Clough Genesis Lesson 24

Animal Classifications – Genesis 7:1-10

You recall that the flood is one of the chief pictures that the Bible gives us at the very beginning of history. As we have taught doctrine here we have tried to show you that again and again, for effective application of doctrine you’ve got to be able to think through a vivid historic real picture of what God was doing when He revealed that particular doctrine.

Now the flood is the third great event in our divine viewpoint framework and one that is correlated with the doctrine of judgment/salvation. And the doctrine of judgment/salvation as we have expressed it under five points, we’ve said that it involves grace before judgment, that God always waits, He never judges until a certain time is right. That God when He does judge perfectly discriminates between those who are judged and those who are saved. That when He does judge and when there is damnation there is only one way of salvation; that this one way of salvation always has to be appropriated by faith and that God’s judgment judges both man and nature.

The importance of the flood is that it stands at the origin of history and later many, many doctrines and many, many images, and many, many references will be made to this picture. And so one who cannot visualize in his mind the simple picture of the flood, I do not see how you can at all hope to grasp the doctrine of salvation, judgment, or whatever. Three specific types are mentioned in the New Testament; that is, pictures that are developed out of this primary picture of the flood. One is the Christ type, that the ark is a type of Christ, that those who are saved are sealed in the ark. Unlike the movie where the ark was perched up on this hill and they got all the animals in the ark and then John Hustin was up there as Noah pulling the pulley to shut the door from the inside. Now that’s precisely how it never happened because Hollywood in its usual accurate way has completely reversed the thrust of the closing of the door of the ark. In the Bible God closed the door of the ark; nobody else, God did, and he sealed it from outside, a little thought would have clarified, I would think, to anybody who would think through the thing that you can’t seal that kind of a door from the inside; it was sealed from the outside by God.

And so the ark is a type of Christ. Then we said last week that the ark and the word for “pitch,” the word kaphar and the word kaphar is used again and again in the Bible for atonement, and thought it is usually associated with blood atonement the primary reference here isn’t to blood at all; the primary reference is simply to pitch that makes a boat water tight, and therefore the primary picture of atonement is what which covers and insulates and protects the saved person from the wrath of God.

And finally the third type of the ark, it is a type of baptism, according to 1 Peter 3; incidentally a very important type because those who are saved are dry.

Now today we come to Genesis 7:1-10, we’re going to look at these verses, we’re going to discuss a few more things about the ark and then we’re going to see a film, hopefully that will give your mind lots of good picture images to work with. One of the things that maybe some do not understand is why I spend so much time going through, like last week, naval architecture, dynamic balances in the ark and so on. This is just part of my propaganda warfare, to root out from your minds the ideas that the world system has put there that the flood was some sort of myth, something that the early thinkers just cranked out; some sort of subliminal problems that they had and they were just compensating for them by making these myths. And by forcing us back to the dimensions of the ark, by forcing us back to the stability of the ark and all of the details of the animals of the ark, what we’re doing is we’re eroding slowly step by step this mythological imagery that you’ve got stored away about the ark. Today we are going to look more at the load of the ark or the animals that he took aboard.

In Genesis 7:1 God speaks to Noah and gives him a signal to start boarding the ark; this is done before the flood, obviously, in fact, some time before the flood, but the critical point to note in verse 1 is that once again God clarifies the distinctive of the saved versus those who are the lost. Notice: “[And the LORD said unto Noah,] Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for I have seen righteous before me in this generation.” Now this righteousness that God speaks of is two-fold. On the one hand the obvious surface interpretation is that this is the +R in Noah’s experience. Noah was a man who obeyed Scripture. Genesis 6:22 says “Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did he.” Genesis 7:5, “And Noah did according unto all that the LORD commanded him.” So two times, you’ve got repeated, Noah obeying the commands of God. So the righteousness, which means adherence to God’s standards, means that in his experience he took the commands of God and obeyed.

