think you will see very quickly that you think in terms of pictures. Therefore the Bible supplies you with these key pictures, and the doctrine of judgment/salvation is always pictured in connection with the flood. Christian’s baptism, in 1 Peter 3, is connected with the flood. So here we have an easy to see picture that can have very powerful effects in your soul. So as we work through all the details of the flood, I’m going to take you to this detail and that detail and some other details, but don’t lose the forest for the trees; I’m just showing you those details to enrich the picture your mind can have of the flood. Let your imagination play free with the details of the Scripture in seeing it and see if you can construct in your own soul a picture of the flood, so that then you can draw all sorts of truths to apply in your Christian life.
For example, one of the two doctrines that we said with the flood is the doctrine of judgment/salvation. And judgment/salvation always orients you to at least one very famous word, the word “grace.” That word is one that’s thrown out a lot and misunderstood very much, but Genesis 6:8 is the first occurrence of the word “grace” in the Bible. And as I have said again and again and again and again and again, if you will pay attention to when a word first occurs in the progress of revelation you will quickly discover that that’s your key, right there, and look and hunt around in that particular section of the text until your mind fixes on a picture so forever afterwards, whenever you think of grace you always think of a picture or a drama with grace in the foreground and judgment in the background. Don’t think of grace as just oh God’s being nice to me. No! Grace is more than God being nice to you; grace is that God is undertaking to solve a problem created by our sin and our rebellion and because He wants to judge, and yet because He loves He is trying to solve this problem. Grace cannot be conceived unless you have first conceived of sin and judgment against that sin. Otherwise you simply do not and cannot have any idea what grace is all about.
So grace, grace before judgment is the key; grace has judgment always in mind. Application: in our own generation we call this gospel of the New Testament a gospel of grace. Now the gospel of the New Testament isn’t the good news that God is a good God. The gospel of grace in the New Testament is the news that God, although He is going to damn the world, is making a way out for us. You see, if you have that idea of grace you see how much more powerful it makes the gospel. The gospel isn’t aw gee, you ought to believe on our nice God, He’s on His knees before your heart’s door wanting entrance. Now that’s a picture of a begging deity; the God of the Bible doesn’t beg to you and He doesn’t beg to me; he’s not a begging God, He’s a very threatening and awe-inspiring God and He’s saying I’m going to damn you, you’d better pay attention to the gospel. That’s the setting and the proper setting for the gospel call.
Looking at this next book which begins with Genesis 6:9, “These are the generations of Noah,” we are clued in advance that we now are going to deal with one of the greatest stories of all times, one of the greatest disaster of all times, in fact, the greatest disaster apart from the great holocaust of nature which will occur at the return of the Lord Jesus Christ. The human race has, for generations, tried to forget the flood. History teachers today in the classroom are largely successful in blinding their students to the true great event of the flood, and therefore the average person who knows history knows very little of this flood, it’s sort of suppressed. And I can understand why people love to suppress it; it’s not a pleasant thing and our minds don’t like to think on unpleasant things, but truth is truth and we must plow on to look at this most awesome of events.
Genesis 6:9, “These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.” “Generations of Noah” means the progeny of Noah. All the titles of these books talk of the certain patriarchs before the flood and what he produced. The emphasis in the rest of verse 9 is on the character of Noah. Now one of the things that maybe you’ve never thought about, thinking of this just as a Bible story, you’ve never thought of the real Noah, the guy on whose shoulders was borne the awesome weight of being the sole lifeline of the human race.
Now maybe a modern illustration of Noah’s predicament would give us more empathy for Noah. Imagine if you were to go home today and God were to speak to you this afternoon and visualize yourself as head of a family, and God says to you that I am going to completely destroy the surface of this planet, and I’m going to do it within your lifetime and right now I want you to get started building a space ship and the space ship is going to be launched in orbit around planet earth while earth is destroyed, while the surface undergoes these cataclysmic type phenomena, and while this is going on for 13 months I want you to take you, yourself, your family, animals, certain samples from the zoological realm, certain samples from the botanical realm, I want you to put them aboard and I want you to take enough provisions to keep yourself alive not just for 13 months but I want you to take enough provisions that will keep you alive until you’re able to go back to the surface of the planet and start agriculture up again and are able to resupply yourself. I want you to take that much provisions, I’ll tell you all about how to do it, you just do what I tell you to do. Now can you imagine the awesomeness; your brothers and sisters would not be permitted, only you and your immediate family; everyone else would be judged, everyone would be destroyed except you. And you launch out into this thing and you’re orbiting the earth and you see it happen before your face; you watch the earth just convulsing with all sorts of phenomena destroying itself. And then you realize that it’s quiet down there, except for the noise in the rocks and the noise of the wind and the noise of the fire; no human sounds, no animal sounds, no pleasant green left at all, it’s all destroyed, gone. And the only green things that lived are what you have aboard your space ship. Now in that setting, that’s the setting of Noah.
