Genesis 8:15 Commentary and Bible Study

Even though Noah now saw that the face of the ground was dry, he would not leave the ark without the command of God. It was God who had said, ‘come’ in order to invite them into the ark, and it was God who now said ‘go’; go back into the world and fill it. The flood had wiped clean the earth and they knew that they had been spared. They must have been filled with the fear of the Lord and awe at his dealings with man. They alone had survived and now God was telling them to go out of the ark and begin again. How could they avoid the same development into evil that the world had seen before? Every step was therefore to be ordered by the Lord and they must have been afraid to take a step on their own without his word to guide them. They would still be able to remember individuals who were now dead. All the opponents who had mocked them were gone, and they alone had survived. They carried with them the record of the history of the earth, of the creation account which was eventually written down by Moses. They knew of the coming of sin into the world, and what it had done to man’s nature, and they must have prayed fervently that they would be held back from temptation.God desire for the animals on the ark is that they should once again populate the whole earth, and he therefore blesses them in exactly the same terms as when the earth was first created. ‘Be fruitful and multiply’, God had said to the fowl of the air, the fish of the sea, and every living thing that moves on the earth, and the command is repeated. His destruction of vast numbers of living creatures was not to be interpreted as a disapproval of what he had made, or a change of mind about project earth. The earth was to teem with life again after this interruption, and in the case of the fowl, the cattle, and the creeping things, God’s command is accompanied by an instinct which he has put in every living thing to multiply. The earth was made for man, and the various forms of life were put on earth to serve man’s needs, and therefore that life must not be restored again on the renewed earth.Scripture teaches that all animal life has spread out from a single point on the earth after the flood, so that the Biblical model necessitates a migration of every living species from these original kinds across its lands. It does not teach that each species and each variant was created in situ in exactly the form in which it now exists as some foolishly suggest. Those kinds that came forth from the ark had a rich set of genetic material, only part of which was at first expressed. Just as man’s breeding experiment on domesticated dogs has shown how much potential was present in the first domesticated dogs which could not be seen, so natural selection has exploited the same potential for variation. It is difficult to say what species that now exist came from the same original kinds, but certainly what needed to be preserved on the ark was much less than the number of species now in the world.The violence of the flood waters would have altered the face of the earth so that it would almost certainly have been unrecognisable to them. When we see the vast layers of sedimentary rock containing innumerable quantities of fossilised creatures, much of which were surely deposited by the flood waters, we realise how much the landscape must have been changed.