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Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8
Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8
Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8
Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8
Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8
Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8
Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8
Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8
Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8
Genesis Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8
Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8
Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8
Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8
Genesis chapter 8 Genesis Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8
Genesis Genesis chapter 8 Genesis chapter 8 Genesis Genesis chapter 8 translated by a number of Jewish scholars.
They say 70 or more Jewish scholars before Jesus was born. They translated the Old Testament into Greek so the Greek world could read the Hebrew text.
Well, in the Septuagint, this verse that I just read in Genesis 8, they translate the word when with the Greek word pneuma. Pneuma.
And that word pneuma is the word universally used in the New Testament to refer to the Holy Spirit. Pneuma.
Alright, so I just throw that out to you. The word wind is very significant. This is more than just a wind to dry up the water. God's about to do something. Something as supernatural as the bringing on the flood.
He's about to bring it to a close and He does so through His Spirit. The Holy Spirit. Now, the second word added, we need to consider it, and when we add the two together, we have something really quite profound.
The second word is the word subsided. Alright, so you have the word wind. I believe that's the Spirit of God passing over the earth.
And then we have the water subsided. That was the result. Subsided. Now, the word subsided comes from a very rare word in the Hebrew text.
In fact, it only appears five times in the Old Testament. And in case you want to know, it's shakak. S-H-A-K-A-K. That's not how it's spelled in the Hebrew.
But in English, that's how we would spell it. Shakak. And it's subsided. It's a rare word. It only appears five times. And let me give you a couple of examples.
In fact, these two examples I'm going to give you are from the same book of the Bible, the book of Esther. And Esther 2.1, the Bible says, After these things, when the wrath, pay close attention to that, the wrath of King Ahasuerus subsided.
His wrath subsided. He remembered Vashti and what she had done and what he had decreed against her and so forth. But the key to understanding is the word subsided is there in the verse in relation to wrath.
Alright? Later on in the book of Esther, when the king had Haman executed, if you remember the story of Esther, the Bible says in Esther 7.10, So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai.
Then the king's, that's the same king's, king's wrath subsided. There's our word. Same word that appears in Genesis 8.1.
Now, what's the meaning here then in Genesis 8.1? Well, I don't believe it's that the water just simply went down.
That it subsided, that it went down. Now, it eventually does. Okay? And we're going to get to that here in a minute. But that's not the meaning here in verse 1 with the word subsided.
Rather, it is the wrath of God that has subsided. Now, our problem, I think, is the word subsided itself.
What in the world does that mean even in English? Well, it means that his wrath was pacified. Really, that's not even very good.
The word abated or satisfied. We might even say that his wrath was spent.
It was spent. It was finished. The full wrath of God as he intended accomplished its goal.
It was finished. Abated. Subsided. Pacified. Satisfied. Whatever word you'd like to use there. So, God did two things to make this new earth for Noah and his family and eventually for all of us.
And the first thing he did was to finish up with the judgment. To make an end of that. And that's what verse 1, I think, means.
God made a wind, his breath, his spirit to pass over the earth and the waters subsided. God's judgment was abated. That had to be done before anything else could happen.
anything else good could happen. Alright, so then there's the second thing that he does and that's verse 2. The mountains of the deep, or the fountains rather, of the deep and the waters of heaven were also stopped and the rain from heaven was restrained.
Now, this is why I think that this phrase or this sentence at the close of verse 1 is something separate, something different because then in verse 2 he says, and also I stopped the water too.
First, God's judgment had to be put a stop to. It was abated. It was finished. And then he turned off the water in order for this earth to be inhabitable.
He just shut it off. And so you have the stoppage of the water sources and then you have the flood waters beginning to recede. And now we're ready to go on and so I will say this, that they receded rapidly, very quickly.
Verse 3, and the waters receded continually. That's how it's translated in the New King James. You have a New American Standard, they have the word steadily, steadily.
And that's probably more accurate. And it gives us the sense of something happening pretty quickly. Just coming right along. I mean, it was receding very quickly from the earth.
Literally, the Hebrew is almost impossible to just translate word for word right into the English. And it would be, it might sound, kind of go like this, that the waters were going and returning.
Going and returning. Those are the two words that really appear in the text. And the idea is that they receded continually or steadily. But the idea is that the water was receding very quickly.
And then it goes on and says, and at the end of the 150 days the waters decreased. Began to decrease very quickly. Let's skip verse 4.
I'll mention verse 4 in a little bit later. But verse 5 says the waters decreased continually. There's the same, pretty much the same phrase, until the tenth month.
And in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen. You know, it's almost like, again, he wants us to mark, find it on the calendar and figure out when this is.
But this is a historical, this is a historical account. So he's telling us very specifically. And then suddenly the tops of the mountains were seen. So we put all that together.
The flood, we learned this back in chapter 7, verse 11, the flood began on the second month. And the water began to recede on the seventh month.
That's what it says in verse 4. And so for five months, 150 days, the waters were at their maximum height, and then they began to recede very rapidly because the Bible says on the seventh day of the seventh month, the ark rested on top of the Ararat, that's verse 4, and by the first day of the tenth month, the tops of the mountains could be seen.
It's going down very quickly. And you know, I think I mentioned that from the beginning, because the Bible marks the time according to Noah's age, from before the flood came to when it ended a whole year transpired, or passed.
So the water had to have gone down very, very quickly to uncover all of the tall mountains. Alright? Now, here's the question that I know you just want to ask.
What is the question? Where did all that water go? Well, I don't know. That's part of it.