Now let’s see what he did in order to obey. One of the things in his Bible, not in ours, but in his was a series of blueprints, so one of his acts of obedience was to build the ark. That is a long series of thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of steps, from every little board, every little piece that had to be put on the ark, over maybe years, all of that is considered to be a righteous act in God’s sight. Noah did it, not because he knew the rain was coming, necessarily, he could picture it all, but he knew God told him to do it; that was enough, Yes Sir, we do it, period, no argument. And then he went on and he did a few other things. Another thing, 2 Peter says, is that he preached to his generation, he gave a verbal testimony to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ so that his generation would understand why the flood was coming. Incidentally, that’s something else God always does, before He hits us with some titanic act, some awe inspiring show, there is always a verbal explanation. God does not want you and he does not want me to feel our way through life. He wants us to understand our way through life and so Noah preached to his generation.

We could say that Noah did a lot of other things included in this righteousness. So it’s an experiential righteousness. But experiential righteousness, as Martin Luther discovered, is always an incomplete righteousness. And so therefore we have to have something better than experiential righteousness, we have to have something called imputed righteousness or perfect righteousness credited to our account which comes from the Lord. This is the message of the Reformation, that man stands before God in His wrath clothed with the righteousness of Christ, and it is only Christ’s righteousness that can keep a man saved. So this is why the word righteous occurs in verse 1. It’s very important and it makes a difference between who goes in the ark and who doesn’t. Only those that have righteousness board the ark; it’s as simple as that, very, very simple picture.

Now let’s go on and look at the loading or the boarding of the ark. Genesis 7:2, “And of every clean beast thou shalt take t thee by sevens,” commentators over the years have debated the sevens there, whether that’s seven animals or seven pairs of animals. We take it seven pairs of animals, so fourteen in all. “…the male and his female; and of beasts that are not clean by two,” that is two pair, “the male and his female. [3] Of fowls of the air by sevens,” by seven pair, “the male and the female,” and now the purpose of it all, “to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.” The ark, in the final analysis, is life preserving. Notice this image now, it’s life preserving.

Last week I urged you, if you have trouble in your minds, imagination visualizing this, and you’re really a modern type person, the best thing to do is think of a rocket ship that’s going up to orbit the earth and God says look, I’m going to destroy the planet so therefore why don’t you all just get in a rocket ship, it has life support systems aboard and just orbit the planet for 13 months while I destroy the surface. Maybe that would connote this kind of a thing. But nevertheless, whatever the picture, the idea is life preserving.

Now let’s take that little image and apply it to the future. When the Lord Jesus Christ finally finishes drawing out His bride from history, the Church, and we go into eternity, notice what has happened; that there has been preserved. Although in Revelation 21-22 the new heavens and the new earth are created ex nihilo, they are created like the first universe, not by a long process of evolution but by the Word of God, what is not created? And what is not created is life because the life of the new heaven is the life that is transferred to the new heavens from the old one. And so we form the seed, and all of history, and Christ’s plan of salvation is also like the ark, to keep the seed alive. There’s going to be a long string that’s continuous, from the point act of creation of Genesis 1 over to the eternal state; no breaks because by the grace of God that narrow thread, though it’s got very, very narrow at times, has always been sustained. That’s the picture of the ark as a life supporting system.

Notice too in Genesis 7:2-3, because we’re going to come back to this, is there are two categories of animals, the clean and the unclean. The significance of the clean and the unclean animals here goes back to something in Moses law. Now if you take a time line and you put Moses at 1400 BC; Noah, say at 2300-2400 BC, some thousand years between them, you’ve got a separation. Over here, with Moses, you’ve got his Law, the Law defines dietary prescriptions to what you should eat and what you should not eat; these dietary prescriptions are given in Deuteronomy 14 and Leviticus 11. And they divide the animal kingdom into what is clean and what is unclean or today the Jewish word “kosher,” what is kosher and what is not kosher. And under the Old Testament dispensation you could have gotten out of fellowship eating non-kosher food. This was God’s instructions to Israel.

But the interesting thing is that as far back as 1,000 years prior to the Mosaic Law there were clean and unclean foods in existence. So this tells us something, that when the Mosaic Law prescribed it prescribed on the basis of what is there, that is, that the categories of clean and unclean aren’t just typological categories that Moses kind of slapped onto the animal kingdom for theological reasons. The clean and the unclean categories are categories that reflect very deeply the structure of these animals.