And I would suggest to you that the Bible, with justification in Ezekiel, refers to Noah as one of the three greatest men of the human race, in that list, Noah, Job and Daniel, all men who had their great testings in the face, not of just Israel but testings in the face of the human race as a whole.
So here we have Noah, and he was a just man, meaning that he had righteousness in his life, he was mature in his generation, that means he attained spiritual maturity, he took in the Word of God, he digested the Word of God and where he showed his character is that he refused to go along with the prevailing culture, everything was wrong; all of his brothers, all of his sisters were wrong. Only he, his wife and his children, we have a total of eight people and that is it, nobody else. And remember, the human population, we calculated before at, say, 700,000,000 people, so you’ve got odds here of approximately 100,000,000 to 1. That’s the pressure, the social pressure that’s being applied to Noah. Noah survived; is it any wonder, therefore, that God refers to him, yes, he’s just and he’s mature. He proved his spiritual character by his ability to resist the tremendous weight of the culture against his position. Everybody was against him.
And it says,
[Genesis
Genesis 6:11, “The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.” The background for the flood is this universal declaration of the self-destruction of evil. There are two things you want to remember about this and that is that evil always self-destructs. God has made it that we. We don’t have two Gods, Satan and Christ, sort of like a tug of war fighting each other as equals. We have a war going on but it’s the infinite God fighting by a set of sacred rules and his creatures down below that want to defy Him at every point. But even Satan is a creature, he’s not a god and therefore he is not sovereign, therefore he is not in charge of his own destiny, leave alone anyone else’s. And therefore whatever Satan does ultimately reveals nothing but the sovereign plan of God. Satan himself is bound by the laws of God. Evil is bound by the laws of God; cause/effect, certain people do certain things, they will always crater. This is cause/effect in history; it is there because God is a sovereign God. It comes out of that attribute and this is why Wednesday night, in those Schaeffer films, we had that question about is it right to view the Roman Empire in 30 minutes. Answer: yes. Why? Because history is shaped by God’s sovereignty, it’s not a bucket of marbles. Now yes, we’re usually taught history in the school classroom as though it’s a bucked of marbles and therefore has no order, nothing in it, but we believe as Christians on the Christian presupposition that the Scriptures say God ordained historical flow and progress, therefore historical progress shows God’s laws at work and you can see this in Romans 1:18 and following if you want to see how evil playing out in history glorifies God.
So “Noah begot three sons,” but “the earth becomes filled,” notice the word “filled.” If we could graph evil on a line graph we’d have an upper bound for our value on evil; we would say that history does something like this. Evil can rise and become strong and powerful and dominate whole societies and individuals until a point is reached, a point of no return. At that point, because God is sovereign and has promised that down here in the future Jesus Christ will do what Jesus Christ has been assigned to do, because of God’s sovereign plan evil will not be permitted to cross or cut off that plan or to interfere and retard the plan of God. So God’s Word shall not return void; God’s Word cannot be stopped by the processes of evil. And so when evil mounts up and increases its strength, when it reaches this critical point God says that is it, and He judges. And it’s an awful thing in history when you see this particular thing happen. God will not permit evil to exceed a certain boundary before He crushes. This was done in several cases and every time you get some liberal nitwit he gets all upset by these things like the extermination of the Canaanites, those good sweet vicious people called Canaanites, and supposedly the Jews when they conquered the land were immoral because they waged a holy war and destroyed every one of the Canaanites; men, women, children, dogs, cats, mice, it didn’t matter, any thing, as long as they occupied Canaanite ground they were to be destroyed. Ohhh, how could a loving God do anything like that? Because He’s a loving, precisely because He’s a loving God.