You know, that's the one question that the liberals and moderates like to ask and present as an argument against a global flood.
That it would be impossible, literally impossible, for all that water to go. Where would it go? You know? And so they say, well, see here, then, if there was a flood, most of them would say that there was no flood at all, but if there was, it must have just been a localized thing.
Well, I believe it was global, and so then we have to answer the question, where did all that water go? Well, the first answer, really the one that ought to be enough for us, is an answer to the question that will not satisfy the critics, because the critics do not believe in the supernatural, and so any time you have something that appears to be supernatural or a miracle in the Bible, they would label that as myth or legend or something like that, or parable or allegory.
And so the answer is not going to satisfy the critics, because the flood was a supernatural event, and so the rapid recession of the water was also supernatural.
We'll just have to wait until we get to heaven to ask God what happened to all the water. That's the first, you know, for sure correct answer. But, really, it's not all that hard to come up with a logical answer.
All that water was deposited in three places. Under the surface of the earth, subterranean lakes and waterways and so forth, on the surface of the earth, oceans, seas, lakes, today, two-thirds of this earth is covered with water.
Now, I think we can assume that that was not the case prior to the flood. And then a third place where water was deposited would be, above the surface of the earth, the cloud systems.
And I guess we could add a fourth and say that the water was deposited in between the two. And it's between the on the surface and above the surface.
And what I mean is the air, our air in the form of moisture. As, you know, part of now the new, not new for us, the new for Noah, this new meteorological cycle.
And so there's evaporated water on its way up and there's rain water on its way down constantly around this planet. There's not a time when that's not taking place somewhere. So there's always water in between the two.
water. And I'm not so sure that we could begin to fathom just how much water that would be if it all, you know, turned into rain at one time.
It would be a huge amount of water. All right? That won't answer it all the way because this is a supernatural thing. And we can't explain the supernatural.
We just believe it. And the Bible is very clear in the sending of the flood and in the receding of the waters. No matter how you cut it, according to the biblical description, it came down real fast.
And it had to go somewhere. And though the Bible is silent about it, we can answer some of it. The rest of it we have to leave with God. We have to leave with Him. And I'm perfectly fine with that.
I want to close then because we're about out of time. In fact, I may not even spend time going over this. But something I think is really quite interesting. And this has to do with the handout I gave you.
The language of Genesis 8, 1-5, really further than 5, chapter 8, and really even a reference on into chapter 9. The language there echoes the description of the six days of creation in Genesis 1.
in the gradual events that took place on the six days of creation. And I think the reason is obvious because Genesis 8 represents the making of a new earth.
And so many of the things that occurred during the making of the first earth are repeated again in interesting ways after the flood in the creation of a new earth.
earth. And so here I've given that to you. Day 1, and I've just kind of walked through some of this. You see it there for yourself. But day 1, earth, spirit, and waters.
That's what happened on day 1 in creation. Chapter 1, verse 2, the earth was without form, and the spirit, ruach, of God, was hovering over the face of the waters.
Mayim. All right, so that happened in chapter 1, verse 2. That's day 1 of creation. In chapter 8, verse 1, God made a wind, that's ruach, to pass over the earth.
Same word, eretz. And the waters, mayim, subsided. So you have the same combination of words there. Day 2, water and sky.
In chapter 1, verse 7, 8, thus God divided the waters, which were under the firmament, from the waters, which were above the firmament, and God called the firmament heaven. And that's the word for sky.
Shammayim. And you have the same word appearing in chapter 8, verse 2, the rain water, and the rain, that's water, from heaven, from the sky. Shammayim was restrained.
And then day 3, water, dry land, appear. Those three events are things. Chapter 1, verse 9, let the waters into the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.
And it was so. That's day 3. Chapter 8, verse 5, these, of course, by the way, are not occurring according to days, necessarily. There's not an exact parallel between the two, a correlation between the two.
But in chapter 8, verse 5, the waters decreased continually, and the tops of the mountains, that's the dry land, were seen. They appeared. day 4, we don't have a comparison.
Because on day 4, God created the luminaries, and He didn't have to recreate those. The flood didn't destroy them. Day 5, birds above the earth, cross to heaven.
Chapter 1, verse 20, let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth, across, cross, and it's the same word, ponim, the face, or ponim actually goes with face there, not across, of the firmament of the heavens.
And in chapter 8, then He sent out a raven, that's a bird, you know that, don't you? I don't know why I had to explain that, I wasn't trying to be demeaning, which kept going to and from until the waters had dried up from the earth.
He also sent out from Himself a dove to see if the waters had receded from the face, that's ponim, of the ground.
Then day six, creature, cattle, creeping thing, man, image, all those things happen on day six. Chapter 1, verse 24, let the earth bring forth the living creature according to its kind, cattle and creeping thing and beasts of the earth, each according to its kind.
And then when we get into chapter 8, verse 17, bring out with you every living thing. This is for the new world, that's creature of all flesh that is with you, birds, and cattle and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.
And then in chapter 1, verse 26, he says, let us make man in our image. And then when we get into chapter 9, verse 6, for in the image of God He made man. Reverse order, but the same idea.
And there's some other parallels and I've just mentioned some that are the easiest to see, that gradually unfold, that gradually were unfolded for us, revealed for us in the six days of creation.
And here in chapter 8, when the new world was created, they're gradually, gradually revealed, unfolding for us in the text. so it's something that might be interesting to you.
Thank you.