Now what is the difference between the clean and the unclean animal? Creationist biologists have hypothesized several things. One is, and it’s not true of all of them, but some of the unclean animals have various inefficient digestive systems, and whereas the clean animals, when they get through assimilating food it’s in a purer state, so that therefore when you eat kosher meat you’re eating meat that is cleaner than a non-clean meat, it’s a less probability of contamination. But the only other thing that seems to be significant that we know of today, there may be lots that we don’t know of, but one thing that one biologist points out is that all of the unclean animals in these lists share one characteristic, and that is that they function in creation as scavengers. They are basically garbage men, God’s garbage men to clean up the mess. And since man will learn some of his survival skills by watching the animals God at the very beginning is saying now there’s one kind of animal I don’t want you to mimic; I don’t want you people, made in my image, to live like garbage men, like scavengers; I don’t want you eating garbage for the rest of your life. So therefore God does not permit man to pattern his life after the unclean animals. There may be other reasons but these have been those suggested.

So after these categories in verses 2-3 are aboard, Genesis 7:4, the announcement says, “For seven days yet,” no real reason is given in the text for this seven day waiting period; we can guess, we can say perhaps it was because it was a test for Noah’s faith to get in there and be laughed at for seven days, all the kooks came out of the walls to laugh at Noah and so on, tell him I told you so, ha-ha-ha-ha, built this big 450 foot long boat on a piece of land, that’s really going to float Noah, and so forth. You can imagine the ridicule but then also there may be more serious reasons. Seven days, from passages like Genesis 50 seem to be the traditional mourning period for a funeral. And it may very well be that the seven days was a period of mourning for the destruction of the earth. This is the global funeral that is being conducted during this brief waiting period.

And it goes on describing how [Genesis 7:6] “six hundred years old,” and in verse 7, when the boarding occurs, notice the list in verses 7-8 lists these passengers aboard the ark in order of rank. First Noah, then his sons, then his wife, then his son’s wives, then the clean, then the unclean animals. There is an order in that list. And it describes in verse 10, finally, “that the waters of the flood came upon the earth.”

As I said, when a Christian reads this and he lives in our generation we have got to be very sharp that we understand the factualness of all this. Now it’s nice to sit here, yeah, I take in the Word. Well, maybe you don’t. If you take in the Word it means taking it in to the point where you can verbally defend it to an opponent, and you’re told this in 1 Peter 3, “Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asks a reason of the hope that is in you.” And if you can’t defend your faith I seriously doubt whether you really believe; you go through the motions of sitting down, listening to the Scriptures, but whether the Scriptures actually take hold in the depth of your soul is questionable if you can’t explain that to someone else, or at least enter into some intelligent discussion. So the Christian ought to look at this.

Unfortunately at this point we have some work that has been done in the past. Now the film that you’re going to see is based on the work that was done by Dr. Morris when he computed the volume of the ark in the book, The Genesis Flood back in 1961. In the movie you will see that the volumetric dimensions of the ark are given and it’s concluded that some 50,000 animals boarded the ark, that the ark was sufficient in volume for 50,000 animals averaging the size of a sheep, and therefore the ark was sufficient. However, since 9161 further criticisms against Morris have come up in the literature. A man by the name of Filby has written a book, The Flood Reconsidered, in which he attacks Morris’ position by saying that yes, it’s all right to cram 50,000 animals into the ark but you’ve got to have food space, you’ve got to have water space, you’ve got to have breathing space, and you’ve got to have some exercise space, the animals have to walk around a little bit at least, they can’t hibernate 100% of the time.

So therefore in 1973 a British creationist biologist at the University of Manchester came out with a paper in the Creation Research Society quarterly on the number of animals in the ark and it’s the product of several previous papers that he had done, very carefully researching kinds. And this is an eloquent testimony to what somebody can do who takes in the Word of God and then applies it in his profession. This man’s profession is a biologist. And therefore since we believe in special revelation and general revelation we believe that we can hook the two together and mutually benefit each other. And people who don’t believe in applying the Word of God basically disbelieve the Word.

In Genesis 6:17 Dr. Jones points out to us the certain terminology that is used. In this verse he says observe the word “flesh;” he says God is going “to destroy all flesh,” but he says, and he points out an interesting thing, that where you have these general terms in the Bible you will have the sentence set up, it will discuss a general term, then there will be a comma, and in apposition after that general term or that general phrase you will have a qualifying phrase. And so he says that though the verse says “I will destroy all flesh,” in apposition to that you have the qualifying phrase, “wherein is the breath of life,” or the breath of lives. It’s repeated in Genesis 7:22 also, showing animals have souls, incidentally, and so therefore this qualifying phrase delineates what flesh it is that is going to be destroyed. I will destroy animals that have breath in them.