When you have
people that endanger and pollute and become degenerate to the point that they
are destroying the plan of God then they are destroyed. This has always been the case… always been
the case. It happened to the Church; the
Church was at one time the strongest it ever was, had some of the finest
theologians in
And in the days of the flood the damnation was universal, notice in Genesis 6:11-12, these are universal terms, not just local. “The earth was corrupt…the earth was filled with violence. [12] And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh” upon the earth had been corrupted. Now at this late date I do not understand why it is that we have evangelicals thinking the flood was local, that somehow for 13 months you could sustain water that was over the top of hills only in one location and not have the water trickle out of the system some place, and maintain a local flood. And moreover, have the ark ground at Ararat, upstream instead of coming downstream, so it wasn’t a river flood. And yet at this late date we still have Christians that think in terms of the local flood.
I just got through writing a paper for publication in one of the journals dealing with a man who’s criticized Morris & Whitcomb’s book about the universality of the flood, and the guy makes this big point that it’s all local. But look at the language here, I mean, how more universal can you get. I don’t know how the author can make himself clearer that this is a universal judgment, the critical factor here being that if the flood was universal and if it altered the earth’s geography, then that’s the central problem and natural science, not the days of Genesis 1. Yet this man, who is a knowledgeable born again Christian comes up with this brilliant statement, saying that all we have to do is get rid of the literal days in Genesis 1 and we’ve solved all the critical problems of Genesis and science. Come on! The Genesis days don’t amount to a hill of beans compared to the problem you’ve got with Genesis 6, 7 and 8. Genesis 6, 7 and 8 present a universal earth transforming flood and I suggest to you that with whatever you do with the days in Genesis 1 you’ve got this problem to contend with and you have to solve this problem in conjunction with the days, as well as other problems. In fact, I could even say that every chapter from Genesis 1-11 conflicts with what you are told is the truth today; every one of the chapters. So if we’re going to solve our problems we’re going to have to solve them all at once, as a package deal, not piecemeal. And anyone familiar with the Scriptural problems ought to see this. There’s no excuse at this late date, Christians fiddling around with such outmoded solutions.
Those of you who were here when we went through the epistle to the Hebrews remember that problem in Hebrews 6, everybody gets wrapped around the axle in Hebrews 6, forgetting there are four other passages, Hebrews 2, Hebrews 3, Hebrews 10 and Hebrews 12, you’ve got four other warning passages, you don’t just solve Hebrews 6, you have to solve those chapters and solve it together as a unit, as a package deal and the same with Genesis. So this is why in the Genesis series we are taking the radical approach of saying it conflicts at every point; let it all hang out, letting all of the differences become obvious and then as we go through it bit by bit I think you can put the pieces back together again to see where we’re coming from.
Genesis
Genesis 6:13, “And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh has come before Me; for the earth is filled violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.” Verse 13 is loaded with a lot of information. Let’s look at it carefully. By the way, let’s go back to verse 12 a minute, “God looked upon the earth,” now we know when we look at God’s character that God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, immutable and eternal, and some other attributes. So these being the attributes of God, one of them is that He is omniscient; that means he knows everything. Well, if God knows everything, why does the Bible picture Him sort of sitting in a chair looking? Isn’t that kind of mundane, kind of too concrete for theology? And people have really made this objection to the Bible.
But again I
suggest to you that you, in your mind, and I in mine, have no way under the sun
of comprehending omniscience. Try it;
try shutting your eyes and visualizing omniscience; square, triangle, what is
it? You can’t visualize it, there’s no
picture that can fill your mind that communicates to you omniscience, so the
Bible gives you one and it gives it to you in pieces like this one in verse 12,
“God looked upon the earth,” and the picture there is an easy to visualize one,
think of a man sitting on a throne in the sky and he looks down. I mean, that’s the picture the Bible is
giving, it’s not trying to laugh at it, just look at it. He’s looking down, He’s looking at
So God looks, He’s looking to see what’s going on. And then He speaks in to Noah in Genesis 6:13. So He selects out of “all flesh” in verse 12, here’s election operating, by the way. He picks out of all man a man with just character, “perfect in his generations,” and he says Noah will be my man. The word “Noah” means rest in Hebrew. He will be My man for the hour, and I am going to save the human race through him. So God makes His announcement in verse 13, “[And God said to Noah,] The end of all flesh is come before Me;” “the end of all flesh” refers to the fact that evil has peaked, that God is now no longer, on that graph again, He is no longer going to allow evil to grow beyond that cut off point. The end, or the literal cut, the word qetz here, you can even hear it, it’s qetz up, it’s the word for cutting something off, “the end of all flesh” has arrived. “…for the earth is filled with violence through them,” not of itself but through man, once again testifying that it is man that is the discordant agent in the universe, not genes, not atoms, not biorhythms, not cosmic forces, but man, man is the one who morally rebels against God and it’s man that’s the problem, not his environment.
