Genesis 7:4 Commentary and Bible Study

‘For yet seven days, [there is seven days to go] and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights’, and there will be destruction of every living creature from off the face of the earth. So there is a last week of mercy. Now, the ark is a visible sermon to Noah’s contemporaries. It literally happened, but it is preserved also in the record as a message and as a sermon. ‘Can you just imagine,’ the old preachers used to say – and you pick this up in old sermons endlessly – every time Noah or one of his sons picked up a hammer and drove it into some nail or fastening for a plank or timber of the ark; every time that happened, the sound seemed to say, ‘flood’, to the people within hearing. All the passers-by spoke about this, as Noah to them. For them it had become a message which said – although not something that was believed, but something that was ridiculed – ‘Listen to that going on over there. Flood, flood, flood.’ Everybody knew. It was a proverb, no doubt. A flood is coming, but nobody believed it. And they carried on with their unbelief in God, and their violence, and their wickedness. The earth was in a terrible state. And now, there is a last week, and the final appeal goes out. There is only week in which to repent. And yet the message is spurned. And so the ark begins to be loaded. The people see the animals coming into the ark and they no doubt find the sight deeply disturbing – what could cause the animals to behave in this way? The animals enter through the one available door, but nobody looking on dares to enter. There is too much shame in the game, and for anyone to give way now when they have all jointly been so scornful of Noah would be too terrible for them to contemplate. So perhaps they watch from a distance nervously now, not wanting to admit their fears to each other.