So Dr. Jones did an interesting concordance study as a biologist and he checked out every time this expression is used; he checked out where the word “life” and its cognates are used. He came to a very interesting conclusion: this phrase, “wherein is the breath of life” is never used of invertebrates; it’s only used of vertebrate animals. Now this has implications which we’ll see in a few minutes.

Now in Genesis 7:14 Dr. Jones takes us to another verse, and he says notice that in Genesis 7:14 there is a catalogue given and this catalogue reflects the vocabulary of Genesis 1, it’s exactly the same vocabulary of Genesis 1, except there are missing elements. Let’s look at Genesis 7:14, “They, and every beast after its kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth after its kind, and every fowl after its kind, every bird of every sort.” Now, says Dr. Jones, let’s look at the way the Bible classifies the animal kingdom. Keep in mind that the classifications that the Bible uses are classifications which we will call phenomenological classification, that is classifications that depend upon sight so that the layman could walk out into the field and classify this animal’s clean, this animal is unclean, this animal is clean, this animal is unclean.

And this has led to misunderstanding on the part of critics of the Bible. For example, in the list of clean and unclean animals there are certain criteria that are used; a criterion for example of hoof, a criterion of animals that according to the King James translators chew the cud, but the Hebrew doesn’t say “chew the cud,” it just says ruminate. And in the list, sure enough there’s the rabbit alongside the cow that one that ruminates. Welll say the critics, ha-ha, the Bible’s wrong, rabbits don’t chew their cud so obviously this observer in the text here is making a major zoological mistake by classifying the rabbit with, say, the cow. Well it’s not a mistake because he never intended to say, to assert the technical complexity of a cud-chewing digestive system. He’s not talking about regurgitating from one stomach up into the mouth and back again; that is something that goes on inside the animal, he’s not interested in what’s going on inside the animals; he’s interested in what is the external phenomena that I can see with my eyes as a lay person, and rabbits… [Clough makes mmm mmm mmm mmm sound] so therefore they are classed along with the cattle. So the Bible is classifying things phenomenologically. It’s not doing them theoretically, so just take the Bible the way it was meant.

Now on this phenomenological classification there are five classifications given in the Hebrew text. And translated literally here’s what they look like. The word that’s translated “beast” refers to quadrupeds, generally speaking; the second one, land swarmers, third one, water swarmers, fourth one winged fliers, and the fifth one man. Now in Noah’s catalogue of Genesis 7:14 you will see that the water swarmers are missing, they’re not listed, and since the vocabulary exactly parallels Genesis 1 we find this omission significant. What Noah is trying to say to us in the text is that he was not commanded to take all these animals aboard, only some, there’s restrictions here.

Now let’s look at each one of these three, the beast, the land swarmers, and the winged fliers and let’s see if Noah had to take each one of those categories on the ark, or in fact whether there were qualifying phrases in the text to the careful biologist that would say no. All right, says Dr. Jones, let’s look at the word for “beast.” “Beast,” can be broken down into hoofed beasts and this is not technically hoofed beasts, all these, but under the phrase in the Hebrew which occurs this way so we’ll leave it, hoofed beasts and beasts of the earth. Now why they put those labels on is a matter for discussion. I don’t know exactly why, maybe someone with biological training can tell us why, but nevertheless, these are the Hebrew expressions, not the modern expressions, the Hebrew expressions.

Under the “hoofed beasts,” it’s divided into clean and unclean; the clean would consist of deer, antelope, cattle, sheep, goats, that kind of animal. And the unclean would be the rabbits and so on. Then the second category, “beasts of the earth” would be large mammals, reptiles, rodents, that kind of thing. Now that’s just the way God divides the animal kingdom up when He taught Adam in Genesis 1. If you don’t like it, take it up with God, I didn’t author that.