Just stop and
think for a moment; what was the perfect environment of all time in
history. We’re so filled with socialism
that says that the problem with man is his environment and all we have to do is
trade houses or cars or something else and change the environment and this is
going to make everything better. How do
you explain
Now Noah didn’t determine his environment because he didn’t have power to reform it but Noah didn’t get crushed by his environment, did he? Didn’t Noah survive the most awful thing? Didn’t Noah survive 100,000,000 to 1 odds? Yes. Well, then the environment can’t determine man, and that’s good news. And when you face a problem Satan will whisper into your heart and say your environment conditions you; you can’t see yourself, this pressure that’s in your life, this problem that you’re facing, it’s too big for you, you can’t sustain it. Well by the energy of the flesh no, but by God’s grace yes and Noah had available to him God’s grace and he survived.
So though “the end of all flesh has come,” though “the earth is all filled with violence” I, God says, “I am destroying,” and the word is in the present, “I am destroying it,” it is a participle, and it’s a particular kind of participle called a future instance participle, that means that it’s a participle that refers to action that’s going on in your mind. The picture in the Hebrew of the participle is motion picture, not something that happens but something that is in the process of happening, but yet you can say wait a minute… wait a minute, God isn’t yet destroying. No, but the picture is that in the mind where you have this idea that’s going to come out here as fruit into overt behavior, the idea is already in motion and the future instance participle is used to communicate this. So that’s why at the end of verse 13 you have “I am in the process of destroying” them now. But the flood hasn’t come; God isn’t in the process—yes He is! In His mind He is and this means from verse 13 forward that Noah can’t reform his generation, again saying the Canaanites… this is an announcement of a damned generation, a generation that no matter how much the Word of God is taught, no matter how many people go out with missionaries, nothing is going to change it; it is a damned generation because God has already decided to curse it.
Now Genesis
Now the means of salvation, “Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms thou shalt make in the ark, and shall pitch it inside and outside with pitch. [15] And this is the fashion which thou shalt make of it: the length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. [16] A window thou shalt make to the ark, in a cubit thou shalt finish it above; and the door of the ark shall thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories thou shall make it.”
Now we have the means of salvation; one means, not several, we do not have an ecumenical council to sit down and decide a compromise plan of designing a boat capable and helpful and pleasing everybody on earth. We have God, in revelation, sending down the plans. Again, some of you who work with the Wednesday night thing with Schaeffer and you’re not used to thinking abstractly and philosophically and you have a problem with reason and revelation, all right, relax, you’ve got an answer right here. It’s simple, look at this ark for a moment. Just don’t get complicated and it’ll come to you easily. Here’s a time line. Here’s an event way off, we’ll call this event X, in this case it’s the flood. Here you are right here with Noah. Now can you determine the future? No, there’s no way reason can find out about event X, can it? You can sit down with a computer and you really don’t know the future. So there’s no way reason, by itself, can unravel the mystery of X. So therefore what do you have to do? You have to rely upon revelation and so when God speaks at this point by revelation, then revelation is clearly superior to reason.
And that’s the big battle between the
Christian and the humanist today; we say revelation is the starting point, they
say reason is the starting point. Your
educators do this; there has always been a tendency to do this. I don’t know what has got into them…well, I
know what’s got into them. But you can
go back in the history of
So the flood is an easy picture for those of you who have a hard time trying to visualize this abstractly, just think, where did the plans come from to build the ark? From reason or from revelation and the answer is obviously revelation. So think of a blueprint in your mind and on the blueprint visualize the white lines of the boat and think of that blueprint as revelation or reason.
