· 9:8-11: This is the point where God says He is making a covenant with Noah, his descendents and all other living things on the earth. He had promised this in Gen. 6:18; now the promise is kept. As the passage indicates, this covenant involves the promise to never again destroy all living things by water.
· 9:12-17: The rainbow was the sign of the covenant. Was this something Adam never saw? Young earth creationists disagree. Here are quotes from two of these.
o Jonathan Sarfati (The Genesis Account, p613): … God mainly used natural causes in the preservation of Noah and the animals, the cause and rise of the Flood, and its abatement. This suggests a continuity between natural laws before and after the flood. (In other words, there were rainbows before as well as after. Thus, there was rain before and after, and so forth.)
o Henry Morris (The Genesis Record, p227): The “bow in the cloud” (v13), of course, requires both sunlight and “the cloud” – that is, liquid water droplets in the air – before it can form. Before the Flood, the upper air contained only invisible water vapor, and therefore no rainbow wat possible. With the new hydrological cycle following the Flood, the former vaper canopy is gone; and it is physically impossible now for enough water ever to be raised into the atmosphere to cause a universal flood. When a storm has done its worst and the clouds are finally exhausted of most of their water, then there always appears a rainbow, and so God would have us remember again His promise after the great Flood.
o Of greater importance is to note that in Scripture the rainbow is a glorious symbol of God’s majesty and grace. Morris points out that the rainbow appears only three more times in Scripture. In Ezek. 1:28 it surrounds the throne of God before He judges His people Israel. In Rev. 4:3 it again surrounds His throne before the judgments of the Great Tribulation. In Rev. 10:1 it adorns a Mighty Angel, who by appearance must be the Lord Jesus, as He prepares to come and establish dominion over the earth.
o One other devotional thought: Peter draws from the historical account of the flood in speaking of God’s patience (2 Pt. 3:1-9). He says that those who deny that Jesus Christ will come again to judge the world, as those who “willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water, and in the water, by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water.” I fear for a close friend who, from science class in a Christian college, was told that there was no evidence for a universal flood. This young man, it appears, lives without the conviction of God the Creator. My point: this is an important, foundational section of the Bible!
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