Genesis 7:8-20

⁸ Among clean animals, and among animals that are not clean, and among birds, and among everything that creeps on the ground,

⁹ in pairs, male and female, they went into the ark with Noah, as God had commanded Noah.

¹⁰ And after seven days the waters of the flood came upon the land.

¹¹ In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the sky were opened.

¹² And rain fell upon the land forty days and forty nights.

¹³ On the very same day Noah and his sons, Shem and Ham and Japheth, and Noah’s wife and the three wives of his sons with them entered the ark,

¹⁴ they and every beast, according to its kind, and all the livestock according to their kinds, and every creeping thing that creeps on the land, according to its kind, and every bird, according to its kind, every winged being.

¹⁵ They went into the ark with Noah, in pairs of all flesh in which there was the breath of life.

¹⁶ And those that entered, male and female of all flesh, went in as God had commanded him. And the LORD shut the door behind him.

¹⁷ The flood continued forty days on the land. The waters increased and bore up the ark, and it rose high above the land.

¹⁸ The waters prevailed and increased greatly on the land, and the ark floated on the face of the water.

¹⁹ And the water prevailed so mightily on the land that all the high mountains under the whole sky were covered.

²⁰ The water prevailed above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep. _________________________________________

Death and Resurrection

For Christians, baptism is a symbol of death of the old person, and the promise of renewed, resurrected life. The first universal judgment upon humanity seems to prefigure this. The world needed to die in order for God’s new world to come about. God chose to bring this death by immersing the world in water. Only what God had decided to preserve would remain to be part of the new world. God chose to rescue Noah and his family. Noah means “rest.” His name points to the sleep of death. But it also speaks of the promise that the one who provided a death to sin also provides a resurrection unto eternal life.

LORD, thank you for the promise of rescue.