So the superiority of revelation to reason is thereby given. God, knowing in the future event X tells man 120 years ahead of time what event X is and He tells what he must do, and He gives detailed plans, notice. Revelation doesn’t consist of saying I am God and I control all things, period, end of creed. Revelation includes lots of data, not just general theological statements. Look at the data of verses 14-16. Many of you read those verses and you think this is too much data, what do I care what the dimensions of the ark are. What do I care where there’s a window or where there’s a door, I don’t need all that data. Well apparently God says you do or He wouldn’t have given it to you. I’ll show you why if you look at the data in an interesting way, which we will in a moment, you’ll learn some interesting doctrine.
So, “Make an ark of gopher wood,” that’s the first instruction. Now what’s “gopher wood?” I don’t know what gopher wood is and nobody else does either. The word “gopher” isn’t used any other place in the Bible so we can’t tell. The nearest thing and the best guess people have come up with is cypress, however, those who have… the guy who found the piece of the wood on Mount Ararat, that has been analyzed in a laboratory and found to be a relative of the oak and I don’t know enough about trees to tell the relationship of oak and cypress, maybe they’re not related, but anyway, those are the two big guesses today. But honestly speaking as a Bible teacher nobody knows what “gopher” means. All we know is that in verse 14 where it’s used it’s in rhyme with another word. “…rooms shall you make in the ark, and pitch it within and without with pitch,” the word “pitch” is kopher, so gopher and kopher, that’s the way they sound; gopher we don’t know but kopher we do; kopher is pitch and we know this because it occurs in other languages and it is used not just for pitch that comes from trees but for bitumen, asphalt, hydrocarbon, petroleum products.
And so people have asked, well wait a minute, if petroleum deposits were caused by the flood, how do we have petroleum before the flood, isn’t this a contradiction? Well, maybe the petroleum was made by minor catastrophes before the flood or what may be astounding is that it might have been artificially manufactured hydrocarbons. We’re suggesting in the high technology of the antediluvian world that chemistry was known and I’ll give you further evidences of this as we go on, but there is a possibility that this was an artificially manufactured hydrocarbon of some sort, like our tar and pitch.
Now the tar and pitch, or kopher, is the word later used in the Bible in an entirely different way for atonement. Now here’s something, a marvel to behold, and an easy picture to log in your soul, get packed away and use it. Every time you and I use the word “atonement” in Christian circles we generally think of blood atonement. We think of the fact that the blood is shed for us, which is a valid picture. After all, that’s what communion is all about, that’s what Passover is all about. But I suggest to you again, using the principle that first occurrence forever shades the word in history afterwards, that with kopher or atonement is used here, what is it used for? What’s the basic idea? Not blood, the basic idea is cover. What is the pitch doing but making the boat watertight so it won’t sink. So your primary meaning behind the word atonement, what Christ does for you, what Christ offers in His cross, is what the pitch did to the boat, it made it unsinkable in the face of judgment. It was the pitch that by covering the boat made it immune to judgment. And there’s your basic picture behind atonement. If you think of atonement now think of just gooey tar being spread across wood to make it waterproof. There’s your basic idea of atonement. In other words, atonement doesn’t refer to blood, necessarily; it refers to what Christ’s blood does for us. In this parallel the ark was waterproof against the waters of judgment and Jesus Christ, by His shed blood, makes us impermeable to the judgment of God. So we have that strong parallel in atonement.
Now it further says that in the ark they are to make “rooms.” The word “room” here is the word qanen or the word nests, or cells, or the way we would translate it, not nests but holes. There’s a scale model of Noah’s ark down in the front and some of you might want to look at it, I’ll show you some slides of it and in this ark we have tried to hypothesize what these inner holes look like. And they were used, of course, to house animals and their provisions.
Genesis
But now here is the reason God the Holy Spirit gave us all this little data and information, verses 15-16. If we take these dimensions and we compare them with shipping today, guess what? There wasn’t a ship in all the history of humanity made larger than these dimensions until 1858 with a boat called The Great Eastern. Now what do we do about this situation, this condition. Well, what did we say earlier? I showed you evidence that the antediluvian population had a high technology. Now the tech, true, after the 8th generation drops off, but if we are to diagram history into two civilizations, there are more to come in the future but right now just two, the antediluvian society between Adam and the great flood, and the postdiluvian society of which we are members, and we look at the rise of technology in the postdiluvian era, say about 1900, let’s make the curve go up almost exponentially after 1800, since 1800 technology has climbed very, very rapidly.