The “land swarmers,” now this is a second category and in this category there are three subdivisions. Each subdivision has its own particular Hebrew expression. Under “land swarmers” it says “all that that goes upon the belly,” the lizards and the snakes, everything the girls would love, that’s in category number one. Two, “all that goes on all fours,” small rodents, carnivores and so on. Then three, there’s a third category, “all that causes to multiply feet,” literally, small invertebrates, and significantly these are missing in the Noahic account. So therefore, since the vocabulary is known from Genesis 1 and is omitted in Genesis 7, we say that the selection of animals aboard the ark was selective, it was not total.

And then we come to the winged fliers, and this category neatly divides in two between birds and insects, and bats are also classified along fliers of the heavens; remember it’s not technical, it’s phenomenological. So under the fliers of the heavens you have the clean and the unclean, the birds of prey, by the way, our national emblem, the American eagle, is an unclean animal as far as the Bible is concerned because we are part of Rome and therefore it’s considered the unclean of the Gentiles. It’s interesting that the United States at one time did have the option of choosing the turkey as the national bird and had it we would have gone kosher, but the United States, under the sovereignty of God, deliberately selected the eagle and we believe that this is providential because we, as a national entity are part of the Gentiles and in the eyes of the Gentile, major Gentile power, we are unclean in God’s sight. Fliers of the heavens: clean, the game birds, and the unclean, also includes the bats. The missing ones, however, the swarming fliers, Noah was never commanded to take these aboard, so again you have a significant omission.

So with all these omitted Dr. Jones concludes his article by saying, “Thus only the following groups were taken into the ark: all birds and all land dwelling reptiles and mammals and possibly some of the more terrestrial amphibians.” This is not to say that land invertebrates were not present on the ark because obviously they’d creep in, they’d get in through the coats and the fur and so on of the other animals. So they’d be aboard, it’s just simply saying that Noah did not have to make arrangements to take aboard these kinds of animals. Now in Dr. Jones’ research he’s found that the Hebrew word for miyn, or kind, corresponds approximately to our modern family. Now that’s about 700 kinds or approximately 2,000 animals and no more, he estimates, were taken aboard the ark. So this is considerably down grade or volume from this film which talks about 50,000 to Professor Jones’ 2,000.

There is one interesting test that might be performed, a test that would show the credibility of God’s Word. Do you notice in verses 2-3, I mentioned to you that the clean animals were taken aboard in seven times the volume of the unclean animals? Now if such were the case, and since we live in a fallen universe with mutants and genetic pollution and so on, you’d suspect that if we now took a catalogue of the animals that have become extinct in history that the clean animals would have better survivability than the unclean since all animals today come out of a larger, more viable gene pool, seven times larger gene pool, than the unclean animals. That’s not an absolute truth, it’s an evidence though.

Now what do you suppose would happen if one were to take statistics on animal extinction and compare them by clean and unclean categories? Professor Jones has done this. He’s taken the unclean hoofed animals versus the clean hoofed animals. Now here are the percent of unclean hoofed animals that exist compared to the number who have existed throughout all history, that is from fossil evidence and so on, paleontology and so forth. 25% of the families of unclean hoofed animals have survived, meaning 75% have dropped out. Of the families of the clean hoofed animals, 100% remain to this day. So this is a statistically significant difference between the survivability of the clean and the unclean animals. Now one can argue with it, yes, some of these are domesticated and so forth and so on. But still, the statistics are there, and they are in the right direction if we are to take the Bible literally. Here is some biological zoological evidence that confirms the text.

I said we were going to have a film and I want you, as you watch this film, it goes over some of the details of the text, but maybe you can use this to sit back and visualize what the film shows you, visualize this whole flood story. The film was made by a man who was dying at the time it was made, it was a tremendous testimony to Christian character, Sam Taylor made this film, had the idea of it; I worked with Sam when he was doing the film Footprints in Stone that some of you have seen, and we together talked through the idea of having a future film someday on the flood. Sam started this film and got cancer and died during it and his wife finished it along with his son. You’ll notice the titles in the beginning of the film, you’ll see it looks like all the Taylor’s involved; it was a family project and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the quality. Most of the camerawork was done by a boy who was 18 years old, who studied camera, it was his life and his hobby and he put most of these sequences together that you’re about to see. So it’s not only a film about the flood but it’s also an interesting testimony to what a hard hit family, Christian family, operating under the shadow of their father’s death can produce.

[shows film]