Genesis 6:7 Commentary and Bible Study

The word translated ‘destroy’, literally is wipe clean. I will wipe clean man, and the world, he goes on to say. It is a term that will be used for the washing of a dish or an article. There is going to be a cleansing of the world. You notice it is not just men, it is man and beast, and the creeping thing and the fowls of the air. Why should they go too? we ask. If God is going to judge and destroy the generality of men, why should the animals and everything else be included? Because it is going to be a picture. It is not only an historical fact that this would happen, but it is a picture of the old being wiped clean and all things being made new. It serves as an illustration of the change that God will bring about at conversion, when all things become new. So, everything is going to go – even the things that are to man’s advantage, which he uses. The whole house is going to be cleansed, not only the people but the furniture and the trappings and the ornaments. However we have to be careful how we speak about conversion. All things are new at conversion. A new creature is produced at conversion. But be careful, it does not mean that a person who is converted is sinless. It does not mean that there are no elements of sin and of the fall anymore than with the type here. Noah, and his sons, and his son’s wives carried into the new world their sinful natures. They had a new start, a cleansing, a new beginning – even their surroundings would change; everything would be different – but sin would still be there, and it is the same with us. We have a new spiritual faculty at conversion. You can pray; your spirit is alive and engaged by God; you have a newly awakened conscience; your tastes change and your desires – you have better desires and new desires. You are indeed a new creature, but the old ones are still lurking there in the background, deep down inside you. You have a new view of God; you have new fear of God – one of the great signs of conversion. You have a new sense of debt towards God, and towards Christ for all that he has done for you, and of course, you have a new destiny, but the old nature is still there. It maybe, and this should be, that it is overpowered by the new nature, but residual sin is still there. You are now, without doubt, a person of two natures.Now there are efforts to deny this understanding of the believer. There are teachers, and many sound teachers who say, no, you cannot possibly have two natures; you must only have one; there cannot be an old nature still. And then they have an awful job trying to explain where sin comes from, still in the heart, and inner temptations and sinful desires. No, the old nature is certainly still there, and so you have to mount a guard against it constantly. If you do not guard against it, it will take over the reins again, and assert itself and drive you.And yet it is also true that the believer has the earnest of the Spirit, and we ‘which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body’ (Romans 8:23). We are saved soul and body, but the redemption of the body is yet future, guaranteed by the earnest or down-payment of the Spirit. At death we will be separated from sin, from the ‘body of this death’ (Romans 7:24), and at the resurrection the body of each believer will be raised ‘a spiritual body’ (1 Corinthians 15:44), without sin. At that time the heavens and earth will pass away and God will create all things new and perfect. For man’s sake the creation itself was subject to vanity and the curse (Genesis 3:18; Romans 8:20-21), and the therefore in this picture of the recreation of all things at the return of Christ, not only man but the creatures which share the world with him and which were made for him are also wiped clean and symbolically made new as they emerge from the ark into a world which is no longer under the curse.