Now it’s interesting that many of the processes we are saying we discover, and I am saying, on the basis of the antediluvian civilization, we are recovering; not discovering but recovering, because this technology of the antediluvian society started off and must have escalated very high up to the flood. In fact, the ark would represent one of the great accomplishments of the craftsmen of the antediluvian world, even though the plan came from God, the craft was done by man. And after the flood you had a cratering of technology to a primitive level, Stone Age man, then you have Bronze, then you have Iron, and then you come on up into the modern era. Now what we are given in our history courses is we are only given that picture. And for us with just that part of the picture it sure does look like man’s evolving upward, but what happens is that we have failed the data before, which completely blows that picture. The picture before is that the technology was there.
Now we said earlier that one of the keys to
evaluating technology was the use of electricity in the ancient world. We said
that this was true even though we say we only discovered electricity in the 19th
century and we have a problem why they were making batteries in
So the design of the ark is most
interesting, particularly Genesis
So is there some other meaning. And if we look carefully in history, lo and
behold we discover it. In the Jewish
tradition, in a book called The Queen of
Sheba and her Only Son Menyelek, which is a part of the non-inspired text
of the Bible, but nevertheless good for word studies, translated by Sir E. A.
Wallace Budge, and unquestioned authority in ancient eastern translations, we
have this passage in which tsohar is
used. Now listen to the sentence. This is taken from Jewish tradition dating
back to the time of the temple and listen how tsohar is used. “Now the
house of Solomon was illuminated as by day, for in his wisdom,” that is in
Solomon’s wisdom, “he made shining pearls,” tsohar,
“which are like the sun, the moon and the stars on the bottom of the roof of
his house.” Now there’s the use of
tsohar. Now what are “shining pearls”
that you put on the bottom of the roof of your house that looked like the sun,
the moon and the stars? I suggest the
use of electricity. Now you can say well
that’s bizarre; maybe it’s bizarre but we know the tradition dates back before
Thomas Edison. So it wasn’t written to
fake out
Well, that’s not enough to say that tsohar in verse 16 is electricity but watch this one. Samuel Noah Cramer, without question it was until the time, I think he recently died, but until the time of his death Dr. Cramer was the leading world’s authority on Sumer, and he combined a lot of his professional papers into a book towards the end of his life called History Begins at Sumer; you can buy it, it’s a popular book. And he discusses the Sumerian flood legend which is their version of Noah’s flood and his descendants in it. “In the preparation of Ziusudras boat,” the Ziusudra is the Sumerian Noah, “Utu brought his rays into the boat to lighten its interior.” Now again, this tradition dates far before Thomas Edison. What are they talking about if it’s not talking electricity, you explain it.
There’s another tradition; Alexander the
Great went across the world, conquering and he used to write home to his old
teacher, Aristotle, and he’d go into some area, Aristotle had trained him as a
teenage boy to explore and look and classify living things and so on, and so
everywhere Alexander went he would write notes and send back these notebooks to
Aristotle and say hey, I discovered this, this, this and this. Well one day he sent home a notebook from
So I suggest to you Genesis 6:16, which is
a confused verse, I don’t know how to translate this verse, all I know is the
first sentence is okay, “A tsohar you
will make in the ark,” and then it just says, “to a cubit finish it
above.” Now that’s the way it literally
reads in the Hebrew. Now how you get
sense out of it I don’t know, I just don’t know how to handle that
sentence. But something is going on
there and I know that tsohar doesn’t
mean window. And then you make a door in
the ark, and you’ll make the three floors, [Genesis
Now, let’s look at some close up slides of
this model of the ark for a moment. And we’re
going to conclude by drawing some theological conclusions about the nature of
the ark. This is a close up of a model;
notice again we have a box-like structure.
The source of this model I obtained from supposed eyewitnesses who had
climbed up Ararat in 1909, an Armenian boy described in Violet Cumming’s book, The Search for Noah’s
But this week we want to conclude by
turning to 1 Peter 3:20 to show you what the ark is a type of and to also look
at some of those dimensions. In 1 Peter
But in verse 21 notice the parallel between the ark and Christ. And just as these people were in the ark, safe from the flood waters, so we are in Christ safe from God’s judgment. Now you all know that, those of you who have been under any Bible teaching for any length of time. Now what we’re going to do is teach you a little lesson on appreciating details in the text. I’m sure as we’ve gone through these verses this morning it must have occurred to you, why does God preserve all these weird details; why a cubit this and a cubit that and this ratio and that ratio? What good does that do for me spiritually? Well let’s watch what it does for you spiritually.
