Genesis 7:6-12

Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came on the earth. Noah went into the ship with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives, because of the waters of the flood. Clean animals, animals that are not clean, birds, and everything that creeps on the ground went by pairs to Noah into the ship, male and female, as God commanded Noah. It happened after the seven days, that the waters of the flood came on the earth. In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on the same day all the fountains of the great deep were burst open, and the sky’s windows were opened. The rain was on the earth forty days and forty nights.

What is recorded here in Genesis about the flood is very factual and accurate. It is void of much descriptive language. Some try to say that Genesis contains poetry, but this passage makes it clear to me that this is a very strict historic record. I say this because if I had been in that ship, I honestly believe that I would have been terrified. It would have taken a degree of discipline for me to not allow my emotions to come out in my writing, so I believe that the writer intended to carefully document history.

We don’t know for sure what “all the fountains of the great deep” were, but it sounds like water coming out from deep in the ocean. When it says that the sky’s windows were opened, I get the picture that some water that wasn’t supposed to get to the earth was getting to it. Scientists that observe the signs left over from the flood believe that the continental plates may have shifted drastically in those forty days. The earth’s surface was probably modified quite significantly.

Had we been in that ship, we probably would have had a chance to doubt God because of the sounds of horror happening outside, but God had promised that every living thing in the ship would be saved. Small storms on earth can be pretty terrifying, but this was a storm like no other. Perhaps, God caused the animals to be at peace in a special way somehow but there is a very real chance that the animals were frightened too. The wrath of God is not a small matter. The earth was torn apart in those days and we see the effects of that time of God’s wrath on the earth’s surface today.