We have a paper, a research paper, done by
a naval architect on the structure of Noah’s ark. It was done in 1977 by a boy studying at
Trinity Seminary near
Turn to Genesis 8:1, here is where he said the ark would have come most clearly to capsizing, and by looking in detail at this scene we then can make some conclusions about its design. In Genesis 8:1, after the flood is finished, three’s a great wind that begins across the earth, and the question that Mr. Collins raises is that if we take the ark, cross section wise here, and we make it set as high as we can up out of the water, see in Genesis 7:20 it says “fifteen cubits [upward] did the waters prevail,” and most people have said that the ark sank, like the model we have up here, halfway down, that is, it sank 22.5 feet into the water, and the fact that it didn’t touch any mountains going over is why you have this phrase in Genesis 7:20. So that was a pretty stable {?}, you’re not going to tip that boat over by a whale.
So what he decided to do was to say toward
the end of the flood let’s suppose you have a light boat, because the
provisions have been used up, waste has been thrown overboard, and so the boat
is setting high up out of the water with a maximum cross section to the
wind. Now we apply a wind perpendicular
to the side of the boat and we compute what the high wind would do to that
boat. And mean is the normal formula for
doing this because the United States Coast Guard requires, before any ship is
designed, certain standards of design so the boats won’t capsize in the
Now, here’s the worst case that he worked
up, and watch the amazing answer. First
you have to compute the weight of the boat.
So we assume that the ark was made of one foot square planks; now
obviously the wood would have been thinner than this but let’s give it the
worst situation; one foot thick plank, three floors petition. Taking
He computed one hundred long tons of animals, for reasons which we’ll get into next week. He computed food and water, over-computed deliberately to take fresh water aboard so that they could use fresh water the other side of the flood, 3,000 long tons. Add 3,000 long tons of provisions and you get 10,240 long tons, and this would be the displacement of the ark. Now at that displacement, even, we only get a displacement of ten and a half feet. Remember we said 22.5 the Bible give; even with that, we may have under computed the weight, but that’s all right because we want the ark to sit high up out of the water, so this is 10.6 feet, but we want to even make the ark higher and even more vulnerable and exposed to the wind so let’s say that by the time of Genesis 8 half the water had been drunk and half the food had been eaten and all waste products thrown overboard. So we decrease this by 3,000 long tons to 7,240 long tons. Now we recomputed the draft and now the boat sits only 7.5 feet in the water, so it’s practically floating around the surface of the water with this tremendous side part exposed to a wind.
Now let’s make things exciting. The Coast Guard says that boats ought to be stable against a 60 knot crosswind, 60 knots being about a 70 miles an hour wind, which you can get that at sea, pretty well, but it’s a pretty strong wind, a 70 miles an hour crosswind, you try standing in it some day. Or you get a feel for it, drive your car 70 miles an hour and stick your hand out and feel the resistance against it.
All right, so what we want to do is really jazz the thing up and hop it up good so instead of putting a 60 knot wind against the ark let’s jazz it up and put a 210 knot wind against it and since the wind force goes up by the square of the velocity, now we’ve really got a force against the side of that boat. So let’s compute how much the boat would tip under these conditions, and he’s going to come up with four answers. These are four measures of the force, and keep in mind the diagram that we have of the boat tipping, this rotational force, here the wind is blowing this way, the water is offering resistance this way and so you’re having a tip force that’s applied.
Here’s some of the answers he gets. Under 210 knot crosswind, with half the cargo
gone, under the worst case the ark would incline 3 degrees. Now most ships that are trudging the
Another interesting conclusion is the range, what he calls the range of positive stability. That is, how far can you pit this thing before you get to the point where the buoyancy force is no longer stabilizing, how far can that tipping go? And by constructing certain graphs he found that the tipping can go all the way up to 90 degrees in the ark; that thing can go on its side and still right itself practically, about 89 degrees, something like that is where the tipping force goes. So since the modern ocean vessels cannot usually stand a lift more than 45 degrees in most cases, again we have fantastic… whereas a modern boat like this it’s got its problem because it’s weight up on the top deck and this center of gravity is high and when the center of gravity is high it means that boat doesn’t have to tip so far before that arrow becomes parallel over the buoyancy arrow going the other way. Well, the ark is deliberately constructed with a low center of gravity so it’s fantastically stable under that situation.
Then he computed it another way and said okay, let’s suppose we take the ark and tip it and say… now the Coast Guard says that they want to calculate the force the ship would tip 14 degrees and that is considered a dangerous type tip. Now this is not just rolling, this means when you get a steady thing when you get cargo shifting around and everything else, and so they measure how much force is required to tip it to 14 degrees, and he computed that the ark, and again we want to take worst case, make everything as hard as we can on the ark, so let’s make the door leaky and say that the door is not sealed well so when the ark tips it can’t tip beyond the third floor because that door has got a leak in it. So we can calculate, given the dimensions, that the ark, therefore, can tip all the way, 38 degrees, and that’s as far as it can tip without taking water through that door. So let’s compare the forces there. To tip to 14 degrees it would take 22 degree foot tons, which is the measure of the work, but to tip it all the way over to this point, 38 degrees, which is critical would take 365,000 degree foot tons, or 16 times more force than the Coast Guard requires to be applied to the hull of a modern ship.
Another question that he worked and another final answer that he gave on this thing is the relative magnitude of these forces. Again back to our little diagram; the magnitude of the force that’s working this way to right the boat versus the force that’s working this way to tip the boat over. The force that would be working at a 210 degree knot wind, crosswind, is 18,650 foot tons, say 18,000, okay, just to measure; all we want to do is look at the difference in numbers. We’ve got 18,000 force this way, foot ton force. The force of buoyancy operating the other way is 106,000 foot tons to stabilize it, or four and a half times what is needed.
Now the long and the short of all this is that the ark is an extremely stable boat. In all due deference to the modern naval architects who design boats not so stable, the reason they do is they have to trade it off for speed, the hull has to move through water and you can’t design a boat like this to move anywhere. So God, when He designed the ark, since it wasn’t moving anywhere, concentrated on getting stable form.
This has two practical applications for us, many but let’s just conclude with two very practical applications. One is that you can go through all the flood myths of the world, go to your Babylonians, oh, they’ve got a beautiful ark in their myths, 360 cubits by 360 cubits; it’s like an ice cube. Did you ever watch how stable an ice cube is in the water? Try one, shake it around a little bit, the thing tumbles. So all you have to do is take the dimensions of the ark in all the heathen legends and compare them with the dimensions of the ark in the Bible and lo and behold it turns out a very interesting thing. The ark in the Bible is the one that’s stable. All the heathens who make up their legends, remembering vaguely about the flood but without the aid of the Holy Spirit to inspire the text, come up with these bizarre dimensions.
Now I would suggest to you that rabbis in 1000 BC did not know all the intricacies of the {?} hull. So obviously the dimensions in these verses, verses 14-16, are critical to establish the inerrancy of God’s Word. Here we have a clear indication of the inspiration of our Bible.
And the second and relatively spiritual application is what would you have done in the middle of the storm aboard the ark? Now you know this thing, this boat’s tipping back and forth, just a little. Would you have been one of those people going along the inside of the boat and you’d see it’s all covered with, you know, perfectly safe, but gee, I wonder if this is going to hold up here and be wondering this all during the 13 months, a nervous wreck, driving everybody nuts all around you, worrying about the fact, oh, is this going to hold up, is this going to hold up, is this going to hold up, is this going to hold up? Now you’d have a choice as a believer in that ark because only believers were on the ark, you’d have a choice in this operation. You objectively would be perfectly safe, no way were you at all unsafe, objectively. Now you have a choice; you can enjoy that objective faith that God has decreed for you and relax and enjoy it, or you can be hyper all the time. But either way, you’re objectively safe. And the story of the ark ought to communicate that to you. You are objectively safe from God’s judgment in the person of Christ and you can be up, am I going to lose my salvation, am I going to lose my salvation, am I going to lose my salvation over this, that and the other thing, and be upset and a nervous wreck and drive everyone nuts, including yourself. Or you can just relax and trust; the choice is yours but however you respond subjectively doesn’t change the objective fact you are perfectly safe in Christ. And that’s the story of the flood.
Next week we’ll deal with more of the details of this interesting boat and